Dionne Warwick
(1940 -)
singer, social activist and philanthropist
Dionne Warwick: the woman we know chiefly as the sublime singer of Bacharach and Bees Gees repertoires: as an evergreen music legend, over an illustrious five-decade career. As a performer, she has enchanted audiences from the Atlantic west to the Pacific east and on all continents.
Behind the scenes and without fanfare, Dionne Warwick has been at the heart of significant social activism and philanthropy. This extraordinary woman, originally from New Jersey, has worked tirelessly as a social ambassador and activist. She has been a true pioneer in broaching sensitive humanitarian causes, including becoming one of the first artists to lead the music industry in the fight against the AIDS epidemic which was sweeping her country in the 1980s and killing many of her own friends. In 1985, Warwick reunited with Burt Bacharach and long-time friends Elton John, Stevie Wonder and Gladys Knight to record the landmark song, That’s What Friends Are For, which became the number-one hit record around the world and the first recording specially dedicated to raising awareness of, and ultimately over $3 million towards, AIDS research – a cause which Dionne Warwick continues to champion to this day. In 2002, Warwick was honoured by the American Red Ribbon AIDS Foundation, and more recently she was named a ‘Hero in the Struggle’ by the Black Aids Institute.
Known best for her collaborations with Hal David, Burt Bacharach, the Bee Gees and Barry Manilow, Dionne Warwick’s musical artistry – developed as a child ‘in church’ in New Jersey and early exhibiting her own soulful blend of pop, gospel and R&B - has deservedly earned her the soubriquet of ‘the singer who bridged the gap’: the striking young woman whose uplifting voice – along with only the best – transcended in its appeal all race and cultural boundaries.
In her concern about the ongoing quality and equality of education and educational opportunities across the US, Dionne Warwick has personally – and proudly - given support to the Dionne Warwick Institute of Economics and Entrepreneurship in New Jersey, a college designated as ‘star school’ as early as 1998 and an American Choice school in 2000. The school has a solid curriculum that honours the basics of reading, writing, mathematics and science. She headed up the development and production of a history book that puts its focus on African-American history, for use in schools, libraries and bookstores throughout the world. Warwick was also honoured with the first SupportMusic Appreciation Award which she received in Washington DC for her tireless efforts to preserve music education in school curricula.
She notably served as US Ambassador of Health in the 1980s and, in 2002, was elected as United Nations Global Ambassador for the Food and Agriculture Organization. She serves on the Board of Governors of the ‘We Are Family’ Foundation and, following the massive tragedy of 9/11, participated - along with over 200 other music stars - in the remake of the hit song, We Are Family. In 2003, she received a lifetime achievement award from the R&B Foundation, and was selected as one of the Top Faces of Black History. She has been lauded by US presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
And now Dionne Warwick can add ‘doctor of divinity’ to her already-impressive list of lifetime achievements, having been awarded the doctorate in 2021 by Huron University College, Toronto. It may have been deemed a most fitting tribute to Ms Warwick, whose family included relatives that made up the legendary gospel group, The Drinkard Singers. Her mother Lee Drinkard managed the group while aunt Cissy Houston (mother of Whitney Houston) shared the lead vocals. Dionne Warwick herself started in gospel as a child and years later sang with the Gospelaires before launching her successful solo career.
Dionne Warwick continues, in her ninth decade of life, to continue her work as a socially conscious and concerned global citizen, supporting such causes as homeless youth, children’s hospitals, the LGBTQ community and music education. There is every sign that, at the current age of 82, she will continue to use her voice, if less to hold audiences spellbound with heart-rending classic songs, then to speak out for humanity and for what she believes is simply the right thing to do.
Alla Horska (1929-70)
‘An artist against
the machine’
Alla Horska, born in 1929, was a Ukrainian artist of the 1960s, a monumentalist painter, one of the first representatives of the Ukrainian underground art movement and a dissident and human rights activist of the ‘Sixtiers’ movement. Born in Yalta but later studying in Kyiv, she realised her national identity as a young adult, learning the Ukrainian language and committing herself to the Ukrainian national cultural revival of the 1960s.
‘You know, I want to write in Ukrainian all the time,’ she said in 1961 in a letter to her father, then director of the Odesa Film Studio. ‘When you speak Ukrainian, you start thinking in Ukrainian. I’m reading Kotsiubynsky. The language is beautiful.’
Young Alla also had a massive social conscience. ‘The memories are a huge burden. The memories of the 30s. My heart pounds terribly with the pain of my soul. I want to do something, run somewhere … and scream.’
In 1962 Alla Horska became one of the founders and active members of the Club of Creative Youth in Kyiv. In the same year, Horska and other members of the club discovered the unmarked grave sites of ‘enemies of the Soviet state’, disposed of in Bykvinia Lukyanivsky and Vasylkivsky cemeteries. The activists declared their grisly find to the Kyiv City Council, proposing to erect a memorial. In 1963, they faced pressure to end their campaign, and one of the club members died after he was beaten by the police.
When in 1966 Yaroslav Hevrych, amongst others, was arrested for possessing Ukrainian literature banned in the Soviet Union, and brought to trial in the Kyiv Oblast Court, Alla Horska, along with club members and other arts and culture representatives, came with bouquets of carnations to support the group. Alla later publicly accused the law enforcement authorities of psychological pressure on Yaroslav Hevrych during the interrogations, resulting in his false testimony. She asserted that it was not a crime to read a book, even if it was one ideologically opposed to the official doctrine of the state.
In 1968, Horska was among 139 academics, writers and artists to sign a letter to the Communist Party Central Committee Secretary General Leonid Brezhnev, claiming that ‘the political processes of recent years have turned into a form of repression against dissidents … stifling the civic activity and social criticism that are necessary for the health of any society. They signal an increasingly strong restoration of Stalinism. … In Ukraine, where violations of democracy are amplified and aggravated, the resurgences of Stalinism are even starker.’
Between 1965 and 1968, Alla Horska took part in protests against the repression of Ukrainian human rights activists: Bohdan and Mykhalio Horyn, Vyacheslav Chornovil and others. Because of this, she was persecuted by the Soviet security services. However, a kind of temporary protection was offered to her on the condition that she, together with a group of other artists, agreed to work on monumental works of art in Donetsk and Krasnadon (now Sorokyne) - to which they consented because of the ideological importance of the works they were constructing.
Alla Horksa’s apartment in Kyiv had long since turned into a place where those just released from gaol would find accommodation and where dissidents could thrash out the issues of the day. It became a meeting-place for the intelligentsia – though it was never free of risk or fear. It was discovered – to no great surprise – that Alla was the subject of surveillance and, later, intimidation when listening equipment to monitor her own home was found in her neighbours’ apartment.
In November 1970 Horska, aged only 41, went to visit her father-in-law in Vasylkiv, a small town near Kyiv, never to return. Her body was found in the basement of his house a month later. According to the autopsy report, ‘A. Horska died as a result of multiple skull fractures and haemorrhage to the brain cavity.’ The examination concluded that the death was caused by ‘blunt force trauma’ to the head.
Horska’s husband Viktor Zaretskyi was arrested on the day Alla’s body was found, under suspicion of murdering his wife. Under the intense psychological pressure of interrogations, Viktor accused his own father of having reason to kill his daughter-in-law. The case of the death of Alla Horska was closed, and its true cause - and culprits - remain unresolved to this day.
Alla Horska’s funeral in December 1970 turned into a civil resistance campaign in which well-known dissidents honoured Horska’s work – both artistic and political – in stirring speeches. The public outcry triggered by Horska’s death disturbed the authorities and it took several months to subside. Oleksiy Zaretskyi, Alla’s son, believed that the purpose of his mother’s murder had been to intimidate, discredit and demoralise the Ukrainian human rights movement.
Liudmyla Semykina, an associate and friend, said: ‘Alla Horska was born for protest. She was a defender, a torch. She was willing to sacrifice and never afraid to speak the truth. … That’s why she was blacklisted, and then eliminated.’
Bohdan Horyn, friend and human rights activist, wrote: ‘Alla Horska may have been killed, but no one can kill Alla’s ideals … From today on, Alla Horska’s name will burn like a bright torch in our spiritual world and illuminate the surrounding darkness with its flames of hope.’
Alla Horska created dozens of art works in a wide range of media: mosaics, murals, stained glass and paintings.
Sources: The Ukrainian Week; Euromaidan Press (Hromadske, translated by Christine Chraibi)
Heroica’s Black History Month 2020 salute to:
Audre Lorde (1934-92)
(image by K. Kendall)
A self-described ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’, Audre Lorde dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. Lorde was born in New York City to West Indian immigrant parents. She attended Catholic schools before graduating from Hunter High School and published her first poem in Seventeen magazine while still a student there. Of her poetic beginnings Lorde commented in Black Women Writers: ‘I used to speak in poetry. I would read poems, and I would memorize them. People would say, well what do you think, Audre. What happened to you yesterday? And I would recite a poem and somewhere in that poem would be a line or a feeling I would be sharing. In other words, I literally communicated through poetry. And when I couldn’t find the poems to express the things I was feeling, that’s what started me writing poetry, and that was when I was twelve or thirteen.’
Lorde earned her BA from Hunter College and MLS from Columbia University. She was a librarian in the New York public schools throughout the 1960s. She had two children with her husband, Edward Rollins, a white, gay man, before they divorced in 1970. In 1972, Lorde met her long-time partner, Frances Clayton. She also began teaching as poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College. Her experiences with teaching and pedagogy—as well as her place as a Black, queer woman in white academia—went on to inform her life and work. Indeed, Lorde’s contributions to feminist theory, critical race studies, and queer theory intertwine her personal experiences with broader political aims. Lorde articulated early on the intersections of race, class, and gender in canonical essays such as ‘The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House’.
Lorde’s early collections of poetry include The First Cities (1968), Cables to Rage (1970), and From a Land Where Other People Live (1972), which was nominated for a National Book Award. Later works, including New York Head Shop and Museum (1974), Coal (1976), and The Black Unicorn (1978), included powerful poems of protest. ‘I have a duty,’ Lorde once stated, ‘to speak the truth as I see it and to share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigating pain.’ Lorde’s later poems were often assembled from personal journals. Explaining the genesis of ‘Power’, a poem about the police shooting of a ten-year-old black child, Lorde discussed her feelings when she learned that the officer involved had been acquitted: ‘A kind of fury rose up in me; the sky turned red. I felt so sick. I felt as if I would drive this car into a wall, into the next person I saw. So I pulled over. I took out my journal just to air some of my fury, to get it out of my fingertips. Those expressed feelings are that poem.’
Her poetry, and ‘indeed all of her writing’, according to contributor Joan Martin in Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, ‘rings with passion, sincerity, perception, and depth of feeling’. Concerned with modern society’s tendency to categorize groups of people, Lorde fought the marginalization of such categories as ‘lesbian’ and ‘black woman’. She was central to many liberation movements and activist circles, including second-wave feminism, civil rights and Black cultural movements, and struggles for LGBTQ equality. In particular, Lorde’s poetry is known for the power of its call for social and racial justice, as well as its depictions of queer experience and sexuality. As she told interviewer Charles H. Rowell in Callaloo: ‘My sexuality is part and parcel of who I am, and my poetry comes from the intersection of me and my worlds… [White, arch-conservative senator] Jesse Helms’s objection to my work is not about obscenity … or even about sex. It is about revolution and change.’
Lorde was a noted prose writer as well as poet. Her account of her struggle to overcome breast cancer and mastectomy, The Cancer Journals (1980), is regarded as a major work of illness narrative. In The Cancer Journals, Lorde confronts the possibility of death. Recounting this personal transformation led Lorde to address the silence surrounding cancer, illness, and the lived experience of women. For example, Lorde explained her decision not to wear a prosthesis after undergoing a mastectomy in the Journals: ‘Prosthesis offers the empty comfort of “Nobody will know the difference”. But it is that very difference which I wish to affirm, because I have lived it, and survived it, and wish to share that strength with other women. If we are to translate the silence surrounding breast cancer into language and action against this scourge, then the first step is that women with mastectomies must become visible to each other.’
Lorde’s 1982 novel, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, was described by its publishers as a ‘biomythography, combining elements of history, biography and myth’. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984) collected Lorde’s nonfiction prose and has become a canonical text in Black studies, women’s studies, and queer theory. Another posthumous collection of essays, A Burst of Light (1988), won the National Book Award. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde was published in 1997.
In 1981 Lorde and fellow writer Barbara Smith founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, which was dedicated to furthering the writings of black feminists. Lorde would also become increasingly concerned over the plight of black women in South Africa under apartheid, creating Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa and remaining an active voice on behalf of these women throughout the remainder of her life. Lorde addressed her concerns to not only the United States but the world, encouraging a celebration of the differences that society instead used as tools of isolation. As Allison Kimmich noted in Feminist Writers, ‘Throughout all of Audre Lorde’s writing, both nonfiction and fiction, a single theme surfaces repeatedly. The black lesbian feminist poet activist reminds her readers that they ignore differences among people at their peril … Instead, Lorde suggests, differences in race or class must serve as a “reason for celebration and growth.”’
Lorde’s honors and awards included a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A professor of English at John Jay College and Hunter College, Lorde was poet laureate of New York from 1991-1992. Warrior Poet (2006), by Alexis De Veaux, is the first full-length biography of Audre Lorde.
Text credit: poetryfoundation.org
A Woman Speaks
BY AUDRE LORDE
Moon marked and touched by sun
my magic is unwritten
but when the sea turns back
it will leave my shape behind.
I seek no favor
untouched by blood
unrelenting as the curse of love
permanent as my errors
or my pride
I do not mix
love with pity
nor hate with scorn
and if you would know me
look into the entrails of Uranus
where the restless oceans pound.
I do not dwell
within my birth nor my divinities
who am ageless and half-grown
and still seeking
my sisters
witches in Dahomey
wear me inside their coiled cloths
as our mother did
mourning.
I have been woman
for a long time
beware my smile
I am treacherous with old magic
and the noon's new fury
with all your wide futures
promised
I am
woman
and not white.
Audre Lorde, “A Woman Speaks” from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. Copyright © 1997 by Audre Lorde.