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

to Zimbabwe Chad Azania.

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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