The "Power" and "Sequelae" of Audre Lorde's Syntactical Strategies

Author(s): Lexi Rudnitsky

Source: Callaloo, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring, 2003), pp. 473-485
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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 THE "POWER" AND "SEQUELAE" OF
AUDRE LORDE'S SYNTACTICAL STRATEGIES

by LexiRudnitsky

1.

Widely anthologized, honored by numerous awards, and praised by contempo-

rary poets (Adrienne Rich, for example, proclaimed her "a visionary"), Audre Lorde's
work has nonetheless received little critical attention. To date, no full-length book
exclusively dedicated to her writing has been published. The criticism that does exist
tends to focus on her "biomythography," or memoir, Zami:A New Spelling of My Name,
rather than her poetry. But for Lorde, even Zamiwas an extension of her poetic project:
it sought to describe, in her words, "How I Became a Poet" (Zami 31). Indeed, Lorde
considered herself principally to be a poet and claimed that she only taught herself to
write prose later in life ("An Interview" 95). When asked why she published a short
story under the pseudonym Rey Domini, Lorde responded, "I don't write stories. I
write poetry. So I had to put it under another name" (87). Embedded in this seemingly
straightforward response are two theoretical assumptions that motivate much of
Lorde's writing: 1) that poetry is of primary importance, and 2) that conventional
markers of identity are inadequate. These two premises, as I later hope to demon-
strate, are central and inextricably linked threads in Lorde's work.
Lorde privileged poetry over other forms of expression because she believed that
poetry alone had the ability to create a new language, which would, in turn, make
possible a new social order. This new social order would reside in what she famously
dubbed the "house of difference," a community that celebrates difference and derives
its creative potential from diversity (Zami 226). Lorde's "house of difference" stands
in direct contrast to what she calls "the master's house," which is built on exclusion,
exploitation, and conformity ("The Master's" 112). In her essay "Poetry Is Not A
Luxury," she writes that when the right "language does not yet exist, it is our poetry
which helps to fashion it" and that "[p]oetry coins the language to express and charter
this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom" (37-38). One of the
primary ways in which Lorde fashioned and coined a new language was by disrupt-
ing traditional syntax. In her interview with Adrienne Rich, she explains the signif-
icance of grammar to her writing:

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 CALLALOO

I learned to teach grammar. And then I realized that we can't

separate these two things [writing and grammar]. We have to do
them together because they're integral. That's when I learned
how important grammar is, that part of the understanding process
is grammatical. [...] I learned that grammar was not arbitrary,
that it served a purpose, that it helped to form the ways we thought,
that it could be freeing as well as restrictive. [... O]nce we know
it we can choose to discard it or use it, but you can't know if it has
useful or destructive power until you have a handle on it. (95)

For Lorde, who taught English at the university level, the decision to subvert
grammatical conventions was conscious, and beyond that, political. "As black peo-
ple," she argues, "[w]e were tutored to function in a structure that already existed but
that does not function for our good" (Tate 106). Thus, she implicitly establishes a
connection between political structures and discursive ones. Seen in this light, her
well-known aphorism, "[T]he master's tools will never dismantle the master's house,"
directly informs her poetry: Since the master's rules include the use of conventional
syntax, her poetry seeks to create new syntactical structures to accomplish the
revolutionary work that she sets out for it ("The Master's" 112).
While most of the scholarly literature on Lorde is concerned with her prose, a small
body of literature does exist that is chiefly concerned with her poetry. However, with
few exceptions, this criticism has the curious habit of treating her poetry as if it were
prose. That is, it looks at content without taking into account formal structures. Such
works paraphrase her poems and smooth over the difficult syntax in order to reveal
its true "meaning" (Brooks 272) or its underlying "message" (Martin 278). Even Gloria
T. Hull's article "Living on the Line: Audre Lorde and Our Dead Behind Us," which
acknowledges "the frequency with which edges, lines, borders, margins, boundaries,
and the like appear as significant figures in her work," fails to look closely at the ways
in which Lorde enacts these figures in her poeticlines (154).
Part of the reason that critics have ignored Lorde's formal strategies may stem from
the myth that her poetry's power derives from her experiences and observations, as
opposed to her technical aptitude. Lorde herself contributed to this misconception
when she told Rich that "Power," one of her best-known poems, "came out without
craft" (107). Likewise, in an interview with Claudia Tate she claimed that many of the
poems in The Black Unicorn, her most celebrated collection of poetry, were simply
excerpted from her journal: "I was recording in my journal, but no poems came. I
know now that this was a period of transition in my life. The next year, I went back
to my journal, and here were these incredible poems that I could almost lift out of it" (111).
Another separate, but related, reason that critics have neglected to comment on
Lorde's form is that she wanted her work to represent a break in poetic tradition. She
not only insisted that her poetry be free of the formal structures that limited her
predecessors, but she defined her poetry in opposition to theirs. In her essay, "Poetry
is Not a Luxury," Lorde writes of poetry as "a revelatory distillation of experience, not
the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to
mean-in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight" (37).
However, simply because she does not work within traditional forms does not mean

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that her poetry is formless; and simply because she dismisses "sterile word play" does
not mean that her poetry does not play with language.
In fact, in one of the few scholarly studies that deals with Lorde's formal structures,
"Apo Koinou in Audre Lorde and the Moderns: Defining the Differences," the critic
Amitai Avi-ram argues that the use of word play, particularly apo koinou, is central to
Lorde's work. From the Greek "in common," apo koinou is a device in which a single
word or phrase is shared by two independent syntactic units. A classic example is the
opening to Lorde's poem "Prologue,"which begins, "Haunted by poems beginning with
I / seek out those whom I love." Here the pronoun "I"serves as the object of the first line
and the subject of the second, introducing the speaker's struggle to assert her subjectiv-
ity-what she refers to as "the me that I am"-in defiance of the accusation "that I am
too much or too little woman / that I am too black or too white / or too much myself."
Apo koinoualso refers to a particular kind of enjambment, in which the meaning of
a line is altered by the lines adjacent to it. Lorde relies heavily on this technique
throughout her work. Consider, for example, "The Black Unicorn," the first poem in
the eponymous volume. When Lorde writes, "The black unicorn was mistaken," the
reader assumes it is the unicorn who has made a mistake. However, Lorde challenges
this assumption in the following lines, adding that the unicorn was mistaken "for a
shadow / or symbol." Thus it is no longer the unicorn who is mistaken, but the reader
who has mistaken the unicorn for a mere representation of something more primary.
At the close of the poem, Lorde again uses apo koinou to cast doubt on the unicorn's
existential status: "the black unicorn is not," she writes, before concluding in the next
line, "free." While the apo koinou structure allows syntactic units to share a bond, it
simultaneously allows each unit to retain its own individual meaning. Thus, the
reader can both maintain that the unicorn does not exist ("is not"), and that the
unicorn does exist but "is not / free." Of course, within the logic of Lorde's poetics,
these contradictory readings inform one another: a subject cannot truly exist, accord-
ing to Lorde, without being free.
Avi-ram uses a different poem from the Black Unicorn-citing the final lines of
"From the House of Yemanja"-to illustrate what he considers the function of apo
koinou in Lorde's poetry:

the sharpened edge

where day and night shall
meet and not be
one.

This passage, according to Avi-ram, "provides an uncanny description of the effect of

apo koinou in Lorde's poems: the reader is brought to rest, suspended directly upon
that 'sharpened edge,' where his vision of semantic and social realities is honed"
(202). Furthermore, he argues that "the delay of the final period heightens the force
of closure when it comes" (203) and that apo koinou ultimately produces "absolute
articulation" (205). However, in my reading, the speaker's very refusal to become
"one"-and her insistence that the meeting of opposites will not produce a new
unity-would seem to preclude the possibility of "rest," "closure," and "absolute"
meaning.
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Avi-ram's reading, while highly conscious of the importance of difference in

Lorde's poetry, nonetheless reverts at times to a dialectical logic, which strives to
reconcile binaries and resolve contradictions, rather than allowing them to coexist.
His view is not surprising, for Lorde herself stated in her oft-quoted address "The
Master's Tools": "Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of
necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic" (111).
However, a dialectical paradigm is not sufficient to describe the way in which
meaning is constituted in Lorde's work. The metaphor of a spark, after all, is not one
of synthesis but of unresolved friction. And her tentative description of this process-
not a dialectic but "like a dialectic"-suggests a degree of uneasiness with the very
concept.
Perhaps the model of a "dialogic of difference," which Mae Gwendolyn Henderson
defines as "not only a relationship with the 'other(s),' but an internal dialogue with
the plural aspects of self that constitute the matrix of black female subjectivity," comes
closer to explaining what takes place in Lorde's work (17-18). (Henderson contrasts
this to what she calls a "dialectic of identity," which "presupposes as its goal a
language of consensus, communality, and even identification" [20].) In "Speaking in
Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition,"
Henderson rigorously applies this dialogical model to fiction, closely analyzing the
plot, characters and dialogue in several novels written by black women. What she
does not do, however, is bring this model to bear on formal considerations.
In this paper, then, I want to draw on a dialogical model to analyze Lorde's use of
syntactic ambiguity. This ambiguity, I intend to argue, often has a pointed objective:
that of complicating the subject position, undermining monolithic categories of
identity, and demonstrating that difference can be a source of creativity.
While unstable subjects are present in many of Lorde's poems, particularly those
found in TheBlackUnicorn,this paper will focus on two of her so-called journal poems,
"Power" and "Sequelae." Although Lorde claimed that these poems were artless
expressions of "feeling" and "truth," I want to posit that their formal structures are
highly wrought (Tate 111). These structures call into question the stability of the
speaker's identity, and in so doing, create a provisional subject whose identity is large
enough to "contain multitudes."1 It is from her ever-shifting position as, in Barbara
Christian's words, "a black, lesbian, feminist, poet, mother" that Lorde is able to
articulate her poetic vision and insist that complicated subjectivities are not only
consistent with creativity, but constitutive of it (209).

2.

The opening stanza of "Power" has mystified many critics:

The difference between poetry and rhetoric

is being

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ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.

One popular reading has suggested that "being / ready to kill / yourself" is a
contemporary analogue to Shelley's idea that poets must relinquish their individual
identities and instead fully inhabit their subject matter.2 In his article "Lorde's
POWER,"Thomas Dilworth writes:

[S]elf-murder seems preferable because it is merely a metaphor

for "killing" passionate egoism. Such self-killing resembles po-
etry, which involves objectivity and the death of the ego. [. ..]
Poetry is not merely self-expression; it exists for its own sake as
an object of beauty by virtue of aesthetically significant interre-
lationships. Antithetical to poetry is rhetoric, which is utilitarian
language that does not exist gratuitously for its beauty but
chiefly as expression for a speaker or to affect a listener. (54)

While Dilworth is able to sustain his reading fairly consistently, his interpretation
ignores important aspects of Lorde's poetic project. Her poetry does not aspire to
"objectivity," but rather undertakes what Hull has called the "ceaseless negotiations
of a positionality from which she can speak" (155). Likewise, Lorde suggests, it does
not strive toward self-effacement, but "self-revelation" ("The Transformation" 42).
Furthermore, in an interview with Tate, Lorde explicitly contradicts Dilworth's
definition of poetry: "[T]hequestion of social protest and art is inseparable to me. I can't
say it is an either-or proposition. Art for art's sake doesn't really exist for me. [...] I
loved poetry, and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of
changing my life. [. ..] That's the beginning of social protest" (108). Lorde, then,
dismisses Dilworth's notion of poetry as an art form that "exists for its own sake as an
object of beauty," and instead argues that poetry can become an object of beauty only
by serving a social function. During the same interview, she explicitly describes the
process of writing "Power" as an act of political protest:

It was a poem written about Clifford Glover, the ten-year-old

black boy shot by a cop who was acquitted by a jury on which a
black woman sat. In fact, the day I heard on the radio that O'Shea
had been acquitted, I was going across town on 88th Street and
I had to pull over. A kind of fury rose up in me-the sky turned
red. I felt so sick. I felt as if I would drive the car into a wall, into
the next person I saw. So I pulled over. I took out my journal just
to air some of my fury, to get it out of my fingertips. Those
expressed feelings are that poem. That was just how "Power"
was written. (111-12)

In a separate interview with Rich, she again emphasizes that writing "Power" was a
way of taking action:

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There is the jury-white male power, white male structures-

how do you take a position against them? How do you reach
down into threatening difference without being killed or killing?
How do you deal with things you believe, live them not as
theory, not even as emotion, but right on the line of action and
effect and change? All of those things were riding in on that
poem. But I had no sense, no understanding at the time, of the
connections, just that I was that woman [the single black woman
on the jury]. And that to put myself on the line to do what had to
be done at any place and time was so difficult, yet absolutely
crucial, and not to do so was the most awful death. And putting
yourself on the line is like killing a piece of yourself, in the sense
that you have to kill, end, destroy something familiar and de-
pendable, so that something new can come, in ourselves, in our
world. And that sense of writing at the edge, out of urgency, not
because you choose it but because you have to, that sense of
survival-that's what the poem is out of, as well as the pain of my
spiritual son's death over and over. (107, my emphasis)

Significantly, Lorde uses the expressions "on the line" and "writing at the edge,"
expressions that suggest the poetic line, to describe the process of composing "Pow-
er." For Lorde, putting yourself on the line and writing poetic lines are synonymous,
and both involve "killing a piece of yourself." This sort of suicide, then, clearly does
not entail "the death of the ego" as Dilworth suggests. Rather, it involves refusing
false assumptions that others seek to impose on you (i.e. the rhetoric that "convinced"
the black jurywoman) and asserting your own vision (i.e. the poetry that enables you
to express the "things you believe"). As Lorde explains in "The Transformation of
Silence into Language," choosing poetry over rhetoric is "the decision to define
ourselves, name ourselves, and speak for ourselves, instead of being defined and
spoken for by others" (43).
The content of the original version of "Power" published in Between Ourselves is
exactly the same as that of the one published in Lorde's subsequent volume TheBlack
Unicorn;however, some of the line breaks are different. For example, the first stanza
in Between Ourselves is only four lines:

The difference between poetry and rhetoric

is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.

In contrast, the first stanza in The Black Unicorn is five lines:

The difference between poetry and rhetoric

is being
ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.

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In the later version, Lorde breaks the second line after "being," suggesting that the
difference between poetry and rhetoric is an existential one: poetry is associated with
existence and rhetoric with nonexistence. For Lorde, as I mentioned earlier, the act of
being is predicated on freedom. She underlines this point in "The Master's Tools":
"freedom [. ..] allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative.
This is a difference between the passive be and the active being" (111). Here, in
distinguishing between the active and passive voice, she highlights how subtle
syntactical distinctions suggest very different semantic possibilities.
As we read on in the poem, however, we learn that the difference between poetry
and rhetoric is not just "being," but "being / ready to kill / yourself." This, of course,
is an example of apokoinou,in which the succeeding lines transform an affirmation of
existence (being) into a denial of existence (killing yourself). However, in my reading
of this poem, which I believe is borne out by Lorde's notion of difference, existence is
not canceled out by nonexistence. Rather, the distinct meanings coexist in a produc-
tive tension, which serves to spark rather than limit meaning.
The next stanza is treated as a single sentence, though it contains at least four
independent clauses. It opens with another instance of syntactic ambiguity:

I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds

and a dead child dragging his shattered black
face off the edge of my sleep

The complex syntax in this line is typically glossed over by critics. For example, in his
essay, "In the Name of the Father: The Poetry of Audre Lorde," Jerome Brooks
explains, "[T]he streets of New York become 'a desert of raw gunshot wounds' and the
poet's dream is disturbed by the 'shattered black / face off the edge of my sleep."'
This, he claims, is an instance in which Lorde demonstrates her "ability to hold event
up to her relentlessly clinical analysis" (271). While Brooks praises these lines for their
precision, he neglects to note that the participial phrase "dragging his shattered face"
is grammatically imprecise: It could either modify the "I" ("I am... dragging") or the
child ("a dead child dragging"). The distinction may seem insignificant, but it raises
the question of agency. Does the speaker have control over her dreams, which would
occasion poetry, or is she controlled by the horror that surrounds her, which would
occasion rhetoric? Furthermore, if the "dragging" is imputed to her, then is she
performing the same action as the eleven white jurymen who "dragged" the one black
jurywoman "over hot coals of four centuries of white male approval"? Is she, as the
reference to killing children in the first stanza might suggest, somehow implicated in
this child's death?
In addition to the grammatically ambiguous subject, the second stanza suggests
the notion of multiple subjects through its fractured images. The "shattered black /
face" cannot but recall the closing lines of "Outside," an earlier poem in The Black
Unicorn collection, which is explicitly about the speaker's multiple identities: "I am
blessed within my selves / who are come to make our shattered faces / whole." In
addition, the speaker herself is physically torn: her "stomach churns at the imagined
taste" of blood while her mouth, which "splits into dry lips," thirsts for it. Significant-

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ly, the rhetoric of splitting is echoed when Lorde describes writing "Power": "I went
through a period once when I felt like I was dying. I wasn't writing any poetry, and
I felt that if I couldn't write I would split" (Tate 111). This kind of split, then, is a
betrayal of herself by herself-"without loyalty or reason"-and is associated with
the inability to write poetry.
Lorde further details the forces that prevent her from writing in the remainder of
the stanza, describing "the whiteness / of the desert where I am lost / without
imagery or magic." In "Poetry Is Not a Luxury," Lorde states that the source of
inspiration for black women writers "is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is
ancient, and it is deep" (37). Furthermore, in that same essay, she explicitly identifies
poetry with "magic" (36). The totalizing whiteness, then, negates the possibility of
poetry because it subsumes all color, from the blackness of the child to the redness of
his blood, and cancels out all imagery and magic. (The whiteness also recalls a blank
page unmarked by the pen.) Furthermore, the fact that she is "trapped on the desert,"
with its biblical resonance, suggests deferred freedom, which is antithetical to Lorde's
notion of poetry as liberating. Even the slightly jarring use of the word "on"-a
preposition that implies surface-denies access to poetry's depths. Instead of writing
poetry, Lorde admits that she is "trying to make power out of hatred and destruction,"
a useless gesture that she identifies with the rhetoric of racism and brutality.
In the next two stanzas, Lorde moves from the allegorical desert into the court-
room. These stanzas describe the occasion of the poem: the killing of ten-year old
Clifford Glover and the acquittal of the police officer who shot him. The agents of the
action in these stanzas seem to be clear and well-documented: the policeman mur-
dered the child, and the white jurymen acquitted him and "convinced" the black
jurywoman to agree. Significantly, however, there is one instance in these two stanzas
in which the subject is not explicitly identified: "a voice said, 'Die you little Mother-
fucker."' This disembodied voice suggests that the hatred extends beyond the indi-
vidual police officer's hatred of the murdered black boy into a more systematic hatred
of blackness.
The speaker's subjectivity continues to be destabilized in the final stanza. She notes
that if she fails to distinguish between poetry (visionary action) and rhetoric (reaction
or inaction), she will either abuse her power like the police officer or relinquish her
power like the jurywoman. Furthermore, this failure will have the result of metamor-
phosing the black-woman speaker into an angry black teenage boy who rapes an
elderly white mother. Such an action would confirm the racist rhetoric that black
people are "beasts" and quite literally "motherfuckers." The "greek chorus" that
glibly articulates this racist rhetoric recalls both the Western male tradition that
presents itself as objective and the tragic tradition in which the speaker is to blame for
her own suffering (Dilworth 56). Lorde, of course, undermines the authority of the
chorus by mocking its egregiously reductive summation and by refraining from
capitalizing the word "greek."
In her article "A Woman Speaks," Brenda Carr suggests that the rhetoric the
speaker seeks to avoid posits an irreconcilable difference between her blackness and
femaleness: As a woman, she objects to the rape of another woman, but as a black
person she objects to the designation "motherfucker." Thus, Carr suggests that the

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final stanza offers another way of reading the first one: If the speaker perpetuates
rhetoric instead of creating poetry, then she must be ready to kill herself, by which she
means surrendering her position as a subject who is simultaneously black and female
(135). The difference between poetry and rhetoric, then, is that the one involves a self-
reflexive and provisional subject while the other involves a monolithic subject whose
identity is predicated on exclusion.

3.

Like "Power," the poem "Sequelae" was ostensibly lifted wholesale from Lorde's
journal (Tate 111). Indeed, the poem's circular form-it begins with the image of a
"burning sword" and ends with the image of a "flaming sword"-is consistent with
the way Lorde describes her journal entries: "My journal entries focus on things I feel:
feelings that sometimes have no place, no beginning, no end" (Tate 111).
Furthermore, the poem's nontraditional syntax-it contains no punctuation except
at the end of each stanza-gives the impression of a kind of stream-of-consciousness
often associated with informal writing. However, Lorde's syntax is highly deliberate:
she self-consciously refers to the poem's "disorder" and is cognizant that her writing
"hand is a receiver/threatening as an uncaged motor." By casting aside the cages of
traditional form and syntax, Lorde suggests, the poem undermines the master's rules
and thereby becomes subversive. The syntactical moves in "Sequelae," then, are
equally strategic as those in "Power." In fact, the poem not only employs unconven-
tional syntax, but it is in many ways about unconventional syntax.
"Sequelae" may not explicitly refer to "poetry" in the way that "Power" does.
However, as in many of Lorde's poems in The Black Unicorn, the image of the sword
stands in for the pen.3 Thus, in the opening lines when she describes the "burning
sword" and the "burned hands" that wield it, Lorde immediately announces that
"Sequelae" will operate within a meta-discourse on writing:

Because a burning sword notches both of my doorposts

because I am standing between
my burned hands in the ashprint of two different houses

As we will see, it is only by incinerating these houses, and along with them the
structures that uphold traditional syntax, that the speaker is able to produce the
"ashprint" that becomes poetry. Once again, Lorde uses the metaphor of sparking a
fire to signal creative production.
The entire poem hinges syntactically on these first lines. As fragments, they could
be read in different ways. It is possible that they complete a thought that occurred
before the poem began. For example, "[I zoriteb]ecause a burning sword notches both
my doorposts." This reading would make sense given the title "Sequelae," which
suggests that the poem is a series of reactions, likely pathological ones, to an event that
occurred previously.4 Another reading would suggest that these lines introduce a

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thought that the rest of the poem completes. Since the lines are not resolved according
to the rules of conventional syntax, the rest of the poem can be read as an explanation
of why the "burning sword" and the "burned hands" have caused the speaker to set
fire to the houses.
While both of these readings are plausible, smoothing over the ambiguous syntax
would involve overlooking an important aspect of Lorde's poetics. Rather than fill in
the missing words and insert proper punctuation, we must instead consider why
these things are absent in the first place. Why does the poem begin with a subordinate
clause that turns out to be insubordinate? Why does a dependent clause function as
an independent one? Lorde may have sought to demonstrate that those who have
been discursively marked as subordinate and dependent are in fact capable of
autonomy. In a more general sense, the syntactic ambiguity here and elsewhere in the
poem produces multiple semantic possibilities and thereby plays out Lorde's theory
of difference.
The use of apo koinou in these opening lines further resists the imposition of a
coherent single interpretation. For example, the radically enjambed second line
dramatizes the liminal state that the poem describes: The speaker's metaphysical
condition of being "between" becomes her physical location between two burned
down houses. It is worth noting that the "two different houses" are not synonymous
with the "house of difference." Rather, the speaker's exclusion from the polarities of
these houses, where difference is conceived of in terms of binary oppositions, recalls
the "master's house."
Throughout the rest of the poem, Lorde harks back to the "keyholes / of yesterday"
when the master's house was still standing. Peering in, the speaker discerns that in
order to be given permission to enter, she must accept the identity conferred upon her
by the dominant culture-"the dreams of people / who do not even know me"-and
thereby surrender constitutive elements of her identity. In a way, the speaker's
stealthy entrance into the house is analogous to her entrance into the world: her
mother's thighs serve as doorposts of sorts. Indeed, the "growing dark secrets / out
from between her thighs" suggest that the pressure to hide aspects of her identity-
blackness, femaleness, and lesbian desire in particular-and even to deny her exist-
ence itself, paradoxically seems to have started at birth.
Keeping these "dark secrets" to herself, the speaker gains admittance to the
master's manse. "In a new room," the second stanza begins, "Ienter old places bearing
your shape." The word "stanza" derives from the Italian word for "room" (Corn 79).
Thus, by mentioning the "room" at the start of this stanza, the speaker not only makes
reference to her location in the house but also to her location in the poem. Indeed, the
house itself becomes a metaphor for the confining "shape" of formal, grammatically
correct poetry.
Once inside, the speaker discovers she is "trapped" in the master's house, and like
the speaker in "Power," she must emancipate herself by casting off the master's white,
patriarchal structures:

while I battle the shapes of you

wearing old ghosts of me
hating you for being
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 CALLALOO

black and not woman

hating you for being white
and not me

In the context of reading this as a poem about writing, the "you" whom the poem
addresses is poetry itself, and "the shapes of you" represent its formal possibilities.
The battle here is not merely the speaker's battle to express herself,but to express her
selves through poetry-to be "black," "woman," and "me" all at the same time. In
"Power" Lorde argues that insofar as a poem neglects to convey the speaker's
multiple identities, it ceases to be poetry. Similarly, when the speaker of "Sequelae"
accuses her poem of "being white" instead of "black," "you" instead of "me," and "not
woman," she suggests that it has begun to degenerate into rhetoric.
Part of the reason that the speaker directs so much "hating," "anger," and "fury"
against this kind of rhetoric is that she recognizes that it threatens to subsume her.
Curiously, as the poem progresses, the "I" and the "you," or the speaker and the
poem, become increasingly difficult to separate. The speaker no longer battles "the
shapes of you / wearing old ghosts of me"; instead she battles "old ghosts of you /
wearing the shapes of me." Indeed, one of the central conflicts of the poem involves
the speaker's effort to exorcise these ghosts-a process she describes as "the separa-
tion I cannot yet make" in the beginning of the poem-who seek to possess her and
prevent her multiple identities from finding their voices.
The distinction between the "I" and "you" further collapses when the speaker
detects "the sharp smell of your anger / in my voice." The speaker, in effect, performs
an act of ventriloquism, articulating a powerful emotion that originates in another
body-or at least from an alien part of the self. The origin of this emotion is further
obfuscated by the synaesthetic description, in which the senses of feeling, smell and
sound are conflated.
Conversely, the speaker perceives the sound of another's voice emitted from
herself: "I hear the high pitch of your voice / crawling out from my hearts / deepest
culverts." In addition to semantically obscuring the distinction between self and
other, these lines syntactically obscure the distinction between the plural noun
"hearts" and the possessive one "heart's." Later in the poem, Lorde again fails to use
an apostrophe to indicate possession when she writes about "my mother draped in my
fathers / bastard ambition." Here, as well, the noun is both plural and possessive. This
syntactic move is revealing not only because it reinscribes the speaker's multiple
identities-only a complicated subject could have more than one heart and more than
one father-but because it suggests that possession is only possible when she accepts
that she has multiple identities: her "hearts" and "fathers" do not belong to a single
integrated self but must be shared among many coexisting selves.
These multiple selves, however, are not welcome in the master's house. Touring
the "august" premises, the speaker soon recognizes that it is a place "where nobody
lives" because its requirements for admission-the possession of a fixed and easily
categorizable identity-are not viable. Instead, the house is haunted by ghosts of the
frustrated selves who died upon entering. It is here, inside the master's house, that the
speaker comes to the terrifying realization that "compromise is a coffin nail," by

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 CALLALOO

which she means that silencing part of her identity (e.g., subordinating her blackness
to her womaness) is tantamount to dying.
As in "Power" where identity is a life-or-death matter, the speaker in this poem is
in danger of being killed by a "masquerading" self-one that pretends to represent
her, but in fact denies the existence of her multiple selves; one that imitates conven-
tional rhetoric, rather than inventing visionary poetry:

my hands grip a flaming sword that screams

while an arrogant woman masquerading as a fish
plunges it deeper and deeper
into the heart we both share

It is, of course, significant that the speaker and her alter ego struggle over a "flaming
sword," that is to say pen, for the power to write. Bringing the poem back to the
opening image, the speaker escapes from the master's house and presumably uses her
fiery utensil to burn it down. Free at last, she exorcises the alien parts of herself-the
"old ghosts" with whom she has been battling throughout the poem. Although a
sword has been plunged into her heart as well as her nemesis's, the speaker-as she
earlier informed us-has a reserve of "hearts" and manages to evade death. "I have
died too many deaths / that were not mine," the poem concludes. Maintaining
multiple identities, then, becomes crucial to the speaker's survival: death cannot
possess her because it cannot locate her essential self.

4.

In this paper, I have sought to demonstrate that the syntactical structures in Audre
Lorde's work are crucial to understanding her poetic project. While scholars have
praised the content of her poems, most have failed to consider the ways in which her
formal structures complement, dramatize and even produce that content. By disrupt-
ing conventional grammatical rules and using ambiguous syntax, Lorde's poetry calls
into question monolithic subjectivity and enacts a dialogic theory of difference. When
critics smooth over these strategic devices to produce a logically coherent reading of
her poems, they ignore the very premise of her poetic project: to dramatize, through
elusive language, the impossibility of pinning down her multi-faceted and fluctuat-
ing identities and to demonstrate that complex subjectivity is a necessary premise for
creativity. In her speech "The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action,"
Lorde insisted, "For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the
truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it" (43). It
is time we began to heed Lorde's own instructions for reading her work; if we do so,
we may begin to unleash the latent power of her poetry that for too long has been
misread and ignored.

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NOTES

1. After taking on the identity of a slave, "savage," prostitute, etc., Whitman writes in the
penultimate section of "Song of Myself": "I am large, I contain multitudes" (123).
2. In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley argues that imagination requires "a going out of our own nature
and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person,
not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must
put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species
must become his own" (282-83).
3. See, for example, "Dahomey" or "The Women of Dan Dance with Swords in Their Hands to
Mark the Time When They Were Warriors" in The Black Unicorn.
4. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the first definition of "sequela" is "A morbid affection
occurring as the result of a previous disease," and the second is "A consequence."

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