Onyekachi Iwu

Things I Wish I Could Tell My Mom

I am returning to Of Woman Born: Reflections on Motherhood as Experience and Institution by Adrienne Rich because I think it was one of the most impactful for me this semester. I am currently doing a project that explores the relationship between black women and their mothers. A lot of the complex emotions and pains Rich details mirrors a lot of the conversations I’ve been having with black women about the relationships they have with their mothers.

The line “I too shall marry, have children, but not like her” and resenting our mothers for teaching us “compromise and self hatred” resonated with me so much.  It reminded me of “Things I Wish I Could Tell My Mother” by Daysha Edewi, a video where Edewi sets up a hypothetical scenario where she is able to confront her mother about the conflicting messages she sent to her as a little black girl. Her mother told her all the time that she loved her and adored her, while simultaneously constantly shaming and criticizing her body. She speaks a lot about feeling hypersexualized in her mothers eyes, although her and her mother shared the same body type. Within patriarchy, mothers try to teach their daughters to defend themselves against men– wear longer skirts, less make-up, gain less weight. However, by trying to protect their daughters from the pain and fear they experience, they end up traumatizing them and perpetuating the system.

I hated my mother for not fighting this system, for passing down insecurities and these performances of what love and care should be, and how that love and care does not exist for myself, but with men. Because of how our mother’s violence feels, we naively assume our awareness of this violence means we can break the cycle. I remember spending moments where I would assure I would never be so cruel to my child, call her names, and police her body in the ways my mother has done to me. And to some extent, I believe this is true. But I have so much more sympathy for my mother as an adult. No one taught her any different.

Rich also discusses how the patriarchy inherently feels threatened by the relationship between a mother and daughter, a relationship that exists outside of giving energy and care towards a man but directs that energy into another woman. There is this idea that the love and care women inhabit should be reserved and received by men alone, it’s function is to raise and parent men, even into the man’s adulthood. She mentions how her mother gave up being a pianist in order to further her husband’s dreams, similar to the ways mothers give up their dreams in order to give space to the dreams of their children.

Mothers and daughters rarely speak to each other, and have no standard for how to build a relationship in the home despite both experiencing this immense pain. How do we begin to heal if we don’t even know how to speak to one another?

UNTITLED (2004) by Lynette Yiadom Boakye

This week, we had the amazing pleasure of meeting Ntozake Shange in person. There’s something almost unsettling about meeting writers, or any artist one admires in fact, in the flesh. I don’t know if anyone else experiences this. As I watched Shange eat slowly, sip quietly at soda, or struggle to find a page to read from, I was interested in what ways I had constructed her as a mythical figure in my head. And how there was also beauty in these little human moments she gave us casually.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe that a text has a living person behind it, not just the voice you use to read the text. I feel as if there is a Shange that exists who has my same voice and lives in my head, who is the haphazard stapling of all of the inverses of my insecurities. Someone who is the embodiment of all of the women and characters her text speaks through. And then there is the Shange in the flesh. Someone breathing and alive and with a history that no amount of text could fully translate. It was hard to look at her at times, since my brain was wrestling with these two images. Above is a painting by Lynette Yiadom Boakye that I think speaks to this distortion, at least what I experience, when I meet the art vs the artist.

Although I wasn’t able to attend a lot of the lunch, there were a few things I found very compelling that Shange spoke about. One moment was when I asked her what other mediums she would like to translate herself through. In response, she began describing the creative relationship she had with cooking. She spoke of “redefining food for myself as a woman”. Rather than viewing food as a female duty, she spoke of reclaiming the practice as a way to connect to her body and to her culture. It reminds me in the way women often reclaim things used to chain them as a way to release themselves.

I think one of the most interesting things I learned about her work was the note Jennell made about how For Colored Girls was originally meant to be a story about women of color. Although I value solidarity as a concept, I wonder if in search of solidarity the specificity of our experiences are lost. I think the notion of solidarity also disturbs me through the ways I see antiblackness and misogynoir play out in other communities of color. I personally take a lot of issue with the term woman of color, and have actively rejected that term when people try to define me in that way. Until this class, I believe Shange’s work to be work for black women, when in reality, she is interested a wider sense of healing.