MOTHERLAND, FATHERLAND, HOMELAND

One of the most emotive, endearing, and semantically loaded words in the Russian language is the beautiful word Rodina, normally translated as Motherland (also available in Russian version as Rodina-Mat’). There is another parental word Otechestvo, Fatherland, no less meaningful but in the masculine way, as befits the distinction between the fatherly and motherly love.

Motherland and Fatherland are two very proper English words, but, ironically, there is nothing like them in modern American usage. There is of course another word, Homeland, made very common after it was used in the name of the recently established Department of the Federal Government--- Department of Homeland Security. I confess that in this phrase, which is remarkably reminiscent of the Russian-coined Committee of State Security (the KGB) the word Homeland does not evoke any positive emotions whatsoever, and that is an obvious shame, because in the conspicuous absence of Motherland and Fatherland from the active vocabulary of modern-day America and with the term Homeland reduced to the rather unpleasant connotation (compare this also to the German word Geheime of ill fame), how does an average American express his or her patriotism, love of his country?

This land is your land, this land is my land,

From California to the New York Island,

From the Redwood forests to the Gulf Stream waters--

This land was made for you and me…

Apparently this originally politically-incorrect, but later “cleaned up” golden oldie by Woody Guthrie (look up my earlier entry This Land Is Your Land in this section, published on my blog on July 15, 2011) is about all that my land and your land can yield us, in the absence of the parents: fatherland and motherland.

What does it tell us about America that we do not know? That, being a nation of immigrants, even her most patriotic citizens restrain themselves from using this most patriotic of all linguistic symbols: the land of my fathers, my mother land, perhaps subconsciously reserving it for their old country, which they, or their parents, or ancestors had come from? Doesn’t it mean that a deep-seated sense of patriotic loyalty to that other place: England, Ireland, Germany, Italy, etc. (not to mention the distinctly different Oriental, African, Hispanic cultures, which cannot but perpetuate their allegiance if not to their old country, then certainly to their old culture) has psychologically blocked the acceptance of these particular patriotic expressions in the popular psyche of the “American nation”?

…I wonder…