waterfalls and vaccuum lines

A Response to Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

Photo by Josh Wilburne on Unsplash

My babysitter’s house on Bedford Avenue smelled of Murphy Oil Soap and the heavy, brine-thick scent of boiled peanuts. It was a Brooklyn fortress, and Granny Daphne¹ was its queen… though to me, she was a headless one. At that age, the world ended at the knee. She exists in my memory like an adult in an old-school cartoon. In my mind’s eye, Granny Daphne is an ample pair of legs encased in a floral house-dress with a Caribbean lilt that dropped from the ceiling, and a wig that sat like a crown atop a face I can no longer conjure.

She was the mountain that made the air steady in the nebulous overlap between my mother’s 9-to-5 shift, and my daddy’s 3-to-9. She kept us corralled, a pack of neighborhood children drifting through the rooms of her brownstone.

The light in the den where we played was filtered through lace curtains, casting spiderweb shadows across the floor. A neon blue light shone from the floor unit TV. there was a music video on the screen depicting clear blue water that promised … a different kind of drowning.

I was looking at TLC’s video for “Waterfalls.”

I remember noticing that the women were liquid. They were goddesses rising from a CGI mist, skin gleaming like polished glass under a summer rain. I watched, and something in the center of me—a place I didn’t have a name for yet—began to pull. A slow, rhythmic thrum.

My body reacted before my mind could find the brakes. I wiggled. I squirmed against the floor, my small hips searching for a language for this friction, for the sudden, heavy magnetism of the women on the screen.

Then, I looked down.

Granny Daphne had vacuumed that morning. I had been sitting on perfection: straight, stiff, silver and burgundy lines in the nap of the rug. They were the rows of a life well-kept. But where I had moved, the lines were gone. I had smeared the order. I had rumpled the perfection with my confusing, heavy body.

The shame arrived with a sickening jolt. I was certain the blurred carpet was a confession. I thought some adult would walk in, look at the ruined lines, and see exactly what had been happening inside my skin. I felt as if the carpet itself was an informant, shouting that I was looking at the screen with a hunger that was too old for my bones.

I am reading Audre Lorde’s Zami, and it’s gorgeous and raw. She calls her work a biomythography, and I’m kind of obsessed with the concept.

It suggests that the “truth” of a life isn’t found in a dry list of events, but in the intersection of lived experience and the ancestral or internal myths that give those experiences meaning. In the book, Zami, Lorde uses this form to reclaim her roots, bridging the gap between the personal “I” and the collective “we” of Black womanhood and history. She looks back to the women of Grenada and the “Afrekete” spirit to define herself, proving, as she says in her subtitle, that this is “a new spelling of my name.” It suggests that identity isn't something you are simply born with, but something you must mythologize into existence.

In Lorde’s world, the “Bio” refers to the biography and speaks to the tangible timeline of places and events that make up a life. The “Myth” is the spiritual and emotional layer full of the dreams, feelings, and connections both ancient and modern, that explain why we feel what we feel. And the “Graphy” speaks to the act of shaping these elements into a cohesive, rhythmic narrative.

In that Brooklyn living room, I was living my own biomythography. The Bio is in the Murphy Oil Soap and the silver-and-burgundy lines of the rug; the specificity of Bedofrd Avenue, 1994. But the Myth is in the water. It was the liquid goddesses on the screen who were teaching me a language for a hunger I shouldn’t have had yet.

I experienced a moment, and since then, my personal memory has collided with knew knowledge. And has taken on new weight and meaning. The memory of those carpet lines and the tension of wanting to disappear into the blue water was my first mythic encounter with the Erotic.² I was a girl being baptized in a CGI mist, learning that my body held a heat that no radiator could account for.

But the body, once awakened, demands more than just watching. It demands to touch, to mix, and to become.

Granny Daphne’s makeup table was a place of forbidden alchemy.

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

It smelled of pressed roses and something sharp, like old secrets. One afternoon, the curiosity that lived in my marrow became a physical weight. I wasn’t tryna be “bad.” I wanted to see bout the things women wore. Big Girl Business.

I pulled down a jar of baby powder. I unscrewed the lid and watched the talcum powder puff into the air like a dry, white ghost, settling on the floorboards. I aggressively spritzed her perfume (top notes of jasmine and bottom notes of something heavy and musk-dark) into the white cloud. Then, for science, tossed in a little of the nail polish remover I found. I wanted to see what texture powder and perfume would make if combined with the sharp sting of the solvent.

I was making a new world on her floor. I was mixing the scent of her womanhood with the liquid of my own interrogation.

When Granny Daphne found me, the silence was louder than any scream. I stood in the wreckage of her powders and paints, my hands stained with the colors of her elegance. I saw that Caribbean fire flash in her eyes, fierce and unyielding.

And then the shame came again. The same shame from the vacuum lines, but this time it was loud. I got a whooping for pouring out forty dollars worth of beauty products and “acting a fool in people’s house”. It was then that I came to the realization that my hunger to know, to touch, to blend, could leave a scar on the things people held sacred.

But look what I have learned by 2026: Lorde’s work teaches me that there is no separation between the mess and the memory. We are born into a myth already written by others, but we reach back into the red clay of memory to reshape it. We destroy the altars of our grandmothers not because we hate them, but because we are trying to find the ingredients of our own power in her bottles and in the background of her faded photographs.

In my earlier reflection, Tip on the Tightrope, I explored how this kind of world-building is a matter of self-preservation. Even then, on Granny Daphne’s floor, I was practicing a “creative and spiritual practice.” I was learning to navigate the tightrope of vulnerability—spilling the perfume to see if I could survive the scent.

Granny Daphne’s fierceness was a fence meant to keep the world out, but I was the thing already inside, breaking the jars. I was learning that the texture of my own will is sticky, pungent, and impossible to wipe away.

I am three years old, and I am beginning to spell my name. It is a long name, filled with the sounds of waterfalls and Caribbean laughter. It is a name that doesn’t ask for permission to be felt.

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self portrait done in proceate. Look at me being artistic. I actually really love this lol.

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Love y’all. Mean it. If you love me back, Buy Me A Book!

1. Granny Daphne was not MY grandmother. She was legit the lady who watched the neighborhood kids. There is however, a lesson here in what Nah Dove calls “Other Motherhood”. It refers to the communal nature of child rearing, culture bearing, and change making that Black culture bestows upon its MaGes (people of marginalized genders).

2. Audre Lorde’s The Uses of the Erotic is absolutely my shit. A seminal text. One like, and I will read it aloud to yall on live and we can discuss. Comment done when finished. LMAO.