Greenlandic Mothers, Danish Mothers, and "Mother Denmark": Displays of Motherhood in Mâliâraq Vebæk’s Historien om Katrine

Historien om Katrine (1982; “Katrine’s Story”) is the Danish translation, made by the author Mâliâraq Vebæk herself, of her Greenlandic novel Búsime napíneq (1981; “Meeting on a Bus”). The text recalls the tragic fate of Katrine, a young Greenlandic woman who leaves for Denmark to get married with Erik, a Danish seasonal worker. Her dreams of a happy life with him start fading as she learns of his infidelity and consequently falls prey of alcohol abuse. Katrine’s alcoholism is the reason why she is no longer deemed capable of mothering her daughter, Emilie. Motherhood, then, emerges in the novel as part of Katrine’s individual drama, but seems to acquire a more ‘collective’ significance, if one takes into consideration the other maternal figures of the book, who are clearly divided in Greenlandic and Danish mothers. Whilst Historien om Katrine has already drawn the attention of academia as a piece of migrant and post-colonial literature, less consideration has been given to its implications regarding gender roles and their representation, as well as to the theme of motherhood. My paper addresses this gap and aims at illustrating how this term – both in its literal and its metaphorical connotations – is employed throughout the novel. In doing so, I will parallelly attempt to verify whether the intersection of ethnicity and gender gives new life to long-lasting discourses that characterise the Danish-Greenlandic post-colonial context and whether it constitutes a useful heuristic tool to analyse asymmetrical power relations.