Becoming Afrekete: The Trickster in the Work of Audre Lorde

Audree Lorde ends her autobiographical work Zami by [r]ecreating in words the women who helped give me substance: Ma-Liz, DeLois, Louise Briscoe, Aunt Anni, Linda, and Genevieve; MawuLisa, thunder, sky, sun, the great mother of us all; and Afrekete, her youngest daughter, the mischievous linguist, trickster, best-beloved, whom we must all become. (255) Prominent among these real and mythical women is the trickster Afrekete, "whom we must all become." Lorde also alludes to the trickster figure in an earlier book, The Black Unicorn. Interestingly, in this collection of poems, Lorde calls the trickster by the more widely-used name of Eshu (also known as Elegba or Elegbara) and refers to him in the glossary as MawuLisa's "youngest and most clever son" (emphasis mine), who is "often identified with the masculine principle." However, she notes as well that "in many...rituals, his part is danced by a woman with an attached phallus." Lorde's description of Eshu continues: "The mischievous messenger between all the other Orisha-Vodu [gods] and humans, he knows their different languages and is an accomplished linguist who both transmits and interprets. This function is of paramount importance because the Orisha do not understand each other's language, nor the language of humans. Eshu is a prankster, also, a personification of all the unpredictable elements in life" (119-20). In The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. also writes about Eshu, whom he defines as "a trickster and...messenger of the gods, figur[ing] prominently in the mythologies of Yoruba cultures found in Nigeria, Benin, Brazil, Cuba, and Haiti, among others" (xxi).(1) Gates further describes Eshu as: master of style and of stylus, the phallic god of generation and fecundity.... A partial list of [Eshu's] qualities might include individuality, satire,...irony, magic, indeterminacy, open-endedness, ambiguity, sexuality, chance,...disruption and reconciliation, betrayal and loyalty, closure and disclosure. . tall of these characteristics...taken together, only begin to present an idea of the complexity of this classic figure of mediation and of the unity of opposed forces. (6) Both Gates and Lorde emphasize the relationship between the trickster and language. Lorde specifically points out the trickster's multivocality and ability to act as translator. She also highlights the trickster's associations with unpredictability, abundant eroticism, and gender ambiguity. Reading the traces of the trickster in Lorde's work can lead to productive interpretations of the way she constructs both text and identity within the text. The two are intertwined; commenting on references to Afro-Caribbean mythical figures such as Afrekete and MawuLisa in Lorde's poetry and prose, AnnLouise Keating writes that Lorde "...establishes her linguistic authority by identifying herself with [the] black goddess..." (28). With this move, Lorde reverses the dominant values of a society which, she comments in Zami, "defined us as doubly nothing because we were Black and because we were Woman..." (225). Of course, the trickster is certainly not the only persona Lorde chooses to project in her works, nor are the characteristics which mark trickster discourse the only aesthetic values she draws on. Lorde borrows selectively from the trickster tradition, focusing on aspects she finds most relevant, including choosing to identify with a lesser-known, overtly female manifestation of the trickster, Afrekete, as a supplement to the phallic Eshu. In Another Mother Tongue, Judy Grahn paraphrases a description of Eshu and Afrekete offered by Lorde: "[o]riginally he was a female, Afrikete [sic], in the old thunder god religion that preceded Yoruba....Eshu/Afrikete is the rhyme god, the seventh and youngest in the old Mawulisa pantheon....As the trickser, he/she makes connections, is communicator, linguist, and poet. …