Languages

The naked truth

Johs Kalvemo calls himself a child without borders – more or less raised in water – on the Norwegian side of the Tana River.

Johs Kalvemo is perfectly happy in a state of undress. A man who might well be a fish in his next life, he doesn’t mind in the slightest walking around clad in nothing more than a swimsuit. No one could accuse him of being self-important – but perhaps nudity is part of the image?

Location

Johannes Edvard Kalvemo lives in Oslo and is a journalist for NRK Sápmi. He was more or less literally brought up in the water – more specifically, in Valjok, on the Norwegian side of the Tana River.

“Growing up on the Tana – that’s my identity. I’m a child without borders.” 

On the other side of the river was Finland. He had friends there, and swam across the river to play with them. The current in the Tana River is strong. Johs became a good swimmer and made the most of it. Toward the end of his swimming career, he won gold medals in the Masters, one in the 1500-metre freestyle and the other in the 100-metre butterfly. It’s still swimming that keeps him young and healthy. 

The border
A few imprudent butterfly strokes, however, almost cost him his freedom. The border between Norway and Russia runs along the Pasvik River. The border is invisible, both underwater and above the surface. Johs was swimming in the river one day when his friends, gathered on the river bank, saw that he’d crossed the central channel – and thus ventured into the Soviet Union. Panicked, they screamed at him to swim back. He did so, but not in time to avoid attracting the attention of a guardboat with floodlights and heavily armed soldiers that was on the spot within minutes. 

“I’ve never swum so fast in my whole life. I sure know what would have happened if I’ve been arrested – naked – on the Russian side,” chuckles Johs.  

Many years later, in 2002, Johs dives into the same river again, this time from the Russian side – in Rayakoski, at the head of the Pasvik Valley. It’s something he wouldn’t have been able to do during the Cold War. But Johs, thanks to his mere presence and (not least) his absurdly oversized borrowed swimsuit, manages to make this appearance on the borderland memorable, too. The moment he dives in, the swimsuit is swept off his body and disappears into the depths of the river. The women are hustled back into the sauna when Johs wades back ashore. The next day, touring the power station in Rayakoski, he takes the opportunity to ask the guy in charge if anybody happened to find a swimsuit in one of their turbines. 

“The power could damn well have gone out in the whole Pasvik Valley!” 

The bushy walrus moustache shakes. It’s always shaking. The moustache is likely also a part of the image, and even though its owner is actually a deeply serious man, laughter comes easily to him. Johs has, in any case, good reason to be pleased that a powerful easing of tensions has taken place on the border where an Iron Curtain once divided Europe. For the Pasvik Valley is also a part of Sápmi, where borders aren’t an issue – except when they create problems, which they’ve done for hundreds of years.

The network
“Three beers!” Johs shouts in Finnish, his well-worn voice carrying surprisingly well despite the room’s hopeless acoustics. ”He has entered the pool bar at the pool hotel in Levi, one of Finland’s busiest winter sports venues. He’s here for the event of the year for the network of journalists in the Barents region: the annual convention of Barents Press International. This is where the people without borders assemble. The network of journalists that developed in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse was Johs Kalvemo’s brainchild. He has served as Barents Press’s midwife, mentor, mascot, father, and grandfather for nearly twenty years. Barents Press has established a post-Soviet fellowship among journalists in the North, an instrument for freedom of expression and democracy-building. To the ears of these journalists, such rhetoric doesn’t sound platitudinous. Much of the Barents region is part of a young democracy, and in this geographically immense area Johs Kalvemo has given voice to some of the most powerless inhabitants – the indigenous people generally, and Russia’s indigenous people especially. 

Distrust
“I’ve taken on the role of guard dog. It’s still true that the major national media, by and large, are silent about the plight of the indigenous people. But we ourselves aren’t silent any longer. We’re one people in four countries. Barents Press, in particular, has to take note of that. That’s why I get on my soapbox almost every single year and ask why they don’t include the Sami flag either in their logo or on the dais.”  

The walrus moustache shakes again. He’s a master of gallows humour. Johs says he can’t do anything other than laugh at the suspiciousness that has been directed at him. He’s a guy who’s in the habit of turning a friendly face to those around him, but the Norwegian surveillance police seem never to have comprehended that. They kept an eye on him from the mid 1970s to 1992. You can read about it in Johs Kalvemo’s file. This fox of a journalist publicly took on the authorities and made a TV documentary about the case and about himself. In the end, Odd Einar Dørum, who at the time was Minister of Justice and was also a former classmate of Johs’s at the Trondheim University College of Social Work, had to affirm, also publicly, that no Sami people in Norway had been under surveillance because they were Sami, or, for that matter, because they were journalists. In other words: Johs is still wondering why the surveillance police were spying on him. 

“The authorities don’t feel totally safe with us. It’s exactly as if they think we’re planning to form our own country.” 

The moustache shakes powerfully. Maybe it’s something about that flag….  

The diagnosis
Johs has experienced most of the stages of the stigmatisation of the Sami people – the shame, the surveillance, the fight for rights, the culture-building. Much has happened in Sami Norway in the last 50 years. After nearly 40 years in journalism, Johs has won countless prizes for his documentaries and reporting. But it didn’t start with journalism. Johs was educated as a social worker, and for a while he ran the social services department in the municipality of Kautokeino. He’s also been a member for many years of the Control Commission for Mental Health Care in Finnmark. It was while working there that he discovered, with “a certain surprise,” as he himself puts it, that identity and ethnicity, as late as the early 1990s, were considered diagnoses. At one of the county’s psychiatric institutions, a patient’s file actually showed that he had been diagnosed as Sami.  

“What an uproar there would have been if a Norwegian patient had been diagnosed as a Norwegian!” 

Now it’s not just the moustache that shakes. 

The pressure
“There are few of us, but enough of us,” Johs likes to say. So what signs are there to indicate that Sami culture will be able to survive – not just in the streamlined, globalized world, but in the geopolitical field of tension between East and West that is northern Europe? So many other indigenous peoples have succumbed …

“I’ve thought about that a lot and I ask myself whether there are enough of us to take on what’s coming at us now. These riches of ours in the North – fish, mines, oil. Will we handle the pressure? Or will we be passive observers of the development of the Barents region, the Far North enterprises, given the powerful interests that are involved?”

“Are you a pessimist?”

“Well, I allow myself to be a realist, in any case, and say that we shouldn’t be satisfied with the way things are. We shouldn’t be satisfied with the fact that our leaders get to nibble at cherries with the big guys. If they don’t have real power and influence, we can be run over. That danger is there.”

This portait interview is a cooperation between BarentsObserver and the author Arne Egil Tønset and photographer Ingun A. Mæhlum that recently have published the book Barents Portraits - A Journey Across Borders.

Translated from Norwegian by Bruce Bawer.