Portrait: Mari Boine

By: Ingvild Kjøde

REFUGEE FOR LOVE.

Actual with her new CD Idjagiedas   <<In The Hand of The Night.>>

Civil state: Unmarried, two sons of 29 and 22 years old.

Wants to put in the corner of the class: -The ones who call for peace on the one hand and sell weapons on the other.

Norwegians finest men: - Trond Storaker at the isle of Røst, an exemplary man that does not sell the truth that we need to have more and more all the time (and doesn’t drown his compromises with liquor or swallowing pills) and my producer Svein Schultz.

Certainty in life: - That I want to sing until I die.

Mari Boine (49) nearly always was afraid.

For people, for words and for love. Now she finally dares to be loved.

It was during puberty, under the open skies of Finnmarken, that she noticed it for the first time. The fear. The paralysing fear. It was like the skies came down on her head. Like she was enclosed. Like she couldn't breathe. She felt the day of judgement coming nearer.

<<Breath me back to life. Free me back to life.>>

Over thirty years later a little black dressed woman moves through the streets of Oslo. With a light, almost floating step. She travelled over the world, let her music guide her to where she had to go. She is free.

- I am endlessly confident that people can develop themselves, she says.

Mari Boine is sitting at a table in Oslo. In her face rest both a glow, and every now and then a girlish smile.

- The last six-seven years I only walked around and thought "Wow! There ís a live without fear!" I am healed.

After almost half a century something happened to Mari Boine. Her friends talk of the polished stone. Yes, actually she is polished to a diamond. They speak of a woman that was in a storm, but now ran into nice sheltered weather. Mari Boine herself talks about giving in.

- For many years I was furious. Because of my people, the history and the suppression. I was furious at my parents, because of the fundamentalism and everything that was wrong in the upbringing. When they died, I was furious at them being dead. Furious about everything that resurfaced. So I started digging and found we were all victims. My parents were victims because of the harsh Christianisation and the leaders befóre them, which were converted the hard way, were also victims. Because of their own fear of the nature within us. I started to understand and to forgive and I believe that is why the fear has disappeared these last years.

<<You saw I’d been to the shadowlands. My face was sinking. Sinking to the deep.>>

Mari Boine is the middlemost child of five. At home in Gàmehisnjarga, near Karasjok in Finnmarken in Northern Norway, the family gathered themselves around the wood furnace in the kitchen. Often they sang psalms. They are good memories. There are also a lot of difficult memories. Mari's parents were stern Laestadians and most things were sinful at the house of Boine. Joik, dancing, laughing out loud, theatre and concerts were forbidden.

Mari was intelligent. She was good at school, good at adapting and good at making herself invisible. She chose for the teacher training, a husband and children. And for extreme shyness. She believes she did not say more than 100 words during her entire education at the teacher training.

- I was so close-mouthed. If you grow up with stern fundamentalism almost everything becomes dangerous. If for example I heard joik on the radio, I thought "fysj" and turned it off. I was brainwashed, but felt I had something inside me.

- Was it a pain?

- Of course. But you put on a mask.

Then I started to learn about my roots. At the same time I learned to play the piano and guitar and joined in a singing group. The first time I composed a song, I thought it would never happen again. I thought, "help, what have I started". I was a teacher, a family mother and a decent daughter. Then the raging fury broke out of me and took over.

With singing also a kind of obligation came. Mari felt an enormous responsibility towards her people. There was something to go for the entire time. it was never enough.

- How did you cope?

- It demanded a lot. It was like all Samoyed pain flowed through me. Still I can be afraid to sit down with the guitar, because what comes out is so utterly honest. At the same time there was this much urge to know who I would be. In the end I had to leave to find out who I was.

In 1989 Mari Boine divorced her husband and a year later she moved to Oslo.

- That was a tough time. I was divorced, my parents died with an interspace of seven months and at the same time I got well-known in the media.

- And you left your two sons. What did that cost you?

- In my life there was no other choice. And that not only had something to do with music. People can condemn me too.

- Could one call it a selfish act?

- in a certain way. But on the other hand I could not give the world the music without this choice. I am very glad that nowadays I have a good understanding with my two sons. it is them who paid the price.

- Do you talk about this?

- Yes we talk. And yes, that hurts.

<<Right inside of everyone there’s a big medicine.>>

Oslo was impregnated with January cold when Mari moved to the South. The first years were tough for the child of the villmark, as she says herself.

- I played in a theatre and the stage became a sanctuary. The rest of the time I laid in an apartment in Gamlebyen and I shivered. I was so afraid. I almost do not understand I survived. Every now and then friends are angels send in your life. I'm glad for that.

- What were you afraid of?

- For almost everything. In a social way I could be completely paralysed. I didn't know what to talk about. I could not talk about this and that. Every time I opened my mouth, I talked about profound, serious subjects and people got sick in my neighbourhood. So I also got sick.

The tangled Samoyed woman had a mantra she used to comfort herself: "I am one of the odd peculiar people I like to see in the movies", she repeated to herself. It was good having a mantra, but it were lean times for Mari's own love.

- I was afraid to death for love. If you grow up this strict, you almost don't believe your parents have love for you, you get filled with pain.

- Didn't they have love for you?

- Yes, but their love was so controlled by rules and bans, passed though generations by forces from the outside. We were Samoyeds, but we were not allowed to live like that, because we should not be suspected to belong to the ancient paganism. I was not allowed to be whom I wanted to. It felt like they kept 20% of me and the other 80% had to be hidden in a closet. At the same time I had a grandma who almost was love. She went her own way and didn't always comply with the strictness. But she died when I was 14 years old.

- And so you feared love?

- If memories of love are not good, I think you close yourself for it. Nothing hurts as much as being hurt by the ones you love. Look at the young persons that had a difficult childhood, they become as hard as a stone. Anger and toughness are a more simple solution than acknowledging the pain.

<< I opened myself to my inner world and let the language from inside there flow freely… this is how Idjagiedas was born.>>

Fortunately Mari had a force within that was more powerful than the fear. The music was strong and went first.

- Because of the music I could cry and rage. Others may become drug users of violent, but I had a channel, Mari says.

She was loved by several of her own people. Mari Boine became an international artist. Boine's Europe agent Donald Weimer tells:

- I receive a mass of phone calls and emails from people who are waiting for the new CD. Mari sings at the large festivals in Europe and although people do not understand what she sings, they understand the music is honest.

At home in Norway Mari sang during the Peace price concert, when the royal couple married and during the opening of Hit Awards in Oslo Spektrum.

She sang at the famous <<Café del mar>> CD's and she won the Nordisk Råds Musikkpris in November 2003.

- Every time I was on stage it was like light appeared in the dark tunnel I lived in. I got so much love from the audience, I slowly regained confidence in love, she tells.

And she revived. She is so glad the new CD is ready.

It is over four years ago the last CD came out. I have needed the time to acquire impressions, to really do something and to get time to learn to know the living life.

- Is it hard to create?

- Well, it happened because I wondered why I could not just make simple pop music.

- Oh?

- Yes, there is something double in my relationship with my own music. For a long time I hardly listened to my first records/CD's. There are so many struggles to hear on them and the music can affect you in the mean time, even with me. With the last two CD's that's different. I can listen to those and think YES! This time I wanted break new grounds, to bring forward new elements in my voice. I invited Georg Buljo, who joins as guitarist, to write three melodies, and Svein Schultz also contributed with songs. Moreover we improvised songs together.

- Are you done fighting?

- I think I need a break from the barricades. I have fought for many years and now I hope some youngsters can take over. I have chosen to use lyrics of the Samoyed writers Karen Anna Buljo and Rauni Magga Lukkari on the CD. Women who still know the old nuances in the language. It is a pleasure singing the songs. This time I only wrote two lyrics. Yes, apart from the songs I sing in a language that actually does not exist.

- A new language?

- Yes, I entered the studio and tried to achieve something. First nothing came, but suddenly a song came in a language unknown to me, but clearly already a longer period somewhere within me. Or maybe this just passed though me? But apart from these songs, I now sing the words of others. I think I need a break for my own honesty.

- What about the contemporary honesty?

- Terrible! "Hear how there is lies in books and papers," Bjørneboe wrote and I completely agree. When I meet people who are so strong to be completely honest, it feels improbable good. We live in a world where everything has to be perfect, treated afterwards and smooth. That is sick.

- Are you gloomy about the world?

- Both the one and the other. There is an awful lot of cynism. When I think of what is happening in Samoyed country, Northern-Norway and many other places, of the suppression and destroying nature, yes, then I feel we've lost from the capitalistic forces. Ten years ago I thought it possible to stop that development, but now it is clearer than ever capital has won. It is a great concern for all honest people.

Mari spreads her arms, before she relapses a little.

- I am afraid of exorbitant use of everything in Norway the last five years. And it frightens me that FrP (Fremskritt Parti) is this large. At the same time many positive things happen in the world. I think people get enough of al the material and become more aware of other values. I so much want to hold what I think is positive and not sink in pessimism.

<<Come into the embrace of my thoughts, come in – my embrace. I lay out blankets of clouds.>>

It really looks like she is as intelligent to think positive.

Mari Boine was married - and divorced - twice. First from her Samoyed husband, then from the African guitarist she was married with for three years. She does not regret, neither the marriages nor the divorces.

- I experienced many good things from the marriages and would not have been without them.

- Do you also feel reconciliation concerning your growing up?

- I think you are placed in the family where you need to be. I believe in reincarnation and think my soul needed to be hardened.

- Yes?

- Yes. When you're in the centre of it, you only want to get out. But now I have a bit more distance from everything, I want to thank all who placed me for this.

- Do you think yourself good enough?

- At times, yes.  Forbid, I am like all others – I would like to be more beautiful, thinner, and all that. But in the end I really started loving myself. That is incredibly nice.

- Does that have to do with age?

- Hm. I think it has to do with loving.

There is something new and light in Mari Boine's behaviour. A new shine in her look, a new flow in the music. Yes, it is being told she is completely in love. She smiles herself, that young smile.

- How about love with you?

- I started daring. But I can't say anything, it is this new.

Then she says some more still:

I have started looking the love that is entirely new to me. The healthy love.

- How does that feel?

- Terrific! But it took this damned long.

(The quotes stem form Mari Boines latest CD)