"Ukraine, Mama"

Here's a song I much liked; Dayana Kulbida, who seems to have written and performed it, doesn't appear to be a professional singer, but I thought it was very well executed, and I even liked the very simple video (I rarely like videos). You can read an English translation of the lyrics below (thanks to my mother, Anne Volokh), though as usual it can't capture the true effect of the original.

Where is my body?
I fall into the abyss
The darkness envelops
and asks me no questions;
What is your name?
Whose eyes do you have?
Did you like cobblestones?
Did you have a cat?
How to sleep in the bathroom?
And how in the hallway?
How to rescue not things, but a dog?
Was February cold?
So cold that on the skin
It left a note,
24/02.

[Refrain:]
Mama, mama, the whole land is in the hands of your son
Mama, mama, and in my veins there are both Azov and steel
Mama, mama, she's not dead already and will never die, my Ukraine
We'll believe, mama
We'll fight, mama
We'll live, mama
Ukraine, mama

You loved the wind,
You held the hand
Of the one who was running away
From death together with you
Waited for the summer
To go to the mountains and higher,
Bruise your knees and then fly
You wanted to go to the sea
So the waves and the silence
And a home you would have,
But you would have no fear
And a warm pillow at home
Your teapot and books
And the soul of your nearest
Embracing you

[Refrain]

Darkness, tell me,
Why are you destroying?
The grass is beautiful
When it's green,
Not black
Did the child's pigtails
Bother you?
Or Uncle Valery's
Left leg?
Why is there oxygen
But nothing to breathe?
Why were there three brothers
And now there are two?
And how to forget
My family's faces?
And how to remove "Mother"
From my address book?

[Refrain]

Mama, mama, I will never forget your son
Mama, mama, all the sons and daughters, their steel
Mama, mama,- we're all together
And Ukraine will never die
We'll believe, mama
We'll fight, mama
We'll live, mama
Ukraine, mama

(We translated "мам," which is "мама" in the vocative—Ukrainian retains this special case for when you are addressing someone—as "mama" rather than the more formal "mother" or the more casual "mom.")

By the way, it just recently struck me that Russians and Ukrainians make a big thing of their nation as their mother (though at least in Russian, it's also sometimes the fatherland, "отечество")l but Americans, to my knowledge, don't. We love our country, but to think of it as "Mother America" or even the land that birthed us (analogously to the Russian "родина") strikes me as quite alien to most Americans.

Am I mistaken on this? If I'm right, does it stem from many Americans' sense that this is in large part a nation of immigrants and of the descendants of fairly recent immigrants?

Or is it something else? Do other countries follow the Russian/Ukrainian "our mother" (or sometimes "our fatherland") approach, or the American approach? The Germans famously spoke of the "Vaterland," and in France La Marseillaise refers to "la patrie," but I'm not sure how alive those terms are today, and whether the link between "patrie" and "père" (father) remains vivid or is as archaic as between "patriot" and "father." Inquiring minds want to know.

Comments

[DaivdBehar]

Again, the fact that Putin remains alive is the ultimate lawyer idiocy, failure, and avoidable catastrophe. You stink, lawyers.

[Sigivald]

WiThOuT lAwYeRs, PuTiN wOuLd JuSt GeT kIlLeD lUlZ!!!!

[mbrettmoore]

You have enriched us so much with your disdain. Please, what other professions do you hate?

[Aurelius]

The author raises several good questions. What does the idiom of state/nation as parent say about cultures that employ it? Is there a difference in meaning between referring to the central essence of the nation as female parent vs male parent? And to what extent do these idioms persist in the speech of various cultures today?

It occurs to me that some of these questions are implicitly highlighted by the 80’s era song about the Soviet Jewish refuseniks, “We Are Leaving Mother Russia” — https://youtu.be/dlZ2_wGaeS0

[rsteinmetz]

Thinking of it I’m not sure it is an American Thing, but more of a British Thing. I can’t recall anyone referring to Great Britain, or any of it’s component parts as a mother or father land. Great Britain was also famously settled at various times by Angles, Saxons, Danes and Normans. It also contains Scots, Welsh and Englishmen and previously others. For that matter most of the countries most identified with Britain including Canada, Australia and New Zealand don’t seem to follow that either.

[David Bremer]

To your question about “Mother United States,” no, I’ve not heard that type of construction (unless doing so intentionally to invoke a comparison to Russia).

I’m quite sure it has to do with the high degree of immigration. In most other parts of the world (at least until, say, the last 75-100 years or so), the people there have generally been there for generations. It would be easy to think of a country as a motherland if you could probably go back a dozen generations in which your ancestors farmed the same plot as you. But in the United States (along with many other countries in the Americas), the native people were generally displaced. And even if you could trace your ancestors all the way back to the Mayflower, your family likely traveled westward out of Massachusetts or New England generally.

In fact, I suspect that if you asked many Americans what they considered to be their “motherland,” you’d get a lot of people who would identify foreign countries. Maybe less as we get further away from the old insular European immigrant communities. But still a pretty good number.

[JohnTheRevelator]

I think the reason Europeans refer to their countries a the fatherland is that it is literally the land of their fathers, forefathers etc. They are ethnostates. The US is not an ethnostate, so it would make no sense to refer to it as the land of our fathers (notwithstanding the reference to our founding fathers)

Sometime far in the future, the people of whatever state inhabits North America will probably refer to it as their father- or mother-land, and it will seem odd to the inhabitants of, say, a colony on Mars or Europa, all of whose families arrived within the past 1-200 years.

[Sigivald]

This.

(Also reminds me of the vapors people got 20 years ago about “Homeland Security”, pretending “Homeland” was “Fatherland” was “Nazi Germany!!!”

Jesus, people, the FRENCH call their country a fatherland, too. It’s a commonplace, not a Giant Tell Of Evil Intent And Badthink.

DHS might have been a bad idea [or, as I consider it, a perfectly sensible reorg of the Federal bureaucracy, terribly done and managed and subject to the inevitable bloat and mission creep of Every Government Thing], but not because of the !%$^@ name.)

[IRichie]

Beyond the immigration aspect, I think there is a streak of independence that originated in the United States which would resist the notion that we “belonged” to the country or state. With this mentality it is not the “Mother/Father Land” as much as it is “my/our land”.

[Pereours]

As Woody Guthrie put it famously: “This land is your land, this land is my land.”

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

I have heard that song was written when he came across a “No Trespassing” sign in his rambles, and was an anti-private property song.

[Sigivald]

I’d believe that. Commies don’t like private property – except theirs.

(Commies? Yes.

Per Wikipedia: “the anti-Stalin owners of KFVD radio were not comfortable with Guthrie’s political leanings after he wrote a song praising the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet partition of Poland.”

He may never have joined the USCP, but he was a goddamn Communist.)

[jorgyusa]

Since the nation is born from the American Revolution and Declaration of Independence, the people birthed the nation. Not the other way around.

[Heresolong]

Some of us weren’t thrilled when the Department of “Homeland” security was formed. Smacked of European fascism.

[JohnTheRevelator]

That name grates on me too. The funny thing is that the similar agency in most other countries is called a department or ministry of the interior, as in internal security. Couldn’t copy that since the US already has a department of the interior that manages federal lands while having no security role.

[rsteinmetz]

I believe in the UK it’s called the Home Office, although it not exactly the same.

I would suggest that Home Office is a far better name that Homeland Security.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

In a literate and honest context it would be called the Department of Defense.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

Same here; terrible name. Hard for me to understand how any “real” American could not shudder at it.

FWIW, I sometimes think the only true Americans are immigrants, legal or not. I was born here; the only choice I have conceivably made was to stay here, while immigrants consciously uprooted themselves. I am the descendant of true Americans, in that regard, but it feels a cheat to put myself in the same category as those who chose to come here.

[Sigivald]

Eh, I think (see above) that’s just trying too hard, and being too easily spooked.

Would you prefer “Internal Security”? That’s even WORSE.

Just because Nazis cared about an ethnic homeland doesn’t mean the United States can’t use the term in a non-ethnic sense in an umbrella department without Being Kinda Fascist.

(I mean, I’m am American. This is my home, from birth. Calling it the home of Americans seems … completely reasonable? That’s how nation-states work?)

[Peter]

I wonder if some of the Mother/Father terminology actually is a holdover from pre-Christian times when the land was actually seen as a mother/father deity? That’s certainly the way it’s handled in a number of neo-pagan religions that have sprung up in the last century, and has some history in those pagan religions we know something about. So it might explain the lack here, since there’s not history to call on.