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Our story sounds different every time my mother tells it.—Aglaja Veteranyi, Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta

My literary fathers tend to stick around.  The late Gabriel Garcia Marquez lived a long, wild life, even if it ended in unjust and heartbreaking—yet poetic, inevitable—dementia.  My literary mothers die untimely and tragic deaths.

Unless, of course, they’re Toni Morrison.  But Toni is mother to us all; I can’t claim her for myself.  She is the grand matriarch who refuses to lay down with every single word.

Yes, I have many mothers, but still I am waiting on my mother to come back for me.  You—some of you few unlucky orphans—know this feeling.  Having many literary mothers is a little like being raised by wolves.  Having many mothers means you still nurse when the first mother looks away.  Or when her body is scavenged by lesser animals, many of them inside of her.

My literary mother Angela Carter wrote her final novel after being diagnosed with cancer.  Leaving behind a small son and husband, she still made a party of words.  She wanted us to remember “What a joy it is to dance and sing!”  In fact Wise Children—full of birthdays and babies and twins and magic and Shakespeare and Carnival—ends in incest between a seventy-five-year-old and her hundred-year-old uncle.  What a way to go out, Angela.  Mom, white-wine drunk again.

But I want to tell you today about my mother Aglaja Veteranyi, whom you probably never heard of, and who drowned herself in 2002 in Lake Zurich.  A Swiss writer of Romanian origin, Veteranyi was part of a touring circus.  Her stepfather was a clown and her mother an acrobat.  She, herself, was made to juggle and dance.  This is the subject of the novel Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta, which she published before she took her own life (other works were released posthumously).

My mother Aglaja is a child, herself.  My mother is waiting for her own mother to return, because she has been abandoned at an orphanage.  My mother Aglaja feels that “home is nowhere, betrayal is everywhere,” (195).  She yearns for her mother’s polenta, which, in her native Romanian, mamaliga, translates roughly to “mother’s home cooking,” (197).  Yet some part of her fighting for survival knows that to eat mamaliga is to eat poison.  This, too, is how I know Aglaja is my mother. 

The family was not Rom, but they were wanderers and outcasts, having fled poverty, austerity, and an illiterate Romanian dictator in 1967.  The child narrator in Polenta feels dislocated because “Here [in this new place] everybody has warm water in their bathroom and a refrigerator in their heart,” (123).  She understands that God is sad because he, too, is a foreigner.  “Out of love for poor suffering humanity, God will eat polenta.  He’s a foreigner himself, traveling from country to country.  He’s sad because he has to start out on a long journey again,” (178).

WithPolenta, there is no dilution of Aglaja’s experience.  Vincent Kling notes in his exquisite afterward, having had the vision to translate the work into English, that she is never detached.  He explains that Aglaja’s voice offers the “adult retrospective viewpoint but at the same time the child’s passage through successive stages of awareness.”  Every line is touching, funny, or pained.  Everything is true.  Always, she is with us. 

I want to tell you about Aglaja Veteranyi because I read Polenta in a single sitting.  I read this book looking up at Aglaja and thinking, how will I ever wear your clothes?  I read this book thinking, Are you My Mother?  I read this book thinking, You Can Be Nobody’s Mother.  I read this and stopped every few sentences to write something.  I read this believing that everybody should read this.  I read this and felt afraid.  I read this and thought of all those stories of the old witch who fattens children up to eat them.  I read this and felt rage at not knowing the good-enough mother.  I read this and thought how you can make a mother out of words.  I read this and mourned because words are not always enough, not always.  I read this and could not stop reading.  I read this and knew what I wanted to be.  I read this and knew where I came from.  I read this and wanted to share my mother with you, so she could be your mother, too.

My father died of absence.  My mother lives in helplessness.  My sister is only my father’s daughter.  I’ve grown up little by little.  And I don’t want any children.—Aglaja Veteranyi

Recommended reading: Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta, Aglaja Verteranyi, Dalkey Archive Press

EXTRA-SPECIAL JULY BONUS: Annie shares her smartypants annotations, saying “I am getting really intrigued by how people map texts (their own and others).”

We agree, and if you’ve any annotations or other visual media to share of your own literary mother (suggestions: altars to said idol, drawings, fan letters, collages, elaborate napkin notes, unsent sexts, autographs, marginalia, hair lockets, hair shirts, star maps, or assorted ephemera), send ‘em in, with or without an essay- we may add it as a regular feature!

Annie Liontas’ debut novel, LET ME EXPLAIN YOU, is forthcoming from Scribner in 2015. She is the recent recipient of a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund to conduct research in Trinidad for her newest work BADEYE, which also received Honorary Mention in the 2013 Dana Awards.  Annie will be attending the 2014 Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal on an Editor’s Choice Fellowship. Her story “Two Planes in Love” was selected as runner-up in BOMB Magazine’s 2013 Fiction Prize Contest and was published by BOMB in December. Other stories and poems have appeared in Ninth Letter,Night Train, and Lit.  She graduated from Syracuse University’s MFA Program, where she was awarded the Creative Writing Department Fellowship and a 2013 Summer Fellowship. In 2003 and 2000 she received the Edna N. Herzberg Prize in Fiction at Rutgers University.  Annie served as Editor-in-Chief of SALT HILL from 2012-2013.  She co-hosts the TireFire Reading Series in Philly.