By Thu Anh Nguyen
There are certain phrases in Vietnamese that I have memorized, so that when I speak them, they act like a time machine, aging me backwards to childhood. I don’t use those same phrases anymore because they sound so childish.
In Vietnamese, the phrase xin loi means “I’m sorry,” but if you break down the translation to its individual parts, xin means “please” and loi means “fault,” so you are begging for forgiveness for your fault. So much supplication. No wonder I have a hard time apologizing.
When my boys do something to hurt one another, and I am present, they force out a “sorry” that is so disingenuous and performative that I have to stop myself from laughing. What are they really sorry for? Sorry for the hurt? Or only sorry that I witnessed it? They don’t understand the power of the words, maybe because they never learned the phrase in Vietnamese like I did.
As a parent, I am always searching for the right words to teach, to mother. I am trying to translate from Vietnamese to English, and sometimes back again. I am trying to translate my adult views of the world to my children. I try, but sometimes it is impossible because mothering and motherhood defy language. Often, the language at my disposal feels too simple.
What I love about Mia Ayumi Malhotra’s poetry collection Mothersalt is the way it investigates and interrogates language–all its shifting meanings and shapes–using the lens of motherhood in all of its forms and phases. The language of these poems is alive, and the poetic form is broken open the way that a mothering body is alive and breaks open.
The collection’s first poem has the shape of a traditional poem: one long stanza with lines of similar length. It is entitled “Where Poems Come From,” and echoes the introduction to reproductive talks about “where babies come from.” There is so much beautiful resonance in this book between babies and poetry. In the poems that follow this one, we watch the body transform during pregnancy, so it makes sense that the poems take on different forms as well: Malhotra begins with short prose poems, sometimes only a few sentences on a page, and then moves towards longer poems that contain at least as much white space as they do poetry. The book contracts and expands as does the mothering body.
What is particularly effective about the many shapes of Mothersalt is that it allows Malhotra to describe motherhood in all its complexity. In her eponymous poem, persimmons, quince, and fleshiness are all images that relate to the sensory richness of a changing body which Malhotra vividly describes with words such as “dilates,” “effaces,” and a “belly bulged.”
It feels ridiculous to have to say that motherhood experiences are vast and vastly different, but there is a dominating narrative that would have us believe that motherhood is ideal, and purely good. But what about human life is always ideal and purely good? In Malhotra’s rendering, motherhood is both painful and beautiful. There is what is “monstrous” in the “fractured sleep” in the poem “On Mothering,” and also the “luminous ritual” of mothering itself, because “inside every mother is a daughter–and a daughter inside her, and still another, nested forms reaching through time” (“Dear Body–”). The second section of the book deals mostly with the pain of labor and delivery, and Malhotra often zooms into the bodily details of it: the “breasts swollen,” the body “going rogue” like a “bad dream.” But this is a productive pain, described so lovingly as a house that Malhotra wants to live in “fully–to throw the windows wide and let the light stream in. To examine the locks, pry open the hasps so every sash can be lifted.”
As Malhotra says that labor is a “[p]ain [that] builds a new roof,” we come to the end of her collection with poems different in subject matter and form than the first two sections. Reading them felt like going through a worm hole, emerging on the other end disoriented and fast-forwarded through time. The mothering body gives way to post-birth life, and these poems are about mothering daughters outside of the womb.
The daughters have their own lives now: in “Late Spring,” the mother must reckon with her daughter “no longer [being] a baby,” and voicing her own desire to “go home.” The gorgeous home built by pain and birthing now has walls that are “tilted,” that are “sliding on an invisible axis toward some undefinable point on the horizon.” Those lines come from the final poem called “Instax: A New Lyric,” and in the last lines, the daughter hits the shutter button on her camera. The child is the artist now, capturing a moment with her camera with her mother watching her. The mother/speaker of the poem is trying to describe this moment like all of the others that came before. And of course, the poem is the child too, this creation gestated and birthed by Malhotra. Once motherhood begins, it has its own momentum. Once the poem is released, it has its own momentum too: the reader can make meaning with it beyond what the writer intended.
Writers anthropomorphize their writing all the time. Faulkner told us to “kill your darlings,” which encouraged us to remove our favorite parts–our darlings–of our writing in service of the whole. What is unique about the way Malhotra uses language as a metaphor for motherhood is that language and form together are so spacious as to allow for the magnitude and multiplicity of motherhood.
When my eldest son Henry was born, I was the first of my friends to have a baby. I felt so lonely in my new motherhood. I wrote him long letters to commemorate every month of his life, and when I was reading Mothersalt, I was inspired to reread those letters to Henry. It was like looking through a mirror and a window: I saw myself as a young mother, and I also saw a stranger struggling to do something she had never done before. My letters were both full of hyperbole and stark truths about how difficult I found the whole enterprise of motherhood.
I wish Mothersalt had existed in those days; it would have been a balm. It would have comforted me to read these poems that consider motherhood not by declaring it any one thing, but instead by turning ideas of it over and over and over again, like working a rock in your palm until it’s worn soft and buffed–making something altogether new–by your careful attention.
Thu Anh Nguyen is a poet whose poetry has been featured in the Southern Humanities Review, Cider Press Review, NPR’s “Social Distance” poem for the community, The Crab Orchard Review, The Salt River Review, 3Elements, Connections, and RapGenius. She also writes about equity, justice, and community through literacy. Her essays on the importance of reading diverse literature have been featured in Literacy Today.