“As much as I need life,
“I grew up as a black person, needing validation, love, and sharing.”

Born in Harlem, New York in the 1920s, Audre Lorde was born to an African immigrant family.
He suffered from severe myopia to the point where he could not see without glasses, and he was a child who began to speak later than his peers.
Audrey's mother, who was forced to be a minority in New York, hoped that Audrey, who was in the same situation as her, would learn and adapt to the rules of the world faster than anyone else. However, Audrey has been fighting to survive against the rules of the world since she first learned to read in a classroom for the blind.
Audrey wears a hood, a symbol of underachievement, and sits in the "brownie" group, which carries racist connotations; she is warned by a nun that black people have a distinct body odor; she is rejected for class president because she is black; and she is kicked out of an ice cream parlor in Washington, D.C., during her summer vacation with her family.


The parents feel guilty only for not having anticipated the possibility of Audrey being subjected to racism in the first place, and demand that Audrey quietly integrate into the world's order.
So Audrey says she identifies as "white" without even hearing the precise meaning of the word "colored," or doesn't hear of Crispus Attucks, the first black martyr of the American Revolution, until she's eighteen, or grows up among geographic maps that don't even mark her mother's homeland, Carriacou Island in the West Indies, without ever revealing her origins, her appearance, or her identity.


But Audre Lorde does not remain hidden or discriminated against.
Just as she had decided to do when listening to her older sisters' stories as a child, Audrey creates her own story.
At Hunter High School, where there were only three black students, Audrey identifies herself as a "stigmatized" among her friends who were once marginalized, and discovers love when she meets Jenny, who leads her to a lifelong friendship.
At Stamford's factory, he meets Ginger and realizes his sexual identity, and in Mexico, the first place he chose to stay, he meets Eudora and is loved for who he is.
And then, back in New York, he meets Muriel and Aprekete, who have left emotionally deep tattoos, and finds new answers even in despair.
Audrey, who constantly searches for and creates a place for herself, leaves her mother's home to create her own narrative, and even makes the streets of Harlem, filled with discrimination and hatred, her 'home', creating an autobiographical myth as a black person, a woman, and a sexual minority.


Women who gave me a place to rest when I needed it
The women who pushed me out into the sun, still dyed black

"Jamie" is a story about the women Audre Lorde loved.
Before she was labeled a black feminist poet, Audrey was a woman who loved women.
The first woman Audrey loved was Jenny, whom she met when she was in deep conflict with her mother.
Jenny and Audrey, who were like loose women, swearing, smoking cigarettes on the street, stealing money from their mother's purse, and singing union songs together as they wandered the streets.
But in 1948, when the winds of change were blowing across the world, Jenny committed suicide.
Without ever having shared their passions, written a book together, or made love, Audrey helplessly lets Jenny go.
After that, Audrey leaves home and attempts to stand on her own two feet.
Her first relationship resulted in an abortion, and Audrey, unable to find suitable work, moved to Stamford.
And here she meets Ginger and becomes aware of her identity as a lesbian for the first time.
Audrey, who had “no idea what it meant to make love to a woman,” feels a wave of joy and satisfaction wash over her, vaguely sensing that “I wanted it to happen, and that it was different from anything I had ever done before.”
But seeing Ginger not taking relationships seriously, Audrey decides not to love anyone and not to get close to anyone.

That resolve is shattered when he meets an older woman, Eudora, in Cuernavaca, Mexico, a city of unfamiliar sounds, smells, and experiences.
Eudora, a journalist who had immigrated to Mexico to escape McCarthyism, was “someone who had spent her life thinking, someone who could understand me no matter what I said,” and Audrey, who had spent many days talking endlessly at Eudora’s house, embraced him and suggested for the first time that she wanted to make love to him.
To that suggestion, Yudo responds like this:
“You are so beautiful and brown.” In Mexico, where she feels “in the place she wanted to be and chose to be,” and “a definite being with a clear social profile,” Audrey finds self-affirmation through love.

The woman who taught me the omnipotence of love was Muriel, whom I met back in New York.
Muriel, who was Audrey's senior at the factory where she worked and wrote poetry.
From the moment she first met him, Audrey felt that Muriel “seemed to understand everything I said, without any explanation, not only my words but also the countless things I could not express because of the weight of my pain.”
The letters they exchanged with Muriel contained their hunger and isolation, yet a humorous yet clear perspective on the world, and they were convinced that their loneliness and even their dreams were similar to each other.
Together they feed cats, pick up old furniture from the street, sneak fruit and drinks, and make love, Audrey makes space for Muriel to seep deep into her life.
They arranged their worlds in their own way, offering each other certainty, magic, and the wonder that comes from hard work, and Audrey discovers that all of this is a legitimate feeling that comes with being in a relationship with someone you love.
At the same time, Audrey realizes that Muriel is not her creation.
That Muriel had always been herself, that she had only helped shape him, just as Muriel had done for Audrey.


“Only after that place was no longer my home
“I learned the latitude of Carriacou.”

"Jamie" is also about Audre Lorde's journey to find "home" while exploring her identity in her relationships with women.
As a child, Audrey's dream home was an island in the West Indies, "a place far away, a place I had never been to, but knew well from my mother's word of mouth."
Where there were songs about everything, where the white-browed honeyeater flew swiftly, where Linda's mother, Mary Liz, inherited the teachings of her grandmother, Ma Maria, who looked out over the crashing waves of the Caribbean Sea from the shores of Noel's Hill.
And the island where Mother Linda was born amidst the thick scent of lime, and where “women who survived without their husbands who went out to sea, and who came to love each other even when their husbands never returned.”
“The way the Carriacou women love each other is the legend of Grenadine, as is their strength and beauty.” Like her mother who grew up dreaming of Carriacou, Audrey grew up dreaming of Grenada, and the Grenadian dialect that formed her mother’s language became Audrey’s own, and like her mother, Audrey became a “strong woman.”


Audrey wasn't "trying to be loved or approved."
I tried to “just stay alive” or “remain human.”
To do that, I had to become a ‘strong woman.’
But even in the Villages of New York in the 1950s, it wasn't easy for a black lesbian to become a strong woman.
Black lesbians were the "exotic sister outsiders" who had no real advantage in coming together, and finding a place where someone like Audrey, who didn't define herself as either femme or butch, was acceptable was especially difficult.
Moreover, at the lesbian bar, Audrey was treated as a “closet college student” and “invisible,” and at Hunter College, she was treated as a “closet lesbian” and “intruder.”
Even though lesbians, black or white, were the only ones making real efforts to connect with women at the time, Audrey felt alienated from them, and even in her relationship with Muriel, who wasn't black, she felt an insurmountable difference.
For those like Audrey, who were not given a 'place' or a 'home', they "clung to any place that offered space, comfort, silence, a smile, or a non-judgmental attitude."

And then, on a sad and lonely spring day, Audrey finally meets Aprekete, who leaves another mark on her life “as an emotional tattoo.”
Aprechete was someone who knew only “my own life”, someone who could share the fire without confining or suffocating each other, someone who brought “the most authentic things from the most ancient times, from the farthest places, yet close to home”, someone who redefines the female body and rediscovers Audrey’s roots, and thus shares countless dreams.
Audrey, who has navigated the turbulent waves of emotions, reconnects with her emotional roots through Aprechette, rediscovers love as the answer to despair, and begins to build her own 'home' solely on her own.
Although their time together was brief, Audrey leaves Aprekete, reforms, and reshapes herself to become a better exchanger.
He buys a few boxes of salt and a new broom to take to his new apartment, finds a new job, and starts living his new life in a new way.
At the same time, carrying on the traditions of women who came from their mothers' roots who had dark skin.
And “creating again in language the women who gave him his essence.”