Muting, Mortification, and Motherhood
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embryo by giving birth, then that act was no less an act of violence than abortion
would have been, and her plight exemplifies the flipside of the dilemma Johnson
elucidates in “The Mother”—where Brooks’s speaker and “sweets” suffer as a
result of her decision to abort, this rapper’s mother and child suffer as a result of
the decision not to abort. While the ra pper’s mother would have been
condemned by evangelical pro-life groups for what they hold to be the mortal
sin of infanticide, the baby she kept is now telling her “I hope you fuckin’ bum
in hell for this shit.” She is damned if she did and damned because she didn’t.
This doubly-binding dichotomy is representative of the gross
oversimplification of the rhetoric surrounding abortion, and the ambiguity of the
song’s pronouns attest to the complications it brings to the subject-object
relationship. It is, as Johnson explains of similar ambiguity in “The Mother,”
“clear that something has happened to the possibility of establishing a clear-cut
distinction. . . between subject and object, agent and victim.” To return to the
figurative courtroom drama the song constmcts, the rapper is at once accuser
and confessor—the eponymous lyric implies the latter, while the slurs he hurls
at his mother construct him as the case’s plaintiff. The mother is called to the
stand to defend herself by the apostrophic address, yet the song denies her any
opportunity to do so. His repetition of “I’m sorry mama” preemptively negates
anything she can say; he will have already apologized for whatever claims her
speech might launch against him. This act of silencing is a part of the
punishment the rapper is inflicting upon his mother, employing the
“embarrassment” of apostrophe as a weapon against her and striking her dumb
in front of an audience, though he clearly hopes to provoke more than mere
“titters” (in Cullers words). As previously suggested, he twists embarrassment
and suspends temporality in a more sinister direction than either Culler’s or
Johnson’s, combining the two into mortification, a hybrid effect of apostrophe
that at once humiliates and de-animates.
Indeed, the etymological presence of “to kill” in the Latin root of
“mortification” indicates that the rapper is more concerned with habeas corpse
than corpus. The song’s judicial undercurrents intersect tellingly with its
condemnation of motherhood when the rapper establishes 1973 as a
chronological reference point, aligning his infancy with the landmark Roe v.
Wade Supreme Court decision that the right to privacy should encompass the
right to abortion. Intriguingly, the first verse of the song has already set the
rapper up as the object of civil demonstrations, and the “picket signs” evoke
iconic images of placard-wielding protesters outside of abortion clinics.
Addressed altematingly to the listener and to the rapper’s mother, the song
expresses a child’s rancor toward a mother he believes has failed him. He
infantilizes himself throughout, referring to himself as a “kid,” recalling his
childhood, and calling his mother “mama” or simply squalling “ma!” as an upset
baby might do. Additionally, when taken in a literal sense, cleaning out one’s
closet is a chore, something a mother might demand of her child, and considered
as such it provides the rapper an opportunity to subvert his mother’s voice and