Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, by Audre Lorde

Staff review by Chris Saliba

A powerful autobiographical novel about growing up a black lesbian woman in 1950s America.

Audre Lorde was an American writer and feminist, self-described as “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior poet.” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, professes to be autobiographical fiction, or a “biomythography”, a mixture of myth, history and biography, but it really reads as a pretty straight forward autobiography, but with a poet’s unique sensibility.

Lorde was born in New York City to Caribbean parents, who migrated to the United States. The book describes growing up in America in the 1930s and 1940s, experiencing racism (even from school teachers) and feeling very caught between cultures. This turns out to be a major theme: how do you live, how do you define yourself, when you don’t fit in anywhere? How do you create yourself? Being lesbian, black and gay meant you were on the very fringes, never understood.

The psychic core of the Zami is Lorde’s sexuality, which is discussed in frank detail: the lovers, friendships, the painful betrayals and sexual experiments. The second half of the narrative concentrates on the 1950s, Lorde’s formative years, and is fascinating for its evocation of New York’s lesbian subculture, the bars, the cliques, the sexual politics and role playing.

Often while reading this memoir of survival as a black lesbian in 50s America, you do a double take. There are pages and pages of seedy, backstreet gay clubs, suicides and rough living, then suddenly Doris Day appears with her huge hit Que Sera Sera and you realise idyllic 50s America was just a fiction. Lorde sums the times up:

"The Rosenbergs had been executed, the transistor radio had been invented, and frontal lobotomy was the standard solution for persistent deviation."

Audre Lorde’s Zami is an intimate and often moving portrait of a generation of brave gay women and their struggles to simply exist, let alone figure out where they belonged in society. This was a generation of women ahead of their times. Being out of the closet and alone had its consequences. Grimly, Lorde writes, “Many of us ended up dead or demented, and many of us were distorted by the many fronts we had to fight on.” Being black and gay was even more isolating: “The Black gay girls in the village gay bars of the fifties knew each other’s names, but we seldom looked into each other’s black eyes, lest we see our own aloneness and our blunted power…”

An eloquent testament from a pioneering poet and activist.

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, by Audre Lorde. Published by Penguin Modern Classics. ISBN: 9780241351086  RRP: $22.99

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