I read some of Lorde’s essays and wanted more so I got hold of this autobiography. She was born in 1934 to a poor Caribbean family in New York, grew up with a stern mum and a distant dad. She was very short sighted, designated blind early on, and until she had glasses stumbled around in that blurred world.
As adolescence arrived and she began to explore her sexuality, she found there were no templates at the time for Lorde that gave any take on how to live your life as a Black lesbian, there were no support groups, no books, no nothng. In those times it was an act of great courage to sail out into the world while remaining true to your nature, your feelings. And sail out Lorde did. In Zami, Lorde writes of her life in her late teens to early twenties with great emotional candour, pathos, not a little humour and with a rich, aching sensibility of others’ vulnerable circumstances. Two moments: I love how she lugs her typewriter around from place to place (those things were heavy in those days, not like IPads etc). I also love her ‘hanging in the corner with her gay gals at the club’ descriptions, the subtleties and inside humour she reveals.
Audre Lorde gets under your skin.
I’ve been reading her late night for about 8 days now. I can usually whizz through books. I read her carefully. I’ve just learnt that, in Western film, conventionally, heroes enter from the left, villains from the right. (It reverses in Japanese film.) I wonder if Lorde’s prose style is an aspect of where she’s coming from, a similar flip, such that I have to slow down in order to understand her fully.
The book as tangible object. I’m taken by the many underlinings, circlings and scribblings in different pens, biro, ink, pencil, faint, heavy in the text (this is a tree book I’m reading). Usually around her lesbian awareness, her Black awareness. I start imagining uniting around a table on a sunny terrace all the previous readers. They’d need to come in their contemporary clothes – from 80’s geri curls, disco flares, dungarees, weaves etc. There would be the furtive not-yet-out lesbians reading for courage or to understand an alternative, the current generation of young out black lesbians, peering back into history…
What I got from the book. The biggest thing I’m getting is Lorde simply remained true to herself. Eg at the time she describes there was within lesbian culture a big binary of Dominant/Submissive. The dominant females looked for ‘femmes’ – submissives to walk with, to show off. The ‘femme’ image, Lorde explains, was imported lock stock and barrel from contemporary patriarchal views of femininity and therefore, racism meant no black woman could be femme, they all had to be butch. Lorde simply ignored the binary. She also talks about how women could be ‘reaching out across our differences’. I am drawn also to the subtlety with which Lorde paints relationships between women.
Enter conclusion here. This is a great book. And the copy I have read is even greater in my mind, for all these markings and circlings and underlinings from previous readers. It provides almost a history of a community. You just can’t get that from an e-book.
Sheba Press 1982