Audre Lorde: Trauma Theory and Liberal Multiculturalism

A question becomes important in politics to the degree that it points to real processes about which a society cannot even reach an agreement on how they are to be conceived or interpreted, much less resolved, or to events that introduce something which can no longer or not yet be contained within the historical unities or narrative continuities through which a society proposes to define itself. And perhaps there can be no genuine democracy unless a society respects and provides room for the emergence of questions of this type--questions raised by the problems and antagonisms that society generates. Indeed we may well ask: What is the "question of identity"--the political "question of identity"--today? --John Rajchman, "The Question of Identity" (60) Almost every critic who has written on Audre Lorde has made the argument that her work is "transformational." AnaLouise Keating, who has written prolifically on Lorde, says that "by speaking out [Lorde] begins constructing the world she envisions; that is, she creates a new discourse enabling her to invent a world in which those truths can materialize" (157). (1) The majority of these arguments, however, have focused on Lorde's prose, and the studies that do address her poetry in large part approach it from the angle of content only, rarely paying close attention to its form. While I agree that Lorde can produce "transformational" or at least alternative language, particularly in the midst of an ever-strengthening hegemonic discourse of US liberal multiculturalism, (2) I argue that it is the formal qualities of Lorde's poems and their use of what I define below as a "traumatic" aesthetics that can be truly transformational by allowing readers to become aware of the limitations of dominant liberal multicultural discourse and its ways of representing identity and subjecthood. The poems speak to issues of "political importance" as defined by Rajchman in that they are able to linguistically represent "something which can no longer or not yet be contained within the historical unities or narrative continuities through which [US] society proposes to define itself" (60). Communication requires entering into and utilizing a language that preexists the speaker. She cannot communicate without recourse to commonly shared discourse, and if she is able to use it to communicate "new" ideas, it is only because that language is at a point at which it can express those ideas. I would argue, however, that one of the functions of lyric poetry is to speak dominant rhetoric differently, to open up different forms of expression and description. This, of course, does not mean that it does not have its own formal and communicative rules, only that those rules are not the same as everyday, often narrative-based, communication. I mentioned that little work has been done on the formal qualities of Lorde's poetry. There are, however, a few notable exceptions. Amitai F. Avi-Ram has studied Lorde's use ofapo koinou, a figure of speech in which "a single word or phrase is shared between two distinct, independent syntactic units," to draw connections between Lorde and modernist poets and to argue that she uses this trope to develop a "new language" which allows for "an alternative constitution of the subject in poetry" (193, 206, 207). Lexi Rudnitsky employs a similar methodology, reading the "syntactic ambiguity" of Lorde's work in relation to her multiple identity positions, but arguing that Lorde's disruption of traditional syntax and grammar has "the pointed objective ... of complicating the subject position, undermining monolithic categories of identity, and demonstrating that difference can be a source of creativity" (476). Finally, Sagri Dhairyam examines Lorde's fraught relation to modernist poetic forms both because she has inherited them from a white male tradition and because they invite readers to perform their own interpretations of Lorde's identity--often resulting in limited and exclusionary readings. …