Nostalgia, Motherhood, and Adoption: Two Contemporary Swedish Examples

Lena Ahlin

doi:10.3390/h8010008

Abstract

This paper explores the notion of nostalgia in two recent Swedish narratives of transnational adoption: Christina Rickardsson’s Sluta aldrig gå, 2016, (published in English as Never Stop Walking in 2017), and Cilla Naumann’s Bära barnet hem (“Carrying the Child Home”, 2015). The two narratives deal with adoption from South America to Sweden, include autobiographical content, and enable a comparison between an adoptee memoir (Rickardsson) and a parent-authored text (Naumann). Both texts center on maternal images, but the analysis suggests that Rickardsson’s narrative echoes the borderland nostalgia characteristic of adoptee writing. The adoptee memoirs, being reflective in mode and restorative in purpose, occupy a borderland between the two forms of nostalgia described by Boym (2001), while interrogating the temporal, spatial and affiliative boundaries of transnational adoption. Naumann’s nostalgic enterprise incorporates the mirrors, doubles and ghosts of reflective nostalgia. These representations are a fruitful means to represent the “other” family, and the alternative lives that were left behind in the process of adoption. Ultimately, her text suggests the limitations of the autobiographical mode and illustrates the capacity of fiction to provide a symbolic register in which to articulate the unspeakable aspects of adoption.

Highlights

This paper explores the notion of nostalgia in two recent Swedish narratives of transnational adoption: Christina Rickardsson’s Sluta aldrig gå, 2016, and Cilla Naumann’s Bära barnet hem (“Carrying the Child Home”, 2015)
This paper explores the notion of nostalgia in two recent Swedish narratives of transnational adoption: Christina Rickardsson’s Sluta aldrig gå: från gatan i São Paolo till Vindeln i Norrland, and Cilla Naumann’s Bära barnet hem (“Carrying the Child Home” my translation, 2015)
This is a novel with autobiographical elements depicting the author’s return with her adopted son to the place of his birth, Bogotá, Colombia. These recent, widely read works suggest that the topic of transnational adoption, and the concomitant questions of kinship and how to establish a fruitful relationship to the past, is relevant to a large reading public. Both narratives deal with adoption from South America to Sweden, include autobiographical content, and enable a comparison between a parent-authored text (Naumann), and a text by an adopted child (Rickardsson)

Summary

Autobiography: A Nostalgic Genre

One of the key points of this study is the relationship between nostalgia and life writing. Autobiographical writing functions as one such site of self-production This idea is pertinent for adoptee writers, whose memoirs serve to counter the often “parent-centric” narratives that have hitherto dominated the discourse about transnational adoption. Women’s life writing is often dialogical as the mother’s biography is intercalated with the daughter’s autobiography Both Rickardsson’s and Naumann’s text can be usefully related to Malin’s notion of “embedded maternal narratives” in which the writer’s mother functions as an “intersubject” as the life narratives of mother and daughter intersect As Rickardsson’s and other adoptee narratives suggest, the issue of what could have been is highlighted by questions concerning the alternative life the writer had faced if she had stayed in her country of birth, or been adopted by another family. The shadow lives of alternative possibilities are central components of Naumann’s narrative as well, as indicated by the imagined lives of the birth mothers of adopted children and, in the fictional story of Ana, of orphans who do not get adopted

Christina Rickardsson

Cilla Naumann