Some Do Magic And Some Do Harm

Sofi Oksanen is a small and striking woman, paler perhaps even than I am ("I think you and Sofi are the palest people I've ever met," says my mother), dark hair streaked magenta, dreaded, piled and looped up into a mass almost half as large as she herself. She wrote a novel called Purge. It's about sex trafficking and sexual violence, friendship between women, Estonian identity, life in the former Soviet Bloc. (This is what I know from the back cover and her talk today at the Albright Knox, not from actually reading the book - something I have not yet done). She came to town with Tommy Wieringa, the tall and good-natured and talented author of Joe Speedboat, another book that I have not read (yet). Both of them were bursting with interesting things to say, so many interesting things that I started to take notes on the palm of my hand and wound up filling the inside front cover of the new old book I bought after brunch and before their reading with associated scribbles. But for today, I think I'll stick with the palm notes, which say this - "private" and "Scandinavia" and "trolls?" and "Fever Ray" and "Sofi."


Sofi was asked a question about her writing process. She explained that she started to write Purge because she came across the issue of rape concentration camps and sexual slavery in Eastern Europe in the 1990s and felt like she needed to do something, "and I'm a writer, so what can I do but the writing, about anything." She first wrote Purge as a play, because she saw theater as such a collective experience and reading as a private/individual one, and she felt like it would be a more powerful and constructive move on her part to bring this material to the stage. (It is also important to note, as it was noted at the event, that while there is fairly open discussion of human trafficking and the complexities involved in many Scandinavian countries and formerly Soviet countries, there is NOT an open discussion of these issues in Finland). After writing the play and beginning to see productions of it staged, she decided that it had to be a novel, because experiences of sexual violence needed to be allowed the more interior, private space that fiction provides - that in some sense, while she had not anticipated it as such a space, fiction provided her characters simultaneously with more agency and with more amnesty. So complicated because sexual violence is so often experienced privately, and to make the reading experience of it private as well is a particular kind of choice.

I found this fascinating in so many ways - partly because I did my capstone work on creative writing as an avenue to activism and to hear a creative writer speak about these approaches to activism made me want to dive back into that work/those issues, partly because trafficking is such a complex issue, especially during and after war times - but the connection that struck me the very most in that moment was a wholly different one, a matter of personality and culture and art formation.

I spent the better part of the winter listening to Fever Ray, the side project of one half of the Swedish electronic group The Knife. The album is about psychosis and depression, fairytale, the disintegration of reality, childhood, and was written and produced just after Karin Dreijer Andersson had a baby.

Here is one of the songs:



Sofi's words about violence and private experience made me think of this work immediately, and wonder if the common threads I see are something to do with the myth-past of these far northern places and women in them, hunkering down for the winter, being so close to the Arctic circle, or what. For certain, you feel much closer to the raw power of privacy, craziness, violence, and what is experienced within your head and private sphere when you live in a context of long winters, I think.

Also, when you live in a context drenched in folk and fairytale, because so much of the history of folk and fairytale has to do with secrecy, of seeing what others cannot or will not see, stumbling upon fairies under patches of moss in the forest, or what have you. Scandinavian cultures are big on their forest and flower fairies, their trolls.

Now it's the next day and I can't remember where I was going with any of this anymore, and feel vaguely irresponsible writing it.

But I am starting to read Purge, and it is already a lyrical and powerful book, as Sofi herself is a lyrical and powerful woman.