Research in African Literatures Vol. 34, No. 2 Summer 2003: 1–12 Mother, Memory, History: Maternal Genealogies in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle Gil Zehava Hochberg University of California, Berkeley It is by [mother] and through her ( à travers elle ), as a source of memory, that one is rooted in a genealogy. —Guy Dugas, Littérature judéo-maghrébine d’expression française (144) The mother who holds her child also holds her child’s memory. —Jennifer Fleischner, Mastering Slavery (2) I t is by her and through her, through “mother as a source of memory,” that one is rooted in a genealogy, a past, a people, a tradition. “Mother” is often represented as a valuable source of unmediated, direct memory and as such is frequently and forcefully “kept in the past,” located outside of history. Writing about the place of “mother” within the modern national (and anticolonial) discourse, Anne McClintock argues that women often function as unmediated channels of oral memory, while they are them- selves “denied any direct relation to [historical] agency” (90). Positioning women/mothers as primary sites of (personal and social) memory, which is set in opposition to (official and written) history, national and anticolonial discourses limit the role of women, as Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval suggest, to “biological producers” and “transmitters of culture” (7). To this observa- tion Partha Chatterjee adds that a system of dichotomies of inner/outer, home/world, tradition/modernity and feminine/masculine is responsible for assigning to “mother” the double role of “victim and hero.” The mater- nal figure is supposed to represent the muted and stoic expression of a lost traditional identity and the hope for the future growth of the nation’s spiritual essence (251). While within the discourses of nationalism and anticolonial liberation, women are commonly figured as the spiritual essence of the nation and as biological producers of the nation’s sons (the nation’s “full subjects”), within postslavery African diasporic literature and the critical discourse about it, the maternal figure is more often presented in its relationship to a daughter. Her role as a carrier of (cultural) memory and traditional spirituality is commonly explored through a narrative of maternal geneal- ogy. In an essay devoted to the use of the “matrilineal” as a metaphor of tradition, Madhu Dubey argues that “black feminist critics often use the metaphor of matrilineage to authorize their construction of black feminine literary tradition [. . .] and posit the mother as the origin of black women’s