In eight pages this research paper examines African American poetess Audre Lorde and several of her poems. Six sources are cited in the bibliography.
Name of Research Paper File: D0_khlorde.rtf
Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
for her activism. She was a lesbian and a black woman in a white, male dominated society and profession that was not nearly as accepting of those classes of people
as they are today (to the extent that they are) (Audre Lorde). In the introduction to her work included in the Norton Anthology of American Literature, the editors describe
her poetry as waging war against the "tyrannies of silence" (Baym, et al 2615). This is certainly what Lorde accomplished in her poem "The Black Unicorn." (The student researching
this topic should note that this poem was difficult to find online... the quoted section comes from the Provost article and appears to be from the requested poem). In
The Black Unicorn, Lorde establishes that Eshu must aid in translating among the other gods and between the gods and human beings because they "do not understand each others language,
or the language of humans" (Provost 45). Similarly, Lord, herself, attempted through her work to participate in and communicate with a number of groups that frequently did
not speak each others languages - i.e. blacks, whites, gays, straights, men, women, academics, working class people, the "squares" and the "hip" (Provost 45). In The Black Unicorn, Lorde
writes of black experience: Once when I walked into a room My eyes would see out the one or two black faces For contact or reassurance of a
sign I was not alone (Provost 45). Also, in "The Black Unicorn," the title poem from the volume of the same name, Lorde takes on a form
from Western European mythology and transforms it into a seductively black/African one. It is a blatantly and even enthusiastically sensual and sexual metaphor, where she not only stands the myth