Mother and me

The act of rubbing pain medication onto my mother’s ageing arthritic body is customary between us. My recording of it, however, was not. This article traces what that recording revealed: a practice rooted in Black literary matrilineage, in which authors as daughters search, discover and embody themes using rhetorical strategies of ‘signifyin(g)’ – a concept from Black literary theory to denote the practice of revisiting or ‘writing back’ to an earlier text.1 As a type of homage or critical dialogue, this mother-and-daughter trope, acknowledged in Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple (1982) in its signifyin(g) of Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), becomes an act of cultural extension, reclamation and new narrative.2

According to Caroline Rody, the authors of Black literary matrilineage frequently,

How the search is performed, to recover and reclaim silenced historical narratives through the reclamation of self, becomes the means of achieving a Black matrilineage. In transforming the literary to the physical, this exploration would be where I acknowledged my practice with my mother as an act of Black Matrilineage. What follows is the start of this journey, a video recording I made of my mother in 2015, and my interpretation of the encounter.4

My mother’s question at the end of the video, ‘I’h work’, translated by me as ‘did it work?’, created an awareness of the tacit dialogue formed by the embodied impressions that occur between mother and daughter in the act of Black Matrilineage.

I recognised in hindsight the historical connection and undertaking that I was being asked to give by accompanying my mother. It was a contribution of my own body in this process of understanding our history – my mother had already given hers. As a form of continuity and connection with my body and thus history, I came to see how this act between my mother and myself was a metaphor for memory and rememory.5

The act

Late one evening, my mother instructed me to get my camera to record her sounds as I rubbed cream into her body. I had recorded a previous encounter and had made her aware that I wanted another. I did not anticipate the experience I was to encounter. I did, however, want to control the environment so that the recording could be used.

The camera, a digital SLR with a built-in microphone, was positioned towards her face so that the sound could be recorded clearly. My intent was on capturing the sound only. My mother, wearing a leopard print head tie, lays on her right-hand side, her face positioned as if gazing towards her favourite south London markets, on a flower-patterned white pillow (fig.1). Visible in the frame, taking up the central lower half of the right side, is her neck and part of her right shoulder, where her white vest strap can be seen. In the background, hanging from a piece of furniture, are two plastic shopping bags filled with items, while behind her is a patterned, indistinguishable object.

I am positioned out of the camera’s view, placed next to my mother’s legs, ready to participate, to help ease her pain, but also knowing that the action would elicit a response. I wondered if pain was the catalyst I was searching for, to retrieve the narratives of the past I needed to locate, to help me understand the past that my mother and I belonged to. I understood through Julia Kristeva how the mother is marked by an ability to transpose herself across multiple dimensions.6 In participating in the complex connections of motherhood, the mother challenges the hierarchy of the symbolic order and disrupts the patriarchy. As Kristeva states, the mother is

My mother’s body had a part to play, and here I was to witness it.

Interpreting my mother’s expressions

Listening to my mother’s voice, through Julia Lemma’s understanding of the mother tongue as ‘the communication that precedes, transcends and surpasses verbal or written exchange’, means that I do not concentrate solely on the words, but also the sounds she makes.8 Lemma states, ‘It is the sacred communication that protects the other, elevates the self and creates connectedness’.9 Finding that the mother tongue creates a space and form that surpasses and predetermines language resonates, and this is the only way, at this stage, I encounter my mother’s voice.

My mother shares with me an act that is borne out of love and not simply tradition. She shows me the methods of alternation and adaptability that she encounters in her body, enabling her to redefine each ancestral matrilineal relationship as they surface. And due to my presence, my mother, in her giving, helps me understand a personal perspective of identity formation, historical social interaction and embodiment. My encounter with my mother’s language instigates my search through her body, for historic maternal bodies. I am aware that my mother’s words and sounds may contain information from the past I yearn to know. As Lemma notes,

Awaiting the onset of this experience, I am retelling, I see her searching with her eyes around the room. I know that I am ready.

Eyes averted upwards (fig.2), she is perhaps searching for one ancestor in particular to draw inspiration from. Gazing and smiling directly into the camera, for a moment (at 7 seconds, fig.3), her childlike essence is seen and felt by me (in the re-watching of the video), awakening a playfulness as she prepares to stir in me questions that will eventually enable me to fill fissures in our family inheritance as I learn to embody a means of holding history. I wonder (as I write this) if she has at that moment decided how she will pass on this information to me. Pausing the video here, to discern her gaze, I see her staring right at me, lovingly, knowing (perhaps) that as I gaze upon her in the video, through the act we are about to commence, she will offer a gift that reverberates a maternal presence in both of us. A presence that may be able to transcend our respective cultural heritages and also the generational forces that shape us, bringing us both back to a tradition in mothering.

Anticipating my hands on her body, perhaps upon hearing me take the wrapper off the cream, at 9 seconds, my mother’s exhale is audible and charged with a release.

Responding to my touch, pain immediately emerges, and my mother elicits a sound which lays on that cusp between pain and laughter. Seeing her squeezing her eyes tightly, I can only imagine that she is negotiating her pain threshold or witnessing a rememory; she screams. She has told me before about the things she sees, visions or past events; they hold importance for her in her role as matriarch but also spiritually, as a Jamaican Woman. This sound lays on the boundary between a yelp and a cry. Manoeuvring her mouth to make a smile, she says ‘why, doe, don’t do that’. She is not speaking to me, for as she finishes this statement, raising her head she turns her smiling face to me, and says ‘no, keep rubbing, but don’t pay me no mind, but mi, mi have to’. Her words, charged with purpose, are tinged with patois, another way of knowing and determination.

You got to learn to listen an hear, gal, Listen!

As a mother she is placing herself in this situation in order to help me. Her words strike a chord of familiarity of strength, stereotypically ascribed to the Black female body, that carries on (for her family and those that she loves) regardless of her feelings. I observe her sideward glances, which for me expose a trickster-like approach in her meaning. I understand from her statement that these words are not meant for me. There are more than two people present. My role of rubbing in cream is no longer just that, I become a witness, an instigator involved in a private collaboration, for without me, this would not be taking place. Without my mother and her consent to photograph and record her body, this would not be taking place.

Metaphoric shifts in narratives

Placing her head back on the pillow at 22 seconds, she sounds out ‘why’, which is elongated and stops on the ‘h’. Repeating this, her gaze shifts slowly back and forth to the camera’s focus point. Comforting the pain by intensifying ‘ooooooooooh’ in pitch and range, she then extends the sound made when speaking ‘why’. Her voice in carrying this sound, ends with two short humming resonances, which, vibrating on the ‘mmm’, is followed by a sharp cry of ‘yeah’ in the key of A, ending at 36 seconds. Locating her gaze directly towards the camera, she then exclaims, ‘in there tough!’ Contradicting the suppleness of the interior of the human body, it becomes clear that my mother speaks and is speaking in metaphors.

Her sounds and use of metaphoric shifts in narratives influence the definition, demonstrating to me the ritual use of signifyin(g), not only in words but also musically.11

In observing my mother emit a melody through the sounds she elicits from her pained body, I imagine that these phrases construct a timeline of events that she witnesses as she communicates with her ancestors. I believe in this moment she forgets that I am present, witnessing her also being a witness. Gil Z. Hochberg informs the reader that in Black literary matrilineage mother is a witness and also a vessel, the one ‘through which the memory of the past is transmitted’.12 I, therefore, am the storyteller, the signifyin(g) daughter, the one ‘through which memories gain meaning only through their re-integration in the present’.13 I am also a mother.

My mother’s sounds become a language that anchors codes to the past. To uncover the histories I am searching for, I must absorb that they are codified not only through her body but also her voice. I must embody to translate.

Beloved

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), the author introduces us to a form of remembering. Sethe’s re-understanding of a memory connected to her possible Grandmother awakened in her an awareness of her transgenerational connection.14 Explaining that ‘she was picking meaning out of a code she no longer understood’, Sethe later locates the meaning by remembering how it was the language that connected her mother to her grandmother, and, I believe, to herself.15 Morrison states:

Memory, as well as pain veiled in voice, was a code. A way in which histories could be placed. Was this voicing of my mother’s breath the code enabling me to unlock the histories of our familial past? The sounds, words and vocal cries I was hearing from my mother were instances of ‘worrying the line’, a signifyin(g) trope, which according to Sherley Anne Williams’s definition:

As I gaze at my mother in this act, acknowledging that she gives herself and her body to recover history in this manner, I recognise my mother as an archive of history and thus, (metaphorically) ‘the mother-of-history’.18 The importance of the mother in matrilineage may be obvious, but what she stands for and how she operates in Black literary matrilineage transpires, as the mother becomes her daughter and the daughter her mother. The act of Black Matrilineage reclaims in its process historic bodies and the myth of the Black mother (and thus the daughter herself).19

In there tough

My mother’s statement at 42 seconds, ‘in there tough’, secured for me the strength of the numerous narratives that my mother had access to. It also warned me that the histories I wanted to know would be challenging to hear and may be difficult to recover. She was also worrying the line. Blinking excessively and eyes off centre, focusing perhaps on something seen from the corner of her eyes, she utters ‘yeah’ and makes a little laugh (fig.4). I am clear that she is not talking to me. This is followed by a sharp cry which immediately turns to several self-soothing rhythmic hums produced with her mouth closed.

It is here in the effable exchange that meaning evolves and is also modified. In embodying the exchanges I witness through my mother, an encounter transpires that gives me an unprecedented interpretation of a past I did not participate in but called for. Placed on the sidelines, out of the frame, my presence is acknowledged at times by my mother. She is not alone; they that reside in her flesh, are not alone. I am both present and absent; her body, in this patriarchal world, is a ‘maker and marker’ of history – a history enacted on our bodies and bequeathed to future children by the mother’s position as stated in the legal principle used to define the children of enslaved women, ‘partus sequitur ventrem’ (that which is born follows the womb).20 Through this understanding of this past, I am transported. I am connected.

The process is still taking place but here, halfway in my reflection on this encounter, I observe my mother conjuring the intonation to both awaken them (in the past) and me. Conjuring as a means to create, a way of being, doing and bringing about, is an activity that occurs within Black (literary) matrilineage.21 Conjuring is what I want to learn to do. I believe she learned this from the mothers before her. I wondered (in my repetitive encounter with the video) if I would ever be able to do what she does: speak and move across time. What she did was mesmerising. I came to an understanding through my emotions that I was here to learn a rite of passage through this embodiment and become my mother. I positioned myself to continue, to observe and find ways to return and remember them. Clarity through Henry Louis Gates’s view of signifyin(g) and Morrison’s use of women’s voices in Beloved, came as a way in which I could become.22

My photographic response to this encounter (see figs.5, 8 and 9) would be a form of signifyin(g) that demonstrates how:23

I would use photography to transpose my mother’s sounds and to split worlds apart, opening a portal of memories,

In generating this code, Morrison’s use of interior soliloquy suggested ways in which the trope of memory could reveal itself as a ‘timelessness of … presence as well as the unlived spaces of life’.26 As I listened in the spaces as well as through the sounds and words of my mother’s response, this was her soliloquy, three minutes and ten seconds long. A dialogue that simultaneously presents to itself and to another.

My mother demonstrated a re-encounter of call and response. A negotiated response that had to be retrieved by her, as I did not yet know the language of her history.

This connection between voice and body permits my mother’s body to be presented as a living and active archive. The words my mother speaks matter during this interaction. Spaced out between sounds, the to and fro, the call and response and then the return of words, signal for me a history of coded language.

I knew I had to listen differently to hear her sounds, to navigate an embodied re-experience as evidence of recovery. Thus, the purpose, as in Black literary matrilineage, is to rewrite histories with my own body.

Caught up in the moment, my mother becomes aware that I have stopped touching her body. Somewhat startled she turns to me and asks, ‘you done?’ Here my presence is noted and, although at this point I try to undermine my presence by keeping silent, I understand now how it was essential that it was noted.

The act of Black Matrilineage does not happen without me. Trinh T. Minh-ha defines matrilineage as one that is evoked by the oral, over the written.28 She explores the connection that I embody as a daughter within this act, and thus, why my presence is significant and must be noted as such.

My mother in realising that the connection has been severed, exclaims, ‘It bruck! it bruck!’ This double-layered repetitive phrase could also be referring to the cracking of the tough part she mentioned previously, meaning that we have broken into the process! The raised pitch of her voice during this exclamation is a mixture of shock and excitement, helping me to recognise and thus determine its role as urgent. I am urged to continue ‘gwan do it!’ she laughs a little, only to begin again the sounds (of pain) needed to complete the task at hand. As I resume the touching of her body, she resumes the excavating journey.

As I continue to rub cream on her body, the intensity of the pain amplifies the sounds she makes. Pausing for a short breath and to tell me to ‘gwan’, blinking tightly (a few times) with purpose (as if to draw out tears, or to clear her inner gaze), she slows down the rhythm, makes a pause and calls out ‘d’doctor’.

Everything stops. She raises her head towards me and informs me directly that she was calling for the doctor: ‘doctor me say’ (fig.6). We can both be heard laughing. I try to control the level and duration of my laughter. She returns her head to the pillow, laughing and making crackling noises from her mouth due to her mirth, and resumes her previous position by calling out again for the doctor and also the nurse: ‘oh doc, please doc, nurse!’

Instantly, my presence is shifted to that of a witness. With my mother calling for those that are supposed to relieve pain with precision and accuracy, while supporting the transition of pain from the body, I feel excluded. I begin to wonder if this has a purpose, and if in calling for particular figures at this time, someone else is to become visible, or she is metaphorically stating that the act is reaching its pivotal moment. My role as daughter is to witness and to retell the story.

As my mother calls out for the Doctor and Nurse, she utilises the technique of worrying the line. As I become aware that someone else may be coming forward to assist my mother, I understand that what is taking place is possibly pertinent to my search for the key to an interpretation. My mother’s call for assistance affirms that there were other ways of knowing that have been passed on from mother to daughter. I can now see that she did this in order to communicate with me.

I was thus beginning to understand that the process between us embodied the defining features of Black Matrilineage. My mother’s reaction after calling for the doctor and nurse confirms for me that this inclusion was part of her methodology.

Informing me of what is taking place, or perhaps what she sees or remembers, she expresses after a shout of ‘Oi’, that ‘It’s wicked, wicked, I don’t’ know?’ This is followed by more screams, through which the experience of pain seems to be powerful enough to move her body. She exclaims ‘it bruck, the bone in there bruck, it bruck, it bruck’. There has been a narrative running through this all along.

As if inhaling for breath, the sound that responds and escapes as a shriek in this act is the sound made from the word ‘high’, though the first ‘h’ is silent, and the pitch level is raised as she makes the sound. Raising her head towards me to tell me that ‘the bone stick me’, and then resting her head back on the pillow, bringing her left hand up to caress above her left eye socket, she laughs (a form of satire) at her response to what just took place, ‘ah lard!’

This was intense, she had experienced severe pain that was strong enough to move the bone that had been broken. Calming herself, catching her breath to control the pain, her breath shortens and on exhale sounds of relief are released.

The event has taken place.

Continuing the releasing sounds, she smiles into the camera. Her head raises, noting my presence once again (fig.7). She tells me that ‘tears are come to me eyes’. Resuming the exhale of her breath, head back on the pillow, I am informed ‘you better look if it a do’, meaning I presume that I should check to see if the camera is recording. I don’t move.

This small episode is hugely revealing in its metaphoric alliance to storytelling, especially as, in Black literary matrilineage, storytelling is seen ‘as symbolic mothering’.30 Something dramatic has taken place, of which I am only partially informed, and this is significant.

As I listened to my mother’s sounds, Mummy’s breaks, silences, humming and breaths all had meaning. ‘“Humming” which has as much meaning as singing ... is guttural, primordial, the “key” that unlocks ... the mystery and the source of her being’.32 I had believed she was soothing herself; instead, it could be a carefully constructed tool for unlocking the past. Looking again at the video where these hums are produced, I now understand that it is probably at pivotal moments in the act that she makes these sounds and unlocks parts of herself to allow other histories to come forth.

Hurston exclaims that these orators are artists, ‘consciously creating – carefully choosing every syllable and every breath’.33 In The Sanctified Church (1981), Hurston determines the importance of this breath that is heard, and with her explanation I am in agreement, for to understand these is to understand their language spoken.34 Hurston states:

I was witnessing the ways my mother was able to show me whose history we belonged to.

I was also witnessing a maternal history.

Deploying another way of knowing located in Black Matrilineage, my mother introduces and immerses me into a discovery of my heritage. Her responsive sounds to pain are melodic, to draw you in and remember the tune, to be able to repeat it, the way stories are told. Telling the listener that ‘you can’t tender with pain you know; you have to make him know say he no boss’, she suggests that her communication involved more than two people and possibly that pain and boss are male in character. She tells me ‘me tongue dry’: does she need a break or does she need water? Or is this just information? This notation, which is not a request for water but a sense that this journey has been long and has exhausted her, allows me to observe the situation where, in defending the pain that exposes the severe actions of the boss, she does not barter with it, despite it trying its best to overpower her. With this visual metaphor allowing me to relate her phrase to harsh treatment, the dryness of the mouth could also be related to location.

This understanding can also be seen as a way in which the master’s narrative is defied, and this defiance is one of the fundamental acts of Black literary matrilineage.

In the last few seconds of the video, my mother’s breath slows and eventually becomes silent. Ceasing the act and I believe breaking the fourth wall, my mother states ‘ih work?’ Whether a question, ‘Did it work?’, or a statement, ‘it worked’, its use confirms the inquisitiveness of her presentation. Did it work for me to see that I am part of this act? Did what was shown work in its effectiveness to stir me into an understanding of the past that I was searching for? Did the recording work?

By asking, confirming, or suggesting directly to the camera (and not to me) ‘I’h work’, my mother can no longer observe me gazing at her in the past, anticipating the answering of her question or statement. If her statement was fact, then she was able to see the future. If a question, she can only imagine the future. But this may also be a code.

Exploring history through this maternal relationship, it becomes evident that this act between Black mother and daughter is ultimately about love.38 Yes, such an act – and that which she later gives me through the series The Object of My Gaze 2015–7 (see figs.5, 8 and 9) – is most definitely borne out of love, and this becomes the theme of expression that carries the way I approach my mother’s embodied cultural language with myself using photography. Another way to pass it on.