Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography

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Lorde criticized privileged people’s habit of burdening the oppressed with the “responsibility … to teach the oppressors their mistakes,” which she considered “a constant drain of energy.” Phyllis and Helen were much closer to each other in age and thus Lorde often felt like an only child. She longed for a younger sister, and knew that it could only come from magical means as the Lorde family was not going to expand naturally any more. As the youngest she felt she had privileges but no rights, and that if there were another child it had to be a girl because if it were a boy, it would belong to her mother and not to her. What you think you doing coming into this house wailing about election? If I told you once I have told you a hundred times, don’t chase yourself behind these people, haven’t I? What kind of ninny raise up here to think those good-for-nothing white piss-jets would pass over some little jacabat girl to elect you anything?’” Linda, 64-65 Lorde wonders why the most far-out position always seems right to her—why extremes are more comfortable than the “unruffled middle” (15).

She is right about so much, and so much of what she says we desperately need to hear in these broken and divided times. Phyllis and Helen were Lorde's older sisters. They were very close to each other but made no effort to include their younger sister in anything that they did and consequently Lorde did not know them well. From them, though, Lorde learned that one could tell stories, which forever changed her creative outlook. Genevieve Sadly I didn't love this as much as I thought I would, although parts of it I did love and there is some stunningly beautiful writing. Especially in the first half I had trouble emotionally connecting with the character Audre--I'm not sure if that was my state of mind or the writing style. I also wanted to know more about certain parts of Lorde's life (poetry, libraries) and less about her sex life (haha no judgment if your preferences are the other way around).Lorde’s passion for reading began at the New York Public Library’s 135th Street Branch—since relocated and renamed the Countee Cullen Branch—where children’s librarian Augusta Baker read her stories and then taught her how to read, with the help of Lorde's mother.

Lorde refers to this as a biomythography, which is a combination of biography, myth and history. Lorde says that the word Zami is a Carriacou word (Carriacou is a small island in the Caribbean where Lorde’s mother was born) which means women who work together as friends and lovers. This is, amongst other things, a book about love. It follows Lorde’s formative years and takes us up to around 1960. There is a great deal about racism, being a lesbian in 1950s America, friendship and community and Lorde’s difficult relationship with her mother. Lorde's friend and lover in Mexico. Eudora was an American living in Mexico, in love with Mexican culture and history and someone who "seemed always to have lived her life as if it were a story, a little grander than ordinary" (169). She was a lesbian, formerly involved with Karen, another American in Mexico, and the "most fascinating woman I had ever met" (162), according to Lorde. She was forty-eight, gray-haired, a journalist, brilliant, and an alcoholic. She also had breast cancer and lost a breast. Lorde felt there was a "reserve about her own person, a force-field around her that I did not know how to pass, a sadness surrounding her that I could not breach" (164-65). Over the course of Lorde's time in Mexico, Eudora became more encumbered by her alcoholism and her anger, but her role in Lorde's life remained positive and meaningful. Muriel A great deal of Lorde’s writing was committed to articulating her worldview in service of the greater good. She crafted lyrical manifestos. The essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” made the case for the importance of poetry, arguing that poetry “is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” In “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Lorde examines women using their erotic power to benefit themselves instead of benefiting men. She notes that women are often vilified for their erotic power and treated as inferior. She suggests that we can rethink and reframe this paradigm. This is what is so remarkable about Lorde’s writing—how she encourages women to understand weaknesses as strengths. She writes: “As women, we need to examine the ways in which our world can be truly different. I am speaking here of the necessity for reassessing the quality of all aspects of our lives and our work, and how we move toward and through them.” In this, she offers an expansive definition of the erotic, one that goes well beyond the carnal to encompass a wide range of sensate experiences. It was a choice of pains. That was what living was all about. I clung to that and tried to feel only proud. Lorde, 111

Linda loved being close to the water, and Lorde and her sisters saw how pensive she would get when they would go down to its edge. She would tell the girls stories of Grenada, of her home. Lorde knew “home” was a faraway place and where they were at now was only a temporary abode. Someday they would all walk the streets of Grenville, Grenada. There lived Aunt Anni, Linda’s great-aunt, sister to Ma-Liz. Ma-Liz had seven daughters. Their home was in Carricou, but Lorde could never find it on a map and doubted her mother’s geography as fantastical or crazy. But this “home” was there, a sweet place that Lorde kept as “my truly private paradise” (14).

Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014 , Best American Short Stories 2012 , Best Sex Writing 2012 , Harper’s Bazaar , A Public Space , McSweeney’s , Tin House , Oxford American , American Short Fiction , Virginia Quarterly Review , and many other publications. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times . She is the author of the books Ayiti , An Untamed State , the New York Times best-selling Bad Feminist , the nationally best-selling Difficult Women , and New York Times best-selling Hunger: A Memoir of My Body . She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel and the editor of Best American Short Stories 2018 . She is currently at work on film and television projects, a book of writing advice, an essay collection about television and culture, and a YA novel entitled The Year I Learned Everything . Her relationships, especially that with Muriel, made me think about myself a lot. I looked inward about how I feel, and the difficulties of that and the realities of it. I've read a lot about polyamory recently and have been wondering at it, for myself personally--the relationship with Muriel made me wonder about the difference between polyamory, open relationships, and lust alone which drives a monogamous relationship into the ground--communication seems to be an obvious key, consent, another--not only love. It's something I want to think on more, something to research. When Lorde learned to write her name at 4 years old, she had a tendency to forget the Y in Audrey, in part because she “did not like the tail of the Y hanging down below the line,” as she wrote in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. “I used to love the evenness of AUDRELORDE,” she explained. She included the Y to abide by her mother, but eventually dropped it when she got older. Linda and Byron shared decisions and all family policy. They spoke in patois to their children with one authoritative voice. Byron entered real estate and managed small rooming-houses in Harlem. As soon as he came home he and Linda would closet themselves in their room and discuss the day and business or any punishment that needed meting out to the girls.

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Things I never did with Genevieve: Let our bodies touch and tell the passions that we felt. Go to a Village gay bar, or any bar anywhere. Smoke reefer. Derail the freight that took circus animals to Florida. Take a course in international obscenities. Learn Swahili. See Martha Graham’s dance troupe. Visit Pearl Primus. Ask her to take us away with her to Africa next time. Write THE BOOK. Make Love.” Lorde, 97

A girl on the fringes of the Branded, who was "short and round, with immense Mediterranean eyes shining out of a heart-shaped face" (120). She loved poetry like Lorde did. She did not want to go to college so she got a job after high school, and impetuously married a young man named Jim the same night she met him. Their relationship soured and she went to Detroit to live under the radar. Jean Eudora, an older woman and Audre's lover in Mexico. She was a journalist and alcoholic. She was passionate about Mexican culture and history. She had a clothing shop with her ex in the Mexican town where they lived. She had lost a breast due to cancer. I must add that these things are not separable. I cannot in any kind of faith tease it out as a strand. Audre writes of loving women inside all these other shells and spaces and non-spaces, all these stiflings and terrors and sufferings, all these joys and expansions into self and glory. Loving women, unfolding into all these places of being, where it seems to Audre that lesbians are the only women talking to each other, supporting each other emotionally at all in the '50s. She and her friends and lovers invent the sisterhood the feminist movement obsessed about decades later. The first time Lorde ever slept anywhere besides her parents’ bedroom was at a beach house in Connecticut where the family went on a one-week vacation. The first year she slept on a cot; the next year they were poorer and were all in one room. She went to bed earlier than her sisters, with whom she shared a bed, and waited anxiously for them to come in. That year she finally learned what they did in their room at home—they told stories. Lorde was transfixed; she could not believe people could tell untrue stories and not get in trouble. She begged to listen to them every week even though her sisters would get annoyed. Helen would force her to promise she would never say anything about them, and would pinch her if she ever interrupted. Once Helen was so furious she refused to continue the installment of the story, and Lorde was miserable. She decided she would make up a story of her own.The mother – Lorde's difficult relationship with her mother, whom she credits for imbuing her with a certain sense of strength, pervades throughout the book. We chose our name because the kitchen is the center of the home, the place where women in particular work and communicate with each other,” Smith wrote in 1989. The kitchen table also symbolized the grassroots nature of the press. In one scene, Audre's mother hits her for not understanding racism, even though she has done her utmost to prevent her from knowing and understanding it, has made the topic of race taboo. Is she angry with the people who hurt her daughter or frustrated that she can't control the world to protect her? In any case, the punishment doesn't make sense, revealing the divisiveness of white supremacy, the power it has to restrict and shrink love. In 1978, Lorde was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy of her right breast. She declined reconstructive surgery, and for the rest of her life refused to conceal that she was missing one breast. In 1980, she published The Cancer Journals, a collection of contemporaneous diary entries and other writing that detailed her experience with the disease. She decided to share such a deeply personal story partly out of a sense of duty to break the silence surrounding breast cancer.