Loss of Maternal Attachment: Mothers in Mourning in Grossman and Kanafani

• In Event: Culturally Bound: Women’s Friendship and Gendered Attachments

Abstract

This paper examines the representation of the mother in mourning in two novels, one Hebrew-Israeli and one Palestinian: David Grossman’s To the End of the Land (2008) and Ghassan Kanafani’s Umm Sa’ad (1969). In both texts, mothers mourn the loss of a son during the ongoing violent national conflict between Jews and Palestinians in Israel/Palestine. However, in both novels the son does not die in the narrated events, but his death is anticipated throughout and seems entirely inevitable. Reading these texts, side by side, through the theme of mothers confronted by loss, I formulate a notion of motherly attachment in the face of loss. In particular, this attachment is read in the context of political conflict and violence. Under these circumstances, the maternal attachment oscillates between the personal and the collective, and thus probes and challenges the definition and limits of the political – the politics of mourning, the framework of nationalism and the role of mothering in both. To this end, I examine the way the maternal role is described and understood in both texts, especially in relation to its function in constructing the national enterprise and myth. I discuss the way the familial units are described, and how the women, and specifically mothers, at their center understand them, taking into account the delicate balance between traditional structures and critical feminist theory. The figuration of mothering is crucial to the understanding of gendered attachment in these novels, which is put to the ultimate test with the loss of the child.

Author

• Yael Kenan, University of Michigan