posiąść
ways of possessing

Summary/Abstract: The chapter ways of possessing comes from the book ways of swimming, a work situated between autofiction and poetic prose, which is an account of the author’s journey through Scandinavian and Baltic countries. Here, a particular landscape serves as a metaphor for heterogenous identities, their forms of existence and their circumstances. The book shows how we are related to the landscape, how we have re-shaped it and how it shapes us in return – as well as how vulnerable and non-homogenous it is, just like us. The chapter ways of possessing recounts the author’s stay on an uninhabited island in the Rauma archipelago in Finland, where, in December, he travelled by canoe and worked with a forester, felling trees. Later, he spent a week alone there without electricity or running water, but in the company of an old sauna. This experience brings to mind islands that have been repeatedly invaded and occupied. It becomes a metaphor for the desire to possess lands and bodies or for bodies possessed by spirits. It also evokes the figure of Romaine-la-Prophétesse born Romaine Rivière who, in the Vodou trance, was possessed by Virgin Mary and inspired by her to guide the revolution in Haiti. Napoleon sent a division of the Polish army to suppress the uprising, yet the soldiers decided to side with the revolutionaries recoginizing in their struggle their own fight for independence from tsarist Russia. Some of their descendants still live on the island. It is a contemplation on the ownership of the islands as well as their solitude or its people whose primary identity is always defined by their islandness.

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