“My mother must have been other than woman”¹: Matrophobia in Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

Abstract

The mother-daughter dyad is far from simple. Adrienne Rich examines it within the parameters of matrophobia, which is not fearing the mother but fearing to become like her. In Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Audre Lorde fluctuates between the urge to identify with her mother and the desire to break free. This essay examines Lorde’s ambivalent bond with her mother from the perspective of pre-Oedipal attachment theory and matrophobia.

Keywords:

• Audre Lorde
• mother
• matrophobia
• Zami
• identification
• separation

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Lorde, Zami, 16.

2 O ‘Reilly, “Introduction,” 12.

3 Several articles explore Zami by focusing on the mother-daughter relationship. Jacobs examines the Erotic Mother as a mythical potential for self-discovery (“Mothering Herself”); Odhoji analyzes the maternal myth Lorde creates in relation to self-identity and self-representation (“‘Restorying’”); and Li focuses on Linda as a symbol for voice and home (“Becoming Her Mother’s Mother”). There are other articles that investigate Lorde’s relation with Linda but none of them adopt the matrophobic lens in their readings.

4 Lorde, Zami, 3.

5 Kristeva discusses the maternal in depth in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, arguing that individuation happens when the child sees the mother as the abject, being detested, obnoxious, and revolting. Her work is quite significant, but I do not include it because it does not reflect the relationship between Lorde and her mother, who is never castigated as abject in the text.

6 Freud, “Femininity,” 117.

7 Ibid., 121–122.

8 Flax, “Mother-Daughter Relationships,” 37.

9 Ibid., 35.

10 Ibid., 37.

11 Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering, 166.

12 Ibid., 140.

13 Ibid., 169.

14 Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot, 20.

15 Rich’s book heralded the advent of other significant works that focused mainly on the mother-daughter dyad. For a thorough review of all those books and the main arguments they propose, see Hirsch, “Mothers and Daughters.”

16 Rich, Of Woman Born, 235.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid., 236.

19 Cannon, “Reading,” 336.

20 Zami’s date of publication is crucial. According to Showalter, 1950s and 1960s literature depicted mothers as a motif of hating oneself. The following decades, however, were different and delineated an urge to get back to the mother (“Toward a Feminist Poetics”). Lorde’s autobiography in this context is not a mother-blaming book, but rather an attempt to look back on the past and make peace with her traumatic experiences with Linda.

21 Tate, Black Women Writers, 115.

22 In Greek mythology, Demeter rejects the proposal of Hades to marry her daughter Persephone, so he abducts her into the underworld. Infuriated and heartbroken, Demeter discards her duties as the goddess of fertility, with dire consequences. Zeus interferes to save humanity from perishing, but Hades tricks Persephone by offering her a pomegranate, which makes her choose the underworld over returning to her mother in Olympus. The final solution is to make Persephone divide her time between her mother and her husband.

23 Lejeune, On Autobiography, 14.

24 Lorde, Zami, 13.

25 Rich, Of Woman Born, 225.

26 Malin, Voice of the Mother, 6.

27 Fultz, “Mother-Daughter Conflicts,” 228.

28 Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot, 136.

29 Lorde, Zami, 24.

30 Ibid., 27.

31 Ibid., 58.

32 Ibid., 10, 11.

33 Ibid., 17.

34 Ibid., 65.

35 Ibid., 33.

36 Ibid., 34.

37 Ibid., 83.

38 Ibid., 84.

39 Ibid., 88–89.

40 Rich, Of Woman Born, 218.

41 Lorde, Zami, 89.

42 Friday, My Mother/My Self, 143.

43 Chodorow, Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory, 95.

44 Lorde, Zami, 77.

45 In Lorde’s poem “The House of Yemanjá,” the mother is a Janus-like figure who cooks her daughters up in a frying pot to prepare them for the real world. In the poem, the mother favors the other sisters because the persona fails to come up to her expectations. The perturbed mother-daughter relationship in the poem echoes the same conflicts between Linda and Lorde in Zami.

46 Lorde, Zami, 77.

47 Ibid., 78–79.

48 Ibid., 79.

49 Smith, Poetics, 13.

50 Lorde, Zami, 78.

51 Jacobs, “Mothering Herself,” 115.

52 Lorde, Sister Outsider, 53.

53 Kang, “Audre’s Daughter,” 275.

54 Dinnerstein, The Mermaid, 67, 130.

55 Rich, Of Woman Born, 234.

56 Hua, “Audre Lorde’s Zami,” 115.

57 Lorde, Zami, 32.

58 Palmer, “A Second Chance,” 116.

59 Lorde, Zami, 85.

60 Irigaray, “The Bodily Encounter,” 44.

61 Irigaray, “And the One,” 66.

62 Wall, Worrying the Line, 56.

63 Lorde, Zami, 243.

64 Ibid., 249.

65 Ibid., 251.

66 Rogers, The Matrophobic Gothic, 9.

67 In Greek mythology, Medea kills her two children in revenge when their father deserts her for another woman. She epitomizes the anti-mother.

68 Zimmerman, Safe Sea of Women, 191.

69 Lorde, Zami, 13.

70 Ibid., 14.

71 Ibid., 255.

72 Ibid., 31.

73 Ibid., 32.

74 Lorde, Sister Outsider, 83.

75 Cixous and Clément, The Newly Born Woman, 78.

76 Lorde, Zami, 32.

77 Smith, Poetics, 58.

78 Maglin, “Don’t Never Forget,” 258.

79 Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering, 200.

80 Lorde, Zami, 301.

81 Ibid., 143.

82 Carlston, “Zami,” 229.

83 Lorde, Zami, 15.

84 Hammond, “Interview with Audre Lorde,” 21.

85 Burkhard, “‘A New Spelling,’” 127.

86 Lorde, Zami, 18.

87 Lorde, Sister Outsider, 149, 41.

88 Fultz, “Mother-Daughter Conflicts,” 237.

89 Washington, “I Sign,” 148.

90 Johnson, A World of Difference, 147.

91 Woolf, A Room, 83.

Additional information

Funding

Open access funding was provided by the Qatar National Library.

Notes on contributors

Yomna Saber

Yomna Saber is an Associate Professor of English Literature at Qatar University. Her areas of research are African American literature, women’s literature, and gender studies. Her recent publications include “Blurring the Contours of Memory in June Jordan’s Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood” in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies (2019); “Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters: Hearing the Silent Voice of Pain” in Voices of Illness: Negotiating Meaning and Identity, edited by Peter Bray (Brill, 2019); “The Conjure Woman’s Poetics of Poisoning in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day” in Folklore (2018); and Gendered Masks of Liminality and Race: Black Female Trickster’s Subversion of Hegemonic Discourse in African American Literature (Peter Lang, 2017).