Motherhood and Its Ghosts

Continuing her investigation into the archive, Iman Mersal sifts through representations of one of history’s most elusive figures—the hidden mother.

No one excluded my mother from our joint portrait. It is before me now and I can see for myself that I was with her, but she is a ghost. The picture is a burden: an assault on, and fabrication of, what I remember. It doesn’t make my mother present; it sharpens my desire to resist, to transcend her ghostliness, to rescue what the picture hides.

Im...