LangueLetter: Bold voices of minority authors

by Sabira Ståhlberg, Independent Scholar and PolyGlot Writer

To be a writer categorised as a “Minority Author” is far from easy anywhere in the world. A minority label is attached to you, whatever your personal view or self-identification. You are supposed to write about your “own” minority and preferably to remain within its boundaries, so that you do not disturb or challenge existing categories and prejudices in society, literature and scholarship.

If you started your writing career with the minority sticker glued to the forehead, it is extremely hard to be accepted as an author in your own right, with original contents, personal literary language or aesthetic values. The same is true for multilingual writers – once a multilingual author, always a multilingual author: your multilingualism tends to overshadow all other linguistic and literary aspects.

And although you may not want or even wish for it, anything you write is seen as political to at least some degree… in some countries more than others.

From minority to global

The Swedish-language anthology Det icke-ryska Ryssland (‘The Non-Russian Russia’), published in collaboration with Swedish PEN, contains twelve contributions by writers whose background is non-Russian: Tatar, Chuvash, Kalmuck, Udmurt, Dolgan, Saha, Nenets, Azeri and Turkish, Ukrainian and Moldavian. The writers describe their personal and family stories against the backdrop of historical and political developments. The stories have been translated into a flowing and rich Swedish reflecting beautifully the diverse realities expressed in the texts, not only from the city to the village or from the tundra to the steppe, but the language also mirrors various inner worlds of the authors.

This work is a strong witness account of the atrocities and cruelties committed for centuries against the minorities, and the exploitation and destruction of their traditional home regions. The threads in the stories intertwine in many ways, despite geographical and mental distances between the authors: they all describe silencing, shaming and bullying for belonging to a minority. The narratives about how they lost family language(s) and culture(s) are raw wounds, bleeding and painful. Still, these languages and cultures are part of their body textures and connected with memories, tastes, smells, sounds, foods and ways of perceiving the world.

This book is a far cry from official policies and customary attitudes and expectations toward minorities and traditional minority literature. The authors all live in much more nuanced and multidimensional worlds than monolingual and monocultural, or a simplistic minority/majority dichotomy.

Redefining and decolonising

Instead of remaining within and limiting themselves to the linguistic and cultural boundaries of their “own” minority, the authors talk in multiple tongues and cultures, breaking down preconceived notions and barriers about minorities. Their voices are bold and cosmopolitan; all authors are multilingual, multicultural, educated, well-read and well-versed in global literature and the world. Many are migrants who have reconnected with their family heritage and languages only after moving elsewhere, and some are artists and activists.

The authors tell how they discover new dimensions and repossess forgotten worlds in poetry and prose through using multiple languages. They are unafraid to relate how readers become annoyed when the authors (re)turn to writing in their family languages or when they start exploring new dimensions using various languages and elements from many cultures. They also explain how they decolonise majority languages while writing in them, by using concepts and adapting the majority languages to their own contexts and worlds, disconnecting those languages from majority use and employing them for their own purposes.

Resilience and freedom

This outwardly unassuming book with a simple grey cover contains much more than stories: it presents multilayered worlds. The anthology speaks in many voices about how minority rights and possibilities are being restricted and trampled upon, and how minority children are assimilated and taught to believe that their languages are less valuable, if not directly undesirable or forbidden.

At the same time, the anthology talks about resilience, resistance and a willingness not only to reclaim lost languages and cultures, but to do it in a way which is free and unhampered by expectations from the outside, society or readers. The authors are breaking free from external and internal fetters and discover the liberty to incorporate multiple languages, literatures and cultures – actually, the manifold worlds they are living in – into their writings.

For scholars and all readers, both those who already possess knowledge about the minorities, and those who learn about these minorities for the first time, this laudable and highly recommendable work is an eye-opener and absorbing, fascinating and enriching reading. Literary multilingualism research and the development of multilingualism terminology could benefit from more analyses of similar books, which reverberate with fluidity and flexibility and challenge traditional concepts and borders. This book is the result of a fruitful international cooperation; hopefully there will be more in this line in Swedish and other languages.

Det icke-ryska Ryssland, edited by Mikael Nydahl, Dinara Rasuleva and Galina Rymbu, series Ur de dekoloniala litteraturerna ‘From the decolonial literatures’, Ariel Förlag 2024.

Photos: Sabira Ståhlberg 2025