![]() ![]() ![]() It might puzzle some why Lorde, a gay Black woman, would move from Harlem, the neighborhood of her birth, so closely associated with her work, to Staten Island - then, as now, the whitest and most politically conservative of New York City’s boroughs. All these had come to pass within a social and political climate inscribed with racism, homophobia, and violence. Her connections to the place were complex, bringing together her love of nature, her need for a place to write and work, to be with her lover and her children, as well as with other poets and activists. In the poem, “On My Way Out I Passed Over You and the Verrazano Bridge,” Lorde contemplates leaving Staten Island where she had lived for nearly thirteen years. ![]() And it seemed, for me, very symbolic-one of the ways in which we are both connected and letting go.Ĭharacteristically, Lorde challenged her listeners: “What you get from this poem, I ask that you hold and use.” On a trip to San Francisco, not too long ago, I happened to look down and realized that the plane was circling the bridge and therefore, circling my house. I live quite close to the Verrazano Bridge, which is the bridge that connects Staten Island with the rest of New York City…. Lorde introduced one of the poems she would read this way: In May 1985, Audre Lorde participated in a daylong event sponsored by Sisters in Solidarity against Apartheid, a student group at the University of California Berkeley. ![]()
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