Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography

Product Information

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). Muriel was a former co-worker of Ginger's who invited Lorde out. She was twenty-three, Italian, had large eyes and a pale face and dark hair, and had been treated for schizophrenia before she met Lorde. Lorde remarked on her "great sweetness hidden, and a vulnerability which surpassed even my own," with a "sense of humor [that] was sudden and appealing" (186). She and Lorde were both dreamy poets, and both had friends who died young. Muriel had trouble getting her life together, and even though she and Lorde were happy for a time, she began mentally languishing. She could not get a job and began cheating on Lorde, and after they broke up seemed to have another mental breakdown. Rhea 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 only saw her mother cry twice in her life—once at the dentist, and once when her father came home drunk. Phillip's girlfriend. Lorde and Gennie thought she might be a little crazy, as she always sang a tuneless, violent little song as she swept, but as she grew older and wiser, Lorde revised her opinion: "And now I think the goddess was speaking through Ella also, but Ella was too beaten down and anesthetized by Phillip's brutality to believe in her own mouth" (251). Peter

In 1936-1938, the 125th Street area of Harlem was still racially mixed, and that meant that there were tensions. Lorde still remembers people spitting on them sometimes. It was a confusing way to grow up, because her parents always instilled in their daughters that they could have the whole world if they wanted it. Lorde even thought they were rich, only noticing the things she had that she later realized her mother sacrificed for her. Toni asked if she could play tomorrow, and Lorde kept that dream in her heart as she went with her mother on her tedious errands. It was an eternity until the next Monday, but Toni never appeared. Gennie, a.k.a. Genevieve, Audre's closest friend in high school who takes dance classes and commits suicide. The first person she consciously, truly loves. This is a reality we often lose sight of when we surrender to assimilationist ideas about social change. There is, for example, a strain of feminism that believes if only women act like men, we will achieve the equality we seek. Lorde asks us to do the more difficult and radical work of imagining what our realities might look like if masculinity were not the ideal to which we aspire, if heterosexuality were not the ideal to which we aspire, if whiteness were not the ideal to which we aspire.The Audre Lorde Compendium: Essays, Speeches, and Journals, introduction by Alice Walker, Pandora (London), 1996. 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.

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.

References

After finishing high school, Audre moves out of her parents’ home and begins an affair with a white boy named Peter. She does not enjoy their sexual relationship but sleeps with him because this is the normal thing to do. They break up after a few months, but soon afterward, Audre finds out that she is pregnant and undergoes a traumatic and painful abortion. Though the physical effects last only a few days, the poems she writes for some time afterward are dark and despairing in tone. Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle where we are standing." Bea's former girlfriend who came to live with Muriel and Lorde for a time. She was "broad, squat, and very sexy, and in terrible emotional shape" (211) after her husband was killed in car crash that almost took her life as well. She had nightmares often and was looking for a safe place. She and Lorde and Muriel were all lovers for a time and hoped to "practice the kind of sisterhood that we talked and dreamed about for the future" (211), but Lynn eventually tired of being the third wheel and left one day, taking the other girls' money. Toni In the first few chapters, we meet Lorde’s parents and Lorde as a young girl. Lorde makes it very clear at the outset of the text that this is a story of how the women in her life contributed to the formation of her identity—not men. The woman who takes up the most (psychic) space in Lorde’s life is Linda, her mother. Linda is a powerful, imposing woman. She had a “public air of in-charge competence” that was “quiet and effective” (16). She was different than other women, Lorde believed, but it was only when she was older did she see that her mother “took pains…to hide from us children the many instances of her powerlessness” (17). Although a linear account of her life in the traditional autobiography sense, it’s also very much about the women who made Audre Lorde what she was, from the start: her mother and her forebears, her sisters, high school friends, and lovers - a web of women’s lives with Audre at the centre. That sounds much more nurturing than it actually was; most of these relationships were fraught, with her mother especially, and the narrative is shot through with pain and loss.

I picture myself, one day, looking through some forgotten, stored-away box and finding that photo that my roommate took of me and the first woman I ever wanted to marry. Most of the evidence of that love story I would impulsively torch just after our breakup (oh, the drama!), along with the locs I had been sporting when we first met. One area of powerlessness was in regards to racism. Racism was an indelible part of the Lordes’ lives, although Linda and Byron did their best to shield their daughters from this reality. Linda would insist that when white people literally spat on them that “it was something else” (18); it was “so often her approach to the world; to change reality” (18). The girls grew up thinking that “we could have the whole world in the palm of our hands” (18), which ended up being more confusing than anything else. Lorde remembered, as did so many little girls of color, “All our storybooks were about people who were very different from us. They were blonde and white and lived in houses with trees around and had dogs named Spot” (18). At school Lorde’s teachers would often single her out for cruel treatment, with Sister Mary creating two groups of students—the Fairies and the Brownies—and Lorde observed “in this day of heightened sensitivity to racism and color usage, I don’t have to tell you which were the good students and which were the baddies” (27-28). I'm totally fascinated by the term Lorde coined, "biomythography" - I read here that she was quoted to have said biomythography "has the elements of biography and history of myth. In other words, it’s fiction built from many sources. This is one way of expanding our vision."Any world which did not have a place for me loving women was not a world in which I wanted to live, nor one which I could fight for. Lorde, 197