audre lorde zami a new spelling of my name

In finding the “home” that she is seeking not, ultimately, geographically, but, rather, generically – in the very text she is writing – Lorde's life story also ends up signifying the similarity of these two ostensibly disparate forms: the slave narrative and the coming out story, suggesting a common narrative trajectory of marginal American identities in the tradition of American life-writing. literary category of feminist Bildungsroman to examine her biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name in which she presents an alternative model of female de velopment in terms of forming a. Both traditions turn siginificantly on the trope of “home,” of finding a home where one belongs. Lorde says that the word Zami is a Carriacou word (Carriacou is a small island in the Caribbean where Lordes mother was born) which means women who work. Although Audre Lorde calls the narrative of her life Zami: A New Spelling of My Name a “biomythography,” suggesting that the life of an African American lesbian cannot be told in any previously available generic forms of life-writing or self-expression, Zami actually derives from two extant American literary traditions – the African American slave narrative and the lesbian coming out story – rendering it, after all, not a marginal text, but rather a text that falls obviously and firmly in a tradition of American literature.

Audre lorde zami a new spelling of my name