“I found the complete annihilation of identity in the moment of giving birth a shattering and transcendent experience,” the author Olga Ravn says. “It strips you of everything.”
,” your story in this week’s issue, a woman is in the maternity ward of a hospital in Denmark, having just given birth. It’s her third child, yet something’s different this time. Can you describe the kind of ambiguous, uncertain atmosphere of the story?
The days after giving birth are as if you’re living on another plane. The boundaries between individuals become porous—this thing when you give birth and go from being “two in one,” then for some minutes you are one body with two heads, and then two different people. The story, I think, centers on these dizzy hours where all limits between bodies seem to disappear . The women in “Maintenance, Hvidovre” have no language for this, no way of acknowledging it.
I can’t say whether it’s a hopeful metaphor. Hvidovre Hospital is one of the largest hospitals in Denmark. There are around seven thousand births a year . There’s this feeling of giving birth inside a giant medicinal beehive, that you are simply supplying more workers to this big labyrinthian building, the state.
At the end, the narrator returns home to her family, and all is normal again. But there’s the occasional hint of disquiet. How has the experience in the hospital shifted something in the woman?
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