Title & author
Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer by Jamie Figueroa
Synopsis
As Jamie Figueroa aptly displays in Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer, a mother is not constrained to our society’s simplistic terminology. Running through this story that explores grief, trauma, displacement, and family, is a current of motherhood, Figueroa bending gender roles and refusing to allow her characters to be confined.
Who should read this book
Fans of Detransition, Baby and Heart Berries
What we’re thinking about
What role does maternalism play in the twenty-first century?
Trigger warning(s)
Sexual violence, substance abuse, self-harm, abortion, abandonment, mental health, racism
As defined by the Merriam Webster dictionary, a mother is a “female parent.” By that definition, a mother is both limited by the gender binary and by blood relation. But, as Jamie Figueroa aptly displays in Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer (Catapult, 2021), a mother is not constrained to this simplistic terminology. Running through this story that explores grief, trauma, displacement, and family, is a current of motherhood, Figueroa bending gender roles and refusing to allow her characters to be confined.
“Here is what you need to know about a mother’s love…” writes Figueroa near the end of the novel (Figueroa, 211). Yet the entire novel is filled with scenes depicting the vast variations of a mother’s love, depending upon who is performing the act. And, despite the novel's title suggesting that there is only one mother in the story, almost every character— from the Sister, to the Brother, to the stranger that visits the Explorer— can be perceived as a motherly figure. Rufina, the sister of the novel’s title, keeps the ghost of her dead infant “because [when] there is Baby, Rufina is a mother, too, loved and needed” (49). To Rufina, motherhood gives purpose. Her brother, Rafa, feels “love was being an extension of another body, [his mother’s] body. Love was being ignored. Love was being severed, amputated. Love was being called back again and again” (171). Rafa acts as a motherly figure to his own mother, Rosalinda, taking care of her. “She was dependent on him” just as a child might be to a parent (43).
Then, there are the minor characters, such as the Grandmothers to All, Blanca, an aunt, the Angel, and even the house. The Grandmothers to All are “ready in the way only they, as women, can be...its presence in their bellies and hips” (152). Protectors of women across the country, the Grandmothers’ acts are described with a biologically maternal emphasis, despite not necessarily being blood related to those they care for. Similarly, the aunt, a stranger they see taking care of two children, “will never let go of their hands. Which is to say, she is their guardian. Not their mother. Not their father. No actual blood relation. She is Auntie. The woman who stepped forward. The woman who cares. She is every woman in this place who cares, and they are all the children in this place” (134). Like the Grandmothers to All, this woman has no relation to the children, yet she devotes herself as their protector. And even the house Rafa and Rufina live in seems as if it “birthed itself and rebirthed itself over centuries” to best care for those living within (87). Again, Figueroa invokes this language of biological maternity to emphasize the motherly role a character plays within the story.
But why emphasize so many maternal characters? And why demonstrate that they don’t need to be biologically related or even a woman to assume a motherly role? In this way, Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer emphasizes the fragility of life, of relationships. When Rosalinda arrives in Ciudad de Tres Hermanas, she must rebuild a life though fraught with PTSD. Her children become her guardians, despite her being theirs as well, and their city learns to care for them, too. In many ways, the narrative style, the collective identity that Figueroa deploys, furthers this aim. “Once there was and was not…” Figueroa quotes, employing a traditional opening line of Armenian folktales. And from the first page, she utilizes the second person — “now, that should get your attention” and “don’t take your eyes off her” (3, emphasis our own). All of the readers become that “you,” as if gathered around an elder (are we to read it as the Grandmothers to All?) who is reciting the story while we sit at their feet. In this way, Figueroa herself becomes a maternal figure, passing along wisdom to the readers.
There is no doubt that within Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer some of the maternal figures are more “successful” than others. “‘Your ability to feel for anyone else has been compromised by the restriction in your own heart, by your own wounding,’” the Angel tells Rufina (118). Yet this never feels like the moral of the story. Figueroa does not write to decide what makes a “good” mother, rather writes to shed light on the vast identities and roles mothers play. That mothers themselves are three-dimensional and not simply bound to their biological children’s needs. In the twenty-first century, as families evolve and gender norms are shed, the novel is an apt, beautifully written tale of motherhood, calling on its readers to understand that no identity is simple or predetermined.
“Know this: There were stories recorded in the mother’s body. They were present at her birth and present at her death even if she didn’t know how to tell them.”
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How do the various depictions of motherhood better shape our views of maternalism and what it means to be a “mother?”
What role does the Angel play in the story? What about the role of their relationship with Baby, Rufina, and Rafa?
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