Mali Hadad

Rota (Broken)

2019

There is a morbid guilt that mothers pass on to their daughters. It slides through the fissures, between cracks and crevices; it grows in the interstices among whispers and ill will. Let me tell you a story about María, my grandmother: When I was born, she was so angry that her son’s firstborn had been a female, that she took away the Persian rug she had given him for the occasion, and said in a loud voice so that everybody could hear, “Let the mother and daughter die.” But, to quote John Connelly in The Killing Kind, “There is an interconnectedness to all things, a link between what lies buried and what lives above, a capacity for mutability that allows a good act committed in the present to rectify an imbalance in times gone by. That, in the end, is the nature of justice, not to undo the past but, by acting further down the line of time, to restore some measure of harmony, some possibility of equilibrium, so that lives may continue with their burden eased, and the dead may find peace in a world beyond this one.”