مطبوعاتنا

When writing about motherhood, it is impossible to forget the mothers of Gaza. Several of the essays in this volume were written during the Israeli assault on Gaza, amid the targeting of children and the systematic destruction inflicted upon its people. Writing became profoundly difficult for many of the contributors. In the face of death and devastation, everything—including writing itself—seems to lose its meaning. How can we question and reimagine motherhood when mothers are forced to watch their children die before their eyes? This was, in truth, a different kind of dilemma: one that obstructed the very possibility of imagining alternative visions of a world revealing its darkest and most brutal face. Even so, we realized that we had no choice but to complete this book. We chose to express our anger not through silence, but through writing. In this volume, feminist writers from diverse backgrounds, generations, and contexts examine the question of motherhood through a range of theoretical perspectives and approaches, weaving together the personal and the political, the historical and the lived experience.

“Whenever I return in my thoughts to the summer of 1974, I remember that I was already over thirty years old, yet I was still unable to confess to Yima what I had suffered on the rooftop with Nora. My sense of shame prevented me; there was no point in speaking. In reality, a wide river of lies flowed between my mother and me. I never admitted what had happened to me on that day when I went out during her nap. Even after thirty years, I was still unable to summon Yima to an intimate trial between the two of us, where I would stand alone before a court with no jury, no defendant, and no witnesses.”