Zami: A New Spelling of My Name is an autobiography by poet Audre Lorde. Published in 1982, Lorde’s book was released in an era when feminist writers, critics, and theorists were coming to terms with the many ways cultural and sexual diversity could be examined, focusing more intently on relations between women rather than simply placing women as a whole in contrast to men. Zami is a groundbreaking work that pioneers a new genre of writing, which the author called “a biomythography, which is really fiction. It has elements of biography and history and myth. In other words, it’s fiction built from many sources. This is one way of expanding our vision.”
Zami was part of an increasingly popular genre: the coming-out story. Critic Monica B. Pearl writes, “Audre Lorde's text is partly an accounting of how she came to be, or how she came to understand herself as, a lesbian. It is written and published at a time when coming out stories were emerging, as fiction and as personal accounts, and it is not itself unlike a coming out story. The coming out story is a narrative of recognition and naming, a severing from an old identity and the community associated with it, and the adoption of a new identity and thus a reconnection with a new community. The lesbian coming out story describes the process whereby one realizes that one is a lesbian. The lesbian coming out story proliferated, along with the gay male coming out story, in the 1970s, a time that roughly coincides with what was thought of as gay liberation.”
Lorde's mother was born on the Caribbean island of Carriacou, and Lorde tells the reader “Zami” is a Carriacou name for women who work together, who are friends and who are also lovers. Lorde begins the book by declaring that she has drawn much of her strength as a woman from the women in her life who taught her how to harness her own power, and the majority of the book is devoted to the stories of other women whom she celebrates. The book details Lorde's life growing up in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s as a child of West Indian parents in a society that, despite its growing diversity, still feared that which deviated from a perceived norm. Living in Harlem, then traveling to and living in Connecticut, Mexico, and once again in New York City, Lorde draws on her varied experiences as a road to finding her identity as well as her sexuality. As a proud, Afro-Caribbean, woman-loving woman, Lorde in her personal work examined a version of empowerment and self-expression that was specific to her experience but was able to touch many of the oppressed people of the era.
The book was largely acclaimed, with the New York Times reviewer commenting that “among the elements that make the book so good are its personal honesty and lack of pretentiousness, characteristics that shine through the writing, bespeaking the evolution of a strong and remarkable character.”
