[In the excerpt below, Chinosole explores the ways in which Lorde's poetry celebrates Black and female differences from the dominant culture as sources of power and self-definition.]

The fullest vision and deepest wisdom that Audre Lorde shares with us as Black women is what I call matrilineal diaspora: the capacity to survive and aspire, to be contrary and self-affirming across continents and generations. It names the strength and beauty we pass on as friends and lovers from fore-mothers to mothers and daughters allowing us to survive radical cultural changes and be empowered through differences. Matrilineal diaspora defines the links among Black women worldwide enabling us to experience distinct but related cultures while retaining a special sense of home as the locus of self-definition and power. Through matrilineal diaspora, Audre Lorde realizes her journey to "the house of self." …

The meaning of matrilineal diaspora is rooted in African and Afro-American cultures. As a working historical definition, "diaspora," or dispersal, means the forced displacement of Africans that was initiated by the European slave trade, perpetuated through colonial governments, and continued through global economic and military control by the United States and other Western powers. For purposes of literary criticism, diaspora is less important as an outcome of oppression than as the proliferation of cultures of people of African descent, especially in the Caribbean and South, Central, and North America, but also in Africa today. Put quite plainly, distinct African-related cultures have flowered in spite of, and even because of, the simultaneous dispersal of Africans among kindred European masters. The cultures of people of African descent are dialectically linked in origin and destination. Most Blacks in the diaspora have West African ancestry, and now they resist in similar ways Western political systems that have colonized, segregated, marginalized, and continue to discriminate against them….

Matrilineal diaspora is a mainstay of Audre Lorde's prose and poetry. Before examining the culmination of this theme in "Sisters in Arms," I will trace its expression in the use of myth and language in some of the poems in Black Unicorn (1978). Especially in part one, African orishas [spiritual forces] are woven into the poems as a way of heightening contrast in language and culture differences and as a way of realizing self-definition.

Because on one level of reading "From the House of Yemenjá" implies a narrative about her relationship to her mother elaborated on in Zami, it can serve as a major example of how her poetry uses myth in the overall theme of matrilineal diaspora.

My mother had two faces and a frying pot
where she cooked up her daughters
into girls
before she fixed our dinner.
My mother had two faces
and a broken pot
where she hid out a perfect daughter
who was not me
I am the sun and moon and forever hungry
for her eyes.

I bear two women upon my back
one dark and rich and hidden
in the ivory hungers of the other
mother
pale as a witch
yet steady and familiar
brings me bread and terror
in my sleep
her breasts are huge exciting anchors
in the midnight storm.

All this has been
before
in my mother's bed
time has no sense
I have no brothers
and my sisters are cruel.

Mother I need
mother I need
mother I need your blackness now
as the august earth needs rain.

I am
the sun and moon and forever hungry
the sharpened edge
where day and night shall meet
and not be
one.

In the above poem, juxtaposition of voice, tone, and diction not only dominate the expressive mode of language, but is transformed into the structural and thematic principle of nonpolarized dualities. Ordinary life situations are adjacent to West African deities. Not simply a mythical allusion, Yemenjá, a primary orisha of creation, the spiritual force of the oceans, rivers, and lakes, is compared to a mother's life force as necessary but bitter. The speaker emerges in the end as the principle of difference, and Mawulisa is the implied orisha of the sun and moon or nonpolar duality. The first and last stanzas, then, do not simply encapsulate duality, but are structured to represent progression from a tension-ridden difference to a nonthreatening one. The power of unity is in that very separateness. Difference as a source of dread in the beginning, becomes the basis of self-acceptance still chanting its need and "ever hungry."

The difference between Lorde and her mother, alluded to in Zami but clearer here, is around the conflict of color. Her mother being "pale as a witch" is contrasted with "one dark and hidden." The irreconcilability of a fair mother and a dark daughter is a major source of the mother's rejection in this poem. Difference is not simply a matter of contrasting cultures but the internalization of one culture against another and the conflicts or self-acceptance this generates. As a Black woman, the speaker must accept both aspects of herself and recognize the conflict that cannot be resolved; that is creative irreconcilability.

Other poems that utilize myth as a way of identifying and clarifying the self also are found in the first section. One that refines language juxtaposition and tone is entitled "Letter to Jan." In it Mawulisa surfaces "bent on destruction" in a context where the voice of song and flat conversation measure each other in the same stanza. Beginning with the direct and colloquial line, "No, I don't think you were chicken not to speak," the poem advances to simple lyricism in the statement: "When all the time / I would have loved you / speaking / being a woman full of loving." Language juxtaposition, then, is a literary vehicle that complements and accentuates cultural difference resulting from the Black diaspora.

"Sisters in Arms" is based on a triple rather than a double layer of difference. It contains three implicit lines of narrative: two Black women, one from South Africa, the other from the United States in bed as lovers; the police violence meted out to Blacks in South African townships; and the speaker stationary in her garden. The poem opens: "The edge of our bed was a wide grid / where your 15 year old daughter was hanging / gut sprung on police wheels." The second stanza is in a garden: "Now clearing the roughage from my autumn garden / cow-sorrel, overgrown rocket gone to seed." All reinforce the relative safety of the speaker and the horror of the South Africa her sister came from and must return to—the violent contrast between loving and war.

Loving is temporary. War continues. To express this Lorde invokes and incorporates a legendary African queen, Mmanthatisi, in a new way. Her earlier poems used mostly West African orishas, mythical and timeless. Here we get a concrete reference to a historical figure. Interestingly, when Lorde recited this poem in November 1984, she used Yaa Asantewa from West Africa. The South African legendary figure makes the use of matrilineage more accurately historical. The African figure here is not timeless like Afrekete but breaks the time frame through the need for action to advance the future.

Mmanthatisi turns away from the cloth
her daughters-in-law are dying
the baby drools milk from her breast
she hands him half-asleep to his sister
dresses again for war
knowing the men will follow.
In the intricate Maseru twilight
quick sad vital
she maps the next day's battle
dreams of Durban sometimes
visions the deep wry song of beach pebbles
running after the sea.

"Sisters in Arms" advances matrilineal diaspora to an explicitly collective and functionally revolutionary level. Lorde often reads this poem as part of a concerted effort to raise the political consciousness of Americans about South African apartheid. The poem does battle. This is its function. And in this way Lorde actualizes her intent to "move history beyond nightmare into structures for the future" (Zami).

Collective survival and self-gratification are two threads that braid their way through Aframerican literature registering a cultural imperative at odds with itself. Matrilineal diaspora as envisioned by Audre Lorde is just one way of responding to these tendencies. She heightens and celebrates difference.

I can only suggest ways in which this theme is incorporated in works of other Aframericans. In a general way, forced displacement of Blacks resulted in a sense of self that often was culturally contradictory and fragmented in a hostile, dominant society. The Black diaspora experience required an acceptance of fragmentation and adaptation as critical to survival. Slave narratives and Aframerican literature are wedded around the motif of difference and adaptation. Based on the historical continuum of survival through change, a premium is placed on the emotional immediacy of creative irreconcilability, which is a nonstatic, and nonthreatening affirmation of difference. That difference may mean how a person is at odds with herself or her environment or the norms of femininity set up by the dominant culture. Slave narratives have affirmed this and so have Black women writers, except that writers like Lorde place difference in a woman-centered sphere, flaunt it, and celebrate it. The portraits of DeLois and Louise Briscoe in Zami demonstrate this clearly. The idea of differing, being different, and changing is validated as part of Black women's identity.

Walker borrows the term "contrary instincts" from Virginia Woolf, and Barbara Christian uses the term "contrariness" to describe how different and intractable Aframericans must be to survive emotionally and physically [Barbara Christian, Black Feminist Criticism, 1985]. Zora Neale Hurston's Janie Crawford, Toni Morrison's Sula, and Alice Walker's Shug are characters typifying how contrary Black women can be to the established feminine norms. With matrilineal diaspora this contrariness is projected on a global scale. It maps out internalized conflict created by being caught between cultures inside and outside the United States. In addition to Lorde, Paule Marshall develops the diaspora theme in Praisesong for the Widow and The Chosen Place, The Timeless People. Morrison in Tar Baby has her protagonist, Jadine, moving from the Caribbean to the United States and Europe trying to grapple with internal cultural contradictions. With Audre Lorde's theme of matrilineal diaspora, we have more than a mapping out of cultural differences. She projects a futuristic vision. Few have approached the completeness of vision and expression of matrilineal diaspora found in Zami, The Black Unicorn, and "Sisters in Arms."