Prologue: Resurrection Sunday Video #2

This week's poem is Prologue, the last poem in Audre Lorde's 1973 collection From a Land Where Other People Live. I love the vampire imagery in this poem, and I see it as a poem that makes space for all of the amazing black feminist vampire fiction that comes after it. For example Jewelle Gomez found the epigraph for her classic vampire novel The Gilda Stories in this poem.

Our assignment this week is to speak the truth that we are afraid to speak in our chosen communities. Sometimes we feel that we would rather die than speak a difficult truth. Audre Lorde invokes the vampire undead to speak the truth she needs to speak about internalized racism in the Black Arts Movement, what creativity, what characters will we invent to speak the truth that our presence demands?

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Captions courtesy of the Radical Access Mapping Project, Un-ceded Coast Salish Territories of the Skwxwú7mesh, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.

http://radicalaccessiblecommunities.wordpress.com/subtitled-videos/
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Hello loved ones!

Welcome to Resurrection Sunday,
#2 of our 21 week series

in honour of black lesbian warrior poet icon exemplar, chosen ancestor, Audre Lorde.

So, today we're gonna be working with a much less known poem by Audre Lorde about survival.

The poem is called "Prologue",

and in "Prologue", Audre Lorde is addressing

some narrow definitions of blackness

in her chosen community of black arts poets

that is so hard and so deep

that she actually embodies
and takes on subjectivity of a vampire

in order to say what she needs to say.

So I think this poem is amazing
and strange and weird,

which is probably why people don't read it so much;

and, you can see how I think about this poem
and how I see it as a precedent

and as sort of a foundation for black queer futurism
and black feminist vampire fiction

in this book, "The Black Imagination".
Check it out.

OK. So, here is "Prologue", from Audre Lorde's 1973
book "From A Land Where Other People Live".

"Haunted by poems beginning with I

seek out those I love who are deaf

to whatever does not destroy

or curse the old ways that did not serve us

while history falters and our poets are dying

choked into silence by icy distinction

their death rattles blind curses

and I hear even my own voice becoming

a pale strident whisper

At night sleep locks me into an echoless coffin

sometimes at noon I dream

there is nothing to fear

now standing up in the light of my father sun

without shadow

I speak without concern for the accusations

that I am too much or too little woman

that I am too black or too white

or too much myself

and through my lips come the voices

of the ghosts of our ancestors

living and moving among us

Hear my heart's voice as it darkens

pulling old rhythms out of the earth

that will receive this piece of me

and a piece of each one of you

when our part in history quickens again

and is over:

Hear

the old ways are going away

and coming back pretending change

masked as denunciation and lament

masked as a choice

between eager mirrors that blur and distort us

in easy definitions

until our image

shatters along its fault

while the other half of that choice

speaks to our hidden fears with a promise

that our eyes need not seek any truer shape--

a face at high noon particular and unadorned--

for we have learned to fear

the light from clear water might destroy us

with reflected emptiness or a face without tongue

with no love or with terrible penalties

for any difference

and even as I speak remembered pain is moving

shadows over my face, my own voice fades and

my brothers and sisters are leaving;

Yet when I was a child

whatever my mother thought would mean survival

made her try to beat me whiter every day

and even now the colour of her bleached ambition

still forks throughout my words

but I survived

and didn't I survive confirmed

to teach my children where her errors lay

etched across their faces between the kisses

that she pinned me with asleep

and my mother beating me

as white as snow melts in the sunlight

loving me into her bloods black bone--

the home of all her secret hopes and fears

and my dead father whose great hands

weakened in my judgement

whose image broke inside of me

beneath the weight of failure

helps me to know who I am not

weak or mistaken

my father loved me alive

to grow and hate him

and now his grave voice joins hers

within my words rising and falling

are my sisters and brothers listening?

The children remain

like blades of grass over the earth and

all the children are singing

louder than mourning

all their different voices
sound like a raucous question

but they do not fear the blank and empty mirrors

they have seen their faces
defined in a hydrants' puddle

before the rainbows of oil obscured them.

The time of lamentation and curses is passing.

My mother survives now

through more than chance or token.

Although she will read what I write
with embarrassment

or anger

and a small understanding

my children do not need to relive my past

in strength nor in confusion

nor care that their holy fires

may destroy

more than my failures

Somewhere in the landscape past noon

I shall leave a dark print

of the me that I am

and who I am not

etched in the shadow of
angry and remembered loving

and their ghosts will move

whispering through them

with me none the wiser

for they will have buried me

either in shame

or in peace.

And the grasses will still be

Singing."

So, there is so much in that poem,

and it is amazing to work with that poem,

and its vampire queerness, this weekend,

after an amazing Octavia Butler
Parable of The Sower potluck this weekend,

and after our all day poetry retreat here in Durham,

working with some of Lucille Clifton's
most mystical poems.

But for me, what is so brave
and incredible about this poem,

is that there is this challenge of:
what does it mean to be alive?

What does it mean for our words to survive,

when we launch our words into a community
that may or may not be ready to hear them?

And we feel that we may be excluded
from the communities we love.

We feel like we may die
if we speak the truth that we need to speak.

And so Audre Lorde becomes un-dead,
becomes vampire,

speaking about this fear of reflection,

the fear of the abundance of our
reflection of each other.

And I think it's incredible

that she makes that space through
the use of the vampire and the un-dead,

and the multiple generations,

to do the work of healing the
internalized racism within her own family.

Her mother survives in her poem.

She projects that she will survive,

into this moment past whatever
we are projecting onto her.

She leaves a dark print of who she is,
and who she is not.

Whooo!

I love it!

It's Sunday, I could talk about this all day.

But what I want to assign us to do

is to speak that truth
that we are afraid to speak.

Like, that we really feel that we will be rejected
unto death if we share in the communities we love,

and to share it, to make the space to share it,

because we know that the future deserves a present
where our truths were spoken.

Where our reflection was brave.

Ah! Hmm! Mmm! Praise the lord!

And, because it's Resurrection Sunday,

I read this poem 26 times today,

really reflecting and meditating

on what were the words that Audre Lorde used
that started with the letter "A",

or started with the letter "B",

and I pulled out a new poem from the words
that she used starting with the letter "R",

especially as a blessing for us
on Resurrection Sunday.

And... here it is:

So these are the words in the order that they appear
in the poem that start with the letter "R".

"rattles, rhythms, receive, reflected, remembered,

rising, remain, remain, raucous,

rainbows, read, relive, remember."

Even the mini-poems inside her poems
are like the best poems ever.

So, if you want a special poem from Prologue
dedicated to you or someone that you love,

as a School of Our Lorde blessing to you
and the truth that you need to speak,

check us out on the School of Our Lorde website:

And that can happen! That can happen.

And until next time,
happy Resurrection Sunday.

May Audre Lorde live on, through our actions,
through our boldness, through our braveness,

through our love.

Mwah!