Zami: A New Spelling of my Name (Penguin Modern Classics)

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In Mexico, she experienced a great deal of happiness and freedom. She attended university classes, explored Mexico City, and became acquainted with a community of lesbians who were strong, independent, and represented exactly the kind of woman that Lorde wanted to be. She spent most of her time with Eudora, an older woman for whom she had strong feelings. Eudora was unstable, but taught Lorde profound lessons in life and love. Lorde wrote about being an outsider. To read her experiences today probably doesn't mean a lot to many readers because a lot has changed in the world since Lorde was young (at least on paper - I argue things haven't changed much at all except no one likes to talk about it openly). But I have always been an outsider in my own way, and I could relate to Lorde's story even though we have very little in common. She knew that you could be an individual but also to be made up of every person we have shared a piece of our history with, for better or worse. After finishing high school, Audre moves out of her parents’ home and begins an affair with a white boy named Peter. She does not enjoy their sexual relationship but sleeps with him because this is the normal thing to do. They break up after a few months, but soon afterward, Audre finds out that she is pregnant and undergoes a traumatic and painful abortion. Though the physical effects last only a few days, the poems she writes for some time afterward are dark and despairing in tone.

Sadly I didn't love this as much as I thought I would, although parts of it I did love and there is some stunningly beautiful writing. Especially in the first half I had trouble emotionally connecting with the character Audre--I'm not sure if that was my state of mind or the writing style. I also wanted to know more about certain parts of Lorde's life (poetry, libraries) and less about her sex life (haha no judgment if your preferences are the other way around). Lorde writes very well and has the ability to sum things up in a rather pithy way, as she sums up the 1950s: Lorde did not return to New York City until she heard that her father had passed away. She soon decided to move to Mexico, a place that was full of allure, especially to someone who was outside society’s margins during the repressive 1950s.I must add that these things are not separable. I cannot in any kind of faith tease it out as a strand. Audre writes of loving women inside all these other shells and spaces and non-spaces, all these stiflings and terrors and sufferings, all these joys and expansions into self and glory. Loving women, unfolding into all these places of being, where it seems to Audre that lesbians are the only women talking to each other, supporting each other emotionally at all in the '50s. She and her friends and lovers invent the sisterhood the feminist movement obsessed about decades later. Eudora, an older woman and Audre's lover in Mexico. She was a journalist and alcoholic. She was passionate about Mexican culture and history. She had a clothing shop with her ex in the Mexican town where they lived. She had lost a breast due to cancer. Failing in college and eager to escape from New York, Audre moves to Stamford, Connecticut, and takes a job in a factory. There, she begins a relationship with one of the other workers, a woman called Ginger who has already been married and divorced. Even after they begin sleeping together, Audre is uncertain about the nature of her relations with Ginger, who seems to enjoy sex with women but not to see it as any kind of serious commitment.

Each one of us had been starved for love for so long that we wanted to believe that love, once found, was all-powerful. We wanted to believe that it could give word to my inchoate pain and rages; that it could enable them to face the world and get a job; that it could free our writings, cure racism, end homophobia and adolescent acne.” Although a linear account of her life in the traditional autobiography sense, it’s also very much about the women who made Audre Lorde what she was, from the start: her mother and her forebears, her sisters, high school friends, and lovers - a web of women’s lives with Audre at the centre. That sounds much more nurturing than it actually was; most of these relationships were fraught, with her mother especially, and the narrative is shot through with pain and loss. This is not an easy read and repays time and careful reading. It is a great book, one that really should be much more widely known, especially here in the UK. Lorde expresses herself very well: Lorde started a serious relationship with Muriel, a young Italian woman with a history of mental instability. The two of them were madly in love and moved in together, but eventually Muriel cheated on Lorde and mentally broke down. Lorde was devastated and found it difficult to extricate herself from the relationship, but finally the two of them separated. She did not think she would be able to be with anyone ever again, and was profoundly depressed.The mother – Lorde's difficult relationship with her mother, whom she credits for imbuing her with a certain sense of strength, pervades throughout the book. The Rosenbergs had been executed, the transistor radio had been invented, and frontal lobotomy was the standard solution for persistent deviation."