After graduation, she leaves home and shares a flat with friends of Jean's (one of The Branded), ceasing contact with her parents and two sisters. She is elected literary editor of the school's arts magazine and begins writing poetry. When white people spit at them during Lorde's childhood, her mother would disparage those low-class people for spitting into the wind.Īfter getting her first period at age 15, Lorde makes friends with a small number of non-Black girls at Hunter College High School, who label themselves "The Branded".
Despite the rampant racism of this era that Lorde encountered in her daily life, her mother attempted to shield her from it. When the family takes a trip to Washington, D.C., they are not allowed to eat ice cream at a lunch counter because of Jim Crow laws. The family's landlord hangs himself for having to rent his flat to Black people. Lorde does not speak until age four, when she declares that she wants to read, and promptly follows through on this desire. Her parents and other adults, especially her mother, discipline her harshly for insolence.
Her two older sisters, Phyllis and Helen, are very close, but are rarely mentioned in Zami and Lorde spends little time with them. Lorde is legally blind from a very young age, isolating her even further from her surroundings and a family from which she does not receive much warmth or affection. Plot summary Īudre Lorde grows up in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s, a child of Black West Indian parents. The name proves fitting: Lorde begins Zami writing that she owes her power and strength to the women in her life, and much of the book is devoted to detailed portraits of other women. In the text, Lorde writes that "Zami" is "a Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers", noting that Carriacou is the Caribbean island from which her mother immigrated. It started a new genre that the author calls biomythography, which combines history, biography, and myth.
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name is a 1982 biomythography by American poet Audre Lorde.
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