Stories of Secrets, Wounds, and Healing: The Year in Finland

This has been a year of crisis everywhere. Lockdown updates started to appear in Finnish social media in March, when the COVID-19 epidemic broke out in Finland. Radio, newspapers, and social media platforms offered spaces for citizens to discuss and document what it was like to be hit by disbelief—to stop, stay home, and distance. The crisis seemed to ask for textual and narrative structuring and witnessing. Some professional writers, such as journalists, collected stories they later published in books. The popular writer Saska Saarikoski offered her "diary in a state of emergency," Poikkeustilassa: Koronapäiväkirja, and another widely followed journalist, Annastiina Nykänen, published Yksin kotona, an account of living alone because of the pandemic but also because of recent deaths in the family. In addition to these publications, the Finnish Literary Society asked ordinary people to send in their stories to be preserved in the National Archive, inviting them to record their experiences of these extraordinary times to build the cultural memory of a nation in turmoil. These are just few glimpses, and my aim is not to cover the rich crisis testimonials of 2020, even though as I write this essay at the turn of 2021, the pandemic seems to be preoccupying the whole world. In this review I focus on the theme of secrets, traumas, and mental health crises in Finnish life writing in 2020.

Stories Forgotten

In recent years, mental health, in the contemporary context and also the history of madness and mental illness, has been a growing interest in Finland, as elsewhere. One of the most popular biographical films in Finland, which exceptionally has a female protagonist is Prinsessa (2011), a movie that narrates the life of a long-term patient in a mental hospital. In this past year, journalist and writer Susan Heikkinen has continued on this path by publishing a biography of a similarly forgotten patient, someone who was institutionalized at the age of twenty in the 1920s, and who ultimately died in the Seili mental hospital in the 1959.

Seili hospital is a mental institution that in the later phase of its history was an asylum for female patients only (1889–1962), and its location on an island in the Turku archipelago has made it an isolated site throughout its history. The biography Pullopostia Seilin saarelta: Potilas numero 43 is based on archival documents that are fragmentary and peculiar because of their archival history. This "memoir" is based on papers written by a female patient named Saima, stuffed in small bottles, hidden among stones in a small forest on the island, and discovered in 2010, almost fifty years after their writing. These fragments convincingly reveal the role that materiality has in life writing, how "material properties of the media" are important—the material matters and not just the semiotic (Poletti 20–23). Saima's papers were preserved, conserved, and then studied by Susan Heikkinen, who took on the job of a detective to find out who Saima was and what had happened to her. An article in 2012 was followed by a biography in 2020, in which the archival documents are quoted at length. Moreover, all the images of the glass bottles are printed in the book and the texts found in them are published as an appendix.

Pullopostia Seilin saarelta chooses to portray female madness in nonfiction, perhaps as an alternative to recent fiction that has been written about this mystical island of "madwomen," including Katja Kallio's 2018 Yön kantaja, a story of a Seili patient named Amanda, and Johanna Holmström's Själarnas ö, a Swedish novel also based on the fates of female patients in the isolated hospital, which appeared in 2017. Instead of fictionalizing, Heikkinen gives historical context based on research, along with material drawn from newspapers and literature, even including endnotes at some critical points. The history of the Finnish nation—independence in 1917, followed by the Finnish Civil War and the Second World War—the history of psychiatry, and the social history of maidservants in Finland entangle with Saima's life chronology and family...