Although every word hurts, Silvia sits down to write and is able to transmute all her grief. Beyond being a literary gem, A Mother's Voice is pure healing.

“It was a warm, bright morning, with a clear blue sky that I interpreted as a promise, as a good omen for the year that had just begun. As soon as I wrote the final words, my phone rang. It was my sister, telling me that my mother had died.”

Rosa, Rosita, is a beautiful, gentle, melancholic woman, who in her old age suffers a slow and prolonged deterioration. The narrator, her daughter, helplessly observes this painful process. She visits her, listens to her, reads to her, tries to make her laugh, sings to her. When her mother dies, she feels the need to write about her. These pages narrate Rosita’s past, how she met her husband and created a family, with everything this implied for many women at the time in terms of being relegated and silenced. In writing about her, the narrator encounters, as if looking in a mirror, her own childhood, her youth, her first loves, her lack of desire to have children, and her strained relationship with her father.

“One of the greatest new Latin American storytellers.”

This is a grief memoir, a love song: a stunningly intimate novel about the end of a mother’s life told though the eyes of her daughter, and about the lacerating emptiness of that absence. It is about how for the daughter, a “prisoner to words”, the act of writing is her only means of tackling a subject of this magnitude. In the words of the narrator, these are “pages I write slowly, simmering away between long valleys of silence, with the only desire being, perhaps, to remember that voice.” This is a story of mourning, of intense bonds, and above all, a moving tribute to a mother’s love.

The form of the novel reflects the narrator’s grieving process: it is fragmentary, with minimalistic chapters oscillating between the first and third person as her memories are explored and her mother is immortalised in these short glimpses. In a narrative style reminiscent of Marguerite Duras, this is a novel in which the voice prevents another voice from being forgotten, inferring that something immense and sacred is at stake here, that our existence in this world also relies on the way in which we articulate our past, and that our own identity is at risk of shattering if we do not protect the pieces that make us who we are.

As Silvia delves into her childhood memories, we fall in love with Rosita. We watch her in the kitchen as she prepares Arabic delicacies. We hear her requesting her favourite songs in a whisper. We spy on her as she rests on her bed, worried we might disturb her. A Mother's Voice is not only a precious tribute to a departed loved one, it is a portrait of a whole generation of women who did not believe they had a voice, but with love and hope, they raised daughters who managed to empower themselves.

In trying to write the story of a mother, the novel also becomes the story of a family. When the narrator’s siblings find out she is writing the book, they ask her not to talk about certain subjects, to which she responds: “I also try to explain that each of us lived in a different house, in a different family, even though we had the same parents and lived under the same roof.” Arazi explores the idea of perception and memory, and the nature of truth in writing itself: can anyone be satisfied with the written word? Are there true facts, or does the very act of narrating something therefore obscure it, destroy it? “Diving into memory is like diving into a deep sea in the middle of the night, among fish, weeds and sea monsters,” she writes. Her examination of words, of language, reflects her grieving process and how, through writing, she gives form to her mother, gives her a voice. The narrator is trying to use her words to give name to something that is unnameable. “The pain is a blood clot. It is silence. It is a non-word.” Although every word hurts, Silvia sits down to write and is able to transmute all her grief. Beyond being a literary gem, A Mother's Voice is pure healing.

Published in Argentina: Emecé Editores, 2022

Silvia Arazi (Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a novelist, short story writer, poet, actress and singer. She has acted in many plays, films, comedies, musicals and television programmes. As a writer, she formed part of the Abelardo Castillo workshop for several years. She was awarded the 1998 Premio Julio Cortázar de Narrativa Breve in Spain for her short stories Que temprano anochece. Her novel La maestra de canto was translated into German and Dutch and it was adapted into cinema by Ariel Broitman, in 2013. She has published two poetry books: Claudine y la casa de piedra y  La medianera, una novelita haiku  (Second Prize of Argentina’s National Endowment for the Arts) and La familia Cubierto, poems for children. Her most recent novels are El niño de pocas palabras and La separación. She lives in Buenos Aires (Argentina) and in Colonia del Sacramento (Uruguay).   @silvia_arazi \\ facebook.com/silvia.arazi

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