QUI-PHIET TRAN
Schreiner University

WRITING THE MOTHER: DORIS LESSING, ALICE WALKER, AND TRAN DIEU HANG


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.