Diary: Jazmina Barrera—Readers, Writers, Mothers
Cihuatlampa, “the place of women” in the western part of the sky, inhabited by women who die in childbirth according to Mexica cosmology. From the Codex Yohualli Ehecatl (Codex Borgia), a sixteenth-century manuscript from Central Mexico. Vatican Library
I’ve just read “The Third Baby’s the Easiest” by Shirley Jackson. A woman is on her way to the hospital to have her third child. Both the drive to the hospital and her labor are protracted, confused, complicated, and painful. The people around her keep insisting that she is “only having a baby,” and that the third is “the easiest.” My favorite part is when she gets to the hospital and the receptionist asks a series of tedious questions that she has to answer between contractions. When the woman inquires about her job, Jackson replies, “writer.” The receptionist says, “I’ll just put down housewife.” Despite her pain, Jackson repeatedly clarifies that she is a writer and the woman repeatedly says that she’s going to put down housewife.
I look for texts on pregnancy as if they were travel guides. Books with advice, books written by psychoanalysts, novels, poems, or essays by pregnant women. It’s hard work finding literary sources. A friend told me about Mary Shelley, who was pregnant when she wrote Frankenstein. It’s obvious but, for all the times I’ve read the novel, it never occurred to me before: Frankenstein is a story about the creation of life, about a man who doesn’t so much play at being God as play at being a woman.
The feminist Mary Wollstonecraft died while giving birth to the child who would become Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley, in turn, had four children, although only one survived childhood—Clara, whom she was expecting while writing the novel, died just a few days after her birth. It’s not unreasonable to suppose that pregnancy was for her, at least in part, a horror story. I think of the passage from Frankenstein where the monster comes to life and tries to kill its creator, that terrifying fragment, that postpartum nightmare.
It took Dr. Frankenstein two years to fabricate his monster from pieces of human corpses and animal parts. Two years sounds more reasonable than the meager nine months needed to create a whole human being. Pregnancies should last three, four, five years and be less radical, more gradual. My reasons for thinking this have nothing to do with the evolutionary condition that causes newly born humans to be much more vulnerable than the majority of mammals, who can already walk and practically fend for themselves at birth. I think this because pregnancy seems a titanic, supernatural task, incomprehensible and miraculous. I don’t understand how it happens so quickly.
But I’m not kidding myself. I know that it’s not me creating the child; it’s my blood, my lungs, that craziness of genes. It feels as if someone else were using me to fabricate another human being, someone who isn’t me; my hands are outside my womb, I have no idea what’s going on in there, and although I read that the fetus already has lungs, eyes, and hair, I’ll never be able to explain how it’s happening. It all sounds so improbable, like a hallucination or something from a gothic novel.
Parto—from the verb partir, to depart—is the Spanish term for childbirth. It had never crossed my mind to imagine childbirth as the moment when someone leaves you: the moment of departure and the moment of partition. The moment of splitting into two. In English there’s no sense of departure or splitting; mothers give birth. Margaret Atwood wonders: “But who gives it? And to whom is it given?” She definitely doesn’t feel that it is “a gentle handing over” with “no coercion.”
Atwood wrote a short story in which she narrates a birth as if it were a horror story, with a level of suspense that makes one believe that something terrible is going to occur. What does happen is the birth of an enormous baby, a “boulder,” which unhinges the woman’s bones like “a birdcage turning slowly inside out.” The narrator is writing the woman’s story while her own daughter is taking a nap.
Natalia Ginzburg: “The subterranean accord with that hidden form is unspoken; and the relationship between the mother and that living, undiscovered, hidden form is truly the most closed, the most binding, the darkest relationship in the world; it is the least free of all relationships.”
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My mother reminds me that I shouldn’t view the eclipse. A Maya myth from pre-Hispanic times says that the sun is consumed during an eclipse, and if a pregnant woman sees it, her child might be born deformed. In order to neutralize this threat, women used to place an obsidian knife close to their breasts. Even now, when there’s an eclipse in Mexico, women carry scissors or sometimes a piece of red string. I don’t believe in any of that, but I do have a personal superstition about ignoring my mother’s advice. Historically, that has definitely brought me bad luck.
Time passes slowly at night and quickly during the day. I remember that poem by Seamus Heaney about St. Kevin, who stretched out his arms to pray, but his cell was so small he had to put one hand out the window, and a blackbird laid a clutch of eggs in his palm. St. Kevin waited for weeks with his arm stretched out until the chicks hatched and flew away. That’s what pregnancy is like, what nights of breastfeeding are like.
In The Millstone, Margaret Drabble wrote: “It seemed so absurd, to have this small living extension of myself.”
The Mexicas thought of childbirth as a pitched battle. Women who died while giving birth became either a mochihuaquetze, a courageous woman, or a cihuateteo, a divine woman. Warriors coveted the fingers and hair from the corpses of these women, because they were believed to give them strength in battle. It was thought that when women died in this way they accompanied the sun on its journey. They lived in the western part of the sky, in the region of evening, which was known as “The place of women.”
Mothers who write, according to Ursula K. Le Guin, are “almost a taboo topic.” The reason is that they “have been told that they ought not to try to be both a mother and a writer because both the kids and the books will pay—because it can’t be done—because it is unnatural.”
Terry Tempest Williams says that her mother’s voice is a lullaby in her cells: “When I am still, my body feels her breathing.”
Microchimerism refers to the exchange of fetal and maternal cells in the womb. The term comes from the Chimera of Greek myth, a monster made up of the parts of various animals. The fetus’s cells are able to pass into the mother’s body through the bloodstream, but the maternal cells can also enter the fetal body through the placenta. And, although this is less likely, a grandmother’s cells may also enter her grandchild’s body. As fetal cells are capable of adapting to the maternal tissue—like foreigners learning a new language—they insert themselves in various organs to become part of the mother’s body. We are made of others.
Translated by Christina MacSweeney
This post is drawn from Jazmina Barrera’s forthcoming meditation on pregnancy and childbirth, Linea Nigra, to be published next month by Two Lines Press of the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco. Barrera is also the author of On Lighthouses. She lives in Mexico City. Christina MacSweeney has translated work by Valeria Luiselli, Daniel Saldaña, Elvira Navarro, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, and Julián Herbert from the Spanish.
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