When the kids were gallivanting around the house today in their underwear and refusing to clean up their toys, I was sure today’s dose would be from the Kingstonians’ 1968 side on Coxsone (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiRBldKB2hc)
But they eventually settled down and even helped make their mom breakfast and dessert
So, instead, a more thoughtful meditation on motherhood and femininity
This was the lead single on Kadhja Bonet’s first full-length (in 2018)
She’s not only flying over multiple registers
She’s also on sax, drums, and production!
Daughter of two musicians, but didn’t decide to get into the family business until relatively late
Bonet says this song is about the mother she may be
Mother I may be / or maybe not
The lyrics and music spiral around upon themselves
Leaving an uncertainty in their core
I like this, cuz euro-american kinship systems (and thus our popular culture) like to imagine motherhood as given
While paternity would be hidden, uncertain, contested
With its truth revealed only by our high priests of science (…and sometimes on Maury)
Recently, reproductive technologies have made the lines of motherhood much more complicated to us
One of the things I most love learning about are kinship systems that seem radically other
Eg, in Society without Fathers or Husbands, Chinese anthropologist Cai Hua describes the “family” structures of the Na, highland farmers in Yunnan province
They’re not just matrilineal
The closest thing to a father is a woman’s brother
With whom she shares a household
But obviously not sex
Instead, sex and children come from secretive nighttime visits
With whomever she pleases
There’s no interest in determining fatherhood
In fact, no term for father at all in the Na (Moso) language
Nor, obviously, any “marriage”
As the world’s most brilliant anthropologist, Marilyn Strathern, remarks: determining “what is a parent?” is a question of reproduction
“what is being reproduced when a person recognizes his or her parenthood in a child?”
The key insight of her landmark Gender of the Gift is that we can understand kinship and gender systems and our ideas of personhood as corollaries of a particular vision of “production”
The Brazilian ethnologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has taken this insight further in contrasting the commodity economies of (re)production with amerindian gift economies’ “predation”
Where a fundamentally different ontology holds: where relations precede things, and therefore where marriage is given while “blood” relations must be produced
And where everything is (potentially) human, rather than humanity/sociality being a unique addition on top of material, natural existence
The exact opposite of our conception
Bonet’s maybe mother soprano coda keeps ascending till it reaches almost unfathomable crests
Like approaching some kind of sonic boom
Or a breakdown of musical, familial, or conceptual order
Maybe
Or maybe not
Happy mother’s day to all the moms out there
Of whatever definition