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). 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. Lorde's real goal in this book however, is less to explicate the socio-political turmoil of her youth, and rather to examine the various emotional bonds she forms with other women, lesbian or otherwise, around her. Zami is a pensive story of how a marginalized woman learns to thrive and build community. The sheer inwardness of Lorde's focus makes it a work of intensely personal emotional reflection, more than a conventional memoir per se (hence her decision to call this a 'mythobiography'). The real audience for Zami, I suspect, is Lorde herself. Which is completely fair.

In Mexico, she experienced a great deal of happiness and freedom. She attended university classes, explored Mexico City, and became acquainted with a community of lesbians who were strong, independent, and represented exactly the kind of woman that Lorde wanted to be. She spent most of her time with Eudora, an older woman for whom she had strong feelings. Eudora was unstable, but taught Lorde profound lessons in life and love. I think it would not be hyperbolic to say that reading this linked piece by her at the age of about 19 completely changed me and my view of the world: The nacreous lustre of New York blazes forth from the imagination of Lorde; a kaleidoscope of colours and cultures, from 1930's Harlem and the feeling or repression, desperation and poverty mixed with hope for a new future, to the bohemian 1950's Village; She is right about so much, and so much of what she says we desperately need to hear in these broken and divided times. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name is a 1982 biomythography by American poet Audre Lorde. It started a new genre that the author calls biomythography, which combines history, biography, and myth. [1] In the text, Lorde writes that "Zami" is "a Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers", noting that Carriacou is the Caribbean island from which her mother immigrated. [2] The name proves fitting: Lorde begins Zami writing that she owes her power and strength to the women in her life, and much of the book is devoted to detailed portraits of other women. [2] Plot summary [ edit ]

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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 writes very well and has the ability to sum things up in a rather pithy way, as she sums up the 1950s: I was disappointed to see her label butch femme culture as inherently oppressive role playing and rolled my eyes at her statement saying she could tell who is a lesbian because she's never attracted to straight women. I can understand her having those thoughts at that time in her life, but it felt weird to have them presented uncritically by Lorde decades later.

Lynn, a lesbian who lives with Muriel and Audre for a while and is their mutual lover during this time

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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. 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. A woman in her late teens/early 20s being able to afford a one bedroom apartment in a major eastern city while earning a single working-class income (and being able to attend college for free), without being saddled with crippling debt, is a set of lived experiences that is literally unthinkable in the America of 2021.