Maria Peura 

I am good at becoming enchanted. It is useful when you’re a writer.

I get enchanted by people. I get attached to different kinds of atmospheres. I linger by the yellow tent of the scientologists, I find myself in awe listening to a telemarketer who speaks the Karelian dialect. The

transparent and calculated opening line of a Hare Krishna with glimmer in his eyes saves my day. Staring at his minor flaws makes me grateful; thick black hair growing out of a mole, pigment flaws in his iris and skin.

I walk to the dog park just to hear the primitive barking of dog owners once again – I am enchanted by brutality, just as I am by an unknown weirdo, lecturing me about my previous lives without asking if I’m

interested in listening and whether I even believe in reincarnation or not.

 

At times, when I am listening to a fascinating person speak, I suddenly feel as if my head was starting to swell. What the person is saying may be of complete unimportance to me, total nonsense, but something about him, in his presence, in the atmosphere around him, fascinates me, surrounds me, it wraps my innermost around something important and I begin to relax, to open up.

​

I feel boundaries disappearing, all of them. The will to censor, to control, fades away, breaks away. I begin to melt, to become vulnerable, receptive.

 

It is also called vulnerability to suggestion – a characteristic very useful to a writer. It helps to very delicately peel off the foil of censorship off a developing theme.

​

Vulnerability may come against you in everyday life unless you are well aware of the true essence of it. I was once fooled by a hoax therapist. I knew that he was wrong but I was defenceless against his narcissistic

charisma. He knew how to create the right kind of atmosphere, how to set the mental hooks.

​

In regard to the novel I’m writing, he actually made me a favour. After all, what doesn’t kill you can be turned into fiction.

​

There might not be many manipulative people out there, but the devastation they cause can be rather extensive. A religious fundamentalist community, for instance, can be a dangerous environment for someone vulnerable to suggestion.

​

I come from Pello. It is a small village located in the Finnish Lapland, by the Swedish border. In Pello, as in other parts of Northern Finland, religion has a lot of power.

​

The Finnish Lapland is sparsely populated. There’s a lot of space, woods and wilderness. Reindeer management is an ongoing reminder of a wider influence of the Sami population. Shamanism is still very vital in the subconscious of the northern inhabitants, although nowadays they service god mostly in Lutheran terms.

​

In the mid-1800s, a revival movement founded by Lars Levi Laestadius spread from the Swedish Lapland to the Finnish side of the border. The emphasis of the Laestadian movement was on personal decisionmaking, confessing ones sins and devoting oneself to Christ. In revival meetings, people were moved by the charismatic preacher. They stomped their feet against the ground and made noises. Making noises evolved

into speaking in tongues, just like in the Bible.

 

Many of the preachers had sincere intentions. However, there were also those who took advantage of the collective state of enchantment and the lack of critique that comes hand in hand with it. Even recently, there have been cases of sexual abuse and paedophilia coming out in the Laestadian movement as well as in other religious groups.

​

What has this got to do with my work as an author?

​

The religious enthusiasm was strongly present in the environment where I was born in 1970 and where I learned to read and write four years later.

 

My childhood home was not religious; it was rather a sort of a temple of literature. I learned very early on that there probably is nothing more important to life than to become educated, to read, to write. This

caused me a lot of pressure at school, but when it came to reading and writing, I found myself in a paradise, especially as writing became a very joyful and liberal space of solitude for me already in the first grades.

​

Most of the teachers were safe and supporting, but the actions of the religious fundamentalist minority were insidious and harmful. One of the teachers, pretending to be a very devout and virtuous Laestadian, constantly had his eyes on me. He could stop the choir practice and turn everyone’s attention on me because I wasn’t moving my lips expressively enough. He showed my paintings to other pupils and made

scornful remarks of them.

 

One time, we painted the stealing of the Sampo, a well-known tale from Kalevala, the national epic of Finland. I remember how I devoted myself to painting. I finished the painting meticulously and felt good about myself when it was ready. The teacher lifted the painting up for everyone to see, said it was primitive, and shattered something within me, for good.

 

I never gave myself to painting and drawing again. From then on, art was nothing but a mere mechanical performance for me. It wasn’t until adulthood, after having children of my own, that I discovered art again.

Last year, in art therapy, I played the part of a humiliated nine-year-old once again and painted the stealing of Sampo, the therapist praising and supporting me along the way. I framed the painting and hung it on the

wall of my study. I also drew a caricature of my elementary school teacher and occasionally stomp on it.

​

​

Luckily, the teacher could not destroy my enthusiasm for singing. He made us sing a lot of hymns. His method was not passionate but strict and tense. Yet I somehow managed to establish a view of my own on hymns, on the pompous melodies and incomprehensible lyrics of them.

 

The teacher interfered with my expressions, was demanding, discouraging. Still, the hymns dwelled inside me, persistently leading a life of their own. I kept repeating the peculiar words and lines over and over again. Righteous, a lowly worm, a traveller, sanctify me, oh Holy Spirit, by highest heaven adored, triune God, Thou, my soul’s glory, joy and crown. I found it strange that the Christ was referred to as a lamb and I was intrigued by the constant talk about weddings and brides and grooms. Hymns dealing with the torment of Christ were my favourites. I thoroughly empathized with the suffering of Jesus and, luckily, after the

torment, could also feel a sense of liberation – and mercy.

 

I barely dare think what would have happened, had the teacher been able to comment on my writings. What would have been left of my ability to create?

 

Nowadays I am also grateful for the presence of the religious enthusiasm. It inevitably shows in my writing. It was somehow constantly there, especially during my puberty, when I began to experiment different styles, to mimic my favourite authors such as Mika Waltari, Maria Jotuni, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the narrators of the Bible, especially Job and Ecclesiastes.

​

As I was striving away from the religious enthusiasm, fighting against it, I developed a language of my own, at times also very enthusiastic of nature.

​

One of my role models as a writer was Timo K. Mukka, also from Pello, who died in 1974 before reaching his thirties. It wasn’t until high school that I became acquainted with his works, but he set an important example for me as an author breaking the sexual and religious taboos of our home village.

​

Mukka was a highly valued author in Finland on a national scale, but he was heavily teased and discriminated in his home district, especially in Pello. His books were sold in secret, from under the counter. The narrow-minded community found his themes utterly wrong. They would have preferred some straightforward hunting literature or pompous religious books.

 

As an author, I have also gotten involved in some tough themes. As I was writing my first novel I sometimes wished there would have been an easier way out. I wrote about a six-year-old girl who was being sexually abused by her grandfather. The text was blunt, straightforward. I thoroughly empathized with her experiences. It was easy; I had been raped when I was younger. I had also gone through a violent relationship, of which I had yet to recover when the theme of the novel came to me. I had recently given

birth to my first child and was leading a very emotionally demanding time in my life with a small baby.

​

It was natural, yet harrowing, to place myself in the victim’s position. Putting myself in the shoes of a paedophile was even a greater struggle.

​

At times I had to stop writing and start screaming. Never again have I experienced such an anxiety during writing. When the novel was ready, I probably became a bit more whole. A huge burden had been released from the memory of my body.

​

As I started practicing yoga on a regular basis, my body became more flexible, easier to carry, easier to set by the writing desk. I noticed that relaxing the deep muscles kind of relieves the censorship from within. I found it easier to see myself as a channel expressing the text that arises from the subconscious.

​

As an adult, I had reached such a state of flow in writing for the first time during the entrance exam for dramaturgy. It was a five-day exam. The standards were high. I knew I wouldn’t pass if my attitude was not at its best. I was twenty-nine. As I was giving birth to my firstborn child a year earlier, I had realized something very essential about humanity. During labour, I had split into two, observed the two me’s from the outside. I had been convinced that my body was bursting. 

​

I had accepted the idea of dying.

 

In the entrance exam, I returned to a state of giving birth. I promised myself to surrender, to expose myself to failure and shame. I promised to give my all.

​

On the final day, I was given a writing task with the title ‘What I’m Afraid of’. I wrote a story about a man who was regretting his crimes on his deathbed. He had murdered people. He died and was born again as a small girl who was being sexually abused.

​

​

After the entrance exam, it took me a few weeks to write the first draft or my first novel.

​

My decision to surrender had, however, some other remarkable effects as well. As I was writing a scene I suddenly realized that the characters had to speak the dialect of Torne Valley, my very first mother tongue. I had not used the dialect in my writings before. Writing in dialect caused some immediate physical changes in me: my diaphragm relaxed, my breathing deepened, I felt a peculiar sense of happiness.

 

It was as if I had established a new connection to the little Maria that was only just learning to speak. I became more clearly, more physically aware of the impact of language.

​

Dialect is not only a way of speaking; it is a way of thinking. When I write in dialect, I enjoy the possibilities it brings along. The personality of a character changes when I make him speak the dialect. It brings along a unique straightforwardness, even impudence, an acceptable coarseness, entering someone else’s territory, having a huge territory of one’s own in a sparsely populated area. This might go for all Finns, but using the dialect of my childhood neighbourhood makes me find my very own way of relating to being Finnish, a backwoodsman, someone who has become Christian but is a shaman at heart.

​

When I moved to Southern Finland at the age of nineteen, I went through a painful process that involved denying my roots and cutting down the dialectal features of my speech. Then moving to Berlin, experiencing a total loss of my language, which probably was necessary in order to establish a new, deeper relationship to my language and to my way of expressing myself.

​

In Berlin I kept a journal as two different personas; in Finnish as Maria and in German as Rebekka. I also made up a language of my own that was written from right to left like Arabic and that was just words and sentences with no meaning. A language of emotions.

 

 

There is a river flowing through Pello called the Torne River.

 

In 1809, Finland, until then a part of Sweden, became a grand duchy of Russia. Up North, in Torne Valley, this had some tragic consequences. Emperor Alexander I decided that the new national border should run

along the Torne River. As a consequence, eight thousand Finns were left on the Swedish side of the border. They did not speak Swedish. They could only speak Finnish and a Torne Valley dialect that would later be called Meänkieli.

​

Meänkieli was an important part of the identity of the Finns living on the Swedish side of the border. However, people were forced by the authorities to speak nothing but Swedish. In schools, for instance, it was strictly forbidden to speak either Meänkieli or Finnish. 

​

As a result of political struggles, Meänkieli was granted the status of an official minority language in Sweden in 2002. This was very meaningful to me as a writer. Based on its characteristics, Meänkieli is, in my opinion, clearly a dialect but, considering the identity issues, the official status has been of great importance.

​

What would my identity be like if it wasn’t for Meänkieli? I never really gave it any thought until I had my identity crisis as a young adult and got in touch with the very innermost of me, the Meänkieli-speaking core of me.

​

I restored some features of my original language to my speech. It made me feel better, it clearly relieved my anxiety. I started using dialect deliberately; if I felt very anxious or somewhat blocked, I started speaking the dialect.

​

I noticed that sometimes it took only one dialectal word or expression that could swing me away from feeling distressed.

​

A couple of years ago, I attended a Meänkieli literature festival in the Swedish Lapland. The invitation was an e-mail message written in Meänkieli. The organizer of the festival could not speak Finnish, only Swedish and Meänkieli. For the first time in my life, I wrote an e-mail in Meänkieli. And I wept.

​

I figured, this must be how it is like, and even worse, being a refugee. And being lost, far from home, with no shelter, separate from one’s people.

 

I was overwhelmed by the powerful emotions that language contained. I fell off my patterns and started yearning, longing for something.

​

The person coming out of my shell said I must get back to my people. I must settle in where Meänkieli is still spoken. I must strengthen the language that grows deep and fruitful within me.

​

This also involves darkness. Darkness filled with comforting shades and gorgeous colours. There is no need to move to Lapland to become a part of the magic. It lies deep within me, in my cells, in my emotional memory. I am thoroughly filled by my mother tongue.

​

And what happens to language once I sit down and write? What happens to me?

​

I am interested in the matter, and others are interested in it, because the midst of writing, the need that drives one to write, includes a yearning that is difficult to put into words. It is a yearning that has got to do with becoming whole, it might be somewhat religious, a yearning for holiness. A subconscious need to become connected to the universe, to be a part of a greater whole.

​

Reason and ability to analyze things is essential in writing but the basic yearning survives without them; the ultimate yearning that drives one to create fiction.

 

Already as a child, I experienced feelings of great relief. Making up stories was liberating. Writing was like breathing out to me. It was breathing in that caused me more difficulties. I remember how I used to hold my breath when I was reading, as if I were diving. As if I was storing the enchanting world of books inside me instead of living the stories with all my heart and soul. 

 

I remember a short story I wrote when I was twelve. It is about a girl and a boy who meet in a forest clearing and fall in love. Later, the girl comes down with cancer and dies. The boy returns to the forest clearing to reminiscence his early love.

 

As I wrote the story I stood in crossroads in my life, shifting from childhood to adulthood. On one hand I was shattered in pieces; on the other hand I was complete, writing my story, strongly present in the moment.

​

I remember the gratification I felt with a pen in my hand, with the tip of the pen pressing onto the paper. And how wonderful my handwriting, becoming rounder by the puberty, looked on paper. My handwriting, my story, me.

​

Today I’m forty, steering myself towards the starting point, which to me means a conscious strengthening of my roots. It is comforting to think that if I grow old, I can retire to my home district to die. The circle may

close; the lingual circle as well.