6 November, 2023

“We Were Never Meant to Survive”: How the Ghost of Slavery Haunts Audre Lorde and the Black Community in the United States

After the successes of the 1960s civil rights movement, Black people in the United States were forced to navigate the new post-segregation world in which there was an institutionalized semblance of equality. In reality, the horrors of slavery left a generational legacy that still infects the descendants of enslaved peoples today. Feeding America, a group that studies the necessity of assisting African Americans with food insecurity, says that “discriminatory policies and practices have led Black people to be more likely to live in poverty and more likely to face unemployment” than any other racial or social group in the United States. In Audre Lorde’s 1978 poem “A Litany for Survival,” the self-identified “‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’” explores the realities of living in the Black community, and the fact that they were “never meant to survive.” In this essay, I aim to explore Lorde’s concept of survival and analyze this poem through a lens of perpetual racial inequality in the United States, generational trauma and collective memory in descendants of slaves, and the necessity of Black female voices in the never-ending movement for equality. 

Lorde begins “A Litany for Survival” with the discussion of decisions and choice, or rather the inability for people, including herself– she begins the poem with the collective object pronoun “us,” thus is implying a community in which she is a part of– to “indulge/the passing dreams of choice.” In his essay “The Past in the Present,” Ron Eyerman, a professor of Sociology at Yale University, further explores this concept for Black Americans, and contextualizes choice through the lens of slavery. He quotes African American author Nora Zeale Hurston, who said: “‘Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me’” (Eyerman, 165). Hurston was born in 1891, nearly three decades after slavery was abolished in the United States, yet she still felt the same suffering as her ancestors did. While this may seem inconsequential in the context of Lorde’s poem that came nearly a century later, Eyerman argues that “in all areas and arenas, the past was always present,” (Eyerman, 166). Thus, just as Hurston did not choose to feel the impact and participation of slavery in a post-emancipation world, Lorde feels that she, too, is stripped of the ability to choose. Additionally, Eyerman draws on Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X’s seemingly “impossible dream of integration,” detailing that the two would volley with each other, asking “‘How long?’” must they wait until there was equality, to which the other responded “‘no longer!’” (Eyerman, 167). Lorde, who bore witness to the entirety of the civil rights movement, was extremely engaged with the political actions of those around her, and similarly evokes King and X’s urgency: 

seeking a now that can breed

futures

like bread in our children’s mouths

so their dreams will not reflect

the death of ours (Lorde, lines 10-14);

Lorde implores readers to understand that Black people in the United States are forced to live in a state of survival rather than looking to the future– they don’t have the privilege that white people do to have hope. Without being able to afford to have dreams, not only are Black Americans forced to constantly reconcile with their history of slavery, but they are also left behind by society: “modernity is characterized by the ‘tradition of the new’, by future” (Eyerman, 161). They must give up their present existence to assemble a dream for future generations. In both Lorde and Eyerman’s reflections on the generational impacts of slavery, there is an immense emphasis on the lack of possibility in relation to the future. 

In connecting her personal and community’s possibility of a future, Lorde addresses the concept of an inherited trauma, beginning the second stanza of her poem with “for those of us/ who were imprinted with fear” (Lorde, lines 15-16). To understand her intended meaning, we first have to examine the word “imprinted” in the context of heritability. As per the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, to imprint can either mean to physically impress or mark a surface of the body, or it can mean to come to recognize something as a parent through “habitual trust.” Lorde combines these two meanings, as the fear that people in her community are born with is both ingrained biologically, and thus physically “like a faint line in the center of our foreheads” (Lorde, line 17), as well as learned through lived experience. Tyler D. Parry, a professor of African American Studies at the University of Nevada, studies post-traumatic stress among descendents of enslaved peoples through a scientific and social lens. He says that “the notion of an ‘inherited’ trauma stems from the study of ‘epigenetics,’…  these genetic shifts can be inherited by one’s descendants and the negative traits can be expressed in their personality, behavior, and mental health” (Parry, 194). He says that not only was post-traumatic stress extraordinarily common in slaves– he uses one enslaved man who witnessed his wife and child being tortured as an example of what PTS is: “Thomas could still function … but his personality was completely altered and a piece of him forever died with his family” (Parry 190)– but he theorizes that the generational inheritance of said trauma is prevalent enough to receive its own categorization, that of “Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome” (Parry, 194) (PTSS). Lorde dedicates the largest stanza of the poem to a list of what “we” (the “we” being Black Americans) are born to be afraid of, and using Parry’s research, we can contextualize these fears as products of generational trauma and PTSS.

Throughout the poem, Lorde references food, and the scarcity of it. In the first stanza she compares the future to “bread in our children’s mouths” (Lorde, line 12), implying the idea that children would have enough food to survive (something that they were “never meant to” do) is a dream just as absurd and unlikely as a future of true equality. Moreover, in explaining how she, and others in her community, were born with fear, she says they learned “to be afraid with our mother’s milk” (Lorde, line 18). She purposefully chooses this metaphor, as “mother’s milk” is the first, and only, guaranteed food that a person can access. Finally, in her stanza of fears she mentions food yet again:

when our stomachs are full we are afraid

of indigestion

when our stomachs are empty we are afraid

we may never eat again (Lorde, lines 29-32).

In the United States, Black people experience food insecurity at over twice the rate of white people. Due to the disproportionate poverty amongst people of color and systemic oppression that places supermarkets and affordable goods further from those who actually need them, as of 2022 nearly 23% of Black adults live in food insecure households, and 29% of Black children grow up food insecure. In a community that relies so heavily on food to come together, as per “A Place at the Table: The Influence of Black Cuisine,” a 2022 exploration from UNC-Chapel Hill about the importance of food in African American culture, Lorde underscores the ways in which this liberty, that of expressing and connecting through food, is stripped from her community.

In the final stanza of her poem, Lorde emphasizes the importance of speaking up and making marginalized voices heard. Before concluding, she says “and when we speak we are afraid/our words will not be heard” (Lorde, lines 37-38). Donald “C-Note” Hooker, a man who self-identifies as the world’s most prolific prisoner artist, echoes this in his piece “The Importance of Women in the Struggle: Emphasis on the Black Woman’s Voice,” saying that “without hearing the woman’s voice, in particular the Black woman’s voice, we don’t get the full scope of injustice and discrimination” (Hooker, 1). He continues to explore this concept, saying that even though it is of the utmost importance for women to have a primary voice in the movement, as “the Black woman’s voice informs us of the inherent, patriarchal, discrimination, that comes with the gender discrimination” (Hooker, 1), it is also daunting for them to actually speak because there is oppression both outside of and within their own community. This mirrors Lorde’s perspective, as she concludes: “so it is better to speak/ remembering/ we were never meant to survive” (Lorde, lines 42-44). Black people were never meant to survive slavery, much less “breed/futures” (Lorde, lines 10-11) outside of plantations. Lorde’s poem, and simply her proclivity to write and publish any work, is a reclamation of life. Her “Litany for Survival” is proof that Black America is still alive despite the systemic inequality, the inherited trauma, and the lack of legibility that her people have.

Works Cited

Hooker, Donald. The Importance of Women in the Struggle: Emphasis on the Black Woman’s Voice, 2017. 

Parry, Tyler D. “‘How Much More Must I Suffer?’: Post-Traumatic Stress and the Lingering …” Routledge, 2021, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0144039X.2021.1896187. 

Matlin, Daniel. “‘A New Reality of Harlem’: Imagining the African American Urban Future during the 1960s.” Cambridge Core, 27 June 2017, http://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-american-studies. 

Eyerman, Ron. “The Past in the Present – Sage Journals.” Sage Journals, 2004, journals.sagepub.com/doi/epdf/10.1177/0001699304043853. 

“Hunger Hits Black Communities Harder.” Feeding America, 2022, http://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/black-communities#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20USDA%2C%20in,than%20children%20of%20other%20races. 

Soni, Karina. “A Place at the Table: The Influence of Black Cuisine – Unc-Chapel Hill Libraries.” UNC, 19 July 2023, library.unc.edu/2022/02/a-place-at-the-table-the-influence-of-black-cuisine/#:~:text=Family%20reunions%2C%20church%20picnics%2C%20cookouts,overlooked%20by%20modern%20food%20culture.