Black Milk - Elif Shafak [86]
In her autobiographical novel, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Lorde took a closer look at her childhood in Harlem and her coming-of-age as a black lesbian feminist. She said she had always wanted to be both man and woman, adding into her personality the strongest and richest qualities of both her mother and her father. Her writing was suffused with the belief that the synthesis between seeming opposites was perhaps what made us ourselves. In every woman there were masculine traits and in every man, the feminine. As such, treating the two sexes as if they were mutually exclusive was a big deception and a step away from understanding humanness in all its complexity and fullness.
Strikingly, motherhood is redefined in Lorde’s work and glorified without being sanctified. It is divine but there is nothing sacred about it. Lorde believed that there was a black mother in all of us, whether we were mothers or not. Men, too, had this quality inside, although quite often they chose not to deal with it. Lorde’s metaphor of the black mother was the voice of intuition, creativity and unbridled passion. “The white fathers told us ‘I think, therefore I am,’ and the Black mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dream, ‘I feel, therefore I can be free.’”
Lorde did not reject rationality or empiricism outright, but wanted to make it clear, once and for all, how limiting each was in grasping the world. Too much analytical thinking and worship of abstract theory did not sit well with her. Her connection with language and her hand on the pulse of the universe was unashamedly sensual. She regarded self hood—and, therefore, womanhood and motherhood— as essentially multilayered. Thus she refused to be pigeonholed into any single and static category. She was always many things at once, and after her death, she remains so.
If Audre Lorde were alive today and we had met, she would probably have laughed at my six finger-women and then brought out her own numerous finger-women so that they could all dance together under a warm summer rain.
Sandra Cisneros is an eloquent writer and an outspoken scholar who calls herself “nobody’s mother and nobody’s wife.” She has always talked candidly and courageously about the difficulties—and beauties—of being a single woman from a patriarchal background and a writer on the border of two cultures, Mexican and American. She says, “I think writers are always split between living their life and watching themselves live it.”
Born in Chicago in 1954, the only daughter in a family of six sons, Cisneros closely observed the making of manhood and how painful it could be for those who did not fit into given gender roles. Though she grew up in a crowded, noisy house, she received a lot of love from both parents and was given her own space. “I am the product of a fierce woman who was brave enough to raise her daughter in a nontraditional way,” she says.
Cisneros says she wants to tell the kind of stories that do not get told. The House on Mango Street is the riveting story of Esperanza, a Mexican-American girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago. The book deals openly with machismo, chauvinism and the struggle of a woman of color to find her own voice. Esperanza soon discovers that writing heals her wounds, frees her soul. It helps her to develop her natural talents, find out who she really is and resist all kinds of indoctrination that limit her choices in life due to her gender, culture or class.
Questioning both Mexican and American constructions of femininity, Cisneros wants to explore alternative models of womanhood. Her views on marriage and motherhood have always been controversial. In an interview she says in many ways she still feels like a child. And precisely because of this, because she is still one of them, she doesn’t pick up children and