Colony Junior
An inconclusive attempt at a theory of maternal fear, reflecting the impasses of love in a time of genocide.
Text by Hannah Black
In bourgeois/boho New York City, everything can be understood – if you want to lose your mind, admittedly – as points in a complicated system of social status. So I was pleased as well as embarrassed to learn that the childbirth and parenting class my midwife insisted I enrol in was considered fashionable. It espoused wearing your baby on your body, breastfeeding on demand, and exquisite responsiveness to the baby’s every need. I loved the emphasis on total devotion. I am writing this sentence with my one-year-old at my breast. I understood it as a corrective to the austere Western parenting methods of the early 20th century. But though this corrective ostensibly promised greater proximity to earlier, Indigenous or even prehistoric ways of being, it also reinstated Western individualism at an even greater level of chimerical moral authority.
While “attachment parenting” was not directly mentioned, the class drew on a similar alluring, contradictory soup of culture and biology. The helpless human baby is born in a condition of absolute vulnerability, this pathetic state an evolutionary tax paid on the ponderous brains that have distanced us from animals via the (un)happy accidents of symbolic language and knowledge of death. In the class I learned the first months of the baby’s life were a kind of limbo state between womb and world in which the only guarantee of survival is the high-tensile, unwavering attention of the mother. Attachment parenting asserts that its methods are more or less innate to humanity. “It is the way parenting has been done for most of human history,” says the website of celebrity paediatrician Dr Sears, to pick a random example, “And, in most cases, will come intuitively to new mothers and fathers.”
This thesis is often supported by vague entreaties towards “evolutionary” parenting, generating hazy images of villages, forests and caves in which, simultaneously, unspecified tribes tended collectively to their young and panicked mothers single-handedly guarded their babies against wild animals. Of course this corresponded to an equally imprecise longing caused by endemic lack of support and community experienced by many modern parents. I was often reminded of a moment in Kerry Howley’s 2015 essay “The Cage of You”, when, asked to specify which tribe she’s referring to, the midwife leading a prenatal class says, “The one you don’t have.” Despite all the imaginary villages, forests and caves, which in combination form a miasmatic allusion to a prelapsarian indigeneity, this lack was rarely specified as the product of coloniality or capitalism. If there was a counter-proposal for how society might be arranged for the flourishing of parents and children, its furthest imaginative extent was Scandinavian social democracy. Worse, at the level of state surveil- lance and regulation of parenting, these very attachment strategies have been mobilised against Indigenous and working class parents, whose relatively collective parenting modes are perceived from the perspective of the dominant attachment-based model as inadequately committed to the all-important parent/infant dyad.
The West’s simultaneous destruction and reification of black and Indigenous modes of life is well known. But there was a more striking and surprising aspect of my entry into motherhood, which was terror. Our teacher once began a discussion of our new lives as moms (everyone was a mom; I had entered a world of only women) by asking us to share words that we associated with caring for a newborn. With my tiny baby cradled in my arms, I was about to say “fear”, but to my surprise someone else said it first. Others elaborated. One woman who lived in a high-rise said she hadn’t been able to go outside because she had vivid images of dropping her baby down the stairs. Some described hovering over their sleeping baby, holding a finger under the nose to check for evidence of life. I was relieved to learn in this way that I was normal. Intense fear of losing my baby was one of the unexpected aspects of becoming a mother. My joy and gratitude gave the fear its depth and contour; having lived my whole life ambivalent about living, I finally had something to lose. I knew Good, in the form of my baby, and with her I was newly aware of Evil.
Grasping to understand my condition during the first year of my baby’s life, I am struck by how it felt political – the impossible imperative to heal a commodified and colonised world – while having no determinant political valence
Now, contemplating the Manichaeism of the fourth trimester, I can see more clearly that this fearful calculus of love’s stakes has been a lifelong personal preoccupation, partly related to generations of missing, heartbroken or otherwise tormented mothers and partly to the ready cultural availability of the trope. Going back to a strange, melodramatic essay I wrote in 2013 haphazardly combining the hideous love lives of undercover cops and the “wire mothers” given to the unlucky baby monkeys in Harry Harlow’s famous love experiments, I find a younger version of myself just as in thrall to the image of the salvific mother and preoccupied by scientific sadism:
“The first baby monkeys in the experiment were born prematurely and the researchers had not had time to create a face for the substitute mother’s smooth, round head. When they tried to modify their mistake – giving the “mother” two eyes, a line-drawn mouth – the baby became distressed by the incognito, repeatedly turning around the head, back to the smooth and featureless expanse of the first face. The first image of love is the most authentic, not because of any depth or particular significance, but because it was the first. It is valueless, beloved even if useless, and impossible to exchange. But its radiant blankness fixes deathlessly in place all subsequent mechanisms of value.”
What a horror story! Of course, becoming a mother has forced me to reimagine this. But at first, the shape of the fears provoked by my baby’s vulnerability – by the vulnerability it opened in me – inevitably followed the contours of my personal fixations. My fear centred around images of fascist and colonial violence to parents and children, images that I had accidentally collected over the course of decades. Though my selection of these images was influenced by my Black and Jewish family history, and therefore I was disproportionately focused on accounts of the plantation and the camp, they were more or less a random bouquet of terrible events taken from stories I had heard, films I had seen, books I had read and so on. All they had in common was their abstract context: fascist and/or colonial reorganisations of social life, a vague and geopolitically baggy category that encompassed everything from the atrocities of the Encomienda to those of Partition, a range of situations that had nothing to do with me but in which intense, grotesque violence against the basic edicts of life (eat, pray, love) was so characteristic as to suggest an essence. Finally I understood what people mean by “intrusive thoughts” – not thoughts of harming my baby myself, but thoughts of A Baby being harmed. These thoughts were so intense and unwanted that, when alone with my baby, I sometimes had the sensation of laboriously drawing down a metal gate in my mind to shut the thoughts out. Most of these images are still too horrifying to me to recount, but when the internal pressure became too intense and I had to say something to someone, I was able to haltingly describe Japanese soldiers in China in the 1930s throwing babies off a cliff, and the mothers stepping off the cliff after their babies, tied to their fate by the gravitational force of love. This story is relatively speakable, I think, only because of the desperate agency insisted on by the falling mothers, though to call it agency reminds me of what a couple of experienced friends warned me about birth: that the well-known “urge to push” during childbirth registers as an overwhelming and undeniable physical compulsion. The Chinese mothers from this real-life horror fragment were able to avoid being forced to watch their babies suffer or die, even if it meant escaping with them into their own deaths.
My feelings for my baby were both ecstatic and generic, they were the socially mandated and inevitable feelings of a mother, and my baby was also, still, somewhat generic. She was my baby, but she could have been any baby. Whoever she was, I was bound to love her. Unlike any previous love, I did not encounter her already formed; it was my task to help her climb up the steep ladder into self-awareness and autonomy. My love was unconditional to the point that it lacked as yet even the condition of its object. I thought of Marx’s comment regarding the nature of general equivalence in capitalism: “It is as if alongside and external to lions, tigers, rabbits, and all other actual animals, which form when grouped together the various kinds, species, subspecies, families etcetera of the animal kingdom, there existed also in addition the animal, the individual incarnation of the entire animal kingdom.” In my baby, the abstract principle of the Human had appeared to me super-concretely; the Human lay in my arms and drank from my breast. It was through what I’m describing as this abstract, generic quality – probably there are better words for it, in the religion I don’t have – that the onrush of horror-images reached me, because no essential or important thing seemed to separate my baby from any other baby, my maternal love from any other maternal love. At times, drawing down the metal gate in my mind, I felt like I had glimpsed the originary emotional impulse of racism: “These people who suffer beyond reason must be fundamentally different than me!” An effective imaginary barrier against the derangement of universality.
Only later did I encounter anthropological critiques of attachment theory that reminded me that its intense, exclusive focus on the parent/infant dyad is not a universal. From these critiques I learned that there are even cultures in which babies are not considered fully “human” until they have displayed a particular sign or guarantee of humanity, such as living for a year. Hidden under the fear of losing the baby is the baby’s strangeness. The abstract universal cannot contain the baby’s actuality. And the luxurious dyad, if overemphasised, is a form of social austerity, as the commonplaces about parenting “taking a village” reveal, and the richly upholstered inner life the perfectly attached dyad encourages is also, to use Fred Moten’s phrase, a hole pierced in the fabric of the social.
Grasping to understand my condition during the first year of my baby’s life, I am struck by how it felt political – the impossible imperative to heal a commodified and colonised world, alone, for one beneficiary – while having no determinant political valence. In this feeling, there was no substantive difference between the images of a baby murdered by colonisers, stolen by slavers or experimented on by Nazis and those generated by, for example, equally but differently lurid right-wing fears of Democrats sex-trafficking children from the basement of a pizza restaurant or illegal immigrants murdering beloved white sons and daughters. If “all children are our children”, then all children are subject to our local concepts of childhood, with all their displacements and projections.
Hidden under the fear of losing the baby is the baby’s strangeness. The abstract universal cannot contain the baby’s actuality
For all its moral righteousness, its sincerity, my vision of good and evil was somewhat contentless and empty. It reflected the Mother’s blank face. In positioning my mothering on the good side of a struggle against evil, I did nothing to reduce the power of evil in the world, but I did successfully motivate myself for the intricate task of parenting, one that was otherwise widely considered an ordinary, everyday drudgery. Though I felt thrown open and wildly vulnerable to the world, newly sensitive to the reality of history, my life had in fact from some perspectives become more introverted and self-absorbed than ever before. This self-absorption was not entirely masked by the fact that it was absorption in myself only insofar as I embodied my baby’s chances of survival, and was therefore also sacrificial and pro-social.
Whatever the merits of meditative absorption in a process, whatever the necessity of ordinary devotion, it was Palestine that lifted me out of it. I woke up to the world again with Operation Al Aqsa Flood, in the astonishment of that historic moment, and as Israel and their collaborators began their desperate, sadistic punishment of Palestine in its wake. Here, again, was the Human in the form of the Child, not only in my estimation but repeated everywhere, in meetings and online: “All children are our children!” “What would you do if it was your child under the rubble?” We were, as Mohammed El-Kurd has pointed out, “women-and-childrening Palestinians to death”, but it wasn’t only that, because adults were parents and everyone had once been a child. This was the dumb, solipsistic, but un- deniable wager of mom-politics: I know what a life is worth because I nurtured one! It would be too simple to say that this position is not moral, because it can inspire moral acts, but it is not sufficient, it does not form a standpoint.
(To make a standpoint of mothering requires religious faith. Never has the impossible ethical force of Christianity been more clear than in Bethlehem priest Isaac Munther’s 2023 Christmas sermon: “If Christ were to be born today, he would be born under the rubble [...] The meaning of Christmas is God’s solidarity with us in our pain and brokenness.”)
We were culpable, those of us who cried in the register of the parental, because we abstracted the specific historical cause of Palestine into an encounter between good and evil, and in doing so partly evaded the necessity (impossibility?) of figuring out what it might mean to support Palestinian resistance from the West and enact its goals in whatever limited ways we could. Without at least an ideological commitment to resistance, there was only helpless suffering in solidarity with images of suffering. To suffer with those who suffer is inevitable for anyone with imagination and feeling, but it is also, in some way, to echo and emphasise colonisers’ attempts to use violence to obliterate restive social forms. Genocidal violence is the constant companion of state power, its foundation and guarantee. The reality of resistance, not liquid, boundless empathy, is the countervailing tendency. To think otherwise is to be too susceptible to the lure of the abstract Human, ignoring its fissures and omissions, its partiality, its non-embodiment in particular bodies.
In the aftermath of October 7, some of the more Zionist-sympathetic leftists who believe themselves to be humanists have urged a generic, politics-blind empathy that would also include mourning the Israeli dead. This abstract empathy amounts to lamenting that there is violence, that we are mortal. It ignores causes and effects in favour of a transhistorical condemnation of death itself. Importantly, it fails to register that “humanity” is a racial category, not awarded to all, erected through the process by which we lost our imagined tribes, through the historical vio- lence which returned to me as images menacing my baby. Through mainstream media and mainstream politics and the mainstream of thought, ideology demands detailed, categorical empathy with Israeli fear and rage, and only has mournful words for the Palestinians, whose fear and rage against Zionism is presented as if equivalent to the senseless baying of a beast, a human animal, a mammal born able to walk. According to this perspective, the hypothetical Israeli “beheaded baby” is the baby-object of attachment parenting, a future Human whose irreducible singularity is all the more hypertrophied in relation to the parents’ relative atomisation and alienation – and the baby born into actual Indigenous society, for which it represents a precious claim on existence, is a social nuisance, a human shield, a little piece of future collateral damage.
We have to die. Not only as a mortal person but as a mother – an immortal form carried by a mortal body – I am sorry, sorry to have taken the step of inflicting this by birthing my baby into the world, who has as yet no idea what death is, who waves hello to dead insects, who will not remember her uncle, my brother, who died during the first year of her life. She is not like the one-year-olds of Palestine and the Congo who have had to learn too early. We all learn eventually: we have to die. But this necessity is not the appearance of Evil, and should not be augmented by the sadistic ruin of worlds. .