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A Study Guide for Audre Lorde's "Who Said it was Simple"
A Study Guide for Audre Lorde's "Who Said it was Simple"
A Study Guide for Audre Lorde's "Who Said it was Simple"
Ebook39 pages28 minutes

A Study Guide for Audre Lorde's "Who Said it was Simple"

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Audre Lorde's "Who Said it was Simple", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Studentsfor all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 18, 2018
ISBN9781535845823
A Study Guide for Audre Lorde's "Who Said it was Simple"

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    A Study Guide for Audre Lorde's "Who Said it was Simple" - Gale

    17

    Who Said It Was Simple

    Audre Lorde

    1971

    Introduction

    Audre Lorde's short lyric poem Who Said It Was Simple, written in 1970, captures a moment in a New York diner before a political rally. A group of women have agreed to meet there before heading out to march in the streets, and yet, for all their zeal for social justice, they cannot see the oppression of the people around them, the working class and people of color. In a speech delivered in 1980 (published in the collection Sister Outsider), Lorde described herself as a Black lesbian feminist socialist mother of two, including one boy, and a member of an interracial couple, which, she noted, meant that I usually find myself a part of some group defined as other, deviant, inferior, or just plain wrong. It is from a complex position as both insider and outsider that she narrates the poem, using it as a microcosm of the social justice issues of the day.

    Who Said It Was Simple, first published in Woman: A Journal of Liberation in 1971, was published in Lorde's 1973 collection From a Land Where Other People Live. This collection was nominated for the National Book Award in 1974. Her fellow nominees for the National Book Award were Adrienne Rich, Alice Walker, and Allen Ginsberg. Lorde, Rich, and Walker came together to write a single acceptance speech, one that criticized the awards process as a tool of the patriarchy, devised to divide them from one another. Rich and Ginsberg shared the prize that year, and Audre Lorde ascended to the podium with Rich (Walker was unable to attend) to read their joint acceptance speech.

    Lorde spent her career as both a poet and a prose writer identifying difference and arguing that social justice work should not aim to erase the differences between people but instead should embrace those differences and look to them as a source of creativity.

    Author Biography

    Audrey Geraldine Lorde was born on February 18, 1934, in New York City and died on November 17, 1992, in St. Croix, Virgin Islands. The youngest of three daughters born to Linda Belmar Lorde and Frederic Byron Lorde, who immigrated from Grenada to New York City, Audre dropped the y from her name in grade school because she preferred the symmetry of her names each ending with an e.

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