The vigorous sensuality of “The Black Unicorn”
(Photo of Audre Lorde in 1987 by Robert Giard via The New York Public Library Digital Collections)
In 1978, Audre Lorde published The Black Unicorn.
A collection of 67 poems organized into four parts, it features reflections on womanhood, mothers, rage, sorrow, solstice, religion, fear, and rape. She names the Dahomey Kingdom, Harlem, and the goddess Seboulisa. She describes warriors and war, goddesses, the earth, rain, flesh, blood, breasts, bodies, veins. As you read each line and stanza, Lorde’s women take form, their bodies take shape; chest, arms, hair, smiles. You see inside their minds and hearts and feel them move through time and place. The collection is vivid. Demanding. Lorde wants you to feel, see. To name. Transcend.
I began reading Black Unicorn alongside “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Lorde defines the erotic as “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” Lorde writes about the erotic as spiritual; when accessed, it can reinvigorate, empower, and create new ways of co-existing. The erotic is a source of power existing outside male modes of power. Lorde was a vigorously sensual writer, aware and deeply hopeful about how a holistic connection—or healing—of our bodies, minds, spirits, and collective consciousness is crucial for our abolitionist struggles toward liberation.
Like much of her prose, The Black Unicorn connects healing work to a rejection of silence. We choose not to speak because we believe it will protect us, Lorde writes. But silence devastates. It represses and perverts our true feelings, wants, and relationships. She rejects such repression, choosing instead to view the power in speaking and writing.
She is sharp and alluring.
From “Dahomey”: “whatever language is needed / to sharpen the knives of my tongue.” In “125th Street and Abomey”: “give me the woman strength / of tongue this season.” From “Harriet”: “trying to speak trying to speak / trying to speak / the pain in each others mouths.”
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Lorde was a lesbian feminist, philosopher, author, poet, and activist born in Harlem, New York on February 18, 1934, to Caribbean parents from Barbados and Grenada.
She began writing poetry in the 8th grade. She wrote in her journal and she wrote about God and suffering. Her books include Sister Outsider, The First Cities, New York Head Shop and Museum, Coal, The Cancer Journals, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and A Burst of Light. Her writing explores misogynoir, African mythology, spirituality, race, writing, and sexuality. In 1980, along with Barbara Smith, Lorde founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color, an advocacy organization and a publishing house.
In “Awakening Through Audre Lorde,” a 2022 article for Lion’s Roar, a Buddhist, bimonthly magazine, four Black, queer Buddhists discuss the role of Lorde’s writing as a way to better understand and be in unity with our natural world, or dharma. Leslie Booker writes that Buddha teaches that to achieve dharma, one must have a “generous heart and mind.” Booker describes Lorde’s work, especially those written when the poet was diagnosed with breast cancer, as sacred texts that can serve as blueprints for healing and a better understanding of our suffering and that of those around us.
Rima Vesely-Flad describes how Lorde’s work rejects hetero-capitalist-white supremacist-misogynistic structures, including the poet’s categorization of the erotic as a source of power. She describes Lorde’s “celebration of the Black body, of women’s love for one another, of bringing sensuality into every aspect of our work and play…as a vehicle for joy”—the Black body as a site of liberation/abolition.
“Her writing has been a gateway to the dharma for me and many others, even as she never explicitly discussed Buddhism,” Vesely-Flad writes. “Lorde’s focus on one’s interior life—even as she was highly political and overtly engaged in critique and activism—is one way in which she illuminated the dharma.”
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The Black Unicorn is poignant and tender.
Lorde’s love for Black women—the erotic power of the Black body—is felt throughout. She writes so deeply and lovingly about Black women, lovers, mothers, sisters, and grandmothers. Her writing is vulnerable and fearless, calling for a deep, beautiful love capable of changing even the most oppressive systems and relationships.
In “For Assata,” she writes about the political activist, who was imprisoned at the New Brunswick Prison in New Jersey in 1977. The stanzas are stunning and tragic, the way Lorde describes what prison has done to Shakur’s body; her resistance in spite of the police and state violence she faces; and how these inform Lorde’s hopes and love for Assata’s liberation:
your smile has been to war… /
all the baby fat has been burned away /
like a luxury your body let go /
reluctantly… /
I dream of your freedom /
as my victory /
and the victory of all dark women…/
who war and weep.
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The Black Unicorn and much of Lorde’s prose have been instrumental in my writing for the last two years. They are bold demands to embrace an abolitionist faith/love that rejects white supremacist, patriarchal, Christian systems.
Reading Lorde’s collection pulls me outside of myself, forcing me to remember that I write because I believe that it is crucial to help us build and think and struggle together. I write to empower Black women in my community and to center Black, Caribbean, and womanist writing. To connect and love more deeply.
In honor of Audre Lorde’s 90th birthday this week, let her work continue to challenge us to witness and remember the moments of genocide and police and state repression we are seeing worldwide.
Let her work continue to heal us as we fight and struggle together. Lorde didn’t shy away from the personal, societal, and political impacts of life under oppression, and we mustn’t either. We endure, shout, yell, and write our stories and experiences. We feel—love.
In solidarity,
-Olga