How Audre Lorde Helped Me See the Light
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I am a white, cis-gender gay male. Black women have been essential in shaping who I am today, integral to my growth, showing me how to be fearless, resolved, and to take no bullshit, as well as keeping me accountable and aware of the space I occupy as a person with privilege. My relationship to Black women informs how I’ve come to understand what Audre Lorde means when she says, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” and while this piece is written for and about Black women, there are elements that can certainly pertain to being a queer person in this world. This in no way implies that I know what it means to be a Black woman (although many white queer men would like to think they are fierce Black Divas, emulating vernacular and gestures or mannerisms that we stereotypically apply to Black women), but because of my proximity to, and kinship with my Black female friends, some queer, some on the gender spectrum, some straight and married with children, all very different but all celebratory in their Blackness, I can be witness to their experience through their stories and existence and their demand for visibility and equity. I am privy to parts of their sensuality and ownership of their bodies, something for which I feel extremely fortunate, as this is not something randomly shared with the rest of the world outside of poetry or visual art, therefore I am, in a sense, an insider, I am invited in to share that beauty, to praise it. There is a level of intimacy I have with these women that I do not want to take for granted. Ever. This can be said for Black female artists and writers that I admire, such as Kara Walker, Joyce J. Scott, Maya Angelou, and of course Audre Lorde, the person at the center of this discussion, among many others. These are artists who, when I see or read their work, affect me in ways that reach beyond the emotional and into the somatic, my core. I am able to have a moment in which the shared experience is mutual, is silently understood, but also respected as subject matter I can take no ownership of.
When taken out of context, “Not a Luxury” implies that something is not a simple, comfortable, safe tool on which to rely for truly living freely, outside of the confines of survival, necessity, the struggle to exist. To be able to access poetry and what it means to create poetry is not something that comes without experiencing some of the darkest, most painful, most beautiful moments, the necessity to have a tool that can, in more than just the concept of freedom, actually be key to freedom.
In that “distillation of experience” there develops a language, a framework upon which these stories are built, becoming the actual shelter, a basic human right, on the “skeleton architecture” Lorde speaks about. In that distillation we learn that there is no luxury in the urgency of survival.
- My mother is a math teacher. When we were kids, she was worried about a game on our new computer: solitaire. She feared its effect on us, children. It was the “undo” that troubled her. “Life gives no one an ‘undo’ button”.
She is the only person I know who plays Solitaire with real cards.
She had learnt it from an uncle who used it for fortune telling.
As the story went, one morning, he woke up to find that his family had left him and the country. It was a common event those days. And since that day, each morning he woke up to show the world what it meant to wait.
Samuel Formo is an aspiring Moth storyteller currently living in Seattle with his partner of twelve years working as a medical professional for UW Medicine.