The wilderness

"The transition from birth to mother is a space of true wilderness," writes novelist Savaş (White on White) in this perceptive reflection on postpartum motherhood. Savaş describes the monthslong period following the birth of her first daughter in Paris as more difficult than pregnancy or labor. She catalogs practical concerns, including her struggle to produce enough breast milk or to soothe the baby's colic, and recounts the judgment she faced from her mother, a pediatrician, who visited from their native Turkey to help. At the center of her inquiry, though, is the uncanny experience of caring for a baby whom she has yet to develop a relationship with or recognize as a human being, an "immense terrain that no documentation manages to bring to life: I have no recollection of my relationship to the baby.... I can only recall the heightened sense of being." Drawing on an array of texts that deal with such feelings of "liminal existence," including Jack Halberstam's writing on wildness, Nastassja Martin's memoir of surviving a bear attack, and folk and fairy tales, Savaş builds to an intriguing, if slightly underdeveloped, vision of postpartum motherhood as one of the last "invisible" and "uncommodified" spaces under capitalism. As a personal chronicle, it's arresting and deep, and makes for a rewarding entry into the growing pantheon of postpartum literature. (Oct.)