Defying Oppressive Language Structure

In Lexi Rudnitsky’s article “The “Power” and “Sequelae” of Audre Lorde’s Syntactical Strategies,” Rudnitsky examines the importance Lorde placed not only on words and language but also the form and medium of language. Rudnitsky asserts that “Lorde privileged poetry over other forms of expression because she believed that poetry alone had the ability to create a new language, which would, in turn, make possible a new social order” (473). The way this new social order could rise was to write and reside in a “house of difference,” a space that would accept and celebrate uniqueness as apposed to the “Master’s house” which was linked to strict rules of sameness and “correct,” i.e. white American grammar. Rudnitsky points out that while there is literary criticism on Lorde’s works “this criticism has the curious habit of treating her poetry as if it were prose. That is, it looks at content without taking into account formal structures.” By doing this critics, consciously or not, “smooth over the difficult syntax in order to reveal its true “meaning”” thus distorting the intended structural break from the grammatical confines of acceptable form that holds no place for the authentic voices of the Black Arts Movement poets (474). Rudnitsky’s article focuses on a particular style of line breaks and grammatical choices Lorde employed in her poetry, that of Apo Koinou which “refers to a particular kind of enjambment, in which the meaning of a line is altered by the lines adjacent to it. Lorde relies heavily on this technique throughout her work” (475). What this technique accomplishes, as described by Rudnitsky, is the introduction of uncertainty and changeable meaning while reading. The first example from “Power” that this article uses comes in the first three lines of the second stanza: “I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds / and a dead child dragging his shattered black / face off the edge of my sleep.” Rudnitsky argues that the placing of these line breaks “raises the question of agency” and that this agency, or lack thereof, works to answer the question of the difference between poetry and rhetoric (479). The focus of this analysis by Rudnitsky is both on agency and culpability of being in a place to change society but is also unable to make a stand for change because of that same controlling society that continues to oppress and bully into submission minorities. Rudnitsky writes, in what might be the pinnacle of this article that:

If the “dragging” [of the dying child] is imputed to her, then is she performing the same action as the eleven white jurymen who “dragged” the one black jurywoman “over hot coals of four centuries of white male approval”? Is she, as the reference to killing children in the first stanza might suggest, somehow implicated in this child’s death? (479)

By imbuing words with multiple meaning that change the possible interpretations of both the line and the entire poem Rudnitsky is arguing that Lorde demonstrating the impossible situation individual people are placed in when they must go against established powers of society. While Lorde is condemning the failure to stand up to the white jurymen she also recognizes that to do so may mean death; and that if she or any other Black woman had been in that same position, had that same “opportunity” to stand against the established power of white men, that the result may have been the same. “Power” is not a poem about one jurywoman’s lack of action to deliver justice to a child murderer, it is about the system of authority that removes the power of individuals to make changes. It is a poem of helplessness and hopelessness experienced by minorities, specifically Black Women. Rudnitsky is arguing that the syntactic ambiguity of Apo Koinou in Lorde’s poetry “produces multiple semantic possibilities and thereby plays out Lorde’s theory of difference,” which in turn allows for a sense of autonomy by denying the strict rules of grammar and syntax imposed by “standard (white) written English” (482). Rudnitsky goes on to say that by “casting aside the cages of traditional form and syntax, Lorde suggests, the poem undermines the master’s rules and thereby becomes subversive” (481). It is this subtle but poignant subversivism that draws me into Audre Lorde’s poetry. Perhaps it would have been more “impactful” to write strong, aggressive, militant poetry condemning the murder and injustices being carried out by white authority figures, such as the police office who shot and killed a twelve-year-old boy. However, would that brash, honest poetry have been possible or an authentic representation of Lorde’s available power? Lexi Rudnitsky argues that it was through structure and syntactical strategies that Lorde was able to create that authentic voice in “Power” that would accurately reflect the danger of going against the majority in cases of social change. That instead of having the power to be direct, to stand against the eleven white jurymen, the single Black jurywoman, who is possibly representative of the whole Black minority, can at best assert autonomy through nonstandard grammar, and that even if this does not allow direct resistance to oppression it can act as a subtle resistance to oppression.