passage is especially poignant, as is the section in
which Lorde describes her early job at Keystone
Electronics, scanning crystals with unshielded X-
ray machines, chewing the crystals in her mouth
to dispose of them without having to scan them
in an attempt to obtain bonuses to overcome the
poverty-scale wages she and other women of color
were paid—almost certainly a major factor in the
cancer that subsequently claimed her life.) And
when alcohol and old unfinished business with
a former lover result in Eudora’s sending Lorde
away, it is a newly resolved Lorde who departs: “I
was hurt, but not lost. And in that moment, as in
the first night when I held her, I felt myself pass be-
yond childhood, a woman connecting with other
women in an intricate, complex, and ever-widen-
ing network of exchanging strengths” (175).
An important, painful relationship with Muriel
offers Audre a lesson about separations, a subject
that receives her poetic insights in the earlier vol-
ume of poems The Black Unicorn (1978). The con-
ventional ideology of romance promotes the fear
of abandonment by one’s lover. Zami records the
evolution of a black lesbian poet powerful enough
to take on a relationship that repudiates utterly
the conventional ideology of romance—as Lorde
does in her relationship with Kitty/Afrekete, who
at various points in the text is described as Lorde’s
lover (an actual black woman existing in real time
and space) and is alluded to as an ancient Daho-
meian mythological goddess; as aspects of Aph-
rodite, Persephone, Demeter, Athena, and other
Greek goddesses; and perhaps most important, as
aspects of Lorde herself.
Afrekete ’s beauty is associated with her magical
apartment, framed by a murmuring, mysterious,
glowing fish tank, its “translucent rainbowed fish”
shaded by “pot after clay pot of green and tousled
large and small-leaved plants of all shapes and
conditions.” Tar Beach, the rooftop of Afrekete’s
apartment, the “chief resort territory of tenement-
dwellers,” offers the lovers a place to make “moon,
honor, love” to one another, their “sweat-slippery
dark bodies, sacred as the ocean at high tide” (252)
ride one another to the crossroads of joy, sleep,
and the power of black women’s love, poetry, com-
munity, and survival.
The goddess-like “Afrekete, who came out of a
dream to me” (249) is not worshipped as an “other”
or exoticized in the ways that black women’s bod-
ies frequently have been made an object of con-
sumption for white men. Her beauty is a reflection
of Audre’s, their sexuality profoundly mutual, the
images of coital love and penetration profoundly
lesbian in their tenderness and passion, the de-
scriptions themselves italicicized as if to suggest
both their lyrical quality and their mythological
aspect: “There were ripe red finger bananas, stubby
and sweet, with which I parted your lips gently, to
insert the peeled fruit into your grape-purple flower”
(249). Zami closes with lines that could suggest
Afrekete not just as lover but as an aspect of the
self: “We had come together like elements erupting
into an electric storm, exchanging energy, shar-
ing charge, brief and drenching. Then we parted,
passed, reformed, reshaping ourselves the better
for the exchange. I never saw Afrekete again, but
her print remains upon my life with the resonance
and power of an emotional tattoo” (253).
In “A Letter to Audre Lorde,” ESSEX HEMPHILL
offers clear insights into the importance of what
Lorde wrote in Zami and elsewhere:You gave us living, fire-breathing words ca-
pable of healing, tearing down, building up,
braving the long nights and languishing days.
You gave us words we could use wisely. Words
we could depend on. You gave us, simply, your
life as a lesson to guide our own lives through
this maze of destitution and despair that some
would call a country, a nation, a home.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alexander, Elizabeth. “ ‘Coming out Blackened and
Whole’: Fragmentation and Reintegration in
Audre Lorde’s Zami and The Cancer Journals.”
American Literary History 6, no. 4 (Winter 1994):
695–715.
Ball, M. Charlene. “Old Magic and New Fury: The
Theaphany of Afrekete in Audre Lorde’s ‘Tar
Beach.’ ” NWSA Journal 13, no. 1 (2000): 61–85.
Hall, Lynda. “Lorde and Gomez Queer(y)ing bound-
aries and Acting in Passion(ate) Plays ‘Wherever578 Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography