by Audre Lorde
The casing of this place had been my home for seven years, the amount of time it takes for the human body to completely renew itself, cell by living cell. And in those years my life had become increasingly a bridge and field of women. Zami.
Zami. A Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers.
We carry our traditions with us. Buying boxes of Red Cross Salt and a fresh corn straw broom for my new apartment in Westchester: new job, new house, new living the old in a new way. Recreating in words the women who helped give me substance.
Ma-Liz, DeLois, Louise Briscoe, Aunt Anni, Linda, and Genevieve; MawuLisa, thunder, sky, sun, the great mother of us all; and Afrekete, her youngest daughter, the mischievous linguist, trickster, best-beloved, whom we must all become.
Their names, selves, faces feed me like corn before labor. I live each of them as a piece of me, and I choose these words with the same grave concern with which I choose to push speech into poetry, the mattering core, the forward visions of all our lives.
Once home was a long way off, a place I had never been to but knew out of my mother’s mouth. I only discovered its latitudes when Carriacou was no longer my home.
There it is said that the desire to lie with other women is a drive from the mother’s blood.
Acknowledgments
May I live conscious of my debt to all the people who make life possible.
From the bottom of my heart I thank each woman who shared any piece of the dreams/myths/histories that give this book shape.
In particular I wish to acknowledge my gratitude to: Barbara Smith for her courage in asking the right question and her faith that it could be answered; Cherríe Moraga for listening with her third ear and hearing; and to them both for their editorial fortitude; Jean Millar for being there, when I came up for the second time, with the right book; Michelle Cliff for her Island ears, green bananas, and fine, deft pencil; Donald Hill who visited Carriacou and passed the words on; Blanche Cook for moving history beyond nightmare into structures for the future; Clare Coss who connected me with my matrilineage; Adrienne Rich who insisted the language could match and believed that it would; the writers of songs whose melodies stitch up my years; Bernice Goodman who first made a difference of difference; Frances Clayton who holds it all together, for never giving up; Marion Masone who gave a name to forever; Beverly Smith for reminding me to stay simple; Linda Belmar Lorde for my first principles of combat and survival; Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins and Jonathan Lorde-Rollins who help keep me honest and current; Ma-Mariah, Ma-Liz, Aunt Anni, Sister Lou and the other Belmar women who proofread my dreams; and other who I can not yet afford to name.
THE BEGINNING
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PENGUIN CLASSICS
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First published in the United States of America by Persephone Press 1982
First published in Penguin Classics 2018
Copyright © Audre Lorde, 1982
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover: Revolutionary Sister by Dindga McCannon, 1971
(Mixed media construction on wood)
© Dindga McCannon/Brooklyn Museum
ISBN: 978-0-241-35109-3
CHAPTER 1
fn1 Years later, as partial requirement for a degree in library science, I did a detailed comparison of atlases, their merits and particular strengths. I used, as one of the foci of my project, the isle of Carriacou. It appeared only once, in the Atlas of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which has always prided itself upon the accurate cartology of its colonies. I was twenty-six years old before I found Carriacou upon a map.
