At age twenty-three, novelist Doris Lessing (1919-2013) sat on the lawn under a toona ciliata tree and explained to her two children why she was leaving Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) for London. This is the biography of the malevolent mother as remembered by the Over-Eye. What is relevant to surveillance and statecraft is extracted and magnified, the rest discarded.
The Over-Eye’s indignant disapproval is a psychosocial weapon in marshalling adherence to the home plot. Witness to Lessing’s story, this article considers the intersections of maternity, capitalism and psychoanalysis, and situates the matrescene as part of a collective memoir and critical historiography. Narrative passage and personal essay acknowledges intertextual and reparative reading, alongside the interrelationship of the personal and the public, as essential to interpretative critique and positive legislative political action.
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