About Our Dead Behind Us Essay, Research Paper
Heather Fuller
Audre Lorde’s Our Dead Behind Us tests the parameters of "poetry of
witness," a genre that is relatively new in name though not in practice. The
collection’s lyrically-tight, sensuous, and confrontational poems are difficult to
categorize in terms of witnessing, yet it is not difficult to ascertain each poem’s
credibility and durability. The poems bear witness to atrocities in South Africa and
racial disparity in New York City. The speaker does not apprehend the experiences
first-hand, yet the women she loves do. In this sense, witnesses begets other witnesses,
or pass the mantle of responsibility among the members of a community. The witnessing is
ultimately collective and creates a broad and vital context for the concerns of the book,
namely sisterhood and its range of meanings, matriarchy, queer partnerships, intimacy, and
political affinity groups. The witnessing also provides a forum for an examination of
women living extremity.
Lorde is the conscious narrator of women’s ecstasies and sufferings. In "On My Way
Out I Passed Over You and the Verrazano Bridge," she writes:
I am writing these words as a route map
an artifact for survival
a chronicle of buried treasure
a mourning
for this place we are about to be leaving
a rudder for my children your children
our lovers our hopes braided
from the dull wharves of Thompkinsville
Indeed most of the collection’s poems communicate a searching need to serve as a voice
for and to lead present and future generations of women, particularly displaced African
women. Therein, women may find vindication of history’s brutalities, exiles, lacunae.
Later in the same poem Lorde asks, "so where is true history written / except in the
poems?" and she acknowledges, "History is not kind to us." These aphoristic
asides occur within patchwork descriptions of women’s lives in the global community. The
contextualization of history-writing/poetic composition in women’s experience suggests
that perhaps women must write their own way into history.
"For the Record" reiterates the role of the woman poet in writing history.
Lorde constructs a catalogue of women, all victims of murder:
Call out the colored girls
and the ones who call themselves Black
and the ones who hate the word nigger
and the ones who are very pale
Who will count the big fleshy women
the grandmother weighing 22 stone
. . . who wasn’t afraid of Armageddon.
Repetitive devices operate throughout the collection, and the anaphora here is
particularly effective in emphasizing the numbers and diversity of women not inscribed
onto the historical record. Lorde puts the poet to task as the agent who must account for
these women: "I am going to keep writing it down . . . and I am going to keep telling
this / if it kills me" (63). The task becomes a matter of endurance, survival, and
conscience as well as a matter of history. Later in the poem, Lorde writes of the murders
of a South African woman and Indira Gandhi, then contemplates,
I wonder what these two 67-year old
colored girls
are saying to each other now
planning their return
and they weren’t even sisters.
The irony here is sardonic yet intense. In few lines, Lorde conjures a sisterhood of
shared violence, death, and global oppression.
A fascinating feature of the book involves its inclusion of a striking variety of
responses to threat that women have offered. The collection contains accounts of women’s
militance, rage, flight, unyieldingness, apathy, passion, breakdowns, and banding
together, either in couples or larger groups. Couples find a prevalent place in the book,
particularly in the convergence of partnership and eroticism. Lorde celebrates queer
sexuality while she cites the realities of discrimination and "bashing." One
exemplary poem is "Outlines," in which Lorde explores a relationship between
"a Black woman and a white woman / with two Black children" (12). Early in the
poem, Lorde asserts the poem’s significance:
we cannot alter history
by ignoring it
nor the contradictions
who we are.
The poem confronts the visual and social contradiction of this partnership to swing the
pendulum, so to speak. Silence and obscurity will not win acceptance, the poem seems to
reason; rather, visible acknowledgment, recognition, and reinforcement of the relationship
will push the pendulum toward social inclusion—and further from social denial and
oppression. The poem bears witness to the implications of bashing and the subsequent
strain on a relationship:
We rise to dogshit dumped on our front porch
the brass windchimes from Sundance stolen
despair offerings of the 8 A.M. News
reminding us we are still at war
and not with each other
. . . and still we dare
to say we are committed
sometimes without relish.
For all couples and groups in Our Dead Behind Us, history is not static; it is
what they make it. In "Sisters in Arms," the poem from which Lorde derives the
collection’s title, self-made history empowers and instructs: "we were two Black
women touching our flame / and we left our dead behind us" (4). Lorde’s collection
does not literally leave behind or forget; it leaves a trail of witnessed experience, as
if to leave women exiled from history a way back in.
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