Words: Deepanjana Biswas (she/her)
The ripe fruit of humanity has slipped out of its fleshy body into linguistic abstractions through our peculiar fixation on maternity.
‘Blessed is the fruit of thy womb’ Luke, 1:42
The ripe fruit of humanity has slipped out of its fleshy body into linguistic abstractions through our peculiar fixation on maternity. Having a mother – being the child of one – they are all sensations so raw, transcendental, and intimate; that no other relations in the world seem to be able to replicate.
Motherland, mother tongue, mother earth – mother! Land and language are borne from a mother, whose loving embrace children are made to yearn for, whose gentle presence begets a duty of protection. Motherhood is now modality.
The call of the Motherland was popular in any wartime propaganda, be it the towering statue in Volgograd (named on the nose: ‘The Motherland Calls’), or the rhetorical roots of colonial empires, the land was made “mother” – as citizens were given a primordial womb connection to a soil which was progressively encroached or expanded. Even blood-stained trenches echo a birthing metaphor, tethering death to a muddy umbilicus; life and death turned into a similar guttural pool. A son’s devotion is duty, but where does this position the mother?
Though rhetorically elevated, the creator who lingers in language is structurally subordinate. Some of the oldest depictions of the word “mother” in English, such as in the Ormulum: ‘He is full of the Holy Ghost, yet in his mother’s womb’ speak of the Virgin Mary, only in relation to her child, as is common in most religious texts. This agential passivity of the “mother” is a tale as old as time.
The imagery evoked is distinctly different from a paternal endonym, such as Nazi Germany’s Vaterland which depicted military prowess as a biological inheritance. “Motherhood”, instead, ideologically demands a sacredness which inherently strips agency from what should be an actionable process. The “mother” is an accumulation of purity, her land needs to be safeguarded, her tongue preserved, her ecological womb protected. When a civilisation plunders her soil, the womb-connection renders exploitation into inheritance. It’s a wilful dream of absolute intimacy without genuine encounter: the passive heirs chaperone this mother’s existence, her being is an extended right for the child’s future.
The “wild” land is fertile, abundant, and arduously feminine, its inert surface waiting for the masculine and rationalised civilisation to process it. It’s crucial: a land must produce and not act, a passivity which yields purity. Your motherland is for you to sow, reap, and revive, for she has blessed you with existence. It’s almost exciting, isn’t it? This complete, indeterminate importance is put onto one, connecting them to some larger, valuable history. She is a window opening to some merciful light of an origin myth, disconnected from the present in the compassionate manner of relief.
This temporal gap between mother and child, with one locked in the past, and one in the present, is essential to maintain her “purity”. As Tennessee Williams says in the The Glass Menagerie, ‘Memory takes a lot of poetic license…its interior is rather dim…’, and this hazy, dim light is convenient to cloak her in the gauzy veils of purity. There’s no risk of refusal, no friction of real relationship. This narrative quietly centers the child’s experience while erasing the mother’s – she is now a fantastical backdrop. She has no story except the one the child tells about her.
The story told must make this mother completely mythic, untouchable and untainted, and what better way is there to do so except for sexuality? The “mother” is a strange calibration of purity: she must be pure, yet she must produce. However, motherhood implies sexual embodiment: thus “impure” in the historical sense of virginity. But what if this embodiment was taken away? When her state of unconditional love is undisrupted by any former desire: she is finally perfectly clean and holy, and just inexperienced enough to need protection. This paradox is best encapsulated by the idea of the Virgin Mother Mary, but it also is ever present in our relationship with the land. The motherland creates us, without being defiled by an external masculine entity. Asexual reproduction. Parthenogenesis. A singular, autonomous creativity that without self-determination is turned into conscription. You can consume mother endlessly as she is an inexhaustible promise of infinite renewal.
To end, this linguistic abstraction of motherhood is very deliberate. Culture exists not in isolation, but in the peripheral edges of present imagination. It is impossible to detangle this notion of “purity” from the consistent anxiety around female sexuality and autonomy. Mother-ing is emblematic of such, thus perhaps it was inevitable that such generative power had to be controlled through the entropic trappings of love and sanctity. A noun turned into an experience, yet isolated from its process.
Mother (n.): noun to hide the labour of mother-ing.
