Joinmama

Art by Anna Hultin

Of My Body/Of the Land

There is a profound beauty in the correlation between the way my body grows and sustains life and the way our land does the same. This intertwining of land, body and life is the topic of the landscape drawings that make up the project, Of the Land. Each drawing focuses on different ways that the cycles of our land cultivate connection and relationship. Every cycle in our landscape lives in relationship to another process. New growth is birthed through wildfire. The dead sleep of winter breeds new life in the spring. No cycle or growth can exist without relationship to another process or being, just as my child only can grow and exist within my own body full of its own processes and cycles during his first months of life. From this interdependence a deep ineffable relationship is formed. These drawings seek to put an image around something unnamable and intangible; the bond of mother and child.

On new routes, new life, new lines

More about the artist:

Anna Hultin is a wife, mother-to-be and artist who lives in Loveland, Colorado. After receiving her BFA from Colorado State University she opened Gallery Nine-Seventy in Loveland where she a Director and Curator. Always inspired by children and their art, she also creates art curriculum for homeschool students. Anna’s artwork is exhibited locally and nationally, and she is excited to see how her new little one will influence and affect her work.

Words by Samina Najmi

Blind Date

At twenty-one, my mother has striking eyebrows—expansive, dark, and gently converging. Lush like Lalmonirhat’s hills that cradle the white colonial building she calls home. My father sees her for the first time during the wedding ceremony, reflected in a mirror. His heart beats easier at the sight of her light-skinned face, her downcast eyes, and still lips which have never been painted before this night. But the fine hair that rims those lips, and especially those eyebrows, so bold, so black, and sharply angled make him unsure of his ability to keep her. Throughout their 23-year-old marriage, my father will have a recurring nightmare in which another man carries his wife away. (Until one does.) His howls will awaken the sleeping children.

A good Pakistani bride of the sixties, my mother doesn’t open her eyes to look upon her groom’s face until the throng of geet–singing women in brilliantly hued, silk saris have ushered her to the bridal chamber. They sit her down on a bed strewn with roses and gardenia, scooping the emerald silk of her flamboyantly flared pajama after her. A paisley print of solid silver splashes across both the pajama and red tunic in provincial Bihari fashion—much to the bride’s dismay, who had hoped for something trendier from the stores of the big city where, she hears, the groom and his sister live together. The singing women help her cross her left leg and bend the right one, resting her chin upon her knee. They place her hennaed hands in a clasp around the knee–artfully, so that the bejeweled fingers of her right hand cover the shriveled left one that doesn’t open. Adjusting her vermilion-and-gold dupatta over her head one last time, they exit, still singing of maiden temptresses and the fast-beating hearts of their suitors, satisfied to have staged just the right degree of bridal modesty and mystery.

When the groom and bride are finally alone, he lifts her veil of garlands as gently as he can. A teeka with a single ruby at its center glimmers on her forehead, its tiny white pearls brushing against those startling eyebrows. A fine hoop of gold, the bridal nose-ring she will never wear again. The groom’s shapely hand reaches for her chin and tips it up from the knee, ever so slightly. As if on cue, the bride opens her eyes. She sees the slim, dark man her parents have chosen for her, an assistant professor of physics in faraway Karachi. Her eyes take in the crisp white shervani collar that encircles his neck, the wedding turban he will never wear again. The severe, pencil-thin moustache that restrains the generosity of his full lips. She looks into his big, dark eyes and wonders at their melancholy. And what she feels for him is not the heady passion of the romances she has secretly been writing.

The man seems kind, if remote, as virginal as she is, and they spend the night telling the stories on which their forevers will depend. At twenty-nine, he already feels his life ebbing. The bride doesn’t know yet how greedily death claimed his young parents.

In the bathroom she prays for love to grow in her heart.
Samina Najmi is associate professor of English at California State University, Fresno. A scholar of race, gender, and war in American literature, she discovered the rewards of more personal kinds of writing in a 2011 CSU Summer Arts course. Her creative nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Progressive, Pilgrimage, The Rumpus, Gargoyle, Chautauqua, and other publications. Her essay “Abdul” won Map Literary’s 2012 nonfiction prize. Samina grew up in Pakistan and England, and now lives with her family in California’s San Joaquin Valley.

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Art by Dagmara Bilon

Silent scream- paint,marker and menstruation blood on paper (2015) Artist Statement My current practice is an expression of liberty and defiances to taboos and conventions. Opening up awareness to my wonder-es cycling self, gluing plastic bags with gaffer tape to make a gigantic placenta, feeding my plants menstruation blood and using the earth as material to make body prints. In a self-preserving, modern capitalistic and digital, detached society; I seek authentic expression and an intuitive exploration of felt experiences and impressions involving in a direct way the body. Creative frameworks allow me to investigate a visual language that layer various realities to express surreal depictions of the female body as a source of vulnerable confinement and humerus provocation. The process of making is an invocation and reality is dissected into images fusing the imagined and the real. Scenes form out of the process of bringing together objects in relation to body, space and text. My work is process based and unfolds through experimentation, embodied investigation and collaboration with other artists. More about the artist: Dagmara Bilon is a performance artist/maker, who have been making work since 2003. She creates durational, action based and one to one performance work, for live audiences and for video. Dagmara is also a Dance Movement Therapist, a Purple Lady and lives with her two daughters in south-east London. Work has been presented in England, France, Romania, Iceland, Denmark, Croatia and Spain. For more information on her work see website www.dagmarabilon.com www.thepurpleladies.com

On Friday Night – from Mom Egg Review Vol. 12

Lately, my four-year-old thinks she is old enough to strike the matches. On Friday evenings at sundown, when we light candles to usher in the Jewish Sabbath, she climbs onto the countertop, and grabs the slim box with chubby hands that resemble her oldest sister’s.

Without fail, each week, she does this, and without fail, each week, her father and I admonish her that matches are dangerous, somehow not mastering, ourselves, the lesson to keep them out of her reach at the moment we take them out of the cupboard.

Every family has its variation of how the blessing is recited. Some light a pair of candles; some, as we do, light for the number of members of the family. Some recite the blessing in order of seniority; others, in unison. In traditional homes, only the women light; in others, the men participate. But the Hebrew words, whether sung or spoken, remain the same: Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments, and commanded us to light the Sabbath candles.

In our family, the blessing is sealed with a kiss.

This is how I was raised. As soon as Shabbat began, my sister and I stood by our mother’s side as she lit her silver candelabra. It stood on a shining mirrored plate on a buffet in the dining room, in front of an octagonal mirror that reflected us, watching her. She placed her manicured hands over her eyes, and silently said the blessing, followed by a lengthy moment of quiet that indicated a dialogue with God. What she asked of Him, she never shared. When she was done, my sister and I each took our turn, and then she kissed us with great force. Shortly thereafter, we sat down to eat.

In my home, I bless five candles in the kitchen, atop a paper covered with Sabbath-themed stickers, stuck to a layer of protective, yet scratched, acrylic. It was a preschool present from Michaela, our oldest daughter, who died unexpectedly when she was five. I never added a silent prayer to God the way my mother does, but now, I offer up a silent “Fuck You.”

This is especially true on the eves of Jewish holidays, which are also ushered in by candle lighting, and to which we add a second blessing thanking God for enabling us to “reach this occasion.” The phrase sounds more powerful in Hebrew, no more so than when David Ben Gurion exclaimed it upon the establishment of the State of Israel, or when my grandfather, a survivor of Auschwitz, proclaimed it at my wedding. To me, now, that second blessing is, simply, offensive. I thank no one for arriving at this moment; I feel scorched by my daughter’s death, and have neither the envy for, nor the capacity to emulate, those who retain faith after catastrophe.

But this is my heritage. To have created a Jewish home after the Holocaust was a source of pride for my Zaide, as we called him, and it has been paramount to my mother, who refers to the imperative every chance she gets. It is all she can do for her parents, I believe, after what they endured, their forearms branded with numbers, their dreams blazing forever thereafter, despite the prescriptions they took.

The truth is, when I was a child, I loved being a Jew, the stories of our patriarchs, the exodus from Egypt, the fall of the walls of Jericho. I took pride in speaking Hebrew, mastering text, and feeling completely secure, as when I walked into a synagogue during a college semester in Paris, opened a prayer book in the sanctuary, and immediately felt at home.

And even when, as an adult, I became more skeptical of religion, coming to view it as a man-made construct, I continued to observe Shabbat and to keep kosher. When Adam and I married, we agreed to raise our children the way we had been raised. If, playing out the quintessential Jewish parental nightmare, they ultimately reject our lifestyle, we reasoned, at least, they’ll know what they’re leaving.

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Art by Sophie Starzenski

The space in between:
It always happens to me while seeing an image, a landscape, a moment… or just seeing something that I find difficult to explain, a situation that I find inexplicably beautiful. I’m not talking about the beauty of it’s colours or it’s shapes – I’m talking about something different. Something that resonates within us. That beauty depends on the observer, or you could say that it depends on the resonance of the receiver. With time, I could define it this way. Before I used to say what moved me to take certain photos was the space in between the matter.

More about the Artist here

Text by Deborah L. Blicher

Leap of Faith
From Mom Egg Review Vol. 13
The little boy I hope will become my son lines up his scuffed shoes on the edge of the sandbox, gauging the distance to the ground. It’s sixty degrees out, but like all the children I have seen in this Russian city, he’s overdressed to my American eye. Between his striped, knitted cap and puffy blue coat, I can hardly see his face. We speak different languages, but as far as I can tell, he hates me.
The boy, whose name in Misha, is two and a half, with feathery blond eyebrows and merry eyes. Four days ago, my husband Peter and I met him and his sister at their orphanage. The children smiled up at us in the entryway decorated with finger paintings. When their caregiver Anna introduced us–as friends, not yet as parents–they giggled and scrambled down the hall. Smitten, we followed. They rolled trucks at us across the living room carpet. We had a pretend tea-party on the floor and a real one at the table. When Misha vaulted onto the couch and unfurled his body into a magnificent headstand, Anna instructed him to come down. Like every two year old in the world, he refused, so she carried him to the time-out chair.
Over the last three days, the children have sought increasing intimacy with us: holding our hands, daring us to chase them, imitating our English. Yesterday, they ran down the hall in their socks to greet us with outstretched arms. This morning, however, our final visit, they seem subdued. Misha’s sister Katja gravely takes Peter’s hand and leads him to the playground sandbox. Misha doesn’t follow. I walk him to the jungle-gym, which he climbed yesterday with joyful grace. Today he climbs grudgingly. He lets his fingers slip and watches me catch him, and he squawks if I stand too close. I feel he’s wondering both, “Will you keep me safe?” and “Will you give me freedom?”
I decide to try the swing, which he loved yesterday. He faces away from me as I carry him and slumps with apathy when I push him. From behind the swing, I ask whether he’s all right: “Te harasho?” He turns one round ear towards me but won’t reply. When I walk around to the front of the swing, he searches my face a long time.
Back at the sandbox, Peter and Katja have built a row of sandcastles. Peter is earnestly and slowly counting them for her in English. The expression on Katja’s sharp-chinned face suggests she’d like to have him committed. When I set Misha beside her, he turns his back on me and starts singing with a songbird’s loveliness. Then he extends a flattened palm and wipes out the sand-castle I’m building.
Finally I understand. Someone’s explained to the children that Peter and I want to adopt them, taking them away from the life they know. Misha is not angry with Peter because Peter won’t replace a father figure, but he’s angry with me because I’ll replace Anna, the only mother he knows.
His loss staggers me. read more