This group includes her two sons, and she writes with a mother’s and poet’s touch. In her new book, Alexander expands on an essay published in The New Yorker in June 2020, about the generation whose lives have been shaped, for the past 25 years, by stories of Black people being killed by police officers or neighborhood vigilantes. The Trayvon Generation, by Elizabeth Alexander Read: Where to turn when you feel “at odds with being human” And when I say another world, I mean this one, toppled and reborn.” This is a mother working to complicate simplified and harmful narratives-a mother I could stand and dream alongside.
What pulls me to Singh is the way you can almost hear her voice breaking on the page, even as she gathers herself to press on: “No, I do not want to leave this planet,” she tells her daughter. Throughout the book, Singh fights to teach her daughter about her origins in a queer, mixed-raced family, and to consistently connect their lives to the global realities of climate change, racism, and colonialism. “My job as your mother is to tell you these stories differently,” she writes. An initial feeling of pride that her daughter “colored all four children Brown like you” gives way to the need to explain how the holiday connects to a legacy of genocide. Singh opens this intimate and breathtaking letter to her 6-year-old by describing a common yet gutting event: Her daughter has come home from school with a picture book telling a whitewashed version of the Thanksgiving story. It’s not something to find but something to create.” “I know that no such perfect place exists.
REBECCA PACKER FULL
“In these pages I have mentioned my desire to find a place where I could flee with my daughter, a place that will allow her to flourish into her full potential as a black girl,” she writes. Community-based institutions can seed freedom and joy, she reminds us. McClain doesn’t provide us with pat answers, but she offers a wealth of perspectives that broaden our definitions of motherhood and family before returning her focus to what we can control. She weaves together research, conversations with activists, and her personal experience of raising a Black daughter. “I also wonder just how bad things can get and how soon.” McClain’s work is notable for its vulnerability. Wade, the January 6 insurrection, and a devastating pandemic. “I wonder … whether US institutions and our confidence in them will continue to collapse,” she wrote in 2019, ahead of the overturning of Roe v. In McClain’s reported guide to parenting Black children, her prescience stands out.
We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood, by Dani McClain
REBECCA PACKER HOW TO
The five titles below helped me reimagine how to mother in an inhospitable time and place. Books did not offer me an escape instead, they inspired the hope that I can love deeply and create something beautiful in the world. And, to find solace after dwelling in painful memories, I read widely. When I wrote my memoir, This Boy We Made, about my son’s medical and developmental challenges, re-creating scenes of hospital visits and emergencies drained me, and yet I knew that if I didn’t convey the intensity of those moments, my words wouldn’t connect with the readers I wanted them to reach. The right book can whisk you away others draw you in without your permission. (Here I borrow from Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who defines mothering expansively as “the practice of creating, nurturing, affirming, and supporting life.”) How does one cultivate and pass along anything more than rage and despair?įor me, reading and writing can be restorative acts, even when they require me to face dark or uncertain realities.
It can be hard to find space to live and grow and breathe in the U.S., let alone mother. During the upheaval of the summer of 2020, for example, my son also had his third unexplained seizure, and I faced the disorienting truth that I couldn’t promise to keep him safe, even within my own house. Sometimes it feels as though decades of tragedy and erasure have been smashed into the past 30 months. In the introduction to her book Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, Angela Garbes describes these times as “strange and difficult years of instability, loss, and grief-both general and intimate.” That’s it, I thought.
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