#biomythography

I’m finally getting back to Zami and it’s heavy. Beautiful, of course, and smart, and very real. The trauma she had experienced already as a child, which is not necessarily named as trauma but whose effects still show is a lot. Forms of pain I would never have imagined happening. Funny how her biography being set a half-century before I’m used to seeing these kinds of narratives changes it, weights the punch more heavily.

On the slow Saturday local back to my furnished room in Brighton Beach the cramps began, steadily increasing. Everything’s going to be alright now, I kept saying to myself as I leaned over slightly in the subway seat, if I can just get through the next day. I can do it. She said it was safe. The worst is over, and if anything goes wrong I can always go to the hospital. I’ll tell them I don’t know her name, and I was blindfolded so I couldn’t know where I was.

I wondered how bad the pain was going to get, and that terrified me more than anything else. I did not think about how I could die from hemorrhage, or a perforated uterus. The terror was only about the pain.

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Audre Lorde, pg. 110.

I came of age beneath a haze of reproductive rights repression rhetoric. My adolescence was spent in a Catholic school, being taught ‘family life’ instead of sex ed, where groups traveling to DC for the annual March For Life were encouraged and the one girl who became pregnant and stayed pregnant was asked to leave the school. Abortion had been legal for my entire lifetime, I never knew the world of kitchen table abortions with dirty tools, whispered pleas from women “in trouble” desperate to find a contact who could help them, the fear and the risks of controlling your own body.

But now it feels like this world is staring us in the face once again. Threats to defund Planned Parenthood, more restrictive legislation that further limits access to abortion, the prospect of a conservative stacked Supreme Court who could overturn Roe vs. Wade, and anti-choicers leading a new attack on birth control ring in my ears all at once. The image of Gerri Santoro dead on the floor floats in front of my eyes. I have been very afraid.

The description by Audre Lorde of undergoing an illegal abortion on in the early 1950s in her biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name is moving, terrifying, and sickening. She describes obtaining a foley catheter, which is inserted, pushed through her cervix into her uterus, which causes the embryo to detach and the uterine lining to be shed. The description at the beginning of this post is immediately after the procedure, pain followed by new pain, fear compounding fear.

Like you have the og thats Zami by Audre Lorde that is just fantastic.

Revisiting old texts and works I’ve encountered as I kick up this old tumblr for research!