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Lourde hanging fire
- 1. Speaker Audre Lord’s “HangingFire” © 2013 W. W. Norton Co., Inc.
- 2. Audre Lorde • Insertpicture of the author from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Au © 2013 W. W. Norton Co., Inc. 2
- 3. Questions for Discussion •What does the phrase “hanging fire” mean? • What do you make of the references to death that recur in each stanza of the poem? What about the references to the mother's closed door? • What might the speaker mean when she says, “my skin has betrayed me” (line 2)? © 2013 W. W. Norton Co., Inc. 3
- 4. Questions for Discussion •What is the speaker's gender and race? • What details in the poem support your answers? • To what extent and in what ways is this poem about any fourteen-year-old? • To what extent and in what ways is this poem race or gender specific? • Would knowing the race and gender of the author affect your interpretation? If so, how and why? If not, why not? © 2013 W. W. Norton Co., Inc. 4
- 5. THE NORTON INTRODUCTIONTO LITERATURE Kelly J. Mays This concludes the Lecture PowerPoint presentation for Chapter 15 Visit the StudySpace at: http://wwnorton.com/studyspace For more learning resources, please visit the StudySpace site for Norton Introduction to Literature, 11e. © 2013 W. W. Norton Co., Inc.
Editor's Notes
- #3 Carribean-American writer and activist, and active member of the gay community in Greenwich Village, NY. Image by K. Kendall (1980).
- #4 At first glance, “Hanging Fire” seems to be about the pains of all adolescents, the first few lines of the poem capturing the pain and confusion of those years when our bodies begin to “betra[y]” us in a number of different ways (line 2). And you may, in fact, want to ask students to pause over this line and to dwell on the various meanings of the word “betrayed,” which include something like “turned against me” and something like “revealed the truth about me”. ). In what sense are both meanings of the word appropriate in the context of the poem and of our experiences of adolescence?
- #5 We can address a whole series of questions about the extent to which the experiences and feelings recorded in this poem refer to those of any fourteen-year-old and the extent to which they are gender-specific and even race-specific. After all, the particular feature of this speaker's body that betrays her is “my skin,”. How does our interpretation of the poem change if we read it as “universal”? As particular to female experience? As particular to the experience of people of color? Might the poem work in all these ways at once?