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Audre Lorde, "Hanging Fire"

BIOGRAPHY

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The Poet and the Speaker

Poets often choose to present their poems in the voice of another (fictional) person or their own younger selves. Audre Lorde was forty-four when she published this poem, thirty years beyond the adolescence she embodies here. The theme of survival against the odds runs through her work, in particular the poems she would later publish chronicling her battle with cancer. She was also openly lesbian and in Zami, a "biomythography" that she published in 1982, she talks of her loneliness as a gay teenager: "We, young and Black and fine and gay, sweated out our first heartbreaks with no school or office chums to share that confidence over lunch hour. We discovered and explored our attention to women alone, sometimes in secret, sometimes in defiance, sometimes in little pockets that almost touched, but always alone, against a greater aloneness. We did it cold turkey, and although it resulted in some pretty imaginative tough women when we survived, too many of us did not survive at all." Consider how readings of the poem might change by considering the speaker as a fully realized fictional character or as a reflection of Lorde's adolescent emotions.

Comparison of Growing-Up Stories

Your text offers several other stories of adolescent angst and initiation. The range of emotions, context—family, culture, gender, and race—and consequences varies, as do the voices. Some are told in first person, others in third person. Genre—whether the story is told in fiction or poetry—also accounts for differences. Yet they generally have common themes about relationships with parents, precarious self-images, and even a fascination with death. Compare "Hanging Fire" with some of these texts: the poem "Barbie Doll" by Marge Piercy (LIT 833, LITS 619), or the stories "Boys and Girls" by Alice Munro (LIT 452, LITS 385), "Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid (LIT 476, LITS 409), "Gorilla My Love" by Toni Cade Bambara (LIT 447, LITS 380), and "Araby" by James Joyce (LIT 462, LITS 395).

Have you ever thought of writing a poem in a teenaged voice? How would it represent your own special emotions and conflicts at the time? For a creative assignment, try writing your own poem, using this one as a model.

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