{"id":18332,"date":"2011-11-21T02:04:48","date_gmt":"2011-11-21T02:04:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=18332"},"modified":"2017-08-09T15:47:53","modified_gmt":"2017-08-09T15:47:53","slug":"my-hero-audre-lorde-by-jackie-kay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=18332","title":{"rendered":"My hero: Audre Lorde by Jackie Kay"},"content":{"rendered":"

My hero: Audre Lorde by Jackie Kay<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Guardian<\/a>
\nSeries: My Hero<\/a>
\n2011-11-18<\/p>\n

Jackie Kay<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of Creative Writing
\nNewcastle University<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nRefusal to be defined by single categories: Lorde in 1983. Photograph: Robert Alexander\/Getty Images<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

‘Lorde was openly lesbian before the gay movement existed. Her wise words often seem eerily prescient’<\/em><\/p>\n

Audre Lorde<\/a> dropped the y from Audrey when she was still a child so she could be Audre Lorde. She liked the symmetry of the es at the end. She was born in New York City<\/a> in 1934 to immigrants from Grenada<\/a>. She didn’t talk till she was four and was so short-sighted she was legally blind. She wrote her first poem in eighth grade. The Black Unicorn, her most unified collection of poems, partly describes a tricky relationship with her mother. “My mother had two faces and a frying pot \/ where she cooked up her daughters \/ into girls \u2026 My mother had two faces \/ and a broken pot \/where she hid out a perfect daughter \/who was not me.”…<\/p>\n

…I first met Audre in 1984, when I was 22. She told me her grandfather had been Scottish, and that I didn’t need to choose between being Scottish and being black. “You can be both. You can call yourself an Afro Scot,” she said in her New York drawl. Lorde was Whitman-like in her refusal to be confined to single categories. She was large. She contained multitudes…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Refusal to be defined by single categories: Lorde in 1983.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,666,125,1196,8,25],"tags":[2954,1587,2103],"class_list":["post-18332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-gaylesbian","category-identitydevelopment","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-women","tag-audre-lorde","tag-jackie-kay","tag-the-guardian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18332"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54765,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18332\/revisions\/54765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}