Lorde’s consciousness and politics—and queerness—fueled Gumbs’ personal development as she matured and entered academia, writing her Ph.D. dissertation on the literary practices of black queer feminist thinkers Lorde, Alexis De Vaux, Barbara Smith, and June Jordan. Gumbs continued her analysis on Lorde and what she discovered she shared. She started organizing workshops in her lounge known as The College of Our Lord, which finally morphed and moved on-line. (They proceed to today; Gumbs lately hosted a writing workshop on black ladies, authorities, and energy, linking Kamala Harris’s run for president to the police killing of a younger lady, Sonia Massey, in her own residence.) Unprompted, folks despatched his Lord’s attributes for examine and preservation: the pages of her poems, this system of her funeral.
In 2019, Gumbs joined a number of mates to look at De Veaux, who by then had turn out to be her mentor and chosen household, on a podcast known as “Who Yo Folks Is”, wherein host Sharon Bridgeforth interviewed De Veaux about writing of Lorde’s first official biography, which got here out in 2004, Bridgeforth questioned aloud why somebody hadn’t written one other biography. “And so they all turned and checked out me,” Gumbs recalled, laughing. “I used to be hiding behind my glass of water.” On the time, Gumbs didn’t see biography as a part of his multidisciplinary apply. However she had lengthy admired De Vaux and felt honored to be her religious successor. Then another person approached her about writing a e-book quickly after. “At a sure level, persevering with to deflect one thing is disrespectful,” she says.
Gumbs is the newest in a line of Lorde biographers. In 1995, filmmakers Michelle Parkerson and Ada Homosexual Griffin captured what Lorde seemed and seemed like of their documentary Litany of Survival. The Warrior Poet, De Veaux’s e-book, which was printed in 2004, is an in depth and meticulously researched account of Lorde’s life and her indelible affect on the liberation actions of the late twentieth century. On the peak of her dwelling fame, her concepts—what these near her known as Lordeisms—had been usually oversimplified or compressed right into a line or two. “Warrior Poet” was created on the request of Lorde’s property, who commissioned De Veaux to show the stone monument again into flesh and blood. Gumbs attracts from a lot of the identical materials, together with newly digitized and archived interviews which have surfaced in recent times. And it additionally appears to make use of what historian Saidia Hartman calls “important fiction,” dreaming up the gaps in Lord’s archive information. This imaginative work is an try to render Lorde as absolutely and humanely as doable. Gumbs recognized Baker, the Harlem librarian, as an important determine in Lorde’s inventive life. She finds a mirror between the nursery rhymes Baker learn to Lorde and the poetic constructions Lorde used deep in her profession. Gumbs makes connections between Lorde’s curiosity in polyamory and the pollination and development patterns of sunflowers. These particulars join Lorde’s life with common, even cosmic considerations. As Gumbs started to contemplate what she had discovered about Lorde over time, she realized that considered one of Lorde’s strongest theories had but to be popularized.
“There’s not a second in Audrey Lorde’s life that she’s not occupied with our connection to this planet,” Gumbs advised me. “I do not hear folks saying that Audre Lorde is an environmentalist. However she was. As soon as he began trying, he noticed it all over the place. “Gender, sexuality, race, and transnational feminism emerge from ecology. That is the way in which she considered it, and that is the way in which she worded it. Lorde by no means uttered the phrase “local weather change,” for instance, however she printed a scathing collection of letters from her dwelling on St. Croix after experiencing Hurricane Hugo, a Class 5 storm, in 1989. She was important of the militarized response to authorities, characterizing the survivors as marauders and warned of the situations that led to the catastrophe within the first place. “If we do not study the teachings of Hurricane Hugo, we’re doomed to repeat them.” As a result of Hugo won’t be the final hurricane on this space,” she wrote.
