Paper short abstract:

My paper investigates the diverse ways of narrating and experiencing home, belonging, identity and absence in the case of migrant Karelians' evacuation journey narratives written by former child evacuees.

Paper long abstract:

Finland and the Soviet Union fought two wars during World War II which resulted in the cession of a part of the Finnish Karelia to the Soviet Union. As a result the Finnish population living in the territory was evacuated behind the new Finnish border and the group of people called the Karelian evacuees was born. In this paper I discuss how the loss of home and feeling of home and homelessness are expressed in evacuation journey narratives written by former child evacuees. I suggest that the conception of physically shared place as a basis of the group and belonging does not apply in this case. Instead a more central bond for the migrant Karelians' seem to be the experiences of the evacuation and the loss of home.

Evacuation journey narratives are written decades after the war. The diachronical time perspective reveals that the narrative process is a negotiation between individual and collective pasts and between alternative identities and stories. I address how the memories of the evacuation journey and the losing of home resonate with cultural storypatterns and multiple identities and emphasize the multiplicity of potential positions of one individual evacuee and also the variance of evacuee positions inside the group. My aim is to elaborate perspectives toward the self-definition processes of migrant communities and individual migrants which become topical when the existence of the community and the past legitimizing it become questionable along with the loss of a historically shared place of dwelling. The paper is part of my ongoing PhD research.