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My mother,
my mirror
Photos
by Adriana Lestido, text by Luisa Futoransky. Adriana Lestido is a photographer.
Luisa Futoransky is a writer and poet. Her translated work includes a poetry selection,
The Duration of the Voyage (Junction Press, 1998). Both are from Argentina.
Through
a kaleidoscope of memories and feelings, the author probes one of our most intense
and primal relationships–that between mothers and daughters–and the dimensions it
has taken in Argentina’s recent traumatic history |
I“Once upon a time,”
or so fairy tales begin. “Ma-ma!” is but a mere syllable, repeated. And rooted in
my memory is the first sentence of my school textbook: “My mama loves me.” That’s
how you learned to read when I was a child. We were brought up to believe that a
mother’s love was special, different from other kinds. That it can’t err, doesn’t
hesitate, is never ambivalent or contradictory like other loves. But that’s just
an illusion, like most strongly held beliefs.
The subject, long silenced, is starting to crop up at conferences and to appear in
articles, films and anthologies. I remember how I felt at an exhibition a few years
ago where 80 women photographers from all over the world had been invited to show
pictures of mothers as they saw them. It was a parade of complex and multi-dimensional
portraits of mothers: combative or emotional, young or ageing, enticing or gentle.
But distress about resemblance–that “my mother = myself”–was a recurrent theme. The
phrase proclaims it and psychoanalysis pretty much confirms it: like mother, like
daughter. The myths of the perfect mother and the “good daughter” collapse to reveal
what they truly are: a house of cards blown down by a mere breeze.
It so happens that the captions of the exhibition’s photos carried no date, nor do
those in this reportage by the Argentine photographer Adriana Lestido. Are they trying
to tell us that ties between mothers and daughters are timeless? Ties created by
a whole kaleidoscope of distorting mirrors, reflections and boomerang-type occurrences.
What about the physical gestures and mannerisms of speech we repress deep within
ourselves just because they’re copied from her, she who is watching us from the other
side of the mirror? Love and rebellion seem inseparable from this primal, fundamental
relationship always so marked by intensity and guilt. And such anguish as well.
I’m tempted to think mother-daughter relationships in Argentina can’t be all that
different from what they are in Belgium, Transylvania or Canada. Yet they probably
are. My country was unified by the Spanish language, which we called Castilian when
I was growing up, and its people are mainly immigrants.
From generation to generation, away from their country of birth, women have steadily
handed down the extraordinary strength of their culture of origin and through it,
the not-always-silent presence of an absent language. You can detect it in the uneven,
energetic cradlesongs whose words and rhymes are unintelligible but can still lay
nightmares to rest. The uprooted, the immigrant arrives with very few fixed images;
the scarf she sometimes wears on her head perhaps sums them all up. She clutches
her bundle of belongings, the trunk of the castaways. The treasure she brings is
buried deep in her memory, but the locks have been broken or the keys lost amid a
primeval pain.
At the next level, the most powerful one, lies a whole collection of feelings, memories
and melodies. For example, I can see my own mother nearly a teenager scattering corn
to feed the chickens, combing her hair or untangling my long braids. “My poor darling
mother,” went the chorus of the most popular song of the time, sung by Alfredo Castillo.
Then there was the almost-daily ritual of meticulously ironing –with a fire-heated
iron–the pleats of my white starched smock. The stricter she got, the more rebellious
I became. And her victory was more emphatic each time, because she never dies, that
mother we knew when we were children.
The women I’m talking about–mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers–didn’t fit
a preset image of urban dwellers. They were survivors, so they had to use all their
skill to deal with the here and now. They had no keys to enter the New World so they
picked the lock with skeleton keys, or failing that, hairpins, all fashioned into
tools of their future. This is how they filled their lives with new words and gestures.
It was easier for the men to make the transition. Military service, farm work and
trading helped them adapt much more quickly to the ways, the feel and the customs
of the country.
I belong to a generation of children of Jews who came to Argentina, disappearing
off the map as they fled in boats from repeated wars and pogroms. Just like Albanians,
Cubans and Haitians do today, and before them Vietnamese and Koreans–the latest of
history’s never-ending castaways. People with one hand outstretched and the other
reaching behind–but grateful they have hands at all. Exile, long before Babel, was
and still is punishment.
I’m the product of a world which had only just discovered electricity, a world without
television, with dirt roads and impenetrable barriers, where you were invariably
told: “We don’t talk about such things, young lady.” And what a range of “such things”
there were, including all forms of love and, naturally, a taboo on sexuality.
Where women gathered in my childhood, serials on the radio reigned amid the whirr
of Singer sewing machines. During the excessively long periods of mourning, they
drank bitter maté tea and dyed their clothes black all year round, dipping
them in big zinc tubs, so as to strictly observe the rituals. You had to wear black
for three long years before you could dress in the range of greys of the semi-mourning
period. My fellow Argentine women, unable to bear so many deaths in one lifetime,
hid a deep melancholy and rage under a facade of moral strength.
A quarter of a century after the tragedy that convulsed the whole of Argentine society,
the wounds of the descendants have not yet healed. The 1976-83 military dictatorship
and its dreadful cull of tens of thousands of dead or disappeared sent a whole generation
of traumatised and terrified young people fleeing back to Europe, the land of their
ancestors.
This dagger still cuts as sharp as ever in the memories of the victims of this calamity.
Its cruel traces continue to befoul our air, as in Europe do the ugly wounds left
by the ravages of World War II and, more recently, in Asia, by the Cambodian genocide,
and in Africa, by the Rwandan one.
Latin America is brimming with tragedies that can’t be erased. The model behaviour
of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo is a source of consolation. Their dignity, anger
and courage is an example of how the ferocity of dictatorships can be confronted
with justice and love–weapons that are considered ineffective.
As for our own mothers, they who have set up shop forever within us and outside us,
I think we have to take a step back from them to see their true value. There is nothing
more difficult than drawing what is closest to us, the lines of our own hand. For
them as for us, it is difficult to break these blood ties made of so much likeness
and difference. But nobody ever promised us that reaching true independence in our
lives would be a path strewn with roses. |
The Mothers
of the Plaza de Mayo: Truth and Justice
 In April 1977, 14 Argentine
women gathered in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, in front of Casa Rosada, the
presidential palace, demanding from the military dictatorship news of their disappeared
sons and daughters. When the police tried to disperse them, they responded by marching
around the square. This march was repeated every Thursday at 3:30 p.m. for 23 years.
Demanding “truth and justice” at the height of the repression, the Mothers of the
Plaza de Mayo, dressed in their trademark triangular white shawls, achieved more
with the sheer strength of their blood ties than judges, trade union organizations
and diplomacy put together. Enduring symbols of the fight against the impunity of
a military dictatorship under which over 30,000 people remain accounted for, they
set a model that has since been followed by mothers in Lebanon, Israel and Algeria.
They became known for their slogan: “You took them alive, we want them returned alive.”
For more information:
www.madres.org
www.madres-lineafundadora.org |
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