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Old Magic and New Fury: The Theaphany of Afrekete in Audre Lorde's "Tar Beach"
In Chapter 31 of Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, the young lesbian hero Audre meets a woman named Afrekete. This meeting crowns the book: from Afrekete, Audre receives the gift of knowledge of herself and learns a way to live on the borders of her multiple identities. The encounter between Audre and Afrekete functions as the sacred marriage in a heroic quest narrative. However, since the hero is an African American lesbian, the structure of the sacred marriage changes, as do the definitions of hero and anima. Lorde explicitly identifies Zami as a biomythography, thus indicating that she is deliberately creating myth from her own life. This essay discusses Zami as a work that revisions both Eurocentric and African archetypes.
In Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name the young lesbian hero Audre meets a woman named Afrekete (Lorde 1994).(1) This meeting crowns the book: from Afrekete, Audre receives the gift of knowledge of herself and learns a way to live on the borders of her multiple identities. Zami, described on its cover as "a biomythography," is a quest narrative in which Lorde creates myth from her own life. In the classic quest narrative, as described by Jung and Campbell, the hero reaches the culmination of his quest when he meets and is united in a sacred marriage with a divine female figure who represents his anima or soul (Jung 1968; Campbell 1973). This pattern assumes the hero is male, with male experience as the norm. As feminist scholars have noted, when a woman is the hero, the narrative changes.(2) This is certainly true of Zami, as I shall show in the following essay.
Zami re-visions both Eurocentric and African archetypes.(3) I address the following questions: how does this quest narrative by a Black lesbian differ from the classic male quest narrative? What narrative strategies does Lorde use in creating this biomythography? Who is Afrekete, and what role does she play? I shall examine the culminating episode of Zami, first published as a short story under the title "Tar Beach," demonstrating how mythic archetypes from Afrocentric and Eurocentric cultures are reinscribed and re-visioned, with particular...