Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“My child’s ears heard the words and pondered the mysteries of this mother to whom my solid and austere mother could whisper such beautiful words. And finally, my mother knew how to frighten children into behaving in public. She knew how to pretend that the only food left in the house was actually a meal of choice, carefully planned. She knew how to make virtues out of necessities.”

Much of the text centers around Audre’s belief in matriarchy. Indeed, in contrast to the patriarchal society in which she lives, Audre’s childhood was a matriarchy of sorts. Her father, while contributing financially and authoritatively to the family, was an intangible and distant authority figure. By contrast, the proximity of her mother made her authority all the more palpable. In this passage, a young Audre understands that her mother, whom she sees as an authority figure of the highest power, prays to another female of a higher power: the Virgin Mary. Audre’s mother does not pray to a male god but rather recognizes the power of femininity.

Audre appropriates this belief from her mother, which is made all the more apparent by her mother’s vast knowledge of how to stretch reality in order to meet perception: by making disobedient children behave or finding food in spite of poverty. In this way, it would seem as though some of her mother’s power stems from her ability to distort reality in order to fit the necessity of her perception. Therefore, she is able to make Audre believe that she was born into a kind of matriarchy, at least within the family structure, despite the sexism and misogyny evident in the patriarchal society around her.

“Carriacou, a magic name like cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, the delectable little squares of guava jelly each lovingly wrapped in tiny bits of crazy-quilt wax-paper cut precisely from bread wrappers […] Carriacou which was not listed […] nor appeared on any map that I could find […] But underneath itall as I was growing up, home was still a sweet place somewhere else whichthey had not managed to capture yet on paper.”

Audre uses the taste of various foods, especially spices, in order to conjure images and ideas concerning home. As a child, Audre was told repeatedly that home was a kind of magic name of another land; it was never impressed upon her that home is what someone makes, as opposed to strictly a place. In essence, the idea of home itself becomes mythologized—a place that Audre cannot reach as she has yet to fully reach her own identity. This conflation between identity and the idea of home leads Audre to recreate this text as a biomythography as she is attempting to merge seemingly disparate ideas and realities together in order to understand her own identity.

“‘I can’t,’ I said, knowing full well that what you do with black crayons is scribble on the wall and get your backass beaten, or color around the edges of pictures, but not write. To write, you needed a pencil. ‘I can’t!’ I said, terrified, and started to cry.”

Audre’s first school experience is anything but positive. Even though she is smart, her mother has instilled both a rigid set of rules as well as an absolute fear of authority. This, in conjunction with the racism evident within the school system, makes for the perfect storm, one in which Audre is seen as being both stupid and disobedient instead of being recognized for her intelligence.

“I took one hand out of her muff, and never taking my eyes off her face, popped one of the striped candy rings into my mouth. My mouth was dry. I closed it around the candy and sucked, feeling the peppermint juice run down my throat, burning and sweet almost to the point of harshness. For years and years afterward, I always thought of peppermint lifesavers as the candy in Toni’s muff.”

From a very early age, Audre remembers sensual experiences being associated with the women in her life, and with food. Indeed, the first friend that Audre ever makes, Toni, also represents a kind of sexual awakening for Audre, despite her being very young at the time. The language that Audre uses to communicate her interaction with Toni is very much the sexualized language of an adult, and yet it is not gratuitously sexual. In fact, the sexually-charged encounter is both childish and also incredibly mature: the simplicity of the situation—the sharing of candy—as well as the lack of lewdness and objectification of Toni renders it childlike while the description of the situation—the truncated syntax, the tangible diction—mimics the heavy panting associated with adult desire. In this way, Audre conflates her childhood self and her adult self.

“His nasty fingers moved furtively up and down my body, now trapped between his pressing bulges and the rim of the bin. By the time he loosened his grip and allowed me to slide down to the blessed floor, I felt dirtied and afraid, as if I had just taken part in some filthy rite […] The slabby fingers and the nauseating hoist were the price I paid for a torn and faceless copy of an old Bugs Bunny comic. For years I had nightmares of being hoisted up to the ceiling and having no way of getting down.”

Whereas Audre’s first female sexual experience is sweet and age-appropriate, her first sexual encounter with a male constitutes molestation. Despite how sheltered she is by her mother, there is no doubt in her mind that when the comic book man picks her up and presses himself against her, it is wrong and disgusting. Audre perfectly captures the powerlessness associated with molestation cases, as well as the penchant for the victim to blame herself. Audre remembers her fear being coupled with feeling dirty, as though she were somehow complicit in this perversion. Similarly, the reader also witnesses an adult understanding of the idea that bodies are a commodity within society: this molestation is the price that Audre must pay for her comic book.

“I would be carried out to the ocean on that treacherous current that flowed through the Harlem River from a mythic place called the ‘Spitting Devil’ which our father had cautioned us about; this current which had claimed so many of our classmates every summer before the Harlem River Drive was finally built, cutting off access to the free cooling waters of the river for all those hot and dusty little Black children with no dime to buy the doors open into the green coolness of the Colonial Park pool and no sisters to take them comic book trading.”

As part of the biomythography, a work which conflates reality with fiction, Audre conflates the reality of her fear with the mythic warnings of her father. However, although these warnings take on a kind of mythological power, which seems specifically tied to the name, they represent a real concern that her father has: namely, that his children will drown in these waters. In this way, Audre’s fear of rolling down the hill to her eventual drowning is no less real than a child’s fear of strangers after hearing a Grimm Brothers fairytale. In fact, it would seem as though myths hold the power to conflate the fictional with the real, or, said another way, mythic stories begin with a grain of truth. In this instance, the grain of truth is represented by the reality of poverty and racism. In order to keep the Colonial Park pool waters segregated, there was a fee attached, in an effort to not allow black children to swim. In the heat of the summer, black children swam in the free and dangerous waters of the Harlem River. This reality equates blackness with both poverty and the physical vulnerability or the potential for bodily endangerment, demonstrating the precarious space that black bodies occupy within American society.

“Even though she was the only mother I knew who never wore lipstick, not even for Mass on Sundays, still, she was also the only mother I knew who ‘went to business’ every day. I was very proud of her, but sometimes, just sometimes, I wished she would be like all the other mothers, one waiting for me at home with milk and home-baked cookies and a frilly apron, like the blonde smiling mother in Dick and Jane.”

As a child, Audre feels conflicted about her mother, who she recognizes as being very strong, before it was the popular thing for a woman to be. However, Audre recognizes that her mother’s difference in bearing reflects upon her as a child; she feels the tangible threads that connect her mother’s actions to her own. As a result, Audre feels as though she is made different because her mother is different. However, this difference exists more than in just actions: the difference is also physical. Audre notes that the books she reads do not depict people who look like her or her mother; rather, they depict blonde women and white children. Audre is therefore made to feel other not only through the actions of her mother as a strong woman but also as a result of her mother’s—and consequentially her own—blackness.

“I grew Black as my need for life, for affirmation, for love, for sharing—copying from my mother what was in her, unfulfilled […] My mother’s words teaching me all manner of wily and diversionary defenses learned from the white man’s tongue, from out of the mouth of her father. She had to use these defenses, and had survived by them, and had also died by them a little, at the same time. All the colors change and become each other, merge and separate, flow into rainbows and nooses.”

Audre presents her mother’s belief in the dichotomy between blackness and whiteness; her mother believes that lies are inherent to whiteness, which she has learned from the presumably less-than-reputable behavior of her father. However, in the use of these defenses—that is, by appropriating whiteness—Audre says that her mother dies each time. In contrast, Audre presents the indistinguishability between blackness and whiteness, as all colors become each other; in this way, she recognizes that her grandfather’s whiteness is a part of her mother as well as a part of herself.

“I wanted to eat in the dining car because I had read all about them, but my mother reminded me for the umpteenth time that dining car food always cost too much money and besides, you never could tell whose hands had been playing all over that food, nor where those same hands had been just before. My mother never mentioned that Black people were not allowed into railroad dining cars headed south in 1947. As usual, whatever my mother did not like and could not change, she ignored. Perhaps it would go away, deprived of her attention.”

Due to her sheltered upbringing, Audre does not realize the prevalence of racism throughout American society when she is a child. Her mother has been very careful about protecting her children, believing that changing her perceptions will alter reality. However, racism still exists; her mother cannot, by sheer force of will, alter something as entrenched as racism. In this way, Audre shows her mother’s naivety in believing that she has the capacity to deny the existence of such injustice. It is not, then, the victim that makes the injustice; rather, it is the injustice itself which must be pulled out at the root.

“American racism was a new and crushing reality that my parents had to deal with every day of their lives once they came to this country. They handled it as their private woe. My mother and father believed that they could best protect their children from the realities of race in America and the fact of American racism by never giving them name, much less discussing their nature. We were told we must never trust white people, but why was never explained, nor the nature of their ill will. Like so many other vital pieces of information in my childhood, I was supposed to know without being told. It always seemed like a strange injunction coming from my mother, who looked so much like one of the people we were never supposed to trust […] that same problematic color so different from my father and me, even from my sisters, who were somewhere in-between.”

This quotation demonstrates the power that naming something has. Whereas Audre’s parents try to destroy racism by refusing to give it a name, Audre realizes the futility in this belief. Therefore, she decides to blatantly name it repeatedly throughout the text. She has matured from her mother’s belief that ignoring something will make it go away; rather, Audre notices that there are forces beyond the control of any one individual. In fact, it is her parent’s response to racism—the belief that one should never trust white people while not explicitly saying that it is because they are racist—that leaves Audre feeling alone and confused as to her own identity.

“‘At home,’ my mother said, ‘Remember to be sisters in the presence of strangers.’ She meant white people, like the woman who tried to make me get up and give her my seat on the Number 4 bus, and who smelled like cleaning fluid. At St. Catherine’s, they said, ‘Be sisters in the presence of strangers,’ and they meant non-Catholics. In high school, girls said, ‘Be sisters in the presence of strangers,’ and they meant men. My friends said, ‘Be sisters in the presence of strangers,’ and they meant the squares. But in high school my real sisters were strangers; my teachers were racists; and my friends were that color I was never supposed to trust.”

Throughout Audre’s childhood and especially her adolescence, she lives in various systems of categorization. Within each relationship, every group persists in othering those outside of the group; that is, every relationship Audre has subsists by maintaining the similarities within the group that bonded them together, uniting them against the potentially hostile outer world. In this way, Audre goes through the tumultuous period of her adolescence feeling as though she might be persecuted by anyone not within these groups. Similarly, she understands the fallacy of these associations as she recognizes the differences that no one within these groups will speak about. In the process of othering, therefore, Audre only succeeds in feeling more alone.

“The day Gennie picked for dying was the last day of August. It was a damp rainy Saturday, and I lay on the couch of my family’s darkened living room hugging a pillow and praying to god not to let Genevieve die. I had not talked to god in a very long time, and did not really believe in it anymore. But I was willing to grasp at any straw. I felt powerless to do anything else.”

The author succinctly conveys the powerlessness that Audre feels in the wake of her friend’s decision to kill herself. The language used here is much simpler, both in diction and in syntax, than in many other portions of the text. By using simple language and sentence structure, Lorde transports readers to that powerless feeling of adolescence, where everything feels beyond one’s control.

Indeed, the very act of her praying to a god she no longer believes in seems a very childish act, one that subsists in the childlike naiveté of hope. Audre demonstrates that she is not mature enough to be able to handle the reality of the situation as she is still utilizing the fanciful tools of her childhood in order to achieve the desired response, much like how she believed, as a child, that if she stepped on every crack she would get a baby sister. However, adult reality comes in at full force when the audience realizes that Audre has not prevented her friend’s suicide, but rather has only prolonged the inevitable. Only action, not hope, could prevent Gennie from committing suicide; when the time comes, Audre is unable to act, still stuck in the childish fear of parental reprisal instead of looking at the larger consequences for inaction.

“A crumpled flower on the hospital bed. Arsenic is a corrosive. She lingered, metallic-smelling foam at the corners of her mouth, blackened and wet. Her Gennie braids askew, unraveling. The last five inches of them revealed as a hairpiece. How could it be that I never knew? Gennie had plaited false hair into her braids. She was so proud of her long hair […] Now they were unraveling on the hospital pillow as she tossed her head from side to side, her eyes closed in the emptiness and quiet.”

Here, Lorde conveys the terrible reality of teenage suicide and the prolonged death throes of Gennie’s attempt at suicide. The crumpled flower at Gennie’s hospital bedside exists as a symbol of Gennie’s own life: both were once beautiful but are now in the process of dying, discarded and alone. Gennie’s own mouth might resemble a decaying flower, with the blackened arsenicfoam stealing the life from her lips. The author conveys her grief in this scene by using truncated sentences, the shortness of which also mimic Gennie’s shallow breaths. Audre lovingly, painfully watches over Gennie in the last days of her life, realizing all of the things she never knew about her best friend, including those things that do not matter, such as the fact that Gennie’s long hair was fake. In this way, Lorde also alludes to the pain that Gennie kept buried inside her, which the audience surmises is resultant from her father’s abuse of Gennie, which Gennie never tells Audre about. These secrets and the pain have bubbled up in the poison spilling from Gennie’s lips, ultimately killing her. The author therefore implies that it is the secrecy of pain, not the actual pain itself, that kills people.

“When I moved out of my mother’s house, shaky and determined, I began to fashion some different relationship to this country of our sojourn. I began to seek some more fruitful return than simple bitterness from this place of my mother’s exile, whose streets I came to learn better than my mother had ever learned them.”

Lorde must find independence from her mother before she is able to create a connection between herself and America. Her parents, especially her mother, never felt at home in New York; therefore, despite growing up in the city, Audre feels distanced from it. She feels as though she is in exile, like her parents, waiting for an unknown time before she can finally go home. However, once she is free from her mother’s grasp, she is able to form connections to the place of her own birth, realizing that she is separate from her mother. In this way, Audre conflates identity with the concept of home: it is only once she starts to explore her own identity and give up her mother’s notion of home that she feels as though she can make a home for herself in the place of her birth.

“I tried to recall half-remembered information garnered from other people’s friends who had been ‘in trouble’ […] Trapped. Something—anything—had to be done. No one else can take care of this. What am I going to do?”

Lorde depicts the struggles that women had to go through in a time before Roe v. Wade (1973) legalized abortions. In most states, including New York, abortion was illegal, which forced women into terrible situations: they could either carry an unwanted pregnancy to term or they could go through the danger of so-called homemade abortions. This lack of ability to choose led to dire circumstancesin which women felt a lack of agency concerning their own bodies. Similarly, it put many in compromising situations that led to physical and emotional trauma. Lorde captures the lonely desperation she felt as a pregnant teen, switching to present tense in order to convey the urgency of the situation. The narrator seems to relive this moment, as though she can still feel the anguish of being trapped, suggesting that this kind of psychological trauma never goes away. The pain Lorde felt does not seem to lessen with age; almost forty years later, she still feels helpless at a long-solved situation.

“It was standard procedure in most of the ‘software’ factories to hire Black workers for three weeks, then fire them before they could join the union, and hire new workers.”

This quotation demonstrates how widespread and systemic racism is within American society. Although the Civil War ended slavery, almost eighty years later, Lorde is forced to confront the reality and prevalence of racist practices within the United States, which include jobs in the allegedly progressive North.

“‘You know, dear, there’s not too much choice of jobs around here for Colored people, and especially not for Negro girls.’”

The blatant nature of this racism shocks Audre, especially after growing up sheltered by her parents’ refusal to admit to living in a racist society. Audre must come face-to-face with the fact that the color of her skin limits her opportunities. She is unable to ignore racism as her parents did. Rather, it is her lived reality. However, not only is the existence of such blatant racism infuriating, it is also the paternalistic attitude with which the white community center woman speaks about this racism that adds an extra barb to the pain of being born black in America. The woman nonchalantly addresses the community’s racism without apology; there is no sense that she believes that the circumstances are anything but what they should be. Her use of the word, ‘dear,’ is especially grating as it puts this woman in a position above that of Audre. Similarly, she is condescending in her expectation that Audre should know this by now, as though any other expectation—such as that of equality—is something so childish as to be ridiculous.

“The dry slippery touch of nylon and silk filled me with distrust and suspicion. The effortlessness with which those materials passed through my fingers made me uneasy. They were illusive, confusing, not to be depended upon. The texture of wool and cotton with its resistance and unevenness, allowed, somehow, for more honesty, a more straightforward connection through touch. Crispus Attucks. Most of all, I hated the pungent, lifeless, and ungiving smell of nylon, its adamant refusal to become human or evocative in odor. Its harshness was never tampered by the smells of the wearer. No matter how long the clothing was worn, nor in what weather, a person dressed in nylon always approached my nose like a warrior approaching a tourney, clad in chain-mail.”

Lorde uses her distrust of nylon, a man-made material, as a metaphor for her distrust in institutionalized knowledge and of people in general. Unlike cotton and wool, which are natural materials and therefore honest, nylon is not found in nature. Rather, it is made by man, and therefore is capable of deception. The deception that Audre finds the most unforgivable is the lie of omission; that is, none of her teachers told her that the first man to die in the Revolutionary War was a black man. They omitted this fact to deceive her, in her view, in essence to whitewash history, much like how she finds that stockings attempt to bleach her skin. In this way, Audre associates nylons with whiteness, with the bleaching of history, and so she always finds herself on edge when she smells them.

“I smiled up at her and said nothing. I certainly couldn’t say I don’t know. Actually, I was at a loss as to what to say. I could not bring myself to deny what I had just this past summer decided to embrace; besides, to say no would be to admit to being one of the squares. Yet, to say yes might commit me to proving it […] And Ginger was a woman of the world, not one of my high school girl friends with whom kissing and cuddling and fantasizing sufficed. And I had never made love to a woman before. Ginger, of course, had made up her mind that I was a woman of the world and knew ‘everything,’ having made love to all the women about whom I talked with such intensity.”

With Ginger, Audre finds herself in a predicament of categorization; that is, she must express her own identity before she is really even sure of what it may be. Due to the way in which Ginger perceives her—namely, that Ginger assumes because of Audre’s appearance and mannerisms that she is a lesbian—Audre is forced to either acknowledge or deny an aspect of her identity even though the answer might be more complicated than a simple yes or no. In fact, identity, especially something as fluid as sexual identity, is usually much more complicated than it may appear. In this way, the author demonstrates the ways in which perception, assumptions, and society in general influence the construction of our own identity. Because of the social desire for categorization, the expression of identity can be limited, as social categorizations often fail to account for the dynamic nature of human identity.

“It was in Mexico City those first few weeks that I started to break my life-long habit of looking down at my feet as I walked along the street. There was always so much to see, and so many interesting and open faces to read, that I practiced holding my head up as I walked, and the sun felt hot and good on my face. Wherever I went, there were brown faces of every hue meeting mine, and seeing my own color reflected upon the streets in such great numbers was an affirmation for me that was brand-new and very exciting. I had never felt visible before, nor even known I lacked it.”

In New York, Audre found safety in invisibility; that is, if she tried not to be noticed, she was made vulnerable by the color of her skin. She learned to look inconspicuous by staring at her feet, to not go looking for trouble, as it were. However, in Mexico, Audre finds strength in the reflection of her own color back at her. She no longer feels like a stranger when she is surrounded by people with similar skin tone. Rather, she finds a kind of community in Mexico that she felt was lacking in America. In Mexico, Audre realizes the problems associated with the idea of colorblindness; that is, that racism only has the power you give it, and if you deny the existence of race, you deny its hold over you. However, this belief—propagated throughout many progressive circles in the twentieth century—disavows the positive connections that can be formed when one no longer feels other as a result of her skin tone. In Mexico, Audre is not other; rather, she is one face among many that she feels resemble her own. In this way, she finds a home in Mexico that she did not realize she was missing before, a kind of belonging she does not feel in America.

“I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell. There were no mothers, no sisters, no heroes. We had to do it alone, like our sister Amazons, the riders on the loneliest outposts of the kingdom of Dahomey. We, young and Black and fine and gay, sweated out our first heartbreaks with no school nor office chums to share that confidence over lunch hour.”

Here, Audre invokes the history of the Dahomey Amazons, the all-female militia unit in in the African kingdom that was colonized by Europeans. Although these women did not refer to themselves as Amazons, the author invokes the mythological history of the Amazons in her imaginations of a kind of collective young, Black lesbian narrative. Lorde switches from the first person singular pronoun, I, to the first person plural pronoun, we, to demonstrate the shared nature of this narrative. In this way, she creates a kind of collective mythology surrounding what it was like to by young and Black and lesbian in the 1950s. This collectivity serves as a palliative to the inherent loneliness of this social placement, as the author had no one with which to share her experience. When she thinks back on this traumatic time, she must create a shared narrative so as to avoid reliving past pain.

“As I say, when the sisters think you’re crazy and embarrassing; and the brothers want to break you open to see what makes you work inside; and the white girls look at you like some exotic morsel that has just crawled out of the walls onto their plate (but don’t they love to rub their straight skirts up against the edge of your desk in the college literary magazine office after class); and the white boys all talk either money or revolution but can never quite get it up—then it doesn’t really matter too much if you have an Afro long before the word even existed.”

Audre finds a kind of freedom in her loneliness, specifically because she does not feel as though anyone understands her. Black women find her actions embarrassing; black men believe that her lesbianism presents a challenge, which they must overcome; white women either exoticize or tease her; and white men find themselves emasculated by her. In this way, Audre feels as though she does not fit in anywhere. However, as a result of this lack of belonging, she also feels a certain freedom. Because other people find her so categorically Other, she is free to look the way that she wants, including wearing her hair natural. However, her viewpoint does present a kind of dichotomy existent within modern American society. In fact, she examines many dichotomies within society: the dichotomy between white and black, male and female, normal and other. Even in her being other, it would seem as though she is still required to abide by the binaries presented within modern society.

“You could never tell who was who, and the protective paranoia of the McCarthy years was still everywhere outside of the mainstream of blissed-out suburban middle America. Besides, there were always rumors of plainclothes women circulating among us, looking for gay-girls with fewer than three pieces of female attire. That was enough to get you arrested for transvestism, which was illegal. Or so the rumors went. Most of the women we knew were always careful to have on a bra, underpants, and some other feminine article. No sense playing with fire.”

The author candidly recounts the very real fear that lesbians—and indeed, women—faced in 1950s America. The idea that a woman could be arrested for not wearing feminine clothes is something that may be hard for modern audiences to grasp. In fact, the idea that transvestitism was a crime to be policed by plainclothes officers borders on the absurd. Even though these arrests were merely rumors, indicative of the social paranoia of the time, the fact that these rumors had any traction demonstrates the true vulnerability felt by these women. In the 1950s, these women were outcasts in a society that was, at times, openly hostile to them. In this way, the readers must understand the sheer force of will it took these women to merely survive in this environment.