Review of "Zami: A New Spelling of My Name" by Audre Lorde

Shamefully I've never heard of Audre Lorde, even though she is quite famous as a poet and writer, and activist. I hope to read more of her (prose anyway, I don't do that much poetry) because she's a very engaging writer, able to write in an articulate, non-academic way about the way that different kinds of oppression interlock and counter-balance each other. She writes about her life as a Black working class lesbian, and this book covers the period in which she is formed as a writer but before she is one. She writes about work, and racism (at school, college and work) and about the various lesbian tribes and subcultures of 1950s New York. 

She's brilliant at depicting the latter, and in bringing the city to life as it was at a very special moment of its history, when it was still possible to live as a bohemian (bourgeois or other) in Manhattan. I wish I'd read it with a map, and it would be great to have a 'virtual walking tour' of the New York she is writing about.

I note in passing that she obviously moved in Communist Party circles, was involved in the campaign to save the Rosenbergs from execution, relishes the very end of the 1940s as a time of hope, and is excited and enthusiastic about the creation of the State of Israel as a sign of that hope.

There's a lot of material about growing up the children of immigrants that I recognise...she wasn't just Black in New York, she was West Indian, which I think makes for a very different sort of Black experience. It would be good to know more about that.