Title: Migrants and Literature in Finland and Sweden
Abstract: you like it or not!' at the 'Kielten kudos [Tissue of Language] -textum linguarum' seminar in Helsinki dealing with multicultural writing in Finland and Sweden.Perttu's and Hassan's proposals exemplify a call for more visibility of authors with a minority background.However, migrants are not a homogeneous category and the obstacles to being acknowledged by the dominant national literary field which the major literary institutions are part of vary.When considering issues of presence and visibility in relation to literary fields, it is important to have in mind the target groups of the works of authors with a minority background.To claim that migrants per se are marginalised is a simplification.It is obvious that there are barriers when it comes to language.Authors writing in minority languages such as Karelian and Somali, for example, are often not acknowledged by the dominant national literary field simply because they will not reach out to readers in the majority population, including those actors in the literary field, such as publishers, academics and critics, who may contribute to the visibility and success of a writer.The fact that migration and minority status are diverse and multifaceted phenomena is illustrated by the authors mentioned above.Minority groups may be seen as more or less 'strange' and 'alien' compared to the ethnic majority.This is certainly the case in Finland and Sweden where black Muslim migrants from Africa often are seen as more different than white European immigrants.For immigrants themselves who have been violently uprooted, the contexts of upheaval vary.They may have been subjected to displacement due to shifting national borders as in the case of the Karelians, or as an effect of conflicts on geographically distant continents such as Africa.The studies in part II, III and IV of this volume relate to different geographical and historical contexts, which are interconnected with the various forms of migration that have led to the arrival of people who have found themselves struggling to cope with Finnish and Swedish society, respectively.Experiences of encounters with the new country, which by and by may become the new homeland, are reflected in imaginative writing by authors with experiences of migration.The migration of Finnish labourers to Sweden is reflected in Satu Gröndahl's and Kukku Melkas's contributions to this volume, the latter also discusses material related to the placing of Finnish war children ('krigsbarn') in Sweden during World War II.Migration between Russia and Finland is discussed by Marja Sorvari, while Johanna Domokos attempts at mapping the Finnish literary field and offering a model for literary analysis.Transformations of the Finnish literary field are also the focus of Hanna-Leena Nissilä's article discussing the reception of novels by a selection of women authors with an im/migrant background.The African diaspora and the arrival of refugees to Europe from African countries due to wars and political conflicts in the 1970s is the backdrop of Anne Heith's analysis of migration and literature, while Pirjo Ahokas deals with literature related to the experiences of a Korean adoptee in Sweden.Migration from Africa to Sweden also forms the setting of Eila Rantonen's article about a novel by a successful, Swedish author with roots in Tunisia.Exile, gender and disability are central, intertwined themes of Marta Ronne's article, which discusses the work of a Swedish-Latvian author who arrived 'immigrant' , 'migrant' or 'migration' , are constantly being proposed.For example, Simon Harel, among others, prefers the term 'postexilic writing' instead of migrant writing (see Lindberg 2013, 16.).This resembles an older term, exile literature, which describes the mental, political and social process of migration and writing literature in exile.Furthermore, Anders Olsson has underlined that modern 'exile literature' is intimately connected to a wide and sophisticated understanding of 'world literature' , written by trans-border authors who do not 'have a specific national foothold' (Olsson 2011, 186).Migrants oscillate between nations, cultures and languages, their presence can thus be seen as a questioning of the supposedly homogeneous nature of nations, cultures and languages.This view has gained ground in the discussions of postcolonial theory concerning alternative spaces, a third space, and contact zones.In the essay 'The Commitment to Theory' , Homi K. Bhabha discusses 'the Third Space' as a 'contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation' , which destabilises the 'the narrative of the Western nation' the number of asylum seekers from the war-torn Syria was, during 2015 until November, ca 149,000 (FORES 2016).Migration has not been as widespread a phenomenon in Finland as in Sweden.Still, migration is not a new phenomenon in Finland either.Historically, the largest group of people immigrating to Finland consisted of the evacuated Karelians from the Karelian Isthmus, Ladoga Karelia and East Karelia, areas that Finland lost to the Soviet Union after World War II.The estimated number of evacuated Karelians was around 400,000 and the total number of evacuees constituted 11 % of the entire Finnish population in 1944.Finland has even been considered the most multicultural country in Scandinavia in the beginning of the twentieth century.In the first decades of the twentieth century, most migratory waves came to Finland from Russia and the Soviet Union, as well as from the Baltic countries.Then numerous immigrants and refugees from the neighbouring regions, such as Ingrians, Karelians, Russians, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians moved or escaped to Finland.Many of them already belonged to different groups of minorities when still living in Russia or the Soviet Union.Later on, the largest immigrant groups in Finland have been the refugees from Chile and Vietnam in the 1970s and from the 1990s onwards especially from Somalia, Iran, Iraq and from the regions of the former Yugoslavia, in particular from Bosnia-Herzegovina.Due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, most contemporary immigrants in Finland originate from Russia or the Baltic countries.Consequently, Russian and Estonian are the most spoken languages among immigrants in Finland, followed by Arabic, Somali and English.As Russians in Finland constitute an old minority group and Russian has been spoken in Finland for a long time, it is not surprising that Finnish-Russian literature today seems to constitute the largest 'migration' literature in the country.Regarding the country of origin, the largest immigrant groups in Finland at the end of 2017 were those born in the former Soviet Union / Russia (approximately 75,000), Estonia (50,000), and immigrants born in Iraqi (20,000), Somalia (19,000) and former Yugoslavia (12,000) (TI 2018).During recent decades, immigrant groups from India and China, in particular, have found work in the information technological companies.At the end of 2017, about 385,000 persons of foreign origin, were living in Finland.This makes up ca 7 % of the whole population (TI 2018). Short survey: Research on Migration and Literature in Finland and SwedenAfter the end of the war, there was a flow of refugees to Sweden from countries such as Germany and the Baltic States, comprising considerable numbers of intellectuals and cultural workers.Even though we tend today to understand the 1970s as a constitutional decade when migrant and ethnic writing started in Sweden, such literature was in fact already under way after World War II.The existence of this literature has been discussed by volumes were based on presentations by a group of authors.These lexicons, published from the 70s to mid-90s, dealt with Estonian, Finnish, Latin American and Polish immigrant authors in Sweden.