Open a Door

I. Language

My poetic language is North Sámi, my mother tongue. The Sámi language is considered to be one of the narrowest and most threatened languages in the world. Sámi belongs to the Finnish-Uralic language group and is most closely related to Finnish. I grew up in a small village by the Porsangerfjord in Finnmark, Norway’s most northerly county. Sámi was the main language in my childhood village; some people also spoke Finnish, and a few could speak a little Norwegian. This was in the first decades after World War II, during the reconstruction of Finnmark county, following its total destruction and burning at the end of the war. 

The postwar era was at the same time a period of intense Norwegianization. At the age of seven, we were put into boarding schools, away from the Sámi language and culture, and were only permitted to use the Norwegian language. This was a ruthless assimilation policy that wiped out our identity and self-perception. In the course of twenty years in the Norwegian education system, I learned neither to read nor write in my mother tongue. The Sámi language and culture were not topics for discussion. It gave one a feeling of emptiness, an inner anonymous space, a feeling of being a stranger in one’s own life. It was only when I grasped my mother tongue myself, and made the first hesitant attempts at writing, that I became able to write poetry. Then suddenly I had something to say. It was like going on an expedition into oneself, listening to the words which were stored there, and the incommunicable communication which lies in every culture. The laughter of my grandmothers came to life again, their way of looking at things. Slowly a poetic universe opened up; having to repress one’s original language for several decades has meant it has taken time to build it up again.

My first publications were characterized by short poems, perhaps just a few words. This is naturally related to my linguistic journey back to the universe founded in my childhood. There lies my almost inexhaustible source. It is at the same time a journey into the universe of poetry. To me it also means to open the door into a room that was locked for so long. Now the words float to me as if from a treasure trove, and I can see the inheritance from my forefathers as the greatest wealth I could ever have.

II. Hunger

In 1977, when I was still a student at the Academy of Fine Art in Oslo, I proposed a Sámi flag. I wanted my land to have its own colors. I used three of the most used colors in the traditional Sámi dress, the Blue, the Red, and the Yellow, and I avoided the Christian cross. At that time, the Indigenous independence movements around the world also stoked the Sámi students: we needed a symbol for our own struggle for culture, language, land.

One year later, in 1978, eight young Sámi artists—including myself—founded the Sámi Artists Group, known as the Máze-Group after the village in Finnmark where we started our activity and activism for Sámi art. We wanted to change the ethnographic view on Sámi art. Our group stayed in Máze from 1978 to 1983. That happened to be during the period of the Alta Dam conflict and the big demonstrations against the building of the dam. We were young, enthusiastic, and full of courage. I even participated in the hunger strike outside the Norwegian Parliament building in Oslo in October 1979, with the aim of changing the politics against the Sámi people. Ten years after, in 1989, the King of Norway opened the first Sámi Parliament in Kárášjohka.

 

 

WINDLESS PATH 

silent room
fall
leaves

are falling
along a windless
path

—

did a star
pass by
did anything
happen

if the sun
were shining
on the other side
of the moon

—

bend
the bow
so that it
reaches

between the heavens
homeless
in the maelstrom

—

on the water’s edge
I find
the bluish-red shell

while the wind
booms
and the waves break

—

golden sun
comes
and
goes

I am swimming
in
the morning sky
greeting
the clouds

the ocean
is reaching
for your beams

—

the night birds are calling
do I
dare

the secret of the ocean
moonbeam
kissing
you

—

mountains are thawing
silk oceans are bursting

the tender beginning
of dreams
the marks
of snowy prairies

black trees
are scratching
the wounds
the mountains are asleep

—

the moon
the sun
the stars
are
the floating river

the ocean is moving
the sky is whispering

opening the sky
I bang on the door

—

stroke the threads
time
glides

the mountains
are open
singing without sound

—

the night creeps along
the night wind

the ocean wind
is mustering the memories
for prayer