Mothering Herself: Manifesto of the Erotic Mother in Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

In the wake of the mid-twentieth century Women’s Liberation Movement, US women’s literature often responds to the subject of motherhood by stressing how oppressive patriarchal institutions leave mothers powerless and undervalued. Mothers in this literature are often unhappy, disenfranchised, and even pathetic figures. Audre Lorde’s 1982 biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name resists this figure by positing motherhood as an erotically powerful subject position rather than a position of servility. Eschewing simplistic binaries of good or bad mothering, Lorde refuses to treat mothers primarily as resources for others, as women who constantly give of themselves. Rather, Lorde’s Erotic Mother (a figure or essence rather than a strictly literal person) is a resource to herself, able to draw on her own creative “lifeforce” (Lorde, “Uses” 55) for sustenance and joy in an oppressive world. Celebrating the erotic is a particularly radical intervention for a black author given the historical demonization of black women and black sexuality as inherently over-eroticized and salacious.¹ Resisting a culture that often reduces black women to sexless maternal tropes such as the mammy, Lorde’s Erotic Mother embraces sex and nurturance in equal measure.

Lorde makes a radical intervention in the diverse field of maternal studies, which over the past fifty years has addressed women’s relegation to maternally coded labor such as caretaking, cooking, and housekeeping.² Sara Ruddick declares that “‘maternal’ is a social category: Although maternal thinking arises out of actual child-caring practices, biological parenting is neither necessary nor sufficient” (346). In Of Woman Born (1976), Adrienne Rich argues that patriarchal culture extends maternal obligation to any person it deems a woman (regardless of gender identification or maternal status), requiring self-sacrifice, nurturance, and, ironically, asexuality.³ These characteristics and behaviors prove both womanhood and social value, and their absence condemns the woman in question. However, rather than reject the maternal and its complex social history, Lorde’s Erotic Mother embraces maternal concepts of nurturance, tenderness, and creativity but resists conscription to gender binaries, biological processes, or labor demands. She represents a mythically powerful potential for women that is not reliant on providing without receiving but on privileging one’s own needs and capacities.⁴

Zami is the narrative conduit for Lorde’s vision of empowerment through eroticism, a form of memoir wherein she both reimagines her life and practices her philosophical vision of the Erotic Mother. Zami describes Audre’s childhood years, her adolescence, and her early adulthood.⁵ As the third child of West Indian immigrants, Audre grapples from childhood with physical disability (Lorde says that she was legally blind at the age of three), poverty, and white racism while her spiritual, poetic, and erotic awareness contrasts with her authoritarian mother, Linda Lorde. The quiet battle between Linda’s inflexible worldview and Audre’s blooming sexuality continues into her adolescence when she breaks from her mother. In the final section of Zami, Linda all but vanishes, replaced by Audre’s lesbian lovers. The most significant of these is the black lesbian Kitty, short for Afrekete. During Zami’s climactic love affair, wherein Afrekete awakens Audre’s belief in her own womanly power, Lorde roots this power in all women, in the West Indian tradition of her mother, and in motherhood itself.

Critical discussions of Zami invariably draw on Audre’s relationship with her mother, Linda, sometimes through a psychoanalytic lens. Barbara Christian asserts that, “In many ways, Zami seems to me to be a book about Lorde’s reconciliation with her mother” (199). Christian’s argument casts many of Audre’s later relationships as replacements for a never-achieved maternal intimacy. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud frames erotic attachment to the parent as a crucial stepping stone in subject development, as infant-parent attachment eventually transitions the parent into an internal object of the child’s adult sex drive. Zami certainly invites this reading as later love affairs in Audre’s life hearken back to Linda. When making love to a woman named...