Silent Speech in Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name Even though, she was born on February 18 1934 as Audrey Geraldine Lorde, her name instantaneously changed to Audre Lorde; “I did not like the tail of the Y hanging down below the line in Audrey” (Lorde 24). She was only 4 years old when she made this decision, already marking her head-strong character, which Audre Lorde possessed throughout her turbulent life. Not only was Audre Lorde a fervent civil rights activist, but also a devout feminist, however she described herself as; “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” and “dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing the injustices of racism, sexism, and homophobia” (Poetry Foundation). A large …show more content…
Moreover, Lorde states in Sister Otsider: Essays and Speeches that; “Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world.” (Lorde 115). In 1982 Audre Lorde’s biomythography (a combination of history, biography, and myth) was published as Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, in which the author addresses all of the previously mentioned issues in a deeply personal manner; “The poet describes how she sought and found the powerful sources of her own language” (Barale 71). Furthermore, “in designating Zami a biomythography, [Audre Lorde] is claiming that only this new category of writing will contain all her identities” (Pearl 298). Particularly, racism and gender inequality, as well as the inability to speak out about these themes play a central role in her novel: “[Audre Lorde] cannot help but craft language to reveal rather than obscure the difficult and painful [moments of her life]” (Barale 71). Consequently, these notions of speech and silence run through Lorde’s novel like an umbilical cord. Therefore, the focus of this essay will be on the intricate relationship between …show more content…
Arguably her awareness of these injustices seem to be the origin of her inmost rage. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Lorde stated that: “For a woman of color, anger becomes the life force that allows her to survive to assert her own existence in the face of oppression that demands silence and servitude” (Lorde 112). However, Lorde is equally disappointed in the fact that “black women do not acknowledge each other, see each other, especially black lesbians” (Pearl 299). She feels like an outsider and longs for recognition, for others like her who understand
Audre Lorde speaks on how anger has affected her throughout her life and how she has dealt with it in her speech “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism”. Lorde is claiming that her anger, which she gets from being oppressed by not only men, but white women too, is her best use of change. She provides many examples of how white woman have completely ignored her struggles and views on racism, which causes her to become angry with them for their lack of awareness. Lorde urges these women to act on their feeling of anger as they are the best avenue to produce change. She doesn’t want these women to keep their anger in check and hide it, but instead harness it and use it as fuel for progression. Lorde concludes her speech by telling these
For this journal entry, I chose to compare Audre Lorde's Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference to the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards. In Lorde's piece, she talks about how oppressed people are often taught to ignore the fact that they are oppressed. We are taught to handle the difference we face by either ignoring them, copying them or destroying them. Lorde says that society as a whole has failed to see differences as a "springboard for creative change." Her article focuses on the fact that refusing to see creative differences makes it impossible to see the different problems and pitfalls women face. Some problems all women share and other problems all women do not share. For example, the experience of a white woman is different
In Zora Neale Hurston’s essay “How It Feels To Be Colored Me”, her racial identity varies based on her location. Towards the beginning of her life when Zora was in her own community she could be a lighthearted, carefree spirit. However, when she was forced to leave her community, Zora’s identity became linked to her race. In this essay I will demonstrate how Zora’s blackness is both a sanctuary and completely worthless.
Sexuality and spirituality thrives as other topics in which Anzaldua combines genres. In this instance she combines history and autobiography. Again this gives a more humane look at history. However, this use is more distinctly personal whereas the previous combination of history and poetry provided a more universal personal approach. This talks about Anzaldúa’s part in history. Anzaldúa writes, “Being lesbian and raised Catholic, I was indoctrinated as straight, I made the choice to be queer (for some it is genetically inherent)” (41). This line is found in a section dealing with homophobia that resides heavily in the cultures she identifies with. While this phobia exists in the culture at large and is recorded as such, Anzaldúa provides a personal account as an example.
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
In presenting herself as a child on the verge of adulthood, Lorde indicated to the reader that the things she learned at this time would be pivotal and important for the rest of her life. For example, at the beginning of her essay, Lorde wrote that her trip to Washington D.C. was “on the edge of the summer when I was supposed to stop being a child” (221). In this way, Lorde’s trip to the nation’s capital and her experiences of discrimination there provided an intellectual
Over the past few years, racial tensions in America have heightened. During this period, Black America undergo the daily struggle of witnessing the killing of unarmed black men and women. Victims of these endless killings and police brutality, turned into one of many hashtags, which led to the formations of the Black Lives Matter movement. Solange Knowles, younger sister of Beyoncé, soul singer and songwriter was viewed as the angry black woman. Solange used her platform to speak up. She became the most outspoken black artist for black activism in recent years. She embodies the image of a carefree black girl who is willing to let the world know that she is proud of her blackness.
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
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
Audre Lorde was born in New York City the 18th of February 1934 of Caribbean immigrants. As a child, the author had difficulties in communication that made her acknowledge poetry and its power as a form of expression, allowing her to become a writer, a feminist, and a civil rights activist. Which is very strong in “Age, Race, Class, and Sex” in which the author describes her feelings using a style of superior journalism with elements of popular culture that leads to racial issues. In order to emphasize more her sociological argument, Lorde uses personal experience as ethos. “As a forty-nine- year- old Black lesbian feminist socialist, mother of two including one boy, and member an inter- racial couple, I usually find myself a part of some group defined as other, deviant, inferior, or just plain wrong”(Lorde, 114). Audre Lorde strength is in her inferiority and points out very actual issues such as: distortion of relationship between oppressor and oppressed and the misnamed differences that still leads to racism.
“Zami: A New Spelling of My Name” by Audre Lorde is often seen as one of the most influential pieces of writing in terms of Black Feminism as well as LGBTQ community. Though it was intended as an autobiography, it covers a wide range of numerous topics, allowing the author to reflect on them from the perspective of her life. The book is filled with numerous details that may seem to be trivial, yet they represent an important aspect of then-contemporary society.
Audre Lorde, a well-known poet, utilized her poetry to call attention over the political issues of class, feminism, sexism and racism for decades. These political issues are the symbols that transformed her into someone who is not just a woman, but a person whom clarifies these issues using poetry as a voice to define herself as a Black lesbian woman and an individual. The poem “Coal” is a poem that represents her ideals and her feelings towards being a voice among other feminists. It also shows her struggle as an individual that is caught between the issues of feminism coinciding with race, class, and sexism, which is also known as Intersectionality. Because of the attention being called from Lorde’s poetry, people should continue to recognize this political issue and utilize it to spread awareness of the prejudice and marginalization of today’s society.
Audre Lorde was born on February 18, 1934 in New York City to immigrant parents from the West Indies. She learned to talk, read, and write somewhere around the age of four and wrote her first poem in eighth grade, which was then published in Seventeen magazine. In 1962, Lorde married a man named Edward Rollins and had two children before they divorced in 1970. However, in 1968 she moved to Tougaloo, Mississippi and met her long-term partner, Frances Clayton. Her earliest poems were often romantic, but in the 1960s became more politically centered due to the amount of civil unrest combined with confusion over her own sexuality. At the time many of her poems were written, more than one-fifth of the nation lived below the poverty line, and
While reading both “On Growing Up Between Genders”, by Stephen Burt and “The Female Body” by Margaret Atwood, I was so moved by both poets writing that I felt as though I was living their experiences with them. Throughout the course of both pieces, I felt emotionally drawn to obstacles of both writers, while understanding their wants of an experience very different from the ones previously given to them.
Crenshaw mentioned in the article, that “the narratives of gender are based on the experience of white, middle-class women, and the narratives of race are based on the experience of Black men” (Crenshaw). Gender and race still influence women’s lives in the society, but this is not the case in feminist and anti-racist practices. An identity is silenced. Crenshaw trying to explore how this intersectional position can be considered when taking into accounts the violence against women of color. I don’t think that intersectionality is better than the discrimination against the poor. But we can think about that the effect of oppression in a specific time and society area. In other words, maybe we can use oppression as an action in the society.