Although Audre Lorde calls the narrative of her life Zami: A New Spelling of My Name a “biomythography,” suggesting a mythological, or even fabricated, if not fabulous, approach to biography, Audre Lorde knows who she is. At speaking engagements and in many of her essays, she provides a litany of her identities, a litany of who she is, a litany that sometimes changes slightly, but uses terms always selected from the same list: warrior, mother, lesbian, woman. Sometimes she has added that she is a black woman involved in an interracial relationship (when in such a relationship), sometimes that she is the mother of two children, a girl and a boy. In her collection of essays, Sister Outsider, she announces, in one address, “I am standing here as a Black lesbian poet,”Footnote 1 “I stand here as a Black lesbian feminist,”Footnote 2 and “[a]s a forty-nine-year-old Black lesbian feminist socialist mother of two, including one boy, and a member of an interracial couple, I usually find myself a part of some group defined as other, deviant, inferior, or just plain wrong.”Footnote 3 In a published interview she claims, “I am a Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother, stronger for all my identities, and I am indivisible.”Footnote 4
It is this indivisibility that renders Zami a biomythography, impossible to classify in previously available genre categories. She refers to “people in the African Diaspora” as “hyphenated people”;Footnote 5 that is, people of multiple, but bound, identities. She claims this multiplicity when she lists her identities. And in designating Zami a biomythography, she is claiming that only this new category of writing will contain all her identities.
As a woman, and as a black woman, telling her life story, it is not as idiosyncratic as it might seem that Lorde creates the category of “biomythography” to represent what she experiences as multiple identities. Judy Long comments (referring to Audre Lorde's Zami, as some other critics do, as fiction),
Telling women's lives often involves new or mixed genres. Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Audre Lord [sic], and Gwendolyn Brooks have pursued autobiographical projects in the form of fiction. Kate Millett's Flying is autobiographical but violates many conventions of generic autobiography. “Messiness” is the shorthand for this content; it is also an element of style. “Messy” accounts make no attempt to streamline the narrative, to corset the subject, to shear the web of connections. The fullness of women's accounts reproaches the leanness of generic autobiography, and contradicts its claims of universality.Footnote 6
All the texts that Long refers to as “messy” are also in some way culturally marginal: black or Chinese, or, in her latter example, lesbian. These are the narratives that do not fit. These are the “alternative” autobiographies, and they do not fit into “conventions of generic autobiography.” As a life story of an African American lesbian, at a time when there are no precursor protagonists of that kind, Lorde's book Zami is also “messy” under this rubric. However, although Zami calls itself a “biomythography,” suggesting that it does not fit into available generic forms, I will argue here that Zami actually derives from two extant American literary traditions, namely the African American slave narrative and the lesbian coming out story.
COMING OUT STORY
Audre Lorde's text is partly an accounting of how she came to be, or how she came to understand herself as, a lesbian. It is written and published at a time when coming out stories were emerging, as fiction and as personal accounts, and it is not itself unlike a coming out story. The coming out story is a narrative of recognition and naming, a severing from an old identity and the community associated with it, and the adoption of a new identity and thus a reconnection with a new community. The lesbian coming out story describes the process whereby one realizes that one is a lesbian. The lesbian coming out story proliferated, along with the gay male coming out story, in the 1970s, a time that roughly coincides with what was thought of as gay liberation.
One way that Zami is a coming out narrative is that the narrator of the text is interested in community, in being like others. Lesbian coming out narratives “reveal an ongoing tension between the ideas of unity and community and those of diversity and individuality.”Footnote 7Zami expresses this tension primarily by way of lament over the lack of the desired community, the ways black women do not acknowledge each other, see each other, especially black lesbians. Here the Audre Lorde of Zami reflects on the ways black lesbians in New York do not see each other on the street or even in the lesbian bars that they frequent:
Sometimes we'd pass Black women on Eight Street – the invisible but visible sisters – or in the Bag or at Laurels, and our glances might cross, but we never looked into each other's eyes. We acknowledged our kinship by passing in silence, looking the other way. Still, we were always on the lookout, Flee and I, for that telltale flick of the eye, that certain otherwise prohibited openness of expression, that definiteness of voice, which would suggest, I think she's gay. After all, doesn't it take one to know one? Footnote 8
As I will suggest below, the lament for home is the same lament: a longing for others who are like one, who understand one. In this way, Zami constitutes a quest for community.
“Zami” is itself a name that, in its designation, is an attempt to make community, to break silence, to make a common acknowledgment and a common bond. At the end of the book, Lorde explains that Zami is a “Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers” (Zami 223). The critic Chinosole explains that “Zami is patois for ‘lesbian,’ based on the French expression, les amies.”Footnote 9 It is in the homeland of her mother where strong bonds among women are integral to the culture: “Friending. Zami. How Carriacou women love each other is legend in Grenada” (Zami 5; italics hers).
But while “friending” is legendary in the magical land of her mother, in her life in New York “friending” is always problematic, always disrupted, and most often because of the discord between race and the desire of women for other women – in other words, between her identity as black and her identity as a lesbian. Zami often describes splits in groupings that represent her identities, what she experiences as her irreconcilable identities. This comes to light particularly when, in the gay bars of Manhattan, she is unable to find a place for herself as black and as a lesbian:
When I moved through the bunches of women cruising each other in the front room … it was hard for me to believe that my being an outsider had anything to do with being a lesbian … But when I, a Black woman, saw no reflection in any of the faces there week after week, I knew perfectly well that being an outsider in the Bagatelle had everything to do with being Black. (Zami 192)
Coming out stories suggest that what one really needs to be a lesbian is not a lover but a community of other lesbians. Bonnie Zimmerman comments that in the lesbian Bildungsroman, the “lesbian vision of the individual in community, the growth of one into many, expands the developmental motif from that of the formation of individual identity to the formation of communal identity.”Footnote 10 In the introduction to the second edition of the definitive collection of coming out stories, called The Coming Out Stories, the editors write that the formation of community was the very purpose of the book:
When we collected and edited the first edition, it was our hope that the book would serve to help Lesbians come out into a community. We recalled all too well our own painful isolation during the coming out process as we struggled to a new identity.Footnote 11
Zami, too, is filled with – in some ways structured by – this longing for community. In Zami, Lorde frequents the gay bars of New York, but does not experience herself as part of a community of lesbians. This has everything to do with the ways that she does not fit into the white lesbian community:
In the gay bars, I longed for other Black women without the need ever taking shape upon my lips. For four hundred years in this country, Black women have been taught to view each other with suspicion. It was no different in the gay world. (Zami 195)
The very text of Zami is an effort to find community. Like the lesbian coming out story, it can be read as addressed to an audience of its own kind. One critic remarks that it is precisely her lack of agonizing over coming out that suggests it is meant for a lesbian readership: “The absence of agonized doubts about her sexual orientation and the revelation of the actual joys of being a lesbian, including lust and recognizable descriptions of physical passion between women, make Zami seem consciously written for a lesbian reader.”Footnote 12 And unlike her books of poetry, which are published by the large and well-endowed publisher Norton, Zami is published by a small feminist press, suggesting a more focussed appeal. In these ways it can be seen to be written and published to consolidate community and identity among readers. Indeed, Zami and The Coming Out Stories share publishers: first the Persephone Press and then the Crossing Feminist Press.
Finally, Zami is like many other coming out narratives in that, paradoxically, it suggests that there is in fact no “coming out,” no moment of knowing, but rather, as it is described in the coming out stories best known at the time, a “becoming.” In the pre-prologue to Zami, Lorde refers to the whole process of her development as a “becoming” (Zami xv). Similarly, in the coming out stories, coming out is referred to as a process: “I have been [coming out] for eighteen years,”Footnote 13 and, “I understand my coming out as a process which has been unfolding my entire life.”Footnote 14
Nevertheless, in the coming out narrative, even when coming out is experienced as a process, there is often a moment of naming, an enunciation, when one realizes one is a lesbian. Adrienne Rich, in the Foreword to The Coming Out Stories, defines coming out as “that first permission we give ourselves to name our love for women as love, to say, I am a lesbian.”Footnote 15 Though coming out may be experienced and described as a process, often in the stories it is the naming that signals the transition, the mark of taking on a new identity. Indeed, naming is so crucial to the process of coming out that the editors of The Coming Out Stories have used that delineation as an ordering system for their book:
because the relationship between naming oneself and the processes involved in “coming out” is so clear, we have organized the stories in the anthology (very roughly) on the basis of whether or not the woman had a name for her feelings and, if she did, whether or not she accepted it.Footnote 16
Adrienne Rich describes it this way:
Living in the void of namelessness, as so many lesbians do, living in the silence, we must all have had intense experiences of immense significance which became unavailable to us because we had no names for them. When I think of the “coming out process” I think of it as the beginning of naming, of memory, of making the connections between past and present and future that enable human beings to have an identity.Footnote 17
The coming out stories focus on knowing, perhaps having a feeling, but not knowing others who are like one. Coming out is an emerging into knowing and into naming, an emerging into claiming an identity. Not everyone feels it is completed once it is claimed; it is still a process, but it is most significantly marked by the moment of naming. One writer puts it this way: “Over the next few weeks I realized I was in love with her, which did not seem peculiar to me; rather, it was a relief to have a name to put to my feelings.”Footnote 18
In the coming out stories, and in Zami, naming is tantamount to, and coincident with, finding community. When Lorde goes to Mexico, for example, she knows she has been accepted into the community of women when she is provided with a nickname:
La Señora. La Periodista. La Morenita. La Alta Rubia. La Chica. The people who worked in the compound at Humboldt No. 24 had names for most of the norteamericanos who lived and visited there. A bit nickname, a bit designation, a bit endearment. Nobody who was disliked had one. They were never used in anger or displeasure. The Lady. The Newspaper-Woman. The Dark One. The Tall Blond. The Little One. (Zami 136)
Although later she insists that “I could not stand anybody messing around with my name, not even with nicknames” (Zami 213), Lorde herself changes her name as a child and finds community in the very title of her text, Zami, “a new spelling of my name.” In an early episode in Zami, she renames herself when as a child she drops the “y” from her name: “I did not like the tail of the Y hanging down below the line in Audrey … I used to love the evenness of AUDRELORDE at four years of age” (Zami 14). It is also noteworthy that indeed Lorde's legacy as a writer begins with an act of renaming. When Lorde first published prose – a story – she used the pseudonym Rey Domini, a Latin spelling of her name.Footnote 19
The very fact of claiming the power of speech over silence fulfills a coming out paradigm. Though the coming out narratives seem to declare a struggle with sexuality, they are more often and more accurately a declaration of a struggle with language, and a central moment of naming. Coming out focusses on the moment of knowing, on the conversion from not knowing to knowing. And only then from knowing to being, that is, the sexual act. This happens to Lorde to a degree, in the scene that depicts the discussion just before the first time she sleeps with a woman. Her friend Ginger confronts her: “‘Look, it's no big thing.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Are you gay or aren't you?’” (Zami 115). Though Audre in the text already knows that she desires women (“I could not bring myself to deny what just this summer I had decided to embrace,” Zami 115), she is reluctant in this context to articulate it to another as an identity:
“C'mon, now, you can't just not say anything, girl. Are you or aren't you?” Ginger's voice was pleading as well as impatient.
She was right. I couldn't just not answer. I opened my mouth, not knowing what was going to come out.
“Yes,” I said. (Zami 115)
Lorde articulates her lesbian identity before she embodies it. She narrates, “I had no idea what making love to another woman meant, I only knew, dimly, it was something I wanted to happen, and something that was different from anything I had ever done before” (Zami 117–18). Although Lorde already thinks of herself as a lesbian, being asked to say it enables her to have sex with a woman, which proceeds shortly after this halting discussion, and, indeed, with more eagerness than the discussion. Even though there is no moment of realization, there is a moment of ceding and of articulation.
However, as I have suggested, Zami is not only a lesbian coming out story, which are almost all the coming out stories of white women.Footnote 20Zami is an attempt to tell the story of all her identities. As Anna Wilson has suggested,
In the absence of a Black tradition [of lesbian writing], Lorde's biomythography Zami initially constructs a lesbian existence that has needs and features in common with the lesbian myth produced by white Anglo-American novelists. Her sexual coming out is described within a series of metaphors for recognition familiar from that tradition.Footnote 21
While Zami fits the paradigm of the white Anglo-American lesbian coming out story, which, as Wilson suggests, shares a narrative trajectory with the white Anglo-American lesbian novel, Zami is also, and significantly, embedded in the African American literary tradition, especially the tradition of African American self-writing, or autobiography, which in turn derives from the slave narrative, as I will show.
SLAVE NARRATIVE
Like autobiography, the genre of the slave narrative is one of self-reflexivity – writing in the first person to describe the story of one's life in slavery – but was intended, however, to influence others, to advance the abolitionist cause:
Unlike other autobiographical forms, fugitive slave narratives all focused on the same goals: The depiction of an individual life in relation to the social and political culture that controlled virtually all its aspects, and the creation by the narrator of an appreciation in his or her readers of the inhumane conditions of black life in America, in hopes of ending the slave system.Footnote 22
While Zami has not been claimed in the criticism as a neo-slave narrative, some critics argue that all contemporary African American literature fulfills this designation of neo-slave narrative, coming in the aftermath, and reflecting certain themes, of the slave narrative, namely journeying, freedom, and others that I will come to. James Olney comments that “the undeniable fact is that the Afro-American literary tradition takes its start, in theme certainly but also in content and form, from the slave narratives.”Footnote 23 African American literature is also said often to have a pattern, and one that is based on the slave narrative.
All black autobiography is said also to emerge from the style and form of the slave narrative: the “earliest black American autobiographies, the slave narratives, established certain prototypal patterns, both thematic and structural, that recur again and again in subsequent black autobiographies.”Footnote 24 Although there are important differences between Zami and the style, form, and intention of African American slave narratives – for example, most notably, Lorde is not addressing her reading audience as “other” than who she is (and this makes it, rather, like a lesbian coming out story: she addresses the reader as like herself), and she is not trying to persuade or convince her audienceFootnote 25 – Zami owes some significant features to the legacy of the slave narrative.
One important manner in which Zami echoes the slave narrative genre is the struggle with language and literacy that Lorde displays and which is an unfailing feature of the slave narrative. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature puts it very succinctly: slave narratives bear witness to “the urge to be free and literate.”Footnote 26Zami, like the slave narrative, suggests that language is the means of liberation: “The slave narrative represented in itself a spiritual transcendence over the brutalizing experience of slavery. In the act of writing, the slave narrator could again liberate himself from slavery.”Footnote 27 But before the protagonists can write, they must learn to read, and this is consistently depicted as a liberating moment. In the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, considered an exemplary slave narrative, learning to read is a significant moment in the text: “I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read.”Footnote 28 Though the “Slave Narrative's metaphor of literacy … implies the journey from darkness and bondage to the light of knowledge, growing self-awareness, freedom, and humanity,”Footnote 29 reading represents for Douglass the transition from a life of incoherent captivity to an agonizing apprehension, but one that leads ultimately to his deliverance. Although he “would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing” as it had provided him “a view of [his] wretched condition without the remedy” (Narrative of the Life 84), reading “enabled [Douglass] to utter [his] thoughts, and to meet the argument brought forward to sustain slavery” (Narrative of the Life 84). Similarly in Zami, early in her story there is an epiphanic moment concerning the discovery of the power and pleasures of reading:
I learned how to read from Mrs. Augusta Baker, the children's librarian at the old 135th Street branch library … If that was the only good deed that lady ever did in her life, may she rest in peace. Because that deed saved my life, if not sooner, then later, when sometimes the only thing I had to hold on to was knowing I could read and that that could get me through. (Zami 12)
She concludes, as Douglass does, that she must learn to read for herself: “Right then I decided I was going to find out how to do that myself. I pointed to the black marks which I could now distinguish as separate letters … I said quite loudly, for whoever was listening to hear, ‘I want to read’” (Zami 13). As Douglass discovered, “education and slavery were incompatible with each other” (Narrative of the Life 82). Acquiring reading, in the slave narrative and then in Zami, is what leads to articulation and self-reflection; that is, it is the primal autobiographical gesture.
For Lorde, too, though coming to language is painful, and words are inadequate (thus her coining the term “biomythography,” and, indeed, producing a transliteration of her own name), it is language that frees her. By calling herself and her life story “Zami,” Lorde finds an identity that embraces her lesbianism and her blackness as well as her matrilineal legacy.
This is another consistent feature of the slave narrative: an episode at some pivotal point in the narrative of self-naming. On the dawn of his new freedom, Douglass must claim a new name: “On the morning after our arrival at New Bedford, while at the breakfast-table, the question arose as to what name I should be called” (Narrative of the Life 146). In an outline in James Olney's essay of what is standard in a slave narrative, number eleven of twelve is “taking of a new last name (frequently one suggested by a white abolitionist) to accord with new social identity as a free man, but retention of first name as a mark of continuity of individual identity.”Footnote 30 Self-naming, like entering into literacy and enabling oneself to write one's own story, is presented as an act of liberation: “In repossessing his former name and rejecting an identity foisted upon him by society, [the former slave] asserts his new-found freedom. The rite of naming was thus a central experience that came to symbolize the act of liberation.”Footnote 31
Audre Lorde does what all slaves telling their lives do ultimately as a way of claiming freedom: she devises and adopts a new name. What is different here is that the name is not just a surname, but a monomial meant to stand in for all her names. Also, it is not a “new” name in fact, but, according to the subtitle, only a new spelling of her name (Zami: A New Spelling of My Name). It is the same name, therefore, metaphorically, but spelled differently.
The fact that Zami is only a new “spelling” of her name suggests the performativity of the transition of self that is constituted by renaming. To spell is to write: she rewrites her name. The slave narrative is also said to have rewritten the life of the slave into freedom. This has been suggested by Samira Kawash, who writes,
In what I call the “subjectifying reading,” the slave narrative not only chronicles the freeing of the slave and calls for an end to slavery for others; it also wrenches open a gap in the racial order that has denied the subjectivity of the slave and performatively instantiates the transformation of slave into subject.Footnote 32
The slave narrative does not only describe the journey to freedom, it performs it. This is what Lorde does when she suggests that Zami is a new spelling of her name.
Additionally, “Zami” is a name not given or suggested by a white abolitionist, as in the slave narrative, or even the contemporary counterpart, but by her sexual and racial identities. “Zami” is the name given to women in Grenada who love each other. She takes this ancestral (matrilineal) name. Although her initial first name is from her mother, who “taught me how to print my own name” (Zami 14), Lorde re-spells it almost immediately: although she prefers her name as she redesigns it – Audre Lorde – she “remembered to put on the Y because it pleased my mother” (Zami 14). Besides this early re-spelling, in Zami there is no moment of naming, as in the slave narrative, but the text itself, as it is entitled, is an enactment of this moment of naming.
Further, the slave narrative, though it is autobiographical – self-reflexive and concerned with the self – is concerned with community as well as with the self (this is also, as I have suggested, a manner in which it is like the lesbian coming out stories): “By developing out of the memory and recollection of a shared African-American experience, the slave narratives describe a reality that is simultaneously individual and collective.”Footnote 33 This concern with community over self is particularly true of the slave narratives of freed African American women:
Narratives published by black women … slightly modify the narrative's classic structure. This is due to the fact that the experiences of women in slavery were obviously different from those of men. Therefore women slave narrators, instead of concentrating on the slave's “heroic escape,” describe instead the support they received from their mothers, grandmothers, other relatives, fellow slaves, and even white women, on their way to freedom. Whereas the Slave Narratives authored by men follow the slave's solitary journey to freedom, those written by women focus more on the woman slave's specific trials in slavery, including motherhood, licentious masters, their own sale, the sale of their children, and the sale of their mothers. The climax of these narratives is not the slave's escape, but rather the reunion of loved ones.Footnote 34
Writing does more than instantiate the (new) self; it also creates community: “the symbolic act of writing autobiography liberates the narrator and provides a socially shared experience between audience and narrator through the creation of persona.”Footnote 35 The autobiographical act is understood to create community in the very writing of it. Women's slave narratives do this more than men's slave narratives, and this attempt to speak to and create community is particularly a concern of the lesbian coming out narrative.
FUSED IDENTITIES: HOME
Zami comes out of a tradition of African American writing, but because Lorde is also a lesbian her writing cannot fit into the available African American autobiographical forms without gaps. While there is some tradition at this point for lesbian writing – in the limited form of coming out stories, as I have suggested – there is no literary tradition for specifically black lesbian writing. In 1982, the year of the publication of Zami, black lesbian literature was a phenomenon without much of a heritage. “The lesbian literary tradition … is almost entirely white,” notes Anna Wilson.Footnote 36 Writing in 1983, Jewelle Gomez indicates that “[u]ntil recently, there has been almost nothing written by or about the Black Lesbian in American Literature – a deficiency suggesting that the Black Lesbian was a nonentity in imagination as well as in reality.”Footnote 37 However, 1982 is the watershed year for black lesbians in literature. Zami appears in the same year as Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple and both utilize unusual literary forms.
The Color Purple is a novel, in many respects, about a black lesbian.Footnote 38 The protagonist, Celie, falls in love with her husband's lover, Shug, and never returns to her husband or to other men. “Celie and Shug's love, placed at the center of the work and set in a rural southern community between the world wars, is unique in the history of African American fiction.”Footnote 39 Like Zami, it relies on an unusual form; The Color Purple is an epistolary novel, a form more common to literature of the eighteenth century than to that of the late twentieth. This is what the representation of black lesbians does to literature in 1982. The representation of black lesbians makes it impossible to rely on more common (and contemporary) forms and styles. In the case of Zami, neither the autobiography nor the novel will do. Audre Lorde writes a “biomythography,” for that is what form she creates – and needs – for telling the story of a black lesbian – that is, herself.
This is not to say that Zami is exceptional as an autobiography. It does not actually adopt a new form. It does not try to avoid the Bildungsroman structure of maturity and self-revelation; on page one we learn of her origins: “My mother and father came to this country in 1924, when she was twenty-seven years old and he was twenty-six.” It does rest on and play with a borderline between fiction and nonfiction – that is, between autobiography and novel – but even in this Zami is not unusual. The recognition of all autobiography as an amalgam of fiction and nonfiction has now become a trope of autobiographical criticism. Thus we have the autobiographical novel, or the memoir in the form of fiction.Footnote 40
By fusing these forms – autobiography and novel – Zami is able to create a narrative label that holds together – in a form that is familiar and even traditional – the presentation of an identity that has not historically used those forms to present itself: indeed, that would not have found those forms comfortable and would not have found those forms useful to present authentically the self that is an amalgam of identities.
The ways Zami does not fit into the categories of African American autobiography (slave narrative) and other African American literature (neo-slave narrative) or lesbian autobiography (coming out story) or women's autobiography (defined in opposition to men's autobiography, which have set the definitions) – although it has important features of all of these – is the reason why it is called a biomythography and why it is tempting to think of it in some ways as fiction.Footnote 41 It cannot fit into those generic literary categories – black and lesbian – because Lorde does not fit into those identity categories exclusively.
In Zami, it is the confluence, the nexus in one person, of black lesbian woman that makes “fitting in” to a tradition, or even an “alternative tradition,” of autobiography not possible. This is a grievance that suffuses Zami: that the combination of her blackness and her lesbianism means she fits in nowhere, she is always an “outsider,” even to marginal groups. For example,
Most Black lesbians were closeted, correctly recognizing the Black community's lack of interest in our position, as well as the many more immediate threats to our survival as Black people in a racist society. It was hard enough to be Black, to be Black and female, to be Black, female, and gay. To be Black, female, gay, and out of the closet in a white environment, even to the extent of dancing at the Bagatelle, was considered by many Black lesbians to be simply suicidal. (Zami 195)
It is not only in Zami that Lorde identifies herself as an outsider. In a tradition of naming herself in her book titles, her collection of essays, published in 1984, is called Sister Outsider.
While it may seem that Zami is simply, then, an amalgam of coming-out story and neo-slave narrative, rather it shows how these pre-existing forms are inadequate on their own to represent an identity that does not have a representational precedent. Zami also illuminates the similarity between these two forms. As her identity is not an amalgam of identities, but a specific fusion of separate individual identities, so is the text a fusion of these forms. They are informed by these other genres, but “Zami” is not only a new spelling of her name, it is a new writing of self, a new kind of self-writing.
This uneasiness – the inability to find a resting place in a category – is expressed in the text's preoccupation with home. The book begins with references to and a longing for a mythological home when Lorde writes that “home was a far way off, a place I had never been but knew well out of my mother's mouth” (Zami 4; italics hers). But the narrative as well is seeking a home – a generic home; it is a text looking for language, and looking for a way of saying something that has not been said before. There is no genre that will accommodate all that Lorde wants to put into language; this is why it is not autobiography, and not even fiction, but biomythography.
The home that Lorde conjures at the beginning of her story is not the one she came from but the one her parents came from. It is the place that Lorde envisions the family will return to, while Harlem, where she grows up, is the “temporary abode”:
This now, here, was a space, some temporary abode, never to be considered forever nor totally binding nor defining, no matter how much it commanded in energy and attention. For if we lived correctly and with frugality, looked both ways before crossing the street, then someday we would arrive back in the sweet place, back home (Zami 4–5, original emphasis).Footnote 42
This imagined, longed-for “home” is the primary “myth” of the biomythography. Lorde fantasizes what it will be like to be a family in their mythical home:
We would walk the hills of Grenville, Grenada, and when the wind blew right smell the limetrees of Carriacou, spice island off the coast. Listen to the sea drum up on Kick'em Jenny, the reef whose loud voice split the night, when the sea-waves beat upon her sides. (Zami 5)
The longing for a legendary home is another feature of Zami that makes it like slave narratives, in this case like many of the slave songs: “Certainly, ‘this world is not my home’ was a steady theme in the spirituals, one that offered its singers/hearers visions of a peaceful, loving realm beyond the one in which they labored.”Footnote 43 Consider these lyrics:
And these:
The preoccupation with home, with family, is also a way that Zami is like coming out stories. Bonnie Zimmerman observes that homecoming is a trope of the lesbian coming out story, describing the process of coming into a community: “As the protagonist assumes her lesbian identity through her first realization of love or sexuality, she also changes from an outsider into one who belongs; she has ‘come home.’”Footnote 45 Crucially, Lorde's self-realization as a lesbian is articulated as a homecoming. The first time Lorde has sex with a woman, with Ginger, she experiences it as a return home: “Loving Ginger that night was like coming home to a joy I was meant for, and I only wondered, silently, how I had not always known that it would be so” (Zami 118). In other words, Lorde tries also to find a home in lesbianism. This, as Anna Wilson points out, is elemental to the lesbian coming out story; Lorde's “sexual coming out is described within a series of metaphors for recognition familiar from that tradition [in that] the act of lesbian sex is naturalised through being presented as a return to an original knowledge that the protagonist has temporarily forgotten.”Footnote 46 In a later episode, Lorde's partnership with Muriel is symbolized by the joining of their names on a letter box tag:
one blustery day in the first week of April, on my lunch hour, I walked around to Hite's Hardware on East Broadway and ordered a proper metal mailbox tag, with Muriel's and my names upon it. I stood watching as the machine stamped the two names into the shiny brass rectangle, feeling proud, excited, and a little bit scared. It felt like a ritual joining, a symbolic marriage. (Zami 174–75)
This wish for home is also a wish for normativity that makes the narrative both like the coming out story and like the slave narrative. It is a wish for dailiness that is made remarkable neither by sexuality nor by race:
To go to bed and to wake up again day after day besides a woman, to lie in bed with our arms around each other and drift in and out of sleep, to be with each other – not as a quick stolen pleasure, nor as a wild treat – but like sunlight, day after day in the regular course of our lives. (Zami 180–81)
Lorde also finds a home in Mexico – “that nourishing land of light and color where I was somehow at home” (Zami 147) – a place where she “stopped feeling invisible” (Zami 149).
The inadequacy of the pre-existing forms of literature is represented by the preoccupation in the text with home. Jewelle Gomez writes that in Zami the “longing for ‘home’ is more than an emotional and psychological need expressed by an isolated character. It is also the driving force behind most strong writing by Black Lesbians and the richest setting we have.”Footnote 47 Even Lorde's ability to articulate, to find speech over silence, is about homecoming, and about self-determination. Soon after the section where Lorde decides she is going to learn to read, there is a titled section called “How I Became a Poet.” It is the only subtitle in the book, which is otherwise delineated by numbered chapters, and it describes the legacy of language she receives from her mother and her West Indian inheritance: “My mother had a special and secret relationship with words” (Zami 21). Home, for Lorde, is represented by the language from her mother's mouth: “We were never dressed too lightly, but rather ‘in next kin to nothing.’ … Impassable and impossible distances were measured by the distance ‘from Hog to Kick'em Jenny’” (Zami 21). The home that Lorde finds, ultimately, is not geographical, but textual; she finds her home in language: first her mother's language, then her own.
In Zami Lorde writes that at times “the strongest words for what I have to offer come out of me sounding like words I remember from my mother's mouth” (Zami 21, italics hers). Early in her life, Lorde refused to speak: “Even one intelligible word was a rare event for me” (Zami 14). And even later, when she is alienated in a relationship, with Muriel, she reverts to silence: “I seldom spoke. I wrote and I dreamed, but almost never talked” (Zami 187). Her capitulation to, and ultimately control over, speech is part of her act of self-creation through her mother's language. This can be construed most notably through calling herself Zami; that is, a name for “women like her” in her mother's homeland, where women “survived the absence of their sea-faring men easily, because they came to love each other, past the men's returning” (Zami 5).
Although the narrative of Zami is constituted by a search for home – “the sweet place” (Zami 5) – home, when it is found, is not her matrilineal home, nor is it a final resting place. Near the end of the text Lorde relinquishes the Caribbean as her home for the place where she grew up: Harlem, for a love affair with another black woman, Afrekete. After making love on the rooftop of Afrekete's Harlem apartment building, Lorde narrates,
It was not onto the pale sands of Whydah, nor the beaches of Winneba or Annamabu, with cocopalms softly applauding and crickets keeping time with the pounding of a tar-laden, treacherous, beautiful sea. It was onto 113th Street that we descended after our meeting under the Midsummer Eve's Moon, but the mothers and fathers smiled at us in greeting as we strolled down to Eighth Avenue, hand in hand. (Zami 222)
This is the home she “returns” to, for on the eve of her sexual encounter with Kitty (Afrekete), she goes with Kitty to her home in Harlem rather than back to her own home downtown. The thought of leaving her home of the moment terrifies her. Though she is nervous about spending the night with her new amorous attachment, she characterizes the fear as an abandonment of her home:
Had I put out enough food for the kittens? Was Flee coming over with her camera tomorrow morning, and would she feed the cats if I wasn't there. If I wasn't there.
If I wasn't there. The implication of that thought was so shaking it almost threw me out of the car. (Zami 215–16)
Here it is her sexuality, her desire, which quite literally drives her from home: “If the knot in my groin would have gone away, I'd have jumped out of the car door at the very next traffic light” (Zami 216). Sexual desire brings her back to the home that she experienced always as her “temporary abode,” but that now also represents the temporary home she makes for herself, in Harlem, with Afrekete – a mythological figure, and black.
Even before her birth, home became a place that Lorde's parents, due to financial hardship, had to stop dreaming of returning to, though “[l]ittle secret sparks of it were kept alive for years by my mother's search for tropical fruits ‘under the bridge’” (Zami 1). “‘I got this under the bridge’ was a saying from time immemorial, giving an adequate explanation that whatever it was had come from as far back and as close to home – that is to say, was as authentic – as was possible” (Zami 218). In the end of Zami, Lorde finds in Afrekete another woman, besides her mother, who knows how to buy things from “under the bridge”:
Afrekete … came out of a dream [and] brought me live things from the bush, and from her farm set out in cocoyams and cassava – those magical fruit which Kitty bought in the West Indian markets along Lenox Avenue in the 140s or in the Puerto Rican bodegas within the bustling market over on Park Avenue and 116th Street under the Central Railroad structure. (Zami 218, italics hers)
Her sexual alliance with Afrekete replaces the urge for her mother's home. But only temporarily; at the end of Zami, Lorde explains, “I never saw Afrekete again” (Zami 222), for in the end it is not even Harlem that is home, nor a love affair in Harlem with a goddess with whom sex involves the very produce from “under the bridge” that originates in her mother's land. For Lorde, home is a question not only of African American identity but of sexual identity. For there is no home for a black lesbian, except in language. Lorde finds a home not in a place, but in a name: Zami. And that name is the only word in language – which is what Lorde has to invent, not the literary form, “biomythography,” but the very word – that encompasses her blackness and her lesbianism. “Zami. A Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers” (Zami, italics hers 223). And that is why it is a biomythography: myths provide language for what is unknown, frightening or threatening, or otherwise inarticulable and unexplainable.
Though it is her mother's home that she longs for, it is not Carriacou, in the end, that she needs or wants, but language derived from her mother. And this is why, in the section titled “How I Became a Poet,” she speaks not of words and form, but of her mother's speech. It is her mother's language that gives her the names by which to know herself: “Lorde constructs an identity as both Black and lesbian by thinking back through her mother.”Footnote 48 Lorde understands home when she relinquishes her mother's home: “Once home was a long way off, a place I had never been to but knew out of my mother's mouth. I only discovered its latitudes when Carriacou was no longer my home” (Zami 223–24, original emphasis).
In many ways, however, Zami is less about finding home than about leaving home. In describing a childhood family holiday, Lorde narrates that the “first time I ever slept anywhere else besides in my parents' bedroom was a milestone in my journey to this house of myself” (Zami 31). And in leaving home as an adult, Lorde makes a claim to the territory that her parents were unable to claim:
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. (Zami 86)
The end of Zami is also constituted not by arriving but by leaving, but now she takes her mother's tradition with her:
The casing of this place had been my home for seven years, the amount of time it takes for the human body to completely renew itself, cell by living cell. And in those years my life had become increasingly a bridge and field of women.
…
We carry our traditions with us. Buying boxes of Red Cross Salt and a fresh corn straw broom for my new apartment in Westchester: new job, new house, new living the old in a new way. Recreating in words the women who helped give me substance. (Zami 223)
Zami ends with relinquishing home, realizing she does not need the matrilineal home, the “sweet place,” though she can and does take with her its traditions: the salt, the broom, the words.
BIOMYTHOGRAPHY
If the “bio” of “biomythography” refers to Audre Lorde's life, the “myth” refers to the stories of community, to connection. Lorde's book is a narrative that is meant to cohere her identities. To merge self and community, to find a place for self in community, to find home. Finally, the “graph” of biomythography is the writing, the text. The home she finds is in language.
Though Lorde tends to list her identities in a litany – a concatenation – the text of Zami makes all of Lorde's identities fused: inseparable. This is also what the writing of the text does to the traditions from which it derives: the African American slave narrative and the lesbian coming out story. It fuses them; but more than that, it shows their similarity. While both genres – the coming out story and the slave narrative – are conversion narratives, the two have never been embodied before in one narrative. In Zami, Lorde fuses these two traditions, and in this she is making a home for herself in language.
While in Zami Lorde professes her alienation from the identities that constitute her, Zami does “fit in,” after all, textually. As I have shown, by fusing two traditions of American writing, Zami is a text that emerges from extant American literary legacies. As a black lesbian warrior poet mother involved in an interracial relationship, she may be on the margins, but she has written, after all, a classic American text.
