Lembrar a maternidade

Alguns nexos entre memória, narrativa e experiência materna

Abstract

Based on the prefaces of two memoirs written by mothers, Jane Lazarre’s The mother knot (1976) and Rachel Cusk’s A life’s work: on becoming a mother, this essay points out some connections between the narration of mother experience and the notions of memory and storytelling as exposed by Walter Benjamin (1994, 2012) and Jeanne Marie Gagnebin (1994, 2009). Reading keys and remarks found on the prefaces are exploited as loose threads which, if proper sewed, help us to better understand the recollection and narration of maternal experience in the literature of the last decades. As we try to indicate, when mothers narrate their experience, a personal as well as a collective realm is at stake: it is in the continuance of women stories about motherhood that the tradition of these narratives is updated. In addition, we emphasize how notions such as circularity, knot, memory and forgetfulness are important to the memoirs analyzed.