Politicized Mothers

This Introduction focuses on public disruption and violence to demonstrate how a political cause, the greater good, a future feminist matria, motivates many of the women in these narratives to endanger their lives. Exploring the intersection of the familial and the national, the personal and the public, the exile and the refugee, these works are set mid-twentieth century during the time of dictatorships, national independence, and communist revolution. By focalizing wars, violence, and women, the novels offer a unique postcolonial feminist perspective on a subject typically told by men about men. The result is that Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones and Andrea O’Reilly Herrera’s The Pearl of the Antilles conceive matria as an anti-nationalistic maternal space that brings mothers and daughters together and thus provides a means to heal from the traumas of the past.