Review Of Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name, By Audre Lorde

In Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name, Audre, a Black Lesbian Poet, narrates her life story as unfair. This novel is under the unique genre that Lorde came up with called biomythography, which combines real life and myth. Moreover, Zami takes place in the 1950’s, which is still considered a critical time in America history for civil rights. In her quest for “fairness,” Audre often rebels against the status quo. This is due to the feeling she gets through the erotic, or what she describes as “sensation with feeling.” In the essay Uses of Erotic, Audre states “In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial” (Lorde 54) In other words,

Audre states “I would have given anything in the world except my mother, in order to have had a friend or a little sister” (34). Although she has two sisters, Audre felt as if she grew up as the only child because her sisters were not close in age to her. As a result, she wishes immensely for a little sister or female friend. Audre knows that “[t]he Lorde family was not going to expand any more,” and this puts her into disparity and depresses her (34). This is evident when Audre says “No matter how hard I prayed or schemed, the figures [female companion] would never come alive” (36). However, when Toni arrived the feeling of disparity and depression she once felt was erased momentarily, due to the reason she was in touch with the erotic. To demonstrate that she felt in touch with the erotic, Audre states “My life-long dream of a doll-baby come to life had in fact come true”(37). Now in touch with the erotic, Audre was able not to feel those “other supplied states of being” such as disparity and depression, which are significantly different from her native