zeitgeist

What histories have you lived?

The first time I read Zami, I was preggo with my first kid and 19. A girl I’d been in love with back in California showed up unannounced on my doorstep in rural Italy to bring me the book and a long letter about how she felt about my pregnancy. (In hindsight, this was the behavior of someone who was also in love with me, but I was too pregnant and disastrous to see it that way.)

I read Zami again in my early 30s, around the age that narrative ends, when I was living in Portland—in that city’s queer renaissance—and starting to explore biomythography as a genre for my own writing.

I just read it once more—I’m 55, in Oakland, older than most of the characters in Zami, but also reading it now as an historical document as well as all the things it has been to me before: a roadmap to coming of age and trying to stay ourselves, a love story and an apology to a dead friend, a political memoir, a poetic memoir.

The term biomythography is Lorde’s. It’s what it sounds like: a hybrid of memoir and myth. We might call it autofiction. But it’s also political memoir and an effort to memorialize and preserve a lived history for the generations to come. A mid 20th century black lesbian history.