Mother, Memory, History: Maternal Genealogies in Gayl Jones'sCorregidoraand Simone Schwarz-Bart'sPluie et vent sur T�lum�e Miracle

Abstract

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).