Stolen
“Good things come to those who wait” — always true?
From a reader perspective, this was the moral of the story when it came to my time spent with Stolen (Ann-Helén Laestadius), the international bestseller about Sámi reindeer herders and the oppression they face in Sweden. The paperback’s just shy of 400 pages, and for me, it was a bit slow-going at first but crescendoed into something mighty.
But I felt like this “good things come to those who wait” mantra was a specter over Stolen’s storyline as well. The book opens with nine-year-old Elsa witnessing a gruesome killing of one of her family’s reindeers and then being threatened by the assailant. The Sámis are a Swedish minority group, and even if this demographic is new to you (it was to me until I read another novel about the Sámi population earlier this year: The End of Drum-Time), the insidious way a majority group can constantly denigrate those seen by society as inferior will feel and/or sound familiar to you (depending on your background or awareness or myriad other factors).
Using the story of a multigenerational reindeer herding family told over decades, Stolen is a measured look at how and why people might — or might not — protest or speak out. “Elsa didn’t want to appear whiny; she just wanted people to understand. Far too often it was the most outspoken Sámi that took up all the space in the media, because journalists liked to provoke conflict. Some Sámi folks liked to test the limits and give sharp, scornful, and almost threatening statements about the wider society. They painted an ‘us versus them’ picture. Elsa didn’t have much patience for that kind of rhetoric. And it made it far too easy for the haters to lump them all together and call the Sámi whiny or troublesome.” Maybe, depending on your own background, you can mentally transfer this narrative to other groups to make it feel more familiar.
If the focus is always on methods of protest instead of the roots of injustice, can “good things come to those who wait [and only speak up in ‘appropriate ways’]”? When does waiting or trying to fit into a desired narrative fizzle into despair or complacency?
originally published on instagram