Alert: I will reveal something very personal (yes, even by the standards of this blog) in this post.
She would be 87 years old today. But she lives on for me, and many other people.
I first encountered Audre Lorde's poetry when I was in college--right about the time the world (as I knew it, anyway) was discovering black artists and lesbians--and colleges were starting to offer courses in Women's Studies (no gender studies or queer studies) and African-American Studies.
That was during the late 1970s. The way I came to her poems--and her work as a feminist activist--wasn't through class assignments: She came to read on our campus. Honestly, I knew nothing about her before then--or, to be fair, many of the poets who gave readings at our college. That, of course, is exactly the reason I went to those readings.
Some I've long since forgotten. But I knew Audre Lorde would stick with me, even thought I was far from being "out" as a non-heterosexual, non-cisgender person and am about as white as anybody can be. (According to a DNA test, I am 4 percent African. Anthropology 101 tells us the human race began in Africa, so that proportion seems like some sort of baseline for everyone.) Her poems were unlike any I'd heard or read up to that time and, in ways I wouldn't articulate until much later, she showed there were ways one could carry one's self in this world that, up to that point, I hadn't seen.
She's one of those writers that even people who've never read her quote, sometimes without realizing it. "Poetry is not a luxury." Of course, you're not going to hear that from your parents or most of the people you know when you announce that you're changing your major from Business or Engineering to Creative Writing or English Literature (unless, of course, you tell them the latter is a preparation for teaching or law school). What she meant is that poetry is, in her conception--and mine--an attempt to say what hasn't been said and, as often as not, what others won't say.
I don't know whether she did much cycling. But these words of hers capture the reason why many of us ride:
She knew about self-care: Some of her later activism was motivated by her battle with breast cancer, which claimed her at 58 years old. Her spirit motivates my riding and writing, which are as much a part of my self-care as visiting my doctor.
Oh, my doctor is part of the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, of which she was a co-founder. I go to that doctor because I like him, and on principle: That he would work for C-L when he probably could make more elsewhere says much about his motivations, of which Audre Lorde would surely approve.
