Zami (Symbol)
The name "Zami" comes from the small Caribbean island of Carriacou, and Lorde's adoption of it as the new way of spelling her own name is a symbol of her respect and love for her heritage and her crediting her mother with her strength as a woman. Her mother always considered Carriacou "home" and Lorde's using the name of "Zami" is also a symbol of the island being her ancestral home.
Nomadism (Motif)
Lorde is a nomad, not just in a geographical sense, constantly moving to and from one place or another, but also in relationships. Although there are many relationships detailed in the book, she admits herself to having only one to which she was committed and which she viewed as a long-term relationship. She is nomadic in nature, moving from one interest, one job, one home to another.
Whiteness (Symbol)
In the aftermath of the Lorde family's shameful incident at the Washington D.C. ice cream parlor, Lorde reflects on the color white: "The waitress was white, and the counter was white, and the ice cream I never ate in Washington, D.C. that summer I left childhood was white, and the white heat and the white pavement and the white stone monuments of my first Washington summer" (71). Instead of symbolizing purity or light or renewal, white symbolizes horror, blankness, the uncanny. Lorde echoes Herman Melville in Moby Dick, who wrote of how the whiteness of the whale "appalled" him, how "there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood."
The Dream House (Symbol)
After Lorde learns why Rhea really left New York for Chicago—she could not be associated with Lorde anymore because she was Black and gay—Lorde has a dream in which she is navigating her parents' house with Rhea trapped inside. Inside the house, "everything is hostile to me" (199), ceasing to work properly. Doors will not open; the house is against her. This dream symbolizes Lorde's freedom from her childhood, from her parents; she knows this is no longer her home and she is free to go, and to purge herself of her childhood traumas.
Dream of Muriel (Symbol)
As Muriel's mental health disintegrates, Lorde has a dream about her. They are standing on the subway platform and no one else around will look at them, and then Muriel falls off onto the tracks where the train rolls over her and Lorde is "powerless to do anything, my heart breaking beneath the wheels" (227). This dream symbolizes Lorde's growing awareness that Muriel is, essentially, doomed—that she going to be harmed and that Lorde can do nothing to prevent or ameliorate such harm.
