Lose Yourself In This Interview

A winding and beautiful conversation with Hanna Pylväinen

Interviews with fiction writers are often a hard sell. With non-fiction, you can talk about issues. Discoveries. Ideologies. All sorts of stuff that resonates with readers even when they haven’t read the book. You can do that to some extent with fiction authors, but it’s generally much harder to talk about the plot of a fiction book without 1) spelling it all out in annoying detail or 2) ruining it.

It’s difficult to talk about characters the reader has not yet met. You can pivot to craft but that can only take you so far. And yet! A compelling fiction interview for an audience that hasn’t necessarily read the book — it can be done. I have seen it done. It just takes more work: from the interviewer, from the interviewee, and from you, the reader.

When a Culture Study reader (and close friend of Hanna Pylväinen) saw me list The End of Drum-Time as one of my favorite books of the year, she offered to put us in touch. When Hanna replied to my email, I had a real fan slightly-nauseous moment, which continued as I attempted to put together a set of questions that would do my part in scaling the high wall that is the compelling broad audience fiction interview. As you read on below, you’ll see that Pylväinen has more than done her part — and also given you a sense of the care and attention that infuses the book. This interview, like the book itself, is absolutely transportative. I so hope you’ll come along.

The End of Drum-Time is out in paperback on April 23rd — preorder it now, forget that you ordered it, and then open your mail in a few weeks to the very best present. Or buy yourself the hard cover today; it’s beautiful.

I want to start by rooting readers in the moment where the book takes a place — a really complicated and fascinating historical moment — in colonialism, in Protestantism, in geopolitics. It’s all wrapped up in the book title: The End of Drum-Time. What was going on in the northern area of what we now know as Norway, Sweden, and Finland in the mid-19th century? 

I will tell you how I heard it. It was 2009 and I was in Finland on a research grant that I was really using as a romantic getaway, but to make it look like I was really doing research I met with a Finnish scholar who studied the religion I was raised in, which is a small Finnish fundamentalist sect.

I meet with him for coffee in a basement in a mall in Helsinki, and I’m conscious of wearing earrings, which demarcate me to people in the sect as an unbeliever, and I'm not sure if he’s a believer or an unbeliever or not, because I don’t know what it means that he’s studying this guy who started my family’s church. But it’s much harder to tell if a man is in the church because they have less physical denotations of their faith.

So this is what’s on my mind when I meet with him: does this guy think poorly of me because he can tell I’m an unbeliever? And first of all he tells me he knows my parents, and that he’s been to my house when I was a baby, which will tell you how small this world of believers is. But then he’s explaining how the guy who started the church, a guy called Laestadius, really started it among the Sámi people, and he says to me this phrase, “the end of drum-time.”

At the time I take this to mean he’s talking about Laestadius — that the Sámi people called the coming of Laestadius in the 1850s “the end of drum-time” — and I have no idea what that means; I’m on the outside of it, looking in, which also doesn't make sense, because he’s referring to a religion that I come from, that has formed my identity from the first and which, at that moment, I am still trying so desperately to fully shake off of me without realizing that’s a futile goal.

I embark on a long course of learning, and now I can tell you what “the end of drum-time” means. Very, very broadly speaking—Sweden and Norway were using the State (Lutheran) Church to colonize the indigenous people, the Sámi people. Granted, they had been doing that for several centuries—they used the church not just to record births and deaths and marriages but to collect taxes and ascertain literacy and generally make the Sámi “civilized.”

Naturally there’s financial incentives in this, since the area was and is being used for mining, but also Russia—which ruled Finland, and even then was a big threat to Sweden and Norway—wanted to build up their navy in the north, and have fishing rights. At the same time Swedish and Norwegian and “Finnish” settlers were being encouraged to build farms up in the north, and given tax and land incentives for doing so, much like our Homestead Act, since to the minds of the colonial powers, the land isn’t being used, and the Sámi are more or less dirty heathens who herd reindeer, a sentence I can hardly write because it disgusts me, but that’s what they thought.

I think it's also important to note that since some Sámi people are reindeer herders, they're moving with the reindeer across huge swaths of land—this in particular gave the impression that the land was not “used” since “permanent” homes were not being built in the same way as a settler would come and build a farm (and burn the lichen the reindeer lived on and that cannot be immediately grown back).

That’s a bunch of political and social history, but where the phrase itself comes from—“the end of drum-time”—is a translation from a single Sámi word, which actually more strictly could be translated to “the time when we had to hide the drums.” The word refers to the coming of the missionaries amongst the Sámi people, and the burning of noiades (shamans) and drums as early as the 1400s. Naturally, the Sámi people became very good then at hiding their old ways and religion; to this day, they are (in my experience) often reluctant to speak about it; for instance, the location or names of noiades are not given out and if someone talks to you about the old religion or joiks in front of you (Sámi singing) it’s a vulnerable thing for them to do, and a real honor.

So by the time my novel opens, in 1851, it’s fairly well established among the Sámi that 1) it’s important to pretend to be Christian; and 2) it’s important to keep anything about the old ways away from the settlers or priests. Enter: Lars Levi Laestadius, the minister who opens my novel and is a real figure from history. He’s half-Swedish and half-Sámi, and he’s credited as being a minister who brings Christianity (I would say, a kind of Christianity) to the Sámi in such a way that they begin proselytizing amongst themselves; you might argue they make it their own, and spread it as their own.

You came to write about this time in part through researching the fundamentalist sect in which you were raised — Laestadianism. What did you understand about yourself and your family’s place within the religion growing up, how do you understand it now, and how did you try to reflect that understanding in The End of Drum-Time? 

Growing up, the word of words was “Finnish.” We had our Finnish looks and a sauna in our basement and we baked Finnish coffeebread and our family friends were Finnish—and our church was Finnish. We sung Finnish hymns and we said our prayers in Finnish; Finnish ministers came to speak in our little Detroit church, all the way from Finland! Moreover, my understanding growing up was that we called ourselves “Laestadian” because the man who started our church was called Lars Levi Laestadius, and I think I actually thought he was Finnish, too—it’s a bit hard to remember—and the way I was told it, he was “given the gospel” through a “Lapp girl” (no one ever said “Sámi”) that people called “Lappish Mary.”

But this was about the extent of it—it all was very vague, and the emphasis was never on him, or on “Lappish Mary” (a real person, it turns out, Milla Clementsdotter)—they were just seen as somehow more or less miraculously having brought the grace of the gospel from the time of Jesus—how it got to Clementsdotter was never clear. In some ways, I suppose, a lot, if not all, religions, share this kind of ahistoricity—there’s a murkiness that’s necessary because at some level there are some seriously missing pieces, so the focus is often on a more recent revivalist or founder, something further up the chain of time. The idea being, always, that this most recent link is the lasting and only thread back to something real.

So we’re back again to the coffee in the mall in Helsinki and this scholar explaining to me that Laestadius was not Finnish; had traveled on skis to preach to his migrating congregation of largely Sámi people. When I start on my own research I start learning about how he had allowed and encouraged his mostly Sámi congregation to do things the State Church of Sweden did not want or like: speaking in tongues, jumping and crying out with ecstasies, etc.. He felt the State Church of Sweden was a dead faith—he says this quite explicitly—and there’s quite a bit of conflict between him and the State Church, which basically sees him as a rabble-rouser, which, frankly, he is—because, perhaps being Sámi himself (though he's always referred to as a “Swedish” preacher in historical articles etc.), he doesn’t look down on them like the rest of the missionaries do, and because he uses Sámi references in his sermons, and because he presents an opportunity to them to protest the State Church (and thus, Sweden and Norway) by following him—to go with Laestadius is, inherently, to do something rebellious.

But: it can also be argued in a huge way that Laestadius, in letting these expressions of “living faith,” these “awakenings” occur, is really helping preserve the old Sámi religion, with its shamanic ecstasies—and the belief in how important feelings are, how useless “knowledge” is—is also being preserved. And that’s what makes it to me, 135 years later across the ocean in a Detroit suburb in a house with seven siblings where we don't have TV and aren't allowed to listen to music “with a beat” and each think we’ll grow up to have large families of our own—a kind of fervor of faith, the belief in a ritual of forgiveness in which we cathartically release each other from sins, a constant admonition that it’s less important to read or know or study the Bible than it is to “believe”—to have “the gospel,” which is seen as this living thing that gets passed from person to person. And there it is—in its own way, beautifully preserved—something Sámi, which is the thing it turns out I had the hardest time leaving, the sense of ecstasy and relief that my sins were all done with, that I was good and holy and pure, etc.

The End of Drum-Time is about this smash-up of cultures: a kind of puritanical Swedish church with strict rules about how to be—Laestadius even thought curtains were a vanity—but also a privileging of feeling, of feeling as knowledge and proof of holiness. Its also a look at what the larger political factors are that even make this appealing to people, that makes this new religion into being (which, by the way, is still considered heretical by a most traditional Christian churches, which would never, for instance, allow one church believer to forgive another as a holy act).

Because I do think, without the State Church, without Russia and Norway closing their borders to each other (which happens in 1852), without the increasing pressure of colonialism on the Sámi’s old way of life, there’s no Laestadianism, certainly not the Sámi-informed and -influenced Laestadianism that exists today; that is to say, I now understand the church of my youth to have been the result of colonialist forces. Even though you could also argue the church of my youth was itself a colonizing force!

There was never a larger turn towards Christianity amongst the Sámi people—it is still a movement within them today—and it is undeniable that those who became Laestadian became, as is often the case with converts, the most stringent rejectors of the old ways. In summation: it was both a protest movement and its own system of oppression, arguably more powerfully so since it came from within instead of without.

The only way to put threads this complicated into the book was to try and show how people felt—there’s my old religion talking, not at all incidentally. Importantly. Because it was feeling that made this religion into being, and feeling that ultimately preserved it, and passed it down to me, and weirdly, feeling that brought me to return to this time and this place and that got me amongst Sámi reindeer herders who taught me and showed me their lives and befriended me and fed me and led me back into the past, which was back into feeling. So my characters needed to have these feelings—feelings of resentment towards the State, towards the priests, towards merchants, towards settlers—or they needed to want to use these towards their own ends. 

Which is part of the reason there's love in there. I mean, love between family members but also romantic, physical love, because love is also a force that makes us do things, that imparts change. Because once upon a time I left my own family’s church for (so I thought) a man who was not a part of it—the man I went on the research trip with! who was I think walking around Helsinki while I was in the mall— and it seemed to me then that the question of love was greater than the question of God, which is a question that Willa, Laestadius’s daughter, thinks about, too, when she falls for Ivvár, the reindeer herder.

In her case, Ivvár represents a world that’s always been around her and that arguably she is part of, too—her mother, Laestadius’s wife, was also half-Sámi—but that she knows relatively little about. She’s compelled by it, but naive. She actually has no idea what the life of a Sámi person is like. And Ivvár, for his part, has no idea what Willa is really like—he knows she's the minister’s daughter, and he knows he resents the minister, because his own father is falling for what the minister is saying, is converting. But maybe it’s their difference to each other that compels them to each other—there’s always a sense of escape in what you don’t know, though it’s false. I’m not saying they don’t really fall for each other—I think they do—but I think they don't know who the other person is.

Which I think is common. I’ve been in that relationship a few times, myself. I’m not saying Willa is me—she is really her own engine, doing her own things, making choices I can’t say I would ever make—well, maybe—but if the characters take anything from me it is desire and independence, by which I mean, a desire for independence and the independence to have desire you aren't supposed to have.

On a more craft level—if this is of interest—I also ultimately decided to solve the problem of how to tell the readers what I wanted them to know by telling them. In omniscience, which people tend to think of as the “God point of view.” I’d rejected that for a long time, since it seemed frankly too white, too authoritarian—oh great, what am I, another God?

It took me time to acknowledge I knew what I knew, but also, I was more aware after years of research what I didn’t know—which to be clear is still a lot—but now I understood more how to use the book to point that out, and I realized that omniscience, in its own way, was a handy tool, because omniscience can call attention to itself, curtail itself, say, hey, don’t forget, I’m telling you a story and this is all constructed. There’s a teller here and it’s me, and I’m probably getting things wrong.

Ultimately that felt the most honest way to do it, rather than to use fiction in more frankly subtle ways so that the reader totally forgets the story is being told, totally forgets about the teller, begins to enter the slippage that this is real—this is “fact”—I wanted, if possible, for the book to feel more like someone’s telling it who yes, is knowledgeable, but also might not be totally reliable because they’re just a person, they have foibles and they have blind spots. But they love story—that was important, too. The teller must love the story they tell. And the people in it.

I think a lot of my interest in the book comes from wanting to think more about my own Norwegianness and the way people talk about what it means to Norwegian. Like so many Scandinavian identities, it was formed around understandings of race, Christianity, rationality, efficiency….but also on being not Sámi, not Other. I picked up some of this in the book: various settlers who don’t necessarily understand their identity as “Swedes” as much other than being not like the Sámi amongst whom they live. 

You can take this in whatever direction you’d like, but I’d love to hear some of your thoughts on this moment in national/racial identity formation and how you see it playing out with the various characters in the book. 

To put it most bluntly, I used to be proud of being Finnish in some basic ways; I had this sense that to be Finnish was to be from a democratic, well-educated country—I took pride in how many women Finland has in their Parliament, how family-friendly their social policies are, etc.. So in a way it was devastating to my sense of identity to realize that the Finns have been horrible to the Sámi—it’s a very similar story to that of America to its own Indigenous people. I remember once when a Sámi friend asked me if I thought she was smart. This shocked me—she can, I kid you not, not only speak in five languages but navigate through a white-out on a snowmobile forty miles from her siida. And I realized this question was very baked into her being Finnish, where Finns have such an emphasis on “education" that it has not left room for understanding what intelligence is and what intelligence does—and, moreover, my friend had been treated for so long as lesser that in some the question was: will you, as an American, do you also think less of me? It made me incredibly sad as a question.

I think, both there and here, there’s always been the problem that James Baldwin posed as: Why does the white man need the Negro? What is the Negro for? Interestingly, back at the time of my novel, Finns were not thought much of either—you might say they are like how the Irish used to be in America. In any case, it makes a certain sad and sick sense that Finns would need the Sámi to be Other, to lift themselves up and out of what they had been—ethnic peasants and farmers controlled alternately for centuries by Sweden and Russia.

But what’s most sad is how it continues, how it seems there’s nowhere near enough understanding in Sweden or Norway or Finland of what their histories are and what’s owed to the Sámi people and what it means that they are still trying to take their land for mining and for tourism or what-have-you, and, in fact, they still won’t recognize them (this differs from country to country) as an Indigenous people at all. (The Sámi have a deep sympathy for the Palestinians.) Were they really there when they say they were? Are they really their own people? Who says they ever “owned” that land? How is anyone supposed to know if their family has been there for generations? What do they mean that’s their family’s grazing grounds? Do they have papers?

In the book, it was essential to me with all of these cultures in conflict to not make it, to the extent possible, the story of only one of these cultures. That’s a bit naive, of course—I’m American—I’m of Finnish descent—I can never shake that—but I wasn’t interested in, say, the version a Finnish farm-girl in the north would tell about this, because to me it would replicate the problem that already exists, which is to act like it’s only the Finnish person’s story, and to make it so that it’s the Finnish (white) person who sees but is never, themselves, seen.

It seemed clear to me the only way to do justice to the story was to understand the injustice from the people who experienced it—the Sámi—to do whatever the work was that was involved in that learning. And to let the book be about it—be about I see this and you see that and actually the reader sees no, they don’t see that at all, but he sees this, and she almost sees that—all these wild inaccurate ways of seeing, I mean, going about at once, including my own. So it felt very necessary to use the omniscient point of view to go wherever the story needed to go: whatever point of view held the story at any particular moment.

This was, often though certainly not always, a Sámi point of view in the novel—and it was necessary at many times for a Swedish character to see a scene one way and then for the narrator to intercede and provide, really, a corrective—or, sometimes, another character, to show what's really there. Willa thinks she sees this; here’s what the herders see. Because when you are new to a place or a culture, you have so much blindness—really you have such a partial view at best. Of course, even among people we know and cultures we know, are part of—we can still fail to see. We’re all myopic, we’re all the main character, we’re all the only point of view—etc. So somehow the book had to do more, even while, as before, the book also had to understand it was only one point of view. “I contain multitudes”—okay, but I'm also only an “I.”

Your research process for this book is really compelling — can you talk about where you tried to immerse yourself, how you made it happen, and how it shaped the book? 

I knew I had to understand reindeer, first of all. I got in touch with a Sámi reindeer herder through a filmmaker who’d wanted to film this particular family but they’d said no—they were too private—but she thought they might talk to me, since I was just writing a novel. I remember I sent an email and heard nothing back. I tried again a few months later to say that hey, I was making a trip up there, etc., and this time I heard back—oh, they’d been in the fells, sorry, etc. I got some of the best directions of my life to meet them—“drive thirty kilometers and I’ll be in a parking lot on your righthand side with a snowmobile and sledge and my herding dog”—and then found myself on the back of the sledge, covered with a reindeer pelt, being driven over a frozen lake—well, I don’t know if I’ve ever felt luckier than then.

That night turned into a couple of days—now it’s been years. I went back to stay with the family a few times over the years, and I also went back to do two residencies at Lásságámmi, which is the former home of Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, the famous Sámi poet and artist and musician. I lived in his cabin for a month at two different times of year, trying to get a feel for being by the sea and for that quality of solitude which is quite special to the place. Things started to feel familiar the more I went—I recognized the same woman working at the gas station, another at a grocery store—I was there, for instance, for more than one ear-marking, which also felt special—I felt the cyclical turn of it all. By my last visit I even had the special honor—I am not being facetious—of feeling useful, helping out “at the fence” to hold reindeer to be separated. I don't know if I’ve ever been prouder than when my friend’s dad asked, could I come back next year to help. He might have been joking but I’ll take it.

More importantly is that every time I visited I saw everything all over again, and I saw how much was wrong. Every draft was naive in some other, dumb way—every draft needed a new dose of humility and then a spurt of hubris to stupidly write another one. And in the meantime, back in the States, I did all kinds of traditional “research”—scholarly archives at the New York Public Library, had two Sámi memoirs translated from Old Norwegian, read missionary journals, listened to joiks with friends late at night besides lakes and in deep conversation—and reading Sámi poems and novels—and Finnish ones.

It was always an attempt to be absorbed because when I would sit down to write I would have the distinct feeling that I had to travel: I had to travel to the book, to the place. In this sense I did some of my best work in Provincetown, I think because that is also an isolated place that is consumed by the land around it—I’d go outside and feel the wind snap on the beach and I’d be ready to write. It was always hardest to write in that way when I was away from nature, when I was locked up in cities somewhere—it felt hard to “travel” then.

Not impossible, but just tougher, like for awhile the words would all be foreign to me, and I couldn’t recall my characters, or they just felt like characters—that kind of distancing feeling. When of course the best writing happens when your characters start running around on your own, doing stuff you aren’t expecting—god, I love that. I love when they surprise me; then I know I’m doing good work. There’s a moment towards the end of the book that involves earmarking—without giving spoilers—that was a moment, for instance, that I did not know the character would do that. She just did it, seemingly, of her own accord, and I admired her for it.

One of the things that made me certain I wanted to read the book was the blurb front and center on the cover from Julia Phillips — who wrote Disappearing Earth, another of my favorite books from the last few years. I’m usually pretty blurb agnostic, but this one really worked on me — I think because she’d managed to write about a corner of the world with such fullness, heft, and beauty, so I had to believe that this book would do the same.

So here’s your chance to do something similar and convince someone with your blurb: what’s a book that also does what you were trying to achieve with The End of Drum-Time? What makes it work? 

This may be odd, but this is the hardest question for me to answer. I spent some time going through my bookshelf, thinking, is this it? Was that it? The true answer is uncomfortable and I don’t like to say it, in part because I know I’m wrong and in answering I reveal another of my limitations: I don’t know what else is doing what I tried to do.

Part of my difficulty is that growing up, in my church of rules, we weren't allowed to watch television, and I happened to read a lot. I read a lot of old, dead white people—Dickens and Austen and Tolstoy—which is to say, I consumed a lot of omniscience. Not to mention the Bible, of course. But broadly speaking, omniscience in literature has traditionally been used as a mode to criticize social order—I’m thinking of Wharton’s use of omniscience to let us know a “gentleman” would never go into politics, for instance (this specific example comes from Brook Sadler). The narrator would often use aphorism to make grandiose statements about the world—“All happy families are alike,” etc. It is less often that omniscience gets used to write, though, about more than one kind or class or culture or ethnicity at a time—this could be because of the history of literature itself, which has favored those with the time and leisure to write—this could be because it is, as it should be, awkward to make aphoristic statements about a culture that isn’t yours.

Regardless: it has long been the haven of the dead, white writer—omniscience, I mean. This isn’t strictly true! Great examples that come to mind are Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas: I love these novels, probably for this very reason. Another that comes to mind is Edward P. Jones’ The Known World. These, to be clear, are great novels—I am embarrassed to list them in any kind of comparison to myself—they do not require blurbing as such. But I think it’s often the case that novels nowadays tend towards a more individual view of the world—even if a novel isn’t in first person, it’s probably in close third, and even if it's in close third and has more than one point of view character, it’s probably using rotating or multiple points of view that are confined to different chapters.

This isn’t “wrong”—far from it—it’s just that since Flaubert more or less (sorry to take us all on this literary history gauntlet) writers began to want to shield from the world that there was a writer at all, to create what Henry James called “the hero’s compass.” If you add that to what is a strong interest in novels with what Charles Baxter called “therapeutic” plots—that is, in which the psychological trauma of someone’s past is slowly unveiled—what you tend to get is novels which are fairly well centered on the individual and in which the writer is ideally veiled except via their prose style (Americans not that incidentally tend to favor “voice-y” writers) but almost certainly they are going to follow the workshop dictum of “show don’t tell” and privilege a fact or image above a description. Characters do not “feel angry,” I mean. You aren’t supposed to write, “Anne was angry.” Characters throw plates. It’s as if the ability to tell has been taken—we don’t tell, we televise. We show a picture of what happened.

But this is itself a lie. If you write, “Anne smashed the plate into pieces,” a phrase which ostensibly “shows” (proves?) anger, you are still telling.

Maybe—maybe—I desire to be told something in the same way I desire to believe in God. I don’t believe in God anymore, sadly—but wouldn’t it be nice to? So when I’m told a story I’m back in that again. I’m in a story. Someone else is in control of the world and the narrative. I don’t have to do anything but listen, and believe. ●

---

The End of Drum-Time is out in paperback on April 23rd — preorder it now, forget that you ordered it, and then open your mail in a few weeks to the very best present. Or buy yourself the hard cover today; it’s beautiful.