25th October - Law News

Edition 5416: LawNewsIndex is a UK based daily legal news archive on Law, Lawyers, Law Firms, Jurisprudence, Legislation, Litigation, Legal Ethics, Human Rights and Social Justice related issues since 2011.

Today's Highlighted Video: Cable & Wireless Jamaica Ltd (Appellant) v Eric Jason Abrahams (Respondent) (Jamaica) Case ID: JCPC/2023/0080

A selection of important developments in the world of law and justice (for a comprehensive look at the news and events, please visit @theLawMap Twitter/X feed):

Saturday Conversations on Law

• The Chancery Lane Project receives £485,000 grant for climate contract initiative | Law Gazette
• How the war in Ukraine has created a new field of legal practice: Daniel Bilak, managing partner of Kinstellar’s Kyiv office, considers the legal specialism emerging from Ukraine’s front line - The Global Legal Post
• Law firm Hugh James has successfully batted away Ministry of Defence (MoD) accusations of ‘systematic overcharging’ while pursuing military deafness claims | New Law Journal
• The datacentre next door: on the frontline of tech’s latest David v Goliath battle. The AI boom is pitting local residents against corporate giants seeking to power their energy-hungry networks – but one Welsh city is fighting back
• COLP/COFA separation: SRA kicks plans into long grass after backlash from smaller law firms and sole practitioners | Law Gazette
• Corporate counsel in Europe are leading their global counterparts in pushing junior lawyers into higher-value, strategic roles while artificial intelligence (AI) deals with the humdrum, research shows | New Law Journal

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Last Sunday's Editorial: 

 

The 'Sunday Editorial' is a special feature comprising essays, comments and original creative writing on a broad range of subjects from in-house and guest writers:  

 

The Uses of a Living Fire: Audre Lorde and the Poets of Colour Who Followed: There are poets whose influence can be measured by the language they leave behind, and others whose significance lies in the language they make possible. Audre Lorde belongs emphatically to the latter category. Her work changed not merely what Black poets might write about, but what they might expect poetry to accomplish: how it could hold anger without being consumed by it, articulate desire without apology, expose the intimate workings of power, and discover in the particulars of an individual life the outlines of a collective struggle. For the poets who followed her, her legacy was less a prescribed aesthetic than a radical enlargement of poetic permission.

Lorde, who was born in Harlem in 1934 to Caribbean immigrant parents and died in 1992, described herself through a succession of identities that were inseparable: Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet. The formulation has the force of a declaration, but its importance resides in the refusal of any hierarchy among its terms. She would not consent to being understood through one aspect of herself at the expense of the others. Blackness could not be detached from gender; womanhood could not be abstracted from sexuality; political conviction could not be separated from the body in which it was lived. This insistence became one of the fundamental propositions of contemporary Black poetry: that the self is neither a stable literary persona nor a convenient representative of a social category, but a site of overlapping histories, inequalities, affections and desires. Lorde’s achievement was to make that complexity formally productive. 

Her influence is sometimes obscured by the apparent simplicity of her most memorable declarations. “Your silence will not protect you” has acquired an afterlife as an instruction, a warning and a rallying cry. Yet the statement is more demanding than its circulation might suggest. Silence, for Lorde, is not simply the absence of speech; it is a condition imposed by fear, shame, exclusion and the anticipation of punishment. To break it requires more than the courage to speak. It requires the discovery of a language capable of accommodating what established forms of expression have rendered unsayable. Her poetry repeatedly begins at this difficult threshold, where an experience is felt intensely but has not yet acquired a public shape.

In “Coal”, one of her defining poems, language emerges from darkness under pressure. Coal and diamond share a material origin, but their differing appearances disclose the transformations wrought by heat, compression and time. Lorde’s metaphor offers a particularly apt account of her own poetics. Blackness is not an attribute to be explained away, nor is it a symbolic darkness awaiting illumination by somebody else’s understanding. It is a source of radiance, complexity and value. The poem also recognises that language is never innocent: words are shaped by the conditions under which people are permitted to speak and by the prejudices through which their speech is received. To write, therefore, is to work upon the very material that has been used to diminish the self. The poet must make a form from the pressure applied against them.

This has proved a consequential inheritance for later Black poets, particularly those who resist the demand to render their identities intelligible to an imagined, predominantly white audience. Lorde does not supply them with a single vocabulary of resistance. Rather, she demonstrates that a poem can alter the terms of recognition themselves. Its speaker need not begin by explaining her existence, defending her desires or translating her anger into a reassuring moral lesson. She may instead speak from the authority of an experience that requires no external sanction. The distinction is fundamental: a poetry of self-definition is not the same as a poetry of self-justification.

Lorde’s political force, moreover, depends upon her refusal to treat anger as the enemy of thought. In “Power”, written in response to the acquittal of a white police officer who had killed a Black child, rage becomes both the poem’s subject and its organising pressure. The confrontation is not between a composed moral intelligence and an unruly emotion that must be subdued. Rather, the poem examines the terrifying difficulty of finding an adequate form for outrage when the institutions that provoke it also control the means of judgement. Its voice is haunted by the possibility that the language of denunciation may fail to match the enormity of the injustice, or that the speaker herself may be implicated in the violence she seeks to condemn.

This complexity matters to the political poetry that followed. Lorde makes no promise that anger will purify the person who feels it, or that righteous feeling automatically produces righteous action. Anger must be interpreted; it must reveal the structures against which it is directed. Her work consequently offers a more searching alternative to both the aesthetic prohibition against political emotion and the assumption that political conviction is sufficient in itself to make a poem. The emotion must become form, and the form must expose something that emotion alone cannot.

One can recognise this inheritance in the work of Claudia Rankine, whose exploration of everyday racism and the psychological consequences of racialised encounters similarly unsettles the distinction between private experience and public history. Rankine’s movement between the intimate, the documentary and the analytical creates a poetic space in which apparently minor incidents accumulate into a structure of social knowledge. The resemblance to Lorde lies not in a shared manner of writing, but in a shared understanding that the ordinary is never politically neutral. A remark, a gesture, a moment of misrecognition may carry the weight of a history that the immediate encounter appears to deny. The poem becomes a means of attending to that weight without reducing the individual to an illustration of an argument.

Yet Lorde’s significance extends beyond the articulation of racial injury. Her writing about lesbian desire, bodily pleasure and erotic knowledge opened a necessary space within Black poetry, where sexual difference had too often been treated as something to conceal or subordinate to the more publicly legible demands of racial solidarity. She insisted that the liberation of Black people could not be achieved by reproducing within Black communities the exclusions that Black political struggle opposed elsewhere. A movement that demanded freedom while policing the sexuality of its own members would remain compromised by the very logic it sought to defeat.

In “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, Lorde makes a distinction between the erotic and its commercialised or pornographic imitations. The erotic is not merely sexual gratification, still less a decorative language of sensuality. It is a way of knowing: an embodied recognition of what gives meaning, intensity and satisfaction to existence. Its political potential lies in its capacity to expose the distance between what a person has been taught to endure and what she might demand from life. The person who has encountered a profound form of pleasure may become less willing to accept the impoverished terms on which she is expected to live.

For later Black queer poets, this formulation carries implications that are at once aesthetic and existential. Desire need not appear as a confession made in the shadow of prohibition; it may become a source of knowledge, humour, tenderness and imaginative freedom. The work of Danez Smith, for example, brings Black queer life into a poetic field where vulnerability and exuberance coexist with the knowledge of racial violence, illness and premature death. Smith’s language can be intimate and theatrical, playful and devastating, its formal energies refusing the notion that grief must cancel pleasure or that political seriousness demands emotional austerity. Such affinities should not be mistaken for evidence of direct imitation. They suggest, rather, the expanded imaginative territory within which Black queer poetry can operate: a territory whose contours Lorde helped establish.

Her influence is equally apparent in the renewed insistence upon the specificity of Black women’s experience. Lorde’s writing refuses the consolations of a universal sisterhood that leaves racial and economic inequalities unexamined. In “Who Said It Was Simple”, the speaker’s position within a feminist gathering is complicated by the presence of racial privilege; the promise of solidarity is exposed as conditional. The poem is brief, alert and unsparing. Its irony derives from the gulf between an ideal of collective liberation and the exclusions that persist beneath its language.

That scrutiny remains important to poets whose work interrogates the intersections of race, gender, class and sexuality without assuming that these categories can be neatly reconciled. The contemporary Black female speaker is not required to choose between political allegiance and personal contradiction, or to embody an uncomplicated image of resilience. She may be furious with the world and ambivalent about those who claim to oppose it; she may love a community while exposing its failures. Lorde’s example allows the poem to become a place where solidarity is practised through honest disagreement rather than secured by silence.

Her impact has not been confined to the United States. During her time in West Berlin in the 1980s, Lorde encouraged Black German women to recognise their shared experiences and articulate an identity that dominant German culture had largely failed to acknowledge. Her engagement helped create conditions in which a younger generation, including the poet May Ayim, could develop a language for Black German life. The significance of this encounter was not simply that an established American poet offered encouragement to emerging writers. Lorde helped make visible a community that had existed without sufficient public recognition of itself. Poetry became a means of gathering scattered experiences into a collective history. 

The breadth of this legacy also complicates the familiar idea of literary influence as a line running from master to disciple. Lorde’s work travels because it makes connections possible across differences of geography, generation and circumstance. A Caribbean poet writing about the sexual histories of Black women, an American poet confronting police violence, and a Black German poet examining national belonging need not share a style or political vocabulary to discover something necessary in Lorde. What connects them is a method of attention: the recognition that experience becomes meaningful not by being detached from its conditions, but by being examined through them.

This method has formal consequences. Lorde is frequently remembered as a poet of declaration, but her language is more various than that designation allows. She could write with the directness of speech and the accumulating force of incantation, yet her work also draws upon myth, dream, history and the charged symbolism of the natural world. The Black Unicorn demonstrates the extent of this imaginative range. Its African imagery, female figures and mythic presences do not offer a simple escape from contemporary oppression into an idealised ancestral past. Instead, they enlarge the resources through which Black female identity can be imagined. The poems create a space in which motherhood, inheritance, sexuality, memory and political resistance can meet without being reduced to a single explanatory narrative.

This aspect of Lorde’s achievement is particularly important because it distinguishes her influence from the transmission of a political message alone. Later poets inherit not simply her insistence that experience must be spoken, but her determination to discover forms adequate to experiences that inherited language cannot contain. Her writing offers permission to move between modes: lyric intimacy and public accusation, bodily sensation and historical reflection, personal memory and communal invocation. The form need not remain obedient to the conventional boundaries of a poem any more than the speaker must remain obedient to inherited definitions of identity.

Her work as a teacher, activist and co-founder of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press further extended this understanding of literary inheritance. Lorde recognised that the freedom to write depends partly upon the material conditions under which writing is produced, circulated and read. A poetic revolution cannot be complete if the work of marginalised writers remains structurally difficult to publish, disseminate or preserve. Her commitment to creating opportunities for women of colour was therefore continuous with her literary practice. Both were concerned with the conditions under which a voice becomes audible, and with the responsibility of those who have found an opening to make room for others.

There is, however, a danger in converting Lorde into an emblem of courage so reassuring that the difficulty of her thought disappears. Her most portable statements can become detached from the histories and contradictions that gave them force. The assertion that silence will not protect us may be repeated as though speech alone were sufficient, while the less comfortable implications of her work are neglected: that speaking carries risks, that solidarity requires self-scrutiny, that anger must be understood rather than merely expressed, and that liberation cannot be achieved by reproducing the exclusions of the dominant culture. Lorde’s achievement was not to make resistance easy, but to make evasion harder to justify.

Nor does her influence require later poets to write like her. Indeed, the most persuasive evidence of her continuing significance may be found in the variety of forms that have emerged from the territory she helped open. Some poets favour direct address; others fracture the lyric voice, incorporate documentary material or work through silence and visual space. Some write towards collective affirmation, while others explore the instability of belonging. Lorde’s legacy does not prescribe which course they must follow. It enlarges the range of choices available to them and sharpens their awareness of what those choices entail.

Ultimately, the significance of Audre Lorde lies in her refusal to separate poetic invention from the struggle to live truthfully. She understood that the poem is neither a decorative retreat from political reality nor merely an instrument for communicating conclusions reached elsewhere. It is a means of discovering what experience contains, what language conceals, and what forms of relation might become possible once the concealed has been named. Her influence upon later Black poets is thus both historical and ongoing: visible in particular themes and techniques, but more profoundly present in the expectation that poetry should make room for lives that established conventions have diminished or excluded.

Lorde did not offer subsequent generations a map of the future. She offered something more difficult and more sustaining: a way of recognising the materials from which a future might be made. Her poetry insists that Black life cannot be reduced to suffering, that desire is a form of intelligence, that anger can disclose knowledge, and that the individual voice acquires strength through its relations with others. The work remains alive because these are not conclusions that history has settled. They are demands that each generation must encounter anew, and to which poetry, in its particular capacity to transform experience into language, can continue to respond.

Read last week's Editorial 

Taz Rahman holds a masters in ethics and social philosophy from Cardiff University. He is a South Wales based writer and literary documentary maker. His debut poetry collection 'East of the Sun, West of the Moon' was published by Seren Books and longlisted for the Laurel prize in 2024. He is widely published in leading poetry magazines and anthologies and had founded Wales' first Youtube poetry channel Just Another Poet. 

 

  

 

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