Alternative Autobiographical Practices On The Example Of Zami. A New Spelling Of My Name By Audre Lorde

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present women’s alternative autobiographical practices on the example of Audre Lorde’s “Zami. A New Spelling of My Name”. The book, published in 1982, is one of the first non-canonical autobiographical writings by women. The author intentionally gives her autobiographical story a form that goes beyond the autobiography (rooted e.g. in Jean-Jacques Rousseau “Confessions”), both in terms of form and content. The alternative dimension of “Zami” is reflected mostly in Lorde’s attempt to break with a linear timeline of her story. She interweaved different threads of her life to focus on her process of emancipation and self-development as a Black woman, poet and feminist, growing up during the time of racial segregation in the United States (1950s and 1960s). “Zami” emerged from combining biography and myth, historical facts with her poems and dreams. This way of Lorde’s autobiographical writing was categorized as „biomythography”.