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Àwon Ìyá Wa control reproductive organs and are bonded through the power of menstrual blood and the lives it promises. Because the locus of Àjf is the womb, children can inherit the force as they inherit genes or particular traits. However, while a Yoruba proverb asserts, “Instead of the Àjf changing for the better, she continues to have more daughters, producing more and more ‘birds,’”1 Africana literature is not overly re®ective of the mother-daughter Àjf relationship . Most writers depict two types of Àjf. One is the controlling matriarch , who forcefully or gently uses her Àjf to guide her family and, often, the community. The other is the young Àjf who is misunderstood by her mother, who denies or is unaware of her daughter’s latent force. In the case of the latter, it is often a surrogate mother Àjf who guides the young woman to self-actualization. To avoid potential con-®ict, some works depict a mother who is nearing death or whose force is waning while the daughter’s power is still latent. This is the case with Janie and Nanny in Their Eyes Were Watching God. If both women are simultaneously active, they often immediately ¤nd separate spaces for existence and expression. This is apparent in Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, in which an uninitiated Àjf daughter ®ees her initiated Àjf parents and lives alone, honing her own force.2 In Toni Morrison’s Sula, concurrent mother-daughter Àjf interaction is brie®y evident. Eva Peace is the ambiguous one-legged matriarch of Medallion, Ohio, who exercises supreme control over her community. Eva renames and protects community children with the same intensity she uses to kill her own son. Her granddaughter, emergent Àjf 7 The Womb of Life Is a Wicked Bag The Womb of Life Is a Wicked Bag Cycles of Power, Passion, and Pain in the Mother-Daughter Àjf Relationship Sula Peace, truncates Eva’s reign. Sula, whose bold indifferent Àjf bonds her entire community by shattering its ego, returns from college and years of roaming to immediately send her grandmother to a nursing home. By doing so, Sula initiates a changing of the guard of Àjf and removes Eva’s dominating in®uence from the sphere of interaction and from interfering with her personal textual climax. Like other settings, Medallion is not large enough for two simultaneously active Àjf, but some texts give opposing powers space to interact. And when Àjf amalgamates genetically and artistically, the result is the enmeshment of mothers and daughters in a web of creation and destruction, love and hate, isolation and expression. The works analyzed in this chapter are all from the ìtànkálg: Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, by ¤rst-generation Grenadan American Audre Lorde; the short story “My Mother,” by Antiguan Jamaica Kincaid ; and Beloved, by African American Toni Morrison. Morrison’s novel will constitute the bulk of this chapter’s analysis, but all three works share compelling features that accentuate and facilitate the development and interaction of lineage Àjf. Each of these texts is centered on a physical-cosmic space that alternately represents a void and a creative palate. In Zami, the free space is transformed from American nooses to Linda Lorde’s perception-changing Àjf survival tactics to the spiritual and re-creative tablet that immortalizes Audre Lorde’s power of the word in ink. In “My Mother,” the space morphs from brackish pond to blinding blackness to a sea, and the mother uses these media to initiate her daughter ever deeper into the force of Àjf. In the relationship of Sethe and Beloved, the mother and daughter, respectively, of Beloved, the space is an arena ¤lled with profound sacri¤ces, “savings ,” re-embodiments, futility, and a fragile hope. Another theme that connects the three texts is the fact that the male principle is deemed irrelevant to the mother-daughter Àjf relationship . In each text, fathers are dead, are not mentioned, or have been moved out of the sphere of interaction. Audre Lorde, who describes her father’s print on her psyche as “a distant lightning” when compared to the singeing and illuminating, “kind and cruel,” everrelevant presence of mothers, gives the clearest articulation of the role of the father in the mother-daughter Àjf relationship. She testi¤es, “I have felt the age-old triangle of mother father and child, with the ‘I’ at its eternal core, elongate and ®atten out into the elegantly...

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