For some reason the Devanagari font conversion is stuck on for my blog...how odd. Anyway, I have started Zami just a little bit and am already entranced. I've read a few articles by Lorde before and weren't necessarily as into them - in paraticular, I wrote a piece for Dana's Context for the Study of Sexuality class on how her piece, "The Uses of the Erotic," came across a little bit too my-way-or-the-highway for me, which is actually somewhat ironic(/way off) now that I'm exploring her "difference theory" in this book.
I'm actually presently sitting at work waiting for everyone else (re: anyone else) to arrive and thought I would check in here...so I'm not staring at my notes, but a couple of things that I think are worth exploring in conversation are as follows:
1~ How young Audre's vision impairment is written in. I personally didn't even realize that she was legally blind until she talks about getting glasses the first time and I don't know if that was just me not picking up on something before then or if it was intentional like she didn't know she was blind until she could see. It also would seem to have some bearing on her racial self-understanding. That is to say, what is Blackness without sight? I'm not positing an answer at all....just putting it out there. I think it's also interesting because I guess, even though it's not explicitly stated, that the reason she couldn't tell that people were spitting on her because of her race (and she was able to believe her mother's story about people just spitting into the wind) had to do with her disability
2~ How her being Carribean is an element of her Black American experience. I know that I've heard other people deploy what may be stereotypes about Carribean and African immigrants being somewhat separated from the African-American community, but I don't know how that my different in this time period or if that is true at all. It is an interesting point of examination though.
3~ The sexual charge in the scene where she meets her first playmate. I loved it, and it makes me want to go back and reread "The Uses of the Erotic" along with that passage. Also, it was extremely hot, I must say...
I have loads more stuff but now my boss has entered
4 comments:
Another thing I found interesting about Zami is how sexual her portrayal of her perception of her mother is. It made me think of Freud and infantile sexuality.
Not read the entire book yet, but I like it lots.
Yeah, I definitely agree and felt the same way about the sisters. On the bus to work this morning I read the part where she first learns about their bedtime story telling during their family vacation to the beach and it was interesting because in the lead up, I really thought she was talking about mutual masturbation and even after that she keep refering to her sister's fingers/fingering, which obviously refers to pinching but it is characteristicaly (?) erotic...
Also, who are you, Applepiecrust?
oh, applepiecrust would be me, Shruti.
I changed the eternally desolate thing but still didn't want a completely recongizable name.
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