On Writing & Motherhood
By Mariam Tell
When does motherhood become a muse? For generations, parenting has been humanity’s ultimate act of creation – and yet mothers are sidecasted, primarily portrayed as the bearers of stories rather than the creative mind behind the storytelling. This August, for Women in Translation Month (#WiTMonth), we interviewed two women writers whose journey and experience of motherhood have influenced their craft.
Jenine Abboushi is a Palestinian American writer, freelancer, and traveler. She is a regular contributor to The Markaz Review and, most recently, had a piece published in Guernica: “Joli Petit Accent”.
ALQ: Do you feel your work is a reflection of your own gender identity, or a response to the identities of women around you?
JENINE: Yes, very much so. The way I observe people and places, what is visible to me, my social interactions, derive from my experience as a female, and from the beginning of my conscious thinking. And social interactions with other women, friendships and family members who are women, their stories and experiences, have enrichened my life. This all shapes and defines my writing, even when I am not directly addressing gender or women.
ALQ: Since becoming a mother, how do you feel your own identity as a writer and the topics you tackle might have changed or shifted, if at all?
Jenine: Having children rooted me further in the natural world, its rhythms and harmonies. It enabled me to respect and be proud of the power of my physical body, very connected to my spirit and capacity for love. I went deep into the daily task of caring for them and marveling at them. I realized from this time onward how much traditional fathers missed out, and how hard it was for my mother to work outside the home and cook for us every night. With this experience, I gained in resilience, and got much better (I hope) at keeping a plurality of perspectives at play at all times. This trained me for life and also for writing. Growing my children up, as we say in Arabic, and my children themselves taught me so much. I was lucky to be attentive to the rich details of their discovery and shaping of the worlds around them. My children continue to be the richest source of experience in my life. I do not adhere to a public/private division, and in fact have noted that this idea has always been a false one with oppressive gender politics. So I let many realities and experiences enter with ease into my writing. I mix it all up, which in my view is the way we experience reality, and it feels quite natural to me. My children make multiple appearances in all of my writing, as adults and as children, and often myself and my brother as children. Because I write multi-gendered essays and novels (yet to be published), this method fits in well, I think.
ALQ: In your piece for Guernica, ‘Joli Petit Accent’, you talk about the influence of language and linguistic history on your own accent and, as a result, others’ perception of you. How did language play a role in your own childhood, as well as your children’s childhood? Do you feel you have a connection to your ‘mother tongue’ that has influenced your writing?
Jenine: I am not sure I have a mother tongue any more, and my much-loved languages seem very different to me, with different usages, but on equal standing in my thinking, analyses, and my uses of them. I write and speak all of them everyday, practically. With my children we speak and write in three languages at once, with one usually dominating, depending on the context. This doesn’t feel awkward in the least. I do not live this multiplicity in terms of language use as incongruous, however different these languages and cultures are. I also fall into this habit with friends if they know another of my languages, and it enables us to speak in other codes and touch other experiences and meanings that can be best expressed in several languages at once. I have trouble sticking to one, in fact, and people notice sometimes a word slipping in that they don’t understand, and it’s a source of humor. My children can easily separate their languages, and this does not happen to them.
ALQ: I loved reading your piece in The Markaz Review about your trip to Germany with Millal. As a member of the Palestinian diaspora and an individual who has moved a lot, do you feel that travel, language, and family bring you closer to your roots? How has this changed intergenerationally for you, having grown up and now having raised your own children in multicultural households full of storytelling and heritage
Jenine: Yes, travel, visiting family and friends, and exploring new places, for both myself and my children, is vital to our lives. It is a privilege that it is now less expensive and easier to do than when I was growing up. Moving around helps ground us in our diverse worlds, feels more comfortable and ready to share, even fit in somehow, in new ones, and brings together all the different parts of our identities, childhoods, and culture, and renews them.
ALQ: As a lover of literature and a professor, what portrayal of motherhood that you’ve read so far have you most admired or enjoyed? As a writer from/laying claim to the SWANA region, is there a particular depiction of motherhood in SWANA literature that has disappointed you, for any reason?
Jenine: I feel that the full and diverse range of experiences of motherhood, not only in Arabic literature, but in all of literature I know, has yet to be written. Just to give one example, I have yet to read a literary work that explores what it is like to give birth, the physical experience of this. Not only are there not enough women writers for a variety of social and historical reasons, but there is not enough focus on their lives, even in terms of the most classic of experiences, relegated to a woman’s purpose traditionally, motherhood. So I cannot think of any. But the best novel by a woman writer that I have read in a long time is Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, a chef d’oeuvre, very memorable. My favorite collection of essays by a woman writer that I discovered about a year ago is an Italian writer, Little Virtues (and all of her writings really), by Natalia Ginzburg (astonishingly original–I did not know one could write like that). Very gendered writing and brilliant.
Next, we spoke to Nada Aawar. Nada Aawar is a Lebanese-Australian novelist. She is the author of four books: Somewhere, Home (which won the Commonwealth writers’ prize), Dreams of Water, A Good Land, and An Unsafe Haven.
ALQ: I read your beautiful Substack piece, “Stories my Mother Told Me.” At the end, you write: “there are parts of herself that my mother left behind here which I must uncover if I am ever to become whole.” Can you speak about your relationship to a place that was cultivated for you by motherhood whilst living between two lands? How did motherhood affect your interpretation of your own territorial identities, and how is that relationship continuing to shape itself as you experience it as a mother yourself now?
Aawar: Throughout our childhood (I have three siblings), our mother spoke to us about her own childhood in Australia, about growing up in a small town on the southeast coast where the ocean was a constant presence, its smells permeating the air, its deliciously cool water in summer and the sometimes menacing waves of colder months; about the crayfish factory whose workers would sometimes hand out titbits to waiting children, her father’s general goods store frequented by everyone in town, the small house at the back where the family lived and the outhouse that was home to spiders and a plethora of creepy crawlies that came out at night to scare her. She talked about walking to kindergarten on her own at only three years old and one day seeing an indigenous Australian for the first time on the other side of the street and the surprise she felt. All this meant that even though I was growing up in Beirut, I was also absorbing the stories my mother told and her longing to return home at the same time. Writing this now, I realise that despite my attachment for Lebanon as a child, consciousness of a place that was very different, very new was slowly, even then, leading me here. How could it not?
In your writing, how has motherhood manifested in the characters whose lives you construct? Is this portrayal of motherhood close to your own experiences, or do you feel you draw from the experiences of women around you?
I think it’s difficult to be definitive about the way that writers fill out their ideas and their characters once they get down to writing them. I feel that the women I have portrayed, whether mothers, sisters, wives, or lovers have been a composite of all the women who have had an impact on my life. Perhaps, though, it’s true that, of all those mentors, my mother has been the most important. Her beauty, her principles, her love, her confusion and her sometimes sadness, are all there, in my writing. I suppose this is so especially because my father was absent for much of my childhood, since his work took him overseas most of the time and we did not see him very much.
How do you consider your relationship to language, in particular your ‘mother tongue’? Having lived now on two continents, how do you remain anchored and linked to your heritage through language, and how does this show up in your writing?
I work for the health services here as an interpreter and am often asked what my “mother tongue” is. My reply is always that I do not have a mother tongue and that I am bilingual. I don’t go on to say that I believe language is also culture and that I sit in the middle between my “Arabness”, if you will, and the part of me that is very comfortable being in the West. Does this mean that I don’t belong anywhere? Perhaps it does. I remember my mother saying that having lived in so many different parts of the world (we lived in London during Lebanon’s civil war) she no longer felt she belonged anywhere. As far as my writing is concerned, I find that I struggle with dialogue because my characters are often speaking in Arabic and I have to convey that in English. I like to think that I compensate for that with my style of writing that is perhaps more embellished than straightforward English. So I will, for example, use Arabic words whose meanings are implicit within the conversation’s context, or play around with the syntax to convey a different way of speaking. Having said that, I recognise the beauty of “simple” language, the spaces between words and ideas that that style conveys. I am now in the very first stages of writing a novel based on some of those stories my mother used to tell, as well as my experience of living in Adelaide, and am looking forward to depicting conversations and thoughts in one language only.
Is there any depiction of motherhood in literature that you have felt particularly drawn to? Is there any portrayal of motherhood in text that you feel disappointed by?
Hmmmm … it’s not so much depictions of motherhood in literature that I am drawn to as it is portrayals of women in general. Henry James comes to mind: his highly sensitive depictions of women, especially naïve American women, in the face of European sophistication and duplicity. Jane Austen’s novels show how narrow the options for women in 18th Century England were and how heavy was their dependence on the whims of men. I think what I’m trying to say here is that I am more interested in the depiction of women as individuals, independently of their status as mothers. While, as a child, I saw my mother exclusively within the context of her relationship with her children, as an adult I am much more interested in her as a woman of her time, the experiences that shaped her life and her innermost psyche.
You can read Jenine Abboushi’s writing at https://themarkaz.org/author/jenineabboushi/ and follow her on X at @jenineabboushi. You can find Nada Aawar’s books in store and follow her on Substack or X at @nadaaawarjarrar.
Read also:
“From Doaa Ibrahim’s ‘A Cloud Above my Head’”, tr. Alaa Alqaisi
“An Excerpt from Laila Aljohani’s Memoir, ‘Forty’”, tr. Ghazal M. Alharbi