The death of the mother and upbringing by the father

psychic and social inscription from colonial mal-être

Abstract

The essay aims to problematize transatlantic violence that inscribes the death of Mother Africa, the great progenitor womb of humanity, into the psychic life of Black individuals and inaugurates the creation of the colonizing Totemic Father. I take as a conversation starter the excessive use of alcohol as a symptom of the colonial malaise transmitted transgenerationally among Black men from the plantation. In the methodology, I challenge hegemonic notions of science through the poetic-political experience embodied in psychoanalytic research. I employ fiction as a way to highlight the writing lived experience that marks singular voices and histories, collectively mobilized. The metaphor of the womb of the world, Mother Earth, and the metaphor of the womb of humanity’s creation, Mother Africa, are understood as originating elements that construct and inscribe in our psyche the archaic aspects of a primordial shaping of our humanity — the founding Totemic Mother. I engage in conversation the entry of the third and the production of difference since the Totemic Father, but also the entry of seniority as a non-gendered experience of the psychic representation of the mother. I propose that it is plausible to think-feel the Totemic Mother as traces, mnemonic residues of a memorable time, which in the relationship between It and I can overflow, resignifying black existences.