Mother, Memory, History: Maternal Genealogies in Gayl Jonesis Corregidora and Simone Schwarz-Bartis Pluie et vent sur Telumee Miracle

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...