Mothers, Daughters and Language
Illustration: Elisabed Zautashvili
You can listen to an interview with the author on our podcast. Available on our website, Spotify and Apple podcasts
I recently got a call from a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. She wanted to share some stories about the puppy she just adopted from the shelter to feel less alone. Her boyfriend did not like the puppy and wanted her to get rid of it. I advised her to keep the dog and not listen to the man. She agreed, then mentioned that her mother, who lives around 2000 kilometres away, is against the puppy too. We paused for some seconds. My friend is 32 years old, has a stable job and lives by herself and still, she tells me jokingly, her mom often gets her way. She is telling her where to place candles in the apartment, which colours to choose for bedsheets and what material the new pullover she is planning to buy has to be made of. It makes her angry, she says, how intrusive her mother can be. At the same time, she is not able to define boundaries between her mother and herself, she feels bad about this frustrating her. I agreed and we switched the subject. That night, I found it difficult to sleep. Our conversation made me think about my relation to my own mother. Every woman I know feels a seething anger towards their mom sometimes and I am no exception. We rarely speak about it with friends, but when we do, it seems to be a common feeling. I called my friend the next day to tell her that she is not alone with this anger, this feeling of helplessness and injustice that Simone de Beauvoir described so precisely in part two of The Second Sex.
Women, the French philosopher wrote in the 1940s, tend to suffer from their condition as mothers. Bearing children and getting older lead to countless frustrations. She argued that while mothers tend to put a lot of hope in their sons to rejuvenate them by providing them with young male attention, their relationship with their daughters is more complicated. They identify more closely with a daughter and their projections are therefore more intimate. The direct and immediate connection between them is the reason for conflicting behaviour shaped by love but also by manipulation and disapproval. This sometimes hinders the emancipation of the child who struggles to find her own identity independent from her first female role model, her mother. Beauvoir did not write a book about the malice of mothers and the evil of women but about the negative effects of social conditions on women in different situations. She wrote it in the first half of the twentieth century. It was published in 1949 and some things may have changed since then.
When I first read The Second Sex as a student, this part of the work resonated a lot with me and helped me understand the dynamics in my own family much better. I learned to deal with the amount of proximity and distance to my mother and got much more relaxed. Since then, I understood better that the tension between us was neither her nor my fault. I may be a late bloomer from that perspective but this insight helped me emancipate from my parents, seeing that other social dynamics were at work in our interactions. This helped me on my way to peace with them and made sense of all the relations that women in my family have to each other. What struck me, though, is the description of the emotional immediacy, the deep understanding between mother and daughter that makes you feel like nothing can be hidden in the dark. Of course, that relationship is precious. But sometimes, when your emotions are exposed to the cruel and blinding light of your mother’s scrutiny, it can make you feel helpless. This is particularly hurtful when it comes to sensitive subjects like identity.
While it did take me some time to find peace with my mother on most subjects, there is one central issue I cannot solve. It does not haunt me every day, but it is so closely related to my identity that I have not had the courage nor the energy to tackle it. I was four years old and going to kindergarten when our family left our home country Georgia and moved to Germany. My first memories of our German life involved seeing myself playing alone in the sandbox or fighting with other children. I remember a girl who had taken something from me, it made me so angry that I started crying. But I could not say what it was that made me angry because I did not know the German words for it. The speechlessness left me helpless, I could not put my anger anywhere. I felt alone against injustice. Eventually, me and my little brother learned the new language and forgot our mother tongue. Twenty-six years later I still have a hard time speaking it as fluently as a native. My parents were telling us over and over again that we had to integrate as seamlessly into German society as possible. Not only learning the language but making it our mother tongue. I clearly remember being six years old and standing in front of my father’s desk, while he was filling in my school’s paperwork. He looked up to me and jokingly said, “They ask me for your mother tongue. What should I put there? German or Georgian?” I was confused and answered that I guessed Georgian was the right answer. But he explained how that would entail a special treatment by the school, separate language classes and a circle of friends with foreign kids. He wrote down German. Most immigrant children are familiar with being pressured into assimilation by their parents. This pressure sometimes makes us go into excesses to prove that we have adopted our host country’s national character. This became clear to me when I found myself pretending much too eagerly to love German beer whenever I went abroad as a teen. Outside of Germany, I was trying to represent the epitome of a Teuton – feeling the virtual peer pressure of the German Reinheitsgebot.
Immigrant parents want their children to blend in with the local kids, hoping for their children to have the same chances in life as their friends. To me, it also meant I never felt comfortable turning to my mom for advice on Georgia. By disapproving my interest, she sabotaged all my attempts to involve her in my relationship with the country. Studies regularly reveal that immigrant children have a much harder time at school from an early age than children whose families have been living in that region, neighbourhood or exact same house for generations. Every child is insecure from time to time, they are new to things and live through situations for the first time ever. Immigrant children feel yet another pressure: They eventually understand that their parents are exactly as insecure as they are about the injustices of their new life. It makes me feel sorrow and anger when I think about the times I first realised this. I remember the moments when my mom - around the age of 45 - was struggling to speak German in situations involving the parents of my German friends, my teachers or – the ultimate nightmare – German bureaucracy and administration. And while I see the case for assimilation, I find it unjust and infuriating – another widely shared feeling among my immigrant friends – just how helpless one is forced to feel in immigration. My mother spoke three languages fluently, could talk for hours on end, debate, joke and curse in all of them. But now she had to put her thoughts together with small pieces of a new fourth language. She also had to suffer the relative indignity of being an adult who relied on her primary school children for translation. I feel that this anger can often be one of the reasons why many second generation immigrants show a tendency for cultural reversion. They take a big interest in their country of origin, the traditions and folklore of their parents' youth. While I enjoy listening to Georgian traditional music because it satisfies some nostalgic longing in me, my cousin who is the exact same age but who grew up in Georgia (and all of her friends, for that matter) cringe when they hear the characteristic male choir singing about lost loves, high mountain tops and tales of friendship.
The memory of my father at his desk with the school papers in front of him comes back to me very often. It does not feel like a negative memory. I am beginning to understand how all of this has affected my future. It influenced my two circles of friends who never mixed while I was growing up. On one side are all the white German kids without any other background – the ones whose grandparents told me about their careers as pilots and postmen in the 1940s. I understood much later that those who claimed to be postmen were lying about their involvement out of shame, while the pilots did not feel they had anything to hide. On the other side are all my friends whose names the teacher could never pronounce. These were my friends whose parents had the TV remote wrapped in protective plastic, the ones whose mothers wore a headscarf and the ones who visited their families in other countries during summers. Coming back with candy and fizzy drinks that were forbidden in the houses of my white friends. When I think back to this time, I feel happy that most of those friends still found their way in a country that’s designed to work against them. Our new generation of Germans, as we are often seen, the children and grandchildren of those who came to work their health off in German factories and companies, often found their way. Some of them, like musician Ekrem Bora, who owns a record company called German Dream Empire and is known as Eko Fresh, are put forward as good examples and success stories by media and politics to serve as role models for kids. Those campaigns seem to say: you can make it in Germany and once you do, you will be worth our attention and worth the same as everybody. But as long as you’re normal, as long as you do not invent the next vaccine the whole world is waiting for, our justice system will continue ignoring the violence against your restaurants, your bars, your places of worship.
The German white supremacist organisation National Socialist Underground (NSU) killed Enver Şimşek, the owner of a flower shop in rural Germany, in 2000. They then murdered eight more people until 2007 and even organized a series of bombings from 1999 to 2004. The police task force repeatedly suggested to the families of the murdered men that they must have been involved in criminal clan structures. To add insult to injury, newspapers were fantasizing about the “Turkish mafia” and the “Kebab murders.” Şimşeks daughter later wrote a book about the investigations and her memories. She recalls the German police accusing her family members, suggesting her uncles were involved in the killing, pressuring her mother to confess her husbands’ alleged participation in drug trafficking. Not once in the eleven years between the murder of Enver Şimşek and the uncovering of the NSU has the police suspected German killers. Semiya Şimşek’s book Painful Homeland (2013) also outlines her difficult relationship with a country she considers home. The same country that treats the murder of her father by neo-Nazis as an insignificant dispute among imaginary migrant criminal societies. The willful ignorance of prolonged neo-Nazi activity by the police and their complicity in such activities are on the flipside of the aforementioned success stories. It reveals the malicious relationship that German structures have with immigrants. And I wish NSU was the only example.
Putting all those pieces of the identity-puzzle together, I know it was right to ask of us to adapt to middle-class German society. As it was to learn all the codes and understand how to make the social dynamics work in our favour. Even if it meant scrubbing off all the culture that was considered foreign. The personal integration my parents wished for me was a process that ignored my Georgian heritage. I never claimed it and I never learned to claim it either, because I feared the social downfall my parents warned me about. The pressure for good grades at school was high and the implicit expectation that both my brother and I would go to acclaimed universities was strong.
This is even more understandable when you come from a country where a 500g bag of the cheapest ground coffee costs 24 Lari in the supermarket and the retirement income is 50 Lari a month. Where families have to depend on each other because they cannot depend on public infrastructure, where traumas caused by regime changes and civil wars are still very present. My mother was around three months pregnant with me when on the 9th of April, 1989 the Tbilisi massacre happened in the city centre. A protest march was repressed by the military, 21 people were killed, the youngest being a 16-year-old pregnant woman. This was a ten-minute walk from my grandparent’s house and just around the corner from where my grandfather was working. For the following days, the big square in front of the parliament was covered in tulips. I have never really spoken to my family about it and it is slowly dawning on me what kind of abyss this creates.
My Georgian side never played a big role for me. I was blending into my German peer group. I was also trying to avoid men who would draw the sleazy exoticism-card (which still happens, of course). Growing up in a small German town, it was a privilege to easily pass as white and it allowed us to go to university. While I was a teenager, I accepted without any questions that we had to do better than our classmates. My parents had taught me an admiration for France, as it was the case for a bunch of my originally Soviet friends in high school. I now suppose that this is a relic from the tsarist era, where Russian aristocracy spoke French. In their eyes, the noblest thing I could do was to study French literature at university – just like my mother had. Researching the literature, language and history of my origins was never an option. I had not learned to be interested in it and still considered it as something I’d better hide. This feeling prevailed during the first years of my PhD research about contemporary history. Whenever I encountered a non-German researcher working on a topic related to their country of origin, I felt uncomfortable. That was especially the case for other Georgians who crossed my path; researching Georgia seemed to me like some kind of illegitimate shortcut, an unfair and biased advantage. But why? What was it that made me condescend those students? I never felt the same about Germans researching their country’s literature, history or language. I believe I had internalized an overly critical attitude, suspecting foreign students of shady business. At the same time, I was fascinated that they felt confident enough of their foothold in this identity to publicly work on it. Eventually, I understood how harmful my perspective was and I made peace with it which allowed me to find some very inspirational friends. I came to realize that putting those researchers under general suspicion was taking part in the same discriminatory practices I was trying to fight in my academic work. This was one step of unlearning my own biased forms of exclusion and learning solidarity.
I had never managed to identify with someone in a similar situation when I met other children of immigrants and compared their situation to mine. I have always asked myself if I appear as foreign as they do. Somewhere along these deliberations, I found myself falling into the trap of the model minority. I romanticized my country of origin in front of my friends and strangers alike. I was preaching the holy trinity of a harmless homeland: beautiful nature, great food and – of course – the immense hospitality of innocent, well-meaning and sincere people. I realized I had to satisfy my own longing for a paradisiac home. I adopted the short-sighted and condescending image of a noble savage. Was I legitimate enough to speak about my country if I sounded like a Lonely Planet Guide? It was scary, my search for role models continued.
Nino Haratischwili, born in 1983, is a Georgian writer; she writes about the history of the country in the 20th century, about revolutions, wars, revolts, oppression, dictatorship and their traumatizing effects on people. The main characters of her works are mostly women. They sometimes live in Georgia and are confronted with political difficulties. They struggle with the tense situations that every generation had to live through and how it changed their loved ones, disrupted their lives. More often, her characters are the daughters of emigrants who go back to Georgia to encounter the same situations. In one of her theatre works titled Georgia, Haratischwili sets the scene in Tbilisi around 2005, the very precise stage direction reads as follows (translation my own):
TbilisiWarmth, smoke, smog, cherries, old men playing backgammon, friends, wine, wine, wine, scrawny cats in staircases, grapes, hills, childhood, dribbling pipes, noise, cypresses, acacias, lilacs, monasteries, honey candles, beggars, war, many tulips for the dead, paralysis, dreams without reality.
The old house, full of memory, smelling of apple chewing gum and playground-ice cream, and of isolation.
The play tells the story of Nelly, a woman who is looking for the history of her mother inside a tumultuous period in Georgia. She travels back to Tbilisi to search for her childhood memories that she cannot explain. She feels a yearning that has turned her, so Haratischwili writes, into a rushed wild animal. She is the heiress of a so-called postmemory, someone with a “legacy of a distant and incomprehensible past” she is looking to understand. In Memory Studies, the concept of postmemory aims at retracing intergenerational transmission of memory. It was proposed by Marianne Hirsch, whose parents fled Ukraine during the Second World War and who is now a professor of Literature at Columbia University. Initially it is a framework for better understanding the transfer of trauma to generations following the war. The concept is often used to examine the representation of memory in cultural production. When I first read these stage directions, it made me think about the role of nostalgia in speaking about memory. On the one hand, the description moved me because I had the feeling of recognizing things. On the other hand, I was not sure that it was true: what if those words were random and could have been taken out of any city’s travel guide? What if my feelings were clouded by omnipresent romanticization, by a Western mental map? Did I really smell that apple chewing gum as a child?
The most important point here is that Nino Haratischwili writes her work in German. It is read by German readers who are fascinated by the talented author. They imagine a mysterious country of poets, of free-flowing wine and emotions. So when I read her work, I cannot help but look at it through the eyes of a German reader. The words about Tbilisi – do they cater to those reading tourists? If so, how is their search for authenticity different from my search for an authentic memory? Authors like Haratischwili, Katja Petrowskaya or Emine Sevgi Özdamar do not write literature in their native language. They use another language to write about the traumas their parents and grandparents have lived through as if their mother tongue is too closely related to those sensitive memories. Using a foreign language is like taking a step back, a form of distance that brings freedom and maybe helps to find your own narrative. However, the adoption of this kind of imagery through the intermediary of a literary market that is targeted at a Western audience, is a trapdoor. If I fall down there, I will find myself in the spiral of the noble savage again describing landscape, food and hospitality.
There is a new generation of authors who are refusing the integration narrative. They play with the notion of homeland, a word that has become very political after years of German debates about what a “dominant culture” (Leitkultur) could be. They explicitly reject the discussion about assimilation and uniformity, advocating for outspoken diversity and confidence. They are mostly my generation and they have found a productive way to connect to a part of their cultural heritage.
Family plays a major role when connecting with identity. It is a contact link between my own reality and their former life. Stories and tales, behaviour and contact, pass through language to lay the foundations for identity construction. This allows for the country of origin to live on in subsequent generations. I understand that these things take time. Trauma can be transmitted from one generation to the next, especially in the context of war and political tumult. The context of migration, social and financial difficulty play a role, too.
For me, it is a long, sometimes stonewalled process: when I told my mother I would write about nostalgia, she said nonchalantly: “Nostalgia? Why? Which place would you possibly be nostalgic for?”