Excerpt of The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde by Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad
By Rima Vesely-Ford
Black, queer, feminist, Buddhist: The Fire Inside by Dr. Rima Vesely-Ford casts a fresh new light on the radical literary legacies of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde.
Below is an excerpt from The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde (North Atlantic Books) by Dr. Rima Vesely-Ford.
Tantric Buddhism and Audre Lorde
Photo of Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad. Photo courtesy of North Atlantic Books.
Lorde claimed female and nonbinary African deities as a core part of her spiritual practice. Although I see many aspects of her practice as similar to Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, I do not suggest that Audre Lorde’s writings directly convey the intricacies and nuances of the Buddhist tradition. The history of Tantric Buddhism is long and complex and varies according to specific deities, locations, and lineages. It is important to examine it on its own terms. Similarly, it is critical to consider Lorde’s work on her own terms, in her own context. I am not attempting to collapse her ideas into Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, or to conflate the esoteric intricacies of Tibetan Tantric Buddhism with Lorde’s writings. But I seek to illuminate the connections.
I acknowledge that the process of bringing together Lorde’s embrace of West African female deities with Tibetan Tantric Buddhist traditions is messy. I am attempting to put traditions, spiritual prac-tices, and divine beings from different centuries and environments into conversation. These traditions are highly specific, but in my own expe-rience, encountering them has helped illuminate the ways in which female, erotic energy fuels transgressive, powerful ways of being in patriarchal spheres.
I am conscious that my attempts to bring together Tibetan Tan-tric Buddhism with Lorde’s spirituality can be seen as “orientalist”—gazing at a tradition that I have only peripherally practiced from a distant, Western lens. Lorde, herself, was critiqued by African scholars for appropriating African religious traditions that were not hers, and evolving them in ways that were incongruent with their cultural origins, meanings, and contexts.
I also acknowledge that sexual abuse within many lineages of Buddhism is increasingly being made known. In honoring sensuality—in Lorde’s writings as well as in Tantric texts—I do not ignore the harm enacted in transgressing sexual boundaries and exploiting students in uneven power dynamics. It is not my intention to minimize or ignore abuse. For that reason, perhaps, I pay less attention to the relationship between the teacher/guru and the practitioner, even as this relation-ship is at the center of the practice of enlightenment within Zen lin-eages as well as Tibetan Tantric Buddhism. The boundaries between guru and student are crucial to maintain.
But I uplift Tibetan Tantric Buddhism because while researching deity yoga in the Tibetan Tantric tradition, I heard Lorde in a new way. Although I had read her work for decades, and even annotated her book of poems The Black Unicorn, I had glossed over Lorde’s refer-ences to West African deities. Later, after starting a Buddhist practice, I observed that much of what Lorde pointed to—such as the maternal, warrior spirit embedded in West African religions and her practice of visualizing herself as a deity—have corresponding ritual practices within Tibetan Tantric Buddhism.
Because Tantric Buddhism is an esoteric practice, many aspects of it remain unknown and impenetrable. References in Tantric texts are not easily translatable or understood. Yet encountering the teachings of Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, even on a superficial level, sparked in me a deepening understanding of Lorde’s work. Lorde’s writings emphasize power and transgression, specifically, the power of transgression, in a way that helps me understand the liberatory thrust of Tibetan Tantric teachings within the ever-evolving Buddhist canon.
I identified the power of Audre Lorde’s life—her words and activism—as that which arose from her practice of honoring West African female deities. She exhibited defiance in her early years as she resisted the patriarchy and expectations of obedience in her household. Before she traveled to West Africa in 1974, she chose to be in same-gender loving relationships. She contested racism in the second-generation feminist movement and sexism in the Black freedom movement. All of this resistance to hegemonic norms became more spiritually grounded and coherent when she encountered Fon, Dahomey, and Yoruba religious traditions.
As she embraced female West African deities, she imagined herself as one. In my eyes, Lorde’s adoption of African deities, especially one whom she called “Afrekete,” was very obviously subversive: By embrac-ing dark-skinned, female-bodied images, she implicitly rejected white, male, Christian norms.
In this way, Lorde showed me the power of transgression. She uplifted Black mother-warriors as powerful. She reversed the image of that which was deemed defiled and fear-inducing. My appearance had been deemed polluted in my mother’s white family, but in Lorde’s world, my dark, female body was celebrated.
“The Erotic Offers a Well of Replenishing and Provocative Force”
Audre Lorde’s embrace of erotic power shone a light on a concept central to Tibetan Tantric Buddhism: Sensuality, practiced with Right View, can be embraced as a path to liberation. This idea is articulated in a range of Lorde’s works, starting with her “biomythography” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. It is also at the heart of her essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” as well as numerous poems on women’s relationships. During her adult life, Lorde partook in creating lesbian communities in New York City. While these collectives were marginalized and disproportionately policed by dominant heteronormative institutions, they and the other lesbian communities that emerged in the 1950s sought to create safe, culturally expansive spaces.
These spaces, and the gatherings that took place in them, fostered sensual power, one that privileges new ways of seeing the female body as that which is inherently authoritative on its own terms. It is not merely an object to serve the purposes and aspirations of those who perpetuate the dominant culture.3 Rather, the female body is honored in its own right: It is a dark, complex, mysterious manifestation of erotic energy in the world. Lorde wrote:
“The erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough. . . . For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.”
Lorde embraced the transgressive—and therefore dangerous—nature of the erotic. She continued: “When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.”
For Lorde, eroticism as a life force is explicitly spiritual, which she described as “psycho-emotional.” She was careful to refuse dualisms; she did not contrast the white male body with the Black female body. Nor did she polarize the rationality associated with European-derived patriarchy with the emotions correlated with the Black mother. Rather, she included the white male body in her expansive worldview, stating: “I’m not saying . . . that white does not feel. I’m saying that we must amalgamate the two, never close our eyes to the terror, the chaos which is black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is . . . sinister, smelly, erotic, confused, upsetting.” The revaluing of Black women’s bodies, and the sensuality that per-vades them, is a counterweight to the patriarchal mythology that harms women. In claiming women’s bodies as sensual, Lorde was able to see her own energies in an entirely new way. In a 1979 interview, Lorde affirmed:
“Love is . . . a source of tremendous power. Women have not been taught to respect the erotic urge, the place that is uniquely female . . . we, as women, tend to reject our capacity for feeling “our ability to love, to touch the erotic, because it has been devalued. But it is within this that lies so much of our power, our ability to posit, to vision. Because once we know how deeply we can feel, we begin to demand from all of our life pursuits that they be in accordance with these feelings. When you live always in darkness, when you live without the sunlight, you don’t know what it is to relish the bright light or even to have too much of it. Once you have light, then you can measure its degree. So too with joy.”
Eroticism—and the depth of feeling underlying it—served Lorde’s evolving self-definition. So too did the pantheon of African deities she internalized.
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From The Fire Inside by Rima Vesely-Flad, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2026 by Rima Vesely-Flad. Reprinted by permission of North Atlantic Books.