Reviews

Antiphony by Laila Stien

ceallaighsbooks's review

challenging emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? N/A
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

“‘You can't row straight with just one oar,’ she can say. I know that there is a great lack in me. Alone you are no one. Here more clearly than any other place I have been.”

TITLE—Antiphony (Nor. Vekselsang)

AUTHOR—Laila Stien

TRANSLATOR—John Weinstock (Norwegian —> English)

PUBLISHED—1997 (trans. 2006)

PUBLISHER—Tiden Norsk Forlag (trans. Nordic Studies Press)

GENRE—literary fiction

SETTING—Sápmi, late 20th c.

MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—Sámi history & culture; tourism; ethnographic journalism; settler-colonialism; cultural appropriation; intergenerational & inherited trauma; Christian missionary & institutionalized oppression; enforced enrollment for Sámi children into nomad schools; Fear and the oppression & loss of elements of traditional Faith; reclaiming indigenous identity & heritage; indigenous activism & land back movements; white settler guilt; duodji; economical; poetic writing style; reflective settler-colonist POV in indigenous spaces; the soullessness of white settler “culture” and the isolating & dehumanizing effect it has on everything it touches—including, arguably most *especially* & most insidiously, on its “own”

“For a moment she has gone into another room. I don't know which one. I don't have the qualifications to know how it is there, either. Even though she has talked about it. The wolves she has talked a lot about. But I can't manage to picture them. The only ones I know walk around in a tramped down circle along the fence in a narrow enclosure. Her wolves are different. They have teeth and come in packs. She is the fence, the one who stops them, the one who forces them back. With fire and yoik she constrains them. It is the fire she speaks about. She never mentions the other thing. I have it from others that she was a good yoiker. Before she was saved.”

Summary:

“[ANTIPHONY] presents a wonderful picture of Sámi culture in transition and in the face of inevitable outside forces. In this sense it is a much more universal work demonstrating how an indigenous culture reacts to a dominant culture and what happens over the course of a relatively short period. The novel is also an anti- or non-ethnography in a sense, blurring the lines between the center/ periphery (narrator/Sámi women).” — from back cover

My thoughts:

This was a really difficult book to navigate. You almost have to sort of let go of your analytical and conscious faculties and just sink into the writing with your feeling and your emotions. It feels a little like scrying—almost like you’re trying to make out recognizable images and sensations and when you do see something clearly, you hone in on it like a foothold, and then use that to try to reach the next foothold, until you feel like you’re starting to grasp a little bit of the world, the themes, and the experiences being presented in the narrative.

I was definitely very conscious of the fact that Stien herself is a settler who transplanted to Sápmi, married into a Sámi family and became a part of that community. I don’t think I got any autofiction vibes from this particular story but what I did sort of think she might be doing here was asking settler-readers to put themselves in the different Sámi-MC’s shoes and to see how their presence as settlers/outsiders/intruders in indigenous spaces is so problematic and often violent especially in ways they themselves might not even recognize. This is why it is important to approach these spaces with absolute humility and be ready to be silent and just listen. Don’t approach such journeys as a tourist or a collector, an academic or even an equal—put down the camera, connect to the people, face your “lack” (see above quote), and sit humbly & introspectively with the lessons you are given.

But I think the most powerful element for me personally was how the settler-MC related their experiences back south to the kinds of interactions they were witnessing in Sápmi and how settler life almost seemed like a depressingly finite destination of the deterioration of culture and the gruesome effect that has not just on people’s health and happiness but on the very state of their souls.

I would recommend this book to readers who have read at least a couple of other books by Sámi authors already. (See “Final note” & recs in “Further Reading,” below.) This book is best read with great humility, if you’re a settler, and with great gentleness, if you’re indigenous—there are many heavy topics though obliquely addressed.

Final note: I do kind of wish I’d read Linnea Axelsson’s ÆDNAN first because Axelsson’s story fits so well as the sort of backstory context for the MC’s in Stien’s narrative. This would be the perfect book to give you the context I think you would need if you are new to Sámi literature to truly appreciate the themes in Stien’s book. Also ÆDNAN is just the ultimate Sámi novel so, definitely start there. Well start with Valkeapää if you can find it! Then ÆDNAN. Then ANTIPHONY.

“This day I regret that I came. Feel that in a way I have snuck in. Don't know how close I am allowed to be to her sorrow. But since I came, I sit. At the edge of the chair. Wait for someone to touch me on the shoulder, toss me out… She stretches out a hand, but doesn't find me. I come toward her.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

CW // genocide, forced institutionalization, strained family relationships, terminal illness (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Season: Winter

Further Reading—

• ÆDNAN by Linnea Axelsson
• TREKWAYS OF THE WIND by Nils-Aslak Valkeapää
• FIRE FROM THE SKY by Moa Backe Åstot
• THE SÁMI PEOPLE: TRADITIONS IN TRANSITION by Veli-Pekka Lehtola
• THE NIGHT BETWEEN THE DAYS by Ailo Gaup
• AN ACCOUNT OF THE SÁMI by Johan Turi
• STOLEN by Ann-Helén Laestadius
• “THE ASSOCIATION,” by Samir EI-Youssef, in PAᏓESᎢ1NE +100, edited by Basma Ghalayini
• IN THE PALACE OF THE SNOW QUEEN by Barbara Sjoholm (a white american journalist writing about Sápmi—an overall thoughtful book with the caveat that she inevitably gets a few things wrong & one particular thing deeply and tellingly wrong 😅)

Favorite Quotes—

“This face in the reflection of the fire is the only one I manage to see. Because the skin is still young, the hair black, and since I can surely always manage to light a fire, one of the few skills I have acquired. I even start one in the shelter of the trees, where there are trees, don't do it in open, drafty places like those they laugh at. Yes, just that I manage to see: The young, strong face, and the flames that lap up toward the sky.”

“Entirely without gestures and with her eyes resting on a point outside the room or inside herself she shares her most important truth with me - that all good and complete gifts come from above, from the father of light, with whom there is no change or shifting shadow. This she says. It is the others who tell me about the shadows.”

“I find a pretext to go into the store on the way home. Home? Yes. I live here. Here is where I live. It was supposed to be two months. Now it has turned into five. After four weeks I knew everything, discerned everything. Then I began to understand less. Now I know nothing, and the PC lies in a plastic bag.”

“…light must be implanted in children, and it is bad for those who have no light to implant.”

“‘It is a dead faith that doesn't bear the fruit of the faith, but the fruit of death.’ The words come slowly, from her new unaccented voice. I ask what she means, but she has said what she wanted.”

“‘It's hard to speak a foreign language’ she says after a while. I don't deny it. Know that it's that way, also when it is not noticed. On her you hardly notice it. She is steady in her foreign language. Steadier than most. Because she's never been afraid of people, she told me the first time. Because she didn't just stay with her own people during the long summers at the coast, but kept company with everyone, she found friends and was with them in many a thing. There was just one thing she couldn't bring herself to do, and that was dancing. No one from the mountains danced. But they watched. It was amusing to watch. ‘Much too hard to speak a foreign language,’ she repeats after a moment, and I understand that I can go now.”

“There is little I can help her with. I read a little when I am there. Would have sung if I had had a decent voice. I read. And it is while I read that I most strongly perceive that it is the wrong language. All the same she thanks me.”

“‘It was destined,’ she says. ‘Everything is destined. Man doesn't rule.’”

“‘You're working hard.’ Slowly I pick up the finished front part, look at it, bold in its colors, sparkling, but stiff, hasn't been under the iron yet. ‘Yeah, you have to. Can't sit around resting your head on your arms, that'll just bring you sorrows.’ She is probably right. Some people have to be especially careful. Endure through work. Keep the head far away from the arms.”

“Busy constantly. That's the way it turned out. She is the last one who knows how. Her daughters have other things to do. Her daughter-in-law as well. So she has to sew for them all.”

“So quick. So easy. And already the second time I felt at home. Or? I can sit for a long time and feel that way, be full, there’s always food there - and warmth. Then something is said, I say something, or someone something, it becomes quiet, and she smiles, as if to a child. It's a code I can't crack. When I understood that I put my laptop away. …And in that smile lies everything I am unable to reach.”

“The newspaper writes about the readjustment program. Just window dressing, a few say, - death by starvation. A necessary step to stimulate departure from the livelihood and thereby prevent ecological catastrophe, others say. Reindeer and people must be reduced otherwise a wasteland will be next.”

"That's when you should have been here. Before. It was fun. We were so many. When we moved, we were four families in the group. Four tents. That can sound laborious today, but we got right to it, didn't waste any time in getting the tents either up or down. The oldest young people helped cut firewood and brush, strip birch bark. Of course we had some with us, for on the bare rock, out by the coast, there isn't much to find. Yeah, you should have been here then. We were comfortable in the tents. Cramped and comfortable.”

“Not everyone is suited to fight. You have to be a wolf yourself. Only the hardest are able. It's not worth it. When you only have yourself to fight for. No others. What good would it do?”

“She has no regrets, if I can believe that. There hasn't been anything to regret. ‘Everything is destined.’”

"We taught them everything.

It was a waste of time."

“So easy it had been to get there! A few plants of the poles. Then I was there. Could have been there before. Many times. I had narrowed the radius myself. Had no one to blame. Something was beginning to oppress.”