1982
Weight: 14 oz
Method of Disposal: Donating
I am currently on a little bit of an Audre Lorde kick and have just re-read Zami: A New Spelling of my name. One thing I absolutely love about Audre Lorde is that she is so seemingly honest and raw. She is open about things that many people would keep private. I think about her walking the streets with a knife in her coat, not knowing what she is doing or why, but disgruntled with upset about a recent breakup and her girlfriend finding a new partner. This is not okay, and she knows this is not okay. She does nothing with that knife, and she admits to having done it in her biography. She writes about being a woman loving woman and a black woman in a time when that was even more shunned, ostracized, and legislated against than it is now. She talks about trying to form a triatic relationship when no one around her was doing that and how it, ultimately, failed because no one in the relationship really knew themselves all that well. We read about heterosexual feminists who cannot accept lesbianism or queerness of any sort. They have no room in the movement. Lorde writes about the anguish of losing her childhood bestfriend. A friend that came to her for help and who she was unable to help at that time due to her fear of her parents anger. She had no idea that meant her friend would end up dying by suicide, but it haunts her into adulthood. She did not realize the abuse that friend was enduring at the hands of an adult man. And yet, she also shows us beauty, determination, strength, and a will to fight and live.
There is so much packed into this biography about race, class, coming of age, being a woman, loving women and people hating it, loving sex. It ends with Lorde still in her twenties, and she still had so much life left to live. She would pass away at 58, battling cancer, but she packed so much in to the next thirty or so years, and she left the world a more beautiful, empowered place.
I am now re-reading Sister Outsider. I always appreciate the context Zami gives me for the rest of Lorde's work.
No comments:
Post a Comment