Audre’s family hears about Pearl Harbor from their father, who comes home and goes straight to the radio to listen. She is a child of black parents from the West Indies. She has a young friend named Gennie who commits suicide and who was Audre's first love. everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Zami, a New Spelling of My Name. In her essay “Becoming Her Mother’s Mother,” Stephanie Li writes, “The vexed relationship between Lorde and her mother is the foundation of the poet’s journey to voice and home in the text” (Li 141).
Bea’s ex-lover, Lynn, comes to live with them.
Chapter 19 Summary.
Here, Lorde describes the intimacy between mother and daughter in a sensual way, with Linda particularly eroticized with her “warm mother smell […] between her legs.” The eroticism adds to Linda’s power, while it also sparks “Audre’s process of associating the strength and authority of the maternal figure with the pleasure and power of the erotic” (Jacobs). What was the third designation?” (Lorde 15). Audre explains how much she learned to love pounding spices and cooking and the beauty of her mother's mortar.
Linda’s eroticism not only reflects Lorde’s own desire to connect emotionally with her mother and her motherland, but it also reflects Lorde’s belief that eroticism is a mode of female empowerment. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again. From this perspective, her claim to a lesbian legacy is not ‘fictive’ […] but rather operates through a definition of lesbianism that is not limited to sexual desire. Order our Zami, a New Spelling of My Name Study Guide, teaching or studying Zami, a New Spelling of My Name. At 15, she had just finished her first year and decides to read some books about menstruation... (read more from the Chapters 10 - 12 Summary), Get Zami, a New Spelling of My Name from Amazon.com.
Li, Stephanie. “lesbianism is a subject position derived most importantly from the presence of a powerful maternal figure. And after high school she leaves home, dates a boy named Peter who impregnates her. 1 Apr. By naming queerness in a non-pathologized way, Carriacou continues to make a space for queerness within the culture. Herek, Gregory M. “Homosexuality and Mental Health.” Homosexuality and Mental Health. If Lorde had not been connected to Carriacou through her mother, queerness and female empowerment would have been even more difficult to come to terms with. 139–63. Print. She refers to them as “Black dykes,” using the term in a broader sense, “in the sense of powerful and women-oriented women […] And that includes my momma” (Lorde 15). Special offer for LiteratureEssaySamples.com readers. Queerness exists in America as a diagnosis instead of a word. On Carriacou, a legend says that lesbianism is prevalent among the women on the island “who survived the absence of their sea-faring men” (Lorde 14). Lorde recognizes that her mother is “a very powerful woman, […] something else quite different from ordinary woman, from simply ‘woman.’ It certainly did not, on the other hand, equal ‘man.’ What then? Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful. Naming and language is extremely important in the development of identity and self-concept, which Lorde recognizes when she goes to Mexico: “For the first time in my life, I had an insight into what poetry could be. everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Zami, a New Spelling of My Name. Lorde, Audre. Zami, a New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde. Lorde, Audre. The desire to connect with her mother, the woman who ties her to the motherland of Carriacou, directly relates to Lorde’s desires for a sense of home, belonging, and community.
There she meets her next love, Ginger. Published by BookRags.
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name Chapters 15-18 Summary & Analysis. She continues, pondering what the difference is, coming to the conclusion that there is a certain queerness about powerful women. Audre goes to New York City to see her family, who she has not visited for a year and a half. In the epilogue of the book, Lorde writes, “There [Carriacou] it is said that the desire to lie with other women is a drive from the mother’s blood,” which strengthens her mother’s role in Audre’s construction of her queer, Black, female identity because same-sex desire stems directly “from the mother’s blood” (Lorde 256). “Mothering Herself: Manifesto of the Erotic Mother in Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S, 40.4 (2015): 110-128. She is very unhappy in college and moves to Connecticut to find work. She returns to New York after her father's death. Lorde’s mother was an immigrant from Carriacou, a place that Lorde had never been and could not find on a map until she “was twenty-six years old” (Lorde 14). She has an abortion. It is of a foreign wood and carved with fruit and is among one of Audre’s most favorite things that her mother owns. Lorde repeats this word and definition on several occasions throughout the book. 2017. Zami, a New Spelling of My Name - Chapters 10 - 12 Summary & Analysis Audre Lorde This Study Guide consists of approximately 23 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Zami, a New Spelling of My Name.
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In her 1984 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power,” Lorde distinguishes between eroticism and pornography by describing the erotic “as an assertion of the life-force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives” (Lorde 55). During the summer of 1955, Audre works at the library and Muriel does odd jobs for their friends. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name Chapters 19-22 Summary & Analysis. Lorde’s relationship with Linda is strongly connected to Linda’s ties to Carriacou, the motherland; Lorde’s seemingly physical and erotic desires surrounding her mother represent a longing beyond physicality.