Motherhood in terrorism

It's mothers day tomorrow. Ugh. Not to get all emo in my last blog, but my mom died when I was a kid and my grandmother adopted me, so this whole motherhood phenomena is pretty foreign to me. I actually think this is why I've been so attracted to looking at motherhood in national identity. Oh dear lord- someone call Oprah and Dr. Phil.

So when I was going through some research I checked out an article called Daughtering in War by Irene Matthews, which had an interesting subsection on Motherhood and torture in Guatemala. We've talked a lot about active torture- hurting or affecting someone for a gain- but what about the possibility of being by-proxy tortured. I see this happening in two different ways. First, the active creation of what we've talking about in theory with nationalism- the attack on someone's mother. Ok, it may sound silly, but does anything piss you off more than a yo-mama joke?! Is there anything that is seen as a higher act of disrespect? For some reason one scene from Cold Mountain pops into my head (if you haven't seen it, don't. Nicole Kidman and Renee Zelwigger- who I normally like- are as obnoxious as humanly possible). A rogue band of civil war-rejects parade around town attempting to find men who went AWOL. They assume that two men are hiding in a barn, so they torture the men's mothers (is that proper grammer?) so that her screams are what bring them out- to promptly be shot. In effect, it's not the torturer's fault they gave up the desired information- it's the mother's and her screams (which she translates as her inability to protect her sons). I don't mean to sound completely revolting, but is our mother-bond that deep? Why is this not the same as our bond with our fathers? Is it only the son's who react so deeply to the torture of their mothers?

The second type of by-proxy torture, which Matthews talks about in her essay, excludes the desired male entirely. The mother is tortured as a type of penance for doing exactly what nationalism tells her to do; birth soldiers. When the male military or political (etc.) actor is absent, his mother is put in his place- as if the two were united and her pain could be felt through him. There is also a sort of assumption, which we can see all the time in movies etc, that the mother somehow always knows her sons whereabouts through some weird-cosmic connection. Her attack is also supposed to reverberate throughout the family and community systems as being the most horrific possible. Why?? Why is this pedestle created in such a way that all that comes from it is abuse? Actually, now that I say that I realize that this is a different culture than our own. Perhaps in these cultures the mother is valued and idealized more than she is in American culture, so her attack has greater weight- so do Americans have the same experience as rural Guatemalans with this? Is the proverbial yo-mama something which affects us all in exactly the same way???

Ok, that's it for my rantings. Over and Out.