Motherhood and Memory: A Comparative Study of two Post-Conflict Texts from Argentina and Bangladesh

• In Event: Memory and Postmemory in Post-Conflict South Asia and Latin America

Abstract

In conflict zones, motherhood becomes a site for women to create a public- political identity, to reivindicate memory of their children and to propose a subversive non-patriarchal notion of motherhood. This paper intends to study the intersection of motherhood and memory in post-conflict literatures from Latin America and South Asia. The two texts under study are: La casa de los conejos (2007), an autofiction written by the Argentine writer Laura Alcoba, and the novel A Golden Age (2007) written by the Bangladeshi born British writer Tahmima Anam.
In Alcoba's text, La casa de los conejos (2007), the narrator-protagonist Alcoba bears witness to the horror of the Argentine dictatorship (1976-83) when she is a child. She revisits the past when she becomes a mother and creates her own narrative of dictatorship fused with memory, trauma and testimony by reconstructing her childhood memories of when, at the age of 7, she lived with her mother and other combatants in a clandestine operative house of the Montoneros in the city of La Plata from the end of 1975 until the middle of 1976.
Tahmima Anam in her debut novel A Golden Age (2007) brings into narrative the struggle of a widowed mother Rehana Haque in Bangladesh during the Liberation War of 1971. In the novel, the mother-protagonist challenges the state's nationalist patriarchal ideology of mothers as victims of war by actively participating in the Liberation War of Bangladesh, and presents an alternative feminist model of motherhood as a memory-carrier.
Through an exploration of motherhood and memory in conflict zones and drawing upon Andrea O’ Reilly’s feminist mothering and Sara Ruddick’s maternal peace politics, the paper argues that during conflict and its aftermath, the literary narrativization of motherhood becomes a site of memory formation where mothers act as agents of collective memory and contribute to its intergenerational transmission.

Author

• Mehar Wafa, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi