Audre Lorde: Black Female Autobiography in Late XX Century

«Even though she learnt to read and write at the age of four, Audre Lorde was very narrow-sighted, legally blind in fact. As Chinn explains, Audre's earliest and most immediate childhood memories are organized around feel, sound, taste, and smell. Certainly, her formative experiences of her mother, Linda, are about extravisual sensations: the pain from her mother's fingers pinching her upper arm, the "warm milky smell" of her mother's sleeping body, her mother's combing of her hair – all occur outside the visible. Consequently, her memory, too, is dominated by the extravisual, which extends into the universal.»

It is a fact that Lorde exploits an accurately descriptive style, in sensual terms. She describes her physical perceptions, apart from those depending on sight, with precision. Her parents' conversation, listened from outside the room where they went to discuss and decide about the children's future, are called "Buzz buzz" (Lorde, "Zami"). The moment when Linda combs Audre's hair is introduced by the picture of the little Audre's hurting shoulders, caught tight between her mother's legs. Not that the visual aspect has no importance. The extravisual is not dominant; rather, it is included in a broader range of sensations which span from vision to touch to smell to instinct, in order to "construct a sense of self based on plenitude" (Chinn 194). For instance, when Lorde narrates of when, as a child, she first met a little girl called Toni, she describes her "wine-red velvet coat with a wide, wide skirt" (Lorde, "Zami") emphasizing at first the immediate visual impression before the little girl gets closer and the sensual range expands. "I reached out my hands and lightly rubbed the soft velvet…I began to finger the small shiny gold buttons on the front of her coat", Lorde writes, enhancing the sensual intensity of the moment narrated.

The importance of getting to know other people mobilizing the entire array of perceptual impressions, the entire bodily receptors, is what Lorde emphasizes in many passages of Zami; she leads the reader throughout a life lived with her own whole body, not just for the sake of descriptive completeness but in order to show that another way of living any situations is possible if one really gets in touch with them. When I say 'in touch', I do not mean only metaphorically. The sense of touch is extremely important for Audre. Not only touching with the hands, but also rubbing one body against another, kissing, feeling hot and cold. Telling about her affair with Eudora, the American white lesbian who had escaped to Mexico, Audre Lorde talks about how it felt to touch a mutilated body. Eudora, indeed, had undergone breast surgery after cancer, and had one of her breasts removed. Ironically enough, Lorde will suffer the same illness and the same consequences later in her life. It is impossible not to read the two books, The Cancer Journals and this episode of Zami, in parallel. The sexual encounter between Audre and Eudora is described step by step through all the senses:

«Our eyes were on a level now, looking deeply into each other. I could feel my heart pounding in my ears … I could smell her like the sharp breath of wild flowers … I looked from her round firm breast with its rosy nipple erect to her scarred chest. … I bent and kissed her softly upon the scar where our hands had rested. I felt her heart strong and fast against my lips … . My body took charge from her flesh.»
(Lorde, "Zami" 143-144)

If one reads the whole episode, Lorde and Eudora's fears, expectations, excitement and desire clearly surface from the author's thrilled description of the meeting, as if Lorde wants to affirm that full contact between women can happen only when there is courage, neither hiding nor prejudice, and recognition of all parts of oneself. When our bodies come wholly into play, then connection among women is established and that bond, conversely, provides the energy that we need to live with passion and true to our full selves. Eudora and Audre are both exiled by a society which feels discomforted with "different" people, belonging to minorities. They are both lesbians, furthermore Audre is black and Eudora embodies mutilation phobia. Moreover, from the ideological point of view, they are both troublesome to the United States of the 1950s and McCarthyism. The two women find each other in Mexico and exchange their force through a physical encounter that quietens their fears, mends their loneliness and feeds their desire. The relationship ends abruptly, mainly due to Eudora's alcoholism. Audre goes back to the United States with a new conscience of her Self and a new social conscience – it is the time of the Rosenbergs' case and desegregation of schools.

In Eudora and Audre's story the scar stands out with a special meaning. The scar is a physical mark which is visible on their bodies. Even though Audre had not undergone surgery at the time of her encounter with Eudora, she already knew what bearing a physical mark was like. Indeed, she was Black, that is to say her skin had a social connotation which was impossible either to conceal or to erase. Just like Eudora's post-surgical scar, Audre's blackness was a visible sign for which she had been discriminated. Bearing on the skin the mark of one's anomaly may generate either sympathy or hatred. In the encounter between Eudora and Audre the mark of the mutilation / anomaly is transformed into something significant in terms of personal identity and recognition, something not to be afraid of or distrust. In other words, "as a sign also of a wound healing, the scar signifies the mutation of the mutilation. That is, the mutilation no longer constitutes a purely negative mutilation per se" (Engelbrecht).

Furthermore, as Engelbrecht shrewdly observes, all women were breastless girls once (ibid.), therefore, in their past (perhaps in their unconscious), all women all know that the body is an entity in perpetual changing, which is not bad. Otherwise, it is a sign of a constant growing up. There is a path that one constructs and follow in one's life, and one improves just by going through it. Scars and other factual evidence on/of the skin are marks of the fight one has fought living his/her life. Blackness, from awkward sentence, becomes a sign of distinction and recognition, rather than a mark of social abjection. It becomes a symbol of the energy spent to affirm one's identity, just like scars, which end up recalling not so much the illness or accident that caused them but the daily struggle to affirm the value of a subjectivity which has been put into question by society, or life's sudden occurrences as cancer. Physical transformation, understood as renewal, is a factor of great importance for Lorde. […]