LeftExchange
Cassandra’s Prophecy:
Female statement in the Poetry of Audre Lorde
The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being
ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children
--A. Lorde
from Power
In Greek Mythology, Apollo gives Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy, the gift of prophesy in the hope of gaining her affection. When she refuses his advances Apollo declares her visions as a prophetess will be ignored by the people. Despite this declaration Cassandra continues to see the future and feels compelled to share her insight with her sisters (Willis 42). Audre Lorde, a women of similarly prophetic visions joins other women of Poetry in communicating the tragedy and wonder of the late twentieth century. Her poems convey with unrestrained compassion, sensuality and honest anger her communal celebration of female statement. Lorde, like Cassandra, uses her often painful powers of perception to connect her reader with the strength and beauty of the feminine image.
In reconfiguring Descartes’ Cogito in her essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” Lorde defines a new outlook departing from what “The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am.” She asserts, “The Black mother within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.” With this association of cerebral male and emotive female Lorde’s poetry continually demonstrates feminine feeling as arrive at something deeper, more alive than the rehearsed European thought which tries to overpower the visceral or capricious mode of living.
This passion is also displayed in “Love Poem” as a landscape is transformed into a lesbian lover. “Make sky flow honey out of my lips/ rigid as mountains/ spread over a valley/ carved out by the mouth of rain.” The dominant majesty of the female body becomes a sensual universe of contour and form. The ecstasy is expansive as the Earth is personified as a goddess. The crucial aspect of this sexual poem concerns its unbridled statement of amatory lesbianism. Without apologising for or felling embarassed by her fantasy she claims a victory in the gender politics of the 1970’s, affirming the uncomprimised femininity of her poetry.
Along with recognizing sexual freedom, Lorde documents the tribal power of the female in “Beams.” The women warriors of Dahomey leave their strength to the poet who reminds, “ hanging on my office wall/ a snapshot of the last Dahomean Amazons/ taken the year I was born.” This is futher emphasized in “The Women of Dan…” where she increases the tenacity of her female image to a ferocious sword wielding soldier of service and warmth light up her path.
This is far from the complacent female figure of domestic American; far from the acquiescent homemaker of our placid swells-ville of gender roles and rightful places. This ravenous picture of woman conquering her world with determination and compassion lets the reader know that Audre Lorde isn’t interested in common notions or institutional conventions. In her poetry women are captured in a vital beauty, as possessors of prophetic wisdom, and most of all, as themselves—freed from the rhetoric and released in the poem.