why i love zami

There is nothing as bittersweet as finishing a really good book. This particular book, I happen to have read before a few years ago and this was my reread because it was just. that. good.

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name is a “biomythography” by Audre Lorde that a friend suggested to me a few summers ago. I flew through it and its impact has stuck with me ever since. I love to read books that hit me like that more than once, so I purchased the book and fell in love with it all over again.

Why I love this book in no particular order:

1. This is a novel written by a poet, so you can image how the words flow and fit together. Each sentence is carefully constructed and purposefully written. For example, throughout the entire book she capitalized the word Black; she does not capitalize america or god or catholic. Sometimes she capitalizes Mother, and sometimes she doesn’t. Additionally, she fits amazing poetry prose into the novel at times in blocks of italic letters.

2. The beginning of the story opens with Audre in her early life in the 30s and 40s growing up in New York City, born to immigrants from Grenada. The early Audre is both hilarious and worthy of sympathy from her naiveté about what it meant to be “colored” during this time, to her stealing dollar bills from her dad’s wallet to pay kids to vote her as class vice-president (class president was reserved for a boy), to how she didn’t buy the BS the nuns in Catholic school were feeding her. She was the smartest one in her class and yet was punished by the nuns because she didn’t follow directions; like writing her whole name when she was told to just write the first letter. I just fell in love with the picture Lorde paints of this little girl!

3. The way that Audre loves the people that come in and out of her life in this book is rare. She loves them entirely and without fault. Whether it’s her adolescent best friend Gennie, who commits suicide, or the love of her life Muriel, it’s inspiring. Likewise, when she understands that a relationship is not healthy for her, she moves to end it. She all but severs contact with her mother, who she continually butts heads with, and moves out on her own when she’s 17. Which leads me to...


4. Audre is a survivor. On her own as a black, gay female in the late 40s - 50s in New York City, she struggles to make ends meet. She knows that living this way is a piece of cake when compared to being suffocated under her mother’s roof. She leaves home immediately after graduating high school, moves to the East Village, finds work, enrolls in Hunter College, and finds happiness. At one point she has a job as an x-ray reader and sneaks the reading crystals into the bathroom in her socks and crushes them with her teeth, just to make a few extra dollars a week.


5. She is true to herself. Audre doesn’t concern herself with fitting into any stereotype of the cultures to which she belongs. In this time, black people lived in Harlem and Audre moved downtown (100 blocks south of where she “should” live). Audre is a woman, but wears jeans and riding pants instead of skirts. Audre is a lesbian but she does not role play; she is neither butch nor femme. Audre wears her hair natural, in an afro “long before the word even existed”. Although she knows how to type (and owns a typewriter) she refuses to take a job as a secretary. Basically, she rocks.


Although I will never be able to relate to being a black woman or a lesbian in the time when Brown vs. the Board of Education was a real issue, there are many things about the protagonist that I can not only relate to, but admire. There are many passages in this book that jumped off the page and spoke to me like I could have written them myself (or at least part of them). I have compiled these and have read them dozens of times. Enjoy!


"You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. But people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid that pain was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret to not being hurt like this again, I decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving. It is the last dream of children, to be forever untouched."


“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 run 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.”


“How meager the sustenance was I gained from the four years I spent in high school yet, how important that sustenance was to my survival. Remembering that time is like watching old pictures of myself in a prison cap picking edible scraps out of the garbage heap, and knowing that without that garbage I might have starved to death. The overwhelming racism of so many of the faculty, including the ones upon whom I had my worst schoolgirl crushes. How little I settled for in the way of human contact, compared to what I was conscious of wanting.

It was in high school that I came to believe that I was different from my white classmates, not because I was Black, but because I was me.”


“It was a while before we came to realize that our place was the very house of difference rather the security of any one particular difference. (And often, we were cowards in our learning.) It was years before we learned to use the strength that daily surviving can bring, years before we learned fear does not have to incapacitate, and that we could appreciate each other on terms not necessarily our own.”


“For if knowing what we knew, and sharing all that we shared, Muriel and I could not make it together, then what two women on earth could? For that matter, what two people on earth could possibly make it together? The heartbreak of holding on seemed preferable to the heartbreak of ever having to try again, of ever again attempting to connect with another human being.“


“All the pains in my life that I have lived and never felt flew around my head like grey bats; they pecked at my eyes and built nests in my throat and under the center of my breastbone.
Eudora, Eudora, what was it you used to say to me?
Waste nothing, Chica, not even pain. Particularly not pain. “


“And don’t I have the scars to prove it,” she sighed. “Makes you tough though, babe, if you don’t go under. And that’s what I like about you; you’re like me. We’re both going to make it because we’re both too tough and crazy not to!” And we held each other and laughed and cried about what we had paid for that toughness, and how hard it was to explain to anyone who didn’t already know it that soft and tough had to be one and the same for either to work at all, like our joy and the tears mingling on the one pillow beneath our heads.


“I lost my sister, Gennie, to my silence and her pain and despair, to both our angers and to a world’s cruelty that destroys its own young in passing-not even as a rebel gesture or sacrifice or hope for another living of the spirit, but out of not noticing or caring about the destruction. I have never been ale to blind myself to that cruelty, which according to one popular definition of mental health, makes me mentally unhealthy.”