When we are born, we learn the language of the one who takes care of us.

The mother tongue.

But what happens the day a parent loses the ability to speak, from trauma or illness, becomes a dumb figure? 

This is what Johanna Ekström's "Meningarna" is about, like a walk on the streets, through time.

“I write about my mother.

Now I have to go to my mother. ”

All these mom books to be thankful for.

Mothers who suffer from alcohol, illness, political decisions.

And the adult children who write about the new country that opens up when she does not exist.

I remember the mother portrait in books by the sons Erik Wijk, Peter Handberg, Peter Sandström, Kristoffer Leandoer, Magnus William-Olsson, Jonas Gardell.

When a daughter of a daughter, such as Linda Boström Knausgård or Nina Bouraoui, writes about the mother, it is more often about patrolling the border who lives next door with longing.

Want to have her mother, never want to be like her.

When Ekström writes about her mother, the

author Margareta Ekström, who just over 25 years ago had a stroke that took away her speech, she has a rare opportunity to write her way through tunnels of generations because her mother's authorship has also been devoted to mothers and daughters.

It also becomes a defense against the violation of privacy that lurks in portraying her mother so vulnerable, this woman whose controlled cool life has been taken away from her - now her own voice with authority sounds through the text.

It carries, but it also reminds of what has been lost.

And it is her daughter who decides over it now.

For this is an autofictional story

with language and words as the main characters.

What would a mother be without her language, when those were the words she lived in. Johanna and her brother nurture her through the decades, have a bad conscience, worry, and must finally make decisions about nursing homes above their mother's head.

Seeing this integral elegant woman confident among other "users" around the dining table, eating and drinking what she really - what it really is nowadays - does not like, is like seeing her little child in kindergarten for the first time.

Transplanted with a strange smell.

Abandoned?

The shameful anger is captured so well

, the anger over having lost his time witness, the anger over all the time that passes while the daughter goes and goes to her mother without coming forward.

The anger of the sick person who knows - beyond language - that she should be grateful but wants her life back. 

This is also a story about the Swedish folk disease stroke, which can cause aphasia but also personality change, but just as much a depiction of siblings, and a study of the inability to love without turning their feelings into a duty to endure.

Childhood piles up in details that echo the settlement novel "If you stay in the sun".



Johanna Ekström's writing has often suffered from a certain discomfort

, with a coquettish, guarded language.


It is largely washed away from the "Sentences", which is probably the best thing she has done.

It is a frictional emotional study of the violence in care, of the kind of immortality - man as shell - that arises when memories become inaccessible to language.

Two sharp works about the almost self-dissolving homelessness are Jenny Tunedal's collection of poems "Roses damage" and Marie Peterson's novel "You think you know everything".

Ekström's "Meningarna" becomes a sister to these daughters who mourn and lack a ghost.

"I die all the time because you can not take care of me.

You give me freedom but it's like falling through the view you capture so nicely in writing. ”