Remembering, forgetting

On motherhood, memory, and consumption in Burnt Sugar and Mary Cassatt's works

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Now on to the essay!

Mother and Child (The Oval Mirror) by Mary Cassatt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

We imbue meals with meaning through memories – the everyday practice of eating, occasion food, celebratory food, eating out with a friend, street food after work, tea, coffee, beer, sundal and fried fish on the beach… – and eventually it helps us create identities around it. But memory is an unreliable narrator, it permanently changes. We expect parents to be vials of our lives while we excavate remnants of the unknown past, but a collective shared history often falters; memory is after all malleable putty but not concrete enough to be considered reliable.

In Burnt Sugar, Avni Doshi plays with this unrelenting concept of memory which is susceptible to the investigation of remembering and forgetting especially when it’s shared by people – here Antara and her mother – and while Antara is conscious of the power of its social construction and successive deformation, her mother is oblivious to it. Like memory itself, Antara’s mother Tara is vulnerable to manipulation; this duality presents even in their names: Tara, the mother is slowly forgetting, rejoicing, and regressing into a child again while Antara (Un-Tara) is remembering in excess, grieving, transforming into a mother, for her own mother.

Motherhood is tenuous, it can be prickly and verdant on the outside but equally oozing with sap and venom, consuming us whole and regurgitating in parts, stripping away vulnerabilities and reassurances. Consumption and food standout in the book, not merely as lush descriptions of what mother and daughter eat but as what food conveys across. Take burnt sugar for example (yes I’m being literal), which can leave a sticky and messy residue that turns into a blackened resolute crust. The trick is to not scrub endlessly, pick at it till it reveals the rawness, like trying to dislodge various notions of memories. There are vivid references to food and consumption sprinkled throughout the book: an arresting description of smoked and mashed eggplant, the metallic tang of tasting goat’s blood, slippery pearls of sabudana (sago), soaking moong gone funky… the tastes and smells are vivid. Tara who rejected all of life’s responsibilities and motherhood’s proclivities left her daughter uncared for even if she was ‘dripping with milk, leaving me unfed’.

There is erasure in Burnt Sugar, there is erasure in motherhood; erasure of labour and pain as contemporary culture only regularly emphasises how great it is to be mothers; it is erasure of personhood sometimes, as you are no longer a singular self – you are a mother and you will always be one – an evaporation of your past self to make space for your current and future other selves. Sometimes this erasure of personhood is right in front of us, ongoing – mothers in Gaza deliver without any medical assistance, giving birth in genocide, mourning their children and themselves, mothers becoming doctors themselves, resilient and unbreakable.

This care and domestic labour reminds me of Mary Cassatt’s series of portraits of ‘Mother and Child’ that she painted between 1881 and 1891, revisiting the same subject numerous times. ‘Mother and Child’ (The Oval Mirror pictured above by Cassatt) emphasises care work and the maternal bond by evoking religious iconography from the Italian Renaissance, drawing similarities between Madonna and Child, the mirror acting as a halo on the child’s head. Motherhood in art is usually depicted as idealised, carrying such cultural weight because portraying them otherwise might defy the structures and systems in place; childcare has always been thought of and seen as, and still is, a woman’s duty – instinctive and not a burden.

While Cassatt’s ‘Mother and Child’ paintings are unpretentious and tender, mothers and child’s faces and bodies lean towards each other, children nestling into their mothers crooks, vulnerabilities and joys at home, in Burnt Sugar, Antara’s childhood is fraught with danger and is unreliable and whatever affection that Tara shows is hidden (often at night) and violent and often on her terms. But they have similarities too. Both works inform us about the intensity and tension sometimes present in love. Both tell us about home as workplace (Cassatt’s scenes were mostly set at home, in an intimate space) – domestic labour is necessary but it is work. In both, fathers are conspicuous in their absence; in the book, Antara’s father has a child with his second wife and shows little to no affection to her and ignores her comments about his friend’s creepy behaviour towards her, and neither does he perform any of the required domestic labour for his second child.

Cassatt’s scenes were staged anyway, Cassatt (like me) isn’t a mother, Cassatt like Tara in the book does express a certain tiredness in her paintings of mothers and children – some mothers do drift off dreamily and bored, being there and elsewhere. There is erasure again, blanking out, an ontological concept of devotion. Motherhood as constant care work becomes all the more revealing in the book when Antara seeks to care for her mother who is not unlike a toddler – unpredictable, dissatisfied, and unencumbered from all burdens, including care. Thinking about oneself is routinely discouraged in popular culture of motherhood; my own mother was (and still is) undyingly selfless, and growing up, I yearned for her to be more selfish, becoming at times selfless myself so she could put herself first. It didn’t work; it only made my mother more bountiful, yielding, idealised (which I’m grateful for).

But why is domestic labour expected only from mothers and reduced to an act of love, cooking only holding material value when it’s done outside the house by men who call themselves chefs, and the concept of motherhood idealised and ritualised as desired, as joy, as ultimate fantasy? Both Cassatt and Burnt Sugar might give us the answers – it doesn’t have to be.