M.A.M.A. Issue n.6: Autumn Stephens and Sabrina Mahfouz
The ProCreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 6th edition of this scholarly discourse intersects with the artistic to explore the wonder and the challenges of motherhood. Using words and art to connect new pathways between the academic, the para-academic, the digital, and the real, as well as the everyday: wherever you live, work, and play, the Art of Motherhood is made manifest. #JoinMAMA
October 1, 2015: “Elderly Prima Gravida,” by Autumn Stephens. Featured Artist, Sabrina Mahfouz.
Art:
AUTUMN STEPHENS
ELDERLY PRIMA GRAVIDA
Originally published in Mom Egg Review Vol. 13
History of a Girl
A blue cloud aureoles her hair, making her a madonna or hinting at the moment a smidge past perfection when petals begin their downward drift.
Labor Day
Without the children, she is left with too much fruit. Three platters on the drainboard, their chips and cracks mitigated by heaps of peaches, nectarines, plums. The sweet stones she dreamed of all winter, like Demeter, like her own mother, mourning loss of fragrance, sipping boiling water for comfort, reaching back toward a hotter life.
Spoiler
In the movie the children die. She should have chosen a different show, some summer trifle where the men are sex fools and the women are goddesses, sassy but forgiving. All the mistakes she’s made, all the dangerous omissions. That afternoon when she and her friend sat griping pleasurably on the park bench: how did it happen that they commanded sunscreen, water bottles, yet still fell short, failed to precaution the two boys, the girl, against every danger? Failed to extend the protective mantle of maternal instruction against stray dogs, strange men, slippery banks, polluted water, so on. Failed to say, quite explicitly, that it was forbidden to hike up to the waterfall. But then, they were old mothers, decades fanning out behind them as they imagined their children into life. They had gotten away with murder, redefined the status quo. At what point would exceptions no longer be made? At what point would there no longer be time?
Fruitless
For sex he wakes her, laying a hand on some round part. It’s too early—she’s set the alarm for a hundred years. “Go away, I’m practicing,” she says. Curved forms appear lenient but she’s not. No one’s worn a white petticoat since maybe 1969. Under sweatshirt and mom jeans, her spotted skin, her graying hair.
Autumn Stephens is the author of the Wild Women series of women’s history and humor, editor of two personal essay anthologies, and former co-editor of The East Bay Monthly. She has written for The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous other publications. She conducts writing workshops for cancer survivors in Oakland, Calif., and teaches private writing classes.
Autumn Stephens is the author of the Wild Women series of women’s history and humor, editor of two personal essay anthologies, and former co-editor of The East Bay Monthly. She has written for The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous other publications. She conducts writing workshops for cancer survivors in Oakland, Calif., and teaches private writing classes.
About Sabrina Mahfouz:
Sabrina is currently the Poet in Residence for Cape Farewell, an organisation that provides a cultural response to climate change. She is an Associate Artist alumni at the Bush Theatre in London; a Writer at Liberty for the UK civil rights charity LIBERTY and the Creative Director of poetry production company P.O.P.
She is a World Economic Forum Global Shaper on the executive board of the London hub. Sabrina studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, receiving her MA in International Politics and Diplomacy and at King’s College, University of London, receiving her BA (Hons) in Classics and English Literature.
Her creative work has been recognized with a number of awards. Most recently, these include receiving a 2014 Fringe First Award; the 2013 Sky Arts Futures Fund Award; an Old Vic New Voices Underbelly Edinburgh Award; a UK Young Artists Award; The Stage Award for Best Solo Performance 2011 nomination; an Old Vic New Voices TS Eliot Award and a Westminster Prize for New Playwrights. Her first book, The Clean Collection, is available from Bloomsbury.
She currently working on new project as writer and producer. Seem more here
M.A.M.A. Issue n.5: Margaret Rapp and Louise Camrass
The ProCreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 5th edition of this scholarly discourse intersects with the artistic to explore the wonder and the challenges of motherhood. Using words and art to connect new pathways between the academic, the para-academic, the digital, and the real, as well as the everyday: wherever you live, work, and play, the Art of Motherhood is made manifest. #JoinMAMA
SEPT, 15TH REFLECTIONS OF A MULTICULTURAL MOM BY MARGARET RAPP – FEATURING THE ART OF LOUISE CAMRASS
Art:
Louise Camrass
My work is a response to my experiences and observations of life.
For many years I have worked with film and video using both narrative and abstract forms. I have made many short narrative pieces while continuing to develop a visual language through the improvised gathering of images. I am particularly interested in light and composition, and how atmosphere can be created through framing, editing, colour, sound and rhythm.
This approach to the moving image translates directly into how I think about painting, drawing and clay.
Moving between figurative and abstract forms allows me the freedom to find images which most closely express recurring themes of sex and death, the absurd, poetry and light.
I am most interested in finding ways to convey inner feeling, the visual equivalent perhaps of a song or a piece of music.
Reflections Of A Multicultural Mom by Margaret Rapp – From Mom Egg Review Vol. 13
On my son’s third birthday, he got chicken pox. We cancelled his party, but I still gave him the present he most wanted – a Barbie doll. Although I am a “modern” Mom, I was a little uncomfortable giving him a Barbie, so I gave him a Barbie and Ken; and, since he is an inter-racial child and I wanted to be politically correct, I gave him a black Barbie and Ken (although Barbie did have a blonde streak in her hair). My son loved his gift and I can still see him, sitting in front of his cake with a birthday hat on, his face speckled with pox marks, holding up his Barbie (Ken had already been relegated to the unused toy box).
For the next two weeks, while he was recuperating, Barbie was his constant companion. When he went back to daycare, he wanted to take his Barbie for show and tell. While I had my misgivings on how the other children would react –would they make fun of him—I stuck to my feminist principles and didn’t discourage him. That afternoon when he came home, he threw his Barbie angrily in the corner. My first thought was that he had been teased or called a sissy. Then he tearfully said the words that are still imprinted in my mind. “I want a white Barbie.” He had never used the word white to refer to a person before. Years later, I learned that it was actually Jessie, a black girl who lived down the block, that had taunted him about his “black” Barbie.
I hate the word “bi”. Like in I am the mother of a biracial child. I keep expecting to see a child that is painted black on one side and white on the other like those mimes you see in the park standing like statues. It comes from that puritanical Calvinism where everything in America is bifurcated, cut in half, polarized. Like either/or, good/evil, black/white. And you are always expected to come down on one side or the other.
Murphy Brown was very big on TV when my son was small. After his Dad took off, I played the Murphy Brown role – the fast talking, independent woman who raised a child on her own. It worked very well until they found out I had a mixed race child. Even then, it could work if they thought he was adopted. Once they found out I had him the old fashioned way, I was relegated to the welfare Mom role –the woman who was too stupid to keep her legs together and was dumped when she got pregnant.
I know that my son has spent much of his childhood longing for some traditional nuclear family that he will never have (as do many children from both black and white homes). But our society is much more multicultural now than it was when my son was born twenty-six years ago. These days he self identifies as a German Haitian Dominican Jew. And we do have a “biracial” President.
My son is grown now – a muscled young man with light golden skin, deep dark eyes and the somewhat rounded features that compliment his dimpled smile. His dark curly hair is slowly turning into male patterned baldness — a trait which I find attractive but I suspect he is embarrassed by as he has taken to wearing a hat. He lives with a friend in Harlem and writes lyrics for a pop singer that plays the small downtown clubs. Like most starving artists, he walks dogs to pay the rent, It is hard to believe that he is actually a grown man who has to lean down to hug me instead of looking up at me. So why am I still so worried?
Sunday afternoon a couple of years ago, my son called me from the police station. He was picked up at 6am in Harlem in front of his house. When he protested that he had rights, he was arrested. After two days he was released. He spent two days in jail, lost two days work for which he was not paid, his only good winter jacket was torn when he was roughed up and he saw a homeless man beaten down by police while he was in the holding cell.
The particulars of why he was arrested aren’t important. The charges were dropped, the judge apologized. His legal aid attorney told him he should file charges for false arrest. He made some halfhearted noises about filing charges, but never followed through. He seemed defeated by the whole experience. When I told people what happened, indignant at my son’s mistreatment, the first question they asked was what did he do wrong? After a while, I kept quiet about it, ashamed that he had been arrested. I began to believe he had done something wrong. And I wondered if he would have been arrested if he had been white.
Two months ago he told me he was frisked again in the same neighborhood on his way to work. This time, when the arresting officer “copped an attitude” when he tried to find out the reason he was stopped, he didn’t say anything and let her frisk him because he didn’t want to be late for work. I didn’t know if I was more relieved that he had chosen the pragmatic approach to stay out of jail or saddened that he had learned the lesson society expected him to learn – that he is a second class citizen who knows enough to shut-up and keep his head down. And he was still late for work.
Recently my son told me he was glad that he had been raised in an “alternative” family. He felt that it gave him a more worldly and tolerant outlook on life. What I learned is what it feels like to worry every time my son walks out the door.
My life time commitment to feminism and feminist writing is a direct result of my experiences living as a single mom in New York City. I have met many interesting and diverse women I would not have met except for this one commonality and their stories are reflected in my writing. I continue to write short stories and plays for various reading venues in New York, blog on DailyKos and hopefully will get my novel “After the Music Died” published this year.app – Margaret Rapp
M.A.M.A. Issue n.4: Becky Tipper and Lynn Lu
The ProCreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 4th edition of this scholarly discourse intersects with the artistic to explore the wonder and the challenges of motherhood. Using words and art to connect new pathways between the academic, the para-academic, the digital, and the real, as well as the everyday: wherever you live, work, and play, the Art of Motherhood is made manifest. #JoinMAMA
SEPT, 1ST GOOD ENOUGH TO EAT BY BECKY TIPPER FEATURING THE ART OF LYNN LU
Art:
Paradoxes for the Virtual by Lynn Lu
collaborative Skype performance with Birgitta Hosea
Lab451 LONDON; Camden Image Gallery; London, UK. 2015
In a game of Exquisite Corpse, Lynn Lu (live) and Birgitta Hosea (projected from SKYPE) explore intimacy and the generation of interpersonal closeness across a virtual divide through a scored series of shared confidences.
GOOD ENOUGH TO EAT BY BECKY TIPPER. FROM MOM EGG REVIEW VOL. 11 “MOTHER TONGUE” ISSUE
We talked a lot about eating you in those early days. You were made of apricots and berries and soft new bread and cotton candy, your tiny nose like a chickpea. How could we not want to consume you?
We weren’t the first, of course. Saturn, god of time, devoured his own children. Although in his case he ate them to undo them, to reel back the unfurling inevitability of what they would become. To bring time to a halt. We didn’t want to undo you; we simply wanted to savor how sweet you were to the lips and the mouth. It seemed the only sensible way to love you.
Back then, I knew you through my mouth more than I ever expected to: pressing my kisses on you, sliding strands of your dark hair through my lips (your hair glossy and strange as a baby horse). I nibbled at your edges, murmuring how edible you were.
I remember how, later, you learned the word edible and rolled it on your tongue. For a time, you asked of each thing we encountered, “Mama, is that edible?” relishing that you could slice the world in a new way, drawing a line between the parts of it we might eat and the rest (paper, candles, certain mushrooms, stones, and people).
I remember too, when you learned to crawl how you’d squeal with glee when I chased you on my hands and knees, and I’d warn, “I’m going to eat that baby!” And then when I caught you, I’d feast on your tummy with kisses. You know, even now, I’d eat you in one bite if I could.
And then I remember one time – it’s something I’ve never told anyone before. Picture the scene:
You are nursing and there is only us in the whole mute night. When you are done, I wipe a drop of my milk from your chin and hold it on my fingertip. Just one drop, carefully, as if it is both sacred and poisonous. No one can see me; even you are asleep on my lap now. I open my mouth and ready my tongue as if for the fall of a snowflake.
I bring it to my tongue – this food that my own body has made – and it tastes of what it is like to be you, before language dawns and crashes into your little life, where cries and milk are the closest your mouth comes to speech. It tastes of love, of apricots, of ice cream, of eons of other women and babies awake, half asleep, under stars, under skies, under cover, under fire. It tastes of life before I had words for anything, before I could even have told you who I was.
And I think to myself, if anything has the power to stop time, it’s this.
Becky Tipper writes short fiction and non-fiction, which has been published in The Mom Egg Review, Literary Mama, The Mother’s Milk Writing Prize Anthology and elsewhere. She won the Bridport Prize for flash fiction in 2011. Originally from the UK, she now lives with her husband and two children in Maine. Find her at: thebookflea.com
