Who Said It Was Simple

📓 February 15, 2023 • Updated: April 2, 2025

Who Said It Was Simple
By: Audre Lorde (1973)

There are so many roots to the tree of anger that sometimes the branches shatter before they bear. Sitting in Nedicks the women rally before they march 5 discussing the problematic girls they hire to make them free. An almost white counterman passes a waiting brother to serve them first and the ladies neither notice nor reject 10 the slighter pleasures of their slavery. But I who am bound by my mirror as well as my bed see causes in colour as well as sex 15 and sit here wondering which me will survive all these liberations.

Introduction

Audre Lorde’s 1973 poem “Who Said It Was Simple” must be understood within the sociopolitical upheavals of the late civil rights era, when movements for racial justice, feminism, and LGBTQ+ rights were converging, often in tension with one another. A self-described “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” Lorde was committed to a politics of difference that refused to subordinate one axis of identity or struggle to another. The poem’s setting—a seemingly banal observation of a women’s protest against racism, sexism, and war—becomes the occasion for a searing critique of the exclusions and blind spots within feminist and liberal coalitions, particularly as they overlook the lived experiences of Black women.

At the poem’s core lies Lorde’s insistence that personal experience is political, but that this experience is not monolithic. Her speaker reflects on the dissonance between public declarations of justice and the private costs of systemic oppression, stating, I “sit here wondering / which me will survive / all these liberations.” Lorde’s speaker articulates the fragmentation and precariousness experienced by someone at the intersection of multiple identities—Black, female, queer—who must navigate movements that often acknowledge only one dimension of her experience. The mirror and the bed serve as potent symbols of internal and intimate constraints, while the line “which me will survive / all these liberations” captures the poem’s deep ambivalence toward supposedly inclusive political projects that routinely marginalize those most vulnerable.

Critical approaches to “Who Said It Was Simple” might include intersectional feminist theory, particularly the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, which would illuminate how Lorde anticipates the necessity of recognizing overlapping systems of oppression. A materialist feminist or Marxist reading might interrogate how race, gender, and class function within institutional structures—such as the educational setting mentioned in the poem—as sites of both complicity and resistance. Queer theory may also provide insights, given the implicit tensions around visibility and identity in the poem’s representation of the speaker’s positionality and desire. Ultimately, Lorde’s poem resists reductive readings; its layered critique demands that readers reckon with the complexities of solidarity, difference, and the costs of unacknowledged privilege.

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Note & Reference