Audre Lorde and queer ecology: An ecological praxis of Black lesbian identity in Zami

Abstract

This paper employs Audre Lorde’s theoretical paradigm of anti-binarism and ecofeminism to explore her creation of a distinctive queer space which is achieved through the successful incorporation of ecological elements in her narrative of lesbianism. The central premise of this research lies in the intersection of lesbian concerns and the environmental sensibility in Lorde’s novel, Zami. The detailed analysis of instances of lesbian lovemaking interspersed with ecological references in Zami reveals a close connection between environment and queer sexuality, realised in the phrase “queer ecology”. This study investigates how the erotic contours of Lorde’s lesbian identity are shaped by her sustained engagement with the environmental metaphor derived from her immediate surroundings as well as the geography of her ancestral Grenadian island where the Zami myth originates. The cartographies of the physical landscape of Grenada and Black lesbian bodies intersect to form a combined ethos of lesbian eroticism driven by a strong rootedness in ecological affiliation. Through close examination of Afrekete’s role in Zami’s lesbian erotics, this paper activates a distinctive queer-ecological reading of lesbian relationships derived from a combination of aquatic, green, and edible metaphors. This article is an endeavour to bring about a sustained engagement of queer and environmental concerns by unravelling a symbiotic relationship between the two.

Keywords:

• Anti-binarism
• ecofeminism
• edible metaphors
• lesbianism
• queer ecology

Introduction

This paper aims to study the relationship between ecology and lesbianism in Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), and traces the ecofeminist dimension of Lorde’s novel, which explores lesbianism alongside the environmental leanings of its female protagonists. Assessing Lorde’s lesbian ecological theorisation vis-à-vis queer environmentalism, this paper draws from the ecofeminist and queer ecological traditions. It highlights how both ecology and lesbianism are related and through their parallel exploration, Lorde contributes to the development of a combined consciousness and intersection of both. Since Lorde identified as a lesbian, I would urge the reader to be wary of placing her specifically lesbian sexual identity within the broader category of “queer” and clarify that this paper connects her theorisation of lesbianism with the queer ecological framework rather than equating her lesbianism with queer sexuality (and in the process, risking the effacement of her lesbian sexual identity). Or, as Maite Escudero-Alías (2022) puts it: “The queer reparative turn must not isolate those lesbian voices that have laid the foundations of queer thought, but rather integrate them” (p. 264). Therefore, the imagined lesbian community, as espoused in Zami, produces an all-female sexual ethos and liberates the lesbian culture from strictly imperialistic and academically driven theorisations of queer studies.

Focusing on Black lesbians’ mutual interaction and ecological landscape in Zami, my paper traces ecofeminist approaches in influencing and shaping lesbian sexual identity and analyses the role of homoeroticism as a factor defining the ethics of shared environmental awareness among the lesbians in the novel. Finally, it investigates the ways in which Zami bridges these two concepts to produce new perspectives on the combined understanding of ecofeminist and queer studies. I believe the research in this paper is significant as there is space for new scholarly intervention on the interconnection between ecofeminism and Black lesbian consciousness. By tracing a more sustained engagement with these two concepts in Zami, this paper aims to add to the current critical discussion and fill an intersectional gap in available scholarship, as previously, Lorde’s lesbian erotics have largely been assessed independently of the mentioned ecological considerations.

While assessing Lorde’s queer ecological paradigm, this paper draws on her intellectual and political project, which involves the dismantling of binaries. However, it also acknowledges her complication of the simplistic understanding of transcending or dismissing the binaries by recognising that the process of disavowal involves a recognition of the “mistrust and distance between Black women” (Lorde, 1982a, p. 147), as exemplified in her essay “Eye to Eye”. This essay also notes how America’s constrictive conception of Black women has prevented them from realising their potential and power as people with agency and led them to direct their self-hatred and antagonism towards one another. The struggle, then, is not simply between Black and White women but is much more nuanced and complex than that, leading to Lorde’s capacious conception of Black female selfhood, which lies in understanding the roots of this mutual hatred and utilising the resulting anger for political change. The realisation that “The price of increasing power is increasing oppression” (Lorde, 1982a, p. 158) also propels the narrative of Zami, where Lorde simultaneously occupies a position of oppression and power by demonstrating an ability to assess the conflicts within organised groups of lesbians and social circles of Black women that are not without their own incidents of racism and homophobia. However, Lorde uses this realisation towards the annihilation of antagonism, a venture that is at the core of her struggle and triumph in Zami. Additionally, she blends her political struggle with an ecofeminist impulse by deploying ecological metaphors to reclaim her lesbian body, which is not “passively constituted” by oppressive forces but is “subjectively responsive” (Datta and Pradhan, 2022, p. 4) and actively engages with the oppressive systems to shape her identity.

Historical, economic, and political context of Lorde’s writing

In lectures and public appearances, Lorde famously identified herself as a “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”, and as a result, she writes from a mesh of positionalities within which her identity operates. A large part of her multidimensional identity is owed to her ancestry, as she was born to Caribbean immigrant parents in Harlem, New York, in 1934. Growing up in the turbulent environment of the 1950s U.S. as a first-generation citizen, Lorde negotiates her Caribbean ancestry and physical location in the U.S. by witnessing firsthand incidents of racism and exclusion. Embedded in her experience of being perpetually situated on the periphery of a predominantly racist American society as an outsider, her writing emerges from a historical backdrop of racial segregation, the Civil Rights Movement and U.S. capitalism. In the Hugo Letter 12/89 entry listed in “Of Generators and Survival”, Lorde reveals her political and intellectual activism, which is informed by the recognition of a strong connection between racism and the broader landscape of economic exploitation, where the imperialist forces of the consumer-driven U.S. economy position Black bodies as sites for capitalist exploitation. (Lorde, 1990).

Recognising the interconnectedness of racial and economic issues, Lorde extensively writes about environmental injustice and the politics of dispossession by showing how marginalised people from poor and Black communities are exposed to industrial toxins by being forced to live in areas with high environmental and health hazards. As a Black woman suffering from breast cancer, Lorde elaborates on the industrial threats of the “profit economy” (Lorde, 2009, p. 201) in “Difference and Survival”, which she also refers to as a “woman-devaluing culture” in The Cancer Journals (Lorde, 1980, p. 70), as it targets the environment as well as her cancer-stricken body by monetising on both. This paper’s focus on ecology and how Lorde uses it as a tool to examine the erotic in Zami make it imperative to understand her stance as an ecologically driven critique of industrialisation’s combined exploitation of Black women’s bodies and the environment, a sentiment at the heart of ecofeminist criticism. By imagining the ravaged landscape of her sick body as the earth made hollow by extraction, Lorde vitally links the capitalist regime’s “attrition of Black women’s bodies and the environment” (Hume, 2022, p. 207).

Deeply connected with Lorde’s politics of ecological justice in Zami is the idea of the erotic, which she identifies in her essay, “Uses of the Erotic”, as the “lifeforce” and “creative energy” (Lorde, 1982a, p. 55) of women. The erotic, in Lorde’s understanding, is inseparable from the political as it is a power-lending force and facilitates Black women’s repossession of their exploited bodies as potential sites of “self-governing desire, subjectivity, dependence and relation with others, and erotic pleasure” (Miller-Young, 2014, p. 16). As stated in “Uses of the Erotic”, the political force of Lorde’s erotic is best understood in her oppositional praxis to the woman-devaluing culture of U.S. capitalistic and racist forces and her realisation that in touch with her erotic potential, she becomes “less willing to accept powerlessness” (Lorde, 1982a, p. 58).

Within the context of this paper, Lorde’s erotic lifeforce as a Black woman is equated with the lifeforce of ecology itself, where drawing from an ecologically driven understanding of power, she shapes the queer and political contours of her writing. Her novel, Zami, is constructed around the idea of women who are not alienated from each other but “work together as friends and lovers” (1982b, p. 255)—in this definition, the connotations of lesbianism and ecological connection are tied with the idea of labour contained in the word “work”, which carries economic implications. Therefore, Lorde’s recognition of Zami lesbians as asserting their selfhood and navigating a unique lesbian identity by transcending the constraints of structural inequality and exploitation is embedded within a deeper politics of undoing mainstream economic structures and establishing a women-loving-women culture via recourse to nature. Drawing strength from the erotic potential of female and ecological collaboration, Lorde’s nuanced understanding of the erotic as a political practice emerges.

The erotic and ecological metaphors deployed in Zami also mediate Lorde’s diasporic positioning within the U.S. and her ancestral connection with the Caribbean. The narrative reveals how, upon visiting Mexico, Lorde uses this new geographical location to question U.S. racism and homophobia through her ability to harness the beauty and power of the Mexican landscape to create poetry and express her lesbian relationship with a woman named Eudora. The sexually and creatively charged erotic experience in Mexico opens her to feeling a strong connection with the Caribbean, as the Mexican landscape reminds her of her mother’s descriptions of Grenada. As a land acknowledging the erotic potential of Zami women and valuing lesbian relationships, the Caribbean becomes a psychic experience while Lorde simultaneously occupies a physical position in Mexico. It effectively lends her a geopolitical escape from the harsh realities of the U.S. and facilitates “modes of inhabiting life outside the ossified structures of U.S. hegemony of racial segregation and bodily control” (Tamara Lea Spira, 2015, p. 9). Serving as an antithesis of the U.S., Mexico unleashes Lorde’s erotic potential (including political, sexual, and creative) by offering her a powerful space to counter and transform the ways in which she positions herself in the racist environment of the U.S., thereby loosening the control of U.S. racial and sexual structures on her.

Ecofeminism and Lorde’s use of nature metaphors

Lorde’s linkage of women and ecology reiterates the tenets of ecofeminism, which emerged in the mid-1970s as a movement recognising the interconnection between the degradation of the natural world and the exploitation of women. This theory forms the basis of my paper as it reveals vital connections between women and the environment, expanding the analysis to include minoritarian sexualities. By examining the ways in which “queers are feminized, animalized, eroticized and naturalized in a culture that devalues women, animals, nature and sexuality” (Gaard, 1997, p. 119), ecofeminism acknowledges the oppressive dualities and aims to dismantle them to establish a harmonious equilibrium. Addressing this Eurocentric linkage of “women and nature and their mutual inferiorization”, ecofeminist theorist Val Plumwood refers to the “master model” of elite white men, which perpetuates the binaries and dominates both women and ecology by “backgrounding” them (1993, pp. 21-23). By bringing both into active dialogue with each other, Lorde’s Zami attempts a sort of foregrounding and develops sustainable (but not exclusionary) connections between them.

In Zami, Lorde uses the Western connection of women and nature to express her lesbian sexuality, which is also indicative of Stacy Alaimo’s (2010) political appeal to feminists: “Rather than fleeing from this debased nature, which is associated with corporeality, mindlessness, and passivity, it would be more productive for feminist theory to undertake the transformation of gender dualisms” (p. 5). By using ecologically laden language to annihilate the binaries and demonstrate lesbian erotica, Lorde’s perception of nature is modelled around “ecosexuality”, a concept which denounces the idea of nature as a mother and rather sees it as a lover, since “to be someone’s lover is more open-ended than being their mother [as] the lover assumes a relationship based on romance, sexual attraction, and sensual pleasure [and] the lover’s relationship does not assume identities that conform to the gender binary” (Sprinkle and Stephens, 2021, p. 44). This understanding alters the traditional readings that have been perpetuated to denigrate certain groups of humans (in this case, Black lesbians) as well as nonhuman ecological life. Challenging the essentialist notions of ecofeminism, Lorde’s conception of it aligns with Carolyn Merchant’s (1980) critique of the industrial and scientifically motivated cultural regime’s shared domination of women and nature. By reconceptualising human-nonhuman alliances and finding an ecological space to express her alternative lesbian sexuality away from the heteropatriarchal setting, Lorde evokes Merchant’s ideal of fostering “a new partnership between humans and the earth” (p. xv) and overturning “constructions of nature and women as culturally passive and subordinate” (p. xvi).

In light of these vital connections, Lorde’s Zami can be read as an early ecofeminist text. Analysing it in tandem with contemporary ecofeminist and queer ecological discourses reveals multiple layers of transcendence attempted by Lorde. By utilising ecological metaphors and spaces to show her lesbian lovemaking in the novel, Lorde reiterates the queer ecological position, which observes patterns of alternative sexualities witnessed in the nonhuman (botanical and animal) worlds and understands sexuality, biology, and nature as not necessarily heterosexual. Queer ecology, therefore, implies a rejection of heteronormativity and cisgendered-ness as objective standards for sexual conduct and proposes that the queerness of nonhuman worlds “clearly illustrates the unassimilability of sexual diversity” (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, 2010, p. 32). By pairing the natural landscape with lesbian homoeroticism, Lorde embeds her forbidden lesbian desire in spaces appropriated by homophobic regulation. Her merging of lesbian and ecological symbolism is also indicative of Timothy Morton’s conception of non-essentialist biology, where he discusses several biological creatures that exhibit characteristics of asexuality, bisexuality, ambiguous sexuality, and even transitions between homo and hetero sexualities. In “Queer Ecology”, Morton (2010) writes, “If anything, life is catastrophic, monstrous, non-holistic, and dislocated, not organic, coherent, or authoritative. Queering ecological criticism will engage with these qualities” (p. 275). Therefore, by locating lesbian sexuality within the non-essentialist environmental dialogics, Lorde unravels the diversity of human sexuality and mirrors Morton’s exploration of unruliness and transgressive sexuality in certain species and animals, which defies the logic of the strictly constrictive sexual identity approved by the dominant heterosexual discourse.

Merging the nature-culture dualism, the queer ecological aesthetics in Zami also advance positions of theorists like—Donna Haraway (2003), whose term naturecultures destabilises the nature/culture and human/animal binary and shows that sex is learnt social behaviour that is rooted in specific material-social settings and contributes to such associations across both human and nonhuman worlds; Joan Roughgarden (2013), who notes, “Eggs from an all-female species don’t need fertilization by a sperm to trigger the cell divisions that generate an embryo [and] females in all-female species clone themselves when they reproduce” (p. 28); and Bruce Bagemihl (2000), who states that “human beings are simply catching up with these species that have preceded us in evolving gender and sexual diversity” (p. 318)—among others, who study an array of alternative sexualities witnessed in the nonhuman world. Lorde harks on this framework but also goes beyond it by translating the non-binarism inherent in nature to human sexual politics of lesbian desire. Her use of nature metaphors to show lesbian lovemaking in Zami counters the neocolonial narrative of Black women and nature being passively available tools for exploitation, appropriation and capitalist expansion. While the extractivist neocolonial agenda exoticises women’s connection with nature and puts them in a dangerous coalition by diminishing their agency, Lorde explores an alternative understanding of nature by positioning her lesbianism in the natural world, and in this process, she transcends the neocolonial framework predicated upon nature and women’s passivity and highlights the alternative modes of sexual expression by granting agency to both nature and the lesbians interacting with it.

Anti-binarism in Zami: Guiding lesbian erotica

Lorde’s uneasy relationship with binaries, especially gendered categorisations, becomes evidently clear from the prologue to Zami, where she writes:

I have always wanted to be both man and woman…- to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks.

I would like to enter a woman the way any man can, and to be entered- …- to be hot and hard and soft all at the same time in the cause of our loving (p. 7).

This compelling beginning activates the crucial premise of the novel: the ecological dimension of lesbian-loving, where Lorde’s experience as a woman loving other women and her constant pining to belong to nature, is explored at length. Offering respite from systemic oppression, nature acts as a point of departure from the dichotomous constrictions of social conformism and offers a ground to transcend the rigid socio-cultural binaries. Lorde’s desire to be an embodiment of feminine as well as masculine strength is implicated in her rejection of the distinction between these realms and becomes one of the defining features of her anti-binarism, where she pairs the otherwise imagined contraries together.

By not subscribing to heterosexuality and by desiring to possess the qualities of both man and woman as a lover, Lorde also transcends gender and sex binaries. Her theory reiterates that personal identity results from the relationship between seemingly diverse parts of one’s existence and lived experiences, which is also examined in her discourse on difference in “Age, Race, Class, and Sex” (Lorde, 1982a, p. 122). Comparing her body with the physical contours of ecological entities, Lorde transcends the mundane and places herself in dialogue with nature. She envisions her body as an embodiment of the earth, which accommodates both mountains and valleys, two entities seemingly distinct from each other as one denotes pinnacle and the other depth. These paradoxical yet coexisting ecological units mediate Lorde’s reimagination of herself as a carrier of oppositional binary categories. Her extension of the nature metaphors to her own body activates a reading of mountains as symbolic of her breasts and valleys as a representation of the curves of her feminine figure or the depths of her genitalia. By drawing on these loaded ecological metaphors, Lorde effectively addresses questions surrounding alternative sexuality and gender binaries.

In the moment of wanting to embrace both masculine and feminine sexual aspects, in her prologue to Zami, Lorde operates within an essentialist paradigm of heterosexual metaphors to demonstrate her anti-essentialist alternative sexuality. Her nuanced disavowal of traditional sex structures involves rethinking and transforming the cultural understanding of sex and using it as raw material to represent her lesbian sexuality, which has been rendered unthinkable by the very same dominant structure: her nonbinary sexuality is, thus, in line with queer theorisation, which rejects the binary frameworks. Lorde’s politics of challenging sexual binaries is reminiscent of José Muñoz’s (1999) concept of disidentification, which entails establishing “new possibilities while at the same time echoing the materially prescriptive cultural locus of any identification” (p. 30). Following this logic of disidentification, Lorde’s resistance to the culturally accepted idea of sexuality as compulsorily heterosexual involves a strategy of mitigating gender constructions by resisting assimilation into a heterosexual matrix and restructuring it from within. Therefore, instead of either subscribing to or directly opposing the dominant ideology, Lorde, in Zami, tactically employs her disidentificatory strategy to transform the cultural logic from within and represent her minoritarian lesbian sexual position, which otherwise remains occluded from the mainstream (hetero)sexual narrative.

By performing a revaluation of confounding gender roles, Lorde strategically extracts sexual activity from its traditional and heteronormative understanding and questions the idea of intercourse as purely heterosexual. She locates her homosexuality within the purview of the natural (both the understandings of the word “natural” as nature and normatively approved are implied) by placing her body and lesbian sexual desire in the environmental domain. Lorde’s “justification for the ‘naturalness’ of lesbianism” (Lehmann, 2013, p. 5) and her desire to encompass a wholesome experience of lovemaking invites a transformative reassessment of the gender binary where she wants to embody the hardness of the male phallus as well as the softness of female genitalia at the same time. This leads her to curate a narrative of sexual self-sufficiency within an exclusively feminine domain by undoing the necessity of a man for sexual stimulation: what is born from this ethos is a self-contained narrative of female homosexuality. The comparison of her body to the earth lends her writing depth as she births an ecologically grounded self by treating her body as a representation of nature. Her proximity to the earth and everything natural, including “Mountains and valleys, trees, rocks. Sand and flowers and water and stone” (p. 7), comes about as a result of her feeling at one with nature and recognising the naturalness of her body. Therefore, the ideal of universally shared womanhood is invoked via natural imagery, which embeds her narrative in ecological rootedness vis-à-vis her lesbian affiliation.

This use of ecology in Zami for queer purposes is in contrast to the essentialist ecofeminist criticism, which hinges on an inherent distinction between the masculine and feminine and perceives women’s proximity to nature as a given and fixed construct (largely owing to their reproductive capacity). Lorde’s approach is directly oppositional to the traditional ecofeminist positions of theorists like Mary Daly (1978), whose monolithic construction of women favoured a spiritual reconnection around the distinctly female power (as opposed to the male) and insisted on categorisations of “Mother Earth” and “Nature Mother” and a need to have an all-women culture replace the male-centric one, where women discover and develop “the complex web of living/loving relationships of our own kind” (p. 10-11, emphasis in original). Lorde recognises the limitations of Daly’s radical approach, which solidifies the essentialist divide between men and women and hinges on this binary in advocating a separatist culture consisting only of women. In her open letter to Daly, Lorde problematises the limiting perspective of ecofeminism in Gyn/Ecology, also questioning her obliteration of Black women’s experiences under the “assumption that the herstory and myth of white women is the legitimate and sole herstory and myth of all women” (Lorde, 1982a, p. 69). Therefore, in contrast to Eurocentric and essentialist cultural ecofeminism, Lorde uses the connection between women and ecology to explore her Black lesbian sexuality and establishes a sensual communion with nature, shifting the role of nature from mother to lover.

Loving Afrekete: A queer ecological reading of Zami

Alongside associating human and ecological worlds, Lorde also foregrounds her rejection of dualities by creating Afrekete, whom she reinvents from the African mythical narrative. She brings the lived experience closer to her cultural origin by naming one of her lovers, Kitty, as Afrekete. By ascribing the name of this Yoruban goddess to a tangible person, Lorde melds the dimensions of reality and mythology and connects these distinctly contrasting worlds. Afrekete is Lorde’s recreation of the trickster god Esu, usually portrayed as a male in African mythology. In one of her interviews, Lorde revealed that her retrieval of Afrekete as a goddess comes from the original “old thunder god religion that preceded Yoruba” (Grahn, 1984, p. 125), where Afrekete was depicted as a woman, but in the later versions of modernised Yoruban religion she came to be portrayed as a male trickster figure. Lorde inverts gender hierarchies by portraying Afrekete as the feminine face of this Yoruban god and retrieves the female religious tradition from the masculine domain. This is also reflective of Lorde’s broader project of undoing the binaries as she proposes the coexistence of dualistic characteristics by evoking this trickster figure, who is traditionally portrayed as a shapeshifter and encompasses the attributes of both genders.

Some accounts also portray Esu’s gender as ambiguous, where “Esu is also genderless, or of dual gender, as recorded Yoruba and Fon myths suggest” (Gates, 1989, p. 49). By positioning Afrekete in the trickster narrative, Lorde achieves the dual function of embracing her mythically rich cultural heritage as well as her deepest desire to transcend gender binaries. Since Lorde begins Zami’s prologue with the desire to embody the qualities of both genders (her father and mother) simultaneously, she realises this more fully through Afrekete, who is herself a mother and, therefore, becomes “an incarnation of Lorde’s mother” (Raynaud, 1989, p. 238). By signifying a close resemblance to Lorde’s mother and imbibing a similar strength of character, Afrekete becomes immediately attractive to Lorde. She establishes a continuum of female lived experience and women-driven love as symbolised by the Zami women from the island of Lorde’s mother, who work together as friends and lovers. Afrekete is, then, an embodiment of lesbian alliance in Lorde’s consciousness as their lovemaking enables her to “recover the latitudes of Carriacou, the lost lesbian paradise and source of her own mother’s power” (Klein, 1990, p. 335). Afrekete acts as a culmination of the erotic and the ecological, driving forth the creation of an environmentally-driven understanding of lesbianism, as Lorde traces close connections between nature and lesbian identity.

By embedding her experience of lovemaking with Afrekete in the natural landscape, Lorde queers ecology and envisions it as a space conducive to same-sex love and alternative sexualities. Her ecological symbolism and transcendental desire for sexual fluidity embed her lesbianism in the natural world, which accommodates non-essentialist and diverse sexual identities. By retrieving Afrekete as a shapeshifter and a gender-liminal deity, Lorde situates her lesbian desire in the mythical Yoruban narrative: a useful link between the queerness of the theological and nonhuman worlds actualises as the dual-sexed nature of Afrekete transcends the traditional and essentialist gender boundaries and intersects with the non-essentialism and gender fluidity found in the natural world. Lorde’s deployment of Afrekete for non-essentialising human sexuality, therefore, queers both the goddess and the nature. Afrekete is then a malleable image, for as a shape-changer, she traverses the gender binaries. Suggesting vital links between the queer ecological world and the ambiguous sexuality of Afrekete, Lorde re-visions mythology and deities to be as queer, non-binary, and fluid as the natural world itself. Therefore, by acting as a continuum of the queer sexuality witnessed in the natural world, Afrekete shapes the blending and bending of queer and ecological elements in Zami.

Afrekete also exemplifies the decolonial ecofeminist sentiment of Lorde’s writing as she upturns the colonial idea of passivity imposed on Black women by actively engaging with nature on her own terms and towards the end of loving another woman. Lorde undoes the traditional narrative of colonial mastery over women and land as she shows Afrekete owning a farm (discussed ahead). Therefore, Afrekete is not depicted as merely a sensualised and objectified female figure but possesses agency in terms of control over land. However, rather than exercising exploitative dominion over nature, she affiliates with and uses her oneness with it to merge human and nonhuman worlds and celebrate her lesbianism in close contact with nature. The act of replacing the African male god with a goddess figure also connotes Lorde’s rejection of patriarchal religion in favour of a “new naming of women’s power, women’s bodies… and women’s bonds with each other” (Christ, 1980, p. 128).

By inventing a new spelling of her name as Zami, Lorde rejects received patriarchal and religious notions and forges a new identity by affiliating with the Zami women and reclaiming her connection with their shared mythical past. Harking back on the legend of Zami, Lorde weaves her idea of lesbian love within ecology by addressing Afrekete during their most intimate moments in these words:

I held you… slowly playing my tongue through your familiar forests… and tidal motions of your strong body… The moons went out, and your eyes grew dark as you rolled over me, and I felt the moon’s silver light mix with the wet of your tongue on my eyelids (pp. 249-52).

The “tidal motions” of Afrekete’s body symbolise the sea waves that appear to be undulating under the sway of the lunar transition. The repeated motif of water becomes particularly pertinent as Lorde links women and their sexuality with the tidal flow. Her extensive use of ecological imagery in instances like this parallels the acts of lesbian loving and the celebration of nature in women’s appreciation of each other’s physical form during acts of sexual intimacy.

This association between the female body and water reveals that the female body and fluidity are closely tied (both in terms of the postmodernist sense of non-fixity and on a bodily level), which is explored by Margrit Shildrick in Leaky Bodies and Boundaries; therefore, from the menstrual blood and flow of bodily fluids during lovemaking to the water break at the time of childbirth, the female body becomes a carrier of liquids. This connection is also observed by Colleen Kattau (2006), who notes: “Wholly associated with women, the life force of the river parallels the life-giving force of childbearing and the water that pours out of women’s bodies” (p. 133). Following this understanding, a woman’s body can be rendered as a potent source of all that is liquid or “leaky”, to quote Shildrick (1994). Lorde celebrates this connection by drawing from nature and establishing an ecological rootedness to express her lesbianism. It is an indicative decision on her part to present her first lovemaking scene with Afrekete, not purely in physical form, but rather ecologically, where the fish tank and plants in Afrekete’s room act as tropes for the meeting of their bodies: The “translucent rainbowed fish darted back and through the lit water” and “swam in and out between [Afrekete’s doll’s] legs… her smooth naked body washed by the bubbles” (p. 248). The visually evocative image of colourful fish passing between the legs of the doll in Afrekete’s aquarium closely links the natural world and the anatomy of the female form, where the fish make this image of the naked doll (representative of a woman’s body) appear more beautiful and appealing: this shows the synergetic coexistence of the ecological and feminine elements.

The connection between the female body and water becomes even more evident in view of the belief that Afrekete is “also a re-visioning of the sea deity Aflakete” (Ball, 2001, p. 75). This links back to the understanding of Afrekete’s mythical origin as a trickster goddess connected to the sea. Lorde asserts her lesbian identity through this aqualogical¹ rhetoric which is used to describe the moments of her sexual intimacy with Afrekete: by using words like “tossed”, “frothed”, and “washed” (p. 248), she implicates the rhythmical movement of her lesbian lovemaking within that of the sea. Additional images of nature are evoked when Lorde recalls waking up in Afrekete’s house “into a bright Sunday morning, dappled with green sunlight from the plants in Afrekete’s high windows” where existed “pot after clay pot of green and tousled large and small-leaved plants… [and she] came to love the way in which the plants filtered the southern exposure sun through the room” (p. 248). By presenting a landscape replete with greenery and interspersing acts of lovemaking in this ecologically enhancing atmosphere, Lorde represents an environmental sensibility that informs and, in turn, is enhanced by lesbian lovemaking.

The intricacy with which she highlights the many natural hues of Afrekete’s abode brings this goddess figure closer to nature, transcending the purely mythical implications and rooting her within an ecological praxis of pleasure and sensuality. Afrekete’s room emerges as “one of the most narratively and thematically significant sites in the text because of the many-textured intimacies” (Smith, 2021, p. 2), which include the erotic, the gendered, and the ecological. This forms a combined aesthetic of the queer and the ecological, as the erotic geographies of lesbian bodies become intimately tied to the natural landscape of their physical surroundings. The delicacy of images deployed by Lorde reveals a renewed understanding of love between women, which is envisioned as an extension of the love and appreciation they have towards nature. Indulging in sexual acts in an ecological backdrop not only draws these women close to each other but also foregrounds their sensitivity towards the naturalistic elements, which are intricately embedded in their immediate surroundings. The green aesthetics and natural imagery in Lorde’s writing indicate that the fundamental patterns in her Black lesbian fiction display her strong identification with the ecological world. As a Black lesbian, Lorde associates with the green world as part of her resistance to colonialism as well as heteropatriarchy. Since the colonial expansion involves rampant exploitation of natural resources to extract profits from the colonised lands, Lorde’s women act as extensions of the exploited lands in their endeavour to regain lost control within the environmental realm.

This queer ecological understanding can be read vis-à-vis the “green-world archetype” (Pratt et al, 1981, p. 16), a pattern across women’s fiction that explores how they become green-world lovers in trying to overcome the trauma and threat posed by men. Annis Pratt reads this threat in terms of rape trauma, where men capture the ecological world to plunder and destroy. In view of this position, Lorde’s women not only become green-world lovers but also lovers of one another through the mode of “pervasive identification with the natural world” (Donovan, 2016, p. 95). This is revealed when Lorde shows Afrekete as coming from a dream or far-rooted past, where she is “hard and real” (p. 249), but at the same time, she is also a physical manifestation of the goddess from the African legend. Lorde makes Afrekete an active sexual agent in her journey by lending her the qualities of hardness and strength, which are usually associated with the male domain. This dreamy yet real image of Afrekete is embedded in the ecological metaphor of land and cultivation: “She brought me live things from the bush, and from her farm set out in cocoyams and cassava- those magical fruit which Kitty bought in the West Indian markets” (p. 249). In this excerpt, Lorde assumes a masculine role as Afrekete brings her the fruits (and, by extension, her sexual self). However, rather than catering to the male gaze and masculine demands on her sexuality, Afrekete comes to her woman lover. This incident celebrates the green-lover trope amongst women by confronting masculine sexual authority and registering their rebellion against the masculinist conquest of female sexuality and the neocolonial rape of nature.

By combining the physical and ecological elements in her lovemaking, Lorde “evokes a breaching of the boundaries between her own body, the lover’s body, and the natural world” (Provost and Lorde, 1995, p. 52). While exploring the link between nature and the female body, she also employs edible metaphors to draw upon her lesbian lovemaking with Afrekete:

There were green plantains, which we half-peeled and then planted, fruit-deep, in each other’s bodies until the petals of skin lay like tendrils of broad green fire… There were ripe red finger bananas, stubby and sweet, with which I parted your lips gently, to insert the peeled fruit into your grape-purple flower (p. 249).

This instance reimagines lesbian acts of lovemaking through ecological symbolism and embeds nature in Lorde’s most intimate encounters with Afrekete: this can be noted in the extensive fruit imagery used in this excerpt. The connotations of sexual ripeness are invoked through the image of ripe bananas, which Lorde associates with her fingers. The idea of blossoming is invoked through a comparison of the folds of her skin with flower petals. Additionally, Lorde equates the vulva with a flower, thereby drawing an enriching sexual image interspersed with botanical connotations. Her use of fruits also places her writing in “a tradition of queer texts that correlates female sexuality with fruit and nature” (Lawrence, 2014, p. 64), and the metaphors of edibility and consumption are transferred to an understanding of sexual hunger and satiation.

Lorde’s edible imagery finds an extension in her fantastical imagination (italicised in Zami), which situates Afrekete’s fragrance in the world of flowers and fruits, with her being a nourishing provider of Lorde’s emotional and sexual needs. The invocation to her “coconut spicy” (p. 245) fragrance is interspersed with other ecological references that indicate the culmination of physical pleasure by combining the sexual and ecologically graphic language to highlight lesbian erotica:

I rose from a kiss in your mouth to nibble a hole in the fruit skin near the navel stalk, squeezed the pale yellow-green fruit juice in thin ritual lines back and forth over all around your coconut-brown belly (p. 251).

The coconut reference indicates the tropical setting of Carriacou (Lorde’s maternal homeland) and brings the two women closer to this natural landscape. In this way, Afrekete’s distinct African identity ties her closely with Carriacou, a land that abounds in citrus flavours and fragrances, owing to its vegetal life. By paralleling Afrekete’s abdominal region to the structure of a round fruit and her bodily secretions to the juices of that fruit, Lorde places her in the rich topography of her tropical home. Further developing this tropical imagery, Lorde uses the image of a “ripe avocado” and talks about the sweat and liquids involved in her lovemaking with Afrekete, whose wet skin shines like the “veil of the palest green avocado” and “a mantle of goddess pear that [she] slowly lick[s] from [Afrekete’s] skin” (p. 251). The pear and avocado symbolism suggests a connection between the structure of these fruits and Afrekete’s body, thereby invoking the natural and botanical worlds in their act of loving. By deploying extensive edible imagery and showing how this ecological affiliation crosses with her lesbian identity, Lorde situates Zami within a rich queer ecological narrative.

The ecological metaphors used in Zami convey a clearly discernible Black feminist identity by being grounded in Lorde’s Grenadian maternal homeland. The bond shared by the Zami women within the ecologically rich setting of Carriacou becomes permanently etched in Lorde’s memory as she recreates the place through recollections from her mother’s accounts, where Carricaou stands for a female-centric culture with women depending upon and loving each other, “past their men’s returning” (p. 14). In addition to being reflective of lesbianism, Carriacou also shows how nature is significantly embedded in the livelihood and routines of these women—they grow close to one another as they work on the lands and the natural landscape, tilling and garnering it. This has strong echoes of the ecofeminist tradition where women deeply relate with nature and forge a politically useful alliance with it to counter the heteropatriarchal models of dominance and their shared oppression with nature. By showing women working on lands and tapping into their connection with ecology to create mutually sustaining networks of partnership, Lorde’s ecofeminist approach mediates a new queer aesthetic driven by her understanding of a woman-specific culture from her African homeland to which she feels a strong connection. Lorde’s ecological metaphors in Zami, which are largely drawn from the Grenadian landscape, are markers of a powerful matriarchal culture, Black lesbianhood, and environmental affiliation.

Conclusion

As an African-American author positioning Black lesbian experience in nature, Lorde highlights the interrelatedness of the indigenous dispossession of lands and the colonial exploitation of black women as resources for capitalist expansion, where both nature and women are inferiorised as available and exploitable categories (as also observed by ecofeminists). Since the foundation of this exploitation rests on an assumed heterosexual model of patriarchal control and dominance over women’s bodies, Lorde’s recognition of her lesbian sexuality within the purview of the ecological realm activates counteractive modes of resistance where she fights racial subordination as a Black woman and challenges heteropatriarchal gender constructs as a lesbian by utilising the ecological space. While her linkage of female sexuality with nature is reminiscent of the traditional depictions of masculine endeavours as “erotics of ravishment” (McClintock, 1995, p. 22), where the female body is objectified for man’s sexual satiation, she questions the assumed passivity of women and nature as exemplified in this traditional understanding by showing them actively interacting with each other and redefining sexuality as not necessarily heterosexual. Her undertaking of forging lesbian alliances by situating them within an ecological landscape challenges the capitalist and heteropatriarchal paraphernalia modelled around the passivity of women and nature.

By celebrating her connection with nature in Zami, Lorde reclaims her lesbian sexuality and resumes control over her body outside the colonisation of men. Under the established binary system of colonial-sexual domination, the Black homosexual is perceived as irrational and unnatural. However, Lorde reverses this analogy by situating her lesbianness within the natural sphere and thereby naturalising it. She also re-sexualises the Black female body, which had lost its claim to being a sexual and feeling body under the colonial framework of exploitation. Retrieving her Black lesbian body from reduction to mere “flesh” (Spillers, 1987), which is non-evolving and practically fixed and frozen, Lorde presents it as a sexualised site whose vast sexual potentiality is realised in its interaction with nature. Therefore, in the process of depicting acts of lesbian loving in ecological landscapes, Lorde reverses the un-gendering of the Black female body and deconstructs the sexual ambiguity surrounding it. Lorde’s act of retrieval aligns with Maria Lugones’s recognition of Black women’s intersectional oppression based on race and gender, where the colonial understanding categorises them “as animals in the deep sense of ‘without gender’, sexually marked as female, but without the characteristics of femininity” (Lugones, 2023, p. 13). The colonial practice of stripping away gender identity and assigning Black women an inferior status of gendering as women is reversed by Lorde’s queer ecological framework, which uses the environment to unravel the differential construction of gender along racial and heteropatriarchal lines.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Malini Sheoran

Malini Sheoran is a PhD candidate in English literature at the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at The University of Edinburgh. Her doctoral research explores the intersection of queer and environmental concerns in twentieth-century writing of African American women.

Notes

1 I have come up with this term to convey the logic guiding the link between the female body and the aquatic realm.