[In the folowing excerpt, Keating argues that Lorde incorporates elements of African myths into her poetry and, in doing so, "reclaims a tradition which has been almost entirely erased by western culture."]

For Audre Lorde …, writing, "making soul," and building culture are intimately related. By fully integrating her personal experience as a black lesbian feminist with her public role as a writer, she demonstrates her conviction that self-discovery, art, and social protest are inseparable. As she explains in an interview with Claudia Tate [in Black Women Writers at Work, 1983], she believes that societal change begins within the individual: "our real power [her emphasis] comes from the personal, [and] our real insights about living come from that deep knowledge within us that arises from our feelings." Lorde's work is shaped by her belief that poetic expression and political action have their genesis in each individual's emotional life. In The Cancer Journals, for example, she examines the anger, sorrow, and loss she felt after her mastectomy in order to learn "who [she] was and was becoming throughout [that] time." For Lorde, self-expression and self-discovery are never ends in themselves. Because she sees her desire to comprehend her battle with cancer as "part of a continuum of women's work, of reclaiming this earth and our power," she is confident that her self-explorations will empower her readers.

Like [Gloria] Anzaldúa and [Paula Gunn] Allen, Lorde associates her theory of writing with nonwestern traditions. In the interview with Tate, she defines art as "the use of living" and explains that, whereas the European worldview depicts life as a series of conflicts,

African tradition deals with life as an experience to be lived. In many respects, it is much like the Eastern philosophies in that we see ourselves as a part of a life force…. We live in accordance with, in a kind of correspondence with the rest of the world as a whole. And therefore living becomes an experience, rather than a problem, no matter how bad or painful it may be. Change will rise endemically from the experience fully lived and responded to (my emphasis).

By defining her own life as integrally related to an over-arching "life force," Lorde can experience each event as a lesson to be learned from rather than an obstacle to be overcome. Furthermore, by positing each person's interconnection with this holistic life force, she acquires both the courage to explore her emotions as she writes and the confidence that this exploration leads inevitably to personal and communal transformation.

As Lorde herself points out, this approach to life is not uniquely African. Yet by attributing her organic world-view to her nonwestern roots, she subtly emphasizes the political implications of her work. According to Patricia Hill Collins [in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 1990], black U.S. women activists' preservation of African cultural traditions has enabled them to successfully resist the dominant society's attempts to destroy their sense of community: "By conserving and recreating an Afrocentric world-view women … undermine oppressive institutions by rejecting the anti-Black and anti-female ideologies they promulgate." I see Lorde's revisionist mythmaking as an important dimension of this political activism. As she incorporates Yoruban and Dahomean orisha, or spiritual forces, into her poetry, fiction, and prose, she reclaims a tradition which has been almost entirely erased by western culture.

This mythological erasure parallels the experience of African American women who, as Collins demonstrates, are objectified—both by the dominant U.S. culture and by the black community itself—through a series of overwhelmingly negative stereotypes such as the matriarch, the welfare mother, and the sexually promiscuous woman. Although these doubly oppressive images make each woman "invisible as a fully human individual," Collins asserts that many African American women have transformed their status as "invisible Other" into a source of tremendous inner strength. By developing a "private, hidden space of … consciousness," they successfully have defied the externally imposed labels and maintained their authority to define themselves. Indeed, one of Collins's main arguments throughout Black Feminist Thought is that African American women's ability to create a unique self-defined standpoint has been essential to their survival. However, because they often mask their resistance with outward conformity, this inner dimension of their lives has received little recognition. As Collins suggestively notes, "far too many black women remain motionless on the outside … but inside?" (her ellipses).

Revisionary mythmaking enables Lorde to externalize the "inside ideas" Collins sees as a hallmark of black U.S. women's resistance to dominant groups. In her work, West African mythic images serve as vehicles for establishing self-affirmative definitions of black womanhood. By expressing her own self-defined standpoint through the figures of Aido Hwedo, Seboulisa, and other African orisha, Lorde offers her black female readers new ways to perceive themselves and new ways to act. It is this trajectory from "inside ideas" to outer forms she refers to in the interview with Tate when she describes her attempt to develop a voice for African American women. When she writes, she explains, she "speak[s] from the center of consciousness, from the I am out to the we are and then out to the we can" (her emphasis).

Revisionist mythmaking plays a vital role in Lorde's ability to speak both for herself and for other black women. Karla Holloway makes a similar point in her recent study of West African and African American women writers' use of nonwestern mythic material [Moorings & Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women's Literature, 1992], As Holloway demonstrates, by incorpo rating metaphoric ancestral and goddess figures into their work, contemporary black women writers have created both a gendered, culture-specific voice and a "collective consciousness." In their texts, mythology serves as a cultural and linguistic bridge: it is "the meta-matrix for all uses of language and the primary source of a literature that would recover a historical voice that is at once sensual, visceral, and real." Black women writers of the diaspora cannot physically reclaim the African culture—the "language, religion, political independence, [and] economic policy"—lost during the Middle Passage and slavery; however, their revisionist mythmaking enables them to "spiritually" remember and reconstruct their cultural past.

Although Holloway restricts her analysis to the aesthetic dimensions of black women writers' fictional narratives, her emphasis on the interconnection between mythic metaphors, voice, and "spiritual memory" has important implications for Lorde's poetry. In The Black Unicorn, Lorde's 1978 collection of poems thematically unified by references to Yoruban and Dahomean orisha, mythology serves as the "meta-matrix" for her development of a culture and gender-specific voice. In the first section, she reshapes West African myth to define herself as a black woman warrior poet. Throughout the remaining sections, she enlarges this original definition to encompass a network of mythic, historic, and imaginary women extending from the Yoruban goddesses—through the ancient Dahomean Amazons, her family, friends, and female lovers—to the "mothers sisters daughters / girls" she has "never been." Because myth provides the basis for "the community's shared meanings [and] interactions with both the spiritual and the physical worlds" (Holloway), Lorde's retrieval of West African mythic figures enables her to create a liminal space where new possibilities—new definitions of black womanhood—can emerge. Thus Pamela Annas [in "A Poetry of Survival: Naming and Renaming in the Poetry of Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich," Colby Library Quarterly 18, 1982] locates the poems in The Black Unicorn "at the boundary between unnaming and renaming" (my emphasis).

As Annas's emphasis on unnaming and renaming implies, in The Black Unicorn Lorde's revisionary myths are both deconstructive and reconstructive. By replacing white Euro-American goddess figures with metaphors of the black goddess, she rejects ethnocentric concepts of womanhood for a culture-based model of female identity formation. The title poem, for example, concludes with her "redefinition of woman, a necessary naming through unnaming, since in Western literature 'woman' has historically meant 'white'" (Annas). Lorde's revisionist mythmaking challenges other hegemonic concepts as well. In "A Woman Speaks," she spurns the image of feminine power as a gentle nurturing force and warns readers to "beware [of her] smile": she is "treacherous" and angry, filled with "old magic" and "the noon's new fury." Similarly, in "The Women of Dan Dance with Swords in Their Hands" Lorde's revisionist myth subverts the dualistic notion of a transcendent deity. She declares that her power, although divine, is not other-worldly: she "did not fall from the sky," nor does she descend gently "like rain." Instead, she "comefs] like a woman"—like an Amazon warrior woman—with a sword in her hand.

Whether she refers to black women warriors dancing with swords in their hands or to goddesses "bent on destruction by threat," Lorde's mythic figures have little in common with those reclaimed by Anglo cultural feminists. This difference reflects the specific conditions faced by contemporary black women. As Holloway notes, "[t]he African deity imaged in black women's literature is very different from the highly romanticized versions of goddesses rediscovered by Western feminists. The African deity is a figure of both strength and tragedy—like the women whose lives echo hers." In both "Dahomey" and "125th Street and Abomey," for instance, Lorde depicts Seboulisa, the Dahomean creatrix figure, with "one breast / eaten away by worms of sorrow and loss." Yet these poems are not elegies; they are, rather, assertions of power in the face of tremendous cultural deprivations. By identifying herself as Seboulisa's "severed daughter," Lorde underscores both the cultural loss she has experienced as a black woman of the diaspora and her discovery of a personal, communal, and mythic voice. In a stanza which illustrates Collin's description of black women's "inside ideas," Lorde writes that, although separated by "[h]alf earth and time" from this single-breasted black goddess, her own "dream" reunites them. She has inscribed Seboulisa's image "inside the back of [her] head." Through imaginative reconstruction, Lorde adopts the ravaged goddess's name as her own; by so doing, she acquires "the woman strength / of tongue" which empowers her work. She projects her speech outward and boldly declares that she will laugh "our name into echo / all the world shall remember" (my emphasis).

Like Anzaldúa and Allen, Lorde rejects the cultural inscriptions which attempt to silence third world women by negating their subjecthood. As they reclaim nonwestern creatrix figures like Seboulisa, Coatlicue, and Old Spider Woman/Thought Woman, these lesbians of color challenge hegemonic definitions of white, heterosexual, middle-class womanhood. Although the revisionary myths each writer invents reflect the specificity of her historical, material, and ideological conditions, all three women develop writing strategies which expose the arbitrary nature of western classifications. By deconstructing and reconstructing mythic images of female identity, they translate their liminal status into their revisionary myths. In so doing, they break down the binary divisions between inner and outer modes of reality. As they simultaneously spiritualize and politicize their work, they create what Trinh describes as "a new in-between-the-naming space" [T. Minh-ha Trinh, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics, 1991], a place where new definitions—and new coalitions—can emerge.