Being an Outsider

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Audre Lorde was an outsider in more ways than one in the society she was living in and chose to write about. From the time she was four, her characteristics and outer appearances held qualities which enhanced this outsider status. I feel she relished the fact that she was an outsider and was able to write on it, including being able to edit her story to make her appear stronger and wiser for having played this crucial role in society. There are minor and major factors that lead Lorde to view herself as an outsider.

One of the minor factors in Lorde's life that show her outsider status is her family. Lorde knows that she is very different from those around her when looking at her family. She sees the color of the skins of her mother, father, and sisters, as well as her own color and notices right away that her mother could pass for a white woman. Even though Lorde never fully understands why her mother was so hard on her, I feel that this was one of the main contributors to her knowing and first understanding her outsider status. Lorde looks more like her father, but is never around him much. Her dark color gives rise to her feelings of inadequacy and her mother's treatment of her made her always feel inferior.

Her first memories of herself are those looked at through eyes that enabled her only to see the outer shapes of things. Having such bad eyesight was one of the first instances where she notices her difference from others around her outside of her family. In her story where she tells of losing the glasses, she likes the fact that nothing is exactly perfect and all she really sees is the colors of lights and the shapes around her. Her eyesight set her apart from her classmates, having to sit at the front of the room, and reveals her once again she is different. This is also a minor factor in her outsider status.

The first major factor illustrating Lorde as an outsider is the fact that she is a woman. IT is not shown often by itself in her story, but in one particular case where she first notices the differences in gender and how they are perceived in society. This happened when she was running for class elections. She wanted to be president and the positions were for president and vice-president. When the teacher announced that the boy would be president and the girl would be vice-president she felt this horribly unfair. It was her first taste of the ways the world was ran at that time. Men first, ladies second.Cheap Custom Essays on Being an Outsider

A major factor in Lorde's life that demonstrates her outsider status is her color. I am not talking about just within her family. I am talking about when she notices that she is black and that there are racial standards in the world in which she is living. She first sees racism in her trip to Washington with her family when they are refused service at a soda fountain. This injustice, she said, "made me sick to my stomach for the whole rest of that trip," (Lorde, 71). If she had only known then what a long trip it would be for her for the rest of her life in dealing with injustices of that kind.

Her parents taught her that she was never to trust white people. I am not sure if she ever really took this bit of information to heart. I think she knew of what the white people were doing to oppress the black, but I also feel that she noticed that everyone around her that was white was not out to get her. In high school, her white friends never invited her over, but she never had them over either, and yet they remained friends. She noticed the racism of the faculty and in many of the students, and came to understand she was different from them, " not because I was Black, but because I was me," (Lorde, 8).

She found that being Black was hard when she had friends that were white and whose parents did not accept it. Like her own parents not trusting the white people, many of her white friend's parents did not trust the black person. One friend, who invited her to dinner, had parents whom not only disapproved of Lorde because she was black, but because she lived alone. According to this lady "no nice girl left her mother's house before she was married, unless she had become a whore, which in Mrs. Madrona's eyes was synonymous with being black," (Lorde, 10).

Another major factor in characterizing Lorde's outsider status is the fact that she was a lesbian. Her first lesbian encounter was with Ginger, yet she knew something about her sexuality was unconventional way before. I think that her awareness of this may have started with Toni, the little girl who Lorde had met on the stairs outside one day. She had wanted to touch and feel Toni all over to make sure she was real. The second person who opened this awareness to her was Gennie, yet she did not know it was that type of love yet. She knew Gennie as her first real friend, and only later understood her loving for Gennie. After Ginger, she had many other relationships with women. All of these at first were uneasy for Lorde. Meeting women was hard. She had to mainly go to bars, yet she did not like to drink. She says in her story that she felt as if she was the only one. She saw many white women who were lesbians, but it was hard to find other black women who were lesbians.

She had been shocked by the fact that she had seen another girl from her college at a gay bar one night. For a while she had seen herself as the only one in college who was a lesbian. Many times in her life was she shocked by who she saw in the bars or who noticed her as being a lesbian, before she had given any indication of her sexual preference.

The combination of being black and being a lesbian was overwhelming for Lorde. She knew that being woman alone was hard. She knew that being a black woman was even harder. Through in the fact that she chose an alternative lifestyle in choosing life partners and it would feel like the weight of world was on your shoulders. She struggled throughout the entire book with all of these things not only with the society around her, but with in her own mind also. She struggled with her love for Muriel and the fact that "free love" was coming about. She wanted Muriel, but also another so why not share. They tried to work this out, but ended up getting burned.

Another small way in which Lorde demonstrates her outsider quality was in her writing of her relationship with Muriel. Towards the end of the relationship, when Muriel begins to wander, she writes of herself like she is looking in on a scene from the outside with no control over the situation. She sees her control slipping away and feels there is nothing she can do to stop it.

After taking all this in consideration, Lorde was an outsider, but she created this for her readers. According to Ker Conway, she left out many important details that were crucial to understanding who Lorde really was. She created this life for herself in Zami, a life where she was a brave black woman facing the harshness of society without a man, but with a woman by her side. But in reality she was married and had two kids. Many of the attributes she acquired in life cam from her mother. In the book she once said of her mother, "her approach to the world; change reality. If you can't change reality, change you perceptions of it," (Lorde, 18). I guess this is what Lorde did. She changed her reality around to make a better story and to make her look better for it. She chose the experiences she wished to reveal to demonstrate her power and what her position held in this period of time.

Lorde, Audre. Zami A New Spelling of My Name. The Crossing Press Freedom, 18.

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