Snart fanns det ju ingenstans att ta vägen : En ekokritisk undersökning av landskap och sorg i Birgitta Lillpers Om du fick tänka dig ett hem (2010)

Sammanfattning: In this thesis called “Soon there was nowhere to go”, I investigate how relations between environments, landscapes and emotions are shaped in Birgitta Lillpers’ novel Om du fick tänka dig ett hem (If you could think of a home) (2010). I do this by looking at how landscapes are expressed in the novel and how the human bodies who live in this landscapes answers to their surroundings. The landscapes in the novel are exploited and fragmented, destroyed by production. But they are also landscapes full of traces, of different temporalities and connections. Through Volmar Frank, the main protagonist, other ways of relating to the land are made visible, in a sensual way, a way built on his longing for an inclusive relation to his surroundings. Here I also point to the difficulties with a relation built on closeness, because, as Lillpers shows, this could also be the moment where destruction begins, with the human gaze and how it values different lives. The exploited landscapes where loss is inscribed awaken strong feelings of hopelessness and grief within the characters of the novel. This comes from living with the knowledge of an continuous, ongoing loss around them, but also from the painful awakening, a changing gaze from which one cannot return. I investigate grief and the possibility to express this grief, both in a social context and on an individual level. In the thesis I have shown the difficulties that come with ecological grief, both in the acknowledgement of a grief that reaches beyond the human, and in relation to the absence of rituals when it comes to grieving the more-than-human. I also bring up the temporal problems with a loss that is ongoing. Here I problematize norms around what and who is recognized as grievable and how a process of mourning is expected to unfold. Lillpers gives no answers in her novel, neither solutions nor alternative worlds, but she raises important questions about what we do to our environments and to non-human lives. She leaves us with the question of what kind of world we can imagine, if we could think of a home? She also leaves openings to other ways of approaching the world, approaches built on reciprocity. I conclude that grief and the process of mourning could be a place to begin, a starting point for a transformative process, which I argue is necessary to access the problems we face today with destroyed environments and species vanishing at an escalating pace, with consequences for all life on earth.