Linea Nigra

In Spanish, línea nigra refers to the dark line that appears on a pregnant woman's abdomen—the pregnancy line. Mexican writer Jazmina Barrera uses this "black line" as an axis to stitch together her own journey into motherhood with her maternal family history, the history of literature and art, and indigenous civilizations overlooked by mainstream narratives. The book moves among Frida Kahlo's My Nurse and I, Niki de Saint Phalle's sculptures, Diego Rivera's murals, and the classic photographs of 20th-century legendary model Ruth Jiménez and her daughter, while repeatedly returning to the complex reflections on childbirth by women writers such as Ginzburg, Le Guin, Atwood, Rich, Cusk, Alice Walker, and Luiselli. This is not a linearly progressing pregnancy diary but a "literature review" that is half memoir and half reading notes: bodily experience and art history annotate each other, and private memory and public images illuminate one another. During the years of writing, the author's young son was born, the family lived through several earthquakes, her mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and her mother's life's work of paintings was almost entirely destroyed in the earthquakes. Life and death, fate and miracle, freedom and burden are all fundamentally reweighed within her; through this she also learns about death and separation and finds the only way to defy death: creation. The simplified Chinese edition runs just over 190 pages—slight in length yet dense in substance, a meditative work that starts from the female body and reaches toward the history of civilization and maternal memory.