Discriminatory Figures of Speech Rabenmutter

In the animal kingdom there are no good or bad parents – and yet in German the term Rabenmutter (mother raven) has become established to brand women as bad mothers. Elisabeth Wellershaus examines some figures of speech in which parents symbolically stand for a Eurocentric way of thinking. 

After months in lockdown, in the home office and home-schooling, friends and acquaintances tell me they have rediscovered the native wildlife. They report how much they’ve learned about the birds they’ve observed in the park, on the balcony or at the window during those long days without human contact. Wood pigeons, blue tits, blackbirds in full song, loudly chattering magpies. But regardless of how intensively they and others engage with the animals: some myths from the bird kingdom stubbornly persist. One of these is an interesting misunderstanding. People say that a Rabenmutter is a bad parent. And this figure of speech that developed as a result of the patriarchal influences in our society is still used today to describe women who allegedly don’t take sufficient care of their children.
 
Young ravens leave the nest early – that much is true. But not because their mothers heartlessly evict them. It’s more the case that mother ravens continue to keep a watchful eye on their offspring even after they have already left the nest. They protect the fledglings, but at the same time give them space to try things out and explore their environment. Not only that, but the mother raven is interested in equality: together with her mate she ensures that the chicks are cared for by both parents.
 
It’s one thing for these black female birds to be misunderstood. But the mother figure is not necessarily let off lightly in other situations either. As well as Rabenmutter, there’s the böse Stiefmutter (wicked stepmother), the Puffmutter (brothel madam). Words in which parents serve as symbolic scapegoats for the perpetuation of a paternalistic ideology seem particularly anachronistic to me. For example the timeworn concept of Mutterland (motherland), which refers to the treacherous structures of circumstances under colonial rule.
 
My father was born and raised on the island of Bioko in Equatorial Guinea. He went to a Jesuit school, had a Christian first name and sang the Spanish national anthem whenever a member of the colonial government visited to check up on the learning status and progress of the colonised “protégés”. By the time Equatorial Guinea achieved independence in 1968, he already lived in what was termed the motherland – Spain. He was only distantly aware of the discussions about whether the place he spent his childhood was “ready” to cut ties with the European matriarch and govern itself.
 
When it became clear even to the Spanish government that its time in Central Africa was coming to an end, it changed tack and adopted the Rabenmutter policy: it withdrew gracefully and attempted to rule from behind the scenes. However this process – which for ravens evolved over millions of years and worked well – went radically wrong when the first Guinean president came to power after independence. Many people of Bubi ethnicity were murdered under the rule of Francisco Macías Nguema, including my family. Regime critics fled to Europe, others were arrested or killed as well. Spanish people left the country in droves too after the president incited anti-Spanish resentment and enforced withdrawal of the Guardia Civil. The motherland was obliged to retreat to its own continent.
 
Even in our present-day world, mothers have a complex role in national contexts at times. I’m not talking about down-to-earth pragmatic types like Merkel, who as Mutti (Mum) – has created a regime of latent dependence because without her nothing would function. I’m referring more to the demanding kind: a Muttersprache (mother tongue) that expects her native children to speak only this language in situations of any importance, even though multilingual diversity has long been a social reality.

Mother tongue or fatherland – such notions have been pushing their limits for quite a while. And to carry on this imagery – both parents are breaching their duty of care in this respect in our globally networked world.
 
One specific example is the case of Michael Samir Al Ayash. The story of the Hamburg resident was all over German media in 2008. Al Ayash was born in Hamburg on 1st July 1974 and grew up there. In 2002 he travelled back to Germany after a stay in Iraq, and thus began the nationality chaos. He had spent most of his life in Germany, where he was educated and socially integrated, and his mother was German. But until January 1975 a law from the imperial era was in force, the Nationality Law of the German Empire and States of 1913, which stated that German citizenship could only be inherited from fathers. And Al Ayash’s father was Iraqi. On his return he was meant to be deported to Baghdad. Politicians acted only after pressure from the media. A proposal to change the nationality law was rejected by the Federal Ministry of the Interior as “not necessary” – even though thousands of other people were affected by this too. But there was a half-hearted solution for Al Ayash: after several applications he was finally granted asylum.
 
I was also born in Hamburg in 1974 and grew up there. And if my mother hadn’t been the only parent named on my birth certificate I would not necessarily have been eligible for the German passport I’ve been travelling around on for decades, and my unquestioned status as a Black German woman would not have been unquestioned.
 
“Do you see yourself as an African woman?” is a regular question received by Alexandra Fuller, a British Rhodesian author, at her readings. Usually, she writes in Leaving Before the Rains Come, she responds with an entertaining answer about an accident-of-biology-and-geography. She is the daughter of white settlers who fought on the British side in the civil war in what used to be Rhodesia.
 
At one lecture she thought about quoting the former president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki. In his famous speech “I am an African” he talks about how it’s possible to feel both strange and familiar in the same place. But she decided not to. The things is, Fuller’s relationship to the African continent remains more complicated due to the diversity of interests in her own colonial past and her reflected present-day experience as a white African woman. Unlike Ayash, who as a man of colour had to fight to belong at a legal level, in her case it’s “merely” about perceived belonging. And yet both biographies describe how complicated and fragile the concept of Belonging actually is.
 
Maybe it would help if the Rabenmutter could be incorporated into transnational ideology instead of the nation-mother idioms? As a symbolic prop and a reminder that rigid boundaries cannot create a sense of belonging. That feelings of belonging only develop far beyond the concepts of nation and monolingual cultural models anyway. That old classifications are no longer appropriate and it is time to let them go.