Matriarch: A Memoir

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes depictions and discussions of racial violence, discrimination, physical and emotional abuse, domestic violence, marital conflict, death, loss, and grief.

“Later, a daughter will miss the sound of her mother calling her name. You can’t convince her of this when she is young. Not while that voice is so plentiful in the air. She hears her mother say her name over and over, whether as a command to pay attention or a plea to know her worth; a sigh of maternal love or a warning to be cautious.”

Tina Knowles’s lyrical meditations on motherhood establish her explorations of The Complexities of Motherhood and Family Dynamics. Knowles is reflecting on her own relationship with her late mother Agnes Derouen Buyince, while considering her own role as a mother, too. She places this poetic passage at the forefront of the Prelude to set a precedent for her coming explorations, as the passage foreshadows Agnes’s death and Knowles’s longing for her mother.

“Now I could finally stand still, and my heart beat so fast from the run, like a tiny bird fluttering in my skinny chest […] Sometimes that heart felt like it was leading me, making me run faster, outrunning boys with my long legs. And me, always following it, never going as fast as it wanted. A heart threatening to burst out and fly away from any tether—me, my family, Galveston.”

Knowles uses figurative language to capture her childhood longing for freedom and adventure. She compares her heartbeat to “a tiny bird fluttering in her chest”—a simile that conveys notions of both entrapment and vitality. From a young age, Knowles wanted to break free and to discover the world beyond the confines of her home and family. The image of the bird longing to “burst out and fly away” conveys Knowles’s innately bold and adventurous spirit, foreshadowing her lifelong journey to claim her identity and independence.

“I’d always witnessed my mother’s anxiety, heard it and seen it, but this was the beginning of me feeling that fear. Worse, it felt natural, like it had been there all along, passed down to me with all her trauma. Waiting to activate inside me.”

Knowles’s reflections on her childhood visits to Weeks Island contribute to the memoir’s theme of Resilience in the Face of Adversity.