Toni Morrison, 

Beloved
Toni Morrison’s inimitable novel Belovedholds within it one of the most
profound and painful maternal secrets ever brought to literary light. Sethe,
a formerly enslaved person, now resides with her daughter in a house in
Ohio which is haunted by a poltergeist-like spirit. When the spirit takes the
corporeal form of a young woman named Beloved, Sethe abandons herself
to Beloved’s every need, attempting to repair her earlier efforts to kill her
children to avoid their recapture. Sethe believes the character of Beloved is
the incarnation of the infant that died at her hand. This act and its expiation
consume Sethe until she is so reduced by her maternal obsession for
Beloved that only one thing will save her: confronting her own need to
form a separate identity. The novel, among its many astonishments and
radical challenges to hierarchies of power, employs a maternal act of
singular transgression to ask a forbidden question: does a mother owe her
children and society her life and her soul? Isn’t this just another form of
enslavement?

In Maya Angelou's autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya's beautiful, vivacious
biological mother, Vivian Baxter, emerges as an important character in her daughter's life. Vivian
endures as a black woman in a white man's world by displaying strength, honesty, and toughness,
which lead to self- preservation. Vivian lives within the St. Louis jazz society where blacks are faced
with " the hostility of the powerless against the powerful, the poor against the rich, the worker against
the worked for and the ragged against the well- dressed." Ms. Angelou provides her readers with a
vivid description of an unwilling mother thrust in and out of maternal situations during a thirteen-year
span in which she survives as an entertainer in bars from St. Louis to San Francisco. Despite
displaying character traits that may be interpreted as unmotherly, Vivian Baxter is, nevertheless, a
positive role model for her daughter, Maya.

Carol ann duffy – the way my mother speaks

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/the-way-my-mother-speaks/

Virginia wolf always said it was through writing her novel To the Lighthouse that she was finally
able to let go of her mother.

Audre Lorde - Audre Lorde described herself as "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet".

See here great extracts from Maya Angelou’s book about her mother:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/30/maya-angelou-terrible-wonderful-mother

Maggie ofarrell – Hamnet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JdskxUM55Y – 6 mins approx. she reads a description of
hamlets mum

Apart from the title character, who is your favourite character and why?
I really enjoyed creating the character of Hamnet’s mother. We are so accustomed to
calling her ‘Anne Hathaway’ but her father’s will clearly names her as ‘Agnes’. That
was an electrifying, defining moment in the writing of the book. In giving her what is
presumably her birth name, I’m asking readers to discard what we think we know
about her and see her anew. most accomplished novel to date, Hamnet centres around the
emotional life of a deeply intuitive woman, charting the terrain of her grief at the loss of a child.

Jackie Kay – poem to dead mother

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/14w07Gm7tmld6N7gJpLkzCb/when-you-feel-that-
your-grief-doesn-t-count

Elena Ferrante

I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather

shocking thing to admit. I have none of the selfless love of my mother.
I have none of the plodding, practical love. . . . . I am, to be blunt and
concise, in love only with myself, my puny being with its small
inadequate breasts and meager, thin talents. I am capable of affection
for those who reflect my own world.
Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath – see piece about Jacqueline rose

Mothers are the countries we come from: sometimes when I hold my daughter I try to apprehend
this belonging for her, to feel myself as solid and fixed, to capture my smell and shape and
atmosphere. I try to flesh out her native landscape. I try to imagine what it would be like to have
me as a mother. Rachel Cusk A Life’s Work

It is hard to write about my own mother. Whatever I do write, it is my story I

am telling, my version of the past. If she were to tell her own story other
landscapes would be revealed. But in my landscape or hers, there would be
old, smoldering patches of deep-burning anger.
Adrienne Rich
From here; https://writingwomenslives.com/mother-truths-quotes-women-writers/

This entwining is perfectly demonstrated in the writing of American

activist and essayist Rebecca Solnit. According to Solnit her mother
was blind to her daughter’s needs.

My story is a variation on one I’ve heard from many women over the
years, of the mother who gave herself away to everyone or someone
and tried to get herself back from a daughter.
From Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby
In Solnit’s free-flowing prose, The Faraway Nearby, about
storytelling and narrative she (unwittingly?) narrates her own
mother’s story. Solnit reclaims the power – the voice – she was
denied.

She often visited her fury at others or at life upon me. She took
pleasure in not giving me things that she gave to others, often in front
of me, in finding a way to push me out of the group. She thought she
would get something from these acts, and maybe she got a momentary
sense of victory and power, and those were rare possessions for her.
She didn’t seem to know she had also lost something through this
strategy.
As true as any of this might be, and I don’t doubt it is, Solnit doesn’t
say ‘I saw my mother as’; no, she writes ‘my mother was.’

When we write our mothers they will exist in perpetuity as

they were to us. 2.Writer Dani Shapiro has a similarly stubborn rearview of her own
mother.

In Inheritance Shapiro’s writes about her discovery that the father who raised her was not her
biological father. Because her parents are deceased she cannot know what they knew. Shapiro
updates her image of her father, makes him even more compassionate, to incorporate this new
data. But her view of her mother is immutable, Shapiro assumes her mother was unaware or
worse, complicit.2
I’ve written about the burden of bearing witness, telling stories to
engender collective memory. When we talk about our mothers we
witness a life, but when we narrow it to our drama, we deliver
incomplete portrayals.

In a smattering of people writing about their mothers, one stands

out. Mom & Me & Mom is the last of Maya Angelou’s seven
autobiographies.

How did I, born black in white country, poor in a society where

wealth is adored and sought after at all costs, female in an
environment where only large ships and some engines are described
favorably by using the female pronoun – how did I get to be Maya
Angelou”.

From Maya Angelou’s Mom & Me & Mom

The answer, Angelou tells us, is the grandmother who raised her and
the woman who became her mother. Vivian Baxter sent Maya and her
brother to live with their paternal grandmother in Arkansas when they
were three and five. Maya lived there for the next ten years until she
returned to California to a mother she vaguely knew.

After a few weeks it became clear that I was not using any title when I
spoke to her. In fact, I rarely started conversations. […]

She asked me to join her. “Maya, I am your mother. Despite the act
that I left you for years. I am your mother. You know that, don’t
you?”

I said, “Yes, ma’am.” I had been answering her briefly with a few
words since my arrival in California.

“You don’t have to say ‘ma’am’ to me. You’re not in Arkansas.”

“No, ma’am. I mean no.”

“You don’t want to call me ‘Mother,’ do you?” I remained silent.”

Initially, Angelou was unable to use the word “Mom” because Vivian
Baxter, whom Angelou learned to call ‘Lady,’ hadn’t earned the title.

Perhaps because Angelou only lived with her mother from age
thirteen, or perhaps because she is such a keen storyteller she gives
her mother independence, agency. 3.Mom & Me & Mom includes stories told in
her other books and yet, under this theme of “becoming mom” it is vitally new. I am particularly
fond of it because while motherhood happens overnight, becoming a mom, takes ages.
Lifetimes. It’s a destination never reached but always sought. Angelou captures all that is
elemental about motherhood. 3
In one glorious scene, Angelou describes her mother as “catching” her
baby when Angelou gives birth. Both physically and emotionally.
“Here, my baby, here’s your beautiful baby” Vivian says to her
daughter. She caught. A wondrous, full word.
I consider my daughter. I catch her. I cradle her, I hold, lift, elevate,
rock, sway and am always always there to catch her. And my mother
me. That fierce action.

Mothers are action.

And yet we write them still. We paint them sitting.

My daughter. How much power she will have to write my story? Will
I exist apart from how I affected her?

I stopped writing fiction because, like Munro, I always wrote my

mother. Or maybe I wrote myself because ultimately, I am so
much her.

When Angelou finally left home to live on her own, with her young
son and her ferocious power in tow, she finally calls her mother
“Mom.”

I walked away and was back in my bedroom before I heard my own

words echoing in my mind. I had called Lady “Mother.” I knew she
had noticed but we never ever mentioned the incident. I was aware
that after the birth of my son and the decision to move and get a place
for just the two of us, I thought of Vivian Baxter as my mother.
Both women felt like mothers.

We tell stories. These days we tell stories about ourselves. We involve

others in our drama. Some echo more strongly than others, some
reverberate off the pages, some slink into the margins.

But there they remain, contained.

When we write about our mothers – these individuals with whom

we’ve shared a body, a name, a home, a day, many days, a space and
countless memories which could be summed up with the word “past”
– when we write about our mothers we are really writing about
ourselves.
 MOTHER

I am always aware of my mother,

Ominous, threatening,

A pain in the depths of my consciousness.

My mother is like a shell,

So easily broken.

Yet the fact that I was born

Bearing my mother’s shadow

Cannot be changed.

She is like a cherished, bitter dream

My nerves cannot forget

Even after I am awake.

She prevents all freedom of movement.

If I move she quickly breaks

And the splinters stab me.

—Nagase Kiyoko  (1906- 1995)

Nagase Kiyoko wrote poetry for 65 years.  She never called herself a
‘professional poet’, but referred to herself as ‘a useless woman’.  She
was a farmer, and wrote her poetry at the kitchen table before dawn,
while her children and husband were asleep upstairs.  Because of her
sensual and cosmic verse, Nagase Kiyoko is considered by many
Japanese women poets to be the “Grandmother” of modern poetry. 
Just a short reading of her verse goes deeply into the heart of the
reader.  She is ageless in her verse.  She died on her 89th birthday.