Monday, 5 February: Audre Lorde, “Hanging Fire,” UA 297.

Reader: Katie Raney

The Poet:

Lorde was born in New York in the 1930’s. It seems her life began with struggles being born tongue-tied and near-sighted to the point that she was considered legally blind.  After graduating from high school, she would earn her bachelor’s degree from Hunter College and then go on to earn a Master’s degree from Colombia University.  Lorde began to work as a librarian until she took her first teaching position at Tougaloo College in Mississippi.  Here, she released her first volume of poems and would continue to release many more volumes.   Her severe fight with cancer led her to develop The Cancer Journals.  She also wrote other works of poety and prose which would give her many awards. Lorde also became an advocate not only for African Americans but also for homosexuals. 

The Poem:

Reading By: Katie Raney

Course Objectives and Interpretations:

1)     5e. To emphasize how all speakers and writers may use common devices of human language to make poetry, including narrative, poetic devices, and figures of speech.

·        In Lorde’s opening lines she writes “I am fourteen/and my skin has betrayed me/ the boy I cannot live without still sucks his thumb/ in secret.”  Lorde uses these lines to set up the narrative voice of the poem.  In these lines, Lorde reveals to us that the speaker of the poem will be a young adolescent afraid to enter into the world of adulthood.   Fourteen is a significant age where your body or “skin” is physically betraying you.

·        Another thing that the speaker notes throughout the poem is the absence of their mother. Lorde notes that “momma’s in the bedroom with the door closed” at the ending of every stanza. This repetition shows the loss that the speaker feels.  Though this is probably not literal, it indicates the life that the adolescent is experiencing without a maternal figure.

2. 2a. Gender: Is the status of women, lesbians, and homosexuals analogous to that of ethnic minorities in terms of voice and choice? Do "women of color" become "double minorities?"

·        In the poem, the speaker states that she is not able to join the Math Team even though “[their] marks were better than his.”  She also states that “nobody even stops/ to think about [their] side of it.”  This could perhaps show the bias that the school system had against gender.  

Questions:

1.     What worries is this adolescent experiencing in her life?  How are they similar to the situations of many adolescents today?

2.     Why do you think Lorde wrote this poem?

3.     What is the significance of the title?

Works Cited

Gillan, Maria, and Jennifer Gillan. Eds. Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry. New York: Penguin, 1994.

Modern American Poetry. " Audre Lorde’s Life and Career." Cary Nelson. 2002. Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. <http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lorde/lorde.htm>.

New York State Writers Institute. "Audre Lorde." 2007. < http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/lorde.html >.