Meditations of a Mother Artist
Mariahadessa and her daughters (Photo credit: Dominique Sindayiganza)
Interviewer: How do you handle being a mother and an artist?
Betye Saar: What’s the difference?
- From the film “Spirit Catcher: The Art of Betye Saar” by Suzanne Bauman
Years ago I was looking through profiles in the Sunday New York Times magazine’s “The Lives They Lived” section. One picture made the world fall away.It was a black and white photo of Lucille Clifton sitting on the porch with her six children. I read the article. I read it again. A poet. A black woman poet and professor with six children. There was none of that “are you gonna be an artist or are you gonna be a mother” nonsense. There the poet sat on the porch, surrounded by her children. I ripped the page out of the magazine and put it in a book for safekeeping. I didn’t even understand why I needed the image so desperately. I would look at the photo from time to time and feel something stir.
At the time I was a mother of two children who were 5 and 3. In another life–before my children were born, I’d been a poet. For years I wrote and traveled and performed and hung out with poets at all hours of the day and night, I dreamed up ways to make more poems. I played with paint and dye and fabric and collaborated with dancers and musicians. For a few years after I had children, I didn’t write much poetry or see many poets. What I needed was images of mothers making art. What I also needed was to reframe what I thought “art” itself was. Making a life with people is indeed an art.
I am writing this a dozen years, four books, and many performances later. We added a third child to our family seven years ago. I have never–I repeat–never had a writing studio.
I have many roles: each of my daughters needs to be nurtured in her own way, I have a husband who I want to spend time with, I went back to school 6 years ago and I am working on a Ph.D, my parents are elderly and decisions need to be made. There is so much rhetoric out there that tells us that if art is our lane, we have to be at it 7 days a week but my lane is living and living a fulfilling life is definitely an art.
I read a beautiful children’s book about the visual artist Ruth Asawa who made amazing sculptures by hand. Like Lucille Clifton, Ruth Asawa had six children. Her children tell stories of how their mother would create her sculptures in the midst of family life. Hers is another life I hold close. I also think of my friend Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, an award winning poet and mentor to many. She used to take her son Malik to her theatre rehearsals and poetry readings. She also worked full-time as a social worker.
I search out the images and the company of women taking kids to gallery openings, poetry readings, theater rehearsals, or sound checks. Their stories and their images hold possibility. And those images allow me to hold possibility as close as I held my newborns.
Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie (far right), with Diverse Verse Guiding Member Nikki Grimes (center) and Padma Venkatraman; taken by during the author’s visit (with her daughters) to the latter’s home, by her husband, Dominique Sindayiganza
Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie is an interdisciplinary artist and a Ph.D candidate in the Theatre Arts and Performance Studies program at Brown University. Her dissertation centers on “Black Otherwises” in the work of Ntozake Shange and weaves together performance studies methodologies, archival research, Black feminist theory, and African-based spirituality. Tallie is also author of the award-winning children’s book Layla’s Happiness, the poetry collections Strut and Karma’s Footsteps, and Dear Continuum: Letters to a Poet Crafting Liberation. Tallie’s poetry is the subject of the film “I Leave My Colors Everywhere.” She is also featured in “Tell Me Another Story” a film about the importance of inclusivity in children’s literature. Her first academic publication, The Unwieldy Otherwise: Rethinking the Roots of Performance Studies in and through the Black Freedom Struggle co-authored with Leon Hilton was recently published in the journal Performance Matters. Tallie is the mother of three galaxies who look like daughters.
Nikki Grimes and Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie; photocredit: Dominique Sindayiganza
