Mourning the Mamalith: A Graphic Response to Grief

“I love you so much,” are the last words I said to my mother on the telephone on Valentine’s Day, just a few days before she died. Our love was as complicated as it was deep. My mother’s dogmatic fundamentalism left little room for me, her queer only child. I have spent a lifetime unravelling a brutal family history that caused her to cling to religion, to love Jesus above all else, including family. My mother was born in Germany in 1938, violently displaced during partitioning in 1946, then abandoned in an orphanage for several years. Years later, she fled to the United States with me to escape an abusive marriage. My mother’s life and her death have prompted this graphic research. How can one develop a resilient sense of self and belonging despite traumatic origins? Is it possible to inhabit a new place and to make it one’s home without, however inadvertently, causing oppression and grief for those already living there? This piece serves as the Prologue to the graphic novel Queen of Snails: A Graphic Memoir (forthcoming November 2022), where I examine this tangled history in depth.