In a children’s picture book, an alcoholic character called Heikki – a common Finnish male first name – is lying in a hedge next to a plastic bag full of beer. The drawing by Swedish writer and illustrator Gunna Grähs was too much for Sirpa Lamminpää, a Swedish Finn. She filed a complaint about the book to the Discrimination Ombudsman, a Swedish government agency that monitors occurrences of prejudice.
“I don’t want my grandchildren to have this book in their hands,” Lamminpää, 69, said in today’s Swedish Aftonbladet newspaper.
Sirpa Lamminpää moved to Stockholm from Helsinki in 1976. Her third grandchild is due to be born in Sweden in the next two weeks. She is fed up with the Swedish stereotype of Finns as alcoholics and rabble-rousers.
“It doesn’t feel good. How would you feel if your forebears were treated in this way?” she was quoted as saying.
“Can a whole group of people be portrayed as alcoholics?”
Sirpa Lamminpää made her complaint to the ombudsman over Gunna Grähs’s book Dino och lilla Kurren. In the book, “Heikki the Alcoholic” is a second generation Swedish Finn, a labour migrant on disability who drinks a bit too much and roots for the football team Hammarby, based in the traditionally working-class district of Södermalm.
“I can’t fathom how this book could have been reviewed and accepted as a children’s book,” she said in her complaint. “Can a whole group of people be portrayed as alcoholics in such a book without anyone reacting?”
The illustrator herself says that she considers Heikki to be Swedish.
“Perhaps she is simply upset about the character being an alcoholic,” Grähs suggests in the Aftonbladet article. “Only one thing links him to Finland, and that is his name. In my opinion Heikki’s is a case of social class, not nationality.”
”Getting sloshed is international”
Gunna Grähs is a well-known and much-loved illustrator in her native Sweden. She has illustrated children’s books since 1982 and collaborated with many Swedish authors.
“I mean sure, Finns have been typecast in Sweden as knife-wielding drunkards on many occasions throughout history,” Grähs says, “but how actively is that image maintained in contemporary movies and novels?”
“I wouldn’t want to live in a world without Kaurismäki’s films or Susanna Alakoski’s books, and I want to be able to have an alcoholic character in my work, even if he is called Heikki.”
Sirpa Lamminpää says that the character’s name could just as well be Roger.
“Everyone knows that Finns drink, so do Swedes,” she says. “The place for it just isn’t in children’s books.”
“Getting sloshed is international,” Grähs replied, “and Swedes are just as much a part of the Vodka Belt as Finns.”
Edit: the Ombudsman announced that issues relating to perceived prejudice in printed works is the purview of the Swedish Chancellor of Justice, not the Discrimination Ombudsman.
