The Brooklyn Rail

The Irving Sandler Essay Series
Edited by Alexander Nagel

This essay series, generously supported by an anonymous donor, is named in honor of the art historian and critic Irving Sandler, whose broad spirit was epitomized in the question he would ask, with searching eyes, whenever he met someone or saw someone again: what are you thinking about? A space apart from the press of current events, the Sandler Essay invites artists and writers to reflect on what matters to them now, whether it is current or not, giving a chance for an “oblique contemporary” to come in view.

It was merely an idea to visit Sápmi in the middle of winter, while Sápmi is covered underneath three hundred words, all whirling around the existence of snow. It is snow that has turned light into a companion of darkness in winters in Sápmi. As I walk, once a foot slumps in the light flakes, I can’t detect my traces on those words beyond gaping white holes and screeching noises that ache the teeth.

Soon after this visit, I received a copy of Aednan (Knopf, 2024) by Swedish Sámi poet Linnea Axelsson, an epic poem translated from Swedish into English by Saskia Vogel. The word Aednan, the book reveals, means in Northern Sámi, “the land,,” “the earth,” and “my mother.” It also echoes the word “aedno,” “the river.”

Adnan in Arabic means “the one who’s working the earth;” a coincidence that some may not find to be surprising. So close both words sound and likewise is their meaning, when in reality Sámi and Arabic are as distant from each other as Sápmi and Palestine are. In Palestine, it’s the silencing of five hundred words that have been working the earth, aching the teeth; the names of villages destroyed in 1948, of which the only traces that remain are cactus plants covering the remnants of demolished homes. Cactus leaves can be as big as foot tracks in the snow. They are all gaping holes marking absences; monuments that nature forms in memory of those who are no longer there.

That only the place name
still bears witness to
for those who understand

Much of what Axelsson writes in Aednan appears as the pronunciation of possible words in this vast silence I grew up with. Sápmi becomes a companion to Palestine; at one end, snow has been spreading on the earth, and at the other, fire has continued doing so. While “ice-cold winters that bewilder all life” dominate over Sápmi, in Palestine it’s detonated bombs that bewilder all life with destruction, extending not only as far as the eye can see, but as far as the memory can tell. Winter shall pass and snow will melt, allowing life to resume its cycle, remembering with every season the existence of the cycle. Destruction and fire have been devouring life cycles; they appear to be on guard against any memory. And so I face a silent truth in another line in Aednan.

Let the fire
keep you company

Contemplating the cruelty in reality with the truth of poetry seems to be the only path to tread between snow and fire in recent winter days. Aednan, as it recites the life of a Sámi family over more than a century, starting in early spring in 1913, appears to be the place that remains for those who are being chased away from memories; expelled from history.

I stood there looking on
as my friend sold
Vattenfall’s books

_

The lies burned
from the titles
in the tourist’s hands

_

Now she’s going to read

About its great exploit
in the backwoods
its pioneer power stations
in the wilderness

_

How long would they
keep getting away

_

With writing
our actions and
our grazing grounds

our entire cultural
landscape
out of history

In Palestine, a similar story has been told by the colonizers. The words of Golda Meir, the Israeli Prime Minister from 1969 to 1974, are the summary of such a story: “There were no such thing as Palestinians.… It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”

This is a story that tells of a land without people; a desert that would be made to bloom, and swamps to be turned into fields. What this same story does not tell is that since 1948, not only have hundreds of Palestinian villages been destroyed and their populations expelled, but a few were turned into landfills serving Israeli urban areas, hundreds of thousands trees have been uprooted and crop fields drenched with sewage water leading them to become wastelands. Memories of the lives of humans and non-humans destroyed in both parts of the world often remain beyond the reach of language. Those who have witnessed their destruction are unable to say much. The dozen Sámi languages have been themselves targeted until the 1970s by various Scandinavian governmental policies, aimed at eradicating them.

The voice

the cup that memory
fills

Aednan opens with these three lines. The voice remains the sole place for a language that carries traces one cannot see with their bare eyes.

One afternoon in 2024, marking the end of winter and the start of spring, I arrive in Stockholm where Linnea Axelsson and I meet in person. During our conversation, Linnea unexpectedly reaches to pondering over an old Sámi admonition:

To exist without leaving a trace.

“How can this work, not to leave a trace?” I ask Linnea. She makes it very easy, so easy to understand, as I feel ashamed of how I couldn’t understand that myself: “A trace can be left inside us; it doesn’t need to be left behind us. Or, if you like, it’s not very different from what climate activists now call upon: leaving minimal human traces and impact on the environment and the planet.”

Embracing the task of leaving no trace can be—I come to understand—a shield in the face of destruction, when most traces of one’s existence are being erased from the earth as well. No traces can be detected in the ruins, except for ruined past lives, and future lives turned voiceless. Yet a hidden trace can sometimes be the only element to survive ruination.

How am I to
explain to them

that the ruin
is in my voice

We both understand the impossibility of explaining. Linnea and I grew up with silence. As is the case for many Palestinian writers after the 1948 Nakba, no voice was to emerge for it even to become “the cup that memory fills,” since the ruin is in the voice. We speak about silence as a daily companion that can eventually be either caressed in poetry or reveal itself in the stutter of prose.

And why
didn’t you say anything
to me

We finally stopped demanding that from the speechless who had witnessed such ruination. Now both, alongside others perhaps, may know why we cannot voice any demands towards them, as the ache of the present numbs our tongues. We also come to abandon any claim for a coherent narrative from those who were subjected to violence and oppression at every turn of their lives in the past, and from those that violence continues to hunt down in the present. Like elsewhere, words and voices have been shell-shocked by the violence of exploitation and colonization in Sápmi and in Palestine. Decades before the division of the latter into territories and zones, Sápmi has been divided between Scandinavian countries, breaking up families and reindeer herding routes that had been followed for centuries. As lands continue to be confiscated, and dams and windmills to be constructed for generating electricity by the likes of Vattenfall, disorienting herds and herders persist. The herders would in fact become workers for such companies, forced to leave their kids in the care of the state to “civilize” them, but also prevent them from speaking any of the dozen Sámi languages.

The Swedish
language grew
along my thoughts

_

The Sámi since long
asleep in the body of shame

obedience overlaid

_

Clamped
shut up inside

The voice stirred
barely perceptible
almost impossible
to rouse

The destruction to which Palestinians have been subjected, to new increasing variations every few months, did not spare language. An ensuing decades-old silence, strangling the experiences and words of our parents and grandparents, keeps us company today. But violence and oppression have not spared our silence. They have punctured it and overrode it with narratives told by the ones waging this destruction. With coherent narratives composed by words of seeming credibility, we are written out. “We do not exist,” and when we do exist, “we are uncivilized,” we are told.

One evening, a couple of months before I start reading Aednan, I meet with a Scandinavian writer who is full of concern and compassion for Palestinians under fire. The writer is overcome by disbelief, outrage, and worry, noting that Scandinavian countries have been free from any form of oppression; that historically they’ve been places of freedom and equality. I hear in the concerned credible call that in Scandinavia, the values of freedom and equality are applied only selectively, whereas the oppression of the Sámi people—the suppression of their language and their ways of life—goes unseen and unheard. Not hearing and not seeing jointly desecrate the silence of the Sámi and their attempts not to leave a trace that may violate existence.

They’ll have to
excuse us
if we disrupt their
dreams

they’ll have to
forgive us

_

But the era
of progress
and the world’s
conscience
does not contain
the full
history of their land

_

Our land

of course is one
they’ve never
ever seen

The following day after meeting with that writer, I meet with a Sámi artist. We walk up one of the mountains around Bergen, through the woods, while this artist leads the way to a Goahti, a Sámi wooden tent-like structure, not easily visible as it’s caressed by the earth, the moss, and the trees. Called Jiennagoahti, it is an art project initiated by Norwegian and Sámi artists, dedicated to Sámi poetry, literature, sound art, and experimental music.

The site of the goahti, the artist who has been part of the project explains, had been chosen over a long period of time, taking walks in the wood, as they sought the permission of the earth, the moss that covers it, and the trees that shadow it. This explains to a large extent how the Sámi have trod the world of the non-human, asking its permission at every attempt to change it.

As I hear this, I cannot but think of how there was no time to ask the world of the non-human for its permission to build tents for Palestinians every few decades, nor for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza that have been residing in the past year and a half in tents caressed neither by the earth nor by plants. Instead, they are terrorized by the roar of warplanes and the sound of exploding bombs, making their fragile fabrics tremble, as would those seeking refuge inside them, or carry them as they journey from one evacuation zone to another, only to be burned by the fire of bombs, or be swept by the rain floods and the waves of the stormy sea.

When you call
the fact that I
have existed and
am still here

my journey

In the Jiennagoahti, soon after we sit, the Sámi artist releases her voice with a yoik, singing words but also only syllables intermitted by silence and humming at times, after the old Sámi tradition of song. A language that fails one, it seems, is the very language which writes a yoik. She yoiks as she caresses a reindeer skin lying in front of her, one of a few scattered on the goahti’s floor and on which we sit. A yoik, she shares, tries to reach what lies beyond language. A yoik reiterates, in other words, how when one is let down by the language of coherence, one is let into the language of poetry. Yoiks can be dedicated to a feeling, an act, a person, an animal, a part of the earth. This is quickly established in a second yoik on the greed of oil and energy companies that are ravaging the shores and lands of Sápmi. Some of these companies are trying to generate green energy, the utmost form of care for nature that is being promoted for many of us, when in reality the windmills that generate such green energy break the familiar land of Sápmi into confusing disjointed landscapes. The violation of the land by giant windmills and the noises they generate are driving the animals astray, losing their way around hills that have been the only thing they knew and have been mapping with their claws, hooves, and wings for so many centuries. The cruelty towards the human and the non-human alike finds its way into a few words uttered in a soft gentle voice, shifting between humming, half sentences and segments of silence, forming that yoik sung by the artist in the goahti.

We have so much
left to win

So much has been lost, that so much has been left to win, to the extent that the task seems paralyzing. But one such win, soft and gentle, was listening to those yoiks, as they prevented a language that fails one from turning into a failed language.

We have so many ruins to navigate on Earth and in language. But more than anything else during these times, poetry is what came to rescue the little left in such ruins.

In the past months, I’ve been compelled to remember my early school days, when we were expected to recite Arabic epic poetry from the sixth and seventh centuries, without really understanding their call. Now those hardly comprehensible centuries-old poems, which emerged only when a poet stood contemplating ruins, emerged to guide me today, as unfathomable destruction inhabits our existence. These epic poems seem to have been all these years, as Linnea puts it:

staying in the background
of existence

as we are being forced to go on

Feeling the roar
of helplessness.

One summer night in 2024, I dream of sleeping in the wilderness, on the earth barefoot. Suddenly I become fearful of bears and wolves that might be surrounding me in the woods. As a bear approaches, I realize it will start by attacking my bare feet, wishing I had shoes, for at least, I think, this could have helped me in fighting back as the bear clamped its teeth on them. However, I wake up just before the bear does, still “feeling the roar of helplessness.”

The following morning I receive a brief note from Linnea, saying she’s arriving that afternoon in Berlin, asking if we could meet. Yes, that evening if she wishes, I respond in a similarly brief note.

As she arrives, she takes an object out of her handbag, saying she brought me something from Sápmi. She hands me a small bronze ring, the size of an eye, with a tiny rope attached to it, to allow hanging it on one’s belt. Linnea explains this piece was found in graveyards in Sápmi in the past centuries, believed to protect from harm. People believed that if they looked through the ring, they could frighten a bear away. This coincidence in the form of poetry, due to the fact that this can’t be rational in reality, makes me struggle to tell Linnea about my dream from last night. But once I do, I add with bewilderment: “And now you offer me this present.” To this Linnea replies calmly: “I’m not surprised.” We resort to a brief moment of silence.