Explosive memoir on legacy of mothers who abandon daughters
Dr Camille U Adams, who m has pursued her passion for creative writing and literature since her days at Bishop Anstey High School, has written an explosive memoir–How To Be Unmothered, about Trinidadian women with a legacy of mothers who “conceive and abandon their children.”
The writer who has excavated her life for her writing says “Deep trauma isn’t easy to face. Not since Annie John (by Jamaica Kincaid) has a Caribbean work of literature showcased an evil mother as my memoir does. I am writing to that 13-year-old girl who needed someone to say it’s not just you.” With a PhD in Creative Nonfiction from Florida State University (FSU) and an MFA in Poetry from the City University of New York (CUNY), Dr Adams, whose upcoming memoir is a finalist in the Restless Books Prize says “All the mothers in my maternal family line abandon their children. Caribbean realities, like Caribbean families, live behind gauzy, white curtains where ugly truths are covered up. The How To Be Unmothered narrative begins with me at nine when, for once, I’m not guarding my mother from my father knocking her out cold. In revenge, my mother sends me down the drugs and rape-laden Covigne Road. Deserted at 13 when my mother secretly left, I began tracing my un-mothering lineage across five generations.
“In How To Be Unmothered, I reflect on the multifaceted cruelties of this mother who subjects all her daughters to neglect. My memoir reveals my dawning realisation of trauma across generations. No daughter is allowed to escape. Our social conduct is hinged on secrecy, on never bringing shame. And too few rent the veil. We save face. But I am a storm. I do not comply with the norm of Caribbean writers, sometimes complicit, hiding behind fiction and not apprising the world. Caribbean writers are concealing the domestic and societal abusive ills visited upon our girls.”
How To Be Unmothered was inspired by Jamaica Kincaid’s semiautobiographical novel Annie John, where Dr Adams “finally found someone who told the truth, my truth, of my abusive mother. The one relegated to my head. The maltreatment had to go unsaid. J Brooks Bouson argues Jamaica Kincaid is still bound to her shame. Kincaid’s endless repetition evinces her inability to confront and work through the past. Similarly, after nearly thirty years, Roxane Gay is writing about her gang rape and defensive weight gain. Like them, my memoir reveals our ugly truths.”
Excerpt from How To Be Unmothered exclusively for The Sunday Guardian we magazine.
‘Mas Does Start At Memorial Park’ “Why yuh doh wear yuh cute lil Carnival suit, she said. This mother who read my reluctance to go down de road and moved on to persuasion to goad me into wanting to deliver her from her husband’s fists and feet by reaching in the parlour to buy a tin of pigeon peas that she suddenly say she need to make Sunday lunch for daddy to eat even though is just yesterday we went in the grocery.
Just yesterday that we bring home bags and bags after I nag mummy to not feel sad and let we go shop for the week at Kelly’s. She didn’t need to cajole. This mother. I am her not-first daughter, it is enough to be told. But my little Carnival suit conjures hours at mummy’s side while over it she laboured and sewed and delivered it with pride. Hours of me sitting at the edge of the bed in the louvre-filtered sunlight, listening to always-have-yuh-own-money life lessons while the presser foot sped to get the bias cut just right.
It conjures, this little brown Carnival shirt and short pants I am ironing, the hours I didn’t stay back after school to dance and be fitted and costumed for Diamond Vale Kiddies Carnival band because six o’clock loomed and my mother needed her yuhsuch-a-wise-old-soul daughter next to her at the Singer machine in the afternoon. Needed her not-first daughter to stay in the room to soothe the impending doom of her husband’s return from work whose boot crunch over the yard’s gravel would jerk her fingers and knot up the thread.
It represents, this little coconut-tree print pants and shirt in which I am getting dressed, my mother’s present to Ericka and me. A gift of outfits resembling the ‘Hawaiian’ clothes of redfaced, touristing yankees. An outfit resembling the tropical ensembles foreign visitors disembarking down Cruise Ship Complex in town does buy to say they fitting in among the locals on their visits to our Caribbean isles. An outfit made of fabric purchased on a trip for Ericka and me in town down Queen Street in and out of Aboud Syrian family fabric stores where my mother implored, allyuh choose what allyuh like.
It reminds, this short Carnival pants into which I’m stepping that when I walk does ride up my thick inner thighs, of me picking in Aboud fabric store a vibrant pink and red bolt of cloth that I liked. And my mother saying it so coskel, dat en go look too right.
And her choosing another and then finding its replica. The same print but in different colours. A bright lime green for Ericka and for me a dull brown of the same polyester with coconut trees and the sun going down. And I am nine and old enough to know what I like and remind mummy my favourite colours are bright yellow and baby pink. And mummy skin up her nose and aloud thinks ent yuh doh really like dis, yuh doh find dem colours too childish and purchases what she please as my special present of a noncostume Carnival outfit for my sister and me.
Yuh nearly ready, mummy asks me from the kitchen. She eager for me to go down the road in the parlour for the peas and I can feel her make-haste patience shortening as I am buttoning up the shirt of this silky-sliding, mud colour, coconut tree, sunsetting, Yankee tourist and they camera ever outta-timing suit sewn especially for me for Carnival earlier this year.
And in the wake of her trill, I hear daddy grunt in his throat in the living room. My back frissons in fear. I hear the couch creak under his restless shifting position that is warning communication to mummy he go want to eat soon. Hear the clink of wares coming from the upstairs dining room of Tanty Acklyn and Uncle Ken house above us as they done sit down to Sunday lunch this afternoon.
Hear my younger sisters in the yard moving on from mud pies and now making their toy leaves into cars that zoom over the gnarly, exposed roots of the cashew tree that I cut for laglee to stick my school projects in my copy books when neither mummy nor daddy remember to buy Elmer’s glue in the middle of the term and I refuse to have incomplete homework when my teachers walk around to look.
I squirm after I turn my head to the closed door. Then shout Ah coming. And my reply slithers through the inch of space between the wood and carpeted floor.
“Yuh nearly ready, mummy asks me from the kitchen. She eager for me to go down the road in the parlour for the peas and I can feel her make-haste patience shortening as I am Dr. Camille U.” It is my chore. Getting food. Helping mummy keep daddy and his belly in a non-beating mood.”
–End of Excerpt
Dr Adams’s memoir How To Be Unmothered, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, is a finalist in the Restless Books Prize For New Immigrant Writing and will be published by Restless Books in spring 2025. A full version of this essay appears in Passages North.