Moeder Maman Mom

An essay written aloud by Carol Mavor

Moeder, Maman, Mom – dark, sweet, tender, fleshy, tough-skinned, stony-hearted – is fed by three secret journals bruisy with the maternal.

The first journal is Anne Frank’s famed The Diary of a Young Girl.

The second is the teenage journal of Chantal Akerman’s grandmother, featured in the filmmaker’s video: To Walk Beside One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge (2004).

And lastly, the  surprising secretly-taped journal made by my mother, Dorothy Aileen Mavor – when she was suffering from middle-life – spoken (not written) – when I was grown up: an old child. Like Akerman, ‘I always, up to now, feel like an old child.’

Professor Mavor is the Novo Nordic Foundation Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Copenhagen.