The Black Unicorn: Audre Lorde, Intersectionality and the Importance of Community
By Eleanor Flower, 3rd Year English and Classical Studies
In September 1979, celebrated poet, scholar and activist Audre Lorde gave a speech at the Second Sex Conference at NYU. It was a huge event, one of the most significant academic conferences on feminist and gender studies, a discipline that was only just beginning to gain respect and traction within academic fields.
Lorde was selected as a speaker for a panel specifically addressing ‘the role of difference within the lives of American women’. Ideologically, this context aligned perfectly with Lorde’s work. Yet, when she arrived at the conference itself, she found herself confronted with a paradox: in a conference supposedly about the inclusion and importance of marginalised identities and their relation to gender politics and equality, Lorde found herself the only Black woman that had been invited to speak, as well as the only Lesbian. This irony was not lost on her.
What happened at that conference was the symbolic apex of the problems within society—and indeed, within feminism—that Lorde dedicated her life to articulating. Born in 1934 Harlem to immigrant parents, Lorde lived her life at a bridge between two communities: the bustling urban landscape of the New York streets below her window, and the idyllic Caribbean shores of her mother’s stories, where she and Lorde’s father grew up and fell in love. From childhood, Lorde was forced to grapple with the fact that she was Different, both from her parents (whose memories were of a world she had never seen) and her (often white, often straight) peers. It was this difference that led her to write poetry, and later scholarship, that would act as the keystone to the feminist movement we now know as intersectionality.
As time passed, Lorde’s status as the perennial outsider evolved from childlike anxiety to a political consciousness: only a year before her speech at the Second Sex Conference, Lorde published an anthology of poems entitled ‘The Black Unicorn’. At its centre is the image of a mythical creature that is displaced from the reality around it, but also from others of its kind: because it is a unicorn, it cannot be at place within a field of ordinary horses, but because it is Black, it will always stand out from the typical image of its peers. It is not difficult to make the connection here to Lorde’s lived experience as a Black Lesbian feminist living and writing in late 20th century America.
The Black Unicorn presents the image of a life lived perpetually on the margins; a girl whose home was fractured between dreams and actuality, and an adult articulating the loneliness of being both Black and queer. Lorde turned to academia to express herself and be understood. Yet even in a conference with ‘difference’ as its subject, she found herself isolated, the very systems that perpetuate patriarchal oppression implicitly held sacred within a space that was supposedly anti-patriarchal: ‘Women of today are still being called on to … educate men as to our existence and our needs. Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women – in the face of tremendous resistance – as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is … a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.’
The Black Unicorn here becomes a symbol not just of marginalised identity, but of the hypocrisy that exists within supposedly progressive spaces, and furthermore, that this hypocrisy will be its undoing. The Black Unicorn exists in the in-between, but it is symbiotically sustained by the rich traditions and realities from which it was created; it is an outsider not because of some inherent fact, but because of a manufactured purism created from rejection and fear. The tapestry that unites difference is rich and complex, and interwoven with narratives that are both individual and shared, but without these narratives and the marginal spaces around them, the tapestry begins to unravel. And soon enough it is not just the Black Unicorn that has fallen, but the whole world.
Lorde made her speech in 1979, but the warnings she gave have by no means become an artefact of history. As far-right ideologies inch ever closer to the mainstream of Western politics, we are watching in real time as the tapestry of difference that Lorde and her contemporaries fought so hard to maintain unravels, while communities close their walls and pull each other apart. Lorde’s essays and poetry are but one voice within the cacophony that are begging us to listen to the same message: all forms of oppression are inextricably connected, so our resistance within communities of difference must be equally united. As Lorde said, ‘Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.’
Audre Lorde died in 1992 as a celebrated poet and author, yet she is survived by the systems of oppression she spent her life trying to bring down. In 1978, she described the Black Unicorn as ‘unrelenting’ and ‘restless’, and we can only assume that Lorde died still running passionately towards a future society never let her see. But to read her poetry, and to speak it out loud is to continue the war against oppression that she died fighting, so that her Black Unicorn is no longer merely ‘mistaken for a shadow or a symbol’, but acknowledged and honoured as something real. Avenging the Black Unicorn must be a systemic, generational effort, but we can start by choosing to look it—her—in the eyes.
Edited by Scarlett Bantin