mainstream US society. Yemanjá is an Afro-Caribbean goddess who protects and governs everything to do with women and femininity, and she is also the original creator of human life. By invoking Yemanjá in the title of this poem, Lorde is asserting strength through blackness and femininity. The speaker is asserting their connection to culture through this goddess in spite of the “ivory hungers” of her mother.

When the speaker addresses “mother,” they are addressing both their literal family mother and Yemanjá as a mother figure. The duality of these two characters both bearing the word “mother” alludes to the fact that both characters take the role of life-giver to the speaker. When the speaker says “I bear two women upon my back,” she is referring to the dual, and sometimes opposing, pressures of immediate family and society versus historical culture.

An important point to make about these dualities is that they do not follow the predictable good/evil dichotomy which can be seen in some Judeo-Christian literature. Although the “pale as a witch” mother is portrayed as bringing “terror”, she is also “steady and familiar” and an anchor “in the midnight storm”.

I’ve linked to an easy-to-read academic article about Audre Lorde that expands on the role of mythology in her poetry.

This poem can seem cryptic without some understanding of Audre Lorde, a black feminist poet for whom the spiritual and the political were one. She is probably most famous for her notion of "erotics" as not necessarily sexual (though it can be that) but as deep communion and sharing with another person as well as the capacity to experience joy: for Lorde, communion and joy, which she understands as spiritual states, become the basis of a transformative politics.

Further, we should keep in mind that 

For Audre Lorde, knowledge of African myths and religions ... became “…the foundation of noneuropean female strength and power that nurtures each of our visions.”

In this poem, the narrator is mourning the way being raised by a mother who has internalized white values has made it harder for her as a daughter to find her own strength and wholeness.

The poem opens with chilling images that unite domesticity with cannibalism:

My mother had two faces and a frying pot   

where she cooked up her daughters 

into girls 

before she fixed our dinner. 

A good place to start analyzing this poem is to look up the word “Yemanja,” a Carribean goddess, who is often called the mother of all.  The mythical tone of the poem is set up in its first stanza, but the frying pan image overlays the mythical idea of a goddess onto the everyday setting of a modern-day American kitchen.

Audrey Lorde is an American poet of Caribbean descent, and much of the poem navigates between the “dark and rich and hidden” mythical space, perhaps associated with the Caribbean. (Her parents were immigrants from Granada), and “the ivory hungers” of the world that the mother in this poem seems to want to conform to.

Much of the tension in the poem rests in the movement between the need for the mythical “black” “Mother” and an ordinary everyday “mother,” who might help the child navigate the two contradictory, but, like the sun and the moon, no less present sides of herself.