“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I first encountered Audre Lorde the moment I stepped into the field of gender studies. She, along with many others, including my dear faculty advisor, have become my fairy godmothers whom I have looked up to during my journey in gender studies. I’ve never expected to look at Lorde personally, closely, as if I had met her in my lifetime. The documentary “Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years,” directed by Dagmar Schultz, that we watched in Berlin, gave me a glimpse of Lorde not only as a thinker but also as a poet, professor, traveler, and feminist.
The film focuses on her life in Berlin, during what turned out to be some of her last years. Until I watched it, I had never known about her time there. As a daughter of Caribbean immigrants in the United States, Lorde understood deeply the in-betweenness of identity. She carried that with her to Berlin, where she exchanged perspectives with women on the other side of the world.
She once said, “Because I write for Black women doesn’t mean I turn away from white women, who can use and need what I say.” Later in the documentary, she emphasized again that white women must also care about people of color. Her message was not about exclusion but always about building bridges across differences.
What struck me most as I watched the film was her insistence on the power of community. I knew Europeans never had a Civil Rights Movement, but I was still surprised by how fragmented the connections were among Afro-Germans in the 1980s, the time the film depicts. The documentary shows how Lorde helped build networks among black German women that became more than just about survival—they became spaces of knowledge production, like the Afro-German women’s magazine Afrekete. Communities, Lorde reminds us, begin with people but grow beyond individuals. If we imagine what if the movement of people of color in Europe began with Afro-German women, lesbian, queer, trans? That possibility remains alive.
There is no white savior in this story. Lorde does not arrive in Berlin as a savior to rescue anyone. She lacks every feature to become a savior. She was ill at the time, a foreigner, a tourist, and an absolute minority in this context. Rather than depicting the disasters or suffering Afro-Germans faced to magnify her greatness, the film lingers on the work of connection, the weaving of community, and the courage people give each other. As shown in the first scene, Lorde just dances with her friends, maybe whom she met during travel, and chats with them at the dinner table. She did not hand down instructions to “war babies” on the far shore of the sea. Rather, she presented herself: her terror, her struggle, her knowledge, and she talked about them with other women, across identity and ethnic background, respecting their own agency. She didn’t bring the “only right way” to resist oppression, since she believed there is no only right way to do it. Rather, she offered presence, dialogue, and solidarity.
Audre Lorde is like this, a warm novel for the winter. While you know it’s snowing heavily outside, you can sit next to the fireplace and find your own inner peace by reading her. When survival is all you can think of, you can feel her hands on your shoulder. When you turn to see whose hand it is, you do not just see her—you see an entire community standing with you, holding you up.
Through this documentary, I did not just meet Audre Lorde. I met a lineage of struggle, of joy, of community-building. It makes me imagine what kind of community might grow if we chose to value ourselves above our terror. Perhaps that is Audre Lorde’s gift to us: not answers, but the courage to begin building.
