Connecting Souls. Finnish Voices in North America
Edited by Varpu Lindström and Börje Vähämäki Beaverton,
Ontario: Aspasia Books, 2000. 223 pages.
ISBN 0-9685881-2-3, US$ 16, CA$ 23, paperback

In her recent collection Jizzen, the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie writes about the pioneers who settled Ontario. ‘It’s not long ago,’ she remarks; cameras were there, after all, to record their lives and the people and things that accompanied them – ‘the axe and the plough, the grindstone / the wife by the cabin door / dead, and another sent for.’
     The work gathered together in Connecting Souls. Finnish Voices in North America, a collection by North American writers of Finnish descent, view the experience of emigration from the other end of the telescope. Divided into five sections – dealing with Finnish mythology and nature, the New World, memories and the self, reconnections with Finland, and Finnish literature (consisting of a number of translations of mainly newish Finnish writing) – the book offers predominantly poetry, with a sprinkling of short stories and essays, its quest being to offer both readers and writers a connection with the by now often highly elusive quality of Finnishness.
     ‘It’s not long ago’, indeed – in the Finnish case, by far the greater part of the emigration to North America took place between the 1880s and the 1920s – but for the descendants of the early migrants, separated by time, distance and, often, language, from the culture of the old country, reconstructing early experiences in Canada or the United States is a major work sympathy and imagination.
     Diane Jarvenpa’s ‘In the Deep Woods’ sets the immigrant experience in a melancholy natural world not dissimilar to Finland: ‘This is where your grandmother / came to pick mushrooms / in her new country.... / Here in the deep woods / she came to loosen pain, / break it off its wheel, / let it drop off her skin / with the old rotting trunks of aspen.’ The grandmother’s attempt to understand her new home, in other words, comes not through contact with people but through a profound unity with nature, ‘Watching the delicate nests / of the many small birds, / understanding their sudden, / brilliant flash of wings.’ For other writers, the universality of the Kalevala myths facilitates a connection with the family past: Ted Aspen, for example, tells the story of his mother’s emigration from Karelia through the verses of the national epic, linking two lines from Canto 22, for example – ‘You are going for a long time / Forever from your father’s shelter’ – with the moving scene of her farewell to her father at Joensuu station; others, perhaps less successfully, seek an approach to a lost language by incorporating the rhythms of the Kalevala into their poetry or sprinkling their texts with Finnish words.
     For most of the writers, the overwhelming sense is not of the gains of citizenship of a new land but of the losses of migration: migrants losing both country and language, parents losing children, brothers losing sisters, and even, in Lynn Laitala’s harrowingly understated true story, ‘Ashes: Jussi’s story’, a husband deserting a wife – not through adultery or irretrievable breakdown, but because the husband believes, wrongly, that his lovely wife back home in Finland cannot possibly remain faithful to him during his absence, and hardens his heart against her.
     For many, this sense of loss becomes a personal one that swells into resentment. Marlene Ekola Gerberick begins a poem called ‘Letter to My Grandparents’ as follows: ‘I don't think I've ever understood; / no, it’s stronger than that. / I don't think I've ever forgiven you / for coming here.’ Worse still, her parents gave their children names like Marlene Lucille and Colleen Grace instead of Marja Liisa or Sigrid Aino, and denied them their language.
     The issue is, of course, identity, and the sadness and rage felt by many of the book’s contributors appear to stem from a feeling that they have been denied the necessary materials with which to build a sense of self. Occasionally there is an acceptance of loss, as in Kaarina Brooks’ lyrical celebration of her father’s memory in her lilting ‘In My Garden Swing’, but in general the book conveys a raw sense of need unleavened by any mitigating factors. Even when reconnections are made with modern Finland, writers often remain on the outside, condemned – by their monoglot English, their black Nikes as they attempt to join in a polka on a Finnish country dance floor, in Jane Piirto’s ‘Tango Finland’ – to be regarded as strangers: ‘no one asks me to tango / they think I am an alien.’
     Every decision involves a way not taken, of course, and the sustenance of an immigrant culture is undoubtedly a difficult business, particularly in the third, fourth and fifth generations; but it must surely be counted a weakness of the book, or of its writers’ and editors’ approach, that we seldom hear anything of the strengths of the host culture. Only very rarely is there even any indication that the Finnish immigrant experience is less than unique; North American culture is, after all, defined by its immigrants, and the difficulties of transplantation and language suffered by Finns are surely not without precedent. Jane Piirto’s essay, ‘The Finnishness of My Americanness’, is a welcome exception in its juxtaposition of her Finnish heritage with the (denied) Italian heritage of her son-in-law’s parents, as well as its uncomplaining exploration of what, in the absence of language, her Finnishness might consist of: nostalgia for pea soup and saunas, her upbringing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, her interest in Finnish mythology, her love of snow and skiing, her Lutheranism, her socialist leanings, her affinity for clean design...
     In another poem from Jizzen, ‘The Graduates’, Kathleen Jamie explores the experience of those families who stayed at home: ‘I remember no ship / slipping from the dock, / no cluster of hurt, proud family // waving until they were wee / as china milkmaids / on a mantelpiece.’ Nevertheless, and just as surely as for those whose families did cross the ocean, she – ‘we emigrants of no farewell / who keep our bit language // in jokes and quotes / our working knowledge / of coal-pits, fevers, lost’ – is no less surely separated from the collective past. For her, the agent of division is education – the degrees that furnished the visa for her new-found land. For the rest of us, migrants and stay-at-homes alike, it is simply the passage of time, which steals our families, our homes, and in the end even our memories.



 
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