Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

“the mother” 129
claim to her irrevocable actions: “You remember the children. . . .” /
“You will never neglect or beat / Them. . . . / You will never wind up
the sucking-thumb . . . . . / You will never leave them. . . .” (1–9). The
line “You remember the children you got that you did not get” (2) has
an unmistakable echo of Billie Holiday’s blues classic, “God Bless the
Child” (written in 1939 by Holiday and Arhur Herzog, Jr.): “Them
that’s got shall get.” The rest of Holiday’s verse provides a gloss for the
mother’s dilemma: she “got” but only sexually and ironically. She is
among the “losers” and knows her children won’t ever be blessed with
having their “own”: “Them that’s not shall lose / So the Bible said and
it still is news / Mama may have, Papa may have / But God bless the
child that’s got his own.”
Readers are often moved to acquit Brooks’ mother, to empathize
with her inner city struggle and to avoid stigmatizing her for her
self-preserving actions, to recognize her capitulation, her need, her
despair. Abortion as a solution to unwanted pregnancy, even given a
post-feminist, pro-choice awareness of female marginalization and
empowerment, is a strained, stultifying act, one that decries a Pyrrhic
victory for women’s self-determination. Brooks’ Bronzeville woman
makes clear that her aborted children live in her psyche, as they have
lived in her body. They have become ghosts of her own longing for
motherhood, and they swirl into consciousness, tangling their unlived
lives with her own: “I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices
of my dim killed children” (11). The poem is part cathartic vindication
of the narrator’s unspoken predicament: for her own unexpressed
reasons, she has chosen multiple abortions. Not-mothering has
become her burdensome identity in a world that sanctifies images of
motherhood. Especially on the South Side of Chicago in the post-war
years, the special province of motherhood was sacrosanct and immutable.
Mothers, as in the culture at large, try to hold it all together as
best they can, even if they are often times ineffectual. Women could
be reproached, scorned, defiled, victimized—but mothers, then as
now, stand on hallowed ground.
The next lines exert the palpable physicality of her pain, which is
personified in the startling image of “damp small pulps with a little or
with no hair” (3)—the embryonic children who have remained eternally
indeterminate. “I have contracted” (12), the speaker announces—
an obvious reference to labor or to her experience of the abortion. Yet
coming after the line in which she mentions the wind-borne voices