On Learning to Listen and Maternal Opacity

Derek Owuso’s recent novel Losing the Plot intends to offers a closer look at his mother’s migration from Ghana to England, but Owuso is frequently thwarted by her silence. This essay takes his mother’s evasion of interrogation to think about the gap between the idealized image of the mother and the actual experience of one’s mother. In asking how to sit with what one cannot know, the essay comes to an ethics of maternal opacity.

Read more here: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/6ASG8TBTTVIFHITAZGKZ/full?target=10.1080/15240657.2024.2379201