with her fingers, leading to a determination there
and then that she will learn to read. In spelling out
her own artistic creation myth, Lorde begins with
the women in her own family, her mother, and her
sister Helen, whose stories—“filled with tough
little girls who masqueraded in boys’ clothing and
always foiled the criminals, managing to save the
day” (46)—inspire Lorde not only to believe that
she can be a storyteller too but also to realize the
power of language to enable conceptualization
and to incite action—a thread that runs through
the whole of Lorde’s work, later articulated in the
essay “The Transformation of Silence into Lan-
guage and Action.”
The chapter “How I Became a Poet” begins with
two powerful observations: first, that Audre did
not speak at all until she was four years of age, and
second, that her feared and much-loved antago-
nist—her mother, Linda—was also a profound
source of Lorde’s language and vision: “out of my
mother’s mouth a world of comment came cas-
cading when she felt at ease or in her element, full
of picaresque constructions and surreal scenes....
I am a reflection of my mother’s secret poetry as
well as of her hidden angers” (32). Her mother’s
attempts to shield Audre from racism in Harlem
and beyond—strangers’ spittle, teachers’ dunce
caps, white children’s predictable betrayals—often
manifested itself in painful bursts of abrasive
tough love, but juxtaposed to these memories are
those of the eros of mother-daughter intimacy, an
eros that has rarely been explored with as much
beauty or unhesitating honesty as in Zami.
Her childhood memories, complex and eroti-
cally charged, give way to subsequent memories
of lying between a lover’s legs or the association
of the sweet smell of mace and nutmeg with a
lover’s breath or skin. The memory of pounding
garlic while menstruating, the “delicate breadfruit
smell rising up from the front of my print blouse
that was my own womansmell, warm, shameful,
but secretly utterly delicious” gives way to the
most taboo of fantasies: “years afterward when
I was grown, whenever I thought about the way
I smelled that day, I would have a fantasy of my
mother, her hands wiped dry from the washing,
and her apron untied and laid neatly away, look-
ing down upon me lying on the couch, and then
slowly, thoroughly, our touching and caressing
each other’s most secret places.”
Much of this biomythography is devoted to
Lorde’s recounting of the stories of her evolv-
ing lesbian identity, of the women who become
her lovers, and most of all, of the woman she be-
comes—not surprising for a book whose dedica-
tion page is inscribed, “In the recognition of loving
lies an answer to despair.” In Zami, as well as in
“Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” and in-
deed, all of Lorde’s work, the erotic functions as
the capacity for joy, “as the personification of love
in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying
creative power and harmony” (Sister Outsider, 55).
Refusing the split between personal and political,
refusing romance, the stories of Lorde’s relation-
ships, like her love poems, insist on the primacy of
self-empowering.
Ginger, the first woman Lorde makes love to,
she describes as “gorgeously fat,” with “skin the
color of well-buttered caramel, and a body like the
Venus of Willendorf ” (136). Embracing Ginger’s
beauty, she sees her own. Eudora, too, introduces
Lorde to a homecoming within herself, “the way to
the Mexico I had come looking for, that nourishing
land of light and color where I was somewhere at
home” (170). The 19-year-old Audre bravely tells
Eudora (“the most fascinating woman I had ever
met”—and some 30 years her senior), “I want to
sleep with you,” and each of them is transformed.
Audre’s self-imposed notion of butch propriety
drops like a kimono shyly removed: “When I told
Eudora I didn’t like to be made love to, she raised
her eyebrows. ‘How do you know?’ she said, her
eyes wrinkling at the corners, intense, desiring”
(169). Eudora’s fear that her body is no longer
beautiful, in the aftermath of the pale keloids of
radiation burns scarring her chest, is answered
by Audre’s unequivocal desire, her eyes speak-
ing tenderness, her lips’ urgent whisper that their
lovemaking should take place “in the light.” (To
readers familiar with Lorde’s own long struggle
with breast cancer, written about so eloquently
in The Cancer Journals and A Burst of Light, thisZami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography 577