The Absence of Motherland

I’ve been at a conference in Northern Sweden, considering the impact of the absent mother in the cultural imagination; there was talk of the idea of the motherland, of mother earth, of the spectral mother who ‘haunts’ her children.

The land is often feminised; could it be that mining took from the motherland- almost like taking a child, that the mother was emptied, died, and now the dead motherland haunts the landscape, present in her absence?

A thought for the weekend