December 2017 / Motherlands by Rela Mazali in 'Messages from Israel: Violence and Female Values', Shira Richter / Part III

ART, RESEARCH, THEORY: In November 2016 the column space was passed on to Shira Richter, a mother, artist, activist, film maker and educator from Israel, to curate three editions of the m/other voices monthly columns on the topic of the 'maternal' and the 'politics of everyday life' from her particular, situated, feminist maternal perspective of mothering twin sons in Israel. In the first edition of 'Messages from Israel', Richter brought us her interview with Dr. Andrea O'Reilly, entitled 'Motherhood; a Liability or Crime?' In the second edition, on Valentines Day 2017, she brought us her continued and ongoing investigation into patriarchal structures and mother work, in her article  Mary - The Mother Whose Son Preached Feminine Values  and the accompanying video interview with Dr. James F. Gilligan. In the third edition, Shira Richter introduces us to the world and work of Rela Mazali, a feminist artist, activist, scholar, mother, daughter and grandmother living in Israel. 

m/other voices thank's Shira Richter for her tireless work of re-imagining the world from a feminist maternal perspective and Rela Mazali for her graceful and generous contribution to the ongoing conversation unfolding on the virtual pages of the m/other voices foundation. 

Rela Mazali, image courtesy of Shira Richter.

My chosen guest writer for this column is Rela Mazali, one of Israel's pioneer feminist writers and scholars, an artist mother, feminist activist for human rights and gun control. For me Rela is a mentor, teacher, role model, inspiration, and friend. Several times she 'took me in from the cold' when I was feeling like a crazy minority, and 'covered' me with a warm welcoming blanket of intellectual validation and respect. She knows what it is to be a feminist woman artist scholar, daughter mother and grandmother, seeker and outsider in one's own society. She knows what it is to be the unpopular one who questions the structures both around and inside of us.  She knows how it feels to forge new paths, with little support. Her writing style is one of the first I encountered which bravely challenges the structures of form, rhythm, space, voice, perspective and subject matter. She always asks who gains and who suffers from a situation, and what blind spots are we missing? Being one of the few brave women artists who openly admits the inherent exploitation systems existing, even amongst us well meaning maternal feminists, Rela belongs to a generation which paved and keeps paving the road for us. I want to thank Dr. Hadara Sheflan Katsav who curated my work and wrote her PhD on Mother Artists, for introducing me to Rela. It is important to mention the Mother Scholar lineage.  

                                                                                                          -Shira Richter

  mother lands

by
Rela Mazali


 

#1
tectonic activity

Original ink drawing by the author [Rela Mazali]
Scanned from my book: 'Maps of Women’s Goings and Stayings',Stanford University Press, 2001, p. 273.

When she left it the world shifted. Ancient glaciers collapsed silently off the far edges of my peripheral vision, dropped out of sight without preview fanfare. Uncharted infrastructure, in place since the beginning of the world, dissolved. A fulcrum dislodged.

mymother is a dark, large, largely undifferentiated landmass, spilling off of and beyond the side and bottom of cartography. From sites outside the navigable territory of my living, the landmass protrudes. Into and around and below, underpinning upholding underlying undertowing underwriting undergrounding undervalued undermining under current. Then mymother stops. Is the ink-line her death or my disengagement? 

Below my living she is a given. A taken. For granted. Was.

Front cover, 'Maps of Women’s Goings and Stayings', Stanford University Press, 2001. Jacket illustration: Rela Mazali, First visit.

#2
motherwriter

I almost always knew that I wanted to write
I didn’t always know that I wanted to mother
equally, I didn’t know that I could non-mother
that option wasn’t even available enough to be “out of the question”
it was literally out of the question
mothering was inexorable, “what you did.”
the only available question was “when?”

When the ‘when’ and my first living baby arrived, I didn’t and couldn’t have anticipated the flashflood consuming enormity. Instantaneous inexplicable overpowering love.
And equally
I didn’t and couldn’t have anticipated the flashflood consuming enormity. Terrifying hugely expanded vulnerability. Unabating. The space I occupied in the world instantaneously engulfed an added body mass of tangible, acute vulnerability. Mine.

One of the main risks to that vulnerable new being, as modern patriarchy has taught me well and as mymother reiterated, repeated, inculcated and embodied, was is its mother. myself as risk to mychild, mymothering as dangerous. treacherous, tricky.

writermother introduces specific risks to her children, unique dangers on top of the familiar ones, the widely publicized threats of failures at mothering or downright bad mothering. 

At a point that I can’t place chronologically, one or each or all of my children either told me or let me know or somehow let it be known that heshethey didn’t want to be in my writing. Could be, it was less categorical. More along the lines of not necessarily wanting or liking to be. Could be it was more me than them, intimating sensibilities, sensitivities, individualities, irritations, rights. Theirs. Their own people – even if young ones. Owed their own privacy. Owed my respect. Owed my silence. Entitled to non-exposure in public, in writing, in my writing. One way or another, when the older two of my three children were still fairly young, I stopped assuming any sweeping authorization to write about mymothering them.

Unauthorized, I still did it.

As put, unflinchingly, by my close friend, Tamar Hager, “We take advantage of them for our artistic needs and this exploitation does not only ignore their future subjectivity, but rather ‘harms’ their present existence as subjects.” (From her article: “Maternal Autobiography as a Site of Feminist Negotiation and Resistance,” Qualitative Inquiry, 2015, Volume 21(4), pp. 366-375, p. 372.) 

In an intensive, uniquely sanative dialogue that Hager and I have conducted for decades, we examine faults, fears, fights and guilt. Both reading and responding to drafts of each other’s writing, we’ve made our ways through mothering and writing in close proximity, listening, discussing, negotiating, analyzing. Sharing, supporting and loving. This has been a vital enabling factor for both of us.

In Hager’s book on four mothers, two of whom murdered a child and two of whom left children at home for extended periods, she describes sidestepping a painful observation voiced by one of her daughters. “Years of practice in hearing without listening were being used on my daughter to prove to her that she had not understood anything and it was done only to save myself from her judgment and from the truth that she had revealed to me.” (From her book: Malice Aforethought, Kinneret, Zmora-Bitan, Dvir Publishing House, 2012, pp. 387-388; English translation: Barbara Doron.)

Sidestepping my own children’s apparent preference for non-exposure or their right to privacy, unauthorized, I still wrote. About mymothering, which was is a dominant dominating experience. And, unavoidably, about mymothering them. Wrote about them.

What I’m most interested in, when I write, is doing what I’m doing here. That is, in the text you’re reading right this minute. What I’m most interested in is wording what stumps me, in a mono-dialogue, with a stumped me readably struggling to figure it out. Or setting lyrics to what I think I’ve understood, on the belief or the assumption that since it’s interesting and revealing to me, it will somehow be interesting and revealing to some others. Or verbalizing what moved me. 

On an account of mine from a few years back, when I do this kind of writing, “I am present in the narrative—openly equating narrator with real-life writer. The narrated events of the story are equally real, personally experienced, remembered and recounted. Their arrangement in this particular narrative structure isn’t mediated by an imaginary storyteller. It is explicitly my own arrangement. This is a story, then, but not a fiction. It is framed and positioned as an account of reality. It is a form of direct speech (on my part), although this speech is written and read (on your part). I have told or spoken it without distancing (my)self from substance, conversely retaining and acknowledging my responsibility for the portrayal, for the thinking and feelings conveyed, for the standpoint from which the events were lived and retold. Resisting the deeply gendered public-private divide that structures lives in western (and other) culture(s), the story offers a way of enacting through writing some of the moves of political feminist activism—that is, standing up in public and stating, while openly owning, my views; Knitting into a visible whole my self, voice, gaze, actions, words. It is a way of transgressing prohibitions, of crossing lines.” (From my chapter: “Complicit Dissent, Dissenting Complicity: A Story and its Context,” in: Ghada Ageed ed., Apartheid in Palestine: Hard Laws and Harder Experiences, 2015, University of Alberta Press, pp. 129-145, p. 129)

And, continued elsewhere, I’m most interested in creating “a hybrid genre, melding tale-telling and systematic documentation. It studies a sociological-political intersection of gender, class, sexuality, nationality at the site of the author’s—my—mindbody. Through narrated life experience it researches a specific matrix of power. In doing so, it performs knowing as a process, ongoing and subject to embodied limits. What is known to the first person relating [...it] is circumscribed by her placement: A feminized, sub-hegemonic member of the ruling Jewish hegemony in Israel/Palestine. Offered a process of knowing in this literary borderzone, readers too are invited to evaluate its findings.” (From my talk: “How do I know? Who do I write? How do you read?: Embodied positions of being, knowing, writing, reading, understanding in docu-literary work,” Symposium on Gender and Aesthetics, Sabançi University, Istanbul, November 2015)

Feminist graffiti in Istanbul, Photograph: Rela Mazali, 2011.

So changed names aren’t much of an option. Of course I changed my written children’s names but… seriously?

How does a motherwriter whose art supplies are her life respect her children’s choices and rights? In her art, that is? In her writing? Or maybe the real question is: Does a motherwriter whose art supplies etcetera? Or even: Should a motherwriter etcetera? And, no less: Can a motherwriter?

In shame and heartache, I have understood my motherhood as, among other things, (quoting again from “Complicit Dissent…”) “a core area of my compliance, generating my (partial) self-imprisonment. A potent, insidious vehicle for the (partial) imprisonment of relatively privileged women, the prescribed concept of ‘good mothering’ has long served to control women in Western and other cultures. Psychologists, educators and our own mothers teach the imperative of a mother’s predominant presence, conjoining good mothering with staying home. My motherhood is employed to keep me occupied in both senses of the word: both busy, distracted and subject to control and surveillance. In particular, my motherhood is deployed to circumscribe my space and bar me from the public sphere. It thus factors strongly into both geography and voice and plays out distinctly along borderlines: Should I, can I, for instance, cross into Gaza (referring here to the years when this was still possible for Israelis), knowing that timetables are unpredictable and arbitrary, that I may not be able to get back in time to collect my kids from respective day care arrangements? Should I, can I, cross out of consensus, publicly state dissenting views, knowing that not only I but my children too will be sanctioned for them, via various channels? Should I, can I, transgress the contours of ‘good mothering,’ with the painful results this entails?” (p. 132)

This quote, this insight, admittedly conflates my transgression against consensus with my transgression against my children’s rights and autonomy. This might seem a questionable move or equation.  

In fact, it is the society I dwell with which has tied up the two in a Gordian knot. The consensus of Jewish society in Israel mandates and requires that my mothering transgress against my children’s most basic and foundational rights. It obligates me to raise and educate them, and to steel myself, to consent to and encourage their conscription at age eighteen. As it requires this, it requires me to actively not see that in “designating a particular [age] group to endanger itself over an extended period in the [military] service of the state, […Israeli society] is designating random members of this group [i.e. of 18-21 year olds] as relatively expendable ... From the point of view of the collective (not, usually, that of the individual families), the possible loss of members of the group is deemed tolerable or, at least, less costly than losing members of other groups. … While a select though large circle of soldiers and exsoldiers enjoys enormous privilege in Israel, … a status continually shored up by militarization and conflict, this privilege is purchased with the currency of human expendability.” (From my article: “Ethnically Constructed Guns and Feminist Anti-Militarism in Israel,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 9 (2): 289-308 · July 2007, pp. 289-307, p. 296)

The right to life, or the right to freely choose whether to risk one’s life, is just one of the fundamental human rights – my children’s, that is – which I would be failing to defend in failing to transgress against the militarized consensus I live in.

I would also be failing to defend their right to bodily integrity in the broadest sense, including freedom from sexual harassment and predatory sexism. “[S]tatistics clearly place army age women in the group most at risk of sexual assault, harassment, and rape in Israel. … Besides the vulnerable age group of most women in the army, the military is … one of the main generators creating and maintaining masculine superiority in Israeli society. … [And yet, w]here men’s ostensibly elective military mission – in the service of the state – is lauded and valorized, the rape, harassment, and sexual assault of women – in the service of male supremacy – are explained away as individual bad luck, at best, or the victim’s fault, at worst. … [B]ecause women’s forced mission is denied and hidden, the specific, possibly enhanced risk that they face as young conscripts is almost totally erased and disregarded. Meanwhile, in contrast, the risk faced by young men conscripts is perceived as much enhanced, and every boy is seen as a future combat soldier, granting him, at least potentially, ‘the preferred status of “good citizen,”’ as Sasson-Levy puts it (p. xiii).” (From my article: “‘And What About the Girls?’: What a Culture of War Genders Out of View,” Nashim: Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues. 2003. Fall, Number 6, pp. 39-50).

Quoted from the cumulative body of my writing, authored at different dates over decades and published in different venues, these standpoints and beliefs are seen as transgressive by much, perhaps most, of the society I dwell with. And yet, their transgression against consensus both does and does not transgress against each of my three children’s personal space and autonomous individuality. The potentiality that their mother’s published, heretical ideas will be linked to them, that these may even brand them and affect their chances of social acceptance or admission to educational and professional institutions, impinges on who they are and on how they’re received by others. Simultaneously, the entrenched convention of individuated authorship, stops at the boundaries of their personhood, skirts and leaves intact their distinct, separate identities. It doesn’t, or doesn’t necessarily, implicate them. 

On the other hand, narrating pieces of their lives as embodiments of my analyses of the reality I inhabit, of collective events and socio-political structures is – supposedly – a different issue entirely. 

Am I, in one instance, entitled to write this?
“My son is a soldier. Requisitioned and exquisitely trained to defend the wall. He has to be by Israeli law. He might also have been by choice. I can’t see any way of knowing. Brown skinned, blue eyed, light brown hair cropped, high cheekboned, graceful and thin and strong and sensitive. He visits often, my older son, coming through, very happy and appreciating of the normal food and the clean smell of the sheets and towels. Eats and showers and sleeps. His body taken careful care of and given the space to relax. To revert to protectedness. His hands are heavily callused from the metal he cleans and assembles and carries. His skin has been desensitized to rain and cold and arid heat and darkness and he has learned to walk the dark. Alone. With a map in his head. I deeply envy him this. And as I envy him this I realize that it is this that I envy. This mastery of the skills of a coverer of ground. I would be a coverer of ground. But the maps I carry in my head are unwalkable.” (From my book: Maps of Women’s Goings and Stayings, Stanford University Press, 2011, from the chapter: “Sixth Visit: The Indian in the Longing,” p. 182)

The intimacy, the detail, the bodily proximity. Are they overstepping boundaries? Too revealing? Embarrassing?

Am I, in another instance, entitled to write this?
“When I arrived late to pick up Naomi from pre-school – it only happened twice, once it was four minutes and I can’t remember how many the other was – I found her standing in front of the gate on the (narrow) sidewalk with the assistant. They were standing and waiting. For me. The gate was locked behind her and there was no one else around.

“It’s so parents won’t be late, they told me when I asked the morning after. Because that day, the minute I brought my car to a standstill after drawing up slowly and carefully beside them, the assistant opened the door and hoisted Naomi in, package style, and her comportment, despite a polite smile, and Naomi’s tense face emphasized the rush she was in, without even a second for any exchange or for ‘goodbyes’ on a calmer note. Otherwise there’s no end of it, of the liberties they take, they told me when I asked, with the same polite smile I got from the curb the day before.

“I said I really did understand and that I was very sorry. I felt I had no choice and didn’t even feel wrong about failing to object to this practice; of steering a small girl child off the premises, of clicking the gate shut behind her, locked, we’ll wait for mommy here; of standing a small girl child on the street, at the curb, knowingly placing her on-the-brink: tiptoes, curbstones, straining to see just a bit further – maybe it’s mommy? Nerve edges. Where’s mommy? All the other mommies have come. All the other kids are gone. What’s wrong? Where’s mommy? When will she come? Will she come? Will my mommy come and get me? 
“A minute. A minute. Another minute. Four minutes. Myriad split seconds. The terror, the abandonment. The discomfort standing, straining. No gate key, no house key, no place. Assistant clutching a small girl child with her sweaty hand. Hard, so the small hand won’t escape the sticky grip. No comforting-calming stroking. A restraining order: Do not step off the curb, do not step in the street. … A reprimand delivered with polite force. A locked gate. A stand. On the edge. A small girl child’s face struggling with the terror. A small girl child’s hand squirming in the grip. Wordless. Not, for instance: What were you thinking? Do you think I get paid for this overtime?!
“(Assistant-)Teacher time vs. mother time.
“Small girl child time vs. mother time.”

(From my book Home Archaeology: Essay Tales, Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishers, from Chapter 2: Street Talk, pp. 20-21, my translation from Hebrew)

Front cover, Home Archaeology: Essay Tales,  Cover Design: Ori Moran; Jacket photography: Noa Mazali.

The intimacy, the detail, the bodily proximity. Are they overstepping boundaries? Too revealing? Embarrassing?

In these and most other instances of my motherwriting, partnerwriting, I try to answer those questions. I invite in censors. Myself. My children, my partner. First, my own self-censorship, my continual self-interrogation about what might prove too sensitive, too unfair, too exposing (to them), too one-sided (my side). Too hurtful.

There are things I consciously don’t write, though the line is blurred and fine and in flux. And once I’ve decided and written a piece or a book, I allow them censorights. I mark the passages that describe my memories and versions of their experiences and I ask them to read and comment on these – whether they read the whole, or just the passages I’ve marked. It’s up to them. No obligation to read the whole. Since I write in connection, in context, in contact, in life, since they are part of that, I offer and allow them a degree of authority and authorship. They have a say.

To be honest, my children have never ever asked me to delete anything. My partner has. But none of them ever has. So far. This may mean that I’ve been sufficiently respectful of their privacy and sensibilities. It may equally mean that they don’t really dare, that they don’t really feel entitled to censor my writing. That it’s too scary. Or maybe that it’s unrelated and distant from them and they don’t really care. Whichever is the case, whether it’s one of these options or something else completely, for whichever one of the three very distinct and unique individuals who are my children, it’s unclear whether my solution to motherwriting has worked well for them. Or not. 

Front cover, English Summary of the 2017 report by Gun Free Kitchen Tables: Loose guns: Israeli controlled small arms in the civil sphere, Cover design: Noa Mazali.

                                                                      ***

Rela Mazali is a bi-lingual author who writes in both English ad Hebrew, an independent scholar and a feminist anti-militarist activist from Israel; Active against Israel's occupation since 1980, one of the founders of the New Profile movement to demilitarise society and state in Israel (in 1998) and of the Coalition of Women for peace (in 2000), a member of the Jury of Conscience of the World Tribunal on Iraq in 2005, Co-founder (in 2010) and (still) Coordinator of the feminist disarmament project, Gun Free Kitchen Tables (GFKT), she is also the lead author of GFKT's new report: 'Loose guns: Israeli controlled small arms in the civil sphere' (January 2017). Rela's latest literary work is: 'Home Archaeology' (In Hebrew, 2011). Previous books: 'Maps of Women's Goings and Stayings (in English, 2001), WhaNever (in Hebrew, 1987). Among her recently published essay tales and papers: 'Hospital Archive' in Bad Mothers: Regulations, representations and Resistance, Michelle Hughes Miller, Tamar Hager and Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich (eds.), Demeter Press, (2017); 'Speaking of Guns: Launching gun control discourse and disarming security guards in a militarised society', International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2016 Vol. 18, No. 2, 292-304; 'Complicit Dissent, Dissenting Complicity: A story and its Context' in Apartheid in Palestine: Hard Laws and Harder Experiences, Ghana Ageel ed., University of Alberta Press, 2016, pp. 128-148.

Books: 'Whanever A Novel', Kerem Publishers, Tel Aviv, 1987; 'Maps of Women's Goings and Stayings', Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2001.; 'Home Arceology: Essay Tales', Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishers, Tel Aviv, 2011.   

Documentary film: Mazali initiated and served as Assistant Director of Testimonies, 1993, Director: Ido Sela by the Testimonies Group.