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
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.
“Deadline reports that the series adaption of Sula will follow “two Black heroines from their close-knit childhood in a small Ohio neighborhood called The Bottom, through their sharply divergent paths of womanhood. Nel Wright has chosen to marry, raise a family and become a pillar of the Black community. Sula Peace has rejected the life Nel has embraced, escaping from The Bottom, submerging herself in city life, and coming into her own as a woman more intellectually and sexually free than anyone around her. Eventually, Sula and Nel must face the consequences of their choices, and their complicated bond. Along with a mysterious third man named Shadrack, they create an unforgettable portrait of a strange American community, and the relationships, tragedies and triumphs that define it.”
When inspiration strikes, be ready for it. I decided to rework this older piece and then this happened. I used some of my favorite quotes of hers and then added all her novel titles. The quotes are from Song of Solomon and Paradise. The Queen of Literature re-imagined. 2019
RAVENCLAW: “The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.” –Toni Morrison (Black Matters)
I tell my students, “When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”
This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn’t matter to me what your position is. You’ve got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you’ve got.
On January 28, 1856, Margaret Garner, her husband Robert, their four children, and approximately 11 other enslaved people crossed the frozen Ohio River. The Garners sought shelter in Margaret’s uncle’s home along Mill Creek. While in hiding, Margaret’s uncle, worried about how to keep the family safe, left his home to consult with Cincinnati abolitionist Levi Coffin.
Before his return home, U.S. Marshals and slave catchers surrounded and ultimately stormed the home. Faced with seeing her children returned to slavery, Margaret ended her two year old’s life just before being apprehended.
Margaret was held for trial in Cincinnati and abolitionists from across the country came to support her. Abolitionist Lucy Stone spoke at her trial stating, “If in her deep maternal love she felt the impulse to send her child back to God, to save it from coming woe, who shall say she had no right not to do so?”
Margaret was returned to slavery. When Ohio authorities got a warrant for Garner to try her for murder, they were unable to find her. She and her husband, Robert, died in 1858 of typhoid fever in Mississippi. Garner’s story inspired Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison’s novel “Beloved”.
Public invited to star-studded memorial for Toni Morrison
Just three months after her passing, Toni Morrison fans will have an opportunity to honor her thanks to a new memorial taking place this month. According to literary culture website LitHub, the “Beloved” author, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers, will be memorialized with a ceremony at New York City’s Cathedral of […]
Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
(Beloved, 1987)
Toni Morrison (February 18, 1931 - August 5, 2019) - women in history(40/?)
Toni Morrison was an American writer who was known for her examination of Black experience (particularly Black female experience). She won the Nobel prize for literature in 1993.
Toni published her first book, The Bluest Eyes, in 1970 in which she talks about a black girl who is obsessed with white beauty standards. In 1973, her book Sulafollowed.Song of Solomon came out in 1977; in this book, Toni intruduces her first male protagonist and she blends African American folklore and history in a book about the search for identity. Ten years later the critically acclaimed Belovedcame out. In this work, Toni tells a story, based on true events, of a runaway slave who, at the point of recapture, kills her infant daughter in order to spare her a life of slavery. This book won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Toni wrote many other books, in which she talked about many aspects, important to the black community, such as a Black utopian community (Paradise, 1998).
What is always central in the works of Toni Morrison is the Black American experience: her characters struggle to find themselves and their cultural identity in an unjust society.
