A Border Poetics of Migration: Five Mappings of Migration Literature in Norwegian and Swedish

Borders and border-crossings of different kinds are central to narratives of migration. This chapter uses examples from Norwegian and Swedish language novels and poetry to show how borders figure in migration and postmigration literature. It argues that developments in interdisciplinary border studies, border poetics, and border aesthetics provide conceptual tools for understanding borders negotiated by migrants on different spatial and symbolic planes. The texts examined can be divided into two strands, one consisting of works focusing on migration from one country to another, the other of works about postmigratory urban youth negotiating the spatial and symbolic borders of cities such as Oslo or Stockholm. The chapter concentrates in turn on each of the five border dimensions proposed in border poetics, not only the topographical and the symbolic, but also their variants the temporal, the epistemological, and the textual. It argues that textual borders are central to an understanding of how migrant and postmigrant experiences cross the epistemological borders of the public sphere. Along the way it discusses aerial borders, family stories, photographs, and multiethnic sociolects as they appear in the material. The chapter also suggests the emergence of a third strand of writing that could be labeled activist poetry. Texts discussed in more detail include novels and poetry by Maria Amelie, Athena Farrokhzad, Amal Aden, Gulraiz Sharif, Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Sarah Zahid, Johannes Anyuru, Sarah Azmeh Rasmussen, and Romeo Gill.