Katja Kettu’s Rose on poissa as Transcultural Trauma Fiction

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article coins the term “transcultural trauma fiction,” proposing that it constitutes a useful conceptual lens through which to examine the Finnish author Katja Kettu’s 2018 novel, Rose on poissa (Rose is Gone). Set in a Minnesotan world of mixed Ojibwe and Finnish heritage, Rose on poissa narrates a story of historical, intergenerational, and individual trauma, focusing on the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) crisis. The term “trauma fiction” has been in use since the 2004 publication of Anne Whitehead’s eponymous monograph, which applies Caruthian trauma theory to representations of trauma in contemporary novels. My use of the modifier “transcultural” before “trauma fiction” highlights the status of Rose on poissa as a text written by a cultural and ethnic outsider to any Native American heritage about traumas experienced by Ojibwe women and their indigenous and mixed daughters. I argue that Kettu’s literary strategy of transcultural hybridity seeks to acknowledge and mitigate problems potentially posed by the outsider’s gaze and by the risk of exploitative cultural appropriation accompanying it. Rose on poissa is a distinctly hybrid text that draws on both Ojibwe and Finnish cultural influences and intertexts as it depicts white-indigenous relations in the Great Lakes region.