Audre Lorde

“Hanging Fire,” UA 297

Reader: Nancy Broadway

Respondent: Dede Stone

Biographical Information:

            Audre Lorde was born February 18, 1934, in New York City.  She was the youngest of three sisters and her parents, who were immigrants from the West Indies, sent the three girls to a Catholic school.  Writing poetry helped Lorde to express her pent-up feelings.  She had her first piece published while still in high school in the magazine Seventeen.

             The Independent Television Service did a documentary on her life and the following quote from Lorde was on their website:  "I was in high school and I was a mess," she recalls. "I was introverted, hypersensitive, I was all of too intense ... all of the words that other people used for little wild black girls who were determined to live."

            Lorde married when she was twenty-eight in 1962.  She had two children before divorcing in 1970.  In 1968 she started teaching at a college in Mississippi.  It was there that she met her long-term partner, Frances Clayton.  The interviewer for Independent Television Service described Lorde as a “gifted, strong-willed woman who embraced life's moments and focused her energies to fight for civil justice, women's equality and lesbian and gay rights.”

            Lorde died in 1992 after a fourteen year battle with breast cancer at the age of fifty-eight.

The poem’s relation to the course objectives:

Objective 4: to register the minority dilemma of assimilation or resistance

Lorde is struggling with feeling accepted and dealing with things that are beyond her control.

Examples in poem:

“my skin has betrayed me”

“I should have been on Math Team/ my marks were better than his

“Nobody even stops to think/about my side of it”

In her presentation, Allison Amaya thinks the following objective is reflected in the poem:

Objective 3a - African American alternative narrative. "The Dream" factors in setbacks, the need to rise again and a quest for group dignity

Allison states: “The speaker’s set back is whether she will live to see another day.”

Examples in poem:

1. "what if I die/ before morning"

2. "suppose I die before graduation"

3. "will I live long enough/ to grow up"

Objective 6 – To observe images of the individual, the family, and alternative families in the writings and experience of minority groups.

This poem allows a peek at the life of a young teenage minority.  For some reason the mother is inaccessible, yet the mother cares for the daughter because the teen is in school, going to parties, learning how to dance, and wearing braces; but, somehow, her deepest needs are not being met.

Term:  tone

            The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms defines this term as “the attitude of the author toward the reader or the subject matter of a literary work” (482).                        The tone of the poem is somewhat melancholy, but not depressed.  Certainly, Lorde’s thoughts about death are somewhat dark, but she is not asking for or longing for death; she is merely viewing an early death as a sad possibility.

Poem’s title:

            The title of the poem is Hanging Fire and it has been difficult to find out if this term has a special meaning.  The Word for Word website gives the following information: “Smaller dictionaries are likely to miss phrases such as this, but a thesaurus gives a clue. It lists hang fire alongside misfire, flash in the pan and fizzle out—all terms relating to gunnery or musketry.
   When a soldier lit the fuse in a cannon there could be quite a delay until the charge ignited, and this was known as hanging fire. Similarly a flash in the pan related to a failed attempt to fire a flintlock musket, when the flint produced a spark in the priming pan but did not ignite the charge.”

Read the Poem

Interpretation of Poem:

            In her presentation, Kristy Cox states that “the poem consists of short choppy thoughts of a teenager who is concerned about her body, future, and family.  The poem illustrates the thoughts of a young girl who not only has to deal with adolescence but also deal with the cruelty of racism and sexism.”                                                                           I agree with Kristy, but it looks as though Lorde has to be in the struggle alone.  The people in her life have their own struggles—her boyfriend has a hidden secret and her mother is behind closed doors.                                                                                                Like a hanging fire, something has been ignited in her; yet, she ambivalent.  She says that “there is nothing I want to do and too much has to be done.” She also is afraid that what she has to do might not get done before death comes.

Questions:

How would you describe the tone of the poem? 

What is the purpose behind the formatting and lack of punctuation?

Why do you think Lorde titled her poem “Hanging Fire”?

Do you have any ideas about the line that states that if she died they would” tell the truth about me”?

Sources:

Independent Television Service:  http://www.itvs.org/external/Litany/about.html

Online Poetry Classroom: http://www.onlinepoetryclassroom.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=314

Word for Word: http://www.plateaupress.com.au/wfw/hangfire.htm

Allison Amaya: http://www.uhcl.edu/itc/course/LITR/4332/po1aa.htm

Kristy Cox: http://www.uhcl.edu/itc/course/LITR/4332/po2cox.htm