North Carolina Miscellany
COURTESY OF BARBARA TYROLER
the living, alive” (123). And she wants to relay this truth of her mother, without the intrusion of her own perspective as a daughter, in order to sustain the purity of those moments. Many of the subjects in this collection are no longer living. Smith opens the foreword, “Mama,” with the fact that the writers’ “parents are gone, leaving [them] motherless, or fatherless, or, often now, orphans – suddenly out in the world alone” (xi), and the writers want to know, really know, their mothers. This exigence leads to a recurring concern of the writers to detach mother from child in the retelling of the stories. And evident by the stunning heartbreak of a poem “i want to undie you” by Jaki Shelton Green, which is a standout piece in this collection:
ABOVE Award-winning Belle, from the Writers Gallery Series, Mothers, Daughters, and the Writing Life (multiimage composite collection inspired by Mothers & Strangers), by Barbara Tyroler (See more in this series here.)
“from somewhere far beneath the hearts that love you the memory of you / dances across a threshold of stardust. your heart sings forth a new face./ how does a mother continue to sing // how does a mother continue to whisper the story of a daughter’s death” (54). Green echoes the loss of words, “how does a mother continue to sing,” and grapples with the inability to “whisper the story” as the memories are deep down, “beneath the hearts that love” her daughter. This highlights that very difficulty of separating grief, and person, from oneself in the retelling of the story. Sally Greene, in “Estate Sale,” explores this separation grief from a daughter’s perspective: “It’s impossible to disentangle her condition of loss from my own. My mother is disappearing.
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Her mind is disintegrating. What part of me is disappearing in the process?” (117). Greene’s own identity is inextricably connected with her mother’s own fractured memories and identity, and this terrifying realization is echoed in many of the pieces. Mothers are the home where life begins. The incubators. And the nurturers, perhaps. Adrienne Rich opens Of Woman Born, by the universal truth that “the one unifying, incontrovertible experience shared by all women and men is that months-long period we spent unfolding inside a woman’s body.”* Everyone is “of woman born.” The idea of the mother is, therefore, sacred, and this concept is echoed in the collection in the Islamic tenet that paradise lies at the feet of mothers. And mother is also very physical, “the most intimate of all physical relationships” (xi), which is why mothers are hard to define, and why we cannot separate ourselves from them, even in death. While this collection does successfully reflect this sacredness and connectedness to our mothers, a portion of the essays lack organization, are tedious to read and often self-aggrandizing. Perhaps this is because writing about one’s dead mother is trespassing a sacred space: How could we marr our mothers’ memories? How can we do the moments justice? How can we separate ourselves from the body from which we unfurled? n
* Adrienne Rich, Foreword, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, 2nd ed. (Norton, 1995).