Audre Lorde and the Archetypal Back to Africa Movement

Abstract

Purpose: This paper examines how Audre Lorde, one of the most prominent black woman poets of the 21st century, is concerned about the horrors of racism and attempts to erode it through her poetry. As a black, she is excluded from the dominant white society. As a black woman, she is "other" in a patriarchal culture. Methodology: The paper employs the Myth and Archetypal Approach propounded by Carl Jung, Northrop Frye, and Mircea Eliade to examine how Lorde seeks to create a community among blacks using African archetypes. In this regard, Lorde uses a pantheon of mythological and legendary archetypes from the ancient Kingdoms of Dahomey, Ashanti, and Benin to create self-esteem and unity in her people. These archetypes can serve as sources of intellectual enlightenment and models for ritual and cultural behavior. Findings: Lorde sees mythical archetypes as an authentic form of ancestral worship more accommodating than the Christian culture of the West. Such archetypes allow blacks to understand identifiers that contravene Western culture's xenophobia and create unity among blacks across the world. She invokes primordial history to show that blackness and femaleness are not "other" but affirming qualities. Recognizing that blacks had assumed the polarised dialectics of Western culture, Lorde tries to reconnect them to their lost spiritual cord. The archetypes she invokes would appeal to blacks because archetypes are innate. Unique contributor to theory, policy and practice: Thus, by invoking African mythic archetypes, she brings the black community into contact with their lost spiritual history. The paper ends with the caveat that the Back to Africa movement, which has seen a boost in momentum in the last two decades, is a result of the work of poets like Lorde, who, through their poetry, triggered the search for the lost link between blacks in the diaspora and the African continent.