Chapter 15 - The Queer Restoration Poetics of Audre Lorde

Summary

Two years after Hurricane Hugo, which in 1989 devastated the unincorporated US territory St. Croix, and one year prior to her death from cancer, African Caribbean American poet Audre Lorde wrote a poem called “Restoration: A Memorial – 9/18/91.” The poem grew partly out of a series of journal entries that Lorde made in the wake of Hugo on St. Croix, her home at the time, and bears witness to the storm’s catastrophic aftermath, which, in Lorde’s view, was “man-made.” In her journal Lorde suggests that the Caribbean island had been made sick by the capitalist US government, which exploited it for its resources and then neglected it after the disaster – just as her own body had been made sick by pollution from US industry on the mainland and then sicker by the profit-driven “Cancer Establishment.” In this chapter, I will explore Lorde’s concept of restoration in both her poem and her journals. The concept empowered her to confront and resist the environmental injustice she saw affecting the environment around her along with her individual body.