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Popular Culture Review
Through another fraught maternal figure—the speaker in Gwendolyn
Brooks’s “The Mother”—Johnson demonstrates that apostrophe is vitalizing,
vocative, and vocalizing for the addressee; however, “Cleaning Out My Closet”
shows that apostrophic address can just as easily render its object suffocated and
silenced. If the rapper’s1 mother can be conceived of as one of the women to
whom Johnson alludes, one for whom “the choice [to abort or not] is not
between violence and non-violence, but between simple violence to a fetus and
complex, less determinate violence to an involuntary mother and/or an unwanted
child,” then the song constitutes the discontented wail of the bom infant instead
of the aborted embryo’s “mute responsiveness” (191). Interestingly, Johnson
cites The Silent Scream, a pro-life propaganda film Johnson mentions as a
counterargument.
Having given birth to the child, the rapper’s mother also gave voice to
him, and the grown infant is now using that voice to take away his mother’s—
effectively, to abort her. Significantly, the rapper does not actually lodge any
specific complaints against her until the third and final verse, after he has
already excoriated his father, his ex-wife (the object of Eminem’s verbal
violence in multiple songs), and her lover. However, the overriding goal of the
rapper, as he proclaims in the first verse, is to make his mother “look so
ridiculous now,” and her repeated address in the choms builds toward that end.
Although he catalogs a whole range of her sins, from “popping prescription
pills” to “Munchausen syndrome,” the tone only shifts from descriptive to
overtly accusatory when he confronts the issue of her voice and “that CD [she]
made” for him.
The CD in question presumably refers to the short album “Set the
Record Straight” (2000), for which Deborah Mathers, performed two songs with
rap group ID-X as a reaction to his lyrical attacks on her character2 {Market
Wire, 2000). As Brooks’s “voices in the w ind. . . initiate the need” for
apostrophe, so too does the rapper’s mother performing her song, “telling
[her]self that [she] was a mom.” (in Eminem’s words) The rapper is insolently
talking back to his mother after she has talked back to him. In contrast to the
rapper’s father and wife, who have angered him by their flight and adultery
respectively, his mother’s greatest crime seems to have been committed in selfdefense—in fact, her crime is the very act of her self-defense. The rapper sets
the scene in the first half of the third verse, citing his mother’s mental health
issues, including the aforementioned “prescription pills” and “Munchausen
syndrome” and the extreme poverty that necessitated “Going through public
housing systems,” both of which are apparently evidence of her unfitness for
motherhood. Again, at the risk of reading too much into Marshall Mathers’s
biographical background, it seems worth noting that Deborah Mathers was bom
in 1957 and would have been only fourteen or fifteen years old when she had
Marshall—likely an unintended pregnancy {Eminem born 72). The implicit,
morbid suggestion is that she should not have given birth to him. If, in Johnson’s
terms, the rapper’s mother carried through the anthropomorphization of her