Sammanflätning
(Intertwining)
by Pia Mariana Raattamaa Visén
reviewed by Darcy Hurford
This is a novel about intertwining threads in both a literary and a very literal sense. In 1920s northern Sweden, Ingá wove Karesuando bands and sewed shoes. In modern-day Sweden, her great-granddaughter Anna is planning to embroider a multi-generational family portrait. It’s going to be large, including her grandmother, Maija, her mother Frida, her sister and niece. She wonders how to depict the men and how to embroider sound. She sketches Ingá: small, thin, feet not really touching the ground.
Ingá was Sámi, deemed an inferior race by Swedish scientists of the time. When she began to experience hallucinations and anxiety, eventually becoming unable to function, she was taken away to a distant hospital for treatment and her husband and children never saw her again. When she died, the family was informed in a curt official letter: there was no funeral, and no grave to visit. Later they learnt that Ingá had been deemed a ‘feeble-minded Lapp’ and that her skeleton was sent to a research institute in Uppsala.
Intertwining moves around the gaping hole this loss leaves behind, the shame and silence around in it the family, and how they respond it. ‘It takes four generations to get over a war, they say, to forget, to heal. But this was no war,’ Anna thinks, noting that the grieving process is nevertheless the same, whatever the traumatic event. Maija lost her mother as a child, yet didn’t really know what happened and had to carry on living; Frida grew up sensing how the loss affected her mother but was unable to talk about it until now, as she nears the end of her life; Anna and her sister Lis-Mari hear about reburials of Sámi bones found at the institute and want to investigate what happened to Ingá.
The story moves back and forwards in time and is told from different characters’ points of view. It’s just as sharp-eyed in describing contemporary Sweden as it is in the details of early twentieth-century northern Sweden. There are critical observations about elder care, parenthood and migration to Sweden. The language is precise, measured yet poetic at turns, using imagery depicting loss in a striking way. Raattamaa Visén allows Ingá to voice her thoughts in brief sections which never feel whimsical, just a useful way of giving a voice to someone who didn’t get much chance to articulate her thoughts when alive.
The novel is also a reminder that Sweden has never been purely Swedish speaking. Ingá and her family are speakers of Meänkieli, (literally ‘Our language’), a group of distinct Finnish dialects spoken in northernmost Sweden (where it borders Finland) and since 2000 one of Sweden’s official minority languages. Meänkieli is the main language of the earlier generations, their home language and emotional language, and it appears frequently in the earlier parts of the story with Ingá and Maija. If not guessable from the context, it is followed by a translation that allows the reader to follow.
Names and linguistic identity are also entwined, with characters often having a Meänkieli name (Maija, Inka, Erkki, Jaako) and an official Swedish baptismal name (Mariana, Ingrid, Erik, Jakob). Ingá was her Sámi name. She says of herself:
‘I belonged to my mother Ella with the name Ellan-Ingá, and to my husband Erik as Erkin-Inka. (…) The person I wanted to be in the world, Ingá, does not bear the same name as the person I became in the world, Ingrid. I bore my home in one name, I bore my love in another name, and my desperate fear in a third.’
Swedish is the language of officialdom, church and school. In the hospital, where Swedish is the only language used, she is simply Ingrid. The other parts of her no longer are acknowledged.
The story ends with Anna starting her embroidery. She places out all the female ancestors she knows by name, adds a grave, adjusts details in her stitching of Ingá. The project is not just a link between her and the Karesuando bands her great-grandmother wove, but also a tribute to the power of art and creativity as a way of processing trauma. Intertwining is a quietly beautiful book that lingers with the reader.
Sammanflätning
Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2024
260 pages
Foreign rights: Janina Rak, Bonniers
Pia Mariana Raattamaa Visén lectures in language education at Stockholm university and debuted as an author in 2019 with Där rinner en älv genom Saivomuotka by ('There a River Runs through Saivomuotka Village').