It also endearingly charts her progress towards becoming a great reader and writer. With evocative and emotive detail Lorde captures the difficult process of establishing an independent state of being within the circles of family, friends, lovers, community and country. She charts her journey towards being proudly “Black, female, gay and out of the closet” in a time and society with widespread racism, sexism and homophobia. We follow her piercing observations of the world around her being raised in Harlem through to her independence and early adulthood in the 1950s. It's a process of understanding and defining herself as separate from the ways in which she has been categorized by her circumstances and the way other people view her. “Zami” draws on much of Audre Lorde's autobiographical experience to form what she calls a “biomythography”. However, they can also attune us to the challenges some face because of a particular individual's identity or circumstances. And that is not speaking.Great coming of age tales are enthralling because we can all relate to the awkward transition from childhood to adulthood. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, 'If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.' And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And the world won't end.Īnd the speaking will get easier and easier. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.

Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. I began to ask each time: 'What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?' Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, 'disappeared' or run off the road at night. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language.' “I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself.

Zami by audre lorde