77 pages • 2 hours read
Audre LordeZami: A New Spelling of My Name
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Racism
Throughout the narrative, racism plays an integral part to Audre’s development. It is an injustice which Audre has always had to suffer, a reality that extends into every aspect of her life. During her time in school, she was subjected to both subtle and blatant racism at the hands of her teachers:
If the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament […] had been patronizing, at least their racism was couched in the terms of their mission. At St. Catherine’s School, the Sisters of Charity were downright hostile. Their racism was unadorned, unexcused, and particularly painful because I was unprepared for it (59).
After the subtler microaggressions experienced at her first school, which included labeling the students as good Fairies and bad Brownies, Audre is unprepared for the blatant racism of the next school she attends. She suffers severe psychological trauma as a result of this racism, feeling that she does not belong in this academic setting, which is meant to protect children from the outside world. Unfortunately, school merely serves to reinforce the systemic racism apparent within American society.
The racism that Audre experiences is not confined to school. In spite of her parents’ refusal to acknowledge racism, she and her family still experience it firsthand, such as the time when they go to Washington, D.C. and are not allowed to eat ice cream within the shop. Audre’s recounting of her family’s response to being refused service is telling: “Straight-backed and indignant, one by one, my family and I got down from the counter stools and turned around and marched out of the store, quiet and outraged, as if we had never been Black before” (70). Audre’s response indicates that this is not an unusual situation; rather, she suggests that this is what black people have to suffer every day in America. She presents this racism as prevalent, in spite of her parents’ attempts to shield their daughters from this reality.
Similarly, Audre presents the idea of white privilege long before it became a talking point. When she talks to a white friend about getting an abortion, her friend does not understand why she wouldn’t just put the baby up for adoption: “She was one of the people I had consulted, and she wanted to have nothing to do with an abortion, saying I should have the baby. I didn’t bother to tell her Black babies were not adopted” (111). Her friend has not considered the reality of being black in America merely because she does not have to; her whiteness precludes her from anticipating how race affects things such as adoption rates; Audre, however, knows that no one will willingly adopt her baby.
Audre also acknowledges that she has internalized the racism of society, specifically in considering the women that she sleeps with: “During the fifties in the Village, I didn’t know the few other Black women who were visibly gay at all well. Too often we found ourselves sleeping with the same white women” (177). Lorde speaks to the white male gaze the gay community has appropriated as a standard of beauty. In this way, she sees the gay community as perpetuating racist systems of oppression commonly prevalent in American society.
Similarly, Audre presents the idea of colorblindness that was prevalent throughout the gay scene as merely another facet of racism. Many of her friends try to refuse to see race as an issue by refusing to see race altogether:“And we would all rather die than have to discuss the fact that it was because I was Black, since, of course, gay people weren’t racists. After all, didn’t they know what it was like to be oppressed?” (180).
However, this attitude of colorblindness does not differentiate between systems of oppression. Many years later, Audre identifies how the oppression suffered by the gay community is different from the racism she encountered as a result of her skin color. She knows she is not able to hide her skin color, whereas she could remain closeted regarding her sexuality within overtly-hostile environments. In this way, racism becomes a common method for propelling the narrative forward as the narrator, forcing Lorde to grapple with the various intersections of her identity.
The Magic of Femininity
Throughout the narrative, Lorde communicates the nature of femininity as possessive of magical qualities. The magical nature of femininity is first seen through the narrator’s observation of her mother’s knowledge. Lorde believes that Linda possesses knowledge in a manner in which lends her complete power and represents a kind of divine capacity of female authority. Audre describes Linda as being a kind of soothsayer in terms of other people’s actions and believes that this is a quality passed down in the mother’s blood; that is, that Linda’s femininity and responsiveness to female authority—such as the Virgin Mary—is in turn responsible for her own semi-divine capacity.
Throughout Audre’s childhood, Audre believes in the capacity for magic; however, this magic was tied explicitly to femininity. As a lonely child, Audre desired nothing more than female companionship, resorting to magical means in order to accomplish this goal:
Most of my childhood fantasies revolved around how I might acquire this little female person for my companion. I concentrated upon magical means, having gathered early on that my family had no intention of satisfying this particular need of mine […] My magical endeavors, done often enough, and in the right places, letter-perfect and with a clean soul, would finally bring me a little sister […] I frequently imagined my little sister and I having fascinating conversations together while she sat cradled in the cupped palm of my hand(34-35).
While these fantasies might seem like merely the recourse of a depressively lonely and isolated child, the nature of this belief in the female capacity for magic cannot be ignored. It is important that Audre expects her companion to be a fantastically tiny sister, as though the nature of femininity renders it capable of such magic. In this way, the dynamism of femininity extends both to Audre’s creation of the tiny sister and to the tiny sister herself as though the magic of femininity can also be transferred. It would suggest, therefore, that part of the magic of femininity lies within its communal nature; that is, within the grouping and togetherness of females. Although she was unsuccessful in this magical venture, Audre’s belief in the magical associated with female companionship extended to her treatment of women as an adult.
Similar to Linda’s preternatural capability to foresee people’s actions, Audre has an understanding and a knowledge of sexuality that extends beyond herself. One couldcall her ability to know women’s desires and bodiesmagical, especially considering how relatively isolated she was from other people as a child. When Audre makes love to Ginger for the first time, she recognizes lovemaking to a woman as something she has already known how to do:“The sweetness of her body meeting and filling my mouth, my hands, wherever I touched, felt right and completing, as if I had been born to make love to this woman, and was remembering her body rather than learning it deeply for the first time” (139).
More than an aspect of her identity, Audre’s sexual experience with Ginger reads like déjà vu: she has touched this woman’s body before and she knows it intimately. This sexual intercourse represents a kind of memory for Audre, despite the fact that she has never made love to a woman before. It is as though Audre taps into a kind of communal memory bank; she believes that fate has made it so that their paths have crossed, suggesting that they have indeed met before. This kind of understanding of one’s identity can only be viewed as magical as the energy transferring between the coupling of two women’s bodies makes Audre feel complete. In this way, the magic of femininity is tied again to the communal aspect of femininity, the magic of which helps Audre to better understand her own identity.
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