Audre Lorde Analysis

Turkle is able to appeal to the readers emotions in her essay by telling stories and using strong

The essay goes into great detail of his relationship with his father. He describes his father as cruel (65), bitter (65), and beautiful (64). He does mention the bad in length. On the flip side, he tells us some of the good as well. Throughout his storytelling, the reader gets a glimpse into his life and the way he feels. His feelings evolve during the extent of the essay.

Prose starts out with such strong language to set the tone of the essay and to establish her stance. She does risk putting of readers who disagree with her by immediately talking from a purely emotional point rather than introducing a logical argument. Readers may take offense with the writing she speaks poorly of; for example, as a reader, I personally disagreed with many of her early statements, particularly her negative, simplistic view of To Kill A Mockingbird, which she writes is, “...a chance to consider thorny issues of race and prejudice from a safe distance and with comfortable certainty...dubious literary merit…” (Prose 3). Her highly emotional critique of the novel is one of the many example when Prose risks irking or downright irritating her readers.

Webster defines poetry as literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm. Rhetoric is only the art of writing and speaking effectively while poetry is the art of speaking emotionally and freely. Lorde says that poetry is to killing yourself as rhetoric is to killing your children. The first lines of the poem is Lorde calling the readers to action, and telling them to put their children first. Feeling fury over the case against Thomas Shea, in the first stanza, in the first four lines of the poem, Lorde tells us that it doesn’t matter the crime or the race, children must come before hatred. She emphasizes on this in the next stanza.

There are some images and events that stick with a person forever and can change their entire outlook on life. Sometimes these events are experienced indirectly, through the media, but that does not mean that it impacts the person any less. Audre Lorde is one of those people who is indirectly affected by a tragedy that she witnesses through the eyes of the media and her society. For Audre Lorde, the brutal murder of a young African American boy sticks with her and inspires her to write an emotional poem entitled “Afterimages.” The image of the boy, Emmett till, is forever engraved in Audre Lorde’s brain (Lorde 48). Her poem clearly expresses how distraught she is, not only with what happens to Emmett Till, but also with the views of society as a whole. The theme for Audre Lorde’s “Afterimages” is traumatic events can reflect the attitudes of members of a society and can also significantly impact the lives of young people.

There is a double-consciousness, according to W.E Burghardt Du Bois, in which we view ourselves through a veil. Underneath of this veil is the true self. The person that we are in our purest state. The veil itself, however, is how society sees us and our realization of that projection. Looking in a mirror, both layers can be seen. However, the true self is still covered, muddled, unclear beneath the sheer outer shell of expectation. In her poem “Coal”, Audre Lorde alludes to this concept through the dual image of a piece of coal and a diamond. As a black woman, Lorde only transforms from coal to diamond when she embraces her blackness as coal and, ironically, rejects the societal pressure

“Zami: A New Spelling of My Name” by Audre Lorde is often seen as one of the most influential pieces of writing in terms of Black Feminism as well as LGBTQ community. Though it was intended as an autobiography, it covers a wide range of numerous topics, allowing the author to reflect on them from the perspective of her life. The book is filled with numerous details that may seem to be trivial, yet they represent an important aspect of then-contemporary society.

In “The Author to Her Book,” Bradstreet is inundated in indecision and internal struggles over the virtues and shortfalls of her abilities and the book that she produced. As human beings we associate and sympathize with each other through similar experiences. It is difficult to sympathize with someone when you don’t know where they are coming from and don’t know what they are dealing with. Similar experiences and common bonds are what allow us to extend our sincere appreciation and understanding for another human being’s situation. In this poem an elaborate struggle between pride and shame manifests itself through an extended metaphor in which she equates her book to her own child.

Lorde's focal subject in this section is "contrast" - contrasts of sex, class, race, sexuality, encounter, and so forth. She examines the contrasts amongst ladies and approaches women's activists to perceive these distinctions, even to commend them, as opposed to endeavor to defeat them by disregarding their reality. She contends that we should "take our disparities and make them qualities" (99). The (white) women's activist development fears tending to contrast, however just by tending to distinction would it be able to make group. Lorde utilizes the expression "interdependence" to allude to the genuine association amongst ladies and ladies' want to sustain each other. She approaches ladies to hold onto these as the way to the opportunity

The narrator though an educator, is not very good at verbalizing his emotions. He tends to be the person who keeps everything inside

Audre Lorde is a woman of different identities, ranging from being a black woman, a feminist, a lesbian, and a mother. In my opinion, in order to understand where a poet is coming from, we have to delve into a little of their background, much like how Sylvia Plath’s Daddy would not award the reader with its full meaning if you did not understand it as a whole. Audre Lorde was born in New York City, America in 1934. A small, but I think an extremely important fact is that Lorde’s birth-given name was actually ‘Audrey’ but at a young age, on her own accord, she dropped the ‘y’ from her name. This shows that even when she was small, she had a strong sense of non-conformity with her self-identity.

In presenting herself as a child on the verge of adulthood, Lorde indicated to the reader that the things she learned at this time would be pivotal and important for the rest of her life. For example, at the beginning of her essay, Lorde wrote that her trip to Washington D.C. was “on the edge of the summer when I was supposed to stop being a child” (221). In this way, Lorde’s trip to the nation’s capital and her experiences of discrimination there provided an intellectual

The most significant part of the entire text is that most of the readers will never feel the pain of author. The ability not to be able to relate and understand someone’s struggle is very impactful.

The poem, “A Woman Speaks” by Audre Lorde is a both a confessional and identity poem. She is not only addressing her internal battle and self-suffering, but also discussing the societal inequities African American women were suffering in the United States. The poem’s diction, on the surface, produces a tranquil tone to the poem. This facet of tranquility in the poem is used to express how her battle against inequity will not be fought with violence or hatred, and how she is not blaming any specific party or institution for her personal suffering. She instead plans to use the power and beauty of words to communicate the flaws of the image of women, fight against injustice and racism, and alleviate her internal despair. “A Woman Speaks” by Audre Lorde is an anthem for African American women and uses vivid imagery, ancestral references, and a call to action to connect to the reader and enact a fight against the underrepresentation of African American women.

Literature, no matter what the topic of form it comes in, has the ability to raise issues, spark thought/imagination, and/or draw out emotions that have been buried deep within us as people. It is expected, from the authors, that readers will form opinions and criticisms for their works. Be it that the readers’ emotions parallel those of the writer or differ; some thoughts and opinions are expected.