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020			_a9798893380170
245		0	_aIman Mersal: Motherhood and its Ghosts/ _cTranslated by Robin Moger
260			_aBerkeley; _bTransit Books; _bKayfa Ta _c2018
300			_a150p; _c18x13cm
490			_aUndelivered Lectures
520			_aContinuing her investigation into the archive, Iman Mersal sifts through representations of one of history’s most elusive figures—the hidden mother. No one excluded my mother from our joint portrait. It is before me now and I can see for myself that I was with her, but she is a ghost. The picture is a burden: an assault on, and fabrication of, what I remember. It doesn’t make my mother present; it sharpens my desire to resist, to transcend her ghostliness, to rescue what the picture hides. Iman Mersal has only one photograph of her mother, who died giving birth at age twenty-seven. But the woman portrayed in it strikes her as very unlike the one in her fleeting childhood memories, in mood, expression, dress. When Mersal has a child of her own decades later, she begins to wonder whether it’s possible to depict a mother with any degree of fidelity. How to represent—in photography, dream, memory, or writing—an individual whose complex inner landscape has suddenly come under threat of looming archetypes? What is hidden in traditional representations of motherhood? What lies outside the narrative in which motherhood “means giving, the melding of two distinct selves, a love unlimited and unconditional”? Sifting through the archives of motherhood, including journal entries, photographs, and the writings that have informed her own poetic practice, Mersal privileges questions over answers, drifting over arriving, allowing a form of motherhood to exist in these pages unbounded.
546			_aEnglish
650			_aArtist project _99169
650			_aResearch _99170
700			_aMersal, Iman _99171
942			_cBK
999			_c6394 _d6394