Motherhood and literature, a relationship that is transformed in the heat of social changes

From being the great absence of literature, as defined years ago by researcher Nora Domínguez Rubio, a pioneer in gender studies in literature, to becoming an increasingly growing trend of books that narrate it, motherhood is no longer a topic. invisible in contemporary fiction, as demonstrated by numerous titles that address that role from complex and contradictory perspectives.

“In this last decade the issue exploded, not only in Argentina,” the academic assured Télam.

For years, Nora Domínguez Rubio, consulting professor at the UBA and co-director of the Feminist History of Argentine Literature, has studied gender representations in the country’s and Latin America’s literature, and the place of motherhood in narrative. In 2007, she published “Where children come from. Motherhood and writing in Argentine literature”, where she traced the different ways of telling the mother in nodal authors of Argentine literature. Mothers are the object of her study because they illuminate power relations: how they are told, who tells them, with what intentions they speak about the social and cultural, she pointed out in that book.

In recent years, more precisely in the last decade, contemporary Argentine and Latin American literature took a turn in the representations of motherhood: novels, stories, poems, the figure of the mother or the role of motherhood left their place of helpful, domestic and sweetened to re-emerge in its most complex dimension, sometimes far from mandates, inhabiting its unwanted, unexpected or transformative places. Mothers who are protagonists, mothers narrated by their daughters, mothers who make up a genealogy, mothers with health problems, obsessive mothers, diverse mothers. A profuse panorama where motherhood takes on different languages.

-Télam: Do you identify a change in the representations of motherhood in Argentine narrative in recent years? Has the mother stopped being that “absent” person that you once identified?

-Nora Domínguez Rubio: Indeed in my book “Where children come from. Motherhood and writing in Argentine literature of 2007” I identified, very convinced since I tried to demonstrate it by accounting for the absences in the most central authors. Even Arlt in an etching said that Argentine literature lacked those powerful mothers like Gorky’s, for example. I was looking at Argentine literature from the second half of the 20th century. But by the 90s, a greater presence was already beginning to be seen. The tragic emergence of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo as a political collective, I believe, marks a symbolic shock about how Argentine women think, imagine, whether real or imaginary, as mothers. And there was a central text such as “El Dock” (1993) by Matilde Sánchez that takes charge of that unchosen motherhood, in the warmth of a friend-mother who decides on armed struggle and bequeaths her son to the narrator. . In this last decade the issue exploded, not only in Argentina

-T: And how do you explain that twist? Feminisms, the literature of the self, the visibility of women in the publishing market, the construction of more intimate voices?

-NDR: Obviously feminisms encourage ways of thinking and ways of writing about that experience, which continues to be, as Julia Kristeva said so well, an “identity catastrophe” and I think they enable a discourse and the possibility of a first-person voice who takes charge of that experience. It is possible that the development of a literature of the self also sustains this emergence. And the market does its thing, without a doubt, it is not going to miss it. To the point that interviews with writers who in other times reiterated about whether they wrote “women’s literature” now tiresome about how they get along with writing about the maternal. It is true that there are many who write on this topic but others do not. And those who found a way to explore something new there are giving rise to very varied stories and very dissimilar writings. Conclusion: there is no one way to write about mothers but rather an amazing display of very good writing. There is also a line that deals with exploring the memory of one’s own mother; The subject who narrates is placed in a different way in front of the writing and extraordinary texts appeared such as “The heart of damage” by María Negroni or “La insumisa” by Cristina Peri Rossi or “Música maternal” by Graciela Batticuore.

-T: The number of books also represents a conceptual change in the approach to the representations of the maternal role, no longer preferably stereotyped but as a non-romanticized political role, with nuances, a role where there are many ways of exercising and assuming motherhood. Do you identify any of that?

-NDR: This is like this, there is no longer space for traditional roles, there is the need to delve, explore complex affects, open imaginations. The mother may be in a bond that is not biological, but that can be defined as such by the device of attention and care that awakens like the narrator who cares for a child who suffers from a very rare disease, in a climate of an environmental catastrophe in ” Pink dirt” by Fernanda Trías or the novels by Leila Sucari that have an obsessive side on the subject but find characters, fictional worlds, types of discourse that vary in each book.

-T: What scope does literature provide when it replaces or constructs a non-stereotypical role? What difference does that representation make?

-NDR: It seems to me that what this form of experimentation does where the maternal appears as a fictional desire, as it was not in other times, is to imagine complex, disruptive possible forms for the maternal and the representation of children. These imaginary tensions lead discursive forms to fruitful experimentations.

-T: Just as it is reflected in the publishing market, did literary gender studies that investigate motherhood also grow?

-NDR: Academic research on gender has been developing slowly but persistently for three decades. I am talking about Argentina and they have been mainly concerned with investigating the ways in which female writers have accessed the cultural field, avoiding the neutralization that was required of them. There are academic contributions, many are books, very important about women writers. Many of them, such as Ocampo, Storni, Norah Lange, Pizarnik, Griselda Gambaro, Juana Manuela Gorriti, Sara Gallardo, Beatriz Guido and a longer list, have deserved research on different aspects of their productions and it is fundamentally important how their writings and placements They disputed meanings about culture, society and politics centrally. The investigations not only focused on names but on theoretical problems about what it meant to build female literary authorship in different eras, how bodies have been represented, or the tones of a dissenting voice. More specifically, if we think about research on the maternal in literature, some articles have appeared in recent years, here in Chile, in Spain and it seems to me that interest in researching it is increasing and surely this happens because of the emergence of this literary trend.