Story Circle Network
Austin Chapter
Reader's Guide

June 1999
Zami

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
by Audre Lorde

  1. Lorde writes that in Carriacou, "it is said that the desire to lie with other women is a drive from the mother's blood." Can this assertion be reconciled with the fundamental tension in Audre's relationship with her mother? What else might it mean?

  2. As she grows up Audre becomes increasingly aware of her (multiplicative) marginality. How does this position influence her emergence as woman and artist?

  3. Lorde chooses to reverse some standard stylistic choices. She capitalizes "Harlem" but uses lower case for the words "america" and "white house." When writing of the McCarthy paranoia, she uses the term "whitelisting." Imagine you could speak to Lorde about this. What would you say to her? What would she tell you in return?

  4. All of Audre Lorde's writing has a remarkable "quotable" quality--"poetry is no luxury," "dismantling the master's house," and "we were not meant to survive," count among her best-known statements. Find a "quotable quote" in Zami that strikes you especially. What about it is so meaningful to you?

  5. Gennie's death is important, but why?

  6. Lorde writes: "We all cared for and about each other, sometimes with more or less understanding, regardless of who was entangled with whom at any given time, and there was always a place to sleep and something to eat and a listening ear for anyone who wandered into the crew. And there was always somebody calling you on the telephone, to interrupt the fantasies of suicide. That is as good a working definition of friend as most." What working definition of friend would you write?

  7. Lorde wrote Zami (1982) after The Cancer Journals (1980), in which she chronicles her long struggle with breast cancer (and later, liver cancer, which killed her in 1992). How would you speculate that this confrontation with her mortality affected Lourde's point of view and narrative choices in Zami?

  8. During the 1960's Lorde married and had two children. Why, do you speculate, did she choose to end the her literary self-portrait Zami just before these events, with no hint even of their eventual happening?

  9. What makes Zami a "biomythography?"