Nature & Animals Quote by Audre Lorde

A fighting fish making a fragile architecture out of spit and air is exactly the kind of image Audre Lorde loved: bodily, unsentimental, and quietly defiant. The detail does the work. This isn’t a pretty nature metaphor where everything harmonizes; it’s labor under pressure. The nest is heavy, the maintenance constant, the stakes literal. Lorde chooses a creature known for aggression and territoriality, then points to its care work. That reversal is the engine: survival isn’t just combat, it’s the unglamorous, repetitive act of keeping life afloat.

The subtext lands in that phrase “constantly repairing it.” Lorde’s world - as a Black lesbian feminist poet writing against racism, sexism, homophobia, and cancer - is a world where safety is provisional and infrastructure is often self-made. The bubble nest becomes an emblem for how marginalized people build shelter out of what they have, then rebuild it again the moment it starts to collapse. There’s tenderness here, but it’s not soft; it’s engineered.

“It’s as if they live in both elements” widens the frame from animal behavior to double consciousness: existing in overlapping, sometimes hostile environments, switching codes, adapting forms. Lorde’s intent isn’t to romanticize resilience; it’s to insist that what looks delicate can be structurally brilliant, and that caretaking is not the opposite of power but one of its most demanding expressions. In a few sentences, she turns biology into politics without announcing it, which is why the passage feels intimate and radical at once.