Content area
Full Text
INTRODUCTION
In this article I provide a close analysis of Audre Lorde's biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, examining how Lorde writes individual and collective memories, erotic and traumatic memories, and homeland memories as they relate to self-invention and self-narration.1 Using the theories of the philosopher Edward Casey, I propose that Lorde depicts two forms of embodied memory in this text: erotic embodied memory and traumatic embodied memory. While Lorde does share a few incidents of traumatic memories to break the silence-the painful memories of her family experiencing everyday and systemic racism in her childhood, the loss and death of her friend Genevieve, along with experiences of sexual assault during her girlhood-Lorde is more interested in elaborating on the empowerment of erotic memories for herself and for other women. Erotic embodied memories are found in narratives and rituals of food preparation, in Lorde's recall of intimate relationships with her multiple female lovers, as well as in her sensual mythical invention of homeland Africa as symbolized by Afrekete. I note that by discovering her sexual awakening and same-sex desire through narrative or storytelling, Lorde is able to arrive at self-authorization and self-affirmation, writing her subjectivity and personal history through the embodied erotic. Lorde's life narrative shows us that the erotic can be deeply connected to a woman's writing, creativity, spirituality, and potentiality. In emphasizing the memories of the embodied erotic through life narration, Lorde reminds us of the importance of reclaiming and practicing what I call "the ethics of pleasurable feminism," that is, the reclamation of female embodiment, female pleasure, and female sensuality as an activist sacred site to counter the patriarchal, racialized, and heteronormative oppressions that so many women experience in our daily lives. Throughout the memoir memory narratives serve as a way to deal with the tension between Lordes wish to cherish the Afro-Caribbean creolized legacy and cultural memories she inherits from her mother and foremothers, and her need to break away from cultural and social traditions and expectations in order to write her own subjectivity and history toward a narrative space of freedom and self-autonomy. Lordes text, in working through this tension, is a manifestation of both individual and collective or cultural memories and of self-invention.
Writing from a wounded individual...