The Motherland.
Chelsea Bieker’s latest novel Madwoman begins, “The world is not made for mothers. Yet mothers made the world. The world is not made for children. Yet children are the future.”
Mother Nature. Mother Earth. The Motherland.
Like many of you, I woke up in despair, in disbelief, in a dystopia reimagined. I sat up and cried before my house woke up with all of the males inside of it. I walked around in circles. Fetching for my headphones upstairs when they were downstairs by my shoes where I needed them to be. Entering the wrong bathroom for my toothbrush where I had moved them from the night before. I was retracing my steps as if they could tell me where we had gone wrong, how I had gotten into this state of dizziness.
The idea of getting this country back—the promise that led to Trump’s victory—requires acknowledging the binary gender that we created her to be. America the Beautiful. She was a land seized by men, taken hostage, abused and trampled on, sold and distributed as merely territory to be owned.
I firmly believe in something Michele Filgate says in her viral essay turned anthology What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About: “Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them.” What Trump doesn’t seem to understand… well, I can’t finish that sentence because it would be a never-ending run-on… Trump cannot lead us forward in an effort to go back. He does not value women. How is this what our country needs? To achieve a rebirth, as is with any birth, our Motherland needs to be Mothered. Yet even if a Madame President were to repair what’s been broken, empower and accept her family of citizens for their differences with unconditional love, She would still be condemned.
I went for a run this morning hoping that I would have clarity afterwards about my involvement in the world today. Will I, can I keep my commitment to go out and meet a friend? I feel like I need to stay home and write anything at all. The sense I have, am holding, is not that this is 2016 all over again, but 2020. And we are on the brink of another global catastrophe. I have witnessed our country operate out of a fear so strong it outweighed hope. I am expecting riots, hatred, violence and a “storming” of our capital. I am expecting wars closer to home. I anticipate a time of isolation, a time for making art. I’m not sure what else there is to say.
Here is something I know I do not want to hear anyone say, dear readers:
Do not insult a female who authors any novel with immense interiority and provoking intensity as something that is “plotless”. A plot is a piece of land. A plot is a secret plan to do harm. A plot is an interconnected sequence of events. Plots, like many of our inherited stories, are man-made. But art. Art is a reflection. Go back and look harder.
All year long I’ve had this hidden desire to train for a marathon, but my shoes have been falling apart and causing me tremendous pain and I’ve been running in them anyway because I am a woman and this is what I was raised to do. It is a violence that I have normalized my entire life. In her novel LIARS Sarah Manguso writes, “Inflicting abuse isn’t the hard part. Controlling the narrative is the main job.” Her protagonist goes on to say, “I began to understand what a story is. It’s a manipulation. It’s a way of containing unmanageable chaos.”
As I continue to study literature as a student of non-fiction I find myself magnetized by fiction. In order to see things for what they are, I must start first with what I’ve been told. What I have believed. The world is comprised of binaries? Male and female? Good and evil? The only truth that seems to resonate for me is what I find in conflict. Two opposing ideas existing at the same time, one no more truer than the other, relying on the other to exist at all. Why do I believe that a predominantly binary system is going to “fix” anything? It is at the core of the problem. Our states are in no way united.
The revisions of our country don’t seem to be helping. We need a re-write. The same story, but different. If you don’t consider yourself a writer maybe that won’t make sense to you, but I don’t know how else to make sense of what I woke up to this morning. Breaking news. Sam Sanders said on this morning’s VibeCheck, if the news keeps breaking, when do we finally see it as broken?
I am sad and I am angry and I have felt plagued by defeat since I became a mother in 2019. This defeat has also been the most beautiful gift of my entire life and I intend to make something out of it.
Interrogate your own stories, I beg you. That’s it for now.
xAR
