Our times of ecological disasters and climate crisis inspired the author Mikael Niemi to write the novel Fallvatten (2012). The narrative deals with what happens when a dam in a hydro-electric power plant bursts, and creates a tsunami-like flood. The purpose with my essay was to make a thematic analysis of this novel from an ecocritical, ecofeministic and postcolonial perspective. The genre and its importance for the themes and the shaping of the novel were also noticed in the essay. My questions were: Does the author use an ecocritical, ecofeministic and a postcolonial approach in the novel? If he does, how is that shaped in the narrative? Is the story adversarial to civilization and/or technology? Is Fallvatten an ironic novel? If it is, what is the irony about? What are the characteristics of the genre ecothriller, and why can the novel be placed in this genre? How does the genre influence the themes used and development of the story? By using the method of close-reading I have made a thematic analysis of the novel Fallvatten, with a theoretical frame of ecocriticism, ecofeminism and postcolionial theory. The results of the analysis demonstrated that this novel can be regarded as an ecocritical, ecofeministic and postcolonial “rewriting”. In the narrative nature is personified and depicted as an active agent who takes vengeance on humanity’s greed. The author is deconstructing dichotomies and stereotypes about the view of both gender and nature. He is also depicting the Sami cultural identity as hybrid and heterogeneous.  Fallvatten can be placed in the genre of ecothriller, because the environment is a premise for the story and it also includes an intense and increasing suspense. The genre has enabled the author to create a polyphonic and rhapsodic novel containing several protagonists with a variety of points of view. In the story, the protagonist´s personal problems get exposed, and forces of good and evil within them reveals, trough their encounter with the disaster. Fallvatten might be adversarial to civilization, but not to technology. In the story technology is depicted positively and it often seems to be indispensable. The narrative contains several Bible-references, which seems to be meant as a parody. But I don´t consider Fallvatten to be an ironic novel. Instead, I see it as a seriously meant story written with a sense of humor and with an ironical tone. I believe the author handles weighty subject matters in the novel with humor and irreverence because it works in a subversive way, with an ecocritical, ecofeministic and an anticolonial aim.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the didactic potential of Mikael Niemis novel Popularmusic from Vittula as it relates to working with the fundamental values of the Swedish schoolsystem from two perspectives. The first of these relates to how the novel portrays gender, witha particular focus on masculinity and how it interprets itself, femininity, and the world aroundit. The second of these perspectives relates to how it portrays the national minority grouptornedalingar and their situation in Sweden. This paper aims to illustrate not only how thesetwo perspectives are portrayed but motivate why they are useful in the work with fundamentalvalues. To answer these questions this paper utilizes the qualitative method of close reading in theanalysis of Niemis novel. The theoretical lense through which this is done includes researcherMalin Alkestrands definition of didactic potential as well as a repertoire of gender study andpostcolonial terminology, such as otherfication, masculinity and boyology. The study findsthat the didactic potential of Mikael Niemis text as it relates to gender lay in how it breakswith the traditional gender norms of rural masculinity. Another important factor is how thetext highlights the role of femininity and music in shaping the new male identity of thenovel’s protagonist, Matti. The study also finds that the didactic potential in Niemis portrayalof tornedalingar lay in its emphasizing of the political nature and origins of the historicotherfication of said ethnic minority.

In this essay I examine how childhood is represented in the novels Populärmusik från Vittula (2000) by Mikael Niemi and Häng City (2022) by Mikael Yvesand. Both of these works are intended for an adult audience, or at least not written with children and young adults in mind. Yet, they both focus almost exclusively on childhood and feature children as protagonists. In Niemi’s novel this is done by an adult narrator who narrates autobiographicaly about his childhood, while Yvesand’s novel is told in present tense by an autonarrating I. Although both books differ in major ways, they both offer an ambition to represent childhood as authentically as possible through different means. Childhood may be elusive, and perhaps even impossible, to represent in literature, but through fantasy, distance, closeness and other means these books offer different ways to depict childhood respectfully.

This essay deals with recurring grotesque motifs in Mikael Niemi’s novels Kyrkdjävulen, Populärmusik från Vittula (Popular Music from Vittula), Fallvatten and Koka björn (To Cook a Bear). It aims to widen the academic understanding of Niemi’s works by focusing on their aesthetics in relation to previous studies, which have mostly been concerned with placing Niemi in a context of Tornedalian minority literature. With the grotesque defined as monstrous and boundary breaking imagery that challenges common rational, ideological or moral world views, this study shows that these motifs can both strengthen, nuance and undermine postcolonial interpretations of the novels.Through Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque, emphasis is placed on the subversive and utopian aspects of the grotesque motifs. With the use of Sigmund Freud’s term the uncanny (das unheimliche) and Julia Kristeva’s term the abject, psychological and emotional aspects of the selected motifs are drawn to the surface. And, by turning to Sara Ahmed’s thoughts on emotions and performativity, the function of disgust in said motifs is examined. The grotesque motifs in question are: the degradation of the mouth, the lower animals, the boy with the knife, the witch mother, and the androgyne. The first part of the analysis shows that in Niemi’sworks the mouth is associated with storytelling, power, agency and the subject’s ability to both knowand express himself, but also to take the world into himself and be changed by it. The mouth is often degraded, which in a carnivalesque manner results in a linguistic revival. The second part of the analysis argues that lower animals, such as rats, reptiles and bat-like devil spawn, are symbols of the abject – that which man must cast out in order to exist. The motifs of the rats and devils are associated with themes of language, identity and writing, but also allude to a threatening feminine principle. In the third part of the analysis, the motifs of the boy with the knife, the witch mother and the androgyne are found to be juxtaposed to and interwoven with each other in narratives concerning gender, sexuality and coming of age. The results of the study show that Mikael Niemi utilizes grotesque aesthetics to give shape toprocesses of growth and change, captivity and liberation, and a complicated sense of identity that eludes clear and rational definitions. The grotesque in these novels is not purely utopian in a Bakhtinian sense, but more emotionally ambivalent. A determining factor to whether the grotesque image brings true renewal or only a repetition of past pain is the will and choice of the individual. Thus, Mikael Niemi’s novels speak not so much of the power of a minority identity, as of the power and potential of the individual to reinvigorate that identity. They form an individualized, existential project in a Tornedalian context.