A Litany for Survival

“A Litany for Survival” is a free-verse poem by Audre Lorde from her 1978 poetry collection The Black Unicorn, Lorde’s seventh book of poetry. “A Litany for Survival” is also the title of a 1995 documentary film about the poet. Lorde began publishing books of poetry in 1968, and her last book of poetry was published posthumously in 1993. Her book, From a Land Where Other People Live, was a National Book Award nominee; however, The Black Unicorn is arguably her most famous book of poems. In “A Litany for Survival,” Lorde draws upon her own experiences as a Black, lesbian, Marxist writer who battled cancer to illuminate some of the issues that marginalized people face. She explores Concerns About Legacy and Survival, Living Without Security and Safety, and The Power of Fear Over the Marginalized.

POET BIOGRAPHY

Audre Lorde was born in New York City in 1934. Her parents, immigrants from the Caribbean Islands, named her Audrey Geraldine Lorde, and she was the youngest of their three daughters. Lorde attended Hunter High School, and was the editor of its literary journal. She also had her first poem published in Seventeen magazine when she was still in high school. Lorde obtained a bachelor’s degree from Hunter College and a Master of Library Science (MLS) degree from Columbia University, as well as studied for a year at the National University of Mexico.

After completing her MLS degree, Lorde worked as a librarian in the public school system of New York. Her first teaching position was at Tougaloo College in 1968. Later, she taught English at John Jay College, Hunter College, Lehman College, and the Free University of Berlin.

In her personal life, Lorde married Edwin Rollins in 1962, but divorced in 1970. They had two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan. Both Lorde and Rollins came out as members of the LGBTQ+ community after their marriage, and Lorde began dating her long-term partner, Frances Clayton, in 1972. Lorde was born nearsighted, to the point of being legally blind, and draws upon her experiences as a Black woman in her writings.

Lorde is known for her prose as well as her poetry. Her essays, such as “The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House,” are influential in academia and among activists. Her essays about fighting breast cancer (The Cancer Journals), as well as her semiautobiographical book, Zami: New Spelling of My Name, are also widely read. In her lifetime, Lorde published nine books of poetry. She served as the poet laureate of New York from 1991 to 1992, and won numerous awards, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the 1991 Walt Whitman Citation of Merit.

Lorde, along with other writers, established Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1981. She also was a cofounder of the Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa, which helped women impacted by apartheid. Lorde frequently visited Germany and became a prominent figure in the Afro-German movement. In the United States and overseas, Lorde is known for battling anti-gay bias, racism, sexism, and classism. In 1992, Lorde passed away from cancer.

POEM TEXT

Lorde, Audre. “A Litany for Survival.” 1978. Poetry Foundation.

SUMMARY

“A Litany for Survival” has four stanzas of varying lengths. In the first stanza, the speaker describes being a part of a group of people. These people exist at the edge of the sea and the beach, as well as the edge of decisions. They can’t yield to fantasies of having a choice. Their love is in the liminal (in-between) places. These include doorways, times of day, between the internal and external, as well as before and after. They seek an existence in the present that can produce futures. This is compared to feeding children so they are able to have dreams that do not mirror the deaths of these people.

In the second stanza, the speaker continues to describe the group of people to which they belong. These people learned about fear from infancy, and this fear is compared to skin texture. The weapon that controls them is a false sense of safety. Their oppressors’ goal was to keep them quiet with this illusion. All of the people in the group that the speaker belongs to, at the moment, and in their triumph, were not supposed to survive.

In the third stanza, the speaker lists the group’s collective fears. At sunrise and sunset, the group that the speaker belongs to fears that the sun will not remain and return, respectively. The collective also has concerns surrounding food, specifically fears about indigestion when there is food and fears about hunger when there isn’t food. Additionally, the collective fears the loss of love when in a relationship, and the absence of love when alone. They fear not being listened to and understood when they speak, and they fear speaking.

In the final stanza, the speaker concludes that the collective should remember, when they speak, that people in power do not want the members of the collective to survive.