Trigger warning for child abuse and forced cultural assimilation.
None of the five Sámi in Ann-Helén Laestadius’s heartbreaking novel, Punished, want to go to the nomad school in Kiruna. Else-Maj, Marge, Anne-Risten, Jon-Ante, and Nilsa have heard stories about how awful it is there. They’re not allowed to speak their language; they must speak Swedish, even if they don’t know it. They can only go home during breaks. Worst of all is Rita Olsson, the housemother, who loathes the Sámi. In chapters set in the early 1950s and the early to mid-1980s, Laestadius shows us how the abuse these children suffer under Olsson’s “care” and its longterm effects. Rachel Willson-Broyles beautifully translated this moving, harrowing novel.
The first chapters of Punished take us back to the Kiruna nomad school. It’s not everyone’s first day. Nilsa, Marge, and Anne-Risten have been there at least a year and are familiar with the hair-trigger temper of Rita Olsson. Marge and Anne-Risten help Else-Maj learn the rules and Swedish as quickly as possible. Jon-Ante, sadly, is bullied by Nilsa and Rita. Not all of the teachers at the school are bad. Some of the staff know that the way the children are treated is terrible, but they don’t act, either because they don’t have direct proof or because they’re afraid of Rita themselves. In later chapters, we learn that some changes are made to make things better but these struck me as feeble responses to the way our protagonists and the other Sámi children were treated.
The chapters in the 1980s were, if anything, harder for me to read because Anne-Risten, Marge, Jon-Ante, Nilsa, and Else-Maj are carrying the weight of what happened to them without ever sharing their burdens with their loved ones. Anne-Risten and Marge assimilate into Swedish culture (wholly or partly) to avoid lingering racism. Jon-Ante aches to join his family as they herd reindeer. Nilsa only knows how to “toughen up” his children so that no one will physically hurt them. And Else-Maj does her best to live as traditional a life as possible, even though her oldest child just wants to be an ordinary Swedish teenager. And then, into the middle of this, Rita Olssen reappears. Even though she’s physically helpless by the 1980s, Rita still strikes bone-deep terror into the people who remember what she was capable of.
Reading Punished made me feel like a witness, rather than just a reader. I don’t say this because what Rita Olsson does is criminal but also because there are so many places where I wished that I could intervene in the action. Some of the characters, like Marge and Anne-Risten and Jon-Ante, I want to rescue. I want to warn others about the barely-suppressed anger in Nilsa. And I want to let Else-Maj know that she is magnificent and fierce in her dedication to keeping all things Sámi alive—but also that the surest way to piss off a teenage daughter is to force her to follow in her mother’s footsteps before she has a chance to find herself. And I want to help all of them testify against Rita Olsson, so that she can never hurt anyone ever again. We don’t get to see how some of these characters’ stories end. The end of Punished gives the sense that they all carry on: some happy, some miserable, some merely continuing. I know some readers don’t like ambiguous endings like this but it works here (at least for me) because not only do the characters live on, but so do all the ways a person can be Sámi.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.
