Review: “The Sami Problem” by Kathrine Nedrejord

This is a review. The author is responsible for the opinions in the text.

There are many stories in Kathrine Nedrejord’s novel “Sameproblemet”. The title raises expectations of a novel of ideas and struggle, and they are fulfilled, but the first sentence of the book testifies to an identity crisis: “I have lost track of who I was.” The speaker’s name is Marie Engmo, she lives in Paris with a French husband and a few-month-old daughter when she receives the news of her grandmother’s death. So she has to go back to Sápmi for the first time in many years.

The journey home to the village awakens memories and thoughts, and in the airplane seat a description of growing up begins, which gradually enables Marie to understand herself. A girl who went to school at a time when the Sami had to endure both physical and verbal abuse. In Norway she was called “fjällfinne” or “lapp”, and because of her height and light hair she was still “pretty” enough to go home with the boys. In France it is Scandinavian, exotic, but no more so than other northern countries.

A third This story is about becoming a writer and finding your own form and theme after many years of writing journalistically about minorities other than your own. In the background, mentioned but never seen, is a publisher who wants her text, the one about herself.

These different novels within the novel alternately return in one strand and intersect with one another. The grandmother’s life unfolds and her experiences are reflected in Marie’s life. In between there are long sections about how Norway (as well as Finland and Sweden) deals with the Sami.

The Norwegian state did not have to raise its voice, forcibly sterilize or kill to achieve its goal: the eradication of Sámi culture

I have probably never read such an angry and desperate reckoning with the civilized, restrained and complacent oppression that a nation can exercise against its minorities. The Norwegian state did not have to raise its voice, forcibly sterilize or kill to achieve its goal: to eradicate Sámi culture, ban the language, Norwegianize the names and rewrite the history of the country’s first inhabitants. Storting decisions and the exercise of authority were enough.

Many minorities can recognize themselves in abstract terms such as “revival,” when today’s Sámi wear the clothing that their ancestors had to hide. Marie went to Paris to avoid the struggle with her identity, now she returns to a partially different Norway and a different Sápmi, but the anger has not subsided, on the contrary, she is given new oxygen.

It’s something so captivatingly impulsive and atmospheric for this novel. Dialogues alternate with inner monologues, the narrator scratches and scratches, events and formulations return, a love story takes on increasingly clear contours, but hides secrets until the end. Marie’s encounters with her many relatives inspire new stories, but also remind her again and again that she is a guest in the reality that she once left and almost never visited.

It is simply impossible not to float along in the flood of emotions, memories, insights and outbursts. The immediate, uncensored style and the unbridled linguistic energy are of course a completely conscious, adequate expression of the transformation that the protagonist is going through – and it is like an explosion.

Shouldn’t her daughter be allowed to become part of the goodness of the Sami just because she herself was tormented by the prejudices and oppression of the majority society?

The return forces Marie to create a more complex story than the one she had previously constructed about herself and her family. Now she sees the contradictions within the Sami population, between those who live by the sea and those who live by the river, between those who have reindeer and those who don’t. She also sees that the solidarity, the obvious sense of family and the guilty conscience undermine her decisive consent to exile. Shouldn’t her daughter be allowed to become part of the goodness of the Sami just because she herself was tormented by the prejudices and oppression of the majority society?

Reading “The Sami Problem” is intended to be included in an ongoing conversation between a speaker and a listener. The privilege of formulating the problem lies with the minority, because for once it is not the Norwegian state, the Norwegians or even the Swedes who are setting the agenda – here we are not talking quietly, here someone is raising their voice to be heard. And the personal is political, one’s experiences are inextricably linked to the conditions that society has created.

They also mean that as a reader I am tossed between extremes, one moment a member of Marie’s large, warm family, the next moment on the bench of the accused majority. This is not a bad position for the reader, and in Helena Fagertun’s fine interpretation, Kathrine Nedrejord’s language has enough power and breadth to create a feeling of irrefutability: it is impossible to resist the whole call for empathy inherent in this style. Only these thoughts of the publisher in Paris, scattered here and there, seem artificial, but fortunately they disappear as a whole, and there beats a living heart in them.

Read more texts by Ingrid Elam and other reviews of current books