Midnight Crossings

In 1984, poet Audra Lorde came to West Berlin with questions about U.S. geopolitics in an era of reaccelerated Cold War tensions and antagonisms as well as growing frustration with U.S. military incursions abroad and social divides at home. Lorde established divided Berlin as a place of return as she built on previously uncharted diasporic solidarities and created forms of poetry that transcended borders between women writers. Her book, Our Dead Behind Us (1986), as well as other poetry, journal entries, and prose marked her first of many attempts to render the divided city as a space of critical connection that was ripe for intervention. This chapter reads her publicly circulating work in order to view how multiple layers of revision and editorial selection inform her geopolitical views—for example, how, when, and if Lorde depicts the Berlin Wall in order to reflect on broader themes and moments she encounters in her time in divided Berlin. Lorde’s poetry can be understood in conversation with broader discourses on memory and border politics.