Besides both being autofictions, Linda Lê’s A l’Enfant que je n’aurai pas (2011) and Cécile Wajsbrot’s Mémorial (2005) share many similarities. Wajsbrot is a French Jewish writer of Polish origin and Lê is a French writer of Vietnamese descent. Both writers contribute to a redefinition of the concept of motherhood by questioning its founding principles, and by feeling the need to justify their choice of notreproducing – or, in Wajsbrot’s terms, to be “libre de toute descendance” (free from descendants).
This choice is, in both texts, complicated by issues of memory and postmemory. According to Hirsch, postmemory consists in the transgenerational transmission of Holocaust trauma and generally occurs through the mother-daughter relationship (characterized by greater affective proximity than that between a mother and a son). In Wajsbrot and Lê, rejection of motherhood underscores a rejection of their own mother figures, which, as the texts unfold, amounts to a crisis of memory, of origins, and rejection of the original trauma. Thus, rejection of motherhood becomes a refusal of transmission. This paper proposes to explore the specific tropes used, in these two texts, as a means to re(en)gendering memory through a crisis of motherhood in post-Holocaust European literature.
