Interview: Virginia Konchan w/ Janice Lee @ The Conversant
I talk with Virginia Konchan about Daughter, mourning mother, and grief at The Conversant.
Excerpt:
The wonderful synesthesia of Daughter (as one reviewer put it: in Daughter, ”splayed” is a color; “competence” is interchangeable with “space”) attenuates the tension—rather than attempting to resolve it—of the stigmatized, iconicized “mother,” both historical and real.
Mother and child become interchangeable and the narrator (mother/master signifier) is as malleable as the created subjects themselves. In Daughter, the choice to forget seems a more survivable fate than the pain of remembrance and lived trauma—of the mother’s abandonment, death, or our own societal scapegoating and sacrificial murder of the mother in order to have a voice, and survive.
