Maternity for soprano and chamber orchestra

Libretto by David Eagleman

adapted from the story The Founding Mothers

 

You are here because of me.

 

[on screen: mother]

I am here because of her. She gave up cigarettes in her 30s and can’t operate a video player newer than a VCR.

Tall and striking, she once played Cleopatra.

 

[grandmother]

Her mother died in her late 60s, drifting in dementia.

 

[great grandmother]

Her beauty stopped traffic.

 

[great2grandmother]

My great-great-grandmother had a tightly twisted temper.  Hundreds of memories trafficked inside of her like skittish schools of fish.

 

[great3grandmother]

Her mother was as a long-distance runner. She bore the daughter of her married coach, and treated her worse than those she bore later; it was the densest representation of her guilt.

 

[great4grandmother]

A woman blessed with tightly curled locks of hair, she grew it long. Men drowned in her pelagic eyes.

 

[great60grandmother]

We go back further now, to the Dark Ages. She spent an afternoon examining a Roman aqueduct with her children. She explained that there used to be people who knew how to make things like this…and symbols and ways of magic now lost forever.

 

[great204grandmother]

She lived in a quarrelsome village by the Nile.  Her brother died in a fight for her honor.

 

[great719grandmother]

The Upper Paleolithic. She was bitten by a fly and left for dead, but lived with the help of a man. She returned home pregnant.

 

[great1,944grandmother]

She fashioned the first flutes. She worked her whole life refining, changing the length and diameter. Pregnant with her sixth child, she was caught under a mudslide and suffocated.

 

[great4,320grandmother]

She could calm disagreements. She knew almost every one of the humans remaining in our species.

 

[great17,280grandmother]

As she died during childbirth at age thirteen, she cried through the stabbing pain.

[great76,92 grandmother]

She is a Homo erectus, rapid and hairy. She contrives new ways to decorate her braids, wrap pelts, rub sweet saps onto her skin.

 

[great241,920grandmother]

She births eight children, each by a different father.  Only three survive.

 

[great1,537,92 grandmother]

She is a sweet creature who can’t compete with the other females. She sees an opportunity in the banana trees: He is there, and his female has been bitten by a snake and is howling in pain.  My matriarch moves in quickly.

 

[great5,797,44 grandmother]

She can bark with such ferocity that she saves her pack again and again.

 

[great22,075,801grandmother]

She is amphibious. Her features are duplicated in thousands like her. She follows the mesmerizing smells to find males in beams of moonlight.

 

[great88,299,89 grandmother]

She is fully aquatic. She fears anything that casts a shadow over the top of her. She is wholly devoted to the shafts of sunlight that sparkle the murkiness.

 

[great334,281,202grandmother]

She is a small sea creature made of millions of cells. When she detects energy sources drifting past, she unlocks her opening and absorbs them.

 

[great706,406,493grandmother]
She is the first female in history.  This is the moment when gender splits into being.  She is the first to seek another half. A single cell, she is as complicated inside as a city.  She touches against other cells, shares experience, builds something new. She carries the first draft of a genetic handbook passed from female to female in an uninterrupted gift of inheritance.

Because of each of us, you are here.