Zami: A New Spelling of My Name - Audre Lorde

Story Summary:

Zami: A New Spelling of my Name by Audre Lorde is a biomythography that tells the story of Audre’s life growing up as an African American in segregated America and her struggles with race, gender, and sexuality, as well as an account of the women who became her friends and lovers and their deep impact upon her life.

Reflections:

In Zami: A New Spelling of my Name, Audre can recollect and identify certain situations and people from her childhood based upon the way that they smelled. For example, Audre recalls shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor that: “I could tell something real and terrible had happened from the smell in the living-room air” (53). These smells remain as stronger and more permanent memories than those she gained from either sight or sound, perhaps due to her hindered vision. Furthermore, the strong scents are generally unconsciously connected to either Black or white, which deepens the level of separation between the two races as it attaches a more negative sentiment to white and positive sentiment to Black.

There are several moments within Audre’s childhood where she associates a smell with something white in a negative way. On page 60, after being forced to stay after school to practice Latin (something a white teacher made her do, but that the other white students were not required to do), Audre recalls: ”Sometimes on Wednesday nights I would dream of the white, acrid-smelling mimeograph sheet” (60). Here, not only is Audre associating a smell with a negative experience induced by white people, she’s negatively associating the smell with the concept of “white” as a whole. Even the mimeograph sheet is white, and its “acrid” scent proves its unpleasantness.

Conversely, Audre associates positive smells with Black people or things. When she was a child, she remembers her mom as “She breathed exuded hummed the fruit smell of Noel’s Hill morning fresh and noon hot,” and associating these things with home and family (13). She also remembers close times with her mother, and “the warm mother smell caught between her legs” (33). These smells have a wholly positive connotation, and their connection to “Black” further separates them from the negative “white” smells. On page 36, Audre even changes an object from white to black with vanilla extract, saying, “I loved the way the rich, dark brown vanilla scented the flour clay” (36). Here the difference between the concepts of “Black” and “white” is painfully obvious, and once again attached with a strong olfactory sense. Audre remembers the “dark” brown vanilla scent changing the white clay from something too white and undesirable to something entirely pleasant.

The difference between “white” smells and “Black” smells is made very obvious on page 60, when Audre’s classmates tell her that she “stinks,” and her teacher further reinforces this fact: “She told me she felt it was her christian duty to tell me that Colored people did smell different from white people, but it was cruel of the children to write nasty notes because I couldn’t help it” (60). While the other smells associated with white and Black were unconsciously attached to a negative or positive sentiment, respectively, this experience brings blatant attention to the problematic associations. By asserting that Black people inherently smell very different than white people, the teacher is making the rift between the two concepts even deeper than the unconscious associations had. This statement makes it the other scent associations no longer seem accidental, but intentional and without hope for change. Although this observation does not remain true much further past Audre’s childhood, as she establishes entirely positive relationships with whites, the positive and negative associations connected to “black” and “white” scents in her childhood mark those years and still leave a lasting “scent” throughout her life.

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