Audre Lorde's Biomythography ZAMI a NEW SPELLING OF MY NAME

If you've never heard the term "biomythography" you're not alone. The term was coined by the book's author, Audre Lorde, who defines the genre as combining history, biography and myth-making. Having read Lord's work "Zami a New Spelling of My Name," (Zami) I would define it as LGBTQIA  literature based heavily on the writer's life.  Zami is from the Carriacou Island for women who work together as friends and lovers.  The story reveals the evolution of a woman, Audre, coming into her own while honing her craft as a poet and a writer. The vivid childhood depicts Audre as the youngest by a decade of three daughters; thus an outsider to her sisters, parents and then her peers. Legally blind since birth, Audre is shunned by school mates and berated by teachers.  Audre stirs our sympathies for her loneliness and admiration at her resilience.  Her transition to adulthood is arduous. She experiences abandonment including the suicide of her only high school friend. The story mirrors many facets of Lorde's life: her immediate family, education at Hunter, and leaving home at an early age. Lorde's writing is a zeitgeist of an era. She covers racism as when her family was refused service at a lunch counter in D.C.  Major events at the time include McCarthyism, the Rosenbergs' executions, Elvis Presley's rising popularity, use of lobotomies to quell deviant behavior, the spread of polio and its eradicating vaccine.   Audre first finds work at a factory outside of NY. She saves money to travel to Mexico where she feels liberated for the first time. "I started to break my lifelong habit of looking down at my feet as I walked along the street." The trials and tribulations rumble through her later years.  However, the banalities of daily life are varnished in a glossy writing style that elevates events into an arena of loftiness.  Lorde claims, "I choose to push speech into poetry, the mattering core, the forward vision of all our lives." The elegance of her prose merits consideration to the plights of being a woman, black and gay. "Being women together was not enough. We were different. Being gay-girls together was not enough. We were different. Being Black together was not enough. We were different. Being Black dykes together wasn't enough. We talked about how Black women had been committed without choice to waging our campaigns in the enemies' strongholds, too much and too often, and how our psychic landscapes had been plundered and feared by those repeated battles and campaigns,"  Holding "ZAMI" back from being solely a bio of social protest is its tender and fiery love affairs. "We had come together like elements erupting into an electric storm, exchanging energy. sharing charge, brief and drenching. Then we parted, passed, reformed, reshaping ourselves the better for the exchange. I never saw Aferkete again, but she remains upon my life with the resonance and power of an emotional tattoo." The turgid unfurling of Zami's life luxuriates in its awakenings and acknowledgements making it worth devoting time to plow through.