Osame Osayande’s Reviews > Zami: A New Spelling of My Name > Status Update

There must be something I could do differently that would take care of everything, end my agonies of bereavement, return Muriel to reason. If only I could higure out how to convince her this was all ridiculous behavior, unnecessary. We could start from there.

Another piece of me insisted this could not possibly be happening, while images of murder, death, earthquake harrowed my dreams. The psychic discord was ripping my brain apart.

If nobody's going to dig you too tough anyway, it really doesn't matter so much what you dare to explore.

there have never been too many people buying fat Black girls born almost blind and ambidextrous, gay or straight. Unattractive, too, or so the ads in Ebony and Jet seemed to tell me. Yet I read them anyway, in the bathroom, on the newsstand, at my sister's house, whenever I got a chance. It was a furtive reading, but it was an affirmation of some part of me, however frustrating.

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.

Loving hurt too much. 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 pain was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret to not being hurt like this again, decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving.

Yet, I never once heard the name mentioned of the first man to fall in the american revolution, nor ever been told that he was a Negro.
What did that mean about the history I had learned?