My first in a very long time experience reading audiobooks was, in a word, annoying. Without realizing that it was approaching Audre Lorde’s 86th birthday, I decided to ‘read’ Sister Outsider in its entirety via audiobook.
While I am feeling quite smug to have consumed 7 hours of narration over a single weekend, I am truly surprised that this is a popular method of reading. I expected sound design, perhaps a chime in between chapters, inflections, laughter??? (I took my frustrations to Instagram and left with a load of recommendations for well narrated texts, and some even with full cast recordings!)
Cosmetics aside, Sister Outsider gave me so much this weekend. Lorde’s essays are wandering and diverse, cataloguing her experience of travelling through Russia (USSR) as a Black lesbian woman, to ruminations on Malcolm X and Martin Luther King in the 60s, to her thoughts on the power of poetry, women led movements, and white women’s allyship. Robotic recording and all, I think this might be the best way to absorb Lorde: aurally. But it mustn’t be the only way. Hers is the kind of writing that you have no choice but to return to, to savour, to digest– continually.