Motherhood, Motherland, and the Gendered Refugee Experience in Contemporary Slam Poetry

Abstract

The gendered conception of a ‘mother’ nation is a recurring trope in nationalist literature that constructs the woman's body as a bearer of nationalist cultural values and its idealised citizen, while nationalism itself becomes a masculine ideal. The paper examines how slam poets like Rafeef Ziadah, Emitithal Mahmoud, and Muna Abdulahi vocalise their diasporic experience and reinvigorate memories of a diminishing motherland. Through a few select works of these writers, this paper intends to trace the contemporary re-formulations of the ‘mother-ised’ land amidst intergenerational and transnational refugee women forced to flee from their homes due to genocidal violence. The paper hopes to show how the conflation of the body of the nation with the body of the woman goes beyond implications of patriarchal control to draw out a matrilineal heritage of blood and bonds to a homeland quickly disappearing under genocidal threats. In such cases, the woman's body also bears witness to the violence imposed on the land/body. Moreover, the paper also analyses the diasporic experience and identity formulation of the daughters of refugees, and how it is often built on links to the motherland, formulated almost entirely on nostalgic cultural impressions and traditions relayed through maternal bonds.