Shadows of the past lay over the present and spill towards the future the way my father’s Estonia obscured and at times illuminated my experience in Estonia. My father’s Estonia was a secret, hidden away space and one I believe that he only let himself dwell on when he drank, which he did often. Instead of sharing the happy and even sad memories he had, he left me to imagine and excavate scraps of what Estonia was and is on my own.
How sad this makes me. How even now, thirty years after his death, the tears flow because he couldn’t or wouldn’t share it with me. Not knowing who my father was before I knew him is heart breaking and I think Estonia, being Estonian, or the tragedies that Estonia faced during his lifetime created a shadow that kept him from me.
In Jungian terms, the shadow is the repressed contents of the psyche, either individually or culturally. What we do not want to or are unable to hold in our conscious mind, we repress. But repression is a living pile of energy just waiting to explode.
The shadow intrigues me. I delve into the depths to discover my heritage and ultimately to understand the roots of my own life challenges. After all, that which reveals itself fully is easily understood, but that which is tangled in multiple languages, multiple countries, and silence, functions as an emotional riptide.
I know that many people who suffered trauma during World War II did not speak about it. But not all of the “Greatest Generation” had the same general experience.
In the USA, those who fought in the war returned home to communities physically unscathed by the war.
Countries like France suffered horrific loss of life and physical damage. However, after the WWII, they were part of the Western world and therefore, their histories, war stories, post-war period and beyond were known to those not only in France but in other countries as well. From creative, scholarly, historic and social perspectives, the French could and did unearth and re-imagine their experiences in positive and negative ways. A process that continues to this day.
Yet in the eastern swath of Europe that existed behind the so-called Iron Curtain, countries that were forcefully incorporated into the Soviet Union like Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were cut off both from the Western world and often from their own traditions and cultures. The Soviet Union began a process of Russification. (FYI: Russia is not the only country to engage in this process. All the superpowers have done it under different names and many are still doing it.).
Returning to my own interest in my father and Estonia, a very different trajectory happened than what took place in France. For example, educated people were deported to Siberia and/or executed. Sharing information was severely restricted. The social and historic research was done through a communist lens and alternative perspectives were not allowed. All arts and academic work had to support the Communist Party perspective. Add to that the difficulties in communicating with family via letters that could be ready by the government at any time, information about my own family was hard to come by.
For me, this shadow hung over my family personally, but also over any understanding that I had about Estonia’s culture, history and my father’s childhood. In other words, not only did I not have access to family history, but the land of my father was hidden away by the Iron Curtain.
My Estonian shadow is part of my unconscious life, yet I am also embedded in the shadow life of the USA. The USA has situated itself into a binary relationship with Russia and the former Soviet Union. This leads to painting with broad strokes all the evils of the other and failing to investigate the specificity of individual people’s culture and historical contexts both within the USA and also in other countries as well.
In the USA, we often view our neighbors through this binary. One neighbor, friend, or social group is all good and the other all evil. If we look at the transgressions committed by another country or another, we would have to admit to ourselves we make the same or similar transgressions.
This then is what I find so compelling about my foray into Estonian mythology and history. It serves as insight into the problems faced by not only Estonia, but also the problems the USA has created over hundreds of years. If only we faced up to what happened with the same brave face that Estonia faces up to its own dark history, perhaps we might be in a position to grow and evolve.
The shadow unexamined is one that continues to hold us in its clutches. I am ready to be free. Are you?