QUI-PHIET TRAN
In her excellent article "Writing and Motherhood" Susan Rubin
Suleiman criticizes the complacent view held by traditional psychoanalysts that
"mothers don't create works of art because all of their creative,
aggressive drives find an outlet in the production of children" (358).
This male-dominated view is also unwittingly upheld by traditional literature
which glorifies motherhood, but in fact treats the mother as she is written
rather than as she writes. Citing Julia Kristeva who affirms that we know very
little about the inner discourse of a mother, Suleiman suggests that "it
is time to let mothers have their word." The question of the relationship of feminine writing and motherhood,
which sparks much debate among theorists, is also an important concern of many
contemporary women writers with feminist leanings. To this end I propose to
consider three authors, Doris Lessing, Alice Walker, and Tran Dieu Hang,
focusing on The Golden Notebook, The Color Purple, and
"Zenith," respectively. My selection of the materials for study was
prompted by my reading of Tran Dieu Hang's story in which Ng., her main
character, engages herself with burning questions being addressed as well in
the works of Lessing and Walker, namely: How do mothers write themselves? What
is motherhood? What is writing? Do the two conflict or reconcile? All the characters of our three authors, Anna Wulf of The Golden
Notebook, Celie of The Color Purple, and Ng. of "Zenith"
choose to write themselves, instead of letting them be written. Anna and Ng.
take up writing as their vocation. Celie, a less educated woman, addresses God
and her absent sister because she is denied a hearing and understanding
audience. Their most important discovery about their feminine condition is that
womanhood is what a woman cannot do without. A woman is a mother, and only in
this capacity is she equated with life, creativeness, and sacredness. Unlike
the traditional view that the mother is "the essential but silent
Other" for the creative writer (usually male) to explore and appropriate,
she is an active creator in the works of Lessing, Walker, and Tran Dieu Hang.
The child is seen as part of the woman-as-mother's body, even her extension.
Thinking of her babies sucking her breasts, Celie writes that she feels "a
little shiver" and "sometimes a big shiver" (82). When happening
to see her baby girl who had been taken away from her right after she had been
born, Celie says that she can recognize her because "I think she mine. My
heart say she mine" (14). When touching her daughter Janet, Anna
experiences "a feeling of intimacy, exclusiveness" and
"continuity." (7). This metaphor for the continuity of life, the
inseparateness of mother and child is movingly dramatized in The Color
Purple. Celie's stepfather's snatching her baby away from her while "I
got breasts full of milk running down myself" is like a brutal murder
committed against the life of both mother and child because the two are
inseparable. Finally, Ng. proudly speaks of her unique privilege "to smell
the aroma of my children and touch the masterpiece of my own flesh and
blood" while criticizing Muriel Spark, the author of Moon Iglo, for
evading her responsibility to have children. Writing the mother, or writing the
mother's body, for Lessing, Walker, and Tran Dieu Hang, is a way of resisting
the patriarchal system which, as Simone de Beauvoir might accuse, ostracizes
the woman-as-mother as the mute Other, claiming its exclusive right to
creation, continuity, and lineage. Motherhood as a Mode of Salvation. If motherhood is securing
continuity for the social world through the creativeness of woman's body, it
also means, on account of its sustaining power, an important means of salvation
for her. Because the child is the mother's extension, he/she is her life, her
heritage, her redemption. Walker has spoken of this sacred natural link between
mother and child in her scholarly writings before dramatizing it in her
fiction. It is not my child who has purged my face from history and
herstory and left mystery just that, a mystery; my child loves my face and
would have it on every page, if she could, as I have loved my own parents' face
above all others, and refused to let them be denied, or myself to let them go.
(In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens 361) It is not without reason that Anna in The Golden Notebook gives up
all her political, literary, and personal life to devote herself to responsible
motherhood. Torn apart by broken love affairs, political realities, and an
unsuccessful writing career, on the verge of insanity Anna is saved by her
discovery of the great healing power of motherhood. "She knew that on the
day Janet came home from school, she would become Anna, Anna the responsible,
and the obsession would go away" (651). In The Color Purple Nettie,
a surrogate mother, writes to her sister Celie that "it is hard to imagine
life without the children. No matter how down I may be, a hug fron Olivia or
Adam (Celie's children) completely restores me to the level of
fucntioning" (170). When finding her children, Celie says, "And us so
happy. Matter of fact, I think this is the youngest us ever felt" (295).
This greatest blessing of motherhood is what Tran Dieu Hang calls
"zenith," that is, "the simple happiness that comes from a woman
taking care of her family" (Chom Chom, My Darling 4). Writing and Motherhood. While the either/or dilemma---writing or motherhood, female
self-fulfillment or matrimonial responsibility, escape into a child-free world
or confinement in family life---is a heated debate among feminist theorists,
the mothers in the fiction of Lessing, Walker, and Tran Dieu Hang have already
made their choice. Anna Wulf assumes motherhood not only because life turns
against her, but for a more important reason. At the close of The Golden
Notebook she discovers that all her writing is futile because "Words
mean nothing.... They have become, when I think, not the form into which
experience is shaped, but a series of meaningless sounds, like a nursery talk,
and away to one side of experience" (476). Language, she discovers, is
incapable of expressing truth, of making sense out of her fragmented life. She
has kept four journals and yet her life does not get itself understood. She
hides them because she does not believes in the power of writing. In the end
Anna renounces language and her literary writing to embrace motherhood and engage
in "matrimonial welfare work." Anna's liberation from the curse of
words culminates in her allowing Milt, her last boyfriend, to take away her
newspaper clippings from her walls, her last attempt of using language to
impose a form on chaotic reality and her fragmented experience. Ng.'s experience with language and writing to a great extent resembles
Anna Wulf's. At the beginning writing took precedence of her motherly vocation.
A proud young writer, she rejected "the simple happiness...[of] a woman
taking care of her family" in favor of "the hard-earned happiness
flashing forth like lightning from creation." Nevertheless, it did not
take very long for Ng. to realize that her choice left her with "only
emptiness. Like an empty drawer. Like a gaping hole in a tree. Empty. White.
White. Empty. White..." (8). The feeling of emptiness that Ng. experiences
when she is confronted with the loneliness of a writer is exactly the fear of
chaos, formlessness, and breakdown that Anna encounters before she gives up her
writing career. Writing puts both Anna and Ng. face-to-face with the horror of
the unknown and the extraordinary, a serious menace to responsible mothers. At the end of "Zenith" Tran Dieu Hang's character, however,
comes to adopt a different approach from Anna's in order to come to terms with
the paradoxes of her life. The either/or dilemma, motherhood or writing, that
Ng. spoke of earlier in the story is resolved after her encounters with Muriel
Spark, Doris Lessing, and Alice Walker. Unlike Anna who gives up writing to
face up to the realities of life, Ng. feels the need to link them with
fantasies. Writing and motherhood, as her confidant Doris Lessing suggests and
Ng. concurs, can go hand in hand because "both are parts of woman."
But to perceive this truth, to arrive at a true undertsanding of herself, woman
should liberate herself from the rigid role society seeks to impose on her.
Human life or woman's life is multi-faceted. "Within every individual,
every writer, and every mother there are other writers and mothers...[and] only
after woman has seen all her facets and put them together can she have a true
understanding of herself" (16). Motherhood and writing, therefore, are not
mutually exclusive. Woman does not have to be a writer to attain zenith.
Motherhood is already zenith. The tension between the two does not even
exist, nor is a choice between them necessary. Writing and motherhood are two
different stages in woman's life, each of which should be undertaken depending
on her condition. To carry out this protean role, all she needs is the kind of
moral qualities that Ng. learns from Celie---dedication, hard work, and
endurance. Whereas the either/or question was a dilemma for Anna and Ng. at first,
it never exists for Celie. Writing and doing creative work (making quilts and
pants) are a sort of emotional outlet, a mode of survival, and a means of
keeping her from committing violence. Celie's horrifying condition justifies
her need for writing herself. Victimized, brutalized, silenced, and deprived of
her right to smell the flesh of her babies and feed them with her own milk,
Celie nevertheless gets by thanks to her creative instincts. She addresses her
letters to God and Nettie, who are absentees and therefore can understand her
better. She makes quilts and pants to contain in her the impulse to murder her
oppressors. After she has prevailed over the repressive system and has
recovered her motherhood, that is, her zenith, she no longer needs this medium
of expression. A last comparison of the women of our three authors is important. While
Tran Dieu Hang's Ng. is inspired by Alice Walker's Celie, she is strikingly
reminiscent of Doris Lessing's Anna Wulf. Toward the end of Lessing's and Tran
Dieu Hang's fiction both Anna and Ng. become engrossed in a dream: the former
flying over a tiger's cage and the latter soaring over the zenith. While both
characters try to rise above their situation, it is clear that they do not
attempt to change it. Unlike Celie who integrates into the mainstream of life,
Anna and Ng. continue to face their condition of being a woman writer in the
postmodern world: isolation and loneliness. What then distinguishes Celie from her two intellectual sisters? Tran
Dieu Hang has provided us with a clue in her story. Quoting Alice Walker who
claims her (and Celie's) "roots in farming," Tran Dieu Hang's
protagonist means to suggest that Celie's triumph is to be attributed to her
native values and rural upbringing. It is the same values, principles, and
background that enable a refugee woman from the Mekong delta in "There
Will Come New Days," one of Tran Dieu Hang's most successful stories, to
prevail over the many adverse circumstances she encountered in the Gulf of Siam
as well as in the Promised Land. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Twentieth-Century
Literature Conference, University of Louisville, February 24-26, 1994. Works Cited Carey, John L. "Art and Reality in The Golden Notebook."
Doris Lessing: Critical Studies. Studies. Ed. Annis Pratt and L.S. Dembo.
Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1974. Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. New York: Bantam
Books, 1985. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. "Writing and
Motherhood." The (M)Other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic
Interpretation. Ed. Shirley Nelson, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether.
Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1985. Tran, Dieu Hang. "Zenith." Chom Chom, My
Darling. Trans. Qui-Phiet Tran. Asian America: Journal of Culture and the Arts.
1 (Winter 1992). Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers' Garderns. New
York: Harcourt Brace Jonanovich, 1983. ---. The Color Purple. New York: Pocket Books, 1985.
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