Discovering one author whose work you’re eager to share is the great pleasure of book reviewing. Discovering two authors, even more so. How to be Unmothered: A Trinidadian Memoir, by Camille U. Adams and The Water Bearers: A Memoir of Mothers and Daughters, by Sasha Bonét, are gripping multi-generational sagas about mothers and daughters, debut memoirs that sizzle with painful truths. They each contain emotional heft to burst their covers. They each are steeped in ancestry and history, and in the terrible legacies of slavery and oppression.
And, they are two very different books.
I was once told that if you put more than one woman in a room together, they will reach a discussion about their mothers within five minutes. In my experience, this is true.
I am one of four daughters and the mother of two daughters. My mother was one of two daughters.
My mother was a physical specimen. She was athletic and lacked physical fear. She was infuriated when we “ganged up” to prevent her from cross-country skiing through a raging torrent of thigh-deep water flooding the road during a Maine snowstorm, even though death by hypothermia was a legitimate threat. My mother chased a mugger around the block in Philadelphia with her hallmark four finger whistle after he grabbed her purse.
Because she was missing the physical fear link, my mother lacked protective instincts toward her daughters. She was unconcerned to put me on a commuter train into Philadelphia by myself when I was nine and didn’t worry about my walking through abandoned Philadelphia streets in my pre-teens at 9:30 PM to catch the same commuter train home. She didn’t bat an eyelash when one of my sisters crossed central Asia on her own, at great physical peril, in their early twenties. She was fine sending young teens off on world travels with little to no concern about safety and supervision.
On the other hand, none of us could load a dishwasher to her specifications.
Despite her physical prowess, my mother was the first of her generation to die. She succumbed to pancreatic cancer in eight weeks. She was exquisitely sensitive but often distracted to the point of emotional unavailability. She was gentle and loving, but a powerhouse of ambition; quiet and unassuming, yet my elementary school principal said he’d never met anyone more competitive. She was a totemic figure in the household, but needed and sought mothering from me, and, I suspect, from my three sisters. In other words, my mother was a mass of contradictions. On a spectrum of inscrutability, I believe she would be at the far end of the curve.
Is there a daughter who does not wonder about her mother’s inner life and motivations? Camille U. Adams poses the question but leaves the reader to answer. Over the course of her memoir, her mother makes a series of devastating departures. There’s the baby girl her mother abandons in Grenada, upon moving to Trinidad to marry Adams’s father. As a result, the narrator-memoirist calls herself “the not-first daughter.” Yet as the oldest of the Trinidadian children, she bears heavy burdens.
Her father is captive to rum —
Rum unshields his ghastly face. And reveals his homicidal role in centuries of ancestral shackled pain. And his trace. In the centuries of all the descendants he has claimed.
This father beats and abuses mother verbally and psychologically. Mother confides in not-first daughter, enveloping her in fear of her father, and in ongoing stress about the duty to protect her mother and younger siblings. These impossible responsibilities are bestowed on Adams at ages eight and nine and ten and eleven. Adams’s blunt description of this state of being: [When] He’s not here, … we safe.
When Adams is twelve, her mother flees permanently to New York, leaving this not-first daughter in charge of the household, her two younger sisters, and of navigating her raging father who withholds money for food, clothing, and school supplies, and whose furies create a steady diet of terror and deprivation.
Adams, who grew up in Trinidad, earned her MFA in Poetry from City College, CUNY, and PhD in Creative Nonfiction from Florida State University. She writes in a first-person dialect that whisks the reader inside her house, school, family, and, most of all, inside her insightful and questioning mind. Who is the adult, and who the child? These roles seem reversed in Adams’ family.
Scant use of the verb “to be” propels the story forward. The book unspools with ferocious speed, overflowing with family lore. Child Camille is a trenchant observer and often laugh-out-loud funny.
This is the family in whom I am steeped. Churchgoing family who don’t see, who don’t hear, who always aware; who don’t share the secrets they keep.
The un-motherings referred to in the title are physical abandonments, to be sure. But, there are myriad other ways in which Adams is un-mothered. Even when her mother is present, she acts the narcissist. She keeps herself the center of attention and plies her daughter with secrets, forbidden knowledge of her father’s cruelty and of her mother’s methods of placating him, often through sex.
Adams is ever the subject of her mother’s and other family members’ criticisms. Early on, we are given the essence of her unmothering —
My mother knows two modes: unwashable, cloying honey. And rage.
In the last part of the book, Adams becomes philosophical and reflective. She has escaped to America. Confronted with the brutal realities of American racism, and with her mother’s selfishness once more, she shares her wisdom. We see her power and drive to become who she is today. These pages hold insights, but I felt the earlier parts of the book formed the heart of Adams’ project. The memoir is a startling debut, and I look forward to reading what comes next for this author.
Sasha Bonét’s The Water Bearers, recounts her family’s generations of powerful women, women who raise their children singly, and who provide love, not through words, but through showing up and being present. I loved the photographs of her forebears that Bonét includes throughout the narrative.
Bonét sets the tone with an epigraph by Toni Morrison — If you don’t understand the history of African American women, you don’t understand the history of America. Or, as Bonét writes, These stories of the American project belong to all of us.
We are water people, Bonét declares, although many members of her family do not swim. Coming from ancestors who were kidnapped and forced over vast oceans into slavery, they tend to live near water in parts of Louisiana andthe Houston area. They take their strength from water in real and mythical ways.
The poetry of Bonét’s writing captivates. I was raised to believe that each of us was the sum of our grandmother’s prayers, Bonét writes. Her descriptions of Grandmother Betty Jean Davis, a woman of few words who raised multiple children by different fathers, makes this clear. Betty Jean never has much money, isn’t a talker, but she serves as a port in a storm for the extended family. There is food and emotional sustenance in the house. She tells whoever drops by, including long estranged family members, to get something to eat. She gives money to strangers on the street — that’s someone’s baby.
Bonét is a writer and cultural critic based in New York. She is a professor of creative writing for Columbia University and Barnard College. With the skill of a sociologist-historian, Bonét sets her family’s stories within the greater canvas of American history, including the terrible ongoing disappointments and lies of promised freedom post-Civil War.
She delves deeply into the life of her own mother, and how she raised Bonét. We are presented with a woman who is wise but stern, present but rarely effusive, and who possesses great strength of character and purpose. Bonét shows courage on these pages, exposing her own vulnerabilities, and those of her mother.
Bonét also writes about her own motherhood as a single parent, and of watching and learning as her daughter grows up. These chapters had to have been challenging to get on the page: We know that Bonét is midstream in raising her daughter, and still very much in her mother’s orbit. We see Bonét as a successful professional and an open-minded parent. Nevertheless, she is dogged by racism, a tragic condition of life in America. Her recounting of her parenting experiences, replete with insults and misunderstandings, shows her mettle. She is another strong woman in a long line of strong women.
Must it be so? While we can and should celebrate the strength of African American women, I couldn’t help wondering why seemingly inhuman endurance should be a prerequisite to living and raising children in the country of one’s birth. I felt a refrain of “Shame on you America,” especially now, especially with a national regime that is virulently racist, seemingly with no consequence except increasing consolidation of power through lawless grifting and authoritarian seizures.
Early on, Bonét shares her family’s concept of death:
You understand that every act of preservation by your ancestors was a blessing…. We were taught that death doesn’t mean loss, as we are never not in communication with those who have passed. That death is not to be feared but expected…. That somewhere, my grandmother was praying.
In this light, Bonét discloses the secret sauce — she is part of her family’s remarkable history, an actor in a long line of ancestors who have her back, and are willing her a thriving future. That death may not be feared, but that it is life on which we must focus.
This memoir, too, is a debut, one that may not be as raw as How to be Unmothered, but that contains comparable truths and insights. Each of these books adds to the tapestry of women who have helped me to understand my own, wonderful, elusive mother. As I long ago learned, if we live long enough, we get to know our mothers over the course of our lives, whether our mothers are still living or not corporally among us.
These two books are ones to savor and to reread, to think about and to share — not only for outstanding writing, but to honor and respect the voices and stories of the tellers.
