A lecturer and teacher of mine recently told me about a radio show that she heard on radio 4 called 'The Baby Mother's Tale'. This fascinating 28 minute documentary explores the stories of (first to third generation) Afro-Caribbean mothers living in Birmingham, UK and their reflections on parenting and conjugal dynamics within their communities.
Whilst the blurb rightly highlights that 'the voices of these women are almost never heard', the show did remind me of Jamaican Sociologist/Author Olive Senior's path-breaking book, Working Miracles, which documents many similar such stories throughout Caribbean island contexts. In many ways Rebecca Lloyd Evans' radio-short traces the continuity of the familial patterns Senior documents into a metropolitan diasporic frame.
The Baby Mother Tale interrogates the popular tropes of 'baby mother' (mother of a man's child), 'wifey' (main woman) and 'side chick' ('outside' woman) as various patriarchal categories that the women have to reckon with on an everyday basis as they negotiate relationships with their far from perfect 'child-fathers'.
The show sketches a candid picture of maternal resilience and roving marginal men. Yet, there's an interesting moment in documentary where a younger man challenges the practices of his elder peers, forcefully provoking them to admit to their paternal shortcomings. Another poignant moment is when one of the young mothers visits her granny to discuss the history of the phenomenon, with her granny revealing the continuity between the 'other woman' of her generation and the 'side chick' of today.
1 comment:
Great bblog I enjoyed reading
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