Audre Lorde’s Need: A Chorale for Black Woman Voices was “first written in 1979 after 12 Black women were killed in the Boston area within four months” (3). Published in 1990 by Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press as part of their Freedom Organizing Series, Need was intended for “particular use in classes, small community meetings, families, churches, and discussion groups, to open a dialogue between and among Black women and Black men on the subject of violence against women within our communities” (3). The text is written to be read aloud, with four distinct listed narrators: a woman named “Pat”, her son, “Bobbie,” “Poet,” and “All.”

In the preface to the piece, Lorde states, “I wrote this poem in 1979 as an organizing tool, as a jump-off point for other pieces on the theme, and for discussion among and between Black women and men” (4). She then further develops her motive for authoring Need, repeating the line “I wrote it for…” and listing several women who have been violently murdered. Eventually, she broadens out these acknowledgments, writing, “I wrote it for every Black woman who has ever bled at the hands of a brother” and later, “I wrote it for my son, and my daughter” (4).

Lorde’s use of layering, developing repetition here, along with her continual reference to those reading as “my sisters” and “my brothers” (4), offers insight into her views on identity. These linguistic choices exemplify a tenant that appears over and over again in Lorde’s work: we must revel in the singularity of our own experience and simultaneously openly claim the identities that define it socially.

Source: Lorde, Audre. Need: A Chorale for Black Woman Voices. First ed., Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1990.