from Research in African Literatures Volume 34, Number 2

Excerpt from:

Mother, Memory, History: Maternal Genealogies in Gayl Jones's Corregidora and Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle

Gil Zehava Hochberg

University of California, Berkeley

Permission to Copy

You may download, save, or print for your personal use without permission. If you wish to disseminate the electronic article, or to produce multiple copies for classroom or educational use, please request permission from:

Copyright Clearance Center
Professional Relations Department
222 Rosewood Drive
Danvers MA 01923

FAX: 978-750-4470/4744
Web address: www.copyright.com

For other permissions, use our online reprint request form. 

It is by [mother] and through her (à travers elle), as a source of memory, that one is rooted in a genealogy.
--Guy Dugas, Littérature judéo-maghrébine d'expression française (144)

The mother who holds her child also holds her child's memory.
--Jennifer Fleischner, Mastering Slavery (2)

It is by her and through her, through "mother as a source of memory," that one is rooted in a genealogy, a past, a people, a tradition. "Mother" is often represented as a valuable source of unmediated, direct memory and as such is frequently and forcefully "kept in the past," located outside of history. Writing about the place of "mother" within the modern national (and anticolonial) discourse, Anne McClintock argues that women often function as unmediated channels of oral memory, while they are themselves "denied any direct relation to [historical] agency" (90). Positioning women/mothers as primary sites of (personal and social) memory, which is set in opposition to (official and written) history, national and anticolonial discourses limit the role of women, as Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval suggest, to "biological producers" and "transmitters of culture" (7). To this observation Partha Chatterjee adds that a system of dichotomies of inner/outer, home/world, tradition/modernity and feminine/masculine is responsible for assigning to "mother" the double role of "victim and hero." The maternal figure is supposed to represent the muted and stoic expression of a lost traditional identity and the hope for the future growth of the nation's spiritual essence (251).

While within the discourses of nationalism and anticolonial liberation, women are commonly figured as the spiritual essence of the nation and as biological producers of the nation's sons (the nation's "full subjects"), within postslavery African diasporic literature and the critical discourse about it, the maternal figure is more often presented in its relationship to a daughter. Her role as a carrier of (cultural) memory and traditional spirituality is commonly explored through a narrative of maternal genealogy. In an essay devoted to the use of the "matrilineal" as a metaphor of tradition, Madhu Dubey argues that "black feminist critics often use the metaphor of matrilineage to authorize their construction of black feminine literary tradition [. . .] and posit the mother as the origin of black women's literary tradition, as well as the guarantor of its temporal continuity" (245). Dubey's essay focuses on the appropriation of the matrilineal metaphor in the service of constructing a continual narrative about black women's writing tradition. She focuses on the construction of a maternal literary lineage that ties women writers to each other as "mothers of black women's fiction" and/or "dutiful daughters" of this same tradition (245), but her observations are useful also for exploring the pre-suppositions regarding maternity and its relationship to tradition and cultural memory that are treated thematically in the writings of many women writers of the African diaspora, among which are Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, Maryse Condé, and Simone Schwarz-Bart. The centrality of the maternal figure as the originator of women's alternative voice and as a transmitter of memory is an outcome of the particular history of black enslaved mothers. In her acclaimed essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," Hortense J. Spillers convincingly argues that the special conditions of slave "family life" resulted in a unique, and potentially powerful position of African American women (as mother and daughter):
The African American woman, the mother, the daughter, becomes historically the powerful and shadowy evocation of a cultural synthesis long evaporated-the law of the Mother-only and precisely because legal enslavement removed African-American male [. . .] from the mimetic view as a partner in the prevailing social function of the Father's name, the Father's law. (479)
With the absence of the symbolic patriarchal figure, Spillers concludes, the "monstrosity" of a strong maternal figure ("with the capacity to name") offers a radical identity position for (African American) women and an alternative narrative of female empowerment, based on the specific (destruction of) the African American family during slavery. Supporting this claim, Dianne Sadoff argues that black motherhood is tied to a "double history" (10). It is the site of both extreme oppression and radical resistance. Mother, while she appears to be slavery's ultimate victim, also functions as a medium for the transcription of an alternative narrative to this history of oppression. Mother thus "holds forth the promise of a pure origin, an unbroken continuity of tradition, and an authentic black feminine identity" (Dubey 248-49).

IU Press Journals
Home Page
More about Research in African Literatures
Tables of
Contents
Library
Recommendation
Advance
Information
Copyright
Clearance