The head of the parish and the school was Monsignor John J. Brady, who told my mother when she registered me that he had never expected to have to take Colored kids into his school. His favorite pastime was holding Ann Archdeacon or Ilene Crimmons on his lap, while he played with their blonde and red curls with one hand, and slid the other hand up the back of their blue gabardine uniforms. I did not care about his lechery, but I did care that he kept me in every Wednesday afternoon after school to memorize Latin nouns.
Lorde’s childhood was marred by instances of sexual abuse directed towards her and others that she didn’t quite understand due to her youthfully naive nature. Brady’s frequent molestation of Ann and Ilene is just one example of this as Lorde describes how her annoyance was directed toward Brady's racist prejudice towards her as he kept her late to work on her Latin, not at his systemic abuse enabled by the clergy. Lorde herself was also molested by the comic bookstore owner, as well as pressured by a young boy to have sex with him. She is frank about all these examples of sexual abuse, which would have been uncomfortably familiar to many female readers.
“‘What you think you doing coming into this house wailing about election? If I told you once I have told you a hundred times, don’t chase yourself behind these people, haven’t I? What kind of ninny raise up here to think those good-for-nothing white piss-jets would pass over some little jacabat girl to elect you anything?’”
After Lorde loses her class election for vice-president to Ann Archdeacon, she comes home crying in anger and disbelief. This was one of Lorde’s first experiences with racism. Though she couldn’t control the color of her skin, she worked hard to get the best grades to try and earn her classmates' respect. Instead of electing her vice-president, however, they elected Ann, a conventional white, blonde, blue-eyed beauty. Forgetting that her mother had warned her not to come home upset if she lost, she confides in her, and her mother chastises and slaps her in anger and heartbreak. Lorde’s mother wanted to protect her from experiencing racism as long as she could, and blames both Lorde for not heeding her advice, and the world for not recognizing Lorde’s talents. This is a harsh way to teach a child a lesson, and arguably it didn't work, but it's hard not to see Linda's point.
The last day I ever pounded seasoning for souse was in the summer of my fifteenth year...But my mother was concerned because I was fourteen and a half years old and had not yet menstruated… Yet, since she had never discussed this mysterious business of menstruation with me, I was certainly not supposed to know what all this whispering was about, even though it concerned my own body...But four years before, I had to find out if I was going to become pregnant, because a boy from school much bigger than me had invited me up to the roof on my way home from the library and then threatened to break my glasses if I didn’t let him stick his ‘thing’ between my legs. And at that time I knew only that being pregnant had something to do with sex, and sex had something to do with that thin pencil-like ‘thing’ and was in general nasty and not to be talked about by nice people, and I was afraid my mother might find out and what would she do to me then?
Lorde employs a detailed description of making souse with her mother as a segway to talk about her early experiences with sex and menstruation. Making souse is rhythmic, simple, and second nature for Lorde, unlike sex and menstruation which are mysteries carefully guarded by her mother. Fear and confusion are at the forefront of Lorde’s mind as she wonders if she might become pregnant. When she finally gets her period she is relieved that she’s not pregnant, yet terrified that she has crossed the threshold into womanhood. That terror soon becomes pleasure at her new status, and Lorde’s last time making souse marks her last day as a child and a turning point in her coming-of-age story.
“Things I never did with Genevieve: Let our bodies touch and tell the passions that we felt. Go to a Village gay bar, or any bar anywhere. Smoke reefer. Derail the freight that took circus animals to Florida. Take a course in international obscenities. Learn Swahili. See Martha Graham’s dance troupe. Visit Pearl Primus. Ask her to take us away with her to Africa next time. Write THE BOOK. Make Love.”
Genevieve was not only Lorde’s first real friend, but the first girl she fell in love with. Her death weighs on her conscience—what if she could have saved her? What if she had told her how she felt? What if they had been able to fully experience their love for each other, previously only hinted at by holding hands as they wandered New York City together? Lorde’s memories of her love for Genevieve will shape everyone she falls in love with after.
It was a choice of pains. That was what living was all about. I clung to that and tried to feel only proud.
Lorde becomes pregnant and immediately knows she cannot keep the child. She has no qualms about getting rid of it; she doesn't dwell on any guilt stemming from a Judeo-Christian ideology, nor does she berate herself for not wanting to be a mother at this point in time. She is mostly concerned with the physical pain, which is an honest and relatable state of mind. Here in this quote, she tries to be rational with herself, not allowing herself to regret her decision. Having an abortion under any circumstances still meets with lack of understanding and compassion but people are especially judgmental of an unmarried woman, and in the eras when the young and unmarried Lorde experienced her abortion and then wrote about it, she was one of very few voices willing to do so.
Any world which did not have a place for me loving women was not a world in which I wanted to live, nor one which I could fight for.
Lorde's roommate Rhea is a white Marxist political activist, and while she does not personally seem to have a problem with Lorde being a lesbian (though she feigns ignorance), her political cadre has no tolerance for homosexuality. Lorde reflects on this, knowing that she is liberal and shares many of the same beliefs as these people, but, as the quote expresses, she cannot come to terms with their narrow-minded, ignorant, and intolerant views about whom she can love. Lorde knows who she is and has no interest in sublimating that for politics. In fact, she holds all of her identities—Black, female, lesbian, artist, liberal—at once, not needing to elevate one over the other or agonize about which matters more.
The Black gay-girls in the Village gay bars of the fifties knew each other's name, but we seldom looked into each other's Black eyes, lest we see our own aloneness and our own blunted power mirrored in the pursuit of darkness.
Lorde writes openly about how difficult it was for Black lesbians to find community, even in the progressive and bohemian Village. In fact, Zami is, as Monica B. Pearl writes, "an effort to find community." In this quote Lorde writes of Black women's eyes literally and figuratively, creating an image of two flesh-and-blood Black women passing each other on the street and not looking at each other deliberately, and also Black women ignoring fully engaging with each other because they are too ensconced in their own loneliness and need to survive.
I started to wear the West Indian bangles my mother had brought back from Grenada for me. They covered up the scars and the discolored skin, and I no longer had to give explanations of what had happened.
This is a simple image but one that is highly symbolic. This scene is in the aftermath of her breakup with Muriel, in which she poured boiling water on her arm to forget her immense emotional pain. First, Lorde chooses to wear something from her mother. At this point Lorde and her mother were not in frequent contact, but in her attempt to heal, Lorde reaches for something from her mother, from her childhood. Though she does not explicitly say it, it can be inferred that this brings her comfort. And second, these are West Indian bangles—they speak to Lorde's ancestry, her Afro-Caribbean roots. Though the bangles cannot fully heal her wound, they can at least cover up the scars and help her move past this trauma.
We slipped off the cotton shifts we had worn and moved against each other's damp breasts in the shadow of the roof's chimney, making moon, honor, love...
Much of Lorde and Kitty's relationship embodies "womanism," a term created by Alice Walker to describe Black women's particular experiences (as opposed to feminism, which tended to privilege white women). Walker wrote that womanists were women who loved other women, whether sexually or non-sexually. A womanist, she stated, “loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Love struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless." In this scene in which these two Black women make love under the moon (which alludes to the connection between women/goddesses and the natural world), we see womanism in its fullest, most sustaining embodiment.
Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me—so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins. Another meeting.
A traditional autobiography or bildungsroman privileges the self. It is a narrative of the individual, navigating the vicissitudes of their life. Others certainly factor in, but are mostly viewed as peripheral. Certainly Zami, which is in the first-person and is one woman's story, contains elements of those forms. Yet for Lorde, community is more important than the individual. Women in her life are fairly and fully depicted. She frankly acknowledges their influence on her. And, perhaps most importantly, the name she chooses for herself is not simply a name for a single person—it is a name for all women who love women.
