“Vi var ingenting”. In-betweenness, multilingualism, and cross-border identities in Mikael Niemi’s Tornedalian literature

The Torne valley area, a geographically open space and melting pot of contamination and linguistic overlap between Swedish, Finnish and Meänkieli, is the focus of the work of Mikael Niemi, a contemporary Swedish author rooted in this peculiar multicultural region. Using a geocritical research methodology, this article aims at tracing a hypothesis of deconstruction of the dominant Swedish discourse, thus reversing the established anthropotopos, a novel concept that is intended as spatialization of Anthropocene. As a result of the deconstruction, a new interpretation of olotopos, or Place for Everything, can instead be proposed. From these premises, representations of the intergenerational and linguistic conflicts in Niemi’s oeuvre serve to bring out a deliberately decentralized picture, in which the rejection of a prevailing identity allows for the provocative opening to another, possible space in which multilingualism is a means of founding a Nordic borderland (Anzaldùa).