(Re)Birth: Intergenerational Trauma + Motherhood

Intergenerational trauma as a ‘burden of persistent colonialisms’ (Alexander and Mohanty, 2007) presents itself in journeys of motherhood for many women of colour in significant ways. Mothering in this context becomes nothing if not a daily ‘fight for life’ in a world predicated upon collective death. Moments of remembering, challenging and healing trauma become the only survival. Through an examination of maternal mental health in women of colour, I ask how intergenerational trauma haunts the living through their unborn and within journey’s of motherhood under conditions of immense precarity and ongoing violence.

This research examines the role of intergenerational trauma in maternal mental health through a range of mood disorders. Writing in relation to the auto ethnographic reflection of my journey with post partum depression and anxiety, I examine this period as one of triggering unresolved inherited familial and collective traumas propelling a journey towards healing, at the complex intersection of gendered and racialized violence.

Set against the backdrop of historic forms of violence written into the bodies of women of colour, I ask how mothers navigate their traumatic inheritances by uncovering what forces haunt their journeys. How then, can broader genealogies of violence, loss, trauma, dislocation, and gendered and racialized colonial violence challenge conceptions of time by insisting on the colonial present that plays a role in triggering mental health challenges? Significantly, Intergenerational Trauma (IGT) is understood as the living memory of experiences of stress and trauma at the collective level. Scholars note that this unresolved historical grief can be passed from generations in different ways, whether through memory and behavior, or as some recent scientific thinking suggests, at the epigenetic level predisposing people to a range of physiological and psychological issues. Furthermore, while these disorders are said to affect approximately 20 percent of all postpartum women, women of colour are disproportionally impacted, experiencing Postpartum depression (PPD) at a rate closer to 38 percent (Keefe et al., 2015). This racial disparity highlights huge gaps in screening, treatment and the understanding of maternal mental health in communities of colour.

I begin by asking how the intergenerational transmission of trauma can affect experiences of motherhood in post-partum experiences by examining modes of transmission, triggers and impacts on subjectivity. While important scholarly work exists in relation to motherhood and trauma, particularly in Black and Indigenous communities, the examination of colonial genealogies in the making of trauma for historically oppressed communities at the collective level, within contexts of ongoing violence, is an area that requires further consideration.