Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography

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The Audre Lorde Compendium: Essays, Speeches, and Journals, introduction by Alice Walker, Pandora (London), 1996. 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." A friend of Lorde's from high school with whom she had unfinished business. They were both "poets, renegades, and very determined young women" (228) and thus had a lot in common, but they were "wary of each other" (228) as well. When Muriel and Jill slept together, it signaled the beginning of the end for Muriel and Lorde. Dotti and Paulie 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).

She had only started to talk and read a year prior. One day she was at the public library at 135th Street, and Mrs. Augusta Baker was the librarian. Lorde was acting up, screaming and embarrassing her mother, who pinched her sharply to make her stop. Mrs. Baker stood over her and asked if she would like to hear a story. Surprised, Lorde agreed, and the resulting experience changed her life. She knew she had to read herself, and said so out loud. Her mother was stunned and grateful, and kissed Lorde in her excitement. She never thought it possible for Lorde to sit still like that, or to be able to utter intelligible words. Thus Linda began to teach Lorde how to read and write. She decided she did not like the way the “y” on "Audrey" hung down, and began leaving it off until her mother got mad.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 started a serious relationship with Muriel, a young Italian woman with a history of mental instability. The two of them were madly in love and moved in together, but eventually Muriel cheated on Lorde and mentally broke down. Lorde was devastated and found it difficult to extricate herself from the relationship, but finally the two of them separated. She did not think she would be able to be with anyone ever again, and was profoundly depressed.

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 Lesbianism – The book describes the way lesbians lived in New York City, Connecticut and Mexico during the 1950s through 1970s. 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. 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). The dominant impression I get from this is similar to what I've gotten from Susan Sontag's memoirs: that this is a person whose sheer emotional maturity and awareness would make many people 3-4 times her age feel juvenile. Traveling alone to Mexico when you're barely 20 and ending up in an affair with an expat journalist whose pushing 50? Like...Jesus...

References

Lorde only saw her mother cry twice in her life—once at the dentist, and once when her father came home drunk. At her most vulnerable, Lorde gave the world some of her most powerful writing with her work in The Cancer Journals, which chronicled her life with breast cancer and having a double mastectomy. “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.” With these words, she assumed as much control as she could over a body succumbing to disease and a public narrative that, until then, allowed a singular narrative about what it meant to live with illness. She made herself visible and gave other women permission to make themselves visible in a world that would prefer that they disappear, stay silent. In all of her writing, Audre Lorde offers us language to articulate how we might heal our fractured sociopolitical climate. She gives us instructions for making tools with which we can dismantle the houses of our oppressors. She remakes language with which we can revel in our sensual and sexual selves. She forges a space within which we can hold ourselves and each other accountable to both our needs and the greater good. In the earliest days of life in Harlem Lorde and her sisters would traverse the miles uphill to the comic book store in Washington Heights. There was a fat old white man who worked there who touched Lorde one time inappropriately when she got separated from her sister, so she learned to avoid him by staying close to them.

Linda Lorde's mother who lived in Carricou. In the stories Lorde heard of her, she admired the women's community that Ma-Liz was a part of. Mrs. Augusta Baker 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. Lorde wrote about being an outsider. To read her experiences today probably doesn't mean a lot to many readers because a lot has changed in the world since Lorde was young (at least on paper - I argue things haven't changed much at all except no one likes to talk about it openly). But I have always been an outsider in my own way, and I could relate to Lorde's story even though we have very little in common. She knew that you could be an individual but also to be made up of every person we have shared a piece of our history with, for better or worse.Lorde says she always wished she could be man and woman, holding the strongest parts of both her mother and father within herself. She has felt the triad of mother and father and child, and the triad of grandmother mother and daughter. She is “woman forever” and her body is “a living representation of other life older longer wiser” (7). 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 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. 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. 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. Each one of us had been starved for love for so long that we wanted to believe that love, once found, was all-powerful. We wanted to believe that it could give word to my inchoate pain and rages; that it could enable them to face the world and get a job; that it could free our writings, cure racism, end homophobia and adolescent acne.” Lorde employs a detailed description of making souse with her mother as a segway to talk about her early experiences with sex and menstruation. Making souse is rhythmic, simple, and second nature for Lorde, unlike sex and menstruation which are mysteries carefully guarded by her mother. Fear and confusion are at the forefront of Lorde’s mind as she wonders if she might become pregnant. When she finally gets her period she is relieved that she’s not pregnant, yet terrified that she has crossed the threshold into womanhood. That terror soon becomes pleasure at her new status, and Lorde’s last time making souse marks her last day as a child and a turning point in her coming-of-age story.A friend of Rhea's who lived in Mexico with her daughter Tammy after her divorce. She was a "calm, intelligent, and forthright woman in her early forties" (157). She was very helpful and welcoming to Lorde, and introduced her to the community of American women expatriates living in Mexico City. Felicia 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 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