Here is what I knew about Audre Lorde prior to reading this book; famous Black feminist leftist lesbian poet librarian, affiliated with CUNY, died of breast cancer, wrote “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I think that’s all. I thought I knew one of her other poems, one that my grandma had cut out of the newspaper and mailed to me when I was 14, but apparently that was actually by Elizabeth Alexander.
I had read a little of The Cancer Journals in a memoirs of illness seminar, and probably a few other poems across the course of my education. When compiling my reading list, I tried not to include two works by the same author, prioritizing reading as many voices as possible. (I broke this rule once: I’m reading both Fun Home and its sequel, Are You My Mother— I rationalize this because they are both graphic memoirs and therefore faster reads). So, I had to choose between Zami and The Cancer Journals. I chose this one. Partially because I’d read excerpts from The Cancer Journals already, and partially because I hoped Zami would include more lesbian content.
Zami covers Lorde’s life from childhood to around her late twenties/early thirties, and its focus is the many women who were significant in her life up to that point— her mother, her sisters, friends, and lovers. I felt it started slow, but once it got going, it was incredibly gripping. As I remarked to my coworkers recently, I know this is a well-established opinion, but Lorde was a badass.
It’s hard for me to separate my scholarly reading— “reading for exams, reading to understand the history and substance of the genre of queer memoir, reading for criticism” — from my own literary cravings. Like so many of the authors of the books I’ve been reading, I’m a queer woman hungry for role models through books, eager to construct my own canon of intellectual and cultural heritage. Not only in terms of sexuality, but in terms of being a woman, being an academic, living in New York. I’m sure I’d read many books set here before I moved here, but now I’m reading as a resident, trying to make sense of the place I now inhabit and to understand my place in it, and the history of those who were here before me.
The day I read the passage in which Lorde and her sisters walk from Harlem into the Heights to visit a comic book shop, I realized I had climbed that very same hill and walked that very same path earlier in the day, as I came home from running an errand for a friend and visiting another in the same building. I now live only a few blocks north from where Lorde moved as a preteen, in-between the same cross streets. Her New York and her experience of it were both so very very different from mine, yet we have walked along the same streets. As she writes about her visits to the downtown lesbian bars, I know I’ve seen the same buildings she did on my way to my own lesbian bars. Although the socioeconomic makeup and social status of the Village is far, far different now than it was in the 1950s. I treasure her descriptions of her own shitty apartments, her own nights drinking cheap wine with friends, her own commutes to and from various CUNY campuses. I was delighted to learn she lived in Stamford for a little while. A year ago I had never even heard of Stamford, and now I have a friend who regularly visits from there. I was delighted to learn she lived in Mexico City for a little while, studying sociology. I have a friend who used to be a professor of sociology there. My friend is much younger, but I like to imagine she knew some of the same people that Lorde knew there. As I read, I felt the many tiny, tenuous connections between us, and I felt happy.
I also found it valuable to read about Lorde’s experiences of race and racism, since they are somewhat unlike the descriptions of both that I’m more familiar with. I grew up in the South, and mid 20th century NYC racism didn’t always look the same as the racism we learned about in my own community. I also reflected on the differences between Lorde’s description of KyKy dykes (often Black lesbians, lesbians who rejected being either butch or femme, lesbians who were by implication probably prostitutes) with Esther Newton’s description of kiki dykes (spelling and capitalization differences aside, still lesbians who rejected butch and femme roles, but typically upper middle class lesbians who were slumming it downtown or faking attraction to women for attention), and how their respective subject positions inflect their views on the term/the people it applies to.
The parts I’m still pondering are what exactly “biomythography” means, and what, if anything, makes bonds between women special that cross-gender bonds (or same-gender bonds between other genders) cannot have. We’ve moved past political lesbianism and second wave feminism. But what is important for us 21st century women to take with us?
I love the term biomythography. I love how open and ambiguous it is. I love how it makes me think of Lorde’s Significant Women as a pantheon of goddesses who shaped her life. I love how the term implicitly says that not everything in the book might be literally true, but it is how she remembers it, how she tells the story to herself, how she wants to tell the story to her readers, how she wants to pass it along, and that that is Okay, and even Good.
I wanted it to last longer— I wanted the book to cover more of her life, more of her relationships (romantic and not). Particularly, I wanted to read about her marriage, her relationship with her husband and with motherhood and with performing heterosexuality and how they all mixed together for her. In Zami, Lorde thinks Muriel will be her life partner—I want to read about her other life partners. Wikipedia describes two different women as such, and their timelines overlap. What are those stories? Why did she cut off the writing when she did, instead of continuing? I’m left wanting to read so much more of her prose.