Zami Quotes

A choice of pains. That's what living was all about.

I cried to think of how lucky we both were to have found each other, since it was clear that we were the only ones in the world who could understand what we understood in the instantaneous manner in which we understood it.

Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me-so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins.

I wasn't cute or passive enough to be "femme," and I wasn't mean or tough enough to be "butch." I was given a wide berth. Non-conventional people can be dangerous, even in the gay community.

Dark-bright fire lit eyes

I forgot what we were celebrating. Because we were always celebrating something, a new job, a new poem, a new love, a new dream.

You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. but people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid that poin was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret of not being hurt like this again, I decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving. It is the last dream of children, to be forever untouched.

I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.

Any world which did not have a place for me loving women was not a world in which I wanted to live, nor one which I could fight for.

It is the images of women, kind and cruel, that lead me home

Each one of us had been starved for love for so long that we wanted to believe that love, once found, was all-powerful. We wanted to believe that it could give word to my inchoate pain and rages; that it could enable Muriel to face the world and get a job; that it could free our writings, cure racism, end homophobia and adolescent acne.

To go to bed and to wake up again day afte day besides a woman, to lie in bed with our arms around each other and drift in and out of sleep, to be with each other not as a quick stolen pleasure, nor as a wild treat but like sunlight, day after day in the regualr course of our lives. I was discovering all the ways that love creeps into life when two selves exist closely, when two women meet.

I lost my sister, Gennie, to my silence and her pain and despair, to both our angers and to a world’s cruelty that destroys its own young in passing - not even as a rebel gesture or sacrifice or hope for another living of the spirit, but out of not noticing or caring about the destruction. I have never been able to blind myself to that cruelty, which according to one popular definition of mental health, makes me mentally unhealthy.

It's difficult to talk about double messages without having a twin tongue.

I am a reflection of my mother's secret poetry as well as of her hidden angers.

I have always wanted to be both man and woman...to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks. I would like to enter a woman the way any man can, and be entered--to leave and to be left--to be hot and hard and soft all at the same time in the cause of our loving.

Maybe that is all any bravery is, a stronger fear of not being brave.

I knew what it was like to be haunted by the ghost of a self one wished to be, but only half-sensed.

In a paradoxical sense, once I accepted my position as different from the larger society as well as from any single-sub-society--black or gay--I felt I didn't have to try so hard. To be accepted. To look femme. To be straight. To look straight. To be proper. To look "nice". To be liked. To be loved. To be approved. What I didn't realize was how much harder I had to try merely to stay alive, or rather, to stay human. How much stronger a person I became in that trying.

Being women together was not enough. We were different. Being gay-girls together was not enough.We were different. Being black together was not enough. We were different. Being black women together was not enough. We were different. Being black dykes together was not enough. We were different.

DeLois lived up the block on 142nd Street and never had her hair done, and all the neighbourhood women sucked their teeth as she walked by. Her crispy hair twinkled in the summer sun as her big proud stomach moved her on down the block while I watched, not caring whether or not she was a poem.

I have often wondered why the farthest-out position always feels so right to me; why extremes, although difficult and sometimes painful to maintain, are always more comfortable than one plan running straight down a line in the unruffled middle.

As soon as a challenge was overcome, it creased to be a challenge, becoming the expected and ordinary rather than something I had achieved with difficulty, and could, therefore, be justly proud of. I could not own my own triumphs, nor give myself credit for them.

would insist it was something else. It was so often her approach to the world; to change reality. If you can’t change reality, change your perceptions of it.

The breakdown of mummies and daddies was an important part of lesbian relationships in the Bagatelle...For some of us, however, role-playing reflected all the depreciating attitudes toward women which we loathed in straight society. It was the rejection of these roles that had drawn us to 'the life' in the first place. Instinctively, without particular theory or political position or dialectic, we recognized oppression as oppression, no matter where it came from. But those lesbians who had carved some niche in the pretend world of dominance/subordination rejected what they called our 'confused' lifestyle, and they were in the majority.

But I loved her, because she moved like she felt she was somebody special, like she was somebody I’d like to know someday. She moved like how I thought god’s mother must have moved, and my mother, once upon a time, and someday maybe me.

I had discovered a new world called voluntary aloneness.

I remember the warm mother smell caught between her legs, and the intimacy of our physical touching nestled inside of the anxiety/pain like a nutmeg nestled inside its covering of mace. The radio, the scratching comb, the smell of petroleum jelly, the grip of her knees and my stinging scalp all fall into—[italics] the rhythms of a litany of Year’s in my swimming scalp all fall into the rhythms, the rituals of Black women combing their daughter’s hair.

Self-preservation warned some of us that we could not afford to settle for one easy definition, one nearrow individuation of self. At the Bag, at Hunter College, uptown in Harlem, at the library, there was a piece of the real me bound in each place, and growing

Most Black lesbians were closeted, correctly recognizing the Black community's lack of interest in our position, as well as the many more immediate threats to our survival as Black people in a racist society. It was hard enough to be Black, to be Black and female, to be Black and female, and gay. To be Black, female, gay, and out of the closet in a white environment, even to the extent of dancing in the Bagatelle, was considered by many Black lesbians to be simply suicidal.

Rather than the idyllic picture created by false nostalgia, the fifties were really straight white america’s cooling-off period of “let’s pretend we’re happy and that this is the best of all possible worlds and we’ll blow those nasty commies to hell if they dare to say otherwise.

Tardé mucho tiempo en darme cuenta de que nuestro lugar era el hogar mismo de la diferencia más que la seguridad de cualquier diferencia en particular. (Y con frecuencia éramos cobardes en nuestro aprendizaje). Tardamos años en aprender a utilizar la fuerza que esa supervivencia diaria puede conferirte, años en aprender que el miedo no tiene por qué inhabilitar y que podíamos apreciarnos unas a otras en términos que no necesariamente tenían que ser los nuestros.

Nobody wrote stories about us, but still people always asked my mother for directions in a crowd.

I never once gave a thought to the days when I believed that bulbs were starburst patterns of color, because that was what all light looked to me.

I could not let her go, even though so much of me wanted to. An old dream of us together forever in a landscape blinded me.

Sonra Türkler atların dilinden iyi anlarlar. Yani attan a’zami derecede faydalanırlar. At zeki bir hayvandır. İyi terbiye edilirse savaş sırasında çok iyi işler görür.Türkler ata savaş etmeyi öğretirler. Atla o kadar haşır neşirdirler ki onun üzerinde uyuyabilirler. İşte süratlari bundan ileri geliyor. Bizler geceleri onları herhangi bir yerde istirahatte zannederiz.Oysa onlar at üzerinde uyuyarak yol almaktadırlar. Böylece hiç ummadığımız bir anda karşımıza dikilip, hazırlanmamıza fırsat vermeden üstümüze çullanırlar.

I thought it’d be easier here, myself, to live like I wanted to, say what I wanted to say, but it isn’t. It’s just easier not to, that’s all.

this action was a kind of shift from safety towards self-preservation. It was a choice of pains. That’s what living was all about.

Self-preservation starts very early in West Indian families.

But in this plastic, anti-human society in which we live, there have never been too many people buying fat Black girls born almost blind and ambidextrous, gay or straight.

As I say, when the sisters think you’re crazy and embarrassing; and the brothers want to break you open to see what makes you work inside; and the white girls look at you like some exotic morsel that has just crawled out of the walls onto their plate (but don’t they love to rub their straight skirts up against the edge of your desk in the college literary magazine office after class); and the white boys all talk either money or revolution but can never quite get it up—then it doesn’t really matter too much if you have an Afro long before the word even existed.

Even for years afterward white people would stop me on the street or particularly in Central Park and ask if I was Odetta, a Black folksinger whom I did not resemble at all except that we were both big Black beautiful women with natural heads.

told them I had to work out of the city, because I had a fellowship for Negro students. Sol raised his eyebrows in utter amazement, and said, “Oh? I didn’t know you was cullud!” I went around telling that story for a while, although a lot of my friends couldn’t see why I thought it was funny. But this is all about how very difficult it is at times for people to see who or what they are looking at, particularly when they don’t want to. Or maybe it does take one to know one.

I lost my sister, Gennie, to my silence and her pain and despair, to both our angers and to a world’s cruelty that destroys its own young in passing—not even as a rebel gesture or sacrifice or hope for another living of the spirit, but out of not noticing or caring about the destruction.

Zami. A Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers.

The waitress was white, and the counter was white, and the ice cream I never ate in Washington, D. C. that summer I left childhood was white, and the white heat and the white pavement and the white stone monuments of my first Washington summer made me sick to my stomach for the whole rest of that trip and it wasn’t much of a graduation present after all.

Being out of work brought a lot of new and starkly instructive experiences.

We were never dressed too lightly, but rather “in next kin to nothing.

I memorized Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Renascence,” all eight pages. I said it to myself often. The words were so beautiful they made me happy to hear, but it was the sadness and the pain and the renewal that gave me hope.

remember thinking for a while that I was the only Black lesbian living in the Village

I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into me - to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks.

Fair, fair, what's fair, you think? Is fair you want, look in god's face.' My mother was busily dropping onions into the tin. She paused, and turning around, held my puffy face up, her hand beneath my chin. Her eyes so sharp and furious before, now just looked tired and sad.

Bea sat on the landing for two days, with quick forays downstairs to the corner foodshop for Cokes and trips to the john. She finally gave up and went back to Philadelphia. She left me a note saying that what she really wanted to know was why, this way. I couldn’t tell her; I didn’t know why myself. But I felt like a monster. I had made a desperate bid for self-preservation—or what felt like self-preservation—in the only way I knew how. I hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone. But I had. I promised myself never to get involved like that again. Guilt can be very useful. For the three days this went on in the hallway, Rhea was her usual quizzical and accepting self. I had to tell her about the affair, couched in the fact that it was now over. What she thought about Bea I never stopped long enough to ask, but what she said made good sense to me. “Just because you’re strong doesn’t mean you can let other people depend on you too much. It’s not fair to them, because when you can’t be what they want they’re disappointed, and you feel bad.” Rhea was sometimes very wise, just not for herself. I never forgot that conversation, and we never discussed Bea again. I left for Mexico a week later.

I soon adapted to Muriel’s fascination with gay bars. Whenever she came to the city, she explained to me, she came to go barring. She never felt truly alive except in gay bars, she said, and needed them like a shot in the arm.

You’re very beautiful,” I said suddenly, embarrassed at my own daring. There was a moment of silence as Eudora put down her hammer. “So are you, Chica,” she said, quietly, “more beautiful than you know.” Her eyes held mine for a minute so I could not turn away. No one had ever said that to me before.

There was a pain in Muriel to become herself that engaged my heart. I knew what it was like to be haunted by the ghost of a self one wished to be, but only half-sensed. Sometimes her words both thrilled me and made me weep.

More than twenty years later I meet Muriel at a poetry reading at a women’s coffee-house in New York. Her voice is still soft, but her great brown eyes are not. I tell her, “I am writing an unfolding of my life and loves.” “Just make sure you tell the truth about me,” she says.

The physical realities of the dingy bus slid away from me. I suddenly stood upon a hill in the center of an unknown country, hearing the sky fill with a new spelling of my own name.

But this delectable creature in front of me was most certanly a girl, and I wanted her for my very own - my very own what, I did not know - but for my very own self.

I don't know how long I looked for Toni every day at noontime, sitting on the stoop. Eventually, her image receded into that place from which all my dreams are made.

Why what?” she snapped. “Now don’t be silly. You know why.” But I did not know why.

My father answered the door, and would not let Peter into the house because he was white.

We had bought two dozen capsules on Friday.

said Gennie was in the hospital because she had swallowed poison, by accident. Iodine, from the medicine chest. “But what kind of house is that for a young girl to grow up in? How could she make such a mistake, poor thing? Wasn’t her stepmother home?

Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me— so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins. Another meeting

Muriel and I talked about love as a voluntary commitment, while we each struggled through the steps of an old dance, not consciously learned, but desperately followed. We had learned well in the kitchens of our mothers, both powerful women who did not let go easily. In those warm places of survival, love was another name for control, however openly given

But this is all about how very difficult it is at times for people to see who or what they are looking at, particularly when they don’t want to.

My bed was safety, but my life, too, was bound up in where she put her feet.

Just because you’re strong doesn’t mean you can let other people depend on you too much. It’s not fair to them, because when you can’t be what they want they’re disappointed, and you feel bad.

She knew about bundling up against the wicked cold. She knew about Paradise Plums—hard, oval candies, cherry-red on one side, pineapple-yellow on the other. She knew which West Indian markets along Lenox Avenue carried them in tilt-back glass jars on the countertops. She knew how desirable Paradise Plums were to sweet-starved little children, and how important in maintaining discipline on long shopping journeys. She knew exactly how many of the imported goodies could be sucked and rolled around in the mouth before the wicked gum arabic with its acidic british teeth cut through the tongue’s pink coat and raised little red pimples.

On the table behind the built-in bar stood opened bottles of gin, bourbon, scotch, soda, and other various mixers. The bar itself was covered with little delicacies of all descriptions: chips, dips, and little crackers and squares of bread laced with the usual dabs of egg salad and sardine paste. There was a platter of delicious fried chicken wings and a pan of potato-and-egg salad dressed with vinegar. Bowls of lives and pickles surrounded the main dishes, along with trays of red crabapples and little sweet onions on toothpicks. But the centerpiece of the whole table was a huge platter of succulent and thinly sliced roast beef set into an underpan of cracked ice. Upon the beige platter each slice of rare meat had been lovingly laid out and individually folded up into a vulval pattern with a tiny dab of mayonnaise at the crucial apex. The pink-brown folded meat around the pale cream-yellow dot formed suggestive sculptures that made a great hit with all the women present. Petey– at whose house the party was being given and the creator of the meat sculptures– smilingly acknowledged the many compliments on her platter with a long-necked graceful nod of her elegant dancer’s head.

We were like starving women who come to believe that food will cure all present pains, as well as heal all the deficiency sores of long standing.