”sinnepä lapseni saatan – dit skall jag leda mitt barn”

Ambivalenssista Mirjam Tuomisen runoudessa

• Tuula Hökkä Helsingin yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74846

Abstract

”sinnepä lapseni saatan - dit skall jag leda mitt barn”. About ambivalence in the poetry of Mirjam Tuominen

Mirjam Tuominen was not the only Finnish prose-writer who heeded the call of the renewing modern lyric by beginning to write poetry in the 1950s. However, she transported her poetry literally from the art of words into visual arts. In her work literal and visual arts were combined into a ”non-language” where abstract visuality and negation of language became a necessary continuation to the theme of ambivalence of authorship. Her relationship with the international and national tradition of modern poetry was an open one, and her works are in discourse with Aleksis Kivi, Saima Harmaja and Edith Södergran. The works of Tuominen reflect the post-war spirit – and its questions of quilt, shame and existence – through the themes of sacrifice, victim and executioner. She infuses this ambivalence into the psychology of writing and turns it into an ethical and spiritual question of sacrifice. The poems of Miriam Tuominen take responsibility and go more deeply into ideologies, Christianity being one of them. Her poems exhibit reflections of Nazism and Christianity, and they explore the concept of poet that stretches from a suffering self to an observing self and from a self to a non-self.