Singing/Writing into the river

Yoik and watery subjectivity in Elin Anna Labba’s Far inte till havet

Abstract

In recent years, the emerging field of the Blue Humanities has seen a growing scholarly interest in non-Western water knowledges, and attempted to engage more deeply with them through literary works from outside an Anglophone canon (Mentz 2024, 17; Oppermann 2023, 3; Perez 2020, 66). This article constitutes an analysis of a Sámi novel where the human-water relationship is central: Elin Anna Labba's Far inte till havet (2024, Home of the Drowned, upcoming English version, 2026). Approaching the human-water relationship specifically from the Sámi cosmology, this analysis proposes a literal, rather than metaphorical, reading of waterbodies as living subjects endowed with agency, sentience and memory. The practice yoik is read as a means of interspecific communication between different, although entangled, subjectivities. As Western thought traditions, both Literary Studies and the Blue Humanities will face some challenges, ethical and conceptual, when attempting to approach indigenous water knowledges from within their own theoretical apparatuses. Taking inspiration from the methodological approach proposed by the ontological turn in anthropology (Holbraad & Pedersen 2017), this analysis presents an attempt to overcome the issue of untranslatability between non-Western worldviews and Western concepts. Such an approach, it is argued in the article, is of great relevance for the Blue Humanities and Literary Studies if an approximation to non-Western worldviews is yearned for.