Facts: Pink Like
Born: 1958 in the Finnish Tornedalen countryside as Anni Ylävaara.
Lives: In Helsinki. Has a summer cottage in the old home village in Finnish Tornedalen.
Family: Husband and daughter.
Pseudonym: Took the stage name Rosa Liksom already as a student. Her Finnish-Swedish friends all the time used “like” in the colloquial language and that was the way it was.
Occupation: Writer and visual artist.
Language: Writes in Finnish and Meänkieli.
Selected titles: “Station Gagarin” (1988), “Go Moskva go” (1989) Received the Finlandia Prize in 2011 for “Kupé no. 6” which in 2021 became a celebrated film directed by Juho Kuosmanen. “Överstinna” (2015) which she wrote on meänkieli.
Current: With the novel “Älven” which has now been translated into Swedish.
Last to leave the yard is the girl. She goes with the maid Katri, the five cows and the calf Sokkeri. The prey bull Janne makes the heifers shine. The older brothers have already died in the war, and the father is called up again. The heavily pregnant mother, on the other hand, has been given a ride and, by the way, the girl has never had a very good relationship with her.
German soldiers are circling around them, drilling holes in electric poles that are about to be blown up.
“Everything that happens here also happens now and everywhere,” explains Rosa Liksom on the phone from her home in Helsinki, “about 300 meters from the Stockmanns department store,” she adds with a loud laugh.
In the late 1980s, she broke through with a punk book about Moscow – “Go Moskva Go”. But Anni Ylävaara, as her real name is, grew up on a small farm with five cows in a forest village in Finland’s Tornedalen. When she bought her grandparents’ old cabin in the same village five years ago, it was also the beginning of her novels, which, together with the filmed Soviet adaptation “Cup No. 6”, have had a huge Finnish impact.
“Älven” has so far sold around 60,000 copies in its home country and is about a part of Finnish war history that today is almost as unknown to Finns in southern Finland as it is to all Swedes. It is also a novel that in more ways than one is rooted in the author’s own upbringing.
— Throughout my life, I have heard the stories about going to Sweden, and about what it was like to live there in the war camps. As a person gets older, she can become more interested in her roots, I became interested in my hometown.
Syrup loaf gave diarrhoea
Her old relatives, now over 90 years old, visited the summer cottage in Tornedalen and she visited them. The relatives’ spontaneous topic of conversation was precisely the strong childhood memories of the evacuation and the wartime winter in the Swedish barracks – during the winter of 1944/1945, water froze to ice on the floors. Old people and babies died of pneumonia, weakened by the Swedes’ wheat bread and syrup loaves that gave the Finnish refugees diarrhea.
— They started to tell me, I didn’t ask anything. They are so old, it knows that they will die, now they have understood that they want to tell: “we want it to be written”. These are absolutely incredible stories, absolutely incredible. I have only used some of them in this book.
The Lapland War became Finland’s third and least known war during the Second World War. It was fought in the north against 200,000 German soldiers, former allies in the war against Russia. But before the fighting, almost 60,000 civilians – with cows and bulls – are evacuated across the Torne river to Sweden.
Refugees between Sodankylä and Rovaniemi in 1944. Rovaniemi was burned to the ground by the retreating Germans on Hitler’s orders. Before that, the civilian population was evacuated. Young people and children went to Sweden together with the cattle.
The Swedish government, which had already promised to accept 100,000 refugees from Norway and the same number from Denmark, initially said no to the Finnish, but the Swedish king made the government turn the other way, says Rosa Liksom.
Burned everything
Before writing, she plowed through all Finnish research, including testimonies recorded in the 1980s. The retreating Germans – on Hitler’s orders – burned all the farms and buildings that came in their way.
— Everything is real in “The River”, it is fiction and a novel, but the details are real, she says.
This also applies to the Swedes’ way of trying to suppress the sexuality of Finnish women with the help of doomsday preachers.
Rosa Liksom tells the story through the girl who, alongside the horrors of war, experiences life and comfort in the animals and nature around her. She helps a calving cow with the same clarity as she looks at the starry sky.
— When I thought of myself as a 13-year-old, I understood that this young woman is very interested in everything, she is full of adventure and the power of life, she is very curious, she lives in moments and she lives as part of nature. She doesn’t think she’s the leader, she’s on the same level as the animals, and thank goodness it’s going so well.
With newborn calf
As a two-year-old, Rosa Liksom was placed in a box with a newborn calf while her mother milked. In the novel, she has woven what she learned about cows and livestock from her mother and grandmother.
— They could tell about each cow, what they had done and what personalities they were.
While reading “The River”, one can believe that the girl’s happiness in nature means that Rosa Liksom can let her endure even more vile abominations.
But no. This is what reality looked like.
— Being a war refugee is a terrible situation, but it can also open doors to a new life, to a better life. This girl, she saw so much on this trip, and lived so much. After a year, she knows life’s various pain points better and she is not afraid.
Rosa Liksom’s childhood home is in the forest and was never burned down during the Lapland War. However, German soldiers lived on the evacuated farm.