Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

Overview
Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name is a “biomythography,” a form she names to braid autobiography, myth, and history into a narrative of becoming. Set across the 1930s to the early 1960s, it traces her coming of age as a Black, lesbian poet born to Caribbean immigrants in Harlem, mapping the intersections of race, gender, class, desire, and language. The book’s title signals the power of self-definition and evokes “zami,” a Carriacou word for women who work together as friends and lovers, a communal lineage the narrative ultimately embraces.

Childhood and Family
Lorde grows up in a West Indian household shadowed by the Great Depression and fueled by striving respectability. Her mother, Linda, from Grenada and Carriacou, is formidable and resourceful, a curator of silence who shields her daughters from the daily humiliations of American racism by refusing to name them, teaching evasion as survival. Her father, strict and distant, embodies the dangers and disciplines of Black manhood in the North. Nearsighted and willful, Lorde discovers language as both refuge and weapon; when she cannot speak her feelings, she recites poems to be heard. A family trip to Washington, D.C., where a restaurant refuses them service, crystallizes the structure of white supremacy she is learning to read behind her mother’s masks.

Schooling, Language, and First Loss
Catholic school rigor sharpens Lorde’s hunger for words even as it polices her difference. At Hunter College High School she finds a creative intimacy with Gennie, a friend who shares poems and secrets, and together they invent a private world of language. Gennie’s suicide shatters that world, leaving a wound that propels Lorde out of her parents’ tight orbit and into the broader city. Grief becomes a crucible for her art and a first register of how desire, silence, and violence can entangle.

Work, Independence, and the Village
After high school and into college, Lorde stitches together lives: student, factory worker, office clerk, poet. She moves in and out of small apartments and precarious jobs, learning the economies of survival. In Greenwich Village she encounters the lesbian bar scene, its butch-femme codes, its exhilaration, its racism, and begins a series of relationships with women that teach her the contours of tenderness, betrayal, addiction, and care. The Village offers both belonging and fracture: a space where she explores desire while confronting how whiteness shapes even marginal communities.

Mexico and Return
Time in Mexico opens a space of reinvention. Away from New York’s surveillance and American racial scripts, she encounters artists, students, and workers living other possible arrangements of life and love. The freedom to experiment with identity and craft enlarges her understanding of what a self can be. Returning to New York, she carries that knowledge into new intimacies, most powerfully with Muriel and, later, with Afrekete, whose presence gathers together erotic, spiritual, and ancestral currents.

Myth, Naming, and Zami
Threaded through the narrative are her mother’s island stories, Carriacou women, work, and ceremony, memory-shards that become maps. From them Lorde builds the concept of “zami” as a counterhistory to America’s isolations: a lineage of women’s labor and love that crosses oceans and outlasts erasure. Naming is central. She refuses the misnaming that flattens her, crafting a new spelling for her life that honors all her parts: Black, woman, lesbian, poet, daughter of the diaspora. The closing movement with Afrekete and the recalled rituals of Carriacou mark a turning toward wholeness, where biography cannot do the work alone and myth must be invoked to hold what history disavows.

Arc and Significance
Zami charts a passage from guarded girlhood to self-authored womanhood, from silence to a voice rooted in community. Its episodes, family restraint, first love and loss, working-class grind, Village nights, Mexico’s spaciousness, the anchoring of Carriacou, compose a mosaic that reclaims pleasure and connection as political ground. By naming her genre, Lorde names a practice: to tell a life by the truths of memory and desire as much as by the facts of chronology, and to spell a name large enough to hold a people.