Touching What Scorches
Form, fragments, and new motherhood in Jazmina Barrera’s Linea Nigra
These days pour out like water through a sieve and
This is how many of my sentences end these days: interrupted, still searching for the closure of punctuation. My journal and the Notes app on my phone are littered with fragments like this. Some days I return to complete the sentence. Other times they go on floating across the page. Occasionally I open my journal to an unfinished thought with no memory of what I wanted to say, and so the phrase remains cryptic and partial.
My first year of motherhood gives birth to a new form of writing: the practice of scribbling ideas in bits and pieces. I leave notebooks and legal pads open to collect partial phrases as they occur to me. Orphan sentences populate my journal. Later, I return to the page and cobble together these unmoored thoughts, hoping to create something complete. This method allows me to take notes in the interstices of daily life, between work and sleep and blearily sipping coffee with my husband while our baby dismisses oatmeal from her tray with an imperious sweep. Some days I wonder not whether I’ll ever write something complete again, but how.
Still, I’m compelled to gather these fragments, operating under the vague hope that they might one day cohere into something complete.
—
January 10: Maren is three days old. I can feel ropey tissue running from my armpit to my nipple, and pea-sized lumps beneath the skin. It’s my milk coming in. In the mirror I see blue veins spreading across my newly-inflated chest.
January 12: I keep thinking: she will never be this new again.
—
When I picked up Jazmina Barrera’s Linea Nigra, I immediately recognized the form. Linea Nigra is a book of fragments that constructs something whole from the rubble of new motherhood and the 2017 Mexico City earthquake. Writing through pregnancy and her first year postpartum, Barrera attempts to capture the bewildering experience of matrescence in the narrow slices of time she finds to write. She plans to begin the book with pregnancy and end with weaning. But instead, interruptions become their own narrative. The book is stitched together with pauses and section breaks, imitating the disjointed nature of her days. Thematic disruptions—her mother is diagnosed with cancer, a natural disaster shakes the city—fragment the book even further. Linea Nigra’s disjointed form is born of necessity, the only kind of writing that Barrera can squeeze into small pockets of time. It also offers a more complete account of early motherhood than a cohesive structure could.
Some of Barrera’s fragments are a single sentence (“Today I forgot to have breakfast.”). Others span several pages. Some are quotidian, some interact with a work of art by or about mothers. But most sections are a paragraph or so, something she might have jotted down in fifteen minutes: the span of time it takes her son to nurse on one breast. Or the countdown until a nap ends. Or the time left for reflection after tending to the survival-level needs of the day. “I want to write about Silvestre and the books,” Barrera writes. “I have fifteen minutes to do it in, because my mother arrived to look after him but he immediately wanted to feed, then I needed to piss, and now my mother has to leave. I’m going to try to write quickly.”
—
Five days after my daughter was born, I hid in my bedroom with my phone. January turned the room violet in the late afternoon. Beyond the closed door I heard my husband Davis bouncing rhythmically on a yoga ball. Maren was in his arms, bundled in a knit blanket. From the kitchen came the sound of a stove burner clicking and then catching as my mom heated carrot soup for dinner. I had escaped on the pretense of needing a nap, but what I actually needed was to write down the details of the birth. (Her birth, my birth, or ours?) Less than a week prior my body had imploded and then been pried open by my daughter’s passage and already the sensations—a vice clamping down on my abdomen, fever-like chills crawling over my skin—were evaporating from memory. I felt an urgency to pin them down. Lying on my side, my stomach soft and distended, I typed incomplete sentences into my phone.
Quilting of Davis’s jacket against my cheek as I hung on his neck. Tailbone curling under with the shuddery urge to push. Toilet full of blood when I stood. Toasting in the recovery with mimosas in paper cups.
These birth details still live in my phone’s Notes app. The file was soon joined by others: descriptions of my daughter’s newborn body (dark hair furring the rim of each ear), observations on my body’s postpartum fluctuations (woke up at 2 a.m. to night sweats, the bedding damp and tangy). A particularly long list records Maren’s weight before and after every breastfeeding session, from the grinding early weeks when a hospital scale lived on our dining room table.
10:45am
Starting weight: 6.14.0
Right side: 6.15.3 – 15 min (1.3 oz)
Left side: 7.01.3 – 13 min (2 oz)
TOTAL INTAKE: 3.3 oz
At a handful of weeks old, Maren’s shoulder blades poked out like arrowheads. Her silky skin bunched around her joints. Her weight, or lack thereof, was the subject of doctors’ and lactation consultants’ constant scrutiny. To help her gain weight, Davis and I followed an elaborate and around-the-clock routine. Every few hours I brought her body against my own and cradled her head while she nursed. Then I switched to the breast pump while Davis supplemented her feeding with a bottle. Propped on his lap, she’d ball her fists under her chin and go cross-eyed with concentration as she drank. During the blue nighttime feedings, I read novels on my Kindle to keep from dozing off. The rhythmic whoosh and hiss of my breast pump kept time in the stillness of our bedroom.
I found that nursing worked best in the “koala pose,” an endearing term, with Maren propped upright and straddling my thigh, leaning against me so we were stomach-to-stomach. We logged countless hours seated together in this position, appearing, as Barrera describes it, like we were sitting for a portrait. As Maren nursed, her hand swept absently across my collarbone. I held my book behind her head or pecked sentences into my Notes app. (Barrera: “Reading while he feeds. Reading slim books I can hold in one hand. Writing from notes made on my phone while he’s in my arms.”)
“Art loves limits,” goes the adage, which is a hopeful thought when you are limited by a newborn’s mystifying schedule (a silly word for that stage). It was during these endless hours of nursing and pumping that I began to explore motherhood as a subject. If I had any sort of writing practice, it was thanks to breastfeeding. While she nursed I recorded physical details and observations—plain facts, nothing more. I couldn’t make sense of the scenery, but it felt necessary to collect details like stones. One day, I told myself, I would arrange them. One day these fragments would tell me something.
—
February 22: When she nurses she hums, sings, sighs, and murmurs into my skin, eyelids flickering and eyebrows contracting as though with dreams.
—
Linea Nigra reads as many things: a traveler’s log, a commonplace book, an extended essay. But most of all, it reads like a diary. The writer Maria Popova notes a strange but unsurprising pattern in history. Men’s diaries, from Thoreau’s to Kafka’s to Darwin’s, become “journals.”[1] This shift in language implies a transformation into something scholarly, philosophical, and fit for public consumption. Women’s diaries remain diaries, shut out from the literary canon. This designation cloisters diaries in the realm of the trivial, the personal, the private.[2]
In Linea Nigra, I can sense Barrera wrestling with this bias. When her husband tells her she should keep a pregnancy diary, she’s too self-conscious to admit that she’s already writing one. She worries the practice seems “hackneyed,” such a cliché that even the pastel-colored tome What to Expect When You’re Expecting recommends it. And yet her pregnancy and passage into motherhood is the subject that consumes her imagination. This kind of writing, she observes, “writes itself.” While pregnant, Barerra requests to change her grant-funded writing project to focus on the subject of motherhood. “I want to write this book: it’s the only one I can write for the time being.” But the committee turns her down; the change in subject is too drastic. Her advisor tries to comfort her by saying, “But it will do you good to think of other things for a while, to take your mind off the baby.”
The advisor’s assumption is that motherhood isn’t a worthwhile subject—that thinking about the baby only produces pregnancy diaries. But for Barrera, the work of gestation and birth and infant care taps into a new vein of creative energy. She doesn’t need to take her mind off the baby; she needs a method of writing within new limits. So she types on her phone while breastfeeding. She thinks about what she wants to say while showering. She keeps a diary.
“The best memoirs, I think, forge their own forms,” wrote Annie Dillard in her 1988 essay “To Fashion a Text.” As she edited the manuscript, Barrera could have turned the rough material—the details recorded on her phone, the five-minute paragraph scribbled before her son woke up—into a seamless whole. Revision and many drafts might have rendered Linea Nigra a cohesive memoir, buffing over the interruptions and filling in the gaps. But Barrera chose a diaristic form as the final version. The structure tells a story. The interruptions are the point. Linea Nigra’s structure is born of necessity, but it also communicates something essential about the postpartum experience: that it is lived in fragments, each fragment its own world.
—
Certain parenting aches begin immediately. Children are constantly remade. My daughter sheds selves as fast as the clothes she outgrows, becoming a new version of herself every week. There’s no warning when a certain trait—a sound, a gesture, the way her eyes squeeze into crescents when she smiles—will disappear. The only way to preserve any of it is by pinning it down with words.
One day I notice a certain sweet smell on her breath, which I attribute to breastmilk and her lack of teeth. It’s a scent I’ve been vaguely aware of, but today I’m seized with the urge to record this, knowing it could disappear tomorrow and she’ll never smell exactly this way again. While she naps I unearth a notebook from under a pile of books and burp cloths. I settle myself on the gray couch. When I was pregnant, I wrote here with my legs pulled up against the globe of my belly. My journal entries read like a tourist’s letters back home, long and awed. Now I write in lists or broken phrases. As I start to describe this milk-sweet smell, cries sound from the bedroom. I haul my attention to the surface like a diver rising in a swarm of bubbles.
—
April 11: Often, caring for Maren doesn’t feel like work. (Often, it does.)
—
When Maren was five months old, our family drove to the desert. It was Mother’s Day and we were emerging from three weeks of Covid-induced isolation. During this time I parented alone for eleven days while Davis quarantined in the guest room. He recovered, emerged, and then a few days later Maren and I came down with the virus. The sickness coincided with a poorly-timed sleep regression on her part. By the time I recovered, all three of us were scraped thin. When our friend offered his house in the desert for the weekend, we didn’t hesitate.
We drove east between canyon walls and barrel cactus. I propped my feet on the sun-warmed dashboard and scrolled through Instagram. Everyone, it seemed, had thoughts to share on Mother’s Day. I flicked through posts that grieved dead mothers and lost pregnancies, posts that celebrated children and mother figures, posts about longing and delight and ambivalence. I watched the tawny landscape out the window and thought about my own short time as a mother—an identity that still felt sandy in my mouth. What could I say? I dove down for words but came up empty-handed. Despite my habit of recording details, meaning eluded me.
That night after Maren went to sleep, I opened the sliding glass door of our friend’s house and slipped into the backyard. Sitting in the hot tub with my head tipped back on the concrete lip, I watched Davis washing dishes in the kitchen, framed in yellow light through the window. Stars punctured the desert sky. For five months, I’d been shoved up against the enormity of this experience—a new self, a new daughter—and the proximity made things impossible to parse, like a line of text brought so close to my eyes that it blurred and refused translation. There was no accounting for where my love for her began and ended. Its vastness terrified me.
We are writing about death when we write about the way life begins. Love is shadowed by the specter of grief. Listening to the rustle of palm fronds, I understood that, for now, I could only take in fragments. I could look at small things: diapers massing themselves on the dresser, her toes curling and uncurling as she nursed. I could make lists. Keep a diary.
Maybe Linea Nigra’s form is not only pragmatic. Perhaps this partial way of writing serves as a kind of armor—a technique for touching, very briefly, what scorches.
—
May 8: When I’m nearly asleep, my mind roams to Maren curled in the crib one room over. I imagine her body and its soft inlets, and I feel the weight of life’s threats like a cat sleeping on my chest.
—
Can lists be literature? Can diaries be art?
Toward the end of the book, Barrera records an exchange. She and her husband have been translating Rivka Galchen’s book Little Labors. At a discussion in a bookstore, a man in the audience chimes in. He is mystified as to why motherhood has suddenly become a popular subject in literature. “It’s not clear to me why anyone would be interested,” he adds. Better to save that kind of writing for your diary. Better to take your mind off the baby.
If what is most publicly and readily visible about raising children is the tedium of caregiving, perhaps it takes writers in its throes of parenting to reveal its subterranean depths. Raising an infant can indeed be stifling and mundane. It is not, on the surface, the stuff of epics. But beneath the superficial details about nipple shields and morning sickness hums a nearly inexpressible current of love and fear that has the power to both shatter and remake. Writers bound by the limits of early parenthood will create work from this current, and they will do so in whatever way they can—on the back of grocery lists, in bullet points, or typed on their phones at 3am.
“In my opinion, there will never be enough of us,” writes Barrera. “I think of newspapers, lists, letters, herbals, textbooks, pregnancy journals and diaries, homemade cookbooks: all these forms of writing are, or can be, literature. The same thing is true of baby diaries.”
Linea Nigra’s fragmented, diaristic form accomplishes something a traditional structure couldn’t: it captures the felt experience of new motherhood. By choosing to write in and through interruptions, Barrera expands the imagination for what forms literature can take. Reading Linea Nigra, I started to find my own way forward.
—
It’s been over a year since that afternoon when I hid in my room and typed details from the birth into my phone. I am beginning to sift through the fragments I’ve collected, holding them in my hands and sensing their weight, their texture. As I arrange them, I think that perhaps I will write something whole after all.
[1] https://onbeing.org/programs/maria-popova-cartographer-of-meaning-in-a-digital-age-feb2019/
[2] https://sunypress.edu/Books/G/Gender-and-the-Journal2
Annelise Jolley is an essayist and journalist who writes about place, motherhood, ecology, and faith. Her work appears in The Rumpus, National Geographic, The Atavist, The Millions, Brevity, and EcoTheo Review, among others. Her work has received a James Beard Award, a Dart Award, an Overseas Press Club Award, and honorable mention in The Best American Travel Writing. Annelise holds an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Seattle Pacific University. She lives in San Diego.
