s u s s u r a l

A dream soul that wanders.

hi, i have this compilation about mothers and daughters, but you could also check out jeanette winterson’s why be happy when you could be normal, rebecca solnit’s the faraway nearby, anne carson’s the glass essay. here a few more:

Olga Broumas, from Beginning with O; “Little Red Riding Hood”

Christa Wolf, Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays (tr. Jan van Heurck)

“My mother boils seawater. It sits all afternoon simmering on the stovetop, almost two gallons in a big soup pot. The windows steam up and the house smells like a storm. In the evening, a crust of salt is all that’s left at the bottom of the pot. My mother scrapes it out with a spoon. We each lick a fingertip and dip them in the salt and it’s softer than you’d think, less like sand and more like snow. We lay our fingertips on our tongues, right in the middle. It tastes like salt but like something else, too—wide, and dark. It tastes like drowning, or like falling asleep on the shore and only waking up when the tide has come up to your feet and you wonder if you’d gone on sleeping, would you have sunk?”

Carri Thurman, from The Alchemy

Noor Mallouh x Kim Kang Hee (x)

“Most nights, I dream of my mother’s face, by turns harsh and tender / In a nightmare, I shouted at her: Neither you nor I are the enemy! / What do mothers ask their own daughters, everywhere in the world? / Is there a question? Ask me something”

Mary Jean Chan, in Flèche 

Bethany Webster, from Mother Wound Healing: Why It’s Crucial for Women

“sometimes i open my mouth and my mother’s silences come / tumbling out of me”

Rita Wong, from “value chain”

“I know what it means to break apart. I observed it in my mother, in myself, in many women. The process of fragmentation in a woman’s body interests me very much from the narrative point of view. It means telling the story of a present-day female I that suddenly perceives itself disintegrating, it loses the sense of time, it’s no longer in order, it feels like a vortex of debris, a whirlwind of thoughts-words. It stops abruptly and starts again from a new equilibrium, which–note–isn’t necessarily more advanced than the preceding or even more stable. It serves only to say: now I’m here and I feel like this.”

Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey

Bettina Simon, from “Visit to the Home” (tr. Kristina Herber)

“We broke our mother’s heart and became ourselves. We proceeded to breathe and therefore to leave, drunken, astonished, each of us a god.”