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chapter 5 Longing and Belonging in Contemporary Finland-Swedish Literature

Kaisa Kurikka, Hanna Lahdenperä, Kristina Malmio and Julia Tidigs

Abstract

Recent Finland-Swedish prose fiction frequently problematises not only the thematic of place but also the ways in which spatiality is depicted in fiction, which in turn rais- es specific questions regarding language-spaces and links to literary traditions. The triggers for this “spatial turn” in Finland-Swedish writing include its minority status and the affect of longing to belong, since these problematics include the territorial while interweaving actual, material as well as metaphorised territories. Using works by Bo Carpelan (1926–2011), Monika Fagerholm (b. 1961), Pirkko Lindberg (b. 1942), Sara Razai (b. 1979) and Johanna Holmström (b. 1981), this essay discusses contemporary Finland-Swedish literature as a minority literature and its in-betweenness by focusing on the affects of belonging and longing. We argue that recent Finland-Swedish prose fiction can be situated in the heterotopian space of in-betweenness consisting of diverse encounters, tensions and interruptions in relation to past traditions in literary expression. By focusing on the themes of multilingualism, spatial orientation and especially female characterisation, our readings also discuss belonging/longing in terms of inclusion and exclusion.

Literature written in Swedish in Finland has in many ways been a literature steeped in nostalgia; it has for several decades been longing for its great past in the 19th century, when Swedish language and literature still had a promi- nent place in the cultural life of Finland. Nowadays Finland-Swedish literature is marginalized, and in terms of language, the Finland-Swedish literature of today can be described as a minority literature. There have been persistent questions for several generations of Swedish authors in Finland: Will Swed- ish literature continue to exist or not? Will it survive despite the fact that the Swedish population in Finland diminishes? Will it be reviewed and acknowl- edged also in Sweden? However, this minority literature presents features that are not typical of a marginalized literature, namely good economic resources, dedicated publishing houses, and a potential audience both in Finland and in

© Kaisa Kurikka ET AL., 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004402935_007 This is an open access chapter distributed Kaisaunder Kurikka, the terms Hanna of theLahdenperä, CC BY-NC-ND Kristina 4.0Malmio, license. and Julia Tidigs - 9789004402935 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 05:02:51AM via free access 84 Kurikka et al.

Sweden. Because of its status as a minority literature, Finland-Swedish fiction can also be defined as a literature of the in-between: it resides between two nations, Finland and Sweden, and between Finland’s literature and Swedish literature at large. In this essay, we elaborate on the notion of the in-betweenness of contemporary Finland-Swedish prose in relation to the affects of longing and belonging. Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg (2010, pp.1–2) have stated that “(a)ffect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon. […] Affect is born in in-betweenness and resides as accumulative beside-ness ”. At a conceptual level, therefore, affect is already tied to the questions of belonging and longing, since affects express the relations between diverse bodies and the world around them – when dealing with affects, we are dealing with encounters, connections and interruptions between different bodies, both human and non-human. According to Seigworth and Gregg (2010, p.2), affect marks a body’s belonging to a world of encounters, but it also takes place in non-belongings, or in mixed encounters that impinge in- between. Synonymous with force or forces of encounters, affect can be under- stood as a body’s capability to act or be acted upon, varying from the tiniest sensations to huge sensibilities – affect appears both as an intimate and as an impersonal force-field. Longing and belonging are especially significant for minority literatures not only due to their position in-between, but also because of their often directly or indirectly threatened conditions of existence. Questions of belonging and of community have been posed in relation to the language(s) of Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority and its literature since the late 1800s, when Finland-Swedish national consciousness was first raised (Zilliacus, 2000, p.5). This invention of “Finland-Swedishness” was above all a political project and involved imagining a community out of disparate groups and classes of Swed- ish speakers, rural and urban, in different parts of Finland, from Ostrobothnia in the northwest to Viborg near the Russian border – these were people who, until then, had had rather little to do with each other (Ekman 2011, 25). Some of the key questions still discussed today with regard to the language of Finland-Swedish literature are: How far can Finland-Swedish diverge from standard Swedish? How much of regional traits, of slang, of Finnish, can be present if Finland-Swedish literature is still to be comprehensible to Swedes, or able to somehow represent a Finland-Swedish community? Another crucial question, especially since the early twentieth century, has been: How is Finland-Swedish literature to depict life in Finland, when this everyday life is lived, to a large extent, not in Swedish, but in Finnish? Being unable to depict everyday life and dialogue in Swedish in Finland realistically, authors have

Kaisa Kurikka, Hanna Lahdenperä, Kristina Malmio, and Julia Tidigs - 9789004402935 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 05:02:51AM via free access Longing and Belonging 85 invented a new form of fiction: they have constructed a space for use of the Swedish language, which exists only in fictional reality. In contemporary literature, new strategies concerning language are being put to use. Contemporary Finland-Swedish authors have encountered the dimensions and forces of in-betweenness by expressing different aspects of belonging and longing. On the one hand, they express a yearning to belong to a larger Swedish-speaking community and a longing for a world within which their mother tongue is not neglected or threatened. On the other hand, the in- betweenness is highlighted by the fact that these authors do not belong to the community of authors in Sweden and they use a slightly different variety of Swedish, more or less marked by the nearness of Finnish. In-betweenness can also be seen within so-called Finland-Swedishness itself, since it is, in fact, a category of belonging that is constantly being performed and re-negotiated in new ways – Finland-Swedish language is by no means a homogeneous entity, since it differs both regionally and socially. The force-field of in-betweenness exists in other ways as well. Eric Prieto (2012) has argued that the concept of entre-deux (in-between) is particular- ly important in the current postmodern, postcolonial and globalizing world. According to Prieto (2012, p.1), “[t]‌he term entre-deux designates the many different kinds of sites that fall between the established categories that shape our expectations of what a place should be and that often tend, therefore, to be misunderstood, maligned, or simply ignored.” What will this dominant mode of late modern belonging in a world of the in-between mean, then, for a minority literature, which seems by definition to belong somewhere in-between? Does it mean double in-betweenness? Or a new form of belonging? Or something else, a utopian/dystopian form of belonging, maybe? The affects of longing and belonging pose specific questions when one tries to map the spatialities of a linguistic minority literature, whether in terms of language-spaces, spatial depictions or relations to literary traditions. These are the three force-fields we wish to discuss in this essay. We will concentrate on the spatial dimensions surrounding the affects of belonging and longing – it seems that recent Finland-Swedish prose fiction problematizes not only the thematic of place but also the ways in which spaces are depicted in fiction. Per- haps this “spatial turn” of Finland-Swedish writing is triggered by the minority status of the literature, or it stems from the affect of longing to belong, since the problematics concerning minority literatures and the affects of belonging and longing are also territorial problems, intertwining actual, material, as well as metaphorized territories. In our essay, the in-betweenness of Finland- Swedish literature appears as a heterogeneous territory of a heterotopian quality: it is filled with multiple variations of literary expressions. Constantly

Kaisa Kurikka, Hanna Lahdenperä, Kristina Malmio, and Julia Tidigs - 9789004402935 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 05:02:51AM via free access 86 Kurikka et al. changing and allowing various tensions, frictions and dynamics to emerge, the in-betweenness of Finland-Swedish literature seems not to be a space to escape from but an ongoing process of negotiation between different affects. In what follows, we take up issues concerning language(s) and depiction of characters, especially female characters, in Finland-Swedish novels of the in-between. First, however, we relate a contemporary Finland-Swedish novel to a previous tradition of prose writing to highlight the encounters between the traditional forms of prose and the attempts undertaken to strive towards something new.

Narrow Rooms

During the past decades one of the most persistent metaphors epitomising prose literature written in Swedish in Finland has been the expression “the narrow room”. This metaphor derives from Merete Mazzarella’s influential study with the same title, Det trånga rummet, published in 1989. According to Mazzarella, the settings of the traditional Finland-Swedish novel are based on middle-class values, and the novels are detached from the rest of society and the world by their tendency to describe a Swedish-speaking reality as something isolated. These novels also offer an exclusive and one-dimensional view of life as being imprisoned inside a small, narrow room, filled with a sort of “claustrophobic thematic”. Mazzarella’s central argument is that the numerous depictions of narrow rooms in Finland-Swedish prose are to be interpreted as expressions of the linguistic and social anxiety of a minority. The metaphor of the narrow room is interesting because it defines Finland- Swedish prose in spatial terms. The metaphor, as such, seems to strengthen the minority status of literature written in Swedish in Finland by narrowing its place to a tiny area inside a tightly-structured territory situated in the milieu of the major literature, i.e. Finnish-language literature (see also Meidal, 1990, p.64). Recent Finland-Swedish fiction, however, is breaking through the walls of these narrow rooms by finding new modes of expression and narrative structures, as several literary critics have stated (e.g. Ekman, 2014, pp.280–303; Malmio, 2013, pp.193–216). In order to highlight the tensions between the tradition of the narrow room and its variations, we scrutinize the ways longing and belonging are expressed in the novel Axel (1986) by Bo Carpelan. The novel is a late but exemplary representative of the literary tradition of the narrow room. Axel starts in 1868, when its protagonist, a boy called Axel Carpelan, is ten years old. The novel ends after Axel’s death in 1919. It is the story of a lonely, alienated, sickly and neurotic man, and it is made up of fictive diary entries written by the protagonist, combined with short passages (1–3 pages long),

Kaisa Kurikka, Hanna Lahdenperä, Kristina Malmio, and Julia Tidigs - 9789004402935 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 05:02:51AM via free access Longing and Belonging 87 related by a narrator. While Axel’s inner life is vivid and intense, his external, social life is characterised by the ongoing, poor and dull routines of everyday life of a man without money, family and profession. In his diary, Axel dwells on his inner thoughts, feelings, observations, and reflections. A recurrent theme in his diary is a reflection on his feelings of loneliness and of not belonging any where or with anybody. Axel belongs to the Finland-Swedish bourgeoisie, but he is afraid of the other members of his own social group and gender – whom he even despises. He also does not share a spirit of community with his family members. In addition, his efforts to make friends with working-class people are in vain. Haunted by his “bad nerves” and an intense longing for belonging, the only domain where he feels safe is the world of music. However, when offered the possibility of becoming a member of a group of musicians or of writing about music in a newspaper, he rejects the opportunity. He is, hence, unable to belong to any social community. In the second part of the novel, Axel develops a deepening friendship with the famous Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. He lives for the music and career of Sibelius, and he helps and instructs Sibelius in his work. Despite their friendship, they meet very seldom, and Axel continues to live a life of solitude. The novel signals its belonging to a European modernist literary tradition on many levels. Not only does it describe an alienated modern man in a frag- mentary form using the technique of stream of consciousness, but it also be- gins with a citation from Franz Kafka’s diary. Narrated mostly in first-person perspective, it is dominated by the language and the inner life of its protagonist. It is an artist’s novel, although it depicts a failed artist (see Hollsten, 2004, pp.29–31). The short passages narrated by a voice outside the mind of the protagonist function as kinds of introductions to passages from Axel’s diary. The narrator’s perspective and style come very close, however, to the protagonist’s point of view, language and focalization. This means that the perspectives offered by the text are highly restricted. Outdoor and indoor scenes reflect the tradition of the narrow room. The cities depicted in the novel are characterised by small, dark streets, and in- teriors reveal Axel’s personal discomfort: “27.12.1902. The most difficult time, from a psychological point of view, is now at hand, like being locked up in a dark box-room without any air to breathe” (Carpelan, 1989, p.229). The “rooms of his own” are full of psychological and social anxiety. The gloomy and claustrophobic spaces, depicted by Axel in his diary, obviously reflect his poor mental condition, and his life as an outsider is often expressed in deeply nostalgic terms, as he constantly laments his lost life. His psyche is the narrowest room in the novel, and as he is a member of the Swedish-speaking nobility, it portrays a social class about to disappear. As a poor member of

Kaisa Kurikka, Hanna Lahdenperä, Kristina Malmio, and Julia Tidigs - 9789004402935 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 05:02:51AM via free access 88 Kurikka et al. his own class, Axel leads a life “between” classes, because he lacks the economic and social resources needed to lead a “proper” upper-class life. This atypical position is also emphasised by his idealistic love for his maid, Rakel, to whom he shows the highest respect – unlike his peers who sexually abuse their female servants. On the one hand, then, the social and psychological space of the protagonist is highly restricted and the rooms he depicts are thick with suffocation and de- spair. On the other hand, however, Axel exists between levels of different kinds. The narrator describes Axel as being “like a shadow”, his face “like a thin mask, there is nothing underneath it” (Carpelan, 1989, p.65). His encounters with the world are repeatedly characterised by experiences of pain and disturbance, as he is unable to draw limits between inner and outer sensations, dream and reality, exposed as he is to every possible impulse, human or non-human, surrounding him:

Now he crawls in the snow, now he stands still again, now he hears voices, now they have gone and left him, he is either forsaken or free, he doesn’t know which. Here is a door being opened, an inn with long tables and benches, here there are yells like raw mist from mouths and décolletages, the dead things stumble about or stand still, observing him. They stand askew. The city is shrinking around him. Carpelan, 1989, p.65

The borders between the living and the dead, and between human beings and artefacts, are blurred or disappear for a moment. It is as if Axel has no inner “es- sence”, as if he himself is an “embodied” affect, a character put together solely from the to-and-fro movements of inner and outer objects and impulses in the spaces and places surrounding him. The narrow rooms dominate the novel with one interesting exception, a scene of special importance also in terms of longing and belonging. There is one place where Axel is able to feel free for a moment. What is more, this is an in-between place based on a very traditional literary motif, the mountain. Axel climbs a hill and, on his way, passes small houses with “inquisitive” windows, and views of Nådendal, a small city by the sea, which is “crouching down there, as in fear” from above. From the same spot, he even sees “boats cling to one another” (Carpelan, 1989, p.145). The way the houses and the city are depicted refer to the tradition of the narrow room but, simultaneously, the existence of a larger, global space is introduced by the boats, before Axel’s thoughts move to the question of longing and belonging. According to Horst S. and Ingrid Daemmrich, “the mountain top experience may hold the promise of truth, can

Kaisa Kurikka, Hanna Lahdenperä, Kristina Malmio, and Julia Tidigs - 9789004402935 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 05:02:51AM via free access Longing and Belonging 89 express the spirit of faith […], and can convey a picture of the individual at the final moment of temptation”. (Daemmrich, 1987, pp.191–192) Here, under the open skies, Axel moves in his thoughts from one form of belonging to another, and wavers between them: “The greater his longing for people, the greater his longing to be alone: that was his problem, like a weak but stubborn fever in his blood”, the narrator comments (Carpelan, 1989, p.145). His inability to belong to any social group is stated. Then, as he takes in the view consisting of land, shore, and water, the words of the national anthem depicting Finnish nature fly through his head, and awaken the idea of the nation as an “imagined community”. This idea disappears as soon as another person enters the scene. Axel has invited his beloved Rakel to meet him up there, and yet another form of longing, and hence the idea of the romantic unity of two people devoted to each other, is presented. The place that, according to Finnish literary tradition, has been the milieu of divine revelations, and that Axel temporarily saw as a national space, goes back to being the perfect locale when he realises it is the place where he will be able to live and breathe. This allows it to develop into a romantic setting, but then, the look of a working-class woman passing close by turns the beautiful set into a site of social control. All the many short moments of belonging opened up in this scene are unit- ed by a longing. While the focus on the inner reactions of a subject, the im- pressionistic style of narration and the paratextual references to Kafka show the author’s awareness of European modernism, his protagonist embodies the specifically Finland-Swedish tradition of narrow rooms, and he demonstrates that the space of the in-between is the only free space, even when it is so only for a moment.

Longing for an Elsewhere

Although, at times, Bo Carpelan’s Axel – as in the mountain scene above – temporarily strives to distance himself from the tradition of the narrow room, the novel nevertheless belongs to that tradition. It seems especially that fiction written by female authors attempts to broaden the conventions of prose literature, very often in ethical terms. The problematics of the narrow room are linked with the Woolfian question of “a room of her own”, which appears in many recent novels written by women. The metaphor of the narrow room therefore prevails in contemporary writing, but it has become thwarted: female authors may use the metaphor in literal ways, but they also sometimes modify the different strategies attached to it. As a result, the narrow room becomes a place of subversion, a tactic for expressing an alternative worldview in

Kaisa Kurikka, Hanna Lahdenperä, Kristina Malmio, and Julia Tidigs - 9789004402935 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 05:02:51AM via free access 90 Kurikka et al. terms of space: the motif thus emerges as an ethical place for potential politics. In that way, it appears as the expression of a longing for a new kind of future. Pirkko Lindberg’s novel Berenikes hår (“Berenike’s Hair”, 2000) exemplifies this kind of writing. It can be categorized as a feminist dystopia (Samola, 2013), a pessimistic account of a certain future. On the other hand, Berenikes hår of- fers yet another version of the classic figure of the “madwoman in the attic”. Although, for these reasons, the novel can be linked to international traditions of female writing, the fact that it also comments on the male tradition of the Finland-Swedish novel must be underlined. Announcing that Lindberg will develop the motif of the narrow room, her first-person narrator, a young woman called Berenike Kropp describes her dwelling in the very first sentences of the novel as: “Three and a half times four meters, four times three and a half… I have measured this room so many times and I always get the same measures, and I say: it is small, but big enough for one person…” (Lindberg, 2000, p.7).1 In this case, the narrow room is a patient’s room in a mental asylum, where Berenike lives behind locked doors. She has gone through a nervous breakdown which had been caused by a number of factors, most of which have to do with her body-image (she is an exceptionally fat woman with huge curly hair) and her minor status as a woman living in a highly patriarchal society. Berenike sits inside her room, by the windowpane looking out at the garden of the mental clinic. But she fantasises about – or feels she actually travels to – another place called Nadir, where she becomes a god-like creature sitting inside a room with glass walls. Lindberg’s novel illustrates the constant oscillation between the affects of belonging and longing. It also shows how these affects are intertwined. Bereni- ke cannot or rather is not allowed to belong to the prevailing society which upholds very narrow and strict values of womanhood and sexuality. Not being able to fulfil the demands of feminine beauty, Berenike is left with only one way out: the narrowness of her reality being the way of imagination and fabu- lation. Berenike’s fantasy of the futuristic city of Nadir is born from the sense of not belonging to the Finnish society of today. In the end, Nadir in fact turns out to be just as disappointing as Finland in terms of attitudes towards women; the name of the city per se refers to a disappointment, since “nadir” means “the lowest point”. Through her fantasy, however, Berenike still firmly expresses her longing to belong to a humane space. At the end of the novel, Berenike is back in her psychiatric hospital room which now seems even narrower: the walls have shrunk so much that they almost touch her.

1 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations included here are by the authors.

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Although situated in what is actually a narrow room, Berenike’s character is constantly exceeding the limits of her surroundings by telling us stories of her past, present and most importantly, future. Her worldview is by no means one-dimensional or detached from the outer world since her character is built with ceaseless references to the history of women, mythical stories and psycho- analytical interpretations of womanhood. She sees herself as belonging to the chain of female images imprisoned in patriarchal norms. Berenike is pictured, however, as an omnipotent woman with exceptional capabilities because of the forces of imagination, which enable her to go beyond the contours of history and present-day circumstances; she has the power to travel in time and space. In Berenikes hår, the character-narrator places an emphasis on depicting, carefully and in detail, the various surroundings of her whereabouts, whether in the fantasy-land of Nadir or inside the brick walls of the clinic. By emphasis- ing the material conditions of living and existence, Berenike Kropp points to the bodily dimensions of affect: by the same token, the sensations of belonging and longing and various emotions attached to them are inseparable from material bodies experiencing them – Berenike’s last name, “Kropp”, means “body” in Swedish. Hence, in Lindberg’s novel, the force-field of in-betweenness appears simultaneously as a material, sensory and ethical space. Above all, however, Lindberg’s novel expresses the importance of imagination and creative acts enabled by the force-field of in-betweenness; fantasy makes it possible for Be- renike to experience another kind of belonging instead of the non-belonging she is faced with in the mental hospital.

Borders, Belonging and Inclusion

While Pirkko Lindberg’s Berenike seems to not belong anywhere, the protagonist in Monika Fagerholm’s 1998 novel Diva unabashedly makes herself at home everywhere. Diva is, at its most basic, a description of a thirteen-year-old girl and her life in a fictional Finnish suburb in the 1970s, delivered in her own idiosyncratic idiom. She does all the usual teenage things: she goes to school, she hangs out in a shopping centre and goes to the cinema with her boyfriend. However, she also seduces a teacher, climbs up the girl next door’s hair as in “Rapunzel”, and eventually turns into both Snow White and the Marvel superhero Phoenix. Structurally, the novel is equally complicated, with a playful and self-reflexive use of postmodern narrative strategies, several narrative levels and a convoluted chronology. Diva has been described as narratively and thematically boundary-crossing by both reviewers and scholars (Milles, 1998; Solomin, 1998; Sohl, 1999; Stenwall,

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2001; Dahl, 2015). However, the borders themselves are just as interesting as the traverses: conceptualising them as inhabitable space foregrounds social centres and peripheries by revealing the set of rules governing inclusion and exclusion, and the discourse around them. Diva, the eponymous protagonist, starts her narrative by highlighting her liminal state(s):

Phoenix-Marvel Girl I am Diva, everything I tell you is true. Close your eyes, dream about the most beautiful thing there is. Open your eyes again. See me. The girl- woman. DivaLucia. Thirteen years old, almost fourteen. BabyWonder. The one you did not know existed. Fagerholm, 1998, p.11

Here we get a sense of both the narration and the protagonist. Firstly, she draws attention to herself as a narrator and calls on the reader to believe her – to trust her version of truth and reality. However, there is no reality outside of her narration that the reader can use as a comparison. The perspective is relentlessly personal and subjective. Second, she emphasises her existence between different states, in this case child and adult, dream and reality, saint and worldly goddess, and as a superhero. Thus, three lines into the novel, the reader has already been introduced to various kinds of in-betweennesses. Throughout the novel, Diva narrates herself between various social classifi- cations and cultural positions: she is a teenager, between childhood and adult- hood, she refuses to identify with one sexual orientation, and she transforms into fictional and fantastical characters. She also moves across social centres and peripheries, for example, through her interactions with the girls at school and her colleagues in her future as a model. Both are groups she sometimes socialises with but does not belong to – Diva is too much herself to fit in with either, but she feels affection for them and describes their limited worlds with deep irony, aimed at the discourse which groups them together rather than at the girls themselves. In other words, when she emphasises the difference between herself and the girls who read trashy fiction and dream about the men who will rescue them from their humdrum lives, she is not making fun of them. Rather, she is drawing attention to the lack of value and agency tradi- tionally associated with teenage girls. By being in-between, Diva highlights socially sanctioned positions and how they are constructed, what kinds of transgressions are acceptable and even ad- mirable. In Diva, most of the individual characters – as opposed to character- types described in groups – are somehow unusual, eccentric or peculiar, and sometimes downright disturbing, which is what makes them interesting. The

Kaisa Kurikka, Hanna Lahdenperä, Kristina Malmio, and Julia Tidigs - 9789004402935 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 05:02:51AM via free access Longing and Belonging 93 least unusual teenager is Diva’s brother: he is the best hockey player and the most popular boy at school; he writes poetry, which makes him irresistible to his female peers as well as their mothers; he also walks around with books by Sartre and Camus in his pockets; and he wears his scarf like “a certain Euro pean thinker on a certain book cover” (Fagerholm, 1998, p.79). There is nothing transgressive about being both an athlete and a poet, even if it might result in some teen angst, not the way Diva tells it. However, her brother’s poetry or his views on Sartre are not the point. Rather, he is performing a certain kind of masculinity, which she describes as “a certain kind of young man, for they are eternal” by doing the right wrong things (Fagerholm, 1998, p.79). Diva constructs a female protagonist who is decidedly separate from the norm. She describes herself as different from and as stronger and more independent than other girls her age, even if she stumbles at times. Her voice is autonomous enough to be tiresome, but it is also a refusal to be interpreted as something other than the expression of an absolute self. And yet the novel frequently blurs who is speaking, who is seeing, who is being seen, who is being referred to. Diva thus subverts the trope of the narrow room by signalling a belonging everywhere and nowhere, on numerous levels of existence and narration.

Adopted Languages: Textual Multilingualism and Belonging

Since both the Finland-Swedish minority and its literature are linguistically defined, questions of language and belonging and the longing for new, different communities are crucial to both. Since Herder, language has been widely con- sidered a cornerstone of identity, national and personal. In Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Post-Monolingual Condition, Yasemin Yildiz examines the “monolingual paradigm”, where “individuals and social formations are imagined to possess one ‘true’ language only, their ‘mother tongue’, and through this pos- session to be organically linked to an exclusive, clearly demarcated ethnicity, culture, and nation” (Yildiz, 2012, p.2). Monolingualism and its “affective knot”, to reference Yildiz, the supposedly intimate, affective and exclusive “mother tongue”, still has a hold on us even in late modernity, even though there is often a painful friction between the fantasy of the mother tongue and the linguistically diverse life stories of many. Yildiz (2012, pp.13–14), however, suggests that one should “not simply sidestep its force”, but instead try to “work through the mother tongue” in order to strive beyond it. One way of doing this is a critical reading of how languages are put to use and conceptualised in literary texts. Sara Razai’s Jag har letat efter dig (2012, “I have been searching for you”) and Johanna Holmström’s Asfaltsänglar (2013, “Asphalt Angels”) are two

Kaisa Kurikka, Hanna Lahdenperä, Kristina Malmio, and Julia Tidigs - 9789004402935 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 05:02:51AM via free access 94 Kurikka et al. novels where questions of language and belonging are crucial and are explored through textual multilingualism (i.e. the presence of more than one language in the text). The form of multilingualism in both novels is rather traditional: both authors limit foreign words to dialogue or internal monologue, and multilingualism occurs mostly on a lexical level. What makes their multilingualism interesting is in fact what languages are involved as well as the kinds of characters these languages are associated with. While Razai’s book involves Finnish, and to some extent English, the language used is not the by-now standard Finland-Swedish urban bilingual- ism. Instead, the characters include a refugee from a fictional country near Afghanistan, Samim, and a monolingual Finland-Swede with poor Finnish language skills, Annika, who both carve a place for themselves and their relationship in an acquired tongue, broken Finnish. There is no place for mother tongues in Annika and Samim’s relationship; instead, an acquired language becomes an intimate space within which they can connect. Annika consequently finds somewhere to belong, in a domestic but foreign tongue, with a foreigner who has been separated from his country and his family. In Holmström’s novel, two varieties – transliterated Arabic and trilingual Helsinki teenage slang (Swedish/Finnish/ English) – are put to use in exploring questions of belonging. The novel centres on two Finland-Swedish/North Af- rican sisters living in Helsinki, and their struggles to find a “room of their own” when it comes to religion, culture and sex. In the text, from the perspective of the girls, Arabic serves as a vehicle of imprisonment, being a language that sets up borders between what is halal and haram (the latter being the most frequently used Arabic word in the novel, appearing over thirty times, as does the word hijab). Arabic most often belongs to the sphere of religious order, and boundaries that limit the girls’ room for manoeuvre. Of course, associating Arabic with Muslim orthodoxy is neither new nor unproblematic. What makes Asfaltsänglar interesting, however, is the people with whom Arabic is associated. Not with the North-African father, who is in fact quite secular, but with the convert, the girls’ Finland-Swedish mother. The foreigner is then converted into a person who is “ethnically Finnish”, man into woman, and mother-tongue into adopted language of faith and innermost beliefs. From the perspective of the mother, Arabic is where she belongs, it is the language of her religious community. This is not something the narrator tells us outright; rather, it is expressed through the presence of Arabic in the text. And as the novel pro- gresses, we see how the two girls, in different ways, embrace the Muslim faith on their own terms, which in turn is also expressed through language. Arabic is a part of their, and the novel’s, vocabulary, to the same degree that Swedish and Finnish words are.

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Slang, on the other hand, is a rather coarse yet playful language. Although bilingual slang is not something unknown in Finland-Swedish literature, here we discover an updated version (of this kind of language that “ages” at a faster pace than standard language) and, moreover, new types of characters associated with it: a working-class Finland-Swedish girl and a Christian Iranian girl integrated into Finland in Swedish – both of whom are characters that widen the scope, in terms of gender, class and ethnicity. The difference between Arabic and slang, however, is that the Helsinki slang is fully integrated in the text and treated as a domestic variety of language – not marked as foreign with italics, not translated, unlike Arabic which is con- sistently highlighted in that way. There is a discrepancy here between the role a language plays in the story and for the characters, where it belongs, on the one hand, and the way it is marked visually for the readers as foreign, on the other. This points towards the imagined readers, and to the notion of which languages must be marked as foreign to them. Both Holmström and Razai represent something new in Finland-Swedish literature. This has mostly to do with those people they are concerned with – immigrants, native Muslim converts and their children – as well as with the new languages they bring into the novels. The examples of Razai and Holmström illustrate how at least some Finland-Swedish literature still engag- es in classical themes of minority literature such as belonging and identity. In the novels, languages are still connected to beliefs, identity and affects, albeit in slightly new ways. Simultaneously, according to Yildiz, a displacement of the fantasy of the mother tongue is taking place: in Razai’s novel, another language not bearing the traditional characteristics of mother tongue (native, perfectly mastered) still performs the task of mother tongue (affective, intimate). This is also the case regarding the Arabic of the mother in Holmström’s novel, as it is expressed through textual multilingualism.

Remaining in-between

In our discussion of contemporary Finland-Swedish prose, we have discussed some prevailing elements of a minority literature in search of a place of its own. Due to its nature as a literature of the in-between, fiction written in Swedish seems prone to activate multifaceted encounters and interruptions both in relation to the world outside and to the qualities of literary expression. Instead of totally breaking with the ties that bind recent writing to the traditions of the past, Finland-Swedish literature of today seems to stretch the borders and boundaries assigned to it. By opening up to new kinds of textual

Kaisa Kurikka, Hanna Lahdenperä, Kristina Malmio, and Julia Tidigs - 9789004402935 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 05:02:51AM via free access 96 Kurikka et al. multilingualism, by imagining new places, or by experimenting especially with female characterisation, Finland-Swedish literature is broadening the contours of the great tradition of the narrow room. Minority literatures are always faced with the problematics of belonging and longing. They ask, Where do we belong? and Are we longing to belong somewhere else? These questions are combined with the topics of inclusion and exclusion: who is allowed to belong, and based on what criteria, who is included in the territory of a minority literature and who is left outside. We have addressed these questions in terms of language, spatial situatedness and depiction of women. According to our readings, contemporary Finland-Swedish literature tends to both reuse and subvert past literary traditions and previous notions concerning women or the division into “us” and “the others”, rather than leaving them behind completely. This kind of strategy of oscillation between different poles makes the in-betweenness of Finland-Swedish literature a fruitful ground for multiple creative solutions. It seems that, at least to some extent, Finland-Swedish literature happily remains in between. When writing on in-between places, Eric Prieto (2012, p.2) argued that these places should be approached as laboratories for the way of life of tomorrow. Perhaps Prieto’s statement can be applied to the totality of a minority literature as well; contemporary Finland-Swedish literature can be regarded as a laboratory for writing the in-betweenness of today and also that of the future.

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