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“Biographies normativize people,” Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs tells me. “It’s like: this is a person, they were born, they died, their life is linear, they’re only one person. My queer approach doesn’t necessarily agree with any of those things. Does our life begin when we’re born? Does it end after we die? Are we ever one person? Those are questions of queer critique that I live inside of.”

Dr. Gumbs and I are speaking about her transformative new biography Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, a wide-ranging exploration of the many lives of the legendary Black lesbian feminist poet, essayist, educator, and activist. Survival is a Promise is not a traditional biography that traces the facts of Lorde’s life from birth to death. Instead, Gumbs offers us what she calls a “cosmic biography,” a luminous deep-dive into various moments throughout Lorde’s life and relationships in a series of 58 poetic, non-linear chapters.

“I did need to queer the form and be as queer as I am in relationship to Audre, who has made us all more queerly possible,” Gumbs shares when we speak in August. Gumbs, a queer Black troublemaker, Black feminist love evangelist, and an aspirational cousin to all sentient beings, is a prolific writer and community builder. She is the author of a number of books that engage deeply with Black feminist theory in its many forms. Her writing experiments with genre, poetry, and prose, shifting our understanding of theory itself.

Survival is a Promise follows in this tradition, opening up new ways for us to encounter, think, and feel with Audre Lorde’s life and work. Gumbs does discuss the typical beats of a biography, including Audre Lorde’s childhood and family life in Harlem in the 1930s and ’40s, her years teaching at various institutions in New York City, her romantic relationships, her family life, her anti-racist, feminist, queer, and decolonial activist work, and her long-term illness from cancer. But Gumbs interweaves this biographical material with meditations on Lorde’s poetry and prose, as well as with her own experience immersing herself in Lorde’s archives, expanding the scope of the work.

“I’m constantly in the archive,” Gumbs says, as she discusses how she began research for this project. While she was initially hesitant about the normative tendencies of biography as a genre, she came to understand how good of a fit she was for the work of biographying Lorde’s life. “People pointed out very rightly that, having been the first person to visit and research in Audre Lorde’s archives, and having written about and taught about her work for so many years, and having so much access to the people in her life who have mentored me, that I would be a good person to write a biography,” Gumbs says. “As I started to study the form of biography, I got excited about what kind of in-depth ceremony and intimacy and time with and space with Audre Lorde could be potentially possible through a big long biography.”

She describes her time in the archives as a process of “energy exchange.” “I have to know, but I’m never gonna know, so that curiosity and that engagement is a way of being in relationship,” she explains. In one chapter of the book, “naturally,” she describes opening a box labeled “ephemera” and finding it “full of Audre’s silver locks.”

She goes on to meditate on this experience and the intimate Black feminist politics of hair:

“What is hair? The afterlife of skin. The cells that keep on growing even after we die. The body’s process of transforming and leaving a trail. Hair is evidence. A hiding place for seeds across the Middle Passage and other displacements. An intergenerational interface of touch and twist and tie and comb and burn and grease. Hair is a canvas that moves with you. A frame for a face. A reshaped head. A tapestry woven into your scalp. A mesh for hands. Antennae for hearing behind your back.

In racialized capitalism, hair is a secondary race characteristic. A place to look for a weapon. A barrier. A landscape to be tamed, tied down. 

And in the magic of the folk, hair is the ingredient you need to cast a spell or work a root on someone.” 

The pages of Survival is a Promise are filled with Gumbs’ poetic wonderment at the biological, geological, and meteorological phenomena that make up human and non-human universes around us. This is in part because Lorde’s poetry deeply engages these same subjects. Gumbs hopes this book helps to re-center Lorde’s poetry in her legacy, where it has often been overlooked in favor of her field-defining essays.

“It was the most important thing to her…[poetry] was her primary practice,” Gumbs tells me. “My relationship with her work was first through her poetry. That was where I found my kinship with her. That was where I really felt the expansive possibilities that she was opening…That’s the infinite part, that’s the eternal part. I think that if we want to honor Audre Lorde for what she’s made possible in our discourse and in our movements, we absolutely do have to look at her prose. But if we want to engage the eternal life of Lorde, some kind of cosmic eternal possibility, we need her poetry…Where she’s going in her poetry, it’s a whole ‘nother technology. It’s not just for a particular moment, it’s not just for a particular audience. It’s like, it’s for earth. It’s for whatever the energy of life force that flows through, it’s for that. And that exceeds everything, it exceeds time, and exceeds space, it exceeds any institution, it exceeds language itself.”

In addition to excerpting and closely reading Lorde’s writing alongside her life story, Gumbs is deeply attuned to the expansive ecology of friendships and intimate relationships that enriched Lorde’s everyday life. Many of these are close friendships and collaborations with other legendary feminist writers. Barbara Smith, June Jordan, and Adrienne Rich, among many others, all figure prominently here. Chapters follow the origins of the Black lesbian socialist feminist Combahee River Collective, as well as the founding of the Kitchen Table Press, a feminist press dedicated to publishing work by women of color. Chapters also trace Lorde’s romantic partners, including long-time partners Francis Clayton and Gloria Joseph. To recreate these relationships, Gumbs spent time in multiple Black feminist and queer archives and interviewed many of Audre Lorde’s friends, colleagues, and family members.

“Audre says we do not survive as individuals, and I think that that’s true,” Gumbs says. “That’s part of a queer approach to biography: it isn’t really a biography of one person, because we’re not one person at a time. So what’s the ecological approach to understanding this energy that Audre Lorde was moving forward? It was always in conversation. It was sometimes like, as part of a forest.”

“She really lived in conversation, she really lived in relationship,” Gumbs continues. “If we go to meet Audre Lorde, we mostly have to go meet her there, we’re not meeting her alone.”

Reading Survival is a Promise feels like time traveling. Particular chapters focus on specific conferences, talks, or panel presentations where Lorde spoke. Gumbs offers such detailed descriptions — day by day or month by month accounts of the correspondence between these women — that I could really picture what it was like to be present for their field-defining conversations and (occasionally) disagreements.

“I constantly fantasize about being in these spaces where these Black feminists were together,” Gumbs says. “I am in spaces with Black feminists together in my own lifetime, but I’ve always time traveling. What would it have been to be at those black feminist retreats, or to be at that conference, or to be in that conversation, or to be in that classroom? I felt like I was creating the time machine for myself so we can be there, we could be there and feel that.”

I was particularly moved by one chapter, “a litany for survival,” composed entirely of quotes from Audre Lorde’s students during the years she taught poetry at Hunter College, recreating what it might have been like to be in Lorde’s classroom. While the quotes are all presented anonymously, in their own poetic formation, if you flip to the Notes section at the end of the book (and the Notes section in Survival is a Promise is a feat in and of itself, chock full of extraordinary detail about Lorde’s life, displaying just how much research went into this manuscript), you will find a number of influential feminist writers and thinkers — Sarah Schulman, Jewelle Gomez, and even Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins, Audre’s daughter — among the students quoted.

Even as Gumbs meticulously reproduces Lorde’s conversations, relationships, and the sociopolitical contexts she engaged with throughout the 20th century, she maintains a sense of curiosity and humility about Lorde’s life. Many of her chapters include a series of unanswerable questions about Lorde’s thoughts and feelings. By continually pointing both to what she can and cannot know, Gumbs rejects the objective, omniscient perspective many biographies strive for.

“I have no pretense to objectivity around Audre Lorde,” Gumbs tells me. “The other thing is that, inside of that pretense of objectivity — which I don’t believe, because I don’t think people write biographies of anyone that they’re objective about, it takes too much work and too much time! — there’s this form of expertise that seeks to be definitive. And in that pursuit of being definitive, it closes something down, like ‘this is the last word.’ And I don’t want there to ever be a last word on Lorde. I think that the thing that I love about Audre Lorde, and definitely what characterizes my relationship with Audre Lorde, is that, certainly her poetry, but also her life, it really opens things up and it makes us wonder and it offers more questions.”

This curiosity and compassion is tangible in Gumbs’ writing. When Gumbs considers some of the conflicts that shaped Lorde’s relationships — two chapters follow her political disagreements with June Jordan, in part over debates around Zionism and antisemitism in the feminist movement — she stays curious. “How do sisters disagree? Can they come back from mutually perceived betrayals?” Gumbs asks in the book. These are contemporary questions, to be sure. Gumbs follows the archival records here, sharing with us Lorde’s and Jordan’s letters to each other, as well as noting significant archival absences. Her work conveys that it might be impossible for us to ever know everything about what someone thought or felt.

When I ask Gumbs how she approached writing about these conflicts, she replies, “We have to learn to deal with conflict better. I think about how to present [these relationships] in a way that allows those lessons to emerge and for us to be able to still relate to the people.”

“Just like the earth is still in process, everybody who we could possibly write about was in a process,” she continues. “I also try not to define them by just one single moment or one single decision. It’s complicated, but it’s the same thing we have to do with each other. It’s the same thing that we have to do in real time, is to understand, I might be dealing with somebody who’s doing something that is harmful. I don’t think they should be doing it. I profoundly disagree with it. But it still is not the totality of who they are. They still are in a process.”

Throughout Survival is a Promise, Gumbs shows us how Audre Lorde’s life was and still is in process, ever-evolving as the lives of those she influenced continue to evolve in the present moment and will continue to evolve into the future. Gumbs is now contemplating a project about the life and legacy of Augusta Baker, a prominent Black librarian who shaped Lorde’s childhood and transformed the field of children’s literature. Gumbs is also currently writing a book about June Jordan and her relationship with civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer, titled Love is a Life Force. (“It’s gonna be a lot shorter!” she jokes.)

After we end our conversation, I think about the first time I encountered Audre Lorde’s work in my Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies class in college. I remember sitting around a seminar table, discussing and debating what Lorde might have meant when she wrote “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Now as a professor of Gender and Sexualtiy Studies myself, I teach Lorde’s essays from Sister Outsider every semester, continually in conversation with my students about the multiple meanings of Lorde’s poetic and profound writing.

I first encountered Alexis Pauline Gumbs work as a college student, too. When she spoke on my campus about sexual violence, survivorship, and her own experiences at Columbia University, our shared alma mater, her words deeply resonated with me. Years later, when I was a graduate student at Northwestern University, Gumbs visited campus to speak about how she honors the legacies of foundational Black feminist writers in her work. I sat in the audience, moved and inspired by her career as an independent scholar and her spiritual commitment to her craft.

Like Lorde, Gumbs has influenced a new generation of feminists and academics striving to reimagine the way we write, think, feel, and exist in relationship with one another. “Audre Lorde lived on the planet only fifty-eight years. But don’t we feel her impact everywhere?” Gumbs asks toward the end of the book.

Indeed, we do. With Survival is a Promise, Gumbs continues to shape the afterlives of Lorde’s legacy. Gumbs also cements her own legacy as a Black feminist visionary writer, who, like Lorde, uses her work to make all of us more queerly possible. May we continue to feel her impact, everywhere.

Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde by Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is out now.

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