19 pages • 38 minutes read
Audre LordeA Litany for Survival
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1978A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Concerns About Legacy and Survival
Lorde explores how marginalized people struggle to survive and struggle to improve the lives of their next generation. She repeats different forms of the word “survival” in the title, at the end of the second stanza (Line 24), and at the end of the poem (Line 44). Her repetition brings the reader’s attention to survival right away, redirects their attention back to survival in the middle of the poem, and concludes with the idea of survival—highlighting the thematic role of survival. Marginalized people struggle to survive daily. For instance, women make less money than men in the United States, making it harder to afford housing and food, which is a threat to their survival. Additionally, Lorde explores her own survival and legacy in this poem as a response to her cancer diagnosis.
Lorde and her collective “we” strive for a legacy that illuminates the issues marginalized people face and resolves those issues. The marginalized people of her generation are “those of us who cannot indulge / the passing dreams of choice” (Lines 4-5). To improve the lives of the next generation is to offer them choices and dreams. In the future, they hope that the next generation’s “dreams will not reflect / the death of ours” (Lines 13-14). Marginalized people want their successive family members to strive for more than survival. To achieve this, marginalized people must not be silent. Lorde argues that “it is better to speak / remembering / that we were never meant to survive” (Lines 42-44). People must speak about oppression, marginalization, and bigotry, as highlighting these social issues is necessary to dismantle said issues. Marginalized people need to survive in the present to aim for more equality in the future.
Living Without Security and Safety
In “A Litany for Survival,” Lorde also illuminates the conditions of living without security or safety. As the title indicates, the poem is a prayer for survival, as marginalized people, referred to as “we” or ”us” throughout the poem, are consistently confronted with a lack of security and safety. The poem’s collective, then, is depicted as being faced with difficult decisions wherein all their actions or missteps could result in being unhoused, hungry, and/or dead. Lorde describes how the collective is at “the constant edges of decision / crucial and alone” (Lines 2-3). “Alone” (Line 3) highlights how marginalized people do not have the safety nets that come with generational wealth and upper-class bloodlines. People born with such monetary and familial privileges are not only never “alone” (Line 3) but they also don’t have to make crucial decisions between needs. Furthermore, privileged people use an “illusion of some safety” (Line 20) as a “weapon” (Line 19). Marginalized people face precarity—of work, housing, and food—and will accept jobs and situations for a sense of safety. However, their safety is often an illusion. For example, a marginalized person who is laid off from work could quickly also become unhoused and unfed due to a lack of other monetary support.
Lorde describes how lacking safety and security means occupying liminal spaces: spaces that are in-between, such as thresholds and boundaries. Marginalized people are “looking inward and outward” (Line 8). Their internal lived experience is at odds with the outside world controlled by their oppressors. They must reconcile what they see in themselves with how the world portrays them. This is the struggle between internal self-esteem and external projections of stereotypes. Lacking safety and security is also connected to food, as the food that impoverished people have access to may not always be nutritious. Thus, eating such unhealthy foods may only result in “indigestion” (30) rather than feeling nourished. In this way, having a full stomach does not feel secure.
The Power of Fear Over the Marginalized
Lorde offers many examples of what marginalized people fear. These fears control their lives and seem to keep accumulating. The word “afraid” is repeated nine times in the poem: once in the second stanza and eight times in the third stanza. In the first stanza, the word “afraid” appears in the middle of Line 18. In the third stanza, the word “afraid” appears at the ends of Lines 25, 27, 29, 31, 33, 35, 37, and 41—at the end of every other line for an entire stanza. The increasing repetition gives the reader a sense of how fears multiply over time. Lorde also uses the repetition to structure a list of fears, generally placing them around loss. For example, some of the many uses of “afraid” in Stanza 3 explain that marginalized people fear they will lose the sun, both when it rises and when it sets. This highlights how oppression can wear down faith and interfere with object permanence.
Fear spans from childhood until death for Lorde and other collective marginalized people. It controls their lives from infancy, when they are drinking their “mother’s milk” (Line 18). The imagery of breastfeeding is poignant here because Lorde had breast cancer that required her to undergo a mastectomy. Although this was after she raised children and didn’t impact her child-rearing, it remains an example of something that can be lost unexpectedly. Lorde’s death, due to cancer spreading to her liver, occurred when she was still in her fifties. At the heart of the poem is the fear of dying—of not surviving.
Related Titles
By Audre Lorde
