Two Nouns #23 -- Labyrinth
Out with it: I am pregnant – six months in, if you can believe it. Pregnancy in quarantine has meant I’ve missed some classic IRL experiences. There are no coworkers fussing, no warmly proffered seats on public transport. There has been no big reveal. I’ve spent four months conducting business over videoconference, while comedically inflating from the tits down. Coronavirus bars my partner from hospital appointments and so it is just me and the jolly migrant midwives of the NHS system, complemented by my true and chosen families, and my dread.
It me!
Incubating a black baby through a racist pandemic and an antiracist uprising has been overwhelming. I can’t muster the energy for police chat right now, but I’ve been stuck on some of George Floyd’s last words: “Mama . . . I’m through!” His mother died in 2018, but he summoned her in his panicked final moments. Likewise I’m dwelling on the words of Floyd’s young daughter, forced to make sense of the senseless by saying “Daddy changed the world.” I’m tracing the mobius strip of parents burying children and children burying parents – so premature, and sad.
The belated mainstreaming of historical truth and race consciousness is creating needed momentum on policy, and also reaching the amorphous domain of "hearts and minds." I’ve noticed that many appeals to transracial empathy are centered on children. MLK made this technique famous. Nonblack parents are encouraged to think of their precious child—the one hoped for and labored over, the one that is going to ensure they live forever—that one. But rather than the gauzy dream of judgment based on “the content of their character,” people of privilege are now asked to imagine the reality of never feeling safe, because systemic racism turns every black child into Icarus. (Writing this on Father’s Day, I paused to acknowledge the pain of Daedalus – fleeing the Labyrinth he had himself built – as his child plummeted past him into the sea.)
Lament for Icarus, Herbert James Draper.
Icarus, Henri Matisse.
Here I’m going to return to Toni Morrison (whom we stanned in newsletter #17), because it had been a while since I myself revisited Beloved. Her Pulitzer Prize winning novel (spoiler) is about a recaptured slave woman, haunted by the child that she murdered so that it would not have to grow up in bondage. Yes, that is the plot. Morrison based it on the true story of Margaret Garner. Animating the gap between motherhood as canonized and motherhood under white supremacy, these women were trying to tell us something.
Elizabeth Alexander has taken up this torch with a tender New Yorker essay about her two black boys, part of "The Travyon Generation” growing up awash in pixelated antiblack violence:
My love was both rational and fantastical. Can I protect my sons from being demonized? Can I keep them from moving free? But they must be able to move as free as wind! If I listen to their fears, will I comfort them? If I share my fears, will I frighten them? Will racism and fear disable them? If we ignore it all, will it go away?
Questions I have also. Alongside diaper cream and school fees I worry about preserving childish innocence versus real talk about the Minotaur and other monsters. And I worry about my own safety – unconscious bias in hospitals is part of why maternal mortality for black women in the UK and the US is 3-6 times that of caucasian women.
This history runs deep; note the first gynecology was practiced on Afro-descended slave women, and as recently as 2016, medical students and practitioners at the University of Virginia expressed a belief that black skin is thicker and black patients feel less pain. So I am doing the breathing exercises and buying the nursery things. But I am also telling the midwives, my husband, my doula, and my friends. I am practicing how to shed stereotypes, how not to be categorized as angry, or stoic, or overreacting – as I have been practicing my entire life.
2017 protest to remove a New York statue of J. Marion Sims, who developed surgical techniques on unanesthetized slave women. Eduardo Munoz for Reuters.
If you did not know that black women are at risk for this kind of bad outcome, it might be because we are not afforded much space in popular depictions of motherhood. We are prenatal pop goddesses or welfare queens, Jezebels or Aunt Jemimas. We are not the models for maternity wear. Nor the smiling pram-pushers in advertisements. Nor the wellness mamas on Instagram. Even the extremely popular social network Peanut ("Tinder for moms") seems to replicate the exclusionary dynamics in dating apps; zero nonblack women have swiped to request my company for sanity wine.
So I have had to hunt for and curate the experience I am having. I’ve found (do support and share): Like a Mother by Angela Garbes, a spackling of relevant podcasts; I Am Not Your Baby Mother by Candice Brathwaite; the beacon of competence that is Erica Chidi Cohen’s Nurture course (thank you Ann for knowing I needed her in my life); Titus Kaphar’s June 2020 cover for TIME, which looks like this:
I worry that sharing all of this is bad luck, bad form, or bad politics. I could have written on the minefield of navigating professional life as a pregnant woman. An elaborate Yelp review on the marvels of the placenta. How I cringe when people have said, many times over the many years I have been with my nonblack partner, that we would have beautiful children. For now, the intersection of global reckoning and my little pregnancy feels most urgent. I want you to know that my laughter at belly kicks comes with a flicker of dismay.
Lest this read as a tiresome dirge from a cranky pessimist, I want to share an insight from my joyful, affirming, time-zone-spanning baby shower.* My clever friend Jill offered a meditation from Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter:
I imagined two people without words, unable to speak to each other. I imagined the need: The color of the sky that meant 'storm.' The smell of fire that meant 'Flee.' The sound of a tiger about to pounce. Who would worry about these things?
And then I realized what the first word must have been: ma, the sound of a baby smacking its lips in search of her mother's breast. For a long time, that was the only word the baby needed. Ma, ma, ma. Then the mother decided that was her name and she began to speak, too. She taught the baby to be careful: sky, fire, tiger. A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.
Leave aside the expectations that patriarchy piles high on women: This helped me understand why parenting is a place people turn when they try to build empathy for the oppressed. To parent is simply not to look away – to engage, to worry, to speak, to act.
Maybe this doesn’t resonate, because your own experience with these themes is complicated or just different. Maybe kids are not your thing and this discourse is too traditional. Maybe race talk feels a bit much or too hard. Perhaps because I know nothing about childcare, I understand how intimidating it is to stand at the center of a vast maze, tasked with hiking out.
But I am hopeful. This moment is calling for “motherhood” in its elemental form; for each of us to relearn what it means to serve and protect.
Dayo
*Sometime in the recent haze, I made an Instagram story of joyful black people. In case you needed to see that, too!