A review by ceallaighsbooks
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde

challenging emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

”I didn’t know how I was going to bring my personal and political visions together, but I knew it had to be possible because I felt them both too strongly, and knew how much I needed them both to survive. I did not agree with Rhea and her progressive friends when they said that this was not what the revolution was about. Any world which did not have a place of me loving women was not a world in which I wanted to live, nor one which I could fight for.”

This book was simply incredible. There were so many layers of actual perfection to this entire work that I couldn’t even begin to touch on every detail that shone like a lighthouse beacon into every corner of my life—past, present, and future.

First of all, the writing was astonishingly, boneshakingly beautiful. The book is a memoir but it reads very much like literary fiction (probably why Lorde described it as a “biomythography”). I have actually never read a book as beautifully written as this one with so much genuine feeling, passion, vulnerability, and love—and hope! This book is *dripping* with hope and wow. So powerful and so beautiful.

There are a ton of important and impactful themes covered from Blackness to queerness, New York City in the mid-19th c., expat life in Mexico City during McCarthyism, the “progressive” revolution, and just Life in all of its general beauty and horribleness. She also spends a lot of time describing food and fashion which I thought added a layer of tangible reality that made my experience of her writing even that much more visceral.

There is just so much power and relevance in every sentence I have already found myself repeating my favorite quotes to myself as I think of them throughout the day in response to various memories and experiences. I could have read a thousand more pages of this book! Obviously going to be collecting more of her work.
 
“In a paradoxical sense, once I accepted my position as different from the larger society as well as from any single sub-society—Black or gay—I felt I didn’t have to try so hard. To be accepted. To look femme. To be straight. To look straight. To be proper. To look “nice”. To be liked. To be loved. To be approved. What I didn’t realize was how much harder I had to try merely to stay alive, or rather, to stay human. How much stronger a person I became in that trying.”
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