The House of Mothers: Constructing alternative forms of mothering in Kagiso Lesego Molope's The Mending Season

Abstract

Kagiso Lesego Molope's The Mending Season (2005 Cape Town: Oxford) explores the lives of three sisters who reject hegemonic ideals of marriage, domesticity and motherhood, and set about constructing alternative forms of mothering. This article explores the ways in which Molope grapples with the iconic nationalist figure of the mother through a focus on the experience of mothering. It argues that emerging writers like Molope find that the ways in which women as mothers are represented in canonical fiction tend to be one-dimensional. Instead these writers delink the biological aspect of mothering from the experience of mothering. This article argues that, by capturing and elaborating on the diversity of the mothering experience, Molope begins to fragment hegemonic forms of motherhood, and produces alternative structures of mothering.