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‘New living the old in a new way’: home and queer migrations in Audre Lorde's Zami

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0950236x.2011.586784

1470-1308

Stella Bolaki,

Race, History, and American Society

Abstract This essay looks back to an older queer of colour text, Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name that rethinks narrow formulations of the relation of queer and diasporic subjects to the space of ‘home’ before these debates emerged in queer diasporic criticism. Drawing on critics who have suggested that queer migrations entail remaking rather than leaving home, most notably Anne-Marie Fortier and Gayatri Gopinath, I argue that Zami challenges idealized conceptions of home and belonging without abandoning these concepts altogether. My analysis starts by showing how Lorde, departing from the Anglo-American tradition of the lesbian Bildungsroman, queers the ancestral homeland and the childhood home through a kind of translation that demonstrates the dynamic relationship between ethnicity and sexuality in female queer diasporic narratives. It then turns to the lesbian community as theoretical home and traces the process of ‘making home’ exemplified in Zami. Rather than being a straightforward project, this requires continuously attaching home to, and detaching it from, relationships, communities, and places or, in Lorde's words, living in the ‘house of difference’. In reading Lorde's biomythography through the theoretical lens of queer diaspora, my essay seeks to keep open the text's capacity to speak beyond its historical moment: Zami which has been typically read as a work that serves the ‘convenient’ function of ‘making vivid a Black lesbian's position in the world’ looks forward to theorizations of queer diasporas and offers important insights to questions of home and un/belonging. Keywords: Audre Lorde Zami queer diasporahomeblack lesbian Notes For other theorizations of queer diasporas see David Eng and Alice Y. Hom (eds), Q & A: Queer in Asian America (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998); Martin F. Manalansan IV, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in New York City (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); José Esteban Muñoz, Disedintifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Franscisco's Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Anthony Julian Tamburri (ed.), Fuori: Essays by Italian/American Lesbians and Gays (West Lafayette, LA: Bordighera, 1996); Cindy Patton and Benito Sánchez-Eppler (eds), Queer Diasporas (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000); Meg Wesling, ‘Why Queer Diaspora?’, Feminist Review, 90 (2008), pp. 30–47. Lorde's biographer Alexis De Veaux in Warrior Poet (New York: Norton, 2004) explains that Lorde coined this term (found in an unpublished journal from 1981) to reflect the ‘blending of truth, mythmaking, and social history’ in Zami (p. 412, n. 28). I will use Audre and Lorde to distinguish between the narrator (and the author's younger self) and the writer of Zami. Barbara Smith, ‘The Truth That Never Hurts: Black Lesbians in Fiction in the 1980s’, in Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (eds), Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 784–806 (802). Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘Making Home: Queer Migrations and Motions of Attachment’, in Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castaneda, Anne-Marie Fortier, and Mimi Sheller (eds), Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration (Oxford: Berg, 2003), pp. 115–135 (116). Anna Wilson, ‘Audre Lorde and the African-American Tradition: When the Family Is Not Enough’, in Sally Munt (ed.), New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings (New York and London: Harvester, 1992), pp. 75–93 (89). More than 15 years ago, Wilson made a similar suggestion arguing persuasively that Zami addresses not merely ‘the problems of identity politics but also the issues of lesbian aesthetics’ (ibid., p. 78). Wilson's final point in that article, which does not however centre on this topic per se, is that Lorde ‘anticipates even as her textual strategies challenge the white lesbian aesthetic of the moment’ (ibid., p. 90; emphasis added). With the latter, Wilson means the tendency in ‘postmodern’ lesbian narratives of the 1990s to encode subversion in textual, rather than political, terms; a sign, as Wilson notes, of the ‘new pessimism of postfeminism’ (ibid., p. 89). Lorde's achievement in Zami, which Wilson illustrates through her reading, is that she manages ‘to maintain a connection between political and textual subversion, a link that in contemporary discussions of a lesbian aesthetic seems to have become an abyss’ (ibid., p. 90). My own reading aims to keep open the text's capacity ‘to speak forward from its immediate context into the future’, in Wilson's beautiful formulation (ibid., p. 89), and, more specifically, into current discussions of queer diasporas. Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘“Coming Home”: Queer Migrations and Multiple Evocations of Home’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 4.4 (2001), pp. 405–424 (408). All references to this work cited in the essay refer to the following edition: Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (London: Sheba Feminist, 1982). Bonnie Zimmerman, ‘Exiting from Patriarchy: The Lesbian Novel of Development’, in Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland (eds), The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1983), pp. 244–257 (257). Antje Kley, ‘“There Is No Place/That Cannot Be Home/nor Is”: Constructions of “Home”, in Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name’ in Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Heike Raphael-Hernandez (eds), Holding Their Own: Perspectives on the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2000), pp. 119–139. The text has been read by some African-American critics as a celebration of cultural origins and mythic identity, in accordance with the African-American tradition codified and popularised by Alice Walker; See Barbara Christian, ‘No More Buried Lives: The Theme of Lesbianism in Lorde, Naylor, Shange, Walker’, Feminist Issues, 5.1 (Spring 1985), pp. 3–20. For those who have problematised such a narrow interpretation, see Anna Wilson, ‘Audre Lorde and the African-American Tradition’, pp. 75–93. Susanna Egan, Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 131, 134. Ibid., p. 134. Leigh Gilmore and Marcia Aldrich, ‘Writing Home: “Home” and Lesbian Representation in Minnie Bruce Pratt’, Genre, XXV (Spring 1992), pp. 25–46 (32). Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 180. Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘Coming Home’, p. 405; emphasis in original. Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 79. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Penguin 1992), p. 9. Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘Making Home’, p. 129. Alan Sinfield. ‘Diaspora and Hybridity: Queer Identity and the Ethnicity Model’, in Niholas Mirzoeff (ed.), Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing African and Jews (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 95–114 (103). Ibid. Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘Coming Home’, p. 418. For motifs of the lesbian novel of self-discovery, such as that of ‘unlearning’, see Paulina Palmer, Contemporary Lesbian Writing: Dreams, Desire, Difference (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993), p. 41. Lorde has explained earlier in Zami that the strength of black women is legendary in Grenada as is their love for each other (p. 14). Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘Coming Home’, p. 418. Jewelle Gomez, ‘A Cultural Legacy Denied and Discovered: Black Lesbians in Fiction by Women’, in Barbara Smith (ed.), Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), pp. 110–123 (118). Ann Allen Shockley, ‘The Black Lesbian in American Literature: An Overview’, in Barbara Smith (ed.), Home Girls, pp. 83–93 (84). For a past of Black lesbians that dates back to Africa and for the position of Black lesbians in the broader Black American community, see Lorde's ‘Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving’ (1978) in Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007), pp. 45–52. For homophobia in the black community, also see Barbara Smith, ‘Towards a Black Feminist Criticism’, in All the Women are White (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1982), pp. 157–175. Leslie Bow's study Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women's Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) explores a series of recent Asian American texts like Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club (1989), which she finds guilty of such simplistic plot structures. Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires, pp. 193–194. Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘Coming Home’, pp. 409–410. Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, p. 180. Anne-Marie Fortier, Migrant Belongings: Memory, Space, Identity (Oxford: Berg, 2000), p. 164. Martin F Manalansan IV, ‘Diasporic Deviants/Divas: How Filipino Gay Transmigrants “Play with the World”’, in Cindy Patton and Benito Sánchez-Eppler (eds), Queer Diasporas (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 183–203 (195). Lorde writes that women in Carriacou were ‘women who survived the absence of their sea-faring men easily, because they came to love each other, past the men's returning’ (p. 14). In Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (New York: Routledge, 1994), Carole Boyce Davies suggests that ‘the name Zami becomes a renaming of the self as “Black lesbian” (i.e. lesbian as a white identified, Greek-originated term has to be qualified with the adjective “Black” or Latina, or Asian, for example, or renamed). The deploying of the etymology and meaning of Zami is a similar move to find new language and new starting-points from which to express a reality’ (p. 121). Michela Baldo, ‘Queer in Italian-North American Women Writers’, Graduate Journal of Social Science, 5.2 (2008), pp. 35–62 (46), http://www.gjss.org/images/stories/volumes/5/2/0805.2a04_baldo.pdf (accessed 9 May 2010). Ibid., p. 56. For the ways in which African myths inform Lorde's work, see AnaLouise Keating, Women Reading Women Writing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996); Kara Provost, ‘Becoming Afrekete: The Trickster in the Work of Audre Lorde’, MELUS, 20.4 (Winter 1995), pp. 45–59; and Charlene M. Ball, ‘Old Magic and New Fury: The Theaphany of Afrekete in Audre Lorde's “Tar Beach”’, NWSA Journal, 13.1 (2000), pp. 61–85. Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires, p. 11. Julia Watson, ‘Unspeakable Differences: The Politics of Gender in Lesbian and Heterosexual Women's Autobiographies’, in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (eds), De/Colonising the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 139–168 (155). Morrison quoted in Robert B. Stepto, ‘“Intimate Things in Place”: A Conversation with Toni Morrison’, in Michael S. Harper and Robert B. Stepto (eds), Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship (Urbana: University Illinois Press, 1979), pp. 213–229 (p. 213). Jennifer Gillan, ‘Relocating Home and Identity in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name’, in Catherine Wiley and Fiona R. Barnes (eds), Homemaking: Women Writers and the Politics and the Poetics of Home (New York and London: Garland, 1996), pp. 207–221 (213). Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 88. Barbara Smith, ‘The Truth That Never Hurts’, p. 801. For examples of how female queer and ethnic/racial identity are intertwined, see Gopinath, Fortier, and Baldo. Also see Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981); Evelyn Torton Beck (ed.), Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1982); and Barbara Smith (ed.), Home Girls. Leigh Gilmore and Marcia Aldrich, ‘Writing Home’, p. 34. Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘Coming Home’, p. 420. Anna Wilson, Persuasive Fictions: Feminist Narrative and Critical Myth (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001), p. 100. Anne-Marie Fortier and Sara Ahmed, ‘Re-Imagining Communities’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 6.3 (2003), pp. 251–259 (256). As Lorde explains, ‘Role-playing reflected all the depreciating attitudes towards women which we loathed in straight society’ (p. 221): ‘By white america's [sic] racist distortions of beauty, Black women playing femme had very little chance in the Bag’ (p. 224). Lorde notes that she ‘is not cute or passive enough to be femme and not mean or tough enough to be butch’, and adds that ‘non-conventional people can be dangerous, even in the gay community’ (p. 224). Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘Coming Home’, p. 413. Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘Making Home’, pp. 119, 131. Ibid., p. 131. Leigh Gilmore and Marcia Aldrich, ‘Writing Home’, p. 36; emphasis added. Antje Kley, ‘There Is No Place/That Cannot Be Home/nor Is’, p. 136. Robert McRuer, ‘Queer America’, in Christopher Bigsby (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 215–234 (228). See Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman, ‘Queer Nationality’, Boundary 2, 19.1 (Spring 1992), pp. 149–180; Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (London: Harvard University Press, 2007); Judith Halberstam, ‘The Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies’, Graduate Journal of Social Science, 5.2 (2008), pp. 140–156, http://www.gjss.org/images/stories/volumes/5/2/0805.2a08_halberstam.pdf (accessed 9 May 2010). In ‘The Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies’, which criticizes Edelman's No Future for its elitism and apolitical formalism, Halberstam stresses the need for ‘a more explicitly political framing of the anti-social project’ (p. 142). Interestingly, to illustrate the politics of negativity she proposes, Halberstam draws, among others, on the work of women of colour, such as Jamaica Kincaid. Elspeth Probyn, Outside Belongings (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 8. For her notion of ‘outside belonging’, Probyn draws on Montréal's balcony architecture: ‘The example of the balconies in Montréal has no necessary meaning, yet it exemplifies for me a certain movement as different and distinct elements are brought together … Lines of class, gender, sex, generation, ethnicity, and race intermingle as people hang out’ (ibid., p. 5). Ibid., p. 9. Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘Coming Home’, p. 407. Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘Making Home’, p. 130.