CHAPTER THREE UNSETTLING THE FIGURE OF THE NOT-QUITE CHILD

POPULÄRMUSIK

The majority of the narrative of Populärmusik is an extended flashback that takes place in the 1960s in a Tornedalian village in northern Sweden and is told from the perspective of a child named Matti. Each chapter describes one or two different episodes in the lives of Matti and his friend Niila, following loosely the conventions of a coming-of-age narrative. Many of the episodes are about regular everyday activities of children and teenagers who go to school, observe adults at weddings and birthday parties, and develop a strong predilection for pop/rock music. Some of the chapters include elements of magical realism: occurrences that are supernatural or so exaggerated that they seem unreal but are not questioned by the characters in the otherwise realistic narrative. Matti’s story of his childhood is bookended with a prologue and an epilogue of him as a grown-up. In the prologue he has been climbing and finally arrives on top of the Thorong La mountain in Nepal. A snowstorm is about to start, and before descending Matti feels an impulse to bow down and kiss an iron plate with Tibetan inscriptions that he sees on the ground. His lips get stuck on it, causing him to panic and recall a memory of getting his lips stuck on a door lock when he was a five-year-old child in the winter in northern Sweden. Then, as Matti remembers it, his mother had come to save him by pouring a bucket of warm water on the lock. There is no one to help him on top of the mountain, however, and eventually Matti decides to urinate to free his lips. Once he has done that, he feels that “(ä)ntligen kan (han) börja berätta” (at last [he] can start his story).¹⁰ The prologue is followed by his narration of growing up in Tornedalen.

This passage from the prologue of Populärmusik features in several different analyses of the novel. Satu Gröndahl reads it as a metaphor for the emancipation of the Meänkieli language both socioculturally and mentally for the narrator, who grew up speaking primarily Swedish during the era when Meänkieli and Tornedalian identity were associated with inferiority and racial stereotypes.¹¹ Marie Östling discusses it as an example of grotesque realism, which she traces overall in Niemi’s oeuvre.¹² She writes that as Matti bows down to kiss the plate, his mouth is a “high” part of the body, which is denigrated by its contact with the urine as the unclean fluid, and in the Bakhtinian spirit of carnival, this denigration is positive in that it can give birth to something new and better. Östling agrees with Thomas Mohnike’s claim that the passage functions primarily as a foregrounding of the ironic tone of the whole novel but maintains that alongside the humorous is the serious question of life or death, of surviving the near-death experience and being able to finally start narrating. Mohnike understands the passage and the different narrative modes in the rest of the novel as a constant reminder not to trust the narrator and argues that the content and “being true to a supposedly Tornedalian identity” is less “significant than telling a good story.”¹³ Juha Ridanpää, in turn, also reads the novel as producing literary irony, but for him the irony produces primarily sarcasm that critiques Tornedalian and Finnish stereotypes and the social processes of subordination.¹⁴

Analyzing literary irony is complex because, as Linda Hutcheon famously has argued, and as we see from the multiple interpretations of the passage above, it can have many meanings.¹⁵ Sometimes irony is not intended by the writer, and interpreting irony requires the understanding of sociocultural contexts as well as recognizing possible intertextual cues. My analysis in this chapter does not aim to provide a definitive interpretation of irony in Niemi’s novel but rather to discuss how the multiplicity and critical distance created by irony make visible a slippage in the image of the not-quite child. Hutcheon writes that irony “happens in the space between (and including) the said and the unsaid; it needs both to happen” and that, therefore, the “ironic” meaning is always “other than and more than said.”¹⁶ Because of this, irony “removes the security that words mean only what they say” and is particularly well-suited for articulating multiple voices and experiences.¹⁷ Irony is often read as a form of humor that, much like parody, provides critical distance from and access to difficult histories. Also similar to parody is that when exaggerating a stereotype, for example, in order to problematize it, both irony and parody can be seen to contribute to the stereotype instead of subverting it. Or one might argue that the problematization is undone by laughter and that, just like when the carnival ends and everything returns to normalcy, parody and irony often only reinforce social norms.¹⁸ Populärmusik also includes moments of parody, and in the film version by Reza Bagher, many of the episodes are exaggeratedly humorous. In the film version of the prologue, for example, in the opening sequence we see Matti climbing up the Thorong La mountain to the sound of “Vallmusik kring Stångtjärn,” a herding call known in Scandinavian folk music. As he reaches the top of the mountain in faster-paced jump cuts and notices the Tibetan plate, he makes an exaggerated gesture and bows down to kiss it. As he is struggling with his lips stuck on the plate, Matti’s voice-over tells the audience that this moment brought back memories of his childhood, and the camera cuts to the extended flashback on a sunny day in Tornedalen. Isn’t it ironic, both the novel and the film seem to ask, that Matti needs to go to this geographically distant space and experience an unpleasant bodily memory in order to start telling his story? It is, of course, quite canonical for narratives that recall one’s childhood to exhibit vivid memories that are caused by something that one sees, tastes, or experiences in their adult surroundings.¹⁹ The irony in Matti’s narrative is ultimately that while the story he is finally able to tell is about a childhood in a peripheral, postcolonial space, this depiction of Matti as a grown-up imagines him as a stereotypical white Western tourist trekking the Himalayan mountains and potentially desecrating a sacred space because he, first, decides to kiss it (without knowing what the plate is or what it means for the local culture) and then needs to urinate on it in order to loosen his lips.²⁰

The multiplicity of irony, its edge, in this passage sets up the rest of the novel as not only a narrative of not-quite childhood that challenges stereotypes of Tornedalians in Sweden and articulates their history with racialization and colonial ideologies but also as a text that is aware of its own privilege. As it constructs figures of not-quite children and significant moments of becoming/growing/lining up through irony, it incorporates the figure of the child to tell the complex histories of colonialism and racial hierarchies in northern Sweden and creates critical distance from the child figure as a representation of that history. This distance has a twofold function: On one hand, the novel challenges the exceptionalism in the imagined figure of the child who fights injustice by constructing moments that seem to be significant starting points for the child to do that but where nothing significant happens, and, on the other hand, it further elaborates on the figure of the not-quite child seen in other cultural texts of this book who cannot grow up or sideways according to the ideals for Swedish childhood. The novel also explores alternatives to growing up/becoming as alignment with norms as it attempts to solve the feeling of lagging behind the rest of Sweden with a temporal synchronicity with global subcultures instead. It incorporates the queer potential of the Beatles for the Tornedalian children/teenagers who start imitating and performing the image of these androgynous rock stars from the British white working class who exemplified prolonged adolescence instead of performing Swedish childhood—that is, until they grow up and line up with Swedishness nevertheless.

CHILDHOOD AND COLONIAL BORDERLANDS

The opening of the first chapter of Populärmusik sets up Tornedalen as a colonized/peripheral region while simultaneously problematizing the common use of childhood and youth as a representation of the not quite yet modernized and developed space/time.²¹ Matti describes being five years old and observing the town of Pajala’s old-fashioned dirt road getting paved for the first time. He remembers playing with the gravel and asphalt on the new road and adds ironic commentary on the promises of progress and modernization in Sweden: “Sverige blomstrade, ekonomin växte, och till och med Tornedalen hade dragits med i framgångsruschen. Utvecklingen hade kommit så överraskande snabbt att man fortfarande kände sig fattig fast man blivit rik.”²² (Sweden was flourishing, the economy was expanding, and even Tornedalen in the far north was being swept along with the tide. Progress had been so astonishingly fast that people still felt poverty-stricken even though they were now rich.) As the following chapters suggest, however, living in Pajala at that time felt like one was left out of or behind the Swedish cultural history and society and that one typically had to move away from Tornedalen in order to find meaningful jobs and a life. Thinking of the newly paved road, the narrator makes an ironic gesture toward the promise for a better future in the figure of the child, as with the new road, saying, “Fattigdomen skulle kläs i en svart skinnjacka. Det var framtiden som lades, slät som en kind. Där skulle barnen cykla med sina nya cyklar mot välstånd och ingenjörsutbildning.”²³ (Poverty would be clothed in a black leather jacket. What was being laid was the future, as smooth as a shaven cheek. Children would ride along it on their new bikes, heading for welfare and a degree in engineering.) This image of children riding their new bikes on the newly paved road recalls examples in Western literature of the late Victorian and modernist period where, as Jed Esty argues, modernization happened alongside the maturing youth. The figure of the youth who do not grow up in these works that are set in colonial contact zones, according to Esty, could be read as a symbol of the “dilated/stunted adolescence of a never-quite-modernized periphery.”²⁴ Populärmusik engages with the implications of this kind of symbolism in multiple ways as it creates ironic distance from the symbolic connection between childhood, growing up, and modernization.

One example that overexaggerates and treats with irony the image of modernization represented by children playing on the newly paved road is a passage in the first chapter where Matti and his friend Niila accidentally leave their village. After Matti has seen the new road, he wonders where it could take him and how big the world is, to which his father replies that the world ends in China. When Matti and Niila notice a group of German tourists who have come to see the local church in Pajala, they get on the group’s bus to, as they think of it, travel to China. The tourists do not stop them because they think Matti and Niila are the bus driver’s children, thus Matti and Niila are able to fly along with the group to the Stockholm airport and are close to getting on the next plane to Frankfurt until they are discovered and brought back home. This episode borders on the possible and unbelievable and is among the novel’s several events that could be read as elements of magical realism. Similarly to irony, incorporating magical realism in some of the key episodes about growing up and colonial histories functions in this novel to exaggerate and draw attention to the figure of the child as a representation of not-quiteness. Furthermore, as Maria Kaaren Takolander has argued, magical realist literature is a “fundamentally ironic form of writing that narrates the magical as real in order to highlight and critique obfuscation of the profound traumas of colonialism.”²⁵ Both irony and magical realism are often described as multivocal and as not interested in presenting a singular narrative of truth. The ease with which Matti and Niila are able to travel on the plane is narrated in this episode as completely plausible as it exaggerates the newly paved road as a sign of modernization that brings international tourists to look at objects that are important for the peripheral Tornedalian culture and provides a way for the children who are meant to bring a future to Pajala to run away. Their embarking on this adventure could signal the start of an adventure where autonomous and competent children go through something that inspires the adults to stand up to injustice/norms, but nothing significant happens through Matti and Niila in this episode. They simply fly to Stockholm and are brought back because Niila has a stomachache at the airport.

Another passage that combines colonial history, surreal events, and irony is in the chapter where Matti and Niila are at Niila’s family’s cowshed after school. Niila shows Matti the loft of the cowshed, which unveils piles of trash and, to Matti’s surprise, a gigantic bookshelf full of religious and ecclesiastical history books in both Finnish and Swedish. Matti has “aldrig sett så många böcker på en gång, utom i skolbiblioteket på Gamla Skolans vindsvåning. Det kändes onaturligt på något sätt, rent av obehagligt. Alldeles för många böcker” (never before seen so many books at the same time, apart from in the library on the top floor of the Old School. There was something unnatural about it, something decidedly unpleasant. Far too many books.).²⁶ In the midst of this excessive material reminder of the settler colonial history in the region, which feels unnatural and unpleasant, Niila opens a reader about Li and Lo, a popular book at the time that was used to teach children how to read in Swedish and promoted traditional gender roles as well as racist stereotypes, and he starts reading an extract for their homework.²⁷ This frustrates him because it takes great effort to spell out the words, and he throws the book down the stairs with a “våldsam kraft” (violent force), prompting them to start throwing down other books from the bookshelf “under stigande extas” (growing more and more ecstatic.)²⁸ This ends only when Niila’s father, Isak, appears in the cowshed and Matti runs home (Isak’s physical abuse of his children is a recurring theme throughout the novel). The children’s joyful destruction of books from the gigantic “unnatural and unpleasant” bookshelf could be read as resistance to settler colonial education, familiarly mediated through figures of children who do not want to line up with white Swedishness, but it could also be read as simply a playful activity that causes euphoria because it is entertaining.

These two examples construct images of not-quite children who seem to perform the ideal autonomous and competent childhood, but they are not exceptional or inspiring as their actions lead to nothing. In Matti’s descriptions of the school system and life in the Pajala village, we see familiar references to racialization and inferiority that other texts of the not-quite white minorities in Sweden also have articulated. One of the most cited passages in Populärmusik comes from the chapter where Matti has started school and describes the realization that as a Tornedalian he is “a bit” inferior to the rest of Sweden. Matti’s description of his school experience resembles the impact of colonial education on the minds of Tornedalians, something like the other examples analyzed in this book:

Med tiden förstod vi att vår hembygd egentligen inte tillhörde Sverige. Vi hade liksom kommit med av en tillfällighet. Ett nordligt bihang, några ödsliga myrmarker där det råkade bo människor som bara delvis förmådde vara svenskar. Vi var annorlunda, en aning underlägsna, en aning obildade, en aning fattiga i anden.… Vi hade bara oändliga mängder med mygg, tornedalsfinska svordomar och kommunister.

Det var en uppväxt av brist.… Vi var inga. Våra föräldrar var inga. Våra förfäder hade betytt noll för den svenska historien.… Vi kunde inte konversera, inte deklamera, inte slå in presenter eller hålla tal. Vi gick med tårna utåt. Vi bröt på finska utan att vara finnar, vi bröt på svenska utan att vara svenskar.

Vi var ingenting.²⁹

We gradually caught on to the fact that where we lived wasn’t really a part of Sweden. We’d just been sort of tagged on by accident. A northern appendage, a few barren bogs where a few people happened to live, but could only partly be Swedes. We were different, a bit inferior, a bit uneducated, a bit simple-minded.… All we had was masses and masses of mosquitoes, Tornedalen-Finnish swear words, and Communists.

Ours was a childhood of deprivation.… We were nobody. Our parents were nobody. Our forefathers had made no mark whatsoever on Swedish history.… We were useless at conversation, reciting poems, wrapping presents, and giving speeches. We walked with our toes turned out. We spoke with a Finnish accent without being Finnish, and we spoke with a Swedish accent without being Swedish.

We were nothing.

This passage certainly articulates internalized colonization experienced by Tornedalian people, and it draws explicit parallels with the common rhetoric in colonialist developmental historicism, which saw colonized peripheral spaces as less developed than areas in the center of the progress of European modernity.³⁰ After this description of his childhood as deprivation, Matti concludes that in order to “become human,” one simply has to move away from Tornedalen. As people throughout his life empty the village like “en flyktingvåg” (a wave of refugees), they feel like it is “frivillig. Ett osynligt krig” (voluntary. A phoney war).³¹ Becoming human here, of course, means becoming Swedish, and the temporal lag inherent in the idea that one is not yet but can become Swedish/white/human refers to the normative and colonialist understanding of progress and modernity.³² The ironic tone underlying these passages articulates multiple ways of understanding this colonial erasure. On one hand, Matti’s narrative describes a trauma of erasure that features in several cultural texts about Tornedalian or Sámi memories in later decades of the twentieth century, where the new generations often have no memory or knowledge of that identity because memories have been suppressed for so long.³³ On the other hand, that one can become human/Swedish simply by moving south is a poignant example of privilege of the minorities who can pass as white Swedes. At the end of this same chapter, adult Matti’s bodily presence disrupts the narrative of his childhood. He describes himself sitting in a train near Stockholm, on his way to his job as a teacher, and how for a moment he lifts his eyes from writing in a notebook that he had started in Nepal. He looks out of the window and eventually “(hans) blick vänder åter till Tornedalen. Kapitel fem” ([he] switches [his] attention back to Tornedalen. Chapter five).³⁴ This kind of turn to the adult narrator’s physical presence does not occur elsewhere in the main chapters of Populärmusik, and it functions here as an emphasized reminder that this story is written by adult Matti, who can easily pass as a white Swedish man and who might be sitting next to the readers in a train in the metropolitan area of Sweden.

ACCELERATED GROWING UP

A chapter that tells the most surreal story of the novel constructs an image of an accelerated growing up that functions as an ironic take on growing up and out of not-quiteness. It is a hot summer day and Matti goes into an old shed by their school building and hides there from the school caretaker. He finds an old furnace and climbs into it. Imagining that it feels like being a fetus, as if the furnace is hatching him and he is its child, Matti tucks his chin to his knees. He feels both safe and ashamed because he is doing something that is not allowed, “förrådde någon, min mor kanske” (betraying someone, maybe [his] mother.)³⁵ After the caretaker has come in to look for him and has closed the furnace door, Matti realizes he is stuck and that no one can hear him. For the following couple of days, his body hurts and he is thirsty, until he starts losing the sense of time and notices that the days are getting shorter and colder. He sleeps through most of the winter, and once spring arrives, he feels that his clothes have gotten too small for him. He continues to grow as the years go by, and his body fills the furnace until there is no more space left. One night the furnace cracks open like an egg, and he pushes himself out. He looks at his body and sees that he has grown up. As he walks through the village in the winter evening, he finds four young boys sleeping at a crossroad. After seeing that one of the boys is himself, Matti lies down next to them to wait for them to wake up.

This passage, which could be read as a dream or as a surreal/magical event, creates ironic and parodic distance from different depictions of growing up. It reimagines the nostalgic longing to go back to the womb, which in psychoanalytic theories has often been described as a frequent starting point for nostalgia—a place where everyone has been but cannot return to.³⁶ Instead of producing nostalgia for Matti, however, the passage sees him actually reliving the growth in something similar to a womb, where he can survive without food or water, a place he can leave only after he has grown enough to make it burst open. It also reflects on Matti’s desire to grow up quickly so that he can “become human” after he has left Tornedalen; indeed, this episode accelerates his growing up to the point of absurdity. Drawing parallels with hatching an egg, the passage imagines a blurring of boundaries between Matti and other materialities—the animal world and the matter of the furnace are both included in this fantasy as the environment that gives birth to him. When he is climbing into the furnace, Matti describes the smell of metal, oxide, and old fires, and he feels the soot and clumps of rust with his fingers. As he gets stuck in the furnace and his body starts filling it, his human body receives nutrition from the matter of the furnace; he does not need food or water as he is in there for several years. At the same time, once he is out of the furnace, he is not like a baby or a duckling or a machine, but instead he sees on his body signs of having grown up and of no longer being a child. Differently from the traumatic prolonged childhood imagined through the blurred boundaries between the child and the dog in Svinalängorna, discussed in chapter 2, then, Matti’s experience of blurred boundaries between the child and the more-than-human world does not prolong his childhood but instead accelerates his growing up. In the following chapter, as he then goes back to his child body and the regular narrative of the novel continues, moving slowly toward his growing up, the expected temporality of growing up is restored. This episode, however, briefly disrupts that temporality to imagine alternatives to the privileged spaces of growing up or sideways as the Swedish child in the space that at the same time stretches out and dissolves the material boundaries of the child’s body. That this alternative reads as something fantastical, surreal, or dreamlike suggests that a different kind of growing up is experienced as precisely that: impossible.

Bagher’s film version of Populärmusik makes some significant changes when adapting this episode while it, too, emphasizes the speed of growing up in the furnace. First, instead of Matti (Niklas Ulvarson), it is Niila (Tommy Vallikari) who climbs into the furnace, and once he emerges out of it, both Matti and Niila are several-years-older teenagers, played by older actors (Max Enderfors and Andreas af Enehielm). The furnace sequence thus provides the film with a convenient transition to change the actors and accelerate the characters’ growth from young children to teenagers. The sequence itself stands out as a disruption not only of the narrative but also of the largely realistic comedy of the film. The opening shot of the sequence shows Niila in the darkness of the furnace, and then the camera cuts to fast-paced shots that cross-cut Niila as a child, the Northern Lights, reindeer, the ice breaking, and the rushing waters of the Torne River, Niila as a teenager, and Matti as a teenager writing on a typewriter about the time when he kissed Niila to show him how a girl had kissed him earlier. “Smaken av en pojkes kyss” (The taste of a boy’s kiss) is a line that is taken from the novel and functions in the film as a way to emphasize that these children are not only queer in the sense that they deviate from normative ideas and expectations in the Tornedalian community but potentially also referring to their sexual orientation.³⁷ There is no explicit commentary on that in the novel or in the film version, and while Matti has a few sexual encounters with women, neither version attempts to categorize their sexuality in any strict way.

The incorporation of snap zoom and fast-paced cuts in the furnace sequence exaggerate the speed at which Niila grows older. With this, the film both visualizes and embelllishes the image of Niila as a not-quite child who, similarly to the child figures analyzed in the other chapters of this book, realizes that while childhood might be the only time/space where one does not have to have a specific identity category, growing up also signifies a hope to escape not-quiteness, even if that means lining up with the dominant culture. Thus, while keeping its irony and parody, the film, too, refers to the serious impacts of colonial history: In one of the later sequences of the film version, when Niila impulsively leaves the group of teenagers to hitchhike to Stockholm, he says that Pajala is not even located in Sweden because anyone living north of Luleå is not really included in the Swedish society. The speed of growing up in the furnace visualizes the experience of children who feel as if they are already taking on a role of an adult because childhood as a safe or cozy space is a privileged position they do not possess; at the same time, the speed of it gestures toward an impossibility of actually growing up to line up. For Matti in the novel, the furnace provides an expanded moment that temporarily resists temporal, spatial, and biological boundaries and imagines an acceleration of growing up as something fantastical, but for Niila in the film, there is no going back to the predictable trajectory and temporality of growing up.

In addition to implying the impossibility of growing up and lining up, this fantastical/magical episode is among several passages in the novel that undo normative lines and categories, particularly when it comes to gender and sexuality. Magical realist texts, as shown by Wendy B. Faris and others, lend themselves particularly well to questioning conventional understandings of identity and spatiality, enabling contradictory forces and lines to coexist.³⁸ Another episode that parodies and challenges normative images related to growing up through its use of the magical in Populärmusik is Matti and Niila’s encounter with Russi-Jussi, a peddler who was born in Finland when it was still part of czarist Russia (before 1917) and whose androgynous body is the cause of fear and disdain in the village. Matti and Niila decide to visit Russi-Jussi as the last resort to help Niila get rid of his nightmares, which feature his dead grandmother trying to kill him and which leave him with scratch marks on his throat after he wakes up. The chapter includes Russi-Jussi’s origin story, which explains his androgynous body with a Sámi spell. As Matti narrates it, Russi-Jussi was taken to a Soviet labor camp after he had moved to Soviet Russia because he had believed in the promises of communism (as do several other Tornedalian characters in the book); he met other Tornedalian and Finnish communists who were all sent to a labor camp because they were considered to be foreign spies, and among them was a Sámi man. Before the latter died, he advised Russi-Jussi to freeze his body, break off his left small finger, which has all of his powers, and swallow it. Following these instructions, Russi-Jussi was able to turn himself into a woman and escape from the prison. His trip back to northern Finland and eventually Swedish Tornedalen, however, lasted a long time and, therefore, he was not able to turn himself completely back to a man’s body. Instead, Russi-Jussi looks mostly like a man but often wears women’s clothes and, at times, has a woman’s body. Jussi’s advice to Niila that he should cut off his grandmother’s penis when he sees her again and the subsequent hallucination that Niila and Matti share, where Niila fights his grandmother’s ghost and is eventually able to cut off her penis, create another ironic/parodic image of common understandings of childhood development during the twentieth century: Marie Östling reads this chapter as an example of the grotesque in gender and sexuality, as a depiction of Freud’s unheimlich and penis envy, and as a reference to folktales where, in order for the hero of the tale to go through transformation and grow up, the old has to be buried.³⁹ In line with the rest of the novel, however, the description of Matti and Niila’s encounter with Russi-Jussi is ironic as it doubles the stereotypical depictions of the Sámi as spell casters, Tornedalians and Finns as supporters of communism, and people with non-normative gender identities as “under a spell” to create critical distance from such thinking and also to draw attention to the spreading of these ideas among the minorities themselves.

Along with this construction of irony and parody, the chapter’s ending, where Matti says that after their fight and victory over Niila’s grandmother’s ghost both of them got their first pubic hairs, further parodies the idea that in order to grow up and take on the normative features of one’s assigned gender/sexuality, one needs to metaphorically castrate the phallic mother. While the novel does not make any explicit references to the popular psychoanalytic theories of the twentieth century, it complicates gendered expectations for growing up as a Tornedalian man in Sweden based on normative/linear assumptions. Instead, as I demonstrate in what follows, the novel’s focus on the subversive potential of pop/rock music, particularly of the Beatles, queers those expectations on the child. It constructs a more cosmopolitan lining up that is removed from the expectation to align oneself with being Swedish or Tornedalian. As the title of the novel suggests, popular music becomes localized in Tornedalen through Matti and Niila, but the novel also plays with the idea that their growing up and lining up is a shared experience with the rest of the white Western world.

POPULAR MUSIC AND QUEER NOT-QUITENESS

In its exaggeration and exploration of alternative ways to imagining adolescence as a time and space of becoming, Populärmusik incorporates the history and impact of pop/rock music, particularly the subversive potential of the Beatles. Starting from the first chapter, where Matti ironizes the symbolic connection of childhood and modernity with the image of a newly paved road and accidentally leaving Pajala, he also describes going to his sister’s room and playing her Elvis Presley record for the first time. Matti associates the sound on the record with the road-building machines: “Det var framtiden. Så där lät den. Musik som liknade vägmaskinernas råmande, ett slammer som inte tog slut, ett larm som ledde mot horisontens purpurröda soluppgång.”⁴⁰ (This was the future. This was what it sounded like. Music like the bellowing of the road-building machines, a never-ending clatter, a commotion that roared away toward the crimson sunrise on the far horizon.) After Niila receives the Beatles record from his relatives who live in the United States and have come to Niila’s grandmother’s funeral, Matti and Niila become infatuated with the music, start imitating the performances of the Beatles, and later form a band playing their covers. The Beatles record gives them access to Matti’s older sister’s friend group and brings them fame in school and the town. The first time Matti and Niila listen to the record, Matti describes the experience as magical, as if there were no more oxygen and they were thrown into the ceiling, feeling the rhythm of music pulse through their bodies. In the same evening, they are watching the ice breakup of the Torne River, an annual sight important in Tornedalian culture. Matti describes the ice that is about to break as something that one cannot quite see but feels instead, as there is a general rhythm of the water bulging, about to break free, surrounding one like music: “Och till sist märker man hur bron börjar röra sig, den lossnar, den börjar stånga sig uppströms älven som en kolossal isbrytare, man står i fören medan den stampar sig fram genom packisen med fruktansvärd kraft i begynnelsen av en lång och äventyrlig resa.—Rock ’n’ roll music! skriker jag till Niila. Han fattar.”⁴¹ (And then we feel the bridge getting dragged away from its foundations, it’s melting away, it starts to swing around upstream like a colossal icebreaker, we stand forward as it barters its way through the pack ice, enormously powerful, at the start of a long and adventurous journey. “Rock ’n’ roll music!” I yell to Niila. He knows what I mean.)

Connecting the experience of rock music and the ice breaking of the Torne River makes the sound of the Beatles, who have represented cultural globalization as well as subversive youth culture, feel familiar and localized, all the while parodying the localization of this music and its role in the lives of the Tornedalian children. Though they also listen to and mimic Elvis, it is the novelty and modernity associated with the Beatles that becomes important in feeling a sense of synchronicity with the “rest of the world,” which had not been the case before. “Det var långt mellan Pajala och världen” (It was a long way from Pajala to the rest of the world), writes Matti when he recounts eventually watching Elvis Presley’s several-years-old concert on Swedish television.⁴² While the lateness of the Presley concert refers to the feeling of lagging behind, which is common for depictions of marginal, (post-)colonial spaces, the Beatles music provides a sense of shared modernity. Performing the image of the Beatles, however, makes the resistance to normative lining up more cosmopolitan; it feels like a shared and synchronous experience with global subcultures, an alternative to the understanding that the Tornedalian minority is temporally behind the progress of Swedish modernity and that only after they have grown up and left the village have they become human. In its humorous and ironic tone, the novel creates multiple episodes where the Tornedalian teenagers mimic and perform the image of the Beatles. At first it is just Matti and Niila in Matti’s shed, using random items as makeshift guitars and microphones. Together with two other classmates, they form a band, mimicking the motions and sound of the Beatles. Though their first performances are not musically successful, they become popular among the local youth, receiving screams from teenage girls that mimic the famous screams that the Beatles received on the Ed Sullivan Show and after, and earning disdain from some in the older generations (particularly Niila’s father, who does not allow him to play). Differently from a common tendency in theories about subcultures and political mobilization to remain “trapped in the oedipal framework that pits the subculture against the parent culture,”⁴³ as Jack Halberstam argues, however, Populärmusik goes beyond imagining subculture, specifically pop/rock music as the binary of adolescence and adulthood. For Matti and Niila, imitating the performances of the Beatles and learning to play rock music functions as a way to imagine alternative ways of being Tornedalian.

More specifically, their love for music prompts Matti and Niila to discuss the gendered meaning of rock music in the Tornedalian community and what playing music might say about their sexuality and gender. First, Matti describes how Tornedalian culture only values creativity that is efficient and beneficial. This includes pastimes like fishing or wood carving, which, as Matti observes, are expected from men in Tornedalen. He describes how the typical Tornedalian men need to always have more housework or renovation tasks because with too much free time they become violent and unpleasant toward their families. Doing music is not considered “useful” in Tornedalian culture, even though when the band plays at Matti’s grandfather’s birthday party, the guests are emotionally moved and ask them to play more. Niila’s father never accepts his playing music, and Matti and Niila discuss whether playing music would be considered knapsu, a Tornedalian word for a “feminine man.” Matti eventually concludes that while rock music is more often played by men and that it looks “aggressivt manlig” (aggressively manly),⁴⁴ it is still probably knapsu because it is not equal to a day of hard physical labor in the forest. Throughout the novel, it is older men in Matti’s life who use that word to criticize the changing society, and as Matti puts it, one of the most important goals of a Tornedalian man was to prevent being called knapsu. In the end, Matti concludes that because they cannot stop playing music, they are just going to be knapsu.

Focusing on the music and image of the Beatles allows the novel to explore the possibility of growing sideways, which has nothing to do with the privileged image of the Swedish child. Being in their early twenties when they made their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, writes Sasha Geffen, the Beatles exemplified a queer resistance to growing up that was not just a phase of adolescence but something that lasted longer.⁴⁵ The rock musical A Hard Day’s Night, as Geffen demonstrates, focuses on the Beatles as “four men in their twenties who refused to grow up and enter the straight world.”⁴⁶ The androgynous sexuality of the Beatles and Beatlemania both “posed a threat to traditional American masculinity” and challenged gendered expectations; they were “boys emulating girls who have grown tired of gender scripts.”⁴⁷ Performing this image allows Matti and Niila in Populärmusik to imagine an alternative to growing up and out of not-quiteness, and their mimicking of the androgynous pop stars also disturbs the problematic depiction of Russi-Jussi’s androgynous body. This alternative prolonged adolescence promises an affiliation/synchronicity with something that is more cosmopolitan. Through the novel’s ironic and parodic tone, however, the reader is reminded of the slippage in this alternative—namely, that lining up with this cosmopolitan identity actually just means lining up with whiteness. While significant in contributing to queer subcultures, the Beatles music did, as Geffen points out, borrow much from Black musicians, whose new forms of music were not able to reach broader audiences because of the racist structures of American society in the 1960s, and the Beatles’ “gender transgressions arose not from direct innovation but from the repackaging of black musical idioms into a group of pretty white English boys.”⁴⁸

As we find out in the epilogue of the novel, most of the children from Matti’s village have grown up and lined up with white Swedishness. The voice of adult Matti, who lives near Stockholm, where he is writing his story, tells the reader that he sometimes goes back to the Pajala village when homesickness gets too strong. He looks over the landscape and reminisces about the many children who at one point “shared his world” and have now become engineers, business managers, or Swedish teachers in Sundbyberg (near Stockholm) like himself, “med en saknad, ett vemod (han) aldrig helt lyckats bemästra” (with a longing, a sadness that he has never been able to overcome).⁴⁹ This ending suggests, then, that despite the alternative potential of lining up with the queer androgynous pop band, Matti has, just like his peers from Tornedalen, lined up with white Swedishness, and his longing and sadness are the results of the assimilation process that has successfully erased something in his identity.

VÅRT VÄRDE

Similarly to Populärmusik, through its child figure Katarina Kieri’s novel Vårt värde explores the impact of not-quiteness on the generation that is removed from the more explicit and violent colonialist practices and ideologies of northern Sweden. The narrative is told from the perspective of a child whose parents have left the Finnish-speaking villages in Tornedalen to live in the Swedish-speaking towns but who frequently visit their Finnish-speaking relatives and villages. The narrator of Vårt värde describes, quite conventionally for accounts of those who have grown up between two or more cultures, how she feels foreign in both Finnish-speaking villages and in the Swedish towns where she has spent most of her life. Because of her parents’ history with forced assimilation, she does not speak Finnish/Meänkieli and is not able to participate in conversations with some of her family members and friends; she also registers Swedish television and radio programs as mocking Tornedalian people, not really understanding their culture, where exactly Tornedalen is located, or anything about the colonial history in northern Sweden. The child narrator conveys several times that her parents’ childhood was drastically different from hers because her parents were subject to oppression at school and had to work from an early age, thus not really having a childhood at all. With this comparison of their childhoods, the narrator—who describes being able to play instead of having to work at a young age, have money for dental work, or be able to simply walk around and pretend to be a Swedish pop singer—draws attention to the precarious childhoods of the past and how that experience has changed for many by the 1960s and 1970s. While her life differs significantly from her parents, who had “morbröder som sålts på auktion i seklets början” (uncles who were sold on the auction in the beginning of the century),⁵⁰ she is also aware that the shame and inferiority have been passed on to her body, which includes feeling that she is not quite suitable or worthy (a word that figures prominently throughout the novel) enough for either of the cultures.

Differently from the other novels and films discussed in this book, which construct the figure of the not-quite child through mostly prosaic descriptions of the struggles and everyday life of these minorities, the narrative of Vårt värde is more poetic. Instead of a straightforward plot, each chapter combines short episodes of the narrator going on trips with her parents, listening to music, or talking to her peers at school with more philosophical reflections on her identity, family, colonial history in Tornedalen, and more. Repetitions of sentences like “Vi visste vårt värde” (We knew our worth) and variations of it recur in multiple passages throughout the novel. Another significant formal difference of this novel is that the narrative voice of the protagonist often uses first-person plural, thus also constructing a version of a we-narrative or a we-novel. The child narrator also refers to herself as “I,” but the speaking subject is often “we,” including phrasing like “our mothers, our fathers, our worth, our cousins,” even when there is no implication of there being more than one person whom the possessive pronoun “our” refers to.⁵¹ The plural subject has been a recurring feature in many literary works, and it has become common in postcolonial fiction, according to Rebecca Fasselt.⁵² In Vårt värde, as I demonstrate in the following, the construction of a plural child figure reorients the image of the heroic or suffering child to explore the histories of marginalization and settler colonial history in northern Sweden. Instead, it imagines the not-quite child as a pluralized figure who might simultaneously be growing up, sideways, and other directions. First I situate the novel’s depiction of growing up as something that draws parallels to the other works discussed in previous chapters in that it aims to make visible the racialized white Tornedalian body (in this novel emphasizing that it is Finno-Ugric) while continuing to be aware of the privilege of a generation of children who can more easily pass as Swedish. Then I focus on the plural narrative and the construction of the plural child to hold the multiplicity of entangled colonial histories and multidirectional growing as alternatives to the exceptionalism that is often present in the ideal image of the Swedish child growing up and sideways.

GROWING UP FINNO-UGRIC

Vårt värde imagines a child with Tornedalian/Finnish heritage who is already passing as Swedish and that it is, in fact, growing up that makes her look visibly different. The narrator articulates a similar ironic ambivalence toward the promises of modernity that we saw in the narrative of Populärmusik. Going to the harbor with her parents, she observes that “det var ingenjörernas tid, det var förhoppningarnas och det oövervinnerligas tid” (it was the time of the engineers, the time of hopes and of invincibility),⁵³ their fathers looking over the harbor entrances and getting teary-eyed: “De såg det moderna, det stabila och oändliga, de såg att vi kunde fylla våra kundvagnar till brädden på lördagarna på Konsums storköpsbutik.”⁵⁴ (They saw the modern, the stable, and the infinite, they saw that we could fill our carts to the brim at the Konsum supermarket.) At any moment, however, the narrator can feel like none of the hopes in engineering and modernity can prevent them from feeling that everything is foreign to them.⁵⁵ Instead of finding comfort in the changing era, the narrator increasingly feels that the time and materiality of growing up become entangled with the postcolonial era (she is both unsure about this term but also feels like it is unavoidable in her body). “Gruvstrejken var över för länge sedan, men inte vår egen pubertet, och hur gärna vi än ville kunde vi inte backa ur vare sig den eller den postkoloniala era som vi alla hade trätt in i.”⁵⁶ (The mine strike had been over for a while, but not our own puberty, and however much we wanted to, we could not back away from that nor the postcolonial era that we all had joined.) However, while both the postcolonial era and puberty signify a temporality that includes borders and lines, of moving between different states, and of becoming someone else (no longer colonized in the same way, no longer a child in the same way), the novel depicts those lines as blurred and not always visible, even though they stick on the body of the narrator.

The entanglement of postcolonial time and puberty makes the differences that the narrator observes in her body feel more significant. She suspects that it is the Finnish in her that had already “gett oss breda höfter och en galopperande pubertet” (given [them] wide hips and a galloping puberty).⁵⁷ As she is growing up, she realizes that her “Finno-Ugric features” do not have the same “charm” for people around her that they might have had during her childhood. Without claiming a single distinct ethnic background, the narrator draws here from racialized stereotypes regarding Finno-Ugric peoples, a descriptor designating several million people who speak Finno-Ugric languages that differ significantly from Indo-European languages. In the Nordic region this includes Finnish-, Tornedalian-, and Karelian-speakers and the Indigenous Sámi people. While the connection of these diverse groups of people is linguistic and, as I have brought out earlier in this book, they have been impacted by differing levels of racialization as well as success in performing whiteness, all of these people have, as Johanna Laakso puts it, “had to cope with their otherness in relation with dominant European cultures a feeling of being different and alone.”⁵⁸ They have all been, and continue to be, colonized, and in the various theories of race biology during the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, “Finno-Ugric” also described the people who were categorized as inferior to the Nordic race. Both the Sámi people and the Tornedalian-speakers (whose language is closely related to Finnish) were in the earlier theorizations lumped together as inferior, and both groups experienced skull measuring and other physical anthropological studies. While the official subscription to the theories of racial biology ended during World War II, the connotation of Finno- Ugric still carries a meaning of strangeness or difference, which has certainly been used as a source of pride but also continues to be seen in opposition to Europeanness; and as discussed in earlier chapters of this book, the understanding that Europeanness equals whiteness, Westernness, civilization continues to have a significant role in the postcolonial world. Even though she is white, drawing from these racial ideologies, the narrator of Vårt värde describes her “Finno-Ugric body structure” as different from the bodies of white Swedes: “Våra breda höfter, vad skulle vi med dem till? Våra finskugriska anletsdrag, till vilken nytta?”⁵⁹ (Our wide hips, what should we do with them? Our Finno-Ugric features, for what benefit?) She describes these features and the accompanying bodily feeling of inferiority as passed on through generations, the “böjda nackar och breda fötter var inga tillfälligheter, vi hade ärvt dem i rakt nedstigande led, liksom benstammarna” (bent necks and wide feet were no coincidences, we had inherited them in a directly descending line, just like the skeletal structure).⁶⁰

As with the other cultural texts analyzed in this book, it is the time and space of childhood that has the capacity of holding not-quiteness as both/and, where one’s differences might in some ways be valued and provide alternatives to lining up with one specific identity category. Once one notices signs of “growing up,” these alternatives are no longer available, or they do not seem favorable. The narrator describes how part of their attractiveness as a child starts to disappear as soon as they get their first glasses and that even their mothers no longer point out “värdet av starka ben eller inre kvaliteter” (the value of strong legs and inner qualities) and instead seem to favor the “bleka och pinnsmala grannflickorna” (pale and skinny neighbor girls).⁶¹ The slippage between the biological process of growing up and the inability to fully line up is thus felt bodily as their mothers’ suggestions that they should perm their hair like Swedish teenagers, or their brothers’ expectations that they learn Finnish result in a confusion over “alla långa och korta vokaler som rann in i oss och inte heller med allt mensblod som envisades med att rinna ut ur oss” (all the long and short vowels that ran into [them] or with all the menstrual blood that persisted to run out of [them]).⁶² Thus, while the narrator is able to pass as a white Swede, as they are growing up they are expected to further line up with Swedishness, but they feel there is something in their body that hinders them from doing so. The gendered markers of puberty on their body become signs of otherness, like in Ingenbarnsland, where the development of breasts is, in the child’s eyes, connected to stereotypes of Finnish-speaking women. Though less explicit in their commentary on gendered expectations among Tornedalian communities than the narrative in Populärmusik, the narrator mentions, alongside the descriptions of not fully lining up with Swedishness, that it is impossible to live up to the “manliga ideal” (male ideals) that they have always held high.⁶³

While the child in Ingenbarnsland, as discussed in chapter 2, attempted in the novel’s plentiful passages of excrement and other bodily fluids to abject the forced lines of Finnishness, the narrator in Vårt värde simply states that it is not really possible to discard some matter. In the last chapter of the novel, she describes the bodily experience of this inevitability: “Vi hade burit så mycket, det hade lagts så mycket på våra axlar, hela gränslinjen med Torneå och Muonio och Könkämä älvar, och vad skulle vi nu med allt det där fostervattnet till när ingen ändå ville veta av det, allra minst vi själva”⁶⁴ (We had carried so much, there was so much that had been laid on our shoulders, the whole borderline with Torneå and Muonio and Könkämä rivers, and what would we do with all that amniotic fluid now when no one wanted to know about it anyway, above all ourselves.) Even though it feels relatively easy for them to choose disengagement, because of the settler colonial history of erasure, which requires assimilation and derogates any differences from the normative, and because they can pass as white Swedes, they feel the material presence of the multiple memories and histories in their bodies and in their surroundings. While presenting their experiences and memories as heterogeneous and entangled, the narrator does frequently differentiate between the various minority communities and the majority population in Sweden. They mention several times that their peers from Falkenberg (a town in southern Sweden) do not understand them, do not know anything about Tornedalen, look at the thickness of their skeletal structure and without saying it, “kalkylerade med att vi innerst inne var barbarer” (counted on the fact that inside we were barbarians).⁶⁵ At the same time, however, the narrator articulates ambivalent feelings regarding both their privilege to pass and the impact of colonial histories: They say they can easily imitate Swedish pop singers, and they wonder whether it might be “att förhäva sig” (too conceited) to call their era postcolonial because “så jäkla mycket till koloniserande hade väl inte ägt rum vare sig där vi befann oss eller där vi kunde ha befunnit oss” (surely not that damn much colonizing had taken place where we were or where we could have been).⁶⁶

A passage that visualizes the narrator’s ambivalence about lining up and relates to how the cultural texts discussed in this book imagine lining up or not lining up comes from one of the early chapters in Vårt värde. After reflecting on her parents’ and her different reactions to the modernizing that takes place in the northern areas of Sweden, the narrator says:

“Det var vår tid. Det var vår smärta. Vi kunde stå framför fönstren uppe i sporthallens bordtennislokal och blicka in mot centrum. Det var en punkt varifrån vi plötsligt blev främmande för allt.… Vi visste inte riktigt vilka vi var, om det alls var meningen att vi skulle stå där med våra röda kortbyxor, och vilka var de egentligen, de som från första början hade lurat med oss dit?”⁶⁷

It was our time. It was our pain. We could stand in front of the windows up at the table tennis hall and look toward the city center. It was a point from where we suddenly felt stranger to everything.… We didn’t really know who we were, if there was any meaning in standing there with our red shorts, and who were they really, those who from the very beginning had lured us there?

While Sami Blood features a sequence where the Sámi child is trying to synchronize her body with the movements of the other Swedish girls in a gymnastics class, in an attempt to fit in and be allowed to enter Swedishness, and in Ingenbarnsland, the Finnish-speaking child who resists forced lining up through the image of her doing everything not to synchronize her body with the other competitors in a running competition, in this passage of Vårt värde, the narrator expresses uncertainty about moving with other bodies and competing. They are also in a space of athletics and competition, but they are not sure what it means to be there, who their competitors are, and whether it wouldn’t be better to “sluta räkna poäng, sätta oss på bänken och dingla med benen och låta motspelarnas tysta misstro med rätta hagla över våra kortklippta frisyrer” (stop counting points, sit on the bench and dangle our legs and let the opponents’ quiet distrust rightfully fall over our short hairdos).⁶⁸ However, the narrator maintains that they do not give up, even when they do, because it does not really fit them to give up. Instead of resisting lining up by distorting the arrival in adulthood, or portraying an exceptional inspiring figure of the child who ends up lining up with Swedishness, the child’s bodily response to the forced fusion of proximate cultures finds an outlet in a plural voice that takes over the singular.

PLURAL NARRATIVE

Vårt värde begins with a passage where the narrator describes how her family sometimes drove to the harbor to watch the icebreakers on the Torne River. The narrative voice of the first chapter moves between first-person singular and plural. Writing in singular, the child narrator sitting in the backseat of the car says her mother told her father not to drive too close to the edge of the road: “Jag går fast ut ur bilen,’ sa mamma med en stämma så brusten att jag förberedde mig på att både den och äktenskapet där i framsätet skulle spricka”⁶⁹ (“I’m going out of the car,’ said mother with a voice so broken that I prepared myself that both it and the marriage in the front seat would break.) This sentence is immediately followed by one in plural voice: “Men äktenskapen sprack aldrig, och våra mammor gick aldrig ut ur bilarna.”⁷⁰ (But the marriages never broke, and our mothers never went out of the cars.) The first-person plural is used often throughout the novel, both in passages that describe various everyday situations and when the narrator meditates on what it means to live in a postcolonial time and space.

As one of the recurring themes in the novel is the dominant/colonial power’s violence toward language, by choosing plural voice the narrator uses language to resist the singularity desired in assimilation politics, which sought to teach children of the minorities to become Swedes, based on a normative understanding of Swedishness. Describing the effects of assimilation politics on language, the narrator writes in the last chapter of the novel that as a child, “Vi hade haft så mahoton mycket att säga, dels på ett språk som centralmakten sett till att vi behärskade, dels på ett språk som centralmakten sett till att vi givit upp hoppet om.”⁷¹ (We had had so mahoton much to say, partly in the language that the central power had made sure we mastered, and partly in the language that the central power had made sure we gave up on.) Growing up is, in their conclusion, connected to lining up with Swedishness, which is, on one hand, easy because the narrator already speaks Swedish, even though it is a result of the language policies of the colonial power. Maintaining the plural voice here, however, provides the narrator with a way to keep the alternative, the plurality of experiences and identities, to line up with.

Recent narratological scholarship has paid close attention to the distinctiveness of collective narration in texts with we-narrators. Natalya Bekhta defines “we-narrative” as the narrator “speaking, acting, and thinking as a collective narrative agent and possessing a collective subjectivity, which the narrative performatively creates and maintains throughout its course.”⁷² Arguing for the importance of distinguishing between the indicative “we” and the performative “we,” Bekhta brings out that in the first, an individual subject is present in the pronoun “we”—for example, when a couple tells a holiday story or a football fan relates how “we” won the game. In the performative “we,” however, the “I” is erased through the creation of a collective voice. Bekhta’s examples include texts that might include first-person singular, but as they are moving between singular and plural, in the case of a performative “we,” the implication of the plural is still the collective voice. In Vårt värde the frequent use of plural first-person narrative can be read as representing a singular “I” of the child, who observes her parents and who reflects on her family history and the complicated position of growing up in line with the expectations and exciting parts of the dominant Swedish culture and the disappointments of her parents and other Finnish- and Meänkieli-speakers. However, it could also be read as a collective voice of children in a similar position, those whose parents had moved away from the Finnish-speaking villages in Tornedalen and who are coming to terms with their identities and the not-quite or in-between positions they inhabit. Using a plural voice to indicate the parents—the plural first-person narrator always refers to their mothers and fathers—supports this interpretation. At the same time, by also continuing to use singular voice, the novel makes explicit that the “we” does not necessarily signify a group of people, children, or parents. Instead, the “we” might be representing both a group and an individual. This differentiates Vårt värde from Bekhta’s definition of we-narratives that always imply a collective narrator.

As the novel engages with whether or not one could call the life in Tornedalen and in Tornedalian/Finnish families postcolonial (as the narrator wonders about that explicitly), the use of the plural voice contributes to what Rebecca Fasselt has brought out in postcolonial texts that incorporate that mode to not only “forge a collective identity in contrast to imperial powers and Western individualist notions of subjectivity” but to also, differently from earlier work of postcolonial theory, highlight the “more ambiguous inscriptions of ‘we’” and “bring into focus fissures in liberation narratives.”⁷³ This means that instead of the earlier focus on the colonizer/colonized binary that tended to center on the Western/colonizer’s power, later postcolonial literature and the postcolonial we-narratives have moved toward a more self-reflexive mode, looking at the different processes of colonization, decolonization, or postcolonialism in their specific contexts. Furthermore, Fasselt argues that some of the postcolonial texts deploy first-person plural to encode communities as “unstable and porous entities.”⁷⁴ As the narrative of Vårt värde imagines a child whose life is informed by different communities—those that have been colonized, those that have not been for a while, those who represent the colonizer, and the overall complexity of “postcolonialism” as a term for Tornedalian history—its “we” does not attempt to create a unified collective narrator (who is either univocally writing back against the colonizer or simply suggesting an exclusively collective mind). Instead, it destabilizes boundaries and lines between and within these communities.

With its self-reflexive, pondering voice, Vårt värde describes coming to terms with a complex and entangled history of Tornedalen that could be read as colonized by the Swedish state but whose land is also part of Sápmi, and while Tornedalians were expected to assimilate to Swedish culture in the early twentieth century, the reindeer-herding Sámi were segregated from the dominant culture. While the narrator frequently uses the pronoun “we” and the possessive “our” in the novel, these words do not make claims for an exclusive collective identity that, as Fasselt writes, often “indexes collective ownership and distinctiveness and is, therefore, often associated with exclusionary and even violent assertions of group or national membership” and that could be read in the use of the term “Meänmaa” (our land), for Tornedalen as explained above.⁷⁵ Instead, the narrator lists their cousins, neighbors, and friends from different parts of northern Sweden and Finland (some who are Sámi and others who live in Finland) without giving them any specific ethnicity-related descriptors, and the plural voice that speaks of “our cousins, our brothers” further establishes the novel’s description of the groups of people in northern Sweden and Finland as porous communities with entangled histories. For example, she says that sometimes she did not know what was what, “vad som var vår tid och vad som var någon annans, vad som var brytning och vad som var dialekt … vad som var vår smärta och vad som hade åsamkats av polarnätter långt innan vi och vår tid ens var påtänkta”(what was our time and what was someone else’s, what was an accent and what was a dialect … what was our pain and what had been caused by polar nights a long time before we or our time even was born).⁷⁶ The plural narrative here blurs the boundaries between different groups, languages, and generations. With that, Vårt värde expands the meaning of postmemory, the term coined by Marianne Hirsch (and elaborated on in my analysis of not-quite childhood in the novels about Finnish labor migrants in chapter 2) that signifies traumatic memories passed on to the next generations that become so overwhelming that they become a person’s memory even though they have never experienced them.⁷⁷

Similarly to this understanding of how postmemory works, the narrator of Vårt värde maintains that the feeling of not being good enough was handed over to her like “medaljer att hänga om våra halsar” (medals to hang around our necks),⁷⁸ and that while their mothers did not say much more than that they were worth nothing, the narrator nevertheless feels “lärarinnornas dödande blickar och utedassets kyla mot den bara stjärten, vi hörde hur vinternätterna hade knäppt i brädväggarna och hur norrskenet hade sprakat över deras huvuden”(the deadly stares of the teachers and the cold of the outhouse against their bare bottoms, we heard how the winter nights had nipped in the timber walls and how the northern lights had glowed over their heads).⁷⁹ Remaining in plural voice as the memories and stories are told by mothers and fathers, however, disrupts the linear familial mediations of memory and kinship, and the generational time becomes nonlinear and existing all at once.

THE PLURAL CHILD

In its frequent use of first-person plural voice, then, Vårt värde constructs a not-quite child figure who is pluralized. While this child shares some experiences of not-quiteness that we have seen throughout the works analyzed in this book, providing more of a focus on the second-generation/intergenerational not-quiteness, which continues to persist to a certain extent, the novel also resists the possible implications of constructing a figure of a child simply to represent marginalization and discrimination. All the child figures discussed in this book have in various ways challenged the meaning of the hegemonic/dominant image of the child in Swedish/Nordic culture, resisted lining up and growing up according to the expectations based on their race and ethnicity, and rethought the entangled colonial histories and hierarchies of whiteness in Sweden in the twentieth century. These figures have illustrated more nuanced and complicated ways to negotiate lining up and growing up, but they have nevertheless done so primarily through a single child figure who, differently from others around them, resists growing up and lining up with the norms assigned by the dominant power of the (previous) colonizer. The use of “we” in Vårt värde could be interpreted as a way to express a group experience of the generation whose parents grew up in Tornedalen but moved to other areas in Sweden. In sentences that talk about “our worth, our time” and that describe “our mothers and fathers” saying or doing something could easily illustrate this reading. However, the reader is aware from the beginning of the novel (and that awareness is confirmed throughout the novel) that the narrator is one person, having one father and mother. She simply uses the plural voice frequently. This move creates ambiguity and fluidity between “I” and “we,” which is not only reflective of new directions in postcolonial literature as brought out above but also rethinks common cultural images and narratives of childhood.

This “plural child” figure reorients the expectation for a clearly identifiable child or a group of children who suffer from institutional injustice and prejudice or discrimination and prejudice in the society. It also blurs boundaries between the different generations and thus undoes the promise or expectation for a singular predictable futurity in the figure of the child. In its “we,” the plural child narrator combines childhoods of potentially different lineages, temporalities, and geographies. Similarly to the focus on the bodily experience of the colonial history discussed above, the plurality is deeply rooted in the child’s body. Among several references to the drawing of the border between Sweden and Finland in 1809, when many of the Finnish-speaking villages of the Torne Valley became part of Sweden, is one that establishes a bodily example of how plurality in the child’s body might have been constructed: “Artonhundranio års gränsdragning gick rätt igenom våra kroppar och klöv våra tungor i två delar, en som kunde prata och en som inte kunde.”⁸⁰ (The border drawing of year eighteen hundred nine went directly through our bodies and split our tongues into two parts, one that could speak and the other that couldn’t.) While the general impression of the plural child in Vårt värde is an unidentified plurality, the creation of two halves as a consequence of the 1809 border visualizes a situation where one is forced into two distinct languages, cultures, and countries, and where the colonial and assimilation politics have resulted in feeling that only one of those two halves is seen as valuable. The narrator resists having to choose one or the other. She does not want to have “konturer som var så enkla att skära ut” (contours that are so easy to cut out).⁸¹ Thus, she contends with the idea of a distinct image of the child who represents hybridity of cultures, hovering between the minoritized and dominant/colonizer’s culture that are proximate but have been drastically differentiated. She resists being a child figure who signifies the temporal and spatial point of becoming, of transformation from what some have identified as being more primitive than the other.

Instead of aligning herself with an easily identifiable figure of the not-quite child, the narrator longs for an “islossningar som skulle spränga fram och lösa alla band och lägga både finska och svenska sidan under vatten och en gång för alla återställa ordningen” (ice-breaking that would burst out and open all bonds and place both the Finnish and the Swedish side under water and for once re-establish order).⁸² Possibly referring to Antti Keksi’s poem “Keksis kväde” (1677), about the ice-breaking that flooded the riverbanks and that has become the symbol of a specific Tornedalian space shaped by the river, the narrator imagines a new event of creation, one that would dissolve all lines and borders. If in Populärmusik the children saw a connection/similarity between the powerful sound of ice-breaking and rock music as the novel imagined alternative lining up with global subcultures, the fusion of waters in Vårt värde functions as another way to imagine an alternative to lining up with the expected figure of the Swedish child or the Tornedalian child. Finding order in the imagined underwater world that does not have borders and boundaries becomes a visual image of nonlinear resistance to growing up and lining up with the distinct contours of one or other group/identity. Furthermore, imagining the dissolution of borders, bonds, and boundaries does not lay claim to a specific territory. Instead, it suggests that “order” is possible only in a different underwater world without colonial politics, erasure, assimilation, and violence.

This renewed image of the northern Nordic region that aims for acceptance of plurality and heterogeneous identities in some ways resembles one of David Vikgren’s adaptations of Keksi’s poem in his poetry collection Antikeksiskväde: Översättning, dikt (2010).⁸³ The adaptation titled “kollektivversionen” (collective version) is a translation that was compiled by contributions of twenty-six people, all of whose names are printed on a map of a river that bifurcates the back cover of the book and alludes to a map of a literary history by Bengt Pohjanen and Kirsti Johansson, which marks the birthplaces of the authors.⁸⁴ As Heith argues, while Pohjanen and Johansson’s map emphasizes the importance of roots and origins, the map on Vikgren’s book cover “points to the themes of multiple interpretations, process and transformation,” thus contributing to the “making of different versions of the Torne Valley.”⁸⁵ Vikgren’s version, of course, consists of different identifiable voices, a collective of people translating the poem, while the child in Vårt värde holds plurality that is not necessarily collective. With this plural child figure, who does not necessarily represent a specific collective, the novel imagines a reoriented alternative childhood that combines the expectations of and resistances to inherited lines, different temporalities and geographies. It imagines a time and space where one can grow in multiple directions at once, thus making it impossible to predict any specific future in “the child” or to hold the child figure up as an obvious inspiration for sideways growth or for lining up despite difficult circumstances.

While the novel disrupts the singularity or universality of the figure of the child—the idealized understanding of childhood in heteronormative culture and society—by oscillating between singular and plural, the narrative ends in singular voice: “Vi visste inte vad som skulle hända nu. ‘Vad händer nu?’ frågade jag.”⁸⁶ (We did not know what would happen now. “What happens now?” I asked.). Her father responds by asking what happened with the fish they brought with them, and her mother says to the narrator that she can throw the fish out. Ending in singular voice might remind the reader that while the plural voice has provided the narrative a formal alternative to the expectations of childhood, it is possible only in the imaginary, textual level.

Populärmusik and Vårt värde imagine the not-quite child figures exploring the experiences of the first generation of Tornedalians who did not experience racial discrimination to the same extent as generations before. Playing with this figure on a formal level, both novels not only offer moments of pause and delay on the trajectories of becoming Swedish that we saw in the other works analyzed in the previous chapters, but they also unsettle the construction of the child figure to represent the histories of not-quiteness and, by extension, the normative expectations of autonomy and morality in the imagination of the Swedish child. While, like all the films and novels discussed in this book, they seek to articulate the impact of colonial and racial ideologies on the bodies of people who are legible as white, the narratives of Populärmusik and Vårt värde convey a higher awareness of privilege and its meaning for people who inherit the histories of not-quiteness together with the lines of whiteness.