joyfuldemise

Last week, a good friend loaned me a huge stack of books from some university Clit Lit course she's taking and I've been completely consumed by them ever since. Top of the list is a book called 'Zami: A Different Spelling of My Name' (Audre Lourde) I know, I know. I cringed at the title too. I hate coming of age stories with a fiery and unmatched passion, but this one is unbelieveable. It's an autobiography (or a 'biomythography'...which also set off my literary bullshit alarm) of a gay black daughter of West Indian immigrants growing up in the 1940s-70s. The writing is stunning, but mostly I love it because it's illuminating a whole new era for me. So much of the books, music and literature I love came out of those decades, so my concept of that time has always been very patchy and hypothetical. That's the trouble with getting all of your history from artists: it's evocative but incomplete. This book is somehow managing to weave it all together in my head and it's like solving a puzzle I've been working on for years. I'm also getting a sense for the historical relevance of a lot of things and how iconoclastic a lot of my heros were. Oh, and as a bonus, it's a really gay book