I Am Roha’s Emaye: A Critical Autoethnography of Mothering in Liminal Spaces

Kara Roop Miheretu,Allison Sterling Henward

doi:10.3390/genealogy4020035

Abstract

In this critical autoethnographic study, we examine how one woman, Roha’s emaye (Amharic for mother), developed necessary racialized subjectivities as mother of a child who codes as Black in contemporary U.S. society. While substantial research outlines how mothers of color must prepare children to live in a racist world; typically, this perspective focuses on the child. Often, it excludes how mothers—both Black and White—must ‘do’ identity work to make sense of this. Although race is a social and cultural construct, when women cross the color line to partner and have children, the challenges they face both as part of a couple and mother are real. Data are drawn from journals and memories, blending self-observation and reflexive investigation as fieldwork to intentionally comment on and critique cultural practices surrounding mothering and subjectivity. Data were analyzed using Foucauldian concepts of Genealogy, Power, and Subjectification. Findings indicate that this mother was constructed, regulated, normalized, and categorized and found to occupy multiple liminal spaces. This paper argues that tracing how particular subjectivities are given power and regulated in specific contexts of mothering contributes nuanced understandings of how race comes to matter, for whom, and when.

Highlights

Introduction to MotheringRoha arrived on 14 September 2014, in New York, born to my husband, who is Ethiopian and me, a White U.S woman
We use Black to describe the way African-American and Afro-Caribbean people are constructed in light of race and racism in the U.S here we use “I” to capture Kara’s experiences and “we” in analysis to account for authorship
Theoretical models concerned with power and language and which emphasize “ruptures, tensions, inconsistencies, and instability” (Henward 2018, p. 226) allow for new understandings of how race comes to matter, for whom, and when in mothering

Summary

Introduction to Mothering

Roha arrived on 14 September 2014, in New York, born to my husband, who is Ethiopian and me, a White U.S woman. Sitting in the sterile hospital room hours after his birth, I held him tight and pulled a tiny woven hat over his dark curly hair. His warm cocoa skin provided a stark contrast to the pastel blanket wrapping his small precious body. As a White mother to a Black son, it would become my every day. 2014, I had to reconsider all to become the mother my Black son needed. This is a critical autoethnographic study of mothering in liminal spaces (Rollock 2012) as Roha’s emaye (Amharic for mother). We use Black to describe the way African-American and Afro-Caribbean people are constructed in light of race and racism in the U.S here we use “I” to capture Kara’s experiences and “we” in analysis to account for authorship

Autoethnographic Lenses to Motherhood

Roha’s Arrival and My Becoming Liminal

The Racialized ‘Others’ in the Cornfield

Findings

Whiteness on the A train