Helene Uri’s 2013 novel Rydde
ut [Clearing Out] begins twice. First, on a lonely marsh in Finnmark, Norway, with the
character Ellinor stepping from tussock to tussock, turning to hear a man
calling her and moving toward him—walking past the author without stopping or
seeing her.
Then, in chapter two, the novel begins again: with a woman
telling us about her father and what she knows about him—very little in fact.
This father will turn out to have been the grandson of a sjø Sami, a coastal Sami, from northern Norway, or Sápmi.
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| Helene Uri, Norwegian Novelist |
The first-person narrator is a middle-aged novelist, also
called Helene, with two daughters and a husband, living in a comfortable flat
in Oslo. Her father is long dead; her mother aging. Helene is about to begin a
new novel and is searching for a protagonist. She will be called Ellinor, Helene
decides; she’s an academic, without a settled job, a linguist with an interest
in dead and dying languages. In her late thirties, Ellinor is painfully
divorced, for reasons as yet unknown to her creator Helene, but that have
something to do with the fact she wasn’t willing and then not able to bear a
child. Ellinor has no mother, but a father, who, like Helene’s mother, is
traveling into old age.
This postmodern premise is familiar from contemporary
fiction. Novelists as disparate as Philip Roth, Ruth Ozecki, and Karl Ove
Knausgaard have taken to employing not just a lightly fictionalized “I,” but to
writing characters who have the same name and many of the same outer
circumstances and inner characteristics as their creator. This doubleness is
not exact and is always partial. In Rydde
ut we can’t be sure that Helene the fictional novelist is completely the
same as Helene Uri, who, like Ellinor, studied linguistics and has a doctorate
in the subject from the University of Oslo.
Ellinor is a character with both firm and flexible
attributes who shapes herself before our eyes and is given a history that helps
set her story in motion, but remains resistant at times to Helene’s molding of
her personality and her fate. As writer, I was fascinated by the push and pull
of Ellinor and Helene’s stories: intertwining, paralleling, and conflicting. As
a reader, I found myself drawn into Ellinor’s story in particular, giving
myself over to the fictional experience—as if she were “a real person,” whose
loneliness, loss, and awakening touched me deeply. I trust Helene and I care
about her story as well, but I worried less about her—she is, we know,
successful and loved, even though she too will suffer losses in the course of
the novel—losses that in fact may well be more true than Ellinor’s.
One of the things that sets this novel apart from most Norwegian fiction is the inclusion of Sami history and Sami characters, not
just as window dressing but an integral part of the narrative. As Helene begins
to contemplate her fictional character Ellinor, trying to give her a project to
work on and destination for the journey she’ll make, Helene receives a call
from a woman who says she’s a relative living near the far northern town of
Hammerfest. Through contact with this relative and her own research, Helene
tentatively realizes that her grandfather, Nicolai Nilsen, was half Sami,
listed in official documents as blandet, or
mixed race. His father was a coastal Sami fisherman. Helene had thought her
family background settled—she believed they all came from southern and western Norway. Uncertain how to
weave this new knowledge into who she believes she is, Helene chooses an
alternate route. She sends her character Ellinor up to an unnamed town in Finnmark, during the dark time, with a research project: to interview and
survey the Sami families there and to understand the ways in which they have
retained or lost the Sami language. In the process Ellinor slowly makes friends
with Anna, an elderly Sami woman, and Kåre, a Sami man with whom she’ll have
more than a friendship.
Anna and Kåre are fully realized characters, intelligent, complex,
and generous individuals—far from the stereotyped Sami figures that have
appeared on the margins of Norwegian literature for two centuries. Ellinor’s
relationships with them add depth to the story, and Anna and Kåre’s irony and
insight also intensify the themes of historical displacement, political
conflict, and renewed interest in Sami culture (Anna was and is an activist and
Kåre’s grown children take pride in their Sami background). The novel also
casts a welcome light on the coastal Sami society of Finnmark.
The sjø Sami aren’t
the reindeer herders of fairy tales and history and have often been neglected
in research and popular imagery. Their ancestors have been there for millennia;
they were sighted by sea travelers as far back as the ninth century. Fishers
and boat builders (they constructed many of the Viking long ships, it’s
thought), they also carried on trapping and hunting, which eventually led to
domesticating reindeer. As colonization took hold along the coasts of Norway,
many Sami moved inland, but others co-existed with Norwegians and Finns while
still keeping their separate language and traditions. However, “Norwegianization”
policies regarding education, citizenship, and rights to territory and
resources made conditions for the Sami people increasingly more difficult and
many dropped their identity or moved away. Thousands emigrated to North America
in order to escape stigmatization and make new lives for themselves. During the
last stages of World War II many towns and farms in Northern Norway and Finland
were destroyed in a scorched-earth retreat. The Sami, particularly in Norway, were
pressured into ever greater assimilation or isolation; it’s no surprise that
many abandoned the Sami language or didn’t teach it to their children. Often
children were sent to boarding schools where only Norwegian was spoken.
Rydde ut isn’t a
historical novel, but the events above and their consequences form the backdrop
to the parallel stories. Helene’s grandfather Nicolai was one of those young
people from the turn of the century who was sent to a boarding school and then
emigrated briefly to North America; he returned to southern Norway to study
engineering, marry, and raise a family. He spoke little about his past and he
never mentioned to his relatives that he was half Sami. Ellinor’s story, set in
the present, shows her ignorance in first arriving up north about Sami history
and language, and her gradual acclimatization to the rich meaning of past
culture and the stirrings of renewed Sami pride. Not that the novel ever stoops
to rhetoric; the Sami themes are handled with some subtlety, and the Sami
themselves give voice to their own resistance, resignation, pride, and the
irony so characteristic of their society.
This novel works on many levels as it deftly moves back and
forth through place and time. Both Ellinor and Helene experience deaths and are
forced into the role of children dealing with the accumulated possessions of
their parents. Hence the term “rydde ut,” which in its most direct translation means
“clear out.” But the term can also has more sinister, active meanings:
“utrydde” means “eliminate, eradicate, obliterate, wipe out, exterminate, kill
off.” An “utryddet språk” is a language threatened with extinction.
There are nine or ten Sami languages in the territory of Sápmi,
several of which are not in popular use. The one that Ellinor is pursuing in Northern Norway is North Sami, which
has the most speakers. It is threatened but also protected in Norway and Sweden.
Over the last decades new elementary schools have been created and numerous
programs exist to help save and promote the language. For many older Sami it’s
too late; while socially Sami, the language they were never taught or heard
only from their grandparents has indeed been eliminated. Ellinor, as a linguist,
has much of interest to say about dying and dead languages from around the
world; but until she comes north to Sápmi and engages with the men and women
who speak or don’t speak Sami, who remember when they stopped or why they never
started speaking Sami, Ellinor doesn’t fully engage with the pain of language
loss. Helene, as Ellinor’s creator, who is herself as it turns out, related to
people in and near Hammerfest who also share the same heritage, is not unlike others
in Norway with a forgotten or suppressed heritage.
Beautifully constructed, Rydde
ut is both a clearing out and a gathering together of strands from Norway’s
past history and current preoccupations. For many Norwegians, their far north
is a strange country, a distant land of colonization and resistance, a frontier
of exploration and recovery. In this novel Helene Uri bravely takes a step
toward acknowledging what has been lost of language and memory, as well as what
can be recovered and remembered.
Helene Uri has a
website,
with a
Wikipedia page in
English and a more substantial
entry
in Norwegian. An interview with her in Norwegian in
Dagsavisen from 2013 gives more background on her discovery of her family’s
roots in Finnmark and how she used that information in her novel.
