memoir Archives - Not Even Past

Mother is a Verb: An Unconventional History by Sarah Knott (2019)

The easy correlation contemporary American and British cultures build from sex to pregnancy, pregnancy to birth, and birth to childrearing within a nuclear family is far from uniform throughout history. Mother is not an identity. Not all women will mother during the course of their lives. In Sarah Knott’s words, “mother is a verb,” and it is a deeply ambiguous and sometimes ambivalent one at that.

More than any historian I have read, Knott writes for herself. Her book is driven by self-reflection and personal memory. She does not create her questions simply out of academic interest or a curious piece of archival evidence, but out of a need to make sense of her own experience. Knott eschews the conventions of historical writing. Gone is any pretense to objectivity. And she sees no need to discuss the historical development of mothering chronologically or genealogically. Rather, she writes within a genre of self-help and maternal memoir. Her history reflects experiences like the realization of “the glimmer of novelty… the sheer peculiarity of adding reproduction to sex.” And the “privilege of relative stillness” that allows her to sit reflexively with her hand on her stomach, waiting for the baby to move. Her book is complex and expansive, covering twenty-two stages of mothering. Each addresses a particular discomfort, anxiety, or hope.

Knott draws her questions from personal experience, but her archival explorations are diversified outside of her race, class, and gender identities. As she notes early on, certain developments over the past half century or so – capitalism’s low valuing of caregiving, the emergence of queer families, and more egalitarian parenting amongst some working partners, to name but a few – demand a history that pushes beyond the idea that there is a single labor of mothering in any historical period. Biologically producing a baby and mothering were not always synonymous historically. Black enslaved women and children often did the labor of mothering on plantations in the early nineteenth century. Such attention frequently meant that other women (usually with the title Aunt or Aunty) mothered these women’s children for significant parts of the day, month, or year. Lower- class women in seventeenth-century England frequently brought other women’s babies into their own homes, acting as wet nurses to maintain a stable income for their family while they cared for their own infants. And Ojibwe women nursed the infants of women who died in labor, making them their own. Mothering is necessary labor that varies dramatically depending on the society and its structures.

Knott’s chapters wander through broad histories of time periods, specific historical sources, and personal anecdotes. If a single thread runs through her book, a single theme that ties all who mother together, it is interruption. Mothering interrupts life in both momentary and continuing ways. Knott’s morning sickness risked interrupting her lectures. In the eighteenth century an infant interrupted a woman’s ability to work and bring needed income to her family. On a homestead, the infant interrupted the domestic labor of doing laundry, cooking, and cleaning. But interruption is not unidirectional. Those who mother are also interrupted from time otherwise spent mothering. For instance, Knott recounts an anecdote about an enslaved women separated from her children by trips to Washington D.C.. However, mothers also found ways to mitigate interruptions, such as a women in a factory who hung her child in a basket from the ceiling so she could watch the infant while she worked. These interruptions certainly vary between time, place, and person, but from the seventeenth century on, they collectively define mothering.

Mother and Child: Pablo Picasso, 1921 (via ARTIC)

Knott is not the first historian to write herself into her book, but her method offers an important contribution to a growing genre. Her evidence is in the form of anecdote, mirroring what Lisa Baraitser terms the “constant attack on narrative that the child performs.” (264) Her stories are short and interrupted. And her own anecdotes about the way her son’s crying, or her concern over his reflux interrupts her work, are interspersed with historical voices. Through these moments of memoir, she acknowledges herself as a historical actor who plays a role – equivalent to other historical mothers – in the long-embodied history of mothering. Her theoretical framework reflects some of the most important feminist writings of the past forty years. In her appendix on methods, she discusses Joan Scott’s warning that historians of women must move beyond the study of normative women exclusively, or risk repetition of the political marginalization of all women in their future writing. For Knott, writing a history of mothering, of mother as a verb, makes room for glimpses of trans, queer, and on rare occasion even non-female voices. However, she is also honest about the dominant role cis-women often play in her history. It seems that Scott’s warning both antagonizes and entices her throughout the book, but she resists a definitive answer.

One of the most impressive aspects of Knott’s book is how she invokes queer theories of embodiment, plasticity, and normativity without relying on the difficult terminology that is so common in theoretical works on gender. These theories allow Knott to see mother as something people continuously make themselves, through the labor they do, through the conversations they have, and through their own perceptions of their bodies. “Mother” used as a verb insists that there is nothing inherent, biological, or natural about the action, but it is physical, bodily, and constitutive of identities, if always imperfectly and incompletely.

As a white male in my mid-twenties, who has had little interaction with mothering, I may seem an odd reviewer for this book. However, “Mother is a Verb” is as important for those of us who never intend to become mothers, as it is for people who have been and will be. For non-academics who want access to intricate innovative histories, this book offers a novel approach to the fields of gender studies and women’s history. At the same time, historians who hope to write scholarly books that address wide audiences should take note of the clarity and concision of Knott’s wonderful prose. While asking lots of questions about child care both in the past and the present, Knott offers few answers about the proper way to mother. Instead, she demonstrates the historical centrality of the physical and emotional labor of mothering.

Scum of the Earth by Arthur Koestler (1941)

by Judith Coffin

Arthur Koestler lived a remarkable life – as dramatic a death-defying tour of twentieth century Europe as you can find. He was born in Budapest (in 1905) and went to school in Vienna. As a young man, he took up any number of political causes, beginning with socialism and Zionism. He went to Palestine as a reporter, but found it too remote, so he repaired to Paris and in 1930 went from there to Berlin — just as the Nazis were making their electoral breakthrough. He became a communist and went as a journalist to visit the Soviet Union. (Langston Hughes visited at the same time; the two men met in Turkestan.) By 1933, the Nazis had taken over Germany, and a Jewish Communist could not return there, so Koestler resumed his writing and political activity in Paris. He was next dispatched to report (and spy) in the Spanish Civil War, working for the Loyalists. (The Loyalists tried to defend the Spanish Republic against General Francisco Franco’s Nationalists and their allies in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The war, which in ended in 1939 with Franco’s victory, is sometimes called a “dress rehearsal for World War II.”) Koestler was captured by Nationalists in 1937, locked in solitary confinement, and told he would be executed. In Darkness at Noon (his most famous book, a novel about the Soviet terror of the 1930s), the chilling scenes of men being dragged from their cells in the middle of the night to be shot by Stalin’s police are based on Koestler’s own experience of imprisonment in Seville. An international campaign of journalists, the League of Nations, the Red Cross, and others got Koestler released to the British. For the next three years he tacked between France and Britain, writing first Spanish Testament, then Darkness at Noon before being arrested by the French in the fall of 1939. After escaping that ordeal, he worked for the British Ministry of Information, reported on the war and recounted more of his own experiences in Scum of the Earth and Dialogue with Death.

By the late 1940s he was an intellectual celebrity, best known as a disillusioned former Communist with anti-fascist credentials. Koestler also wrote about science, however, flirted with parapsychology, and pursued women, by all accounts treating them very badly. He and his younger, third wife committed suicide together in 1983, about five years after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. All of this is well chronicled by Michael Scammell in Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic but Koestler tells the political part of his own story with more verve than any biographer.

Scum of the Earth (1941) is the best volume of Koestler’s memoirs – not as well known as Darkness at Noon, but almost as frightening, and not fiction. It begins in August of 1939, in the surreal and depressing quiet on the eve of World War II. Since it is August in Europe, Koestler is the south of France, eating bouillabaisse in St. Tropez. The war would not come to France itself until May of 1940, but even before that, the French Republic began to round up “undesirable” foreigners. One might expect an anti-fascist intellectual who had been condemned to death for fighting in Spain to find asylum in France, which was after all the land of the revolution of 1789, the longest standing republic in Europe, officially anti-Nazi and preparing to fight Hitler. Koestler certainly hoped he could count on the French state’s protection. So did thousands of other political refugees from Nazi Germany and its affiliates, like Hannah Arendt. But he was arrested, held outside of Paris (at the Roland Garros stadium) and then shipped to a remote interment camp, Le Vernet, in the Ariège, near the Spanish border. He managed to escape at the end of the year, and then chronicled the fall of France (“a country which has reached the bottom of humiliation”) and his and others’ desperate search for visas or permits to get off the continent.

Scum of the Earth takes us through Koestler’s fears of being arrested at any moment and his bewilderment in face of the implacable French police. It gives us an excellent feel for France during the war – the more remarkable because it takes place before the collaborationist Vichy government was set up. Koestler offers moving portraits of some of his fellow prisoners: a Jewish socialist refugee from Czechoslovakia; an Italian who had spent nine years in prison and been tortured by Mussolini; two fellow fighters from the Spanish Civil War; and a Polish Jew who had fled the pogroms and worked as a tailor in Paris for decades. “What nearly all of them had in common was being anti-fascist, and having been persecuted in their country of origin.” Koestler doesn’t pretty up their political views or personalities; they are disillusioned, sometimes prejudiced, with odd judgments. But each had resisted the Nazis and plainly would have continued to do so. The French Republic, “their natural ally,” nonetheless “abandoned and betrayed” them. Koestler shows us the psychological effects of internment and how the prisoners’ capacity to resist was destroyed: once courageous dissenters became so demoralized that they were simply “thankful that they were not shot.” Le Vernet was not Dachau, or Auschwitz; it was not at the heart of the Nazi terror. But Koestler and those who were interned there had witnessed ten years of defeats: electoral failure and political terror in Germany, mayhem in Austria, persecution in Poland, military downfall in Spain, and so on. “The essence of politics is hope,” writes Koestler, “and hope had gone.” Scum of the Earth covers only one year, but it makes this larger, sad story of Europe’s surrender to Hitler human and real. Fortunately, we know that 1940 was not the end of the story.

Photo Credits
Arthur Koestler, 1948, by Pinn Hans (www.gpo.gov.il) (Public domain) via Wikimedia Commons
Clandestine photo of Le Vernet, photographer unknown

The Snows of Yesteryear by Gregor Von Rezzori (2008)

by Tatjana Lichtenstein

A swarm of plump and colorful waxwings are feasting on rowanberries. Suddenly, a shot rings out. “A good dozen of the birds tumble from the fruit clusters down into the snow amidst fallen berries and drops of blood. Who can tell whether the survivors will ever return?” With this scene Gregor von Rezzori begins his memoir of a boyhood in Czernowitz, a city that in the course of the twentieth century was variously located in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Romania, the Soviet Union, and today’s Ukraine. A sense of irretrievable loss and dislocation, amid images of beauty and destruction, are central themes in this intimate story of the disappearance of Habsburg Europe.

Born on the eve of the First World War, Gregor von Rezzori grew up in a family that, much like his hometown, was profoundly shaken by the collapse of Austria-Hungary. Czernowitz, the capital of the region known as Bukovina, was one of the empire’s most eastern outposts. Nevertheless, it was known as “Little Vienna” due to its vibrant cultural life and architecture. This was a city shared by Jews, Orthodox Christians, and Catholics, in which a multiplicity of languages could be heard. A place that, through the eyes of young Gregor, was deeply connected both to the land around it and to the imperial capital Vienna.

Von Rezzori’s parents belonged to the city’s German-speaking elite. His father was an Austrian public servant in charge of inspecting the province’s Orthodox monasteries, a position he used ostensibly to indulge his passion for hunting on the large estates owned by the Church. An inattentive husband living well beyond his means and with little patience for domestic traditions and social norms, he saw his fatherly duties as limited to raising his son as a huntsman. His high spirits and love of life stood in stark contrast to his wife’s demeanor. Von Rezzori’s mother, frustrated by a life that didn’t conform to her sense of stature nor her expectations of domestic bliss, escaped their home in Czernowitz to spas and health resorts as far away as Egypt. If weak health had been a pretext for her earlier absences, as a mother of two, she became obsessed with illnesses, smothering her children, Gregor and his older sister Lisa, with overprotection and anxiety. In von Rezzori’s world, parents set expectations. The nurturing, however, was done by others: his peasant nurse Cassandra, known in the household as “the savage one,” and later by Bunchy, his worldly and cheerful governess.

The memoir is deeply personal, organized around stories of family members rather than chronology. Its locus is Czernowitz in the years following the First World War when the old order has collapsed. Although its inhabitants were now Romanian subjects, life in some ways went on as it had before. However, the gradual crumbling of the world of Austria-Hungary manifested itself in the anxieties that filled his boyhood home. His parents—reduced from social, cultural and political elites to relics of the old order—divorce, thereby adding new layers of uncertainty. Gregor’s mother, for example, seeks to uphold her family’s elite stature even as its social foundations disappear. She does so by quarantining her son in the house and garden, thereby protecting him from the contamination that was sure to result from play with other children or from venturing out into the world beyond the yard fence. His father, whose pension vanishes with the Austrian state, retreats to live and hunt among Transylvanian Saxons, a German-speaking minority in Romania’s north.

Although infused with a sense of dislocation, von Rezzori’s recollections are at the same time intensely rooted in the city’s streets and squares, its sounds and smells, in the landscapes that surrounded it, and in its rich mixture of peoples and cultures.

Gregor von Rezzori eventually left Romania for Austria, Germany, the United States, and Italy. He wrote many works of fiction drawing on his own experiences. He died in 1998. The Snows of Yesteryear is a deeply moving reflection on belonging and displacement and offers a glimpse into a multicultural world that was eventually obliterated in the calamitous Second World War.

Related Reading:

Gregor von Rezzori, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories (2007)

Gregor von Rezzori, An Ermine in Czernopol (2011)

Tatjana Lichtenstein elsewhere on Not Even Past: The Shop on Main Street

Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller (2003)

by Ryan Groves

Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is Alexandra Fuller’s coming of age memoir set in the midst of a war-torn African nation. She recounts, in often vivid detail, the harsh realities of living in a violently polarized society and the deep scars that war leaves upon its survivors. Most importantly, her memoir captures the confusion she feels about her own identity and the inherent contradiction of being a white African.

Alexandra “Bobo” Fuller was born in 1969 in Derbyshire, England. In 1972 her family moved from the relative comfort of the English countryside to the arid and inhospitable climate of the Rhodesian bush and into a civil war that had been raging for close to six years. While being white afforded the Fullers a certain degree of privilege, the harsh landscape and constant threat of guerilla fighters from neighboring Mozambique meant that night raids, land mines, and basic survival were a part of daily life. On several occasions, Fuller describes her childhood as one of ever present danger. She remembers helping her father, a reservist for the Rhodesian Army, load magazines before he went on patrol, convoying in armored trucks to the grocery, and the reflection of guerilla binoculars from the hills surrounding their farm. When the war ends and Rhodesia becomes Zimbabwe in 1980, the Fuller’s farm is mandatorily auctioned under the new government’s land redistribution policy. Everything that the family had toiled for eight years to build vanishes. From Zimbabwe, the Fullers move to Malawi and then Zambia, struggling to find a place in an Africa where they no longer hold a privileged status. As the world around them changes, the Fullers are forced to confront their own prejudices and personal demons.

The strength of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is its ability to portray many of these trials with a dark and honest humor characteristic of one who has known crippling fear and refused to let it conquer her. The foundation of the book is not its portrayal of the war, but how the Fullers are able to move forward despite the hardships and disappointments they face every day. Unfortunately, tragedy constantly befalls the family. Fuller’s dedication is not only to her parents and sister, but also to three siblings who died (a sister who drowned, a brother who died of meningitis, and another who was stillborn). These deaths and the constant uncertainty of life play heavily into the family dynamic, especially as Fuller’s mother descends deeper into alcoholism and mental illness. Fuller’s witness to her mother’s inner turmoil is at the center of the narrative and is reflected in the title, taken from a quote by H.P. Herbert. Ultimately, it is the figure of Nicola Fuller that is the key to understanding the true purpose of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. Some would see the book as a lamentation for Africa. It is, in actuality, an attempt to understand where and who we come from.

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