| This dissertation investigates the ways in which women of African descent from Brazil, Cuba, and the United States manipulate the mother-as-nation image to construct their own myths of national identity. Throughout this study, I demonstrate how the various images of mother-as-nation manifest themselves in the selected poetry of the Afro-Brazilian poets, Elisa Lucinda, Maria Conceição Evaristo, Esmeralda Ribeiro, and Miriam Alves; Afro-Cuban poets, Nancy Morejón, Georgina Herrera, and Excilia Saldaña; and African American poets, June Jordan, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, and Alice Walker. The mother images employed by these poets include Mother Africa, Mother nature, Mother earth, mother and child, mother as sexual being, and mother as orisha. The revised mother as metaphor for nation embraces a heterogeneous vision of the black women's lived experience in the Americas and proves to be a vital comparative framework for examining the idea of nation throughout the Americas. |
