Risten, a young Sámi woman in Hanna Pylväinen’s The End of Drum-Time (2023), is two weeks married. She’s moved from her family’s lávvu, the temporary shelters dwelt in by Sámi herders on the move, and now she must get used to sharing a lávvu with Mikkol, her husband. He’s a ‘slow riser’: unlike Risten, who likes to make the day’s first cup of coffee ‘straightaway when she woke up’, Mikkol tends to ‘lie still for some time in thought’. Risten finds her husband’s habitual morning reflectiveness annoying: ‘why not make coffee?’, she wonders to herself, instead of thinking about it first?
Pylväinen’s novel takes place in the middle of the nineteenth century, around a village called Gárasavvon on the notional border between Sweden and Finland, then a Duchy of the Russian Empire. The local population is Sámi, mixing with Finnish traders and Swedish settlers; it’s the Sámi on whom the evangelical clergyman Lars Levi Laestadius, the novel’s antagonist and first mover of its events, has trained his eye. Laestadius, known as ‘Mad Lasse’ for his religious fervour, has inspired a dramatic Lutheran flourishing, though this is an idiosyncratic brand of Lutheranism in which Laestadius himself features heavily. Mad Lasse rails against the drunkenness inflicted on the Sámi population by Swedish bottle shops. For the Sámi he feels admiration, however patronising, and even affinity; he himself possesses Sámi ancestry. He’ll stop at nothing, however, to bring them into the spiritual fold of Protestant Europe. Mikkol, Risten’s husband, has embraced Lutheranism and submitted to Lasse as his guide. Risten is less convinced, less willing wholly to abandon fealty to old ways, pre-Christian Sámi belief systems. She also nurtures an old flame for Ivvár, a young herder more immune to Lasse’s persuasions.
It’s only when Willa, one of Lasse’s daughters, falls in love with Ivvár herself and joins him on the seasonal journey to grazing lands by the Arctic Ocean, that the latent antagonism of cultures is revealed. In 1852, a year after the novel begins, the border closes between the Kingdom of Sweden and Russian-governed Finland. The old routes become impassable; traditional Sámi culture, corroded by Swedish alcohol and distorted by Lutheran Christianity, suddenly seems on the brink of collapse.
Beneath its terse impatience, there’s a yearning in Risten’s unspoken question – ‘why not make coffee?’ – to her absent-minded husband. Risten longs for customs to stay the same, not just because of an instinctive suspicion of change but also from a sense of the value of communal, shared identity. This is what Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, calls ‘a world of things… in common’. For Arendt, such a ‘world of things’ is a necessary condition for those trying to ‘live together’ in a society; it must exist in the society as a given, the way ‘a table is located between those who sit around it’.1 Risten’s irritation with Mikkol’s reflectiveness arises in her feeling that too much reflectiveness gets in the way, eroding that shared, central givenness. Some aspects of life have to be insulated from interrogation, from being taken back to first principles. Risten’s micro-frustrations – that Mikkol doesn’t make coffee in the normal way, and that Mikkol tends to think about things too much – come from the same desire: the longing for a shared culture, made more acute by the spectacle of that shared culture’s erosion.
What’s so distinctive about this scene, though, is how Pylväinen interrogates the notion of a shared culture even as she registers its appeal. What appears to Risten as a norm, an aspect of an organic and authentic collective identity, might just be a projection of her own personal preference. Making the coffee ‘straightaway’ on waking is, after all, just Risten’s own ‘way’, one of several ‘preferences’ normalised by her own childhood lávvu. Mikkol has his habits, but Risten realises ‘how set she was in her own’. What’s more, coffee-making – part of the daily life which Risten hopes to keep insulated from the idle reflectiveness she associates with the settlers’ Christianity – is itself originally a settlers’ import. Coffee came to Sápmi in the middle of the eighteenth century, and only established its central place in Sámi vernacular culture at the beginning of the nineteenth, a few generations before The End of Drum-Time.2
It might seem odd of Risten, then, to perceive in coffee none of the foreignness and destabilising influence she sees in Lutheranism. But cultures are permeable. Whatever contemporary pearl-clutching pieties might insist to the contrary, cultures constantly borrow, exchange and appropriate from one another. Top-down impositions on one culture by another – insidious and gradual, often, but also coercive and brutally immediate – become within the space of a few generations an instinctive, intuitive aspect of shared identity. As of 1851, Risten’s culture has known coffee about as long as the English have known fish and chips.3
At a conference this summer I met an American guy who’d recently travelled to Italy for the first time. He stood in a knot of Europeans (yr humble correspondent among them) who asked him, breathless with excitement, how he’d found the incredible food and drink. The American took a deep breath, drew himself to his full height and declared his heretical opinion: he’d been a bit unimpressed by the coffee.
After the howls of disbelieving rage abated the American defended himself, sticking to his guns. It wasn’t that Italian coffee was bad, he explained; it’s just that it didn’t live up to the hype. Sure, it was cheap, and came quickly and reliably with no expectation of a tip. But it always just tasted… fine. He readily accepted, the Gunsticking American clarified, that a bad cup of coffee in America was way, way worse. And yet he still maintained – stubbornly heretical, again – that the best cup of American coffee was better than its equivalent in Italy.
I wondered where the pantomime shock of the Europeans came from: the reflex, in these dark times, to commit ourselves to the most stereotypically European of Europe’s nations; but also, perhaps, from having our minds addled by too much Instagram-era food-culture-content, in which it’s a completely reasonable thing to be actually offended, as offended as you might be at a racial slur or an act of violence, if someone puts cream in a carbonara or pronounces something slightly wrong in a language not their own. But I also think this tongue-in-cheek, storm-in-a-coffee-cup shows a blind spot in the way contemporary enthusiasts, both American and European, define and celebrate culture. For the Gunsticking American, if Italian coffee was going to merit its reputation, it'd have to be exceptional: made not just with love and care, but with some kind of innovative skill that set the cup apart from all its peers. It was in these exact terms that the Europeans leapt to its defence, exulting the crema and the texture of the foam as if we knew what we were talking about. But crema and textured foam isn’t really why Italian coffee culture is so loved, even though those things are enjoyable. Italian coffee is loved not despite its sameness, but because it’s always the same: because it always costs around a euro and is made with minimal fuss and lots of generous care; because it comes so easily and readily, rather than being conceived or perfected or composed like a miniature symphony. It’s not the creativity and innovation that we enjoy; it’s the absence of creativity and innovation. We don’t have to turn everything into an art form.
This might sound like an argument for tradition, but it’s more banal and less value-presuming than that, less hostile to progress. Right now bold dreams of progress are desperately lacking. But bold dreams of progress mostly succeed when they acknowledge the longing for parts of life to be off-limits from progress, the yearning for some things not to be questioned, or improved, but just held in common. It’s better if these things are the banal things, like how to make coffee. It’s the same in the realm of thought and language. We should want to live in a society where, on the high level of ideas, there’s irrepressible diversity. Maybe the way to ensure this, though, is to accept linguistic sameness on the level of the everyday – to not feel embarrassed by commonplace credences about the weather, or how ten days is better than two weeks for a holiday.4 Only our denial of sameness lets us collapse the distinction between the true banality of credences and the false hollowness of clichés. Contrary to the wisdom (itself, ironically, received wisdom) of hawks like Martin Amis unoriginality (in the form of credences, but perhaps even clichés) is not the worst of sins.
Yet the off-limits, banal sameness of these shared things and credences, this world held in common, is always more constructed than we think. This has been an essay in defence of sameness, or in defence of its appeal. But the swiftness with which coffee established its central place in Sámi culture shows us that the appeal of sameness can rarely be separated from the coercion, or at least hegemony, on which sameness so often trades. There’s something tragic about this: we will always go on wanting some things to be shared – across a nation or region, a tribe defined territorially or across territories – but that sharing will always enact, or reflect, some kind of past or present exclusion.
‘It had got so that he was happy enough’, Mad Lasse reflects at the beginning of Pylväinen’s novel, ‘for anyone to call him a Lapp’. Lasse sees in himself the same intensity of feeling and a rugged suspicion of conventional wisdom he finds in his indigenous neighbours (whose homeland, like Disney, he calls Lapland). His determination to bring them to Christ originates not in a sense of their otherness, of a gulf dividing them from him, but in just the opposite: an identification, a sense of sameness.
One of the sacred orthodoxies in the contemporary understanding of colonialism is that it proceeds by a process of othering: the colonisers portray the indigenous peoples whose land or resources they are eyeing up as too savage or strange or exotic to qualify for responsible possession. But I don’t think colonialism always turns on othering. Our understandable preoccupation with the colonial pasts of our own western European nations, which mostly created their empires in far-off places, has given us a distorted sense of othering’s centrality. Colonialism in the Scandinavia of the nineteenth century proceeded not by othering but by ‘saming’: an indigenous people was subjugated at the hands not of settlers from a distant land, but by their own neighbours, some of whom (the Finns) spoke a related, Finno-Ugric language. After the border closes in the second half of Drum-Time, Sámi herders moving through Swedish estates are treated as common trespassers. The coercive fiction is not of a people too barbarous to be accommodated, but the exact reverse: the Sámi are treated as Swedes, just of a kind too delinquent to live by laws which ought to be perfectly intelligible to them.
‘What does it mean for the sovereign at war’, asks Alexander Etkind in an essay on Putinist perceptions of Ukraine, ‘to proclaim that his friends and enemies are one and the same people?’ Since 2014, when Putin started re-enacting Russia’s own colonial fantasies in Ukraine, we’ve seen plenty of othering: any Ukrainian wanting to pursue a European identity, let alone a western-leaning one, is a Nazi automaton for whom the only hope is annihilation. But as Etkind suggests, such othering is only enabled by a deeper and more dangerous saming. Putin’s rhetorical saming takes the pervasive and poisonous suggestion that the Ukrainians – whatever they might think – are really us, our people. It’s a grotesque, blatantly colonial, implicitly genocidal view of the cultural differences between people, and it shows why the natural human longing for sameness, for things in common, is best kept to borscht and coffee.
L.M. Sacasas, on his generally brilliant Substack, writes about Arendt’s common world of things in the context of the contemporary digital culture. Adding the digital to Arendt’s scheme of the private, public and social realms (with the social eroding the public in modernity), Sacasas critiques the tendency of the digital sphere as currently configured to fragment society by thinning out this common world, which Sacasas characterises as our shared ‘material infrastructure’.
Coffee arrived from Sweden where (barring an unsuccessful attempt to ban the stuff by King Gustav III in the 1750s) it had grown ubiquitous. In the early nineteenth century coffee established itself as part of Sámi culture: men took care of roasting the beans and preparing strong, slowly brewed black coffee. In northern Finland and Sweden you can still enjoy kaffeost, black coffee poured over strips of juustoleipä, traditionally made from reindeer’s milk.
According to some theories, a middle nineteenth-century variant on the Sephardic pescado frito, originating from communities of Sephardic immigrants from the Low Countries who settled in the East End.
Credences, says Newman in Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870), ‘are our mutual understandings, our channels of sympathy, our means of co-operation, and the bond of our civil union’. So far, so palatable, but then: ‘they distinguish us from foreigners; they are in each of us, not indeed personal, but national characteristics’.