There Is Not Enough Air to Say It All
In the opening paragraph of her book, MOTHERs, Rachel Zucker says, “In fifteen minutes I’ll need to stop writing and pick up my son.” I had never encountered that feeling of urgency, intermittence, desire to write—crushed within motherhood—said in such a straightforward, condensed manner: the words enact what they are saying, they move from time to son and traverse the writing in between.
In an hour I’ll need to stop writing and pick up my sons.
MOTHERs was one of the books that kept me company while writing my own recent book that just came out, Poem That Never Ends, which traces a sequence of mothers—my mother, my mother’s mother, myself as a mother. Someone said recently, “you have to write about what happened after your book,” and quoted a line from the last poem “Mama wakes up dead”—the same line that stood out to me while practicing reading for the book launch. My mother is alive, but was hospitalized during the pandemic for reasons unrelated to Covid. My mother, like her mother, has a hearing impairment, she reads lips: “she doesn’t need the sound, just the movement: the opening, the closing, the shaping of words.” Since the pandemic, lips have been covered with masks. Silence. Silence over silence. “Are you sure of what you are saying?” I asked the ICU nurse over the phone. “Yes, that’s what she said to me.” My brother and I sheltered in doubt for a while. How could our mother answer a question asked by a masked mouth, a mouth she could not see? What if she said yes to a question that required a no? There’s a space between mouth and mask, between nose and fabric, a space that shrinks as time passes. Did she mean no? Did we want a no? Was she strong enough to get to the ending of a No, the perfect circle of a hole in what appeared to be solid? A space, air grappling.
This is the first book that I have written in a language not my own. Language here generates both intimacy and remove. “Here language is a necessary distance,” I write. The book circles around my mother in a language my mother doesn’t speak. And still, it connects me with my mother’s experience. How moving between languages affects our hearing. How, for instance, when immersed in English, hearing becomes harder for me, and I help myself by “reading lips.”
I clench a pencil between my teeth. I practice before a reading. If it’s a wooden pencil, even better. The tips of your teeth stick in and saliva runs down. The way the pirates in a book I read to my sons carry their knives in their mouths, I carry a pencil, say mother, the most repeated word in my book and beyond. The space within and without the word, air grappling.
One of the things I like about Rachel Zucker’s book is how she weaves a net of “mothers” throughout, women—not necessarily mothers in the common meaning of the word—that were crucial to her writing and living. As I was working on this book, one of my mothers in writing, Irene Gruss, died. Irene. Dearest friend. Tremendous Argentine poet. Even though my book includes many journal entries, and several specifically from December 2018, there is no entry for the day in that month when Irene died.
“The intention is to embody writing not an anecdote.” It’s the only time I quote Irene in my book. During the writing process, however, I could hear her voice asking about one of her obsessions: the distance between anecdote and aesthetic object. How to achieve that in my book. How to turn a personal experience into an open, sharable space. How to make holes into it so that it can breathe.
Irene mastered that. Enacting through language. Here is a quick translation I did from Spanish of one of her poems.
Si el aire sale por mi boca
se me escapa
el alma. Si se me va
el alma por la boca, muero
madre, pero si
el aire queda, también muero,
ayudame a,
preciso
alma, aire
If air goes out my mouth
my soul
escapes me. If my soul
leaves through my mouth, I die
mother, but if
air remains within, I also die,
help me to,
I need
soul, air
The poem in Spanish is playing with the words alma (soul) and aire (air) whose Latin roots are intertwined. It creates a vertical line with a mirror effect: air-soul-soul-air, and ends as invocation, laying both on the same level: “soul, air”: spirit, matter. At the center is the word mother. The speaker hits a dead end—if x, I die, but if y, I also die—that’s when they turn to the mother, “help me to,” a prayer cut short by the comma, because there is not enough air to say it all, and to say this is enough: mother, help me to.
The incompleteness of the phrase is speaking of the endlessness of the gesture—turning toward a mother or an other in the face of finitude—and in that there is a connection to the last poem of my book, the longest poem I have ever written, the one that gives the book its title, “Poem That Never Ends.” There, out of the repetition of the word mama comes a multiplicity of mothers (my mother, her mother, my father’s mother, myself as a mother). The word becomes more material, something you hold onto to keep going, like a body or a stone.
“Are you sure of what you are saying?” I had asked the ICU nurse, and then I must have asked my brother. I must too have asked my mother, once she had been discharged, emphasizing the words escaping my mouth, unmasked though filtered through the screen of a phone. Mama, help me to.
*Poem by Irene Gruss from Irene Gruss, La mitad de la verdad: Obra poética reunida 1982-2007 (Buenos Aires: Bajo la luna, 2008)
Silvina López Medin was born in Buenos Aires and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Her books of poetry include La noche de los bueyes (1999), winner of the Loewe Foundation International Young Poetry Prize; That Salt on the Tongue to Say Mangrove (trans. Jasmine V. Bailey, 2021); 62 brazadas (2015); and...