Motherfucker
It's not what you think.
If you read this title and your eyes widened and you thought, Don’t you think you should have written this word with an asterisk or a hyphen instead of writing the WHOLE word out because that’s just…and wait does your mother read this?!
The answer is No and Yes. Hi mom.
As I wrote the first draft of a draft of a draft of this essay in the radical inclusive creative community space Openhaus here in Portland — longhand with the thick 1.4mm ballpoint pen that is the only pen I can write with because anything less is just anemic — the ink stopped.
Just for a moment. The ink had not run out. But it did dry up for a moment as I patiently tried to write the words that begged to come out but in that moment they were invisible indentations on the page instead of the bold black ink that I needed them to be.
I don’t read tea leaves or coffee grounds or ink blots or the momentary absence of such.
But the ink returned.
If you look up the etymology of the word motherfucker:
You will find the earliest OED citation of the word in usage was from an 1889 murder trial in Texas (Levy v. State) where the defendant and witnesses maintain that the man he shot and killed called him a “God damned mother f-cking bastardly son-of-a-bitch.” With mother f-cking getting censored in print.
You will find reference to a black soldier in WWI sending an open letter to the draft board in a Memphis newspaper calling their ass out as “low-down Mother Fuckers” whose war abroad will not be over until they “straighten up this State.” He was court-martialed and sentenced to 10 years of hard labor.
You will find a rich history of motherfucker originating in jazz, blues and early R&B in the form of praise of unmatched musical chops and later evolving to take its lyrical place in rock, hip-hop, and rap.
You will find the earliest literary references attributed to Norman Mailer with his euphemistic use “mother-fugger” in his WWII novel The Naked and The Dead (1948) and later full-blown “motherfuck” in his novel Why are We in Vietnam? (1967).
You will find its use in comedy, most notably with Lenny Bruce and later George Carlin being arrested for use of the word.
And of course, you will find Samuel L. Jackson.
You will find violence, war, intimidation, intensification, defiance, and reverence. You will find the term and its usage attributed almost exclusively to men. You will find a rush and an almost orgasmic release associated with the use of the phrase. You will find it associated as commonplace. You will know what the word feels like in your body.
Instead of true etymology, you will find declaration upon declaration of what it is not.
Norman Mailer professed in an interview, “…the word never gave me any pleasure…I felt that it was a fair word to use to give the quality of the Army experience…it was used to give a kind of rhythm in speech. It has nothing to do with obscenity.”
Samuel Jackson states it is “really just another word” that “naturally comes out” while also singing its praises because after a year of being severely bullied as a child for his debilitating stutter, “motherfucker” became a speech aid that helped him stop stuttering.
A drama critic testified in the Lenny Bruce trial that “its common parlance and does not mean that the individual being accused of having had intercourse with his mother.”
Time and again you will find ink spilled primarily by men stating in one way or another that swearsies, this word motherfucker that does this thing in our bodies that makes it feel so incredibly satisfying to use has absolutely nothing to do with mothers and fucking.
Nowhere does anyone stop and say, “Bruh, what does this say about our language, our psyche, our ideology, our bodies, our power when the exaltation of the word motherfucker predicates that we deny it has anything to do with mothers fucking?”
It says everything.
I wish I had Inga Muscio on speed-dial.
I got the first edition of Cunt with the yellow jacket and pink flower when it came out in 1998 and snatched my consciousness so my fantasy of having her on speed dial is not metaphorical.
I wish I could channel her artistry of language and her exacting practice of using language to exhume our power back from the dead. I wish I could at least somehow bathe in her mind hoping it would seep into my pores and flow out effortlessly in bold ink.
Language creates, erases, and obfuscates in bodies that are at war with our own power, or lack thereof. Reclaiming language is not about words. It is not about excavating a true definition. Reclaiming language itself is at times a misnomer that has us believe we simply need to repossess words. Reclaiming language can also get co-opted in banal yet violent ways that has us wasting precious energy on bullshit like white folks defending their use of the N-word or the whole-ass mess upon mess of arguments around cancel culture.
I digress but before I get back on point I implore each and every one of us to read Meredith D. Clark’s DRAG THEM: A brief etymology of so-called “cancel culture” before we fix our mouths to add anything else to this cacophony.
When Inga Muscio wrote Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, she was not playing.
She devotes 356 pages to reclaiming the word cunt by remembering and restoring power. To get free you need to know that the triumph of oppression is invisibilizing itself and getting you do the work to keep yourself caged. Her writing reveals the violence of language/restoration of language, the denial of the erotic/inhabiting the erotic, the co-opting of power/embodying power…OK, you just need to read the book. For real.
Once we see, we can’t unsee.
And trying to make us unsee, is a most subtle and powerful form of oppression.
The slight-of-hand that tells us, “Nothing to see here!” and “We are most certainly not referring to mothers fucking because the only way we can conceive of mothers fucking is in the form of incest and ew!”
WTF?
We will allow ourselves to be haunted by our fixation with Freudian anxiety more than we will allow our bodies to remember the priestess/goddess/sage wisdom that lives in us. The wisdom of the Triple Goddess myths and archetypes—Maiden, Mother, Crone —across cultures are a shock to read. The shock is that they have been there the whole time. Unseen.
The mother—as archetype, as lifecycle phase, as actual bodies who birth (but not necessarily so)—is the power of creation. Mother is the embodiment of a season of nurturing. Mother is the embodiment of the expansiveness of love.
Mother is the embodiment of erotic power. Not the absence of such.
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.
It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society is to encourage excellence. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies. — Audre Lorde; Uses of The Erotic: The Erotic as Power.
To fuck as a mother—not in spite of being a mother—is a sacred freedom. Not freedom from, but freedom in its own creation. Yes I mean actual fucking. I mean fucking who and when and how we want. I mean not fucking who and when and how we don’t want. Yes, it is actually that simple. No, it is not easy because that’s how oppression works.
You don’t smash the patriarchy until you fuck freely on your own terms.
I said what I said.
To inhabit our mothering body and soul by opening into the erotic power and desire that gives us life, and is the germinating seed of the cycle of sage wisdom to come, is both radically available and violently foreclosed.
We know. And we forget.
We don’t actually forget. The body doesn’t just keep the score. It keeps our wisdom. It keeps our fire burning even when it dies down to the smallest ember.
Our bodies nudge us. Our bodies plead. Our bodies scream and shake us to please wake up. Our bodies remind us again and again that we are alive. Our bodies implore us to open our mouths and fill our lungs and take in all the oxygen we need for the fire to burn and grow and clear out and create.
Breathe and remember.
A few months ago in the midst of a self-imposed limit of five minutes to scroll through The Guardian, I came across the following headline:
“Now I’ve given birth, I’m worried I may never want to have sex again!”
I wasted none of my precious time on that special brand of doom-scrolling. But as this essay germinated in my mind I went back and found the article and read the full Q&A, which was mercifully brief.
I’ll summarize:
Q. was from a woman who was breastfeeding and co-sleeping with an infant and has a wildly supportive husband who understands when she pushes him away and experiences livid anger when he tries to have sex and she doesn’t want to but they used to have a bomb sex life and they are a “brilliant couple” (oh bless you Brits) and should she push herself into it so the marriage sex life doesn’t fall apart forever or will it organically be fine? And by fine she means she will want to have sex with her husband again because she doesn’t yet know that is the wrong definition of fine.
A. was from a US-based psychotherapist who specializes in sexual disorders so if she says you are fine you are really fine. She reassured this woman she was more than fine and prescribed patience and healing and self-care and going slow and not forcing anything and heaped praise on her husband for his wonderful support and above all else concluded, “your baby deserves your full attention.”
I read it and thought, who’s going to tell her?
I thought about what it would be like to have a coven of motherfuckers around her. Real ones.
Real ones who will conjure words that expel the anxiety that is not hers. Who will nurture the power that does not —cannot, and above all, should not—go back in the bottle. Who will hold space to expel the lies that told her you have to choose mothering or fucking. Who will tell her with giddy joy that she will not fuck in the same way again and she can receive that gift even though it’s not time to open it. Who will show her how the insidious nature of heteronormative patriarchy has her believing she has an absence of desire when it is simply no longer willing to be defined and confined in relation to one other.
We will tell her of transformation that is an open secret. We will show her that there are countless narratives and stories and they aren’t all Eat, Pray, Love.
We will hold space and fiercely guard the grief that vultures seek to consume and regurgitate as devastation when it is compost for joy and (re)birth.
I love this coven. We are creating and healing and guiding and fucking. We are restoring power that has been bifurcated in the season of mothering.
I find this coven everywhere I go and they find me.
The archetype of Mother is associated with the Full Moon.
Every time I go to write these essays on the Full Moon I curse myself and ask “Why do I try to write essays on the Full Moon?!” The energy is so much, sleep is not so much. I write words that are trash. Everything is clear in my head, nothing makes sense on the page. I try to write something before the moon is Full so I don’t wait until the last minute because that is not my jam. And every time I am convinced it won’t come to pass.
Yesterday I was at Openhaus writing trash and accepting that nothing would come to pass on this Full Moon. I turned my focus to being in the community space where black artists and creators were gathered and sharing their work throughout the weekend. The owner Cole Reed, self-proclaimed Gangster of Joy and one of those soul connections that defy explanation, had her work displayed and I found this piece but really it found me. It is called Supple the Feminine Seed.
We talked about forgetting and remembering.
I talked about what I was writing because I do that now. I find you, you find me.
I bought the piece which meant I get to have this powerful creation live in my home and support Cole’s artistry as well as their community non-profit Exit the Maze. I took it home and I wrote this because the moon was Full and I basked in the energy of the beautiful motherfuckers who are alive and create like their lives depend on it. Because it does.
Love this !