On Daughters and Fever Dreams

I watched ladybird this morning, I have slaved after the complexity of the mother daughter dialectic, I have been sitting on this piece for weeks now, what else is there to say?

In a vibrant wakeful dream, I wake up feverish and find myself transported into a world with no mothers and daughters. Shulamith Firestone, in The Dialectic of Sex, writes of families turned on themselves, extinguishing the fire of conventional family units, transformed into spaces of love, shared responsibility, and kindred spirits of children. In my dream, I wake up in a meadow of transgressions and feel my body lose all meaning, the signified is devoid of its signifier and the labels have turned their back on me. The word, ‘Mother’ stripped naked of its semiotic glory parades the halls of a temple and I watch it disintegrate, collapse and shudder against in ends, gnawing away at its tail of syllables. I walk free, aimlessly, with no name or responsibility, my dream inscribes this landscape into an alternate universe, I visit the graveyard of my childhood, nobody has been here for years, the epitaph is engraved in cobblestone, daughter among other things is set in stone, and I am no more one.

There is a rapture that exists between the mother and the daughter, a rapture of wiggle room, a line you must not cross, the absurdist space between the two figures is a land of vagrants, only delinquents roam the land of the motherless, Hamlets and Haiders seep into this rapture and fill the space with blood drawn from the family unit, wringing it dry. To belong in this rapture is a lifelong pursuit of mine. To trespass onto the soil of the free, untethered, to laugh like Medusa and to render the body of the woman into text, to escape from the figure of castration and transcend the lines of carnality, to become a woman who eats, who is never hungry, who is full.

I have for long wanted to go without the pangs of hunger that trouble the insides of my body, my belly is pregnant with ravenous desire, in this world, I have stared into the refrigerator looking for boxes and Tupperware for morsels, any morsels, but I could never wean the oral fixation away. As I grew up, I switched to cigarettes and starved my body of nourishment, despite all of it, I could never trace the source of hunger, its location is unbeknownst to me. The spatiotemporal scenery in which it resides is tucked away in the deepest nook of my body- in my dream, I am free of it. I am full and I am motherless.

The father does not exist in my dream, in my vibrant visions of opiate consciousness, the father is transformed into a fox that leads me to the stream. The water of the stream is lush and the fox runs after the hare that runs the afterlife, the greenery is an amalgamation of impressionists soaked in gauche and lily ponds. The fox leads me to a landmine away from my grave, and in seconds, I am led to the carcass of a daughter – the last of her kind.

A celebration erupts, the carcass is rotting and I scoop the insides out with a wooden spoon. There is nothing left for me to remember, remembrance has escaped my lips and settled into the hills. To be a daughter is to be the mountain, under the shadow of a benevolent sky, the benevolent unerring sky, to be a daughter is to be the Everest sprinkled with the bodies of its explorers. To be a woman on the other hand, I have never had the opportunity to find out, every time I have snuck out to be the woman next door, I have found myself clouded by the looming shadow of the unerring daughter.

The unerring daughter must err in a way such that her shoulders droop and falter to the ground as a clock hung over a tree branch. she must wear a warm sweater and always remember the lamb that was stripped clean for her. she must look in the mirror and trace the reflection of her mother to the dot, a speck missed and she would have to start over again. she must curl up inside the dog’s den and tie herself to the kennel. she must call the kennel home and weep like a hound at the feet of God. She must chew herself alive trying to break away from the invisible string that is the umbilical cord of death hung around her neck.

The unerring daughter is only a daughter as long as she errs, makes her errors visible to the naked eye, and bask in the unabashed guilt that comes with it. To be a daughter is to be in the circus, in the courtroom, and in the kitchen. You are a daughter first, child second. 9 years old, my mother paraded me in the halls of middle school, with a spaghetti top and a bare back. The back, adorned with brown and purple jewels, I was labeled as a daughter with no words necessary. Between us, the rapture was the big bad bruise on my forehead, a mark of unerring pride.

The mutation between daughter and child was an adventurous one, I would slip in and out of skins, moving into spaces, occupying them, running amok in one flesh or the other, and when one was covered in welts, I would put on the other, the costumes were pluralistic and in abundance. The schizophrenic child would assume identities and abandon them under the car, the schizophrenic daughter would shovel the child in before it leaked onto the mother’s new dress. Except when it did, the child would bleat until dead. The schizophrenic child was a rapscallion peeking into mirrors and reflections, the unerring daughter would chase the child to a room and plunge the child into the closet, one day, the knocks from inside the closet ceased, rather abruptly.

In my dream, I recognize the epitaph, the engraved words confuse me, ‘daughter’, I read it over and over again like the back of a shampoo bottle and the words do not dissipate into thin air. In my dreams, the celebration deafens my eardrums to the point of no return. In the distance, I sense a loud thunder approaching, the roar of feet emerging and walking towards me. On some nights, I repeat this vision, I am leering into the fish eye world, I am no more in my flesh, I have slipped out yet again. The stampede of feet and a distant small figure emerges at a distance, I recognize the small stature – the schizophrenic child, now full, hovers over the rampage of feet and overreaching hands, the carcass of the daughter becomes more visible than ever, a rotting corpse of nostalgia, kitchens and dreams stitched together at the feet of the stout and round shadow. Amidst the lush green trees collapsing onto each other and layers of the wind falling in each other’s arms, the motherless child is crowned king, while the daughter returns to dust.