Ethnicity, Cultural Identity and Bordering: A Tornedalian Negro

Abstract

This article examines how experiences of internal colonialism may be expressed in literary writing, through an analysis of Bengt Pohjanen's poem Rat- tipaat (Ragheads). The article discusses the poem and its embedding in a Meankie- li (Tornedalian Finnish) grammar book, Meankielen kramatiikki (Pohjanen & Kentta 1996). The theme explored is the tensions arising between homogenising modernity in a Swedish nation-building context and the particular situation of the Tornedalian Finnish minority in northern Sweden. Colonial complicity and vernacular cosmopolitanism are key concepts used in describing these tensions. The article proposes that the poem represents a remapping of the 'national' and the 'international' as allegiances are established between the Swedish national minority of the Tornedalians and migrants in European metropolitan centres. Hence the Tornedalians in the northern borderlands are presented as symbolic citizens in new migrant cartographies. This implies that a new myth of belong- ing is created, which unifies national minorities with metropolitan migrants. From the vantage point of the political and administrative centre of the Swed- ish nation-state located in the area of Stockholm, the Tornedalian borderlands up in the north have always been regarded as a marginal and culturally alien territory inhabited by the Sami people and Tornedalian Finns. The idea of a northern fringe of the nation-state was enhanced after Sweden lost Finland at the conclusion of the 1808-09 war with Russia. The peace treaty resulted in the border of 1809, which separates Sweden and Finland in the Torne Valley. The Tornedalian Finns on both sides of the border rivers consequently became citizens of different states. During the period that followed, there was a fear amongst the Swedish elite of Russian expansionism. Finland, which had become a Russian Grand Duchy, was seen as a space from where potential threats to Swedish sovereignty might emerge (Aselius 1994; Rodell 2009). From a perspec- tive based on the notion of the geographical centre of the Malardal region as a norm for national culture, the Finno-Ugric peoples of the sparsely populated north constituted a strange element in the national imagined community (cf. Anderson 2006).