Zami: A New Spelling of my Name (Penguin Modern Classics)

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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...

Failing in college and eager to escape from New York, Audre moves to Stamford, Connecticut, and takes a job in a factory. There, she begins a relationship with one of the other workers, a woman called Ginger who has already been married and divorced. Even after they begin sleeping together, Audre is uncertain about the nature of her relations with Ginger, who seems to enjoy sex with women but not to see it as any kind of serious commitment. Lorde writes very well and has the ability to sum things up in a rather pithy way, as she sums up the 1950s: 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."

Success!

She is right about so much, and so much of what she says we desperately need to hear in these broken and divided times.

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: This is not an easy read and repays time and careful reading. It is a great book, one that really should be much more widely known, especially here in the UK. Lorde expresses herself very well: 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. 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.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. 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.

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. 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. The Rosenbergs had been executed, the transistor radio had been invented, and frontal lobotomy was the standard solution for persistent deviation." Lynn, a lesbian who lives with Muriel and Audre for a while and is their mutual lover during this timeGinger, Audre's colleague from the factory at Stamford; Audre's first female lover. Audre later moved in with Ginger and her Mom, and paid rent for room and board. 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."