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Loosing babies
Colored women and lost babies, or lost mothers is something that is on the minds of everyone. Particulalrly white folk. Racism does not work if we humanize folk enough for them to be decent mothers. -mammy -welfare queen -crack babies... So goes another aspect of power--the process of dehumanization, to rip away the liberatory tool of mothering, of nurturing. Don't get me wrong. I do not presume we (particularly women) need to feel any kind of maternal instinct. That is not what I would like to convey here. I am only talking about the power of mothering, and the power of nurturing. The two are linked, but not inextricably... or maybe... Besides nurturing/mothering children... how do we nurture/mother ourselves? Each other? So I got to thinking about mothering and colored women. Two central figures popped up in my mind. Margaret Garner (the real life woman who inspire Toni Morrison's novel Beloved), and La Llorona. I thought about these both because they are both women who lost children by their own hands. These women also have ties to their race that narrate a specific history of European dominance over the wombs of women of color. Margaret Garner kills her children, but does not succeed in killing them all, she is caught, arrested, and put on trial for killing her children during an escape attempt. Her story becomes a trope for abolitionist agendas (I do not say this in an entirely derogatory way...) and her case is dismissed. She is sent back to her owner to work for the rest of her life. the lost baby poem* the time i dropped yout almost body down down to meet the waters under the city and run one with the sewage to the sea what did i know about waters rushing back what did i know about drowning or being drowned Although La Llorona has many stories attached to her legend, what seems to remain constant is that she is in some ways, an indigenous woman, more tied to Xicana/o people than the Colonizers. Her loss of children, in many legends represent a greater loss for the race, which makes her story a cautionary tale. La Llorona** Si porque te quiero quieres llorona que yo, la muerte reciba si porque te quiero quieres llorona que yo, la muerte reciba que se haga tu voluntad ay llorona por suerte de Dios no viva que se haga tu voluntad ay llorona por suerte de Dios no viva Me. I used to have a series of dead baby dreams. One in which I narrate the dream in multiple voices, but always myself. I am a child, a teenager and a mother all in one. I tell how "my mother" (who is also myself) and I go to the clinic for her/me to get an abortion. At one point in the dream everything is illustrated, as if a child drew it. There was, of course, a crowd of anti-abortion protesters who blocked out path, but we continued on... To Solomon*** They say there are consequences for love in this day and age where a man can tell me what to do with my body that i am beautiful and rubber takes out all the feeling and feeling takes out all the poison and here's two-hundred to cover up my mistake The clinic was built like an outdoor school in southern california, where classes are held in a series of connected bungalows. On the doors of each room had an outline of a foot on its door. These feet were different shades of brown, I guess to designate the color of the child aborted. Me and myself enter a room that does not quite match the baby I would have. you would have been born into winter in the year of the disconnected gas and no car we would have made the thin walk over genese hill into the canada wind to watch you slip like ice into strangers' hands you would have fallen nacked as snow into winter if you were here i could tell you these and some other things The baby is produced full term. It cries, it's head is poked in by some mechanical device and it dies immediately painlessly. I am now only the mother, blood between my legs. I look up at the doctor in horror... I feel regret. She says, "You have reached parity." I wake up. (side note on this dream, I never before this dream knew that parity is actually a medical term used to describe the number of live births a woman has... trippy.) Ay de mi llorona llorona, de ayer y hoy ay de mi llorona llorona de ayer y hoy salias del templo un dia llorona cuando al pasar yo de vi salias del templo un dia llorona cuando al pasar yo de vi The second dream: I have a baby. How? I do not know? I only know it is mine. It is a sudden pregnancy and birth because I am not prepared for it. I have not purchased a crib. I remember the story of solomon and the two mothers, and wish not to smother my own child, so I lay it on the ground. I forget that it is lying there. I go about my business for the next few days, forgetting that I am a mother. There is a foul and sour stench in my bedroom. It is my rotting baby under piles of clothes and paper. my babies have closed thier eyes and slept in my womb with trust and when they left me I swear I hear their souls ask why chain themselves in my womb and cry to haunt me in my sleep when i am awake and when i will make love they howl in pain no, my brothers and sister's stay with me and they will stay I am angry it did not cry to remind me that it was there. I wake up. if i am ever less than a mountain for your definite brothers and sisers let the rivers our over my head let the sea take me for a spiller of seas let black men call me stranger always for your never named sake I have always interpreted these dreams as warnings for the preservation of my creative self... my babies. And this is true. My creative self was faultering But now, I am beginning to see that these dreams may also be telling me of myself. I do birth myself constantly, but do I nurture myself? Isn't that imperative to a Black woman's revolution? No, hell, the revolution for women of color everywhere, who are often sold out to carry the race on our backs and between our legs? Todos me dicen el negro llorona negro pero cariñoso Todos me dicen el negro llorona negro pero cariñoso Yo soy como un chile verde llorona picante pero sabroso Yo soy como un chile verde llorona picante pero sabroso And of course there is the real life aspect of this. While I understand that loosing my ovary is not exactly a death of future babies (especially for the purposes of advocating for certain reproductive rights), I still imagine the eggs that are now gone from my left pelvis as babies. I would like to honor my lost ovary in that way, because if it weren't for the fear attached to Black women having babies, I would have that ovary. If it weren't for the preoccupation of pregnancy and childbirth when it comes to Black women, doctors would have seen that the acute pain in my pelvis was more than cramps, more than a UTI, and something other than a tubal pregnancy that I was "hiding." but i did not mean to lock these giant souls in my body my own is too small to say yes or now to weep for my open tomb to cuddle these babies buried in my womb to silence or suckle these ghost mouths to my breast And so comes the project of nurturing the self. Of mothering me for the sake of that lost left ovary. Caring for the right one and my spirit as well. Women of color die of hypertension, high blood pressure, and other stress related disease more than anything (with the exception of AIDS). Colored women take a ritual bath, read that novel, write that novel, laugh, play, have wild (safe) sex, love your muthafuckin' black, brown, yellow, "tawny" selves!
* Lucille Clifton "the lost baby poem" * Lyrics to La Llorona, a folk song. There are multiple versions, but I present here the versus I feel are pertinant to the post. *** "To Solomon" from Skin Religion a collection of poems self published by yours truly in 2002. (c) baj 2002 uttered by a black girl at 1:19 AM.
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2 comments
An extremely poignant post. Thanks for sharing that.
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thanks for all of the poems
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