Bibliography
May. 1st, 2011 02:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyZami: A New Spelling of My Name - Audre Lorde
I read this as part of my research for the article I'm writing on queering classical reception, but I figured that in the end it deserved a note in the bibliography files. It's was labeled by Lorde herself as a genre of 'biomythography' - I don't know how much leeway she allowed herself in terms of padding her recollections, but it makes for a wonderful memoir. Lorde tells her story from her childhood in Harlem in the 1930s up to the late fifties, when Lorde is living in the Village and trying to negotiate the intersectionality of her identity as a woman, a lesbian and Black. It's pretty powerful stuff, and I really would recommend reading it as it's written astonishingly well, with beautifully vivid imagery.
Some themes. Growing up, developing a character, working through periods of transition. Much of this is focused around Lorde's engagement with her lesbianism, but there are also broader questions of growing up and finding oneself, including the year Lorde spent in Mexico as a student at the National University of Mexico. Wrestling with sexual identity is only part of that broader question of growing up - Lorde also has to work through what it means to be a woman and to be a Black woman at that in her world. Her honesty and perceptive comments on those problems are - well, if you ever need to recommend someone something to read to understand the concept of intersectionality, the idea that different systems of oppression combine in different ways and that the liberation project cannot look at only one system of oppression because it will then reinforce the other systems of oppression in action, then tell them to read this book. It beautifully illustrates the dilemma, the awareness Lorde has of not being in the same position as her Italian lover, the deliberate choice to ignore these conflicting dynamics that her group of non-role-playing lesbian friends in the Village made in order to keep their integrity as lesbians who didn't subscribe to the butch/femme mentality. The loneliness of being the only Black woman she knew who didn't straighten her hair.
Relationships between women and how one negotiates them also form a core theme of the book, beginning with Lorde's relationship with her mother and sisters, the girls she attended school with, the women she lived and worked with, and her lovers. There are very few men in this book, apart from Lorde's father, and even then he is more of an absence because of his busy work life (something Lorde specifically dwells on in the book's early portions). Lorde's relationship on her mother is foregrounded in the first half of the book, before Lorde leaves the family home, but her mother's influence continues to seep through the rest of the text in interesting and unpredictable ways. It is... allowed to speak for itself, I think. It is done lightly. But it is also inescapable.
I thoroughly recommend reading this book for all sorts of reasons, some of them literary and some of them political. But read it.
I read this as part of my research for the article I'm writing on queering classical reception, but I figured that in the end it deserved a note in the bibliography files. It's was labeled by Lorde herself as a genre of 'biomythography' - I don't know how much leeway she allowed herself in terms of padding her recollections, but it makes for a wonderful memoir. Lorde tells her story from her childhood in Harlem in the 1930s up to the late fifties, when Lorde is living in the Village and trying to negotiate the intersectionality of her identity as a woman, a lesbian and Black. It's pretty powerful stuff, and I really would recommend reading it as it's written astonishingly well, with beautifully vivid imagery.
Some themes. Growing up, developing a character, working through periods of transition. Much of this is focused around Lorde's engagement with her lesbianism, but there are also broader questions of growing up and finding oneself, including the year Lorde spent in Mexico as a student at the National University of Mexico. Wrestling with sexual identity is only part of that broader question of growing up - Lorde also has to work through what it means to be a woman and to be a Black woman at that in her world. Her honesty and perceptive comments on those problems are - well, if you ever need to recommend someone something to read to understand the concept of intersectionality, the idea that different systems of oppression combine in different ways and that the liberation project cannot look at only one system of oppression because it will then reinforce the other systems of oppression in action, then tell them to read this book. It beautifully illustrates the dilemma, the awareness Lorde has of not being in the same position as her Italian lover, the deliberate choice to ignore these conflicting dynamics that her group of non-role-playing lesbian friends in the Village made in order to keep their integrity as lesbians who didn't subscribe to the butch/femme mentality. The loneliness of being the only Black woman she knew who didn't straighten her hair.
Relationships between women and how one negotiates them also form a core theme of the book, beginning with Lorde's relationship with her mother and sisters, the girls she attended school with, the women she lived and worked with, and her lovers. There are very few men in this book, apart from Lorde's father, and even then he is more of an absence because of his busy work life (something Lorde specifically dwells on in the book's early portions). Lorde's relationship on her mother is foregrounded in the first half of the book, before Lorde leaves the family home, but her mother's influence continues to seep through the rest of the text in interesting and unpredictable ways. It is... allowed to speak for itself, I think. It is done lightly. But it is also inescapable.
I thoroughly recommend reading this book for all sorts of reasons, some of them literary and some of them political. But read it.
