Yo mama so wounded

The mother wound in music, and in us

The motherless child, though we sing about her, is dismissed as if an accessory of folklore, and no one wants to do the brutal labor of wrestling her from fictions to re-situate this horrified son or daughter in the real and living theater of our actual days. When the line erupts, usually in the phlegmy breach-of-contract tone that is Louis Armstrong’s singing, sometimes I feel like a motherless child, and then its accomplice a long way from home, we scatter reflexively, or take cover, ashamed to agree, though he speaks for and through us. We retreat to the dozens, the yo mamma so gone, she used you for a comeback. A nagging sense of abandonment hijacks our attentions No, you, is all we can advance in our defense. The cipher of mockingbird insults becomes intimacy, laughing to keep from crying.

In the nether regions where sabotage enacts its missions through the subconscious, when asked to write about the function of sabotage and saboteurs in culture recently, I was inclined write about men again, as the architects of their own undoing whose negligence curses some families and stunts their emotional development. I was especially focused those industry men who are undermined by handlers; those who become entertainers in a misguided revenge fantasy against handlers that plays into the handlers’ hands. Having become yes men in public, they often terrorize in their private lives. Surveillance turns to a spotlight then, once such a man is initiated, and performance for the sea of witnesses called fans or spectators feels safer than establishing a real identity. Why evolve when you already have an audience that accepts you at your most pathetic. We do the police in many voices.

I was tempted take on the handlers’ voices and the stars’, ventriloquize in both directions, when I realized that one overlooked pathology the well-handled have in common is yo mama so gone, she’s immortal beloved, the boulder their inner sisyphus pushes into lyric and back down the holy mountain into moaned and whispered, often wistful, open secret. Her absence is somewhere between romantic and doomed, and she is somewhere between muse and despot. We have a mother wound, many of us do, which manifests as a blank space or slate where we expected salvation and unconditional love. It announces itself as a need to be seen that feels like a need to be reborn again and again, nurtured by maternal attention that is both trustworthy and steady, free from emotional blackmail, the black celebrity re-mothers himself on stage, herself on stage, and is insatiable. The mother is her first and most effective handler.

She calls out to us, in reeds and vibrato, but her alarm cry is easy to miss or mistake for sovereignty. She enters through the stage door into a half life spent in the service of the distant, disappearing, or disruptive mother, her mirage as mirror-stage repeated over and over, like a first word’s unlearned allure— mama, ma, mah, matter into flesh-of-our-flesh, momo, more of her and less of ourselves in the yearning to be approved of or claimed by the naturalized maternal spirit, which, in a perfect world, is deathless and automatically available to each child on earth. In the real world, she has turned on you (sometimes by not loving herself) and you have to earn her loyalty back and this will be impossible and the subconscious ambition of every subsequent bond, until rupture with ritualized trauma makes other ventures meaningful again. This mother’s love comes in ultimatums and have-not scarcity tactics and you oblige for a while— sing, dance, worry, prettier for her, or get into more drastic trouble to dominate or ruin her into paying closer attention. As Fred Moten puts in B Jenkins, his book-length elegy for his mother, it’s a little alone. As Ye grapples in on Donda, Don’t leave so soon/how can I get through. Lonnie Holley, separated from his mother for many of his early-childhood years, conjures her at his every public appearance, casts her as one of the tragic heroes in his autobiographical one-man show. She gave birth to twenty-seven children; he was the 7th. Who else is a mama’s man? James Baldwin certainly, he became his mother and she outlived him but they were one in spirit, he defended what he did to avenge her. Billie Holiday, selling songs or her body to feed her and her mother. Whitney Houston’s daughter, cloning her mother’s death to meet her in the afterlife. There’s a rumor that Whitney herself was the product of a very secret affair her father had with actress Teresa Graves, who does look just like her, and that Cissy raised her as her own knowing this. It’s just a rumor, a semi-secret haunt, but sometimes she sings like a motherless child, like the subtlest orphan in a playpen with hearsay for companions.

In recent years, I note the psychic demolition my friends’ mothers and my own have threatened us with as inheritance, an inheritance we reject. It’s as if the unstable or neglected woman who becomes a mother is the animus of several lost generations, as if these women resented the role but needed the authority it came with, over anything, and punished us for it, or were simply too young to know better, too young to go steady. We aggressively re-parent (repent) ourselves, and chase a normative relationship with personal narrative and upbringing, but the fact remains. Under the right conditions, which she sets up early, your mother can make you obey her even when you believe you are fleeing, rebelling, or transcending. Her withholding becomes your over-giving. Her under-preparedness becomes your hyper-vigilance. Her smothering becomes your tendency to retreat. Her death becomes your life’s work. Her void becomes your Black Art! Her uncertainty enters you as tremolo, no matter how far you are from home. The perversions I wanted to attribute to men alone, and their overblown displays of masculinity, overcompensating for how vulnerable and motherless they feel, are their attempts to woo their mothers or warn them, or win the quiet war against their spiritual absence by never loving any other woman or themselves right or as much.

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Two years ago, I phoned my grandmother on a normal, lighthearted Saturday. I had a party to go to later that evening, I was to wear all white, so I vividly recall sitting in my desk chair in this white lace gown with the phone on speaker while I finished applying lipstick and mascara, amber oil, my armor of copper and quartz. I’d been short with my mother for a while after she’d blamed me for the death of her longtime lover, a well known local jazz musician who was found dead waiting for a city bus after a show. I learned of his death before she did, had to tell her the news, and she lost her mind at the order of incidence, though she was the last person he spoke to on the phone, while at that bus stop that night in the blistering Santa Ana wind. I think he’d called her for help or reassurance, or maybe just to say goodbye. She mistook it for routine chatter and told him to call back when he had a better connection. I blamed her back, keen to her ability (due to extreme anxiety) to talk over almost anything, from the serious to the devastating, in the faux chipper tone mothers assume on phone calls as if auditioning for a role in a 1950s sitcom about perfect American families and their well-behaved matriarchs. He was found unresponsive late that night with the phone beside him.

I’d distanced myself from her after her tantrum because it’s part of a lifelong tantrum that began after the death of my father. I’d consoled her then too, though only five at the time. We’d done a full lap around loss and absence together. I could leave this ring of fire with some dignity, I’d tried my best. Her hysterias were just too indulgent. I’d tried my best, to do what, I’d contemplate. To save her from herself or stave her off while making my getaway. I held my cub to the sun like the Disney lion. My grandmother sounded tense on the phone: have you spoken to your mother, yes, some I answered. She didn’t want me to tell you but it’s not fair to keep it from you, she was very sick for the past year, she has HIV. Silence, silent tears, anger. I’m not surprised, I answered. She’s better now, she is fine, stabilized on medication. Silence, rage, ok. I cried my eye makeup off, redid it in the same classic cateye and blunt gold shadow, then, like a robot rebooting, I went to the party in my white lace gown. A famous artist sang “Send in the Clowns” to his son, whose birthday it was. It didn’t seem like his mother was there, though I was distracted, she might have been. Maybe I blocked her out like I was busy doing with my own that night. My grief went undetected, It wasn’t really grief, it was renewal, a sudden spring when a truth is so harsh it wakes you from a stupor you didn’t know you were in.

Life is very perfect, rigged in this direction. Indiscretions are perfect. Disappointments that become your strengths are perfect. I wonder if my mother’s lover gave her HIV or some other antic or snare in her long history of trying to escape the destiny of coming from one of those perfect-on-the-surface families through debauchery was to blame, or sheer unmitigated irony, cosmic cruelty. Soon after this, keeping everyone’s secrets, I was commissioned to review Emahoy Tsege Miriam Gebru’s final album Souvenirs, when the only single out from it was a track called “Why Feel Sorry?” I agreed with the glib, lighthearted inquiry; I agree still. Not that it’s futile to care, but that it’s futile to suffer for those who could never return the compassion or compulsion, or to carry a surrogate martyr complex to accommodate their chaos addictions and go down with them for their pleasure or satisfaction, cause that’s how they see love, as a suicide pact. I don’t see it that way.

Souvenirs is the only album on which this mystic Ethiopian pianist and nun, sings, as if by no longer feeling sorry or ashamed of her vows in either direction, she’s overcome past muting and withholding of her voice and becomes her own unapologetic guardian angel. I relate to her dashing, caustic vocalizations on the ballad, those of a bird just relearning to fly after an injury no one noticed. The bliss that arrives once you realize you’ve survived catastrophes of every genre and caste, from the unimaginable to the sudden, and you’re still exquisite and unobtrusive in white lace, after a party. And you still refuse to feel sorry for yourself or anyone else in the break. You do not always know what I am feeling. The point of the standard or trope Louis Armstrong delivers so well is not to invite pity or alms or complain about anguished emotional neglect, it’s to admit that this very feeling of being stranded in an incomplete childhood is the DNA of the song, the good American genetics of it, and the singing itself, which is the only substance near enough to unconditional love to finish rearing us on this earth, under these conditions, where yo mama so broken you must become whole.