A Litany for Survival.

Audre Lorde was an inspiring poet, gay rights activist, and essayist who left a lasting impression on everyone she met. Film portrayals of such persons can be daunting, since they must faithfully render the person to those whom she inspired, while simultaneously showing her relevance to a new audience who know almost nothing about her life. Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson's feature-length documentary, A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde, takes up both of these tasks but is primarily successful in achieving only one of them.

A Litany for Survival begins with some of the last filmed scenes of Lorde's life, when cancer had already spread throughout her body. She speaks, her voice rasping, about still trying to capture the beauty of the earth with a video camera and about her efforts to define herself through her writing, "I'm going on to something else, the shape of which I have no idea. Only thing I know is that it's going to be quite different. What I leave behind has a life of its own - I've said this about poetry, I've said it about children, well, in a sense, I'm saying it about the very artifact of who I have been." It's an ideal introduction. Who, in fact, was Audre Lorde?

The answer to that question begins as Lorde speaks to the camera of various bits and pieces of her life. She talks about her birth in 1934 to Harlem-based emigrants from Barbados and Grenada. She remembers a childhood in a country with little respect for their lives. In her own family the idea of America remains vague when compared with the idea of the Caribbean. The hope of returning home is never discarded.

Lorde recalls how mischievous she was in the Catholic school in which her parents enrolled her, but that school was to introduce her to the world of literature. Her first poems were nervous and searching. Lorde confesses to having been hypersensitive and cautious, but her ideas grew and her poetry allowed her to assert her feelings. Soon, she had made friends with other writers and was living in Greenwich Village. Here, her circle of friends allowed her to discover herself sexually and philosophically. Using hindsight, Lorde observes, "There was not a high political consciousness in and among most of the gay girls, most of the circles where I moved. So political consciousness - like race consciousness - was something that those of us who had it, kept as a secret between ourselves. This made for another in-group within the in-group."

After the Ethel and Julius Rosenberg trials, Lorde wished to leave the United States, to get away from the "sense of impending doom" she felt in the air for those who were different. She went to Mexico for a time. Gaining hope from legal decisions relating to segregation, she returned to the United States. She continued to write poetry, but surprised even her closest friends by suddenly marrying a man and settling down to a life as a working librarian and mother of two children. She was a complacent but unhappy writer. Her life in Queens, New York, remained unconnected to the media images of Freedom Summer bus riders and civil rights marches. Lorde became increasingly despondent and depressed.

Her salvation came in the form of a six-week visiting teacher post at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi. "The six weeks I spent at Tougaloo convinced me that I wanted to work with my poetry in ways that, hitherto, [I had not]. I thought that poetry was here and took care of me privately and there was the other work that I did in the world: I was a librarian, I could get people to read. I could open up heads and touch feelings through other people's words. I realized that I could take my art, in the realest way, and make it do what I wanted. Not as propaganda, but as altering feelings and lives. And that in order to do that I had to be everything I was."

Lorde returned to New York just a few weeks before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. She joined civil rights groups in her area and began working with nascent women's right groups, and she began to write an assertive new poetry. A Litany for Survival juxtaposes scenes of political struggle, Black Panther demonstrations and riots, with scenes of Lorde with her daughter, Elizabeth, and Lorde's spoken poetry as it had juxtaposed her pre-Tougaloo life with concurrent civil rights struggles. This time, instead of a poetry that is self-reflexive about discovering the idea of lesbian sexuality and about trying to find a place in it, Lorde takes hold of her sexuality and shapes it to fit all her struggles.

For the first time, Lorde faces ostracism from people she had thought were her closest friends. Her strong stance in the face of such treatment, her standing up to declare her lesbianism in the face of what poet Sapphire deems "back-to-Africa niggers talking about 'Let's kill the lesbians,' 'Let's eliminate the homosexuals,'" has inspired new generations of gay writers of color. Sapphire notes that, "There was a great terror about being different in those days and for her to stand up and say, 'I am a lesbian,' was not just moving a mountain, it was creating a new world for us."

Throughout A Litany for Survival, Lorde's pioneering spirit is revealed by readings of her poetry, through talks she has with her daughter, conversations with her lovers, and discourse with the camera itself. Sequences with poets Adrienne Rich, Sonia Sanchez, Jewelle Gomez, Essex Hemphill, and Cheryl Clarke, combined with those of friends, family, and coworkers, demonstrate the impact of her life and round out her image for those who knew and admired her. Somehow, though, the film leaves less room for discovery of Lorde for those who are not yet aware of her work. The film's immediate delving into her life from the inside may lose those not already familiar with her life. And any such loss is regrettable.

The film does give us some of the public Lorde. In one sequence, Mario Cuomo, then Governor of New York, is seen presenting Lorde with the title of state poet for the years 1991-1993. During her acceptance speech, Lorde says, "I've been asking myself, what does it mean to be a poet in a country where more money per minute, every minute, is spent on armaments - and we are supposed to be at peace - than is spent to feed the starving children in this country, never mind the world. Where the price of one stealth bomber, already outmoded, is more than the entire federal appropriation for all of the arts in this country. What does it mean that a black, lesbian, feminist, warrior, poet, mother is named as the state poet of New York? It means that we live in a world full of the most intense contradictions, and we must find ways to use the best we have - our selves, our work - to bridge those contradictions." Audre Lorde's life was concerned with planning and building those bridges. Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson's A Litany for Survival shows how the ideas for those bridges were conceived.

Karen Carrillo is the deputy editor of the Brooklyn-based weekly, The City Sun, and is the New York regional editor of the Oakland, California-based Third Force magazine.