The Migrant Mother’s Silence in Her Mother Tongue as a Mothering Strategy

Abstract Historically silenced, literary mothers’ voices are finally now being given their due, but it is noteworthy that migrant mothers’ literary voices are yet to be fully heard. This essay focuses on literary representations of migrant mothers who refuse to speak their own mother tongue to their children. It looks at two texts by women writers originating directly or indirectly from two post-Soviet Baltic states, Estonia and Lithuania. The texts in question are the novel Stalinin lehmät (Stalin’s Cows) (2003) by Sofi Oksanen and the essay “Motinų tylėjimas” (“The Silence of the Mothers”) (2004) by Dalia Staponkutė. Drawing on postcolonial theory, memory studies, and transnational feminist theory, I suggest that the migrant mother’s silence in her own mother tongue connotes several unarticulated realities: the trauma of colonization, the negotiation of post-Soviet migrant femininity, and patriarchal gender regimes. I argue that the migrant mothers represented in both texts withhold their mother tongue as a mothering strategy designed to socialize their children to successfully negotiate the transnational, multilingual spaces they will navigate as adults.