Content area
Full Text
The idea of motherhood as a tool of resistance occupies a noted and complex place within the African American cosmology. I begin my essay exploring these often subversive acts of motherhood, which Audre Lorde explores in her foundational collection of interviews and essays Sister Outsider (1984). Lorde contrasts the black mother with the hyperrational white father, whose ultimate ideal is "I think, therefore I am."1 In an interview with Adrienne Rich included in Sister Outsider, Rich presses Lorde to explore these terms and concepts further. Lorde discloses:
When I talk about the Black mother in each of us, the poet, I don't mean the Black mother in each of us who are called poets... the Black mother who is the poet exists in every one of us... I personally believe that the Black mother exists more in women; yet she is the name for a humanity that men are not without. ..Unless we learn the lessons of the Black mother in each of us, whether we are Black or not ... But I'm not saying that women don't think or analyze. Or that white does not feel. I'm saying that we must never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is ... sinister, smelly, erotic, confused, upsetting. (100-101)
The dis-ease Lorde associates with the Black Mother parallels the sometimes dark ways that Black mothering manifests itself in the novels explored in this essay. The main characters of Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata (1998) and Erna Brodber's Louisiana (1994), Lizzie and Ella, respectively, experience pain, confusion, physical and psychological scarring as a result of their epistemologically and ontologically raced inheritance. Past interpretations of the authors' works have only focused on these negative aspects of communing with the spirits. Lisa A. Long misreads the actions of Lizzie's ancestors, Grace and Ayo, characterizing them as "postcolonial subjects" who are "situated within traditional rape scripts" (6). Long insists that "Ayo and Grace become historical panderers, procuring their ancestors' bodies and modes for the voracious appetite of the racist historical forces that consume their own lives" (6).
Black Maternal Inheritance is the result of a communication process that occurs...