When Language Vanished

Text: Pernille Koch 

Foto: Anders beier

The sombre black granite cladding the rear of the house contrasts sharply with the light over the sea. The sun is still shining, but this summer it seems to have packed it in without really getting started. The wind swirling around the corner of the house chills our feet, so we snuggle up even more in our separate chairs. It’s August, but feels more like early spring. The author Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild has come to Bornholm to write and has been given a house to reside in partway up the winding road leading north out of Gudhjem. We are sitting on a patio in this sloping landscape with the sea and the rocky coast at our feet, and we immerse ourselves in our shared fondness for this very sight. 

“It’s beautiful,” Rakel says. “Yes,” I reply. Sometimes words seem strangely inadequate. Instead, we just soak up the beauty and tranquillity in peace and quiet. 

Neither of us are true Bornholm islanders, because we only came to Bornholm at the age of seven. Rakel from Roskilde, me from Aarhus. Even so, the childhood we spent and left behind here has defined how we perceive the world, reality and language – not least the magical power and impact of nature in shaping who we have become. 

“As a child,” Rakel recalls, “I went for long walks all by myself. My favourite spots were the Paradisbakker Hills and the Helvedesbakker woods just outside Nexø. I loved to hang out in those enchanting places.” Rakel grew up in a close-knit, secure community, her local environment infused with caring for and taking care of one another. “Although I loved my secure family background, something drove me away. It was a longing or seeking for something, something undefinable that I could only find when I was alone and surrounded by nature. I feel that when I’m out in the woods, I can be present in a different way as a listening, sensing being. Seeking.” Rakel pauses, trying to find the right words as she speaks, directing her steely blue gaze at the horizon. 

Her words left their mark on the world of storytelling in 2016, when she made her debut as a writer with a collection of short stories entitled Øer (Islands). In the short story Ud i det grønne (Out in the Open), the woman protagonist wanders through wild forests on an unnamed island in an apocalyptic scenario near the town of Kirkeby. I can’t help asking Rakel if she is writing about herself in the story? Of course not, she replies, but that will never stop my inner eye always imagining this character as having dishevelled, curly hair and grey-blue eyes. 

Rakel talks about growing up on Bornholm and the special areas in the woods, by the sea, on the Skansen earthwork south of Nexø, her long rambles through the purplish hue of heather and the blue of the sea. “Nature has endowed me with a primeval language of sorts, like a parcel of sensations from all the landscapes I know and have assimilated,” she explains. Rakel continues her story about her family: the roots she shares with the others, the family’s many generations of Baptists; the Free Church’s belief in God; and her grandmother and grandfather who were missionaries in Rwanda and Burundi where Rakel’s father was born. All of this prompts the teenage Rakel to ask the profound existential question: Who am I?

To find an answer, Rakel had to leave and get a new perspective. In upper secondary school, Rakel diligently pursued her love of literature, particularly Chinese literature. This interest marked the beginning of a long journey that would take Rakel almost as far away from her Bornholm childhood as she could get. Through her Free Church contacts, Rakel landed a two-year job in a Scandinavian–Chinese art gallery in China’s Yunnan province. In a smoggy, noisy, car-clogged megalopolis, surrounded by a language she didn’t speak, 19-year-old Rakel discovered in earnest what it meant to throw herself headlong into the unknown and almost lose her footing. Rather like Ronja the Robber’s Daughter, who leaps from rock to slippery rock deep in a Swedish forest to learn about all the dangers she can easily overcome. But this time, Rakel was far away from all the forests and landscapes that were familiar to her. The singsong Bornholm dialect and vocabulary of her childhood had vanished around her. Now, everyday life had to be lived in Chinese and the smattering of English spoken at the gallery. 

Here, Rakel inhabits what some might refer to as ‘a romanticised idea of a poor artist’s life’. She borrows an atelier near the gallery, where she shares a very basic room with cockroaches and rats. This marks the beginning of a long inner journey where everything is questioned: her belief in absolutes, in faith, in God and in language – as all of this had been shaped by the reality on Bornholm where Rakel grew up. 

After these years and in this state of mind, Rakel moves away from China. She replaces the cold Yunnan atelier with a student residence in Copenhagen and pursues Chinese studies at the university. Later on during her studies, Rakel moves back to China, this time to Beijing, but decides to change her field of study to comparative literary history instead, partly to get closer to literature and partly to start writing. “The pieces of my picture of the world that had fallen apart in the atelier in China had still not been put back together, and new systems and perspectives were under construction. This may be why I started to write during those years as a way of rebuilding new narratives and worlds through a special poetic style,” Rakel reflects. 

Then something happens which brings Rakel back home to Nexø. While she is travelling through the mountains of China to update the “Turen går til Kina” Danish travel guide, her beloved grandfather dies, and she travels home for the funeral. “All the literary discussions I had during my childhood and youth emanated from my grandfather.

His thoughts about and views of both Einstein and Grundtvig were often the focal point of our conversations,” Rakel recalls. “Perhaps he was the one who ignited my passion for literature and language?” The question lingers in the air. Unanswered. Fortunately, her grandfather lived to see Rakel’s debut novel published, a few months before he died. 

Three years later, after her grandmother’s death, the family also bids adieu to six generations of living in Nexø when her parents move away from the town. Sharpening the focus of Rakel’s awareness. Suddenly a depiction of her childhood gathers in her mind: the walks along Skansen; winter swimming from the beach in Balka; the landscapes that are so close and familiar.

Rakel had already begun writing her first work of fiction, Øer (Islands), in the years before her grandfather’s death. “Is ‘Øer’ – ‘Islands’ – about Bornholm?” I want to know. “No, but I’ve written in the landscapes, albeit in a new context. I actually wrote it while I was living in Greenland, which is an entirely different landscape, even though it’s still an island.”

The affiliation with Bornholm is clear, however. The collection of short stories begins with the story about the last fisherman from Christiansø, who, out of sheer desperation that cod are disappearing, takes revenge on the seals. A problem close to the lives of native islanders on Bornholm. But the short story isn’t about the death of cod or seals. It’s about being alone. Like on an island. Or being all alone in an unknown world with a shattered perception of reality, and speaking a language that is no longer capable of describing the world. “Øer describes what I might call a symbolic space for loneliness or solitude,” Rakel continues pensively. I let her complete her thought. 

She follows the debut of Øer with the dystopian novel Alle himlens fugle (All the Birds of Heaven), whose publishing date in March of 2020 almost symbolically coincides with Denmark’s COVID-19 lockdown.  The novel depicts a world in ruins whose cities are gone, and language itself seems devoid of correlation or knowledge of preceding human civilisation. “I tried to toy with the idea of how language would look if the world were completely different. If the last human survivor lived in an overgrown city and barely knew what the world once looked like when it was populated by others. Wouldn’t this person perceive concrete and asphalt as rocks and stones, the buildings as housing for birds, and the roads as stone paths of sorts?” Rakel asks rhetorically. 

Something completely different is afoot in her subsequent novel Adam i Paradis (Adam in Paradise). The novel is about Bornholm artist Kristian Zahrtmann and his debauched life as an artist in Copenhagen. It begins with Zahrtmann moving into his atelier with his plans and dreams. Rakel tells how the book turns into an intense dialogue with Kristian Zahrtmann himself in the form of the many letters he left behind, which she has delved into and assimilated to find the essence of the language that Zahrtmann used to describe his world. The novel was praised and acclaimed for its unique, lyrical style and was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. 

“My efforts on the novel about Zahrtmann compelled me to understand how language is something we create together in a dynamic process where we influence one another,” Rakel explains. “I’m inspired by my correspondence with friends in which we toy with and create linguistic harmony. The world and language are interconnected, but it wasn’t until I left my comfort zone and plopped down in a new, foreign context that this perspective opened itself up to me.” 

One might call this a process of narrative formation that Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild has written into her life. The big question of youth ‘Who am I?’ was in any case replaced by another and more collective ‘Who are we?’. Rakel’s grand tour went from feeling like she had lost her world and her language and doubting her existence to returning home and reconquering the world which – through narratives, stories and a common language – is bigger than oneself. 

Occasionally Rakel has to search for the words before they can be uttered. “It’s because I’m trying to cut to the bone of language before fleshing it out. And this is a process that I would definitely prefer to create with others. It’s as if the ‘we’ that’s writing inside me strengthens the language even more,” Rakel explains. 

This is where our conversation comes to an end at the house by the winding road in Gudhjem. The day is drawing to a close. We’ve exhausted the words shared across the table, and the sun has sunk closer to the horizon. Being able to share Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild’s linguistic universe and history on this cool August afternoon was an intense experience. My notebook is brimming with words just waiting to take shape in the story of a journey from Bornholm to China and back again and about a language that finally found its way. 

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