I’ve been thinking about Newton’s third law of motion after recently revisiting it for my son’s science project: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It is a consoling law, built upon certainty. But human lives seldom hold such hard consolations.
The leaders we elect, the borders we erect, the violence we permit produce consequences that outlive the choices that set them in motion. Mothers understand something of this. To bring a life into the world is to initiate a sequence whose consequences can never be calculated or contained.
Across Guernica’s August–September double issue, motherhood appears as place, inheritance, origin, and impossible return. The works gathered here cast a look upon the afterlives of history; they ask what follows from our most intimate and collective decisions. In fiction, Naeem Murr’s Bye-Bye Palestine traces the complex entanglements of lives back to a historical rupture whose convulsions remain present in the ongoing genocide in Palestine.
The name holds the story’s central contradiction: a city figured as mother to those made strangers within it. In Emmy Rossum’s Tether, motherhood becomes its own law of action and reaction. In a futuristic world, a daughter uses her heightened olfactory abilities to mark the boundary between herself and her mother.
Following a matrilineal inheritance through scent, she attempts to trace her way back to her own beginnings. In Yukiko Tominaga’s The Little Corner of the Factory, a child discovers the many forms love can take, and the hurt and betrayals it can contain. In a small room inside a rental hot-towel factory, the youngster is initiated into a tenderness that will outlast the people who teach it to her.
Malcolm Garcia’s narrative reportage Last Fight tells the story of a man living in the wake of his brother’s death. Nazeer, an Afghan interpreter who served alongside US forces in Afghanistan, is detained by ICE and dies within twenty-four hours of entering custody. Garcia follows a chain of consequence stretching from the war in Afghanistan to the American immigration system, tracing the afterlife of a vote, and the distance between a choice made in a voting booth and the body upon which its force eventually lands.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
