Na Cailleacha, thoughts for Nollaig na mBan and for the year ahead.
A word for mothers… We invite all those interested in us and our work to think about a question raised by the writer Siri Hustvedt in her essay ‘Tillie’ where she speculates about how detached her father was when he spoke about his mother, Tillie, (her grandmother) at her funeral. She questions the relative obscurity in which her high-achieving grandmother’s life was shrouded by her father relative to the space he gave to talking about his father, whose name he bore. Very movingly, Hustvedt asks ‘Did the debt to her disappear into the forgotten land of the mother and mothers, the speechless realm of the womb where every human being begins and from which every human being is born, a territory Western culture has studiously repressed, supressed, or avoided to a degree I have come to regard as spectacular? The omission of Tillie’s side of the family came “naturally” to my father because in the world of my childhood, we did not tell time by mothers, only by fathers. Didn’t we all share this experience and isn’t it experienced far beyond Western culture?
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