https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i3.101
Archiving Em: Care, Counter-Archive and the Mad Mother in Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom
ARUNAV DAS
Research Scholar
Department of English
Guahati University, Assam
arunabh348@gmail.com
NEELAKSHI SAMANTA
MA English
Cotton University, Guwahati, Assam
samantaneelakshi@gmail.com
Abstract: Pinto’s 2012 novel Em and the Big Hoom is primarily a text about a son’s attempt to reconstruct his dead mother, a mother who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and did not fit into the traditional definition of a mother. Pinto constructs a realistic portrait of a lower-middle-class Goan family acting as a tiny caregiving economy to a mad mother. The author does not gloss over the exhaustion, tenderness and ambivalence that come with taking care of a person with mental illnesses. The narrator is building an archive of his mother out of the fragments she has left behind, and the novel questions whether such an archive can define the life that official and medical records could not. This paper attempts to interpret the novel as a counter-archive of mad motherhood thematised through the lens of care. In her book Moral Boundaries, Joan Tronto argues that care is essentially a human activity and challenges its traditional association with women and as something that is private and invisible. Using Ann Cvetkovich’s “archive of feelings” and Saidiya Hartman’s practice of critical fabulation, this paper argues that the narrator’s archival labour is itself a continuation of caregiving. Diana Taylor’s distinction between the archive and the repertoire further illuminates what the narrator’s project cannot reach: Em’s embodied presence was repertoire, and after her death the book can only register what it could not hold. This paper tries to illuminate how Pinto’s portrayal of Em’s illness is inseparable from her gendered role as a mother, wife and sexual being. Pinto provides the readers with an unfiltered picture of Em’s sexuality. Furthermore, the paper attempts to make an analysis of how the novel offers a model of the illness narrative as counter-archival practice; one in which writing the mad mother is not closure but unfinished care.
Keywords: Madness, Motherhood, Care Ethics, Counter-Archive, Archive Studies
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