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“Sweet Home”: Audre Lorde's Zami and the legacies of American Writing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 July 2009

MONICA B. PEARL
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Abstract

Although Audre Lorde calls the narrative of her life Zami: A New Spelling of My Name a “biomythography,” suggesting that the life of an African American lesbian cannot be told in any previously available generic forms of life-writing or self-expression, Zami actually derives from two extant American literary traditions – the African American slave narrative and the lesbian coming out story – rendering it, after all, not a marginal text, but rather a text that falls obviously and firmly in a tradition of American literature. Both traditions turn siginificantly on the trope of “home,” of finding a home where one belongs. In finding the “home” that she is seeking not, ultimately, geographically, but, rather, generically – in the very text she is writing – Lorde's life story also ends up signifying the similarity of these two ostensibly disparate forms: the slave narrative and the coming out story, suggesting a common narrative trajectory of marginal American identities in the tradition of American life-writing.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , August 2009 , pp. 297 - 317
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 40.

2 Ibid., 110.

3 Ibid., 114.

4 Rowell, Charles H., “Above the Wind: An Interview with Audre Lorde,” Callaloo, 14, 1 (1991), 83–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Ibid., 87.

6 Judy Long, Telling Women's Lives: Subject/Narrator/Reader/Text (New York and London: New York University Press, 1999), 55.

7 Bonnie Zimmerman, “The Politics of Transliteration: Lesbian Personal Narratives,” in Estelle B. Freedman, Barbara C. Gelpi, Susan C. Johnson, and Kathleen M. Weston, eds., The Lesbian Issue: Essays from Signs (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 252.

8 Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (London: Pandora, 1996; first published 1982), 156. Italics hers. Subsequent references to this edition will be made parenthetically within the text.

9 Chinosole, “Audre Lorde and the Matrilineal Diaspora,” in Joanne M. Braxton and Andrée Nicola McLaughlin, eds., Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance (London: Serpent's Tail, 1990), 385.

10 Bonnie Zimmerman, “Exiting from Patriarchy: The Lesbian Novel of Development,” in Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland, eds., The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (Hanover, NH and London: University Press of New England, 1983), 257.

11 Julia Penelope and Susan J. Wolfe, eds., The Original Coming Out Stories: Expanded Edition (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1989), 1.

12 Barbara Smith, “The Truth that Never Hurts: Black Lesbians in Fiction in the 1980s,” in idem, The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 1998; first published 1977), 68.

13 Merril, “Letter,” in Julia Penelope Stanley and Susan J. Wolfe, eds., The Coming Out Stories (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1980), 135.

14 Susan Madden, “I Have Four Coming Out Stories to Tell,” in Stanley and Wolfe, 139.

15 Adrienne Rich, Foreword, in Stanley and Wolfe, xiii. Italics hers.

16 Stanley and Wolfe, Introduction, xvix.

17 Adrienne Rich, letter, quoted in Stanley and Wolfe, Introduction, xviii.

18 Caryl B. Bentley, “My Third Coming Out at Last Has My Own Name,” in Stanley and Wolfe, 81.

19 Lorde, “An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich,” in Lorde, Sister Outsider, 86. Lorde is also ascribed a new name at the end of her life: “Before her death the name Gamba Adisa was bestowed on Audre in a ceremony held in St. Croix. It means ‘Warrior-She who makes her meaning known.’” Jewelle Gomez, introduction to Zami, xi.

20 The second edition of The Coming Out Stories tries to correct this: in the new introduction the editors comment that the original edition “wasn't as representative of Lesbian diversity as we'd hoped it would be” (2), and this new edition “reflects the plurality of our emerging community” (4).

21 Anna Wilson, “Audre Lorde and the African-American Tradition: When the Family is Not Enough,” in Sally Munt, ed., New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 81.

22 Sterling Lecater Bland Jr., Voices of the Fugitives: Runaway Slave Stories and Their Fictions of Self-Creation (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 2000), 35.

23 James Olney, “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature,” in Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., The Slave's Narrative (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 168. See also Kimberley W. Benston, who writes, “All of Afro-American literature may be seen as one vast genealogical poem that attempts to restore continuity to the ruptures or discontinuities imposed by the history of black presence in America. At its center – the slave-narrative tradition,” in Kimberley W. Benston, “I Yam What I Am: The Topos of (Un)naming in Afro-American Literature,” in Henry Louis Gates, ed., Black Literature and Literary Theory (New York and London: Methuen, 1984), 152.

24 Sidonie Smith, Where I'm Bound: Patterns of Slavery and Freedom in Black American Autobiography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974), ix. See also Samira Kawash, Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Narrative (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).

25 In the slave narrative, “black writers and their literary sponsors had very specific audiences they hoped to persuade.” Bland, p. 35.

26 Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, eds., The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997), xxvii.

27 Sidonie Smith, 10.

28 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (New York: Penguin, 1986; first published 1845), 79. Subsequent references to this edition will be made parenthetically in the text.

29 Karin Schmidli, Models and Modifications: Early African-American Women Writers (Basel: Francke Verlag, 1995), 178.

30 Olney, p. 153.

31 Sidonie Smith, p. 21.

32 Kawash, 29.

33 Bland, 30.

34 Schmidli, 173–74.

35 Olga Idriss Davis, “Life Ain't Been No Crystal Stair: The Rhetoric of Autobiography in Black Female Slave Narratives,” in James L. Conyers Jr., ed., Black Lives: Essays in African American Biography (Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 155.

36 Wilson, “Audre Lorde and the African-American Tradition,” 80.

37 Jewelle Gomez, “A Cultural Legacy Denied and Discovered: Black Lesbians in Fiction by Women,” in Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000; originally published in 1983 by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press), 83.

38 Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).

39 Barbara Smith, “The Truth that Never Hurts,” 61–62.

40 See Timothy Dow Adams, who comments: “Autobiographers seldom make a distinction between autobiography, autobiographical novel, memoir, memories, or reminiscence, genres with different ideas of truthfulness.” Timothy Dow Adams, Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990), ix.

41 A number of critics refers to Zami as a novel. See, for example, Erin G. Carlston, “Zami and the Politics of Plural Identity,” in Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope, eds., Sexual Practice/Textual Theory: Lesbian Cultural Criticism (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 232 and 234.

42 Lorde also articulates this elsewhere: “I was raised … in a West Indian household; my parents came from Barbados and Grenada. I talk about this in Zami. As children, in New York City, we were raised to believe that home was somewhere else. Home was Grenada and Barbados. My parents had planned to come to the U.S.A. for a little while, make some money and then go back home. That dream never materialized for them, but they raised us with the idea we were just sojourners in this place. There was an American culture, there were American people, but they were not us. We were just visitors, and someday we would return home.” Lorde, in Rowell, “Above the Wind,” 83.

43 Gates and McKay, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 5.

44 Ibid., 6, 8, 11, 13.

45 Zimmerman, “Exiting from Patriarchy,” 249.

46 Wilson, “Audre Lorde and the African-American Tradition,” 81.

47 Jewelle Gomez, “A Cultural Legacy Denied and Discovered: Black Lesbians in Fiction by Women,” in Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), 120.

48 Wilson, 83. See also Chinosole, who writes that Lorde “develops a configuration of selves based on matrilineal diaspora.” Chinosole, “Audre Lorde and the Matrilineal Diaspora,” 386.