Audre Lorde's Who Said It Was Simple Characterized as a Confessional Mode

The research explores the confessional aspect in Audre Lorde's poem" Who Said It Was Simple ". Lorde depicts her personality under the stress of race, sex and sexuality. She discloses her own bitter experience concerning racism, sexism and sexuality in her poem to revive the retrospective truth of the Afro-Americans' life in the USA. This publicly manifestation of her personality and tribulation throughthe language ofpoetry has been regarded as the hallmark of confessional poetry.


The Concept of the Confessional Poetry
The "confessional movement" has been named as confessional poetry by M.L Rosenthal in 1959 after reviewing a book of poems written by Robert Lowell. The critic M.L. Rosenthal (1985) has used this term to describe a new poetry which, as he believes, has been therapeutic and autobiographical as "it puts the speaker himself at the center of the poem in such a way as to make his psychological vulnerability and shame an embodiment of his civilization". Any discussion of confessional poetry must begin with M.L. Rosenthal. Not only because he is the selfproclaimed originator of the label, but he is also the "most prolific critic" (Philips,1973  Parents (Tate,1983) . Like many American poets of her generation ,as Kara Provost (1995) indicates "Lorde refuses to become a passive victim and she successfully manages to connect her personal life experiences to the broader context of the cultural and political setting around her. In Sister Outsider(1984), Lorde explains "How black women have always been socially visible, and thus vulnerable, because of their colour and yet are ironically rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism".
Lorde (1992) explains that "The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but does not mean it is identical within those differences".. In response to the culture of taboo and silence surrounding her, Lorde uses the confession to speak what is unspoken (Lorde,1984).
By giving voice to subjects the larger community ignores, subjects deemed unspeakable, Lorde forges her own community, one of differences.

Introduction to the Poem
Audre Lorde's Who Said It Was Simple published in 1978. It is a poem of eighteen lines of free verse. The poetess uses terse, declarative sentences, speaking directly to her audience, making readers aware of the black females' tribulation concerning segregation and inequality based on colour, sex and sexuality. As a black and lesbian women has adopted the issues of sexism ,racism and lesbianism, through her poem "Who Said It Was Simple", Lorde confesses openly and strongly her refusal and resentment for discrimination policy systemized against people accounting on their race , sex and sexuality.

Analysis
What Lorde wants to say through the title of this poem Who Said It Was Simple is that being black is difficult enough, being a black woman is even more stigmatized, but to be a black, gay woman is like a minefield in a society. So the issue that Lorde fights for is very difficult and the process of purging society from concepts of racism and sexism is not simple and risky. Through her personal experience, in the outset of this poem, Lorde announces publicly that the Afro-Americans' angry and frustration is not newly born but it has an origin dated back to the history of the Afro-Americans in the Southern States prior to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. As far back as 1859, the United States was becoming increasingly polarized over the issue of slavery (Jones,1999), and the division between Lorde asks from her room if she could achieve and live all types of freedom, away from racism ,sexism and kind of sexuality. She wants a life devoid of all kinds of discrimination, a life built on reciprocal equality and respect. Thus she realizes that simply she is defying an entire system. A system that wants to grind her into the ground, a system that wants to deny her humanity, and a system that praises almost everything she is not. This means that every day she lives is a fight: and sit here wondering which me will survive all these liberations.

Conclusion
The segregation based on race and sex is one of the distinctive features of the black confessional poets. Lorde has confronted racism from teachers and fellow students at an early age; and within her own home she has experienced the "colorism" of intra-racial discrimination that has favored light skin, straight hair, and thin bodies. The poem defines the sense of anger that the speaker in the poem tries to introduce in her poem.
Anger refers to the feminist frustration that women of colour live at that time. The speaker in the poem tries to focus on the state of fury that black women live in a white society that impose inequality. Those women who rally, they think that they protest against whose who wrong them, but there is no change. Slavery is defined as a state of oppression against those who rally but could not change their future. The speaker is a witness who sees that life is stigmatized by slavery, oppression and wrong. The speaker stresses her own identity by defining her gender and race and colour. She is proud of her identity as a black woman who witnesses the persecution of her race. The speaker becomes the witness and the witness turns to be the speaker at the same time. The speaker defines the feminist movement which calls for equality. Equality challenges discrimination. The discrimination is a tool of persecution against the black women. The speaker calls for equality. Lorde gives the reader images of the black women who are slaves in her historical memory, who are women and humans in their life. She emphasizes her blackness and sees that the value of being a black woman is central to her identity. This background of slavery is a history of discrimination, wrong and disrespect that survive in her memory as a human being, a poet and as a lesbian feminist. She wants a life devoid of discrimination and pregnant with respect and equality in the community. For Lorde this is the meaning of feminism. She defines herself by her "bed, sex, and color". The end of the poem clarifies how she defines herself and the black women around her in society.