Review

Confronting oppression

BURST OF LIGHT
Audré Lorde
Sheba, £4.95

’ Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer. None of these struggles are ever easy...because it is easy not to battle at all, to just accept and call that acceptance inevitable.’

In her latest collection of essays and diary extracts Audré Lorde reveals anew the power of the principle that the ‘personal is political’. She is concerned with the politics not of identity, but of transformation: ‘the subject of revolution is ourselves, our lives’.

Her writing is rooted in her experience as a black woman, a lesbian, living with cancer. Constantly questioning, she confronts the pain and anger of oppression and reaches out to the strength and joys of creating and sharing new definitions.

The subjects she tackles are not easy ones: power and the erotic, lesbian parenting, apartheid and racism in the US. But throughout she is concerned to establish and clarify the connections that run through each part in a search for wholeness. Her struggle is for the right to make her own definitions and choices, and in the face of oppression demanding that right is of itself a subversive act.

Thus, for Ms Lorde, illness is no mere metaphor. It is a continuation of this struggle. It is about the right to take responsibility for her body and to be empowered to make informed choices.

She makes it clear that the power to make choices about health cannot be separated from the power to make choices in other spheres of our lives. A timely reminder when ‘patient choice’ is such a popular catch phrase in the UK.

This is a powerful book and an inspiring read — highly recommended.