Mothering heights
|
Gender has become a significant factor in the production and reception of poetry. RENUKA RAJARATNAM looks at how the mother-creativity interface is yielding new configurations of the idea of the poet.
|
IN the human re-membering we often call history, we find that the traditional idea about poetry and the poet in Western culture often clashes with the accepted versions of female subjectivity. Today in Britain and elsewhere, women poets have considered in their poetic productions the many ways in which they have engaged with, questioned, subverted or recast overwhelmingly male-authored traditions of "English" poetry. Despite the dilemmas and dynamics involved in the issue of tradition and female talent, developments in recent British poetry show that gender is a significant factor for both the reception and potential interpretation of the new poetry.
In my recent visit to Oxford (owing to the largesse of the British Council) I had the opportunity to meet up with some fascinating poets, discussing problems women encounter in laying claim to poetic subjectivity. My interest was specifically drawn to the meditation on the relationship between mothering and poetry as I heard and read numerous poems projecting the experience of motherhood during the last two decades in Britain. On one hand the poems showed at times the incompatibility of the two roles — mother and poet — viewing motherhood as a potential interference with poetic creativity and on the other hand, many other poems proved that the roles were mutually compatible for creative potential. What was absolutely fascinating in the debate was how one could separate the vast range of projections and archetypes surrounding motherhood in tradition from the "real" mothers of today who actually nurse their babies, change nappies, cook, wash and write poetry! We are talking about the mothering heights of poetry amidst the anxiety of actual motherhood!
How can motherhood, being "bodily" occupied by the everyday common chores, be compatible with lyric flights of poesy? Can one imagine Dante and Milton changing nappies? Shakespeare, Shelley or Valerie knitting booties or Eliot searching for socks or Dylan Thomas helping with homework? But did not the traditional father-poet Coleridge write those beautiful lines of "Frost at Midnight" beside his sleeping son? Maybe it was the passive state of the child and the general quietitude of the night that spurred him on to reach his lyrical heights.
Grace Nichols
Despite the scepticism, British poetry today continues to show that motherhood has and is generating a vast creative production and what was amazing was that each of the poets who were either formed or deformed by the existing multiple cultural identities mirrored their experiences of motherhood through a framework of myriad cross-cultural contexts. In my observation, the unifying theme of the poets' meet was the discovery of the new configurations of the idea of the poet.
Vicki Feaver, British poet, subverts Keats' idea of poetry that it has to come as "naturally as leaves to a tree" or else "it had better not come at all". Childbirth is a natural act of creation but how many babies are born easily? "The idea of art involves struggle," asserts Feaver and foregrounds motherhood as a legitimate stuff of poetic art. Here is Penelope Shuttle celebrating the "First Foetal Movements of My Daughter":
Shadow of a fish
The water-echo
Inner florist dancing
Her fathomless ease
Her gauzy thumbs
Leapfrogger,
her olympics in the womb's stadium.
After birth, the mother is the source: of care, food, emotions, language — in fact she is the first mirror of all realisation. Here is Sylvia Plath on her experience:
One cry. It is the hook I hang on.
And I am a river of milk
I am a warm hill.
Irish poet Nuala Ni Dhomnahail resorts (unconsciously?) to a unique mother-imagery while expressing a socio-cultural issue: "the language issue":
I place my hope on the water
in the little boat
of language, the way a body might put
an infant
in a basket of intertwined
iris leaves... ... ... ...
not knowing where it might end up,
in the lap, perhaps
of some pharoah's daughter.
Mother is the archetypal then — because she takes over the images wherever the mother-poet speaks, writes or paints. Here is how the Anglo-Irish poet Eavan Boland's elegy "Child of our Time" works through powerful images of lullabies, bed-time stories, sleep and innocence gradually leading to a chilling experience of a child's death in a Dublin bombing:
Yesterday, I knew no lullaby
But you have taught me overnight to order
This song, which takes from your final cry... ... ... .
Child of our Time, our times have robbed your cradle
Sleep in a world your final sleep has woken. 17 May 1974
The poem connects a mother's subjective experience to the objective reality of a place, its history, culture and politics, revealing a global vision of horror when a child's innocence is murdered.
Caroi Ann Duffy
In tones ranging from the wistful to the indignant, the desperate to the resigned, several poets explored the question of selfhood mournfully claiming to have lost their creative and personal identities in the process of mothering. Adrienne Rich feels that poetry can be written by the part of the self that is no mother. She explains, "for me, poetry was where I lived/ as no-one's mother/ where I existed as myself". Carol Ann Duffy describes how motherhood can completely erode the self-identity of a woman:
My hands,
still wet, sprout wooden pegs. I smell apples
burning as I hang the washing out.... ... ... ..
She cannot be myself and yet I have a box
of dusty presents to confirm that she was there.
Contrary to this idea, the Mother India icon of our culture, emblematic of love, labour and sacrifice, glorifies self-negation in a woman. While the powerful rhetorics of this icon idealises the woman, in reality it renders her powerless as she suffers both a cultural as well as a political loss. The icon has dangerously conditioned society into believing the mere passive projection of the iconic idea and thereby subjecting the woman into being an eternally sad, unrealised, desexualised figure. But reverting to the question of selfhood, there is certainly a high sense of melodrama in the poets who see a conflicting identity crisis in the self and motherhood. Is not motherhood an experience that brings one closer to one's own self-recognition and awareness, which in turn enhances creativity?
Eavan Boland
The Afro-Caribbean British poet Grace Nichols recognises and expresses this awareness in a moving birth-poem called "In My Name". Abandoned by the white coloniser cum seducer, the black slave woman celebrates her identity as a mother and commands the earth to receive her "bastard fruit", "strange Mulatto", "perfect-tainted child" and her "little bloodling":
Heavy with child
belly
an arc
of black moon
... ... . I
command the earth
to receive you
in my name
in my blood.
The mother refuses to take the father's name (spiritual or biological) but asserts her identity and ownership. The poem turns anger, mixed blood, powerlessness and bastardy into the power of a mother's love in whose name she conducts the ceremony of birth with sheer dignity. The poem's birth-metaphor can also be fruitfully read as a parable of the birth of the new post-colonial mulatto poetry.
Recent poetry in Britain has split-open the category "Mother" and has shown how various the manifestations are produced by this term. Perhaps the most exciting development signalled here is in the identification of poetry as a valuable index of cultural change. The "Mother" in Britain is no doubt a best seller; check out the vanishing volumes of mothering heights at the Waterstone's!
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
