Indigenous Writer's Poetry Reveals How Landscape Shapes Cultural Identity
A new study of Sami author Askold Bazhanov's work shows how indigenous peoples use nature writing to preserve memory and assert identity amid displacement. Understanding how communities construct belonging through storytelling has implications for heritage policy, cultural preservation programs, and indigenous rights advocacy globally.
Originaltitel: The Landscape of Longing and Belonging: Temporality in the Kola Sami Writer Askold Bazhanov’s Poetry
<p>The article examines Kola Sami literature, focusing on the autobiographical nature poetry written by the Skolt Sami author Askold Bazhanov (1934–2012) in the 1970s–2000s. The focus is on landscape and temporality in the contexts of Sami and Soviet literature, especially the literatures of small northern peoples. What characterises Bazhanov’s nature-centred texts in general is the complex way in which temporality and human and non-human existence are manifested in the northern landscape described. As a case study, the article examines nostalgic discourses, which in Bazhanov’s texts are associated with longing for the childhood landscape in Sami villages that were submerged in the 1960s. These discourses are often combined with romanticised idyllic depictions of reindeer herder life, which I analyse as arctic pastorals. In Bazhanov’s nature poetry, the temporality of the landscape, particularly the Sami history conveyed within the landscape that is described as strongly local, is an important means by which the identity and agency of the poems’ speakers are constructed and reinforced.</p>