Time & Perspective Quote by Audre Lorde

A struggle isn’t a tragic detour in Audre Lorde’s worldview; it’s the job description. The line refuses the soothing myth that survival and recognition arrive naturally with time. Instead, Lorde frames existence itself as intergenerational labor: not just to live, but to leave behind something sturdier than personal triumph - a usable record.

The intent is both intimate and strategic. Lorde is speaking to lesbians of color as a “we,” a collective forged under conditions that routinely erase them. The struggle she names isn’t abstract hardship; it’s the daily pressure of being forced to explain yourself to institutions that pretend you don’t exist, and to movements that too often ask you to split your identity into acceptable parts. In that climate, “invent themselves” lands like an indictment. Reinvention here isn’t glamorous self-fashioning; it’s the exhausting necessity of having no acknowledged lineage, no archive, no public language that fits.

The subtext is a critique of history as gatekeeping. If you’re constantly beginning from zero, you’re easy to isolate, easy to gaslight, easy to recruit into someone else’s story. Lorde’s sentence is an argument for memory as infrastructure: poems, essays, community spaces, political analysis, names. She’s also warning that progress without documentation is fragile; rights can be rolled back, contributions misattributed, foremothers forgotten.

Context matters: Lorde wrote from within late-20th-century feminist and gay liberation movements that frequently sidelined race, while Black political spaces often sidelined queerness. Her answer is neither apology nor assimilation, but continuity: make it possible for the next generation to start from somewhere real.