Audre Lorde, Black Writing, and Intersectional Aging

This chapter will consider the depiction of aging and its intersection with other kinds of difference in Audre Lorde’s poetry, life writing, and essays, building on insights found in her lecture on “Age, Race, Class and Sex” delivered at Amherst College in 1980. Using Lorde as a case study, it will consider the importance of intersectionality to age studies and the value of life-course narrative as a heuristic for revealing its meanings and effects. It will also consider the metaphors of aging in Lorde’s writing that connect it with the larger history of Black consciousness. Poems such as “Timing,” “Echoes,” and “Today Is Not the Day,” essays such as “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” and life writing such as Lorde’s poetic biography Zami all speak of the toll taken on individual lives and communities by unchanging conditions of discrimination, violence, and want, and give voice to the resulting gap between chronological and bodily aging. They also represent more positive facets of Black aging, however, such as the transmission of intergenerational knowledge and an affirmative politics of desire and self-care. The picture will always be complex when considering aging through an intersectional lens, but Lorde demonstrates the vital importance of doing so.