Throughout, her experiences are painted with exquisite imagery. We live with her through her first primary love relationship and its excruciating conclusion and, finally, an affair with a black Southern woman - Afrekete - whose sensuality and independence equal her own it is a relationship that becomes metaphor for her conciliation with her own reality, and with the world. We share her growing awareness of her attraction toward her own sex her first affairs with women a longed-for trip alone to Mexico at 19-feeling-like-35, on one of those journeys that serve as routes for psychic discovery and life as a ''gay-girl'' in the Greenwich Village of the 50's.
With her, we leave the rigid confines of home - a Washington Heights apartment - at 17 to become marginally self-supporting to endure (at times) hunger, an abortion and Christmas alone. With her, we experience the pain of her gradual recognition of racism (something from which her powerful mother seeks for years to protect her) the suicide of a teen-age best friend for whom she has been able to do nothing.
The reader quickly grows to love the sturdy little black girl - daughter of parents immigrated to New York from Grenada before she was born - who is tongue-tied, unable to see without her glasses who forces herself to stay awake half an hour after her parentally-imposed bedtime in order to listen to the stories nightly serialized by her two older sisters who, in her loneliness, dreams of having a ''little female person'' all her own yet who yearns for the magical moments of privacy disallowed by a stern mother who, considering solitude a social perversion, insists that Audre's bedroom door remain open except when she is studying, constantly studying. Indeed, among the elements that make the book so good are its personal honesty and lack of pretentiousness, characteristics that shine through the writing, bespeaking the evolution of a strong and remarkable character. $5.95.ĬARRIACOU is an actual West Indian island as well as the isle of Audre Lorde's imagination Zami is ''a Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers.'' And while the publisher's claim that in ''Zami'' Miss Lorde ''creates a new form, biomythography, combining elements of history, biography and myth,'' is a bit pretentious, the book is, actually, an excellent and evocative autobio-graphy.
ZAMI: A NEW SPELLING OF MY NAME By Audre Lorde.
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