Analysis Of Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name By Audre Lorde

After Roberta found out that Twyla worked there she and the two men she was with laughed at her. Roberta also mentioned that they were all going to see Jimi Hendrix (7). Roberta and Twyla met up again at a grocery store. This time Roberta went up to Twyla to talk to her. Twyla remembered Roberta not wanting to talk to her and only getting greeted with a wow (9). Now Roberta is different than what she was at Howard Johnson’s. Her hair is slick, she dresses like she’s rich, and she lives in a rich neighborhood. Twyla is upset by this because she says that everything is so easy for them and they think they own the world (9). Twyla confronted Roberta about pretending like she didn’t know her at Howard Johnson’s. Roberta responded "Oh, Twyla, you know how it was in those days: black-white. You know how everything was" (13). Through these meetings it is known that Twyla and Roberta are still completely separated by race and class. Despite Roberta being friends with Twyla, she still ignored her and laughed at her for being who she is in front of the two men. She may not have wanted them to know that she’s friends with a poor girl who is of another race and who did not even know who Jimi Hendrix was. Roberta wanted to keep a secret that she associated with someone like Twyla. Twyla saying that they get everything and they think they own the world could be her realizing that the opposite race does not even need to work

When Lorde cannot go just simply because of her ethnicity, is a frightful thing. Lorde has to overcome this because its how the world works now, which is a frightful concept for a young girl to experience. Secondly Lorde experiences discrimination when her family cannot eat in the restaurant because they have a different ethnicity other than white. “The waitress moved along the line of us closer to my father and spoke again. ‘I said i kin give you take out, but you can't eat here. sorry.’”(Lorde, 242). Lorde uses characterization when she uses what the person said to her in the essay. This makes the reader develop an idea about the personality of the waitress. Lorde and her family encounter segregation in this situation. This racism changes Lorde’s view on America. “The waitress was white, and the counter was white, and the ice cream I never ate in Washington, D.C.,

Specifically, she describes the irony behind the Fourth of July. In the beginning of the story, there was a happy and excited tone. As the story continues, the tone becomes angry. She was beginning to feel the injustice that she and her family faced during the trip.  The angry tone continues after she realizes the prejudice that she will continue to face while growing up. Then, at the end of the story, Lorde and her family go to the ice cream parlor. Once they realized the cause of the waitress’s strange behavior, the family became “straight-backed and indignant, one by one, her and her family got down from the counter stools and turned around and marched out of the store, quiet and outraged,” (16) and returned to their hotel. This shows the shame that she felt in this moment, but also the family’s lack of desire to cause a scene. During this time period, many black chose to stand up for their rights and retaliate against the injustice they face, but Lorde’s family rather stay quiet and respect the white people. By the end of the story, the tone changed to sympathetic tone. The reader could sympathize with Lorde on an inscrutable and piteous level because one could feel where the family was coming from. The reader was able to feel their pain of being shamed because of their skin

In the story, she introduces two sisters with almost opposite personalities and different views on heritage: Maggie and Dee. She uses the contrast between the two sisters to show how one should accept and preserve one's heritage. Beyond the contrast between two sisters there exist the judge figure mom, the narrator and the Dee's irony. The irony on Dee's opinion is the key to understand the story and why the mother let Maggie keep the quilts, which symbolize the heritage.

Mama had been so excited for Dee’s visit because she hadn’t seen Dee in years, “You’ve no doubt seen those TV shows where the child who has “made it” is confronted, as a surprise, by her own mother and father, tottering in weakly from backstage,” Mama had dreamed of this day to come because she knew she had done something good for her child, something to be proud of. But upon Dee’s arrival both Mama and Maggie had noticed her change as if she was better then them and understood more of African culture because she had an education, “ I couldn’t bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress me.” Dee had converted not only her name but her clothes and jewelry to make a statement of what “real” heritage is. This quilts led to a controversy between the meanings of their heritage. Ironically for Dee, Mama had offered her the quilts a long time ago but was too interested in appearance rather than the legacy left behind, “ I had offered Dee a quilt when she went away for college. Then she had told they were old- fashioned, out of style.” Then when she comes back, she wants to hang them as décor and doesn’t want Maggie to have them because she’ll ruin them, ““Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts!” she said. “ She’d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use.”

“Do you know what it’s like knowing every day my real mother and brother wonder where I am?” Anne on the other hand lived a normal life with her parents and only started to get confused on who she was when your parents broke the news about Anne’s Aboriginal parent’s sickness. After meeting with her Aboriginal parents, she is still confused on who she is and has the ‘black and white’ voices stuck in her head. White and black voices [together, off]: “How do you think you are?” When Saroo met his biological mother, he understood that he had two families and loved them. However, Anne was still confused after meeting her Aboriginal parents and still has no idea what her identity is, all she knows is that she loves both of her families. Both have the same struggle of not knowing where their parents are, and both struggle to cope with knowing that their parents are still out there searching for them. But in the end they love both their families.

Lorde was a minority in every group that she belonged to, and although she gained support and began to have the ability to self-integrate, she still faced hardships through discrimination. Lorde's feeling that she did not belong completely runs throughout the book: "The ‘time' when I would have to protect myself alone, although I did not know how or when. For Flee and me, the forces of social evil were not theoretical, not long distance nor solely bureaucratic" (205). Here Lorde is pointing out that her struggle is not solely one of a lesbian. Lorde is a double minority in this case because she is a black and a lesbian. This point to the argument in the text as a whole, that Lorde is still a minority even in her own groups, for example, she is even a minority in her own family (the only lesbian) and therefore Lorde's battle of integration did not end at her finding a group of friends.. This emphasizes Lorde's argument that throughout the book, she lives in houses, but never has a home. Lorde, being a double and sometimes even triple minority continues to experience hardship throughout the book. On page 255, Lorde again looks to her friends and lovers as a

One of Hurston’s stories, How it Feels to Be Colored Me, reflects the author’s perspective of the colored race (specifically herself). According to the story, when Hurston reached the age of thirteen, she truly “became colored” (1040). The protagonist was raised in Eatonville, Florida, which was mainly inhabited by the colored race. She noted no difference between herself and the white community except that they never lived in her hometown. Nevertheless, upon leaving Eatonville, the protagonist began losing her identity as “Zora,” instead, she was recognized as only being “a little colored girl” (1041). Hurston’s nickname “Zora” represents her individuality and significance; whereas, the name “a little colored girl” was created by a white society to belittle her race and gender (1041).

In her essay “The Fourth of July”, Audre Lorde described the enlighteningly awful experience of the reality of racism she had during her first trip to Washington D.C. as a child. While Lorde’s older sister had been rejected by her high school from traveling with the rest of the graduating class because she was black, Lorde’s parents decided to take a family trip to the nation’s capital on their own to compensate for such an injustice. Nevertheless, the reality of racism and discrimination the family felt while on their trip foiled their attempt to ignore and overcome such oppression, and led Lorde to view the trip as a frustrating experience. By employing this personal anecdote of her family’s replacement graduation trip for her older sister, Lorde successfully conveyed the impossibility of pretending to live in ignorance of racism and discrimination, and powerfully presented her anger at her family, the black community, and all of American society at trying to do so instead of addressing these problems.

When Lorde was in high school, she experienced indifference but she refused to name what she felt. She ignored the racism and prejudice as long as she could. She decided to join a click which was known as Branded. Though the group was all white, they never discussed their race or their gender. They were

In the prologue, Audre describes her “home” as being a place that could only be from a fairy tale (enchanted even). This home is somewhere Lorde never visited or never observed. She only knows this extraordinary place through her mother’s stories. As Audre grows older, “home” is something she does not have in life. She even expresses that the extraordinary place (Carriacou) from her mother’s stories in no longer the home, she longed for it to be (Zami 256). Even though her home was in Harlem, New York, Stamford, and Cuernavaca, they never felt like home. Throughout the novel, it appears that Carriacou helped Audre deal with the racist society. She finally accepts her character in society as a black lesbian. She in time grows to admit that

Growing up in north London with a diverse ethnic background, her father who is English and her mother who is Jamaican, greatly influences Zadie Smith’s novels and essays, that include the politics of race and the different ways to discover your identity. She studied English and Literature at Cambridge University and graduated in 1997. Six years later she was nominated by Granta magazine as one of twenty “Best of Young British Novelists” and has now been a tenured professor at New York University since 2010. Zadie Smith, a British novelist and Professor, illustrates throughout her essays her writing process and the therapeutic and reflective ways she utilizes writing, whether to mourn her father or to nostalgize her childhood and the impact comedy and report had while growing up, using allusions of influential works and sharing significant childhood anecdotes.

In the book “Desiree’s Baby” by Kate Chopin, Desiree faced a life changing event, her baby was the same color as some of the salves, and her husband blamed he for being for the color of the child's skin. Desiree was a woman living in Antebellum, Louisiana she had a son and a husband who lived on a plantation and commanded slaves. She figured out that her baby had a darker color almost like the slaves, when she realized that he wasn’t tan and he was indeed black, she knew that she had to have some black heritage in her. She couldn’t live with the thought that she was black and would probably have to be sold off into slavery, she took her and her baby’s life. Although some people believe Desiree’s decision to walk into the swamp and take her own life is wrong, because not only her life was taken her baby’s was too

Lorde was a minority in every group that she belonged to, and although she gained support and began to have the ability to self-integrate, she still faced hardships through discrimination. Lorde's feeling that she did not belong completely runs throughout the book: "The ‘time' when I would have to protect myself alone, although I did not know how or when. For Flee and me, the forces of social evil were not theoretical, not long distance nor solely bureaucratic" (205). Here Lorde is pointing out that her struggle is not solely one of a lesbian. Lorde is a double minority in this case because she is a black and a lesbian. This point to the argument in the text as a whole, that Lorde is still a minority even in her own groups, for example, she is even a minority in her own family (the only lesbian) and therefore Lorde's battle of integration did not end at her finding a group of friends.. This emphasizes Lorde's argument that

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde is a book that uses a lot of descriptive words in unconventional ways. These words stick out when read and allow for visualization of things in the way that Audre saw them. Her choices of nouns and adjectives evoke feelings and imagery that involves all of the senses. This is what made the book most encapsulating. An example of an unusual instance of imagery lies in this quote: “Her crispy hair twinkled in the summer sun as her big proud stomach moved her on down the block while I watched, not caring whether or not she was a poem” (Lorde 4). The way Lorde describes the woman’s hair as crispy and twinkling is very unconventional. Those are not words that one would typically use to describe hair,