Mourning the Mamalith: A Graphic Response to Grief

Abstract

“I  love  you  so  much,”  are  the  last  words  I  said  to  my  mother  on  the  telephone  on  Valentine’s  Day,  just  a  few  days  before  she  died.  Our  love  was  as  complicated  as  it  was  deep.  My  mother’s  dogmatic  fundamentalism left little room for me, her queer only child. I have spent a lifetime unravelling a brutal family  history  that  caused  her  to  cling  to  religion,  to  love  Jesus  above  all  else,  including  family.  My  mother was born in Germany in 1938, violently displaced during partitioning in 1946, then abandoned in an orphanage for several years. Years later, she fled to the United States with me to escape an abusive marriage. My mother’s life and her death have prompted this graphic research. How can one develop a resilient sense of self and belonging despite traumatic origins? Is it possible to inhabit a new place and to make it one’s home without, however inadvertently, causing oppression and grief for those already living there? This piece serves as the Prologue to the graphic novel Queen of Snails: A Graphic Memoir (forthcoming November 2022), where I examine this tangled history in depth.