A quantum life: Alexis Pauline Gumbs on Audre Lorde
Last December, Margot Kotler sat down with Alexis Pauline Gumbs to discuss her most recent book, Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. They talked about the breadth of Lorde’s life and the need to think on a planetary scale, the collective work of autobiography, and the work of a poet in Black feminist science.
Margot Kotler: Before reading your wonderful biography, Lorde was on my mind because I was rereading Zami: A New Spelling of My Name in preparation for teaching it. She’s such a canonical figure in academic and activist feminist spaces, so her work always feels relevant. In the book, you highlight the underacknowledged parts of her life: Lorde the beekeeper, the electronics worker, the librarian, the disability injustice survivor. And you also draw out the differences between her life and what’s represented in Zami, which is semi-autobiographical but often treated as a factual record of her life. Why did it feel important to tell a different story about Audre Lorde, and why is that important right now?
Alexis Pauline Gumbs: For sure. Well, I think every part of Audre Lorde’s life is important, and I definitely wasn’t able to write about all of them. But there are through-lines. You see them in Zami: being told to hide under her desk, living in fear of nuclear war, growing up knowing she’s around the corner from where the atomic bomb is invented and that humanity really might eradicate itself. This is what’s at stake when she talks about survival. She really is thinking on a planetary scale.
Today most of us understand that we’re on a planet in crisis in multiple ways and we’re feeling grief in our hearts on a planetary scale. Some of us are turning to people like Lorde as well as to her neighbors June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara. They all grew up in the same neighborhood and they were all thinking about survival on these grand scales.
Lorde transformed that grief and that fear and the nightmares she had throughout her life into an imperative in her work. The technology of her poetry lets us understand our power and our responsibility even when we’re feeling powerless, which may be the case for many at this time. That’s definitely coming up for me.
MK: In everything you are saying, I can hear your challenge to what you refer to in the biography as the “DEI poster version of Lorde.”
APG: It is helpful for me and I hope it will be helpful to others to understand that the brave version of Audre Lorde on the poster is real but not then to short-circuit this impression and be like, “But I’m not that so I must not have a role in this.” Because Lorde was that but she wasn’t only that.
I want people to understand that Audre Lorde, fierce and brave as she was, never stopped having nightmares. Even her fear of public speaking is important for people to know. She had to think about survival on all scales. On the scale of the family she was creating, the relationships she was in, the parenting of her children, her beekeeping, her own erotic life, and her battle with cancer. All of those for her were related. So I wanted us to be able to be with her on all those scales at the same time. It’s one thing to say “it becomes less and less important whether I’m afraid” and another thing to act when you are.
Everyone I interviewed who knew her in some way, they say they are braver and more honest and loving with themselves and understand their power in a more useful way than they did before their encounter with her. But when you see her on the DEI poster, when you see her in the grant application, you understand that the institutions behind these things don’t want the people who read the poster or receive the grant to be too brave, to transform too much or else they may actually shift their conditions. But that is what we need. That’s what Audre Lorde’s life was about.
MK: What you’re talking about, these many versions of Audre Lorde—the poet, the survivor, the real living person, the icon—brings me to the challenges of writing such a full complex life through the conventional form of biography. It’s often difficult for biography to humanize people, yet yours does. It’s not a very flexible form historically. It’s not a very queer form either, not one that adequately frames queer lives. As a scholar of life writing, I tend to think of biography as deeply tied to linearity and heteronormativity.
Was your approach to the book as a “quantum” or “cosmic” biography, as you refer to it in the prologue, a response to these formal limits? It makes sense to me to think about her life on the scale of geologic time, in relation to global histories of racial capitalism, and on many other scales beyond the human, but I’d love to hear how you came to choose this method, this idea of the cosmic, the quantum, and the non-linear.
APG: Yeah, I’m just following Audre. She was transformed by living in the atomic age. And those scientists, or the students of those scientists, and the equations they created that built the atomic bomb. Those are the same people who created what we now know as particle physics and quantum theory. She was interested in those things as a person reading science fiction. You can see it in all of her work: she was interested in multiple realities existing at the same time.
MK: So it wasn’t just poetic or formal for her. The work was tangibly connected to scientific research, and Black feminist science studies in particular, and so is your biography. This was really exciting to me. This may be counterintuitive to some readers who think of Lorde strictly as a poet or have not in their own lives or studies experienced the interconnections of science and poetry. I’m thinking of the influence of Lorde on scholars like Evelynn Hammonds and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. Do you see this biography as contributing to a reevaluation of Lorde as part of this genealogy of Black feminist science studies?
APG: Yes. Lorde is a scientist. So are Toni Cade Bambara and June Jordan. Toni Cade Bambara would say, I’m a cultural worker; Audre Lorde and June Jordan would say, I’m a poet. But what they meant by that didn’t exclude being scientists. Not because they are scientists by vocation but because what they were doing was science. The crystallization of their lives or actions into jobs or modes of production inside of capitalism was not really what they were about. Their science was a practice of Black feminism and the livable possibilities of homefulness. And those are environmental questions. They are cosmic questions. They are biological questions. And they are economic, domestic, aesthetic. They are all of those things.
And—everything you were saying earlier about the form of biography—it is also a patriarchal form.
MK: Oh yeah. Of course. And a colonial form. I mean, everything.
APG: And since the dominant normative function of biography is not the purpose of Audre Lorde’s life, it therefore could not be the purpose, at least for me, of a biographical work about her life. I had to really think about what form would honor her. I wanted readers to be with Audre Lorde in ways that allow for the most possibility. I wanted to create something that she would think was interesting. She who learned about the atomic bomb and then went and read all that science fiction. She who would ask you about the stone you were wearing or find a stone in the street and go to the bookstore and read about geology. She would follow those curiosities. And it was because she had this fundamental belief, an ethic of interconnectivity. That was how she saw her life. She wouldn’t say, I see my life as world historical. She saw her life beyond the terms of patriarchal history, beyond the species. She saw her life as part of life. She believed that what we do with the energy of our lives has an impact on all the rest of life. Not just human life but life.
Of course, there’s no way to write the whole universe. But I do think I structured this in a way that responds to what Audre Lorde has taught me, that the scale of the life of the poet is the scale of the universe, and there should be access points.
MK: That’s a helpful phrase, “access points.”
APG: Access is another meaning for icon. I have a lot of resistance to the term icon, just to be more personal about it. My dad used to be like, Alexis, you are a Black feminist icon. And I’d be like, I don’t think so. Because when I think of an icon, I think of super famous people and I don’t identify with that. I didn’t identify Audre Lorde or the writers that I study with that idea either because it seems removed from life and not human. But then I thought about it, perhaps in the way that Audre Lorde taught me, and I thought of other icons. On my computer desktop there are icons. You click them to access something. They’re access points.
And I do think of Audre Lorde as that. I even think of myself as that. I want to be an access point for people to be able to learn about Black feminist writers in an expansive way. And Audre Lorde absolutely is an access point. It’s not about a person becoming a product but becoming a portal for something. We’re portals for sets of possibility.
MK: I love this idea of icons as portals to knowledge.
APG: I call it Lorde’s theory of thermodynamics. The way Lorde talked about it is, the energy in the room is not about her or any one person. It’s collective. We generate it but we don’t own it. There’s such a profound possibility in that. I often think biography is used to close something down. The best compliment for biography is that it’s the definitive one, as if another one doesn’t need to be written, but my hope is that this biography as a ceremony makes so many different other forms and experiments and practices of engaging Audre Lorde’s life possible.
MK: Speaking of the collective, I want to ask you about the relational work that went into making this biography. I know that you spent a lot of time in the archives and you spoke to hundreds of people—friends, family, colleagues—some of whom could have written biographies themselves, incorporating their quotes and testimonials into your text and honoring their various investments in different parts of Lorde’s life. Can you talk more about the relational work went into making this, and for others who might embark on such a project, how is it useful to engage biography as a collective endeavor?
APG: Before I ever knew that I would actually write something that could be called a biography, I understood that I was part of a collective project. I wouldn’t have necessarily called it that, but now, being part of the eternal life of Audre Lorde, I have the great gift of knowing so many people who love her and have loved her, having mentors and teachers who were once her students, and who are who they are because they were transformed by her.
There’s the relational work and there’s the responsibility. Getting to be the first person to go to the Spelman College Archives where Lorde’s papers are held, to work in those archives, getting to go to St. Croix and work with Dr. Gloria Joseph, Audre Lorde’s partner, those are experiences that call for accountability. I also understand them to be huge privileges. I also fundraised from my community to buy the plane ticket to St. Croix, so it was collective on that level too. So then the question becomes, how is this project accessible to the collective?
Now, it starts to feel weird when I’ve signed a contract and now it’s COVID and I’m sitting alone in a room under quarantine. But even then I was on the phone, I was on Zoom with so many people, interviewing them, talking with them. I don’t know what my experience of quarantine would’ve been like if not for this.
During my editing process, there was a gap between when I had a full draft and when there was any feedback forthcoming from my publisher and the editorial team. At first I was frustrated, like, this is important, let’s go. But then I thought, maybe that’s not supposed to be the first source of feedback at this stage. I started to think, what would an intentional community revision process be like? And I started to think with each chapter and let it come to me: who’s in my community, who’s the great artist? Torkwase Dyson, a Harlem resident and a citizen of the entire world, was one person who came to me. She went to Tougaloo College where Audre Lorde met Frances Clayton, Lorde’s long-term partner with whom she lived and raised children from 1968 until the early 1980s, and where Lorde, after having been a librarian, taught a poetry workshop that made her decide to become a different kind of educator. So I sent Dyson that chapter. Steven Fullwood was an archivist at the Schomburg. He is the person who let me know about the Joseph Beam papers and a fellowship that allowed me to study those papers. So I sent him that chapter for feedback. And then there were people who read but didn’t give me feedback. Revising for those people was clarifying in terms of decisions about ceremony and voice. What’s really important to include and what’s not? When am I getting in the way of the flow of the energy with all the facts? I know too many facts.
MK: I would love to hear how you approached this biography as a poet. I don’t know if you see yourself as engaging in biography as a practice, or if you feel you wrote a poet’s biography. You’ve structured the book with fifty-eight chapters corresponding to the fifty-eight years of Lorde’s life. You invite readers to enter at any point and move in any direction rather than insisting on chronological order. You also write in the first person about your embodied experience of Lorde’s work, which is something we don’t usually see in biographies. How did it feel, as a poet, to shift to this genre?
APG: I write in the legacy of poets who insist that they are poets no matter what they do. This is something that Audre Lorde says even when her publisher-editor Nancy Bereano is trying to get her to publish Sister Outsider as something else. She’s like, But I’m a poet. No matter what I’m doing, I’m a poet. And that is true for me. Being a poet means understanding the poetic question, the ethical question—this is what Lucille Clifton taught, what Mary Oliver taught: can you say the right thing at the right time to the right person? No one has control over who is going to read their book but you still have a responsibility to that ethic.
So all of this is a long way of saying this is a poem. It’s a really, really long poem.
For Audre Lorde, the poetic question is, Can you feel it? Can the reader feel it when they’re reading it? Is there intimacy? Are you allowing the reader close enough to participate and be transformed by it? If not, why bother? She said, If I don’t give them—this is what she learned at Tougaloo—if I don’t give them who I am, that thing I struggled for within myself, anything else they can get at Woolworth’s.
MK: As you talk about intimacy and vulnerability, I want to turn to a question about this moment. So many people are bravely speaking out about the crises of our moment, whether it’s about climate catastrophe, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, or other global crises. One of the things you write about is the relationship Lorde had with other writers and activists, including Adrienne Rich and June Jordan, and the ways they negotiated conflict. You also explain that while Jordan was a vocal supporter of Palestine, that became a difficult point of fracture for her relationship with Lorde. What do you think Lorde can teach us about negotiating conflict within movements and with people we love or share battles with? What advice do you think she would give to young activists who are negotiating this moment right now?
APG: First of all, there was a lot of conflict. There was a lot of conflict with all the people. I think Audre Lorde would want us to learn from her triumphs and also her mistakes. I don’t think she thought we shouldn’t have conflict with each other when we’re in the same movements or when we’re, as you said, in battle together or working for something that we really care about together. We might have different approaches. I think that she thought that was really generative, actually. But she has this ongoing conversation around silence. And in those instances where there actually wasn’t a coming back together, and that was the case with her and June Jordan, I think that caused real grief for everyone.
I think her advice would be for us to reach out. To reach out to people we have access to or find that access. When she says things like “your silence will not protect you,” she is talking about speaking truth to power, and she is talking about standing up for what we believe in the public sphere, but she’s also talking about the damage that silence can do in our intimate relationships and what it means not to reach out, the cost of silence. And it’s often possible that there indeed is nothing we could have said that would change the circumstance. But I do think that Audre would advise us to say what we can say. We might not always know what to say, but to reach out and try to connect is still worth it. What is lost when we don’t do that is real loss. And it’s not just a loss for us individually or interpersonally. It’s a loss for our movements. It’s a loss for future generations. It’s a loss for the possibilities that exist within our connection, which is all possibility. I think that’s what she would say about conflict: to not bury what you’re going to say or be silent when you disagree, and when you do speak, don’t stop there. Adrienne Rich is also a model of that. She was relentless with all her people. Same with Audre Lorde and June Jordan. That’s important. That’s a political decision. And it’s tied to a certain belief about what we do for what we believe in and what we do with those we believe in, even when we disagree.
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Reading List
Bambara, Toni Cade. The Salt Eaters. Random House, 1980.
De Veaux, Alexis. Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde. Norton, 2004.
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. Dub: Finding Ceremony. Duke University Press, 2020.
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline, M Archive: After the End of the World. Duke University Press, 2018.
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity. Duke University Press, 2016.
Hammonds, Evelynn. “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality.” differences 6, no. 2-3 (1994): 126-145.
Jordan, June. Moving Towards Home: Political Essays. Virago, 1989.
Lorde, Audre. Coal. Norton, 1976.
Lorde, Audre. The Black Unicorn. Norton, 1978.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1984.
Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Persephone Press, 1982.
Prescod-Weinstein, Chanda. “The Cosmos is a Black Aesthetic.” differences 35, no. 2 (2024): 193-207.
Prescod-Weinstein, Chanda. The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred. Bold Type Books, 2021.
Rich, Adrienne. Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose. Norton, 1986.
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Alexis Pauline Gumbs (BC 2004) is an aspirational favorite cousin to all life. While at Barnard Alexis participated in direct collective actions against colonialism and helped build the foundation for Africana Studies to become a fully funded department. Alexis is the author of several books including Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals which won a Whiting Award in non-fiction. Her poetry was honored by the 2023 Windham-Cambell Prize and she was a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Prose. Her most recent book Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde has been celebrated as a TIME top ten must-read book of 2024, a Publisher’s Weekly top ten book in non-fiction and was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal. Alexis is also honored to have been named as an outstanding young alum by the Barnard Alumnae Association.
Margot Kotler is the Associate Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women and is part of the affiliated teaching faculty in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College. Her research and publications focus on feminist life writing, the politics of affect in modernist literatures, and queer embodiment. Margot received her Ph.D. in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and has taught writing, literature, and gender studies at Dartmouth College and Queens College, CUNY.