Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“My father leaves his psychic print upon me, silent, intense, and unforgiving. But his is a distant lightning. Images of women flaming like torches adorn and define the borders of my journey, stand like dykes between me and the chaos. It is the images of women, kind and cruel, that lead me home.”

Although Audre feels a connection to both of her parents, from the very beginning of the book she acknowledges her kinship and affiliation with women as being more readily apparent than her relationship to men. Although she knows that her father has helped mold her, she recreates the distance she felt between herself and her father, a distance which is reiterated multiple times throughout the text. While the relationship between Audre and her mother is very close, with a physical proximity—her mother is always touching her, either lovingly or in anger—her father is a kind of shadow figure, something untouchable in its divinity and otherness, like lightning.

This quotation also demonstrates the difference Audre feels between her relationships with men, which do necessitate this kind of distance, and those with women, which make her feel at home. Although these relationships can be as kind as they are cruel, they light Audre’s path to finding her own identity. In this way, the author constructs the idea of home as being synonymous with self-knowledge; it is only through the acceptance of the multifaceted aspects of one’s identity that one can truly find a home.