Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde by Alexis Pauline Gumbs is not a biography. Well, it’s not only a biography. This may disappoint readers who, like me, were excited to hear about this hefty tome touted as the first new biography in 20 years of the legendary “Black lesbian feminist poet warrior mother,” as Lorde liked to identify herself.
Rather than straightforwardly telling Lorde’s life story, Gumbs instead riffs on many of its major elements: places, people, movements and literary motifs. Each short chapter meditates on an aspect of Lorde’s life, employing an extended metaphor and/or series of images (often from Lorde’s writing) to expand or expound upon that aspect. Gumbs also throws popular science, progressive political treatise and her own musings into the mix. Surprisingly, this multifaceted approach not only works but at times achieves a gorgeous lyricism and transcendence, more like poetry than biography.
Gumbs isn’t the first to employ such an approach; deconstructing biography is having a moment. Imani Perry’s recent Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry creatively reconsiders the details of the playwright’s life. Similarly, Amelia Possanza’s Lesbian Love Story: A Memoir in Archives chronicles the author’s reactions to her archival discoveries; it’s as much about her as about her historical subjects.
Gumbs’ multifaceted approach not only works but at times achieves a gorgeous lyricism and transcendence, more like poetry than biography.
I admire this approach’s bold opposition to the supposed “objectivity” of typical biography. These writers are openly subjective, veritable characters in their own books. And if the personal is political, then why not inscribe yourself in your writing? Why not frankly discuss who you are and how this shapes your interpretation of the biographical material you are presenting? Gumbs nods to queer Black Canadian writer Dionne Brand’s “disrupt[ing] the idea of the autobiography” and by implication, the biography: Each narrative is just one possible version of how the story could have been told. Eschewing typical chronology and structure only highlights this for the reader.
Gumbs discusses a lecture in which Brand considers the traditional British literature she grew up imbibing. “Her experience of reading as she offers it back to the world here is not just about how these books impacted her,” Gumbs writes. “It is about what it is possible to write, say, understand, know, and be in a world shaped by the narratives of colonialism.” At its best, this writing approach is downright revolutionary.
At its worst, it’s an alienating read. The loose chronology, while creative, can be confusing. It’s not always clear why Gumbs employs a certain metaphor or image, or how it relates to the aspect of Lorde’s life under discussion. For example, Gumbs vividly sketches Lorde’s “big sister” dynamic with fellow Black lesbian poet Pat Parker, noticing how Lorde was the only person who could get away with calling this tough butch a breezy nickname like “Patty,” but why does she compare their friendship to “abyssal plains” at the bottom of the ocean? Similarly, another chapter bewilderingly begins, “I don’t know if Audre Lorde ever heard recordings of gray whale speech. … The belches, the deep croaks.” While Lorde used this metaphor to describe a woman speaking in her poem “Berlin Is Hard on Colored Girls,” Gumbs’ experimental extension of it diverts from, rather than complements, her discussion of Lorde’s mentorship to Afro-German women.
But most of the metaphors work. Gumbs beautifully likens the healing power of Black female friendship to trees in a forest helping each other process light and feeding each other needed nutrients in a “black-feminist photosynthesis.” Gumbs riffs originally on the shared history of the typewriter and the gun, and describes AIDS with a sharp eye, calling T-cells “warrior poets of the blood.” I teared up when she used Lorde’s recurring motif of light to describe the deaths of Lorde and her fellow poet Joe Beam: “Joe and Audre became pure light.”
Despite its poetic approach, the book does offer some new biographical nuggets, as Gumbs had unprecedented access to Lorde’s manuscript archives. Gumbs heartbreakingly meditates on the death of Lorde’s teen friend Genevieve and Lorde’s subsequent lifelong grief, deftly pointing out both the factual fictions and the deeper truths in Lorde’s “biomythography” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. She writes insightfully about Lorde’s falling out with fellow Black queer poet luminary June Jordan, situating their dispute in their shared lineage to the writers and activists that came after: “Many of us are cousins related through these two sisters.” A more traditional biography wouldn’t allow this rhetorical move.
Ultimately, Lorde comes alive in the book, an affectionate and multi-faceted portrait. The metaphors, many based in nature, root Lorde in the earth and the greater cosmos, inscribing her into the pantheon of ancestors. At its most shining moments, the book is refreshingly, joyfully creative, embodied and alive.
Gumbs best describes her approach in the book’s last chapter, which consists of descriptions of photographs taken by Lorde of her adopted home of St. Croix after 1989’s Hurricane Hugo. Though these are photos of objects and landscapes, not of people and certainly not of Lorde herself, Gumbs writes, “I call these photographs self-portraits because, as Lorde says, observing the damage was like ‘looking in a mirror.’” This is a lovely way of underscoring Lorde’s pain at her home’s devastation — at the same time as cancer ravaged her own body; a wonderful way of emphasizing the interconnectedness of not just living beings but the natural world.
Indeed, this is exactly what Gumbs is trying to achieve. She continues: “And the refraction of the self-portrait spills onto me, spills onto us, because the artist, the self that the portrait invokes, already considers herself intersubjective.”
Intersubjective: This book isn’t merely about Lorde, it is about Gumbs. And it is about you, the reader. The book opens with an epigraph of an audience member at a poetry reading asking Lorde whom she meant when she wrote, in her most famous poem, “We were never meant to survive.”
Lorde replied: “I was talking about you.”
• • •
Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde
By Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Penguin Books; August ’24; 528 pages
Jessica Max Stein is a former editorial collective member of The Indypendent. She is the author of Funny Boy: The Richard Hunt Biography (Rutgers University Press, 2024). In high school, she interned at Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the publishing house co-founded by Audre Lorde.
