Missing Mama
The Experience of Mother Absence In African American Communities
Introduction to the Idea
From our ancestral mothers' abductions from Africa, our Motherland; to the savagery of slavery that tore child from mother; to the black mothers who left strange-fruited southern fields for northern cold cruelties; to the mother who trades her infant for crack; to the mothers today who are entering the prison industries in record numbers, as her children are entering the foster care system — who has been more motherless (and unmothered) than African American children?
Missing Mama is a shared story about collective grief in African American communities. Much discussion has been given to the absence of African American males as fathers and parents. Educators, social scientists, psychologists and others speak and teach about the negative impact on the psychological and socio-emotional development of fatherless children. But what about missing mothers? What about African American children who are experiencing mother loss and absence? Who or what has replaced her? Missing Mama invites questioning dialogue for soul searching answers.
Missing Mama speculates throughout the weight of this profound experience. Its crippling grief and burden of loss has impacted generations of Africans — those left on the continent as well as those Africans enslaved in Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean. Who could speak of such loss as losing our beloved mothers? It arrested the physical, mental and emotional well being of men, women and children. It fettered personal and intimate relationships after slavery as African Americans forged timorous existence in New World political-racist landscapes. Mother absence and the phenomena of unmothered children today is bringing new crisis to African American families.
Missing Mama is a collection of experiences of mother loss (death and absence) in African American communities. Although I had wanted a more academic product that combined scholarly research, explorations of literature, art, music, and history, it could not be written without telling my own story of mother loss. My mother's death, her absence and my sorrow were all interwoven into every aspect of my young and adult life. My life, as I recollect from my earliest memories, was highlighted by her untimely death. It detoured into a gauntlet of caretakers, continuous moving, multiple new schools and continued through odd befriendings, lovers, husbands, daughters, and a multi-sensory spiritual awakening.
Missing Mama invites readers to participate in a literary introspective ritual with African American peoples. Read, weep and laugh to release generations of holocaustic sorrow. Bear witness to our collective ceaseless mourning which continues to impact every aspect of our lives today, from our personal and intimate relationships, to men, women and children internalizing subhuman self-concept and self-images, to the gross behaviors that were once coping and survival strategies, which now spotlights us for constant racial profiling, and to the inability for us to recognize our own cultural genius that hinder our progress for academic scholarship and self-proficiency.
Missing Mama calls for collective awakening. Once nameless, the yoke called GRIEF and SORROW has been identified. It can be removed. I am offering a healing balm for the gaping moral wound in the spirits of African American men, women and children who have lived muted lives. With full permission to express our long buried pain, we can reclaim our full holistic humanness, our position of excellence in our families, and our interdependence in our immediate and global communities.
The Books Planned
Missing Mama: The Experience of Mother Absence is the first book in the trilogy. It is my personal story of mother loss and absence. I tell it through the stories of the caregivers who took my mother’s place. To see a bit of this story, please read my chapter excerpt.
Missing Mama: Voices from African American Communities is planned to be the collective experience and voice of men, women and children of African descent who have missed their mothers due to death or living deaths, such as mental and physical disabilities, poverty, illness, incarceration, HIV/Aids, adoption, abandonment, rejection, substance abuse, emotional/physical abuse, addictions, etc. It is for this book that I am collecting information from you - the rest of the community - that we can jointly share in healing this wound. Please consider taking one of the surveys, depending on your experience: Loss due to Death, or Loss due to Living Death.
Missing Mama: Your Voice and Journey is a journal of affirmations for grieving and healing from past and present grief and sorrow.
