Migrant mothers and children in the work of Colm Tóibín, Maxine Beneba Clarke and Roxane Gay

Since I moved to New York, I’ve been thinking about my mother – and my relationship with her – more than ever. Or maybe a better way to put it is that the distance between NYC and my hometown, Melbourne, has given me a more objective way to think about our relationship. More objective, that is, than it can be given my absolute immersion in the world my family built around me: not only a physical world of home and people, but also a psychological and emotional world, the parameters of which are defined by parents’ beliefs and actions. It’s caused me to think a lot about how attached and limited I am to the world my mother created for me. What exactly is it? What’s it constructed of? How did she build it? What does it mean to be away from her when this is what she’s done – wittingly or unwittingly? Who will I become outside of that world?

My mother has always been the one to construct the edifices, to write the family bible. It was her cherished Catholic church I attended every Sunday, her edicts I cleaved to about what to eat when unwell, her ambitions for me that I meekly followed. I’m not here to complain about any of this: here I am, alive and well, doing things that I love, and with a relatively functional relationship with my mother. Neither of us ended up broken, and I’m grateful for it. But the distance I put between us by moving overseas has shown me that we are not one entity, but two distinct individuals. Does that seem obvious to most people? It wasn’t to me, not for a long time. And now that I’m looking back at how in thrall I was to her, I’m surprised that I don’t feel more lost or damaged now that our relationship is attenuated. Many of my thoughts – casual or radical or laboured – are what my mother taught me.

Adding another layer to this geographic separation is that my mother is a migrant. She left Malaysia to study in England before finally settling in Australia. My journey mirrors – or, rather, extends – hers. We have both been strangers in a strange land. We have both said goodbye to familiarity in search of something else. Maybe her own migration has allowed her, despite the strictness with which she regards other activities, to understand mine – and to release me fully into it.

Now that we live in different cities, different time zones, we communicate much less. Our phone conversations are usually hurried, characterised by inquiries about my basic needs on her end (‘Is everything alright? Do you need anything?’) and reassurances on mine. This year we’ve spent probably no more than five full days in each other’s company. Because of this, I’m slowly becoming aware of a different way to live: my way. My way of living isn’t poles apart from my mother’s idea of how I should live, but it’s certainly more convenient and requires less thought. Finally, I can throw my underwear into the wash along with my other clothes; my mother used to insist I handwash every single pair. Or I can buy as many pairs of shoes as my income allows; ‘Another pair?’ my mother used to say disapprovingly if she saw me in new shoes. Here, it doesn’t seem to matter so much if I spend too much money or put on weight; or, at least, her opportunity to make note of it has diminished. In return, she gets to keep the money she used to spend on the organic fruit and vegetables she’d leave on my porch weekly; perhaps she gets some extra mental space (although it’s possible my sister gets twice the parental attention instead).

The last time I saw my parents – when they came here to New York – I was the one who cried when they left. I was staying here in a new and exciting life; they were going home, remaining the same. So why did I cry?

*

Although I’d like to consider myself emotionally intelligent, more often than not it actually takes an external observation – whether from a friend or a fortune cookie – for me to understand when my internal tectonics shift. Recently, I reread James Joyce’s short story ‘Eveline’, in which a teenager contemplates her decision to leave Ireland for Buenos Aires with her lover. One sentence from the tale, to borrow a phrase from the story itself, clangs upon my heart like a bell. A photograph of Eveline’s father’s friend hangs on the wall at home. When her father shows it to a friend, he says, ‘He is in Melbourne now.’ Something about the finality of this statement chills me. He utters it like Melbourne is somewhere you can never return from; like Melbourne is the grave. It always seems strange to me that my hometown of Melbourne – my cosmopolitan, modern, culturally rich hometown – could ever seem like the end of the world to anyone. Was it ever really so far to go? After this short sentence that says so much, Joyce returns to Eveline’s thoughts: ‘She had consented to go away, to leave her home. Was that wise?’ I came to live in New York so blithely, as if it were my due, a kind of life’s Disneyland. Wisdom and ways of life didn’t come into it at all. That is, until I noticed some unexpected feelings, and recognised them in books I was reading.

Unavoidably, thinking about James Joyce led me to thoughts of his compatriot, Colm Tóibín, whose novel Brooklyn features a young woman, much like Eveline, who leaves Ireland for a foreign place. Much like I went from Melbourne to Manhattan, Eilis Lacey goes from Enniscorthy, the second-largest town in Ireland’s County Wexford, to the New York borough of Brooklyn. It’s the 1950s, and work’s hard to come by in Ireland, so when a priest offers Eilis the opportunity to work in a department store in America, she takes it. This despite the fact that ‘Eilis had always presumed that she would live in the town all her life, as her mother had done, knowing everyone, having the same friends and neighbours’. That is, Eilis had only ever dreamed for herself the kind of life her mother had lived.

Eilis’s departure seems more final than mine; in the 1950s there was no Skype or email to connect the riven family. And Eilis’s passage by ship to New York is no simple hop on a plane, supplied with books and music and movies to pass the time, but a merciless week of vomiting in third class. So it seems appropriate that, once she has left home shores, her family’s absence is somehow present and palpable: ‘It seemed odd to her that Rose or her mother could not come at any moment and tell them to be quiet.’

Occupied with becoming a new Eilis, the version of herself who lives in Brooklyn, she finds herself forgetting her old life, forgetting even to think of it: ‘For the past few weeks, she realized, she had not really thought of home. The town had come to her in flashing pictures … but her own life in Enniscorthy, the life she had lost and would never have again, she had kept out of her mind.’ Which is no small displacement considering her family was all she had: her devoted sister Rose, whose grace, glamour and smarts made her seem like the one who would be able to surpass the life they were born into; and her mother, gentle, steeped in the gossip of the town, with no desire to conceive of the world beyond.

The self, though, turns out to be a precarious thing. In Brooklyn, divorced from everyone and everything she’s ever known, Eilis doesn’t know who she is: ‘She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor.’

I found myself in a similar position shortly after moving to the United States. Once I had got over the excitement of living in iconic New York City, I was preoccupied with not doing very much of anything, and settling into a life where I had far fewer responsibilities than I was used to. I didn’t need to see my friends or regularly assure my family of my wellbeing. A monthly email or phone call seemed to be sufficient to assure my parents that I wasn’t troubled or dead, and I loved it. Compared to a childhood filled with extracurricular activities that my parents had picked – piano, cello, music theory, working in my parents’ business – followed by law school, which my parents had also mandated, lounging about in my tiny apartment in NYC was a taste of unfamiliar freedom. Staying safely alive and solvent was now the only thing I really owed them. I found it liberating. Who would I be now that there were no cues reminding me how I’d been maternally wrought, with my duties as a daughter now curtailed by distance?

In contrast to my slothful delight, Eilis finds the strangeness of her new home alienating, oppressive: ‘Nothing here was part of her.’ But the opposite is true, too; her home acquires a kind of strangeness. When, on the death of her sister, she returns to Ireland for a short visit, she discovers that there’s a new part of her that her mother is unwilling or unable to relate to now that she lives outside her mother’s knowledge or imagination. Instead of inquiring about her new life, ‘her mother had not asked her one question about her time in America, or even her trip home’. As Eilis spends the days with her mother, the gulf becomes more apparent. Social tasks, intended to maintain appearances within the community, seem irrelevant; as does gossip, when Eilis doesn’t even know the new names her mother talks about. Who is this mother, so afraid of or uninterested in her daughter’s new life? Is she satisfied that her maternal duties have ended, now that Eilis has a job and can look after herself?

Yet the young immigrant knows her alienation has to do with a kind of horror at having lost her sister so suddenly, at a distance, and at the way things have changed at home, but stayed so resolutely the same. The differences between her life in America, where she’s made so many strides, ‘made her feel strangely as though she were two people, one who had battled against two cold winters and many hard days in Brooklyn and fallen in love there, and the other who was her mother’s daughter, the Eilis whom everyone knew, or thought they knew’.

Returning to Enniscorthy gives Eilis the opportunity to try out the life she might have had if she’d stayed. She accepts the attentions of a handsome, steady young fellow in town without telling him – or anyone else – that she already has a husband in Brooklyn. She imagines how she might work at the shipping company in town, meet a new beau’s parents, be the glamorous prodigal daughter. Now that she’s in the place she grew up, her Brooklyn life seems like pure fantasy. Perhaps this is how her mother feels about Eilis’s life when she’s away from home. She has proved too mutable, too amenable to other settings. Their paths, having now diverged, may never truly meet again.

There’s something of Eilis in me. I returned home for a short while a year after I had left. I’d anticipated a joyous and relaxing reunion with friends and family. But I experienced it as a kind of purgatory. I had grown up around my family, but they’d missed a vital part of my life: my transformation. I came back not the same as I had been before. The small deceptions Eilis practises while at home seem irresponsible and cruel to those who later get wind of them. But I can understand how, in the first instance, you create a life away from home with what you see around you. You do it out of pure necessity, survival, fear and excitement. You get a job. You find somewhere to live. You marry someone. Released from your familial bonds, you travel the best path you see. Then, if you return home, you may find that your shape has changed and you no longer fit. There, you do what you can with what you see around you. Materials once so familiar are now strange but imbued with the same sense of possibility you can suddenly see in everything. Propriety, loyalty, tradition: all seem strange outside of the context of their making. Either you have to be a reverted version of yourself at home, with your new life stripped from you, or you start again, a shoot twice grafted.

Yet despite our short phone conversations, my mother and I are not Eilis and Eilis’s mother.

*

Throughout my life, I’ve been guilty of thinking about my mother in categorical terms: woman, workaholic, mother, migrant. Part of this has to do with society’s easy reliance on such categories, but it also relates to my own ambivalence about my heritage. The marks her culture has left on me have, at various times, enriched my life as well as made me feel resentful or like an outsider. At times it feels like everything I believe, from what makes an appropriate gift to whether bearing children is a given for a woman, has come directly from my mother, via her mother, and so on back into the distant past. It’s this life framework that has shaped me into who I am.

In Maxine Beneba Clarke’s debut short-story collection, Foreign Soil, two stories explore how mothers export cultural norms, and how their children or their new surroundings respond to them.

The eponymous protagonist of ‘Harlem Jones’ lives in London, but his life is dusted with signs of his mother’s Trinidadian origins: ‘that disgusting yellow porridge his ma cooks in the mornings’, ‘the jerk chicken and sweet potato left over from last night’s dinner’. Her patois is an ever-present reminder of where she came from and, by extension, where he came from. But her race – their race – is also a shared legacy, and has made his existence a fraught one. A black kid’s just been shot dead by the cops, and Harlem himself is in a dead-end job at Tesco, with no hope of anything better.

His ma sticks up for him when the cops come around, but she’s not stupid. She doesn’t want her son to turn out like his ‘good-fe-nothing dadda’, but Harlem’s full of anger: anger at the way black boys get treated in the west. Anger at his ma when she goes on at him to stay out of trouble: ‘He wants to fuckin strangle her, his own mother, who gave birth to him.’ Harlem wants to fuck some shit up, show the cops what they’re dealing with – so he takes a Molotov cocktail down to the police station. Harlem is himself just like petrol waiting in a bottle for a match; he’s poverty and difference and despair all rolled into one, thrown into the middle of an English city where his cultural inheritance doesn’t mean a thing.

In ‘David’, we see what it’s like for a young migrant mother to arrive somewhere new. The narrator, a young Sudanese woman, reflects on her ex-boyfriend, feckless Ahmed, who’s now ‘off with some slag down the Fitzroy Estate’. Intertwined with her recollections of him are unpleasant interactions with Ahmed’s mother, whose criticisms touch specifically on everything that’s ‘wrong’ – read: not Sudanese enough – with the narrator’s own behaviour: ‘These children, born in this country, they think they can behave like the Australian children. They have no idea about the tradition and respect. In Sudan, a good wife knew how to keep her husband, and a good mother would not leave.’

As the narrator’s admiring her new bike, along comes a woman who reminds her of her mother – she looks the same age, and looks Sudanese, too; she’s a kind of stand-in for a mother figure. So, of course, in this woman’s eyes, ‘nothing I said was gonna be the right thing’. Like Ahmed’s mother, this woman begins to criticise the narrator, who nevertheless has to treat this stranger like a mother, accord her the proper respect. All strength to those who could politely withstand the older woman’s carping: ‘You don’t have husband … where is your baby, Little Sister?’ An elder can’t be defied, so when this one asks to ride the narrator’s bike, she reluctantly agrees.

Twinned with this inner-suburban tale is one set far away, in the stranger’s hometown. We learn that the woman has lost her husband to the Janjaweed militia; as the story unfolds, we see that she’s lost her son to them, too, in the most horrific of ways. Bicycles, it turns out, have a particular significance for her: it was on a bike that she last saw her son, David, before he was shot down by soldiers. After her bike ride, the stranger laughs and cries, thanking the narrator for bringing back bittersweet memories of her son. While her identity as a mother has brought out both her most traditional, rigid aspects, it has allowed her to recall her most gentle and human ones, too. She might no longer be a mother, but she can remember what it was like to be one.

‘David’ shows the internal, gentler workings of a migrant mother whose standards may seem rigid or old-fashioned. It jumped out at me and made me reflect: how well do I really know my mother? Of course, I know and understand the effect she had on me. For example, I can easily recall having felt some pressure from her in areas I viewed as traditionally ‘Asian’: academic success, romantic life leading to the formation of a nuclear family, filial piety, respect for elders. That was my inheritance, just as it was hers: the unseen baggage she brought with her when she left the place she was born. I resented it. I resented it when she quit her job as a nurse and became an educator because I was terrible at maths and she wanted to make sure I overcame that gap in my knowledge. I resented it when she wouldn’t let me stay at my friends’ houses overnight. I resented it that I had to learn Chinese, a language I had no ear for. We seemed to be locked in a kind of stereotypical mother–daughter relationship, where she gave everything and I had to accept with humility. And I hated my role.

But with the distance now between us, I could just as plainly see how self-centred my view of her was. Did I know what it was like for my mother to arrive in Australia on her own? I’m chastened to say that I didn’t. Did I know what it was like for her to establish her roots in foreign soil? I made guesses and assumptions, but I did not know. ‘David’ is as simple as a fable, yet the distance between the inside and outside of my brain was one I’d never jumped. My acceptance, however cranky or ungrateful, of the passive daughter role was something I had never seen from the outside. Like Harlem, I saw the accoutrements of motherhood and otherness, and rarely the person that accompanied them. It’s all too easy to see why: I was born into my mother’s expectations, and never expected to escape them. And now that I have, the edicts I saw as being ironclad seem relatively insubstantial, or at least conditional on my remaining a child. And when I finally left, separated from my mother, they seemed to melt away, lost in the oceans between us.

*

On a recent trip home to Melbourne, I caught a virus and was bedridden for days. My mother would stop by in the mornings to take me out to breakfast, or bring food she’d cooked at home. Those trips to the cafe would be accompanied by total silence on my part, as I struggled to hold down food. Of course, I appreciated my mother’s solicitude, though I found it difficult to express my feelings. Knowing I would be provided with the basics when I was weak was as nourishing as the food itself.

Leaving one’s mother, and hometown, behind also means leaving behind the protective aegis – physical or psychological – that she can provide. I certainly felt this strongly in my new city: I was on my own. But what might happen if the opposite was true: if your mother, and motherland, no longer meant safety?

Roxane Gay’s terrifying, haunting debut novel, An Untamed State, examines the complicated relationship migrant children and their parents share, especially when the home country is one as troubled as Haiti. Mireille, a Haitian émigré who lives in the United States, returns to her family’s home in Port-au-Prince to visit her family. While there, she is kidnapped and gang-raped by a group of criminals. Most of the novel is written from the point of view of Mireille and her American husband, Michael, but Gay also represents the struggles of Mireille’s mother, Fabienne, in deciding how best to handle the crisis.

‘They didn’t take Americans. That was how Fabienne had slept at night, knowing her daughters would always be safe when they were in Port-au-Prince.’ When Fabienne’s husband, Sebastien, decides not to give in to the kidnappers’ ransom demands, she is furious. Yet she loves him and doesn’t want to disobey him. Stuck between her husband, her treasured youngest daughter, the realities of life in Haiti – ‘the motherland’ – and her maternal feelings of helplessness and guilt, she seems weak and ineffectual to Michael and Mireille.

After being released, Mireille wants to get out of Port-au-Prince. Fabienne tries to persuade her to stay, but the ‘clinical vocabulary’ she uses doesn’t at all illuminate the anger and fear she is feeling. Instead, she tiptoes around Mireille’s ordeal, calling it an ‘incident’, saying that the family can all ‘move on from this’. To glue her family back together she must convince Mireille that Sebastien loves her despite his decision not to pay the ransom. But Mireille has been delinked from her family; she is traumatised and angry. She says to her mother, ‘I’m no one’s daughter, not anymore.’

Back in Miami, Mireille can’t stand the collision of her old life with her new wounds: not the touch of her husband, not the idea of going to the hospital despite her extensive injuries, not even to hold her own infant son. So she runs to another mother: Michael’s mother, Lorraine, even though they’ve never got along. Lorraine accepts her daughter-in-law into her home, and Mireille ‘remembered, for a small moment, what being safe felt like. I longed for my own mother but she was not safe and could not nor would not keep me safe.’ It’s Lorraine, corn-fed and distant, the mother of Mireille’s all-American spouse, who can provide the safety and comfort Mireille’s own mother, and motherland, ‘land of my mother, and my mother’s mother’, couldn’t. She must learn to rebuild herself outside of the idea of herself she’d had as beloved, as Haitian, as part of a family that could keep her safe.

This is a comfort I’m grateful not to have had taken from me. My home country is a peaceful one, and there’s nothing I have to fear from it. My mother has hurt me – as I’ve hurt her – in thousands of small and large ways, but one thing she will always make me feel is safe. Yet despite her failures, Fabienne makes an astonishing claim on Mireille: ‘You are my child. You hear me? You are mine and you will always be mine and nothing can change that. I made you.’ I can believe that this is true of all mothers and children; mothers make us. Fabienne’s words speak to the simple reality of biology, and to the emotional bonds many of us feel.

These words, too, clanged like a bell inside my chest. Having felt moulded into daughter-shape by my mother for many years, I felt absolutely defined by her – owned by her – in many aspects of my life. Of course, mothers create more than just a new person, too: they create an emotional and psychological context for the child to grow up in. I was astounded to find that when I arrived in New York, I’d brought not only my physical baggage, but also my daughter baggage along for the ride. Unwittingly, I’d been waging an ineffectual war with my mother for the ownership of my self. Was I hers? Or was I mine? But when I departed the battleground it seemed I was as free to be a lone rider as the love I bore for her would permit. I’d also only been seeing her through one lens, the ‘mother’ lens, without taking a step back to see more of her dimensions. A shameful realisation, for sure, but one that holds so much possibility.

At last those tears I shed at the airport offered up their meaning: for so long I had felt like a character in my mother’s novel, inextricably bound to her by her character and plot. But now I’d started my own tale. I had ended that part of our story without realising it.

For all that these books had helped me to look at my relationship with my mother in a new light, I had something to add. Fabienne’s statement of ownership and generation leaves out part of the equation – albeit one I needed novelists’ insight and almost 20,000 kilometres to discover. That is, after being made, we, the children, go on to remake ourselves. My mother and I aren’t the same person, not by a long shot. Rather than considering my mother a kind of permanent extension of myself, as I’d somehow come to do, I can see us as members of a duo – parts in a series. We don’t have to fight each other for ownership of me, but can support each other’s growth as needed. The world my mother made for me was strict and safe, but so much more elastic than I thought as a young adult. I’m free to make myself. And now that we have known each other as mother and daughter, we are free to know each other as people.