Cherrypicker
Narrated female spaces and bodies

Katharina Mevissen tells an entirely unusual mother’s story.

By Holger Moos

In 2019, Katharina Mevissen, born in 1991, received the Deutscher Literaturfonds’ Kranichsteiner Literary Advancement Award for Mutters Stimmbruch, which has now been published by Klaus Wagenbach. Mevissen’s debut novel Ich kann dich hören (I can hear you) was published in February 2019. Literary critics praised the author for her quiet, multi-faceted, and rhythmic language.

“Mother speaks nine languages, but doesn’t talk to anyone any more,” begins Mevissen’s slim, new novel. These include not only four spoken languages, but body language, house language, garden language, children’s language, and lastly, mother’s language. Language is closely related to teeth: Mother came to language through the loss of her baby teeth. Now she’s old, has a toothache, and may soon lose her teeth again, but for good.

As we know, tooth loss – even imagined – can signify all kinds of things, such as unfulfilled sexual desires or, according to Freud, castration anxiety in men. In Mevissen’s work, teeth seem to be a leitmotif for rootedness and rootlessness, but also a sign of physical transformation. Teeth appear again and again, even in the seven illustrations by Katharina Greeven, which in their simplicity are reminiscent of rock paintings.

Mother is a mystery to herself

Mutters Stimmbruch is a strange book in the best sense of the word. The main character, about whom the story is told, has no name. She is always just called Mother: “Mother turns on the faucet... Mother is getting on in years... Mother lives in one hundred and seventy square metres,” etc. This literary mother figure remains vague, her identity ambiguous: “Mother has young legs and coarse hands. She has big teeth, old breasts, and firm calves. Her body has aged unevenly: in some places it is already widowed, in others still youthful, here single, there menopausal, there timeless. Mother is a mystery to herself.”

She lives alone in her house with a garden. First her husband left, and then the children moved out. And the “house says nothing. Silence emanates from every room and cupboard. Mother is silent back and shuffles into the garden. There, the trees are having an animated conversation. Mother takes no part in it and cuts the withered heads from the hydrangeas.” This mother is distanced from everything; she seems almost uninvolved in her own life. She sometimes mistakes her children, who only call her on the obligatory three days (Mother’s Day, Christmas, her birthday), for one another because “they sound so similar.”

But then the house lets her down. Shortly before the onset of winter the heating fails, the roof leaks, a water pipe bursts. At first she tries to hold out, spends many an evening with a hot water bottle in the boiler room, masturbates to the sound of a woman’s voice reading stock market prices on the radio. When she falls and knocks out two front teeth, she goes to the dentist and has all her teeth extracted. She doesn’t return to her house afterwards, but rents a two-room flat in the city. One room is full of plants, the other almost empty – just right for Mother’s undefined need for space.

Phone sex and spring fever

Her life subsequently becomes more and more somnambulistic, the events more and more surreal. She roams the city, has satisfying phone sex in a phone box. She goes to the swimming pool, slips her swimming costume over her shoulders to feel freer (“Her breasts swim away”), and then disappears into the men’s shower. In the supermarket she makes another film-worthy appearance charged by spring fever.

Her voice changes with the dentures. It’s deeper and more powerful, giving her another reason to try it out in more conversations with strangers in the telephone box. The three-metre board in the swimming pool becomes a stage for her to sing a ballad: “Her voice fills the whole airspace, as long as she sings, it belongs to her. Mother has never felt so big.”

Mother is her own focal point

Mutters Stimmbruch is a bizarre novel about ageing, but also about self-empowerment. Mevissen’s style is unusual: With her, the often-heard story about ageing women becoming invisible is told differently; soberly yet poetically, in short, simple sentences, yet enigmatically. There’s no whining, no self-pity; instead at the end Mother self-confidently insists on her singularity. Unseen by others, she is free from their judgement and can put herself in the centre: “Mother is her own focal point. And the teeth in the bathroom are the periphery.”
Mevissen is also a literary scholar and is currently doing her doctorate at the FU Berlin on literary orality and the forms and archives of spoken literature. She wrote her master’s thesis on “Narrated female spaces and bodies. A transnational feminist narrative analysis of gender and spatial representation in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Assia Djebar’s Vaste est la prison.” The title of Mevissen’s thesis seems to be a suitable heading for a review of her current novel.