THE MAMMY, THE BREEDER AND THE RACE WOMAN: STORYTELLING AS SUBVERSION IN SELECTED NOVELS BY CONTEMPORARY BLACK WOMEN WRITERS

Abstract

Audre Lorde categorized her semi-autobiographical novel Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, published in 1982, as biomythography. In doing so, Lorde suggested a new genre of writing that challenges the boundaries of existing genres, particularly for Black women writers. Lorde’s unique method of storytelling utilizes elements of traditional biography as well as the history of myth, this combination constituting a “new spelling” of her name. Since 1982, the term biomythography has become a sort of umbrella for many types of feminist (auto)biographical writing. With close readings of three novels by contemporary black women writers—Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, Octavia Butler’s Dawn, and Nnedi Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix—I argue that work currently considered in the genre of Afrofuturism should instead be read as biomythography. Naylor, Butler, and Okorafor all do the work of biomythography by foregrounding, in fiction, the rich inner lives of Black women in a way that directly challenges two dominant myths of Black womanhood—the mammy and the breeder—and, in Okorafor’s case, reclaims and rewrites the narrative of the Race Woman. Reading these novels as biomythography foregrounds the ways Black women writers use dissemblance to radically reimagine identity, or “new spellings” of their names. My readings open up new lines of critical inquiry for these individual texts while also calling for both a broader definition of biomythography and more attention to it as a genre particular to Black women’s writing.