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Zami: A New Spelling of My Name:
A Biomythography Audre Lorde (1982)
AUDRE LORDE’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
opens with the beautifully articulated question
of spiritual and intellectual indebtedness: “To
whom do I owe the power behind my voice, what
strength I have become, yeasting up like sudden
blood from under the bruised skin’s blister?” (3).
The entire text of this astonishing, genre-breaking
biomythography devotes itself to revealing that in-
debtedness, informing the reader that “it is the im-
ages of women, kind and cruel, that lead me home.”
And home, for Lorde, is a self-invented yet entirely
real country, Zami: “my journey to this house of
myself ” (46), “a Carriacou name for women who
work together as friends and lovers.”
Part autobiography, and part revisionist myth-
making, Zami tells the story of “coming out black-
ened and whole,” of Lorde’s fully claiming the
fierce beauty of black lesbian identity, of becoming
a woman-loving woman, a poet, a creator of self-
authored words and perceptions. Part memory,
part dream, a collage of collective and personal
myth—an interweaving of all of these—the text
disrupts chronology, moves from feeling state to
feeling state in a poetic voice in which Lorde’s spir-
itual and erotic encounters are powerfully her own
but participate also in a collective female, femi-
nist, lesbian mythology. As M. Charlene Ball sug-
gests, in naming Zami a biomythography, Lorde is

“deliberately creating myth from her own life....

Myth can essentialize: it can appear to belong to

a timeless realm that lies beyond history... [but]

revisionist myth such as Audre Lorde’s,... does

the opposite; it challenges and displaces existing

myth” (253). Ball describes the revisionist myth-

making of Lorde and others by noting that “far

from existing in a timeless world that makes pal-

atable the oppressions of this world,” such myth-

making “transforms this world, their readers, and

themselves” (Ball, 63–64). Thus the young Lorde

finds who she needs in the goddess Seboulisa and

lives several lifetimes in order to meet and claim

her as the mirror of her mother: “I grew Black as

my need for life, for affirmation, for love, for shar-

ing—copying from my mother what was in her,

unfulfilled. I grew Black as Seboulisa, who I was

to find in the cool mud halls of Abomey several

lifetimes later-and as alone” (58).

In the uncanny way that factual detail can

often be more compelling than fiction, readers are

introduced to the very young, legally blind Lorde

as she discovers how to see by touch, by taste, by

feel, by listening to the world around her, and

most of all by smell—the pages are redolent with

“cinnamon, nutmeg, mace... guava jelly, sweet-

smelling tonka bean... pressed chocolate...

wild bay laurel leaves” (14). Her newly acquired

eyeglasses—received at age three—enable Lorde

to trace the now-distinguishable letters of words