Book review | The Sámi culture was left at the feet of the hydroelectric power plants, reminds the award-winning novel in Sweden

Epic

Linnea Axelsson: Ædnan – Earth in us (Ædnan). Finnish Kaija Anttonen. Linguist Inari. 773 pp.

The Sami people culture and history have become more widely known in Finland in recent years as well. At school, for example, my own generation, in their forties, was taught almost nothing about the Sámi. We have been exposed to, for example, false information and prejudices spread by entertainment.

Fortunately, living Sámi art has made the indigenous people’s special world view more accessible to outsiders. If nothing else, the subject of art is also the Kafka-like political perpetual motion machine, which the possible ratification of the UN Indigenous Peoples Convention ILO 169 and the reform of the Sámi District Law have become in Finland.

Currently, the fact that Sámi is not limited to the borders of the area we call Finland is often lost in the discussion. The Sámi country extends to the territories of present-day Finland, Sweden, Norway and Russia, and the Sámi community is a global influence.

A wider perspective can be provided by high-quality translated literature.

Part the renaissance of Sámi culture has been a translator Kaija Anttonen founded by Kieletär Inari publishing house, which has published in Finnish especially children’s and young people’s books by Sámi authors.

Swedish-Sámi Linnea Axelsson epic twist Ædnan – Earth in us is still a special effort from a small publishing house. The wonderful work, which could also be described as a verse novel, was awarded August, Sweden’s biggest literary prize, in the year of its publication in 2018.

The August-awarded works have traditionally belonged to large publishing houses. They have not dared to publish this epic, even though 15,000 volumes of the work have been sold in Sweden.

In Finland, the work would probably be ranked out of the Finlandia candidates, because it is not in prose form. The August prize is not limited to a certain genre of literature, although the awarded works are more generally novels. The winner is not chosen by a “dictator”, but the book must succeed in the votes of literary professionals.

Ædna tells the story of a Sámi family over a hundred years. At the same time, it is a story about the arrival of hydropower in Northern Sweden and the subsequent collapse of the traditional reindeer industry.

The book begins in the spring of 1913 with a landscape that seems to have stopped, but on closer inspection, it is full of activity and change:

“The foothills / its infinity // the stone mounds of the reindeer herders // We whipped / with sticks // we drove / the wolverine away”.

At the beginning of the book, two boys are born to a reindeer herder family, who find it difficult to adapt to a mobile way of life. Nila is born with developmental disabilities and the athletic Aslat is injured when he falls from a fell. Their parents Ristin and Ber-Joná have to rethink their lifestyle because the boys do not adapt to nomadism

Swedish skull surveyors soon arrive, then the founders of hydropower plants and circuit schools, which separate the children from the Sami culture. Water is squeezed into dams and people into uniform cities. Even though it is not taught in school, the characters in the book always know that a lot has been destroyed on the way to the glowing folk home.

The work towards the end, the Sámi activist Sandra has rediscovered the traditions, but her mother Lise refuses to speak the language or remember the old ones. Despite the old shame, the culture emerging into a new flourishing is nicely described in the work. Yet many conflicts are never resolved or traumas are never healed.

The arrival of new immigrants to the north can also be included. Universal experiences that cross the language barrier when Lise looks at a young man in a cafe:

“What he has lost // and what he / doesn’t want to lose”.

Anttonen has succeeded in the translation task well, although the short, assertive verses approaching Axelsson’s joik form have undoubtedly been challenging to succinctly translate into Finnish. Many lines contain only one word.

The lack of words is indeed a trump card for the story. When you learn to read a book, you devour its eight hundred pages almost at once. After that, you have time to go back and explore the meanings.