Story of Your Mother

By: Chantal Braganza

Narrated by: Chantal Braganza

What if we considered motherhood an organizing principle instead of a genre or subject?

In her debut book of essays, Chantal Braganza considers the limits of understanding motherhood as identity or action alone, while reflecting on her upbringing as a daughter of Mexican and Indian immigrants and the first years of raising her two children. Inspired by the thinking of Dionne Brand, Maggie Nelson and Jacqueline Rose, she explores what shapes the things we reach for as we search for our family's place in the world. How do we tell our children who they are when we're still struggling to find that language to describe ourselves?

Braganza weaves dreamlike memoir sections of her childhood—some memories, some myths passed down from her family in Vallarta, Mombasa, London, and Toronto—with urgent essays about migration, identity, and speech. She wrangles with the limits of language—finding that even fluency doesn't guarantee the ability to translate something for your children. She engages with the physicality of motherhood and loss, nourishment and violence.

The questions that emerge are: Can we believe the people who have given us the story of who we are? And how do we craft that story for our own children?