Caitlín Doherty Considers the Maternal Collective Voice

Caitlín Doherty writes an essay for MAP about Denise Riley, abortions, time, pregnancy, "women and creativity" (after Simone de Beauvoir), and the intricacies therein. "For Riley, the stoppage of time is connected to an ineffable experience, a recurrence in her writing, in which maternal life shapes the conditions of language and is in turn shaped by the conditions of history, materialism, class." Read on:

…In her recent essay on Riley’s work, Helen Charman asks ‘is there such a thing as a collective maternal elegiac voice?’ Reading Riley and Ernaux together, attempting—feebly—to join my voice to theirs has been like asking to join the chorus. Can the maternal collective sing together, across decades, form a lyric of the moment of pregnancy, one harmonised with the moment of loss? Could this lyric overlook the agency and chance at play in each of our situations, the relevance of class and income and housing? If so, it would be like living in an eternal, blissful, present. The children would never die, the contract would never end.

To abort is not the same as losing a living child to death, nor is it the same as a miscarriage (though they can be more alike than we admit). I know this. I know this acutely in the moments I am most full of grief, because I have nothing to grieve. There’s no real absence in my life, my home, where the baby once was. We never prepared for the baby as expectant, excited parents would have, a little further into the pregnancy. Bordered by our circumstances, there was never space for that baby. So I’m not left with an empty cot or a grave, just a test I won’t throw away. Two ghostly red lines that were a form of spectral communication—you can’t see me, but I’m here. It never had a personality I can miss, or hair I could keep a lock of (or, like Riley, wash from the basin days after its death) and the madness of missing it is entirely self-generated…

The full essay, "Tenancy: Killing Time," is here.