MA as fantasy

Julia Kristeva has written of consecrated motherhood as a fantasy of lost territory that is nurtured by all adults. In the religious sphere, we see it in the form of a Mother Goddess or as Mother Mary, while in culture, we see it as the ordinary-seeming Ma who holds her son’s heart in her fist. In politics too, it emerges as the motherland, although politicians also tap into the power of consecrated motherhood when they bring their flesh-and-blood mothers into political discourse. We saw this most recently when Kamala Harris described her mother as an immigrant in the US – “a brown woman with an accent” who was tough, courageous, and yet, never lost her cool.

What Harris doesn’t quite say is that her mother, being human, is fallible. Instead, she sticks with the fantasy Ma – an unfailing, temperate presence who compensates for other lacking, including an absent or distant father...

Interestingly, the Hindi screen Ma looms larger if she is widowed, divorced or has been abandoned by the father. In this form, she is nearer to the primal Mother – the unrivalled creator and provider whose primacy cannot be challenged. In this way, she becomes an article of faith rather than a flesh and blood woman. The tricky part, of course, is that articles of faith never have any longings of their own. In Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Adrienne Rich writes that it is only as mothers that women’s bodies are seen as “beneficent, sacred, pure, asexual, nourishing”. In order to be deemed worthy, a woman must be seen as maternal, or at least potentially maternal, and these ideas still play out in public discourse.

Read the full article here: https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/kamala-harris-salim-javed-mother-9539227/