"Sweet Home": Audre Lorde's Zami and the legacies of American Writing

Although Audre Lorde calls the narrative of her life Zami: A New Spelling of My Name a "biomythography," suggesting that the life of an African American lesbian cannot be told in any previously available generic forms of life-writing or self-expression, Zami actually derives from two extant American literary traditions - the African American slave narrative and the lesbian coming Out story - rendering it, after all, not a marginal text, but rather a text that falls obviously and firmly in a tradition of American literature. Both traditions turn siginificantly on the trope of "home," of finding a home where one belongs. In finding the "home" that she is seeking not, ultimately, geographically, but, rather, generically - in the very text she is writing - Lorde's life story also ends up signifying the similarity of these two ostensibly disparate forms: the slave narrative and the coming out story, suggesting a common narrative trajectory of marginal American identities in the tradition of American life-writing.