The Finnish people’s favorite word to describe themselves gets an update
This is a transcript of a Subtitle podcast episode
Kavita Pillay: Friends, it’s me Kavita. Hello from the inside of my closet.
Times are tough. The future is uncertain. Right now in this country, there’s a lot of things that feel like the story of Sisyphus. Remember that guy? Pushing a rock up a hill, never quite making it to the top before the rock rolls back down…and he has to start all over?
The myth of Sisyphus reminds me of a word: sisu. Sisyphus and sisu, they sound a bit alike, they’re not at all related. The Sisyphus story is Greek, and the word sisu is from Finland.
“Sisu is like courage on steroids!”
Kavita Pillay: That’s from a TEDx talk about Finland. Sisu is among the many Nordic buzzwords that have been making their way into TED Talks, books and blog posts about Nordic-inspired “wellness”. But sisu has other dimensions. And I first heard about it from this guy.
Sauli Pillay: See-su.
Kavita Pillay: Not seeee-sooo, see-su… am I saying it right?
Sauli Pillay: That’s it.
Kavita Pillay: This is my husband. His name is Sauli. He’s from Finland and he made a brief appearance a few episodes back.
Kavita Pillay: Soon after we first met, you mentioned that there’s this word in Finnish and it means something like perseverance and guts and courage in the face of an overwhelming challenge.
Sauli Pillay: Sounds like a pickup line.
Kavita Pillay: Was it your pickup line? I mean I guess it worked!
Sauli Pillay: I kind of wish I hadn’t mentioned it because you keep bringing it up.
Kavita Pillay: Well, you said that there’s no equivalent for it in English, and I think that made it kind of super enticing! But I think now I’m interested in it because you don’t want to talk about it.
Like when I’ve reported stories from Finland, Sauli has even cautioned me against asking interviewees about sisu! Asking Finns questions about sisu, it seems like the equivalent of wearing shorts and sneakers in Paris. Tacky, and very American…
Why is it that you don’t like talking about sisu?
Sauli Pillay: I don’t know, it feels kind of simplistic, or exoticizing.
Kavita Pillay: You know, we Americans, we talk a lot about how great we think we are, so is sisu something that Finns talk about?
Sauli Pillay: It is an important word to Finns, but it’s not something that we talk about among ourselves. I think it would be a silly conversation. And to me, saying Finns have sisu, it’s kind of like saying, Indians are spiritual.
Kavita Pillay: Ouch, I get it! I definitely don’t want to do that! Here’s what interests me about sisu, especially right now as we’re confronting coronavirus, and the pandemic of racism in America. Many of us are changing our habits. That includes the words we use. Social change leads to linguistic change. And in this case, we’re going to need resources we didn’t know we had for these struggles that we may not win. Which is exactly why I need to know more about this word that my husband doesn’t want to talk about.
Sauli Pillay: Every culture and country has stories about how they have suffered and prevailed. And I’m sure, you know, Finns have suffered.
Kavita Pillay: Famine, a devastating civil war, centuries as a pawn between Sweden and Russia, fighting off Stalin during World War II, but as my husband Sauli puts it, Finland hasn’t suffered more than anyone else.
Sauli Pillay: Think of Polish, or Armenians, or African Americans, or Vietnamese, or Greeks. You know, they must have a word for this. Germans must have a word for this.
Kavita Pillay: Right! The German language is famous for containing nuanced emotional states in just one word.
Roman Schatz: I have a degree as a translator from Finnish into German.
Kavita Pillay: Roman Schatz is a German-born author and journalist.
Roman Schatz: And I would dare to say that no translator can translate sisu into English or German with just one word.
Kavita Pillay: Which is part of what makes sisu kind of cool and intriguing. That it contains so much in just one word. And Roman says it’s not just that.
Roman Schatz: If you’re not Finnish, you can’t have sisu. You can’t learn it.
Kavita Pillay: He’s saying this tongue-in-cheek. Roman thinks this is what many Finns feel. But he says there is a basic reality of life in Finland that requires a certain kind of sturdiness.
Roman Schatz: In Finland, you cannot forget that nature is potentially hostile.
Kavita Pillay: It gets cold in Finland! For at least half the year!
Roman Schatz: I mean, minus 30 degrees Celsius. Nobody can ever adjust to that. I don’t think the Finns are adjusted themselves. They just grin and bear it.
Kavita Pillay: I wanted to hear what Roman has to say because he’s an immigrant who has lived in Finland for most of his life.
Roman Schatz: I studied in West Berlin, a town that doesn’t exist anymore, in the 80s. And on the subway in West Berlin, I met a beautiful young woman from southern Finland. And because I couldn’t make her come to Berlin, I had to follow her to Finland. And that’s why I moved here in 1986, 33 years ago. So I am what you could call a hormonal migrant.
Kavita Pillay: When Sauli and I got married, my sister-in-law gave me Roman’s first book, From Finland With Love. It’s a collection of essays in which he makes humorous observations about Finland, the kind that only an outsider would have the perspective to write. And here I was, another outsider reading his description of sisu, which went like this: when a bad situation becomes even more desperate, you summon up more energy from within. As the odds get worse, you become stronger.
Roman Schatz: Sisu only kicks in when you need it. It’s like a turbo for you, for your engine or something. You don’t need it unless you’re going uphill. When things are smooth, you don’t need sisu. Or then of course, one classical example is that when Finland had to fight the Soviet Union alone without allies in the Winter War.
Kavita Pillay: The Winter War. It’s Finland’s David-vs.-Goliath story. In November 1939, Joseph Stalin attacked Finland. The Finns had a fraction of the men and weapons that the Russians had. And Russia drew Franklin Roosevelt’s condemnation for attacking Finland
President Franklin D. Roosevelt: “It has invaded a neighbor so infinitesimally small that it could do no conceivable, possible harm to the Soviet Union. A small nation that seeks only to live at peace as a democracy.”
Kavita Pillay: But, Finland managed to expel the Red Army and stay independent. It marked the country’s entry into WWII, and in international news of the time, sisu was portrayed as Finland’s almost mystical power. Ever since then, when a Finn does well against all odds? It’s all down to sisu!
Roman Schatz: Or like, a beautiful example is a guy called Lasse Virén in 1972 in Munich, in Germany.
Kavita Pillay: Lasse Virén. Every Finn knows that name. Virén was running the 10,000 meters for Finland in the Olympics when he and a few other runners tripped over one another, leading him to fall on his face.
Roman Schatz: And he got up again and very angrily finished 10,000 meters, ending with an Olympic gold medal and the new world record. And he couldn’t have done it without falling on his nose, I’m sure. That’s sisu.
Kavita Pillay: In that way, sisu has come to mean trying hard, experiencing obstacles and working to overcome them. And whether you fail or succeed, you don’t draw attention to yourself. Given all of this, sitting here in the US, it looks to me like Finland’s approach to coronavirus has these hallmarks of sisu.
Roman Schatz: Yeah, I can see what you mean, you’re right.
Kavita Pillay: Finland has had just over three hundred coronavirus deaths. So far, they seem to have succeeded in containing the disease. And they haven’t made a big fuss about it. This seems like quintessential sisu, the kind you might read about in a blog about cool foreign terms. But there’s also a downside to sisu.
Roman Schatz: As an immigrant or long term immigrant, I sometimes wonder in Finland that this sisu, the readiness to accept hardship, poverty, coldness. It also has caused some sort of collective. It’s the obedience of the lambs. You know what I mean?
Kavita Pillay: As a small nation that was devastated by a civil war, then united soon after in their fight against the Soviet Union, Finland has developed a consensus culture. Rocking the boat is very scary for Finns.
Roman Schatz: In Germany, everybody’s forever protesting against everything. And in the US too. It’s kind of the basic idea of the founding fathers, isn’t it? But in Finland, very often, I get the impression that people should make more noise and they should protest and they should display a bit more of a civil disobedience. But they don’t because this is the way the cookie crumbles and always has been and always will be. And you know, and we can take it, of course, we have sisu.
Kavita Pillay: Roman and I spoke on May 25th. Later that day, George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis by a white police officer who pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes. Less than two weeks later, thousands of Finns gathered in Helsinki’s Senate Square to speak out against police brutality in America. Of course, it’s easier to protest against the US; it’s so far away. Russia is next door, and regularly commits human rights violations, at home and abroad. Are Finns willing to speak out against their huge neighbor to the east? Or instead, do they fall back on sisu, grit their teeth, and accept their lot?
Roman Schatz: Sisu might be misused as some sort of Prozac. Yeah. We have to take it because we can take it.
Kavita Pillay: Sisu comes from a word that means the insides of a person or animal. It means guts. Literal guts. Its first use dates back to the 16th century, when it implied any sort of extreme emotion, especially a bad temper. But over the past century or so, it’s taken on more positive associations and become a stereotypical way to describe Finns and Finnishness.
Tuomas Tepora: It’s interesting about stereotypes, is that they work and they do not work at the same time.
Kavita Pillay: This is Tuomas Tepora. He’s a historian at Helsinki University. Tuomas studies the cultural history of war, Finnish nationalism, and the history of emotions
Tuomas Tepora: Basically what the history of emotions is about, it’s not just about different emotional experiences. It’s also about changing meanings of emotions, changing meanings of emotional vocabulary, concepts, and emotional norms. I think it’s pretty exciting.
Kavita Pillay: So do I, and I’m not the only American to have taken an interest in this, or in sisu. Remember the Winter War? Finland’s David vs Goliath battle against Stalin’s army in late 1939?
Tuomas Tepora: Actually one of the first — if not the first — mentions or depictions of sisu in English date from the Winter War. The Americans were interested in the concept.
Kavita Pillay: In January 1940, Time Magazine published an article on Finland and the Winter War, which called sisu…
Male voiceover: “…a compound of bravado and bravery, of ferocity and tenacity, of the ability to keep fighting after most people would have quit, and to fight with the will to win.”
Kavita Pillay: A few days later, the New York Times wrote an article titled Sisu: A Word that Explains Finland. “The Finns have a favorite word”, the article declared, “Like so much of Finland which eludes definition, it is a thing felt, like religion or love.”
Tuomas Tepora: The American way of seeing sisu was rather different perhaps than what Finn’s thought about it. When we talk about the Winter War and sisu, it’s important to to see that it was a piece of propaganda.
Kavita Pillay: In that way, sisu has something in common with “Keep Calm and Carry On,” a phrase that was concocted by the British government for purposes of domestic propaganda in 1939 as the country prepared for World War Two. But during the Winter War, Finnish authorities didn’t use sisu so much in their domestic propaganda. Instead, Tuomas says they actively promoted sisu to foreign reporters. They made sisu a showpiece of sorts. Tuomas has written that sisu was “coined as a collective quality of a small northern nation who has been forced to endure harsh climate and hostile neighbors.” But it’s never become part of the everyday vocabulary for Finns. So, I wondered whether sisu has any personal resonance for him.
Tuomas Tepora: It is not something that I really have reflected upon in my personal life. But for me, it’s become a research subject.
Kavita Pillay: Tuomas is a bit reluctant to talk about sisu.
Tuomas Tepora: If I should give a sort of definitive way I see sisu, which I really rather reluctantly do, but it’s something that you should not talk about because once you start talking about it, it’s not sisu anymore. It’s something that you should learn by not mentioning it.
Kavita Pillay: He sounds just like my husband Sauli! When I talk with Sauli and Tuomas about their personal perspective on sisu, it feels like a zen koan: the sisu of which you speak…is no longer sisu! And yet, sisu is making a comeback.
Tuomas Tepora: It’s been promoted abroad or outside Finland as something of a trendy character at the moment, that connects sisu with other Nordic characters, which have been rather fashionable lately.
Kavita Pillay: There’s been a slew of books in recent years, all focused on Nordic words like the Danish word hygge. Or the Swedish word lagom. There’s even a book titled “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning”! In 2018, two books about sisu were published for international audiences, so there’s a shift toward looking at sisu as part of these other Nordic terms that you might find on lifestyle or wellness blogs. But there’s more to sisu than some of these other words.
Emilia Lahti: “I became very interested to understand how human beings persevere in the face of extreme adversity, and how do we keep on going when we feel we’ve reached the end of our capacities.”
Kavita Pillay: Emilia Lahti is a researcher. She has brought her ideas about sisu to the TEDx stage.
Emilia Lahti: I’m doing a PhD in applied psychology and theoretical philosophy.
Kavita Pillay: And sisu is the focus of Emilia’s PhD. Which makes her the first person in the world to do a PhD on this topic. She’s also a long distance runner, though that’s an understatement: in 2018, she ran 2400 kilometers across the entire length of New Zealand — in 50 days! All while making stops along the way to talk with people about her experience of being in a relationship that involved domestic violence. It’s part of her campaign, called Sisu Not Silence.
Emilia Lahti: When I started researching sisu in 2012–13, there was really nothing on it. You know, there was not one single peer reviewed article, not one single book on sisu. All the material that I found online were pictures of trucks.
Kavita Pillay: Because there’s a brand of Finnish trucks called Sisu! Like Tuomas Tepora, the historian, and Roman Schatz, the writer, Emilia says sisu is complicated. It has many facets.
Emilia Lahti: Because there’s like constructive sisu, balanced sisu, which is a good kind of sisu. And then you have the destructive sisu as well. So sisu can be either, you know, it’s — the quality itself is just a tool or it’s a potentiality. Sisu can also be very harmful. That’s a very important part of the conversation, actually, to include that.
Kavita Pillay: And here’s where she parts company with previous generations and their understanding of sisu.
Emilia Lahti: And from the very beginning, I kind of carried my own feminine energy to it, and my own philosophy and my viewpoint, and being a trauma survivor, you know, so I was very attuned to the nuances of the concept, and, you know, it could have been someone who would research sisu from a vantage point of war, for example, without bringing topics like virtue and balance and softness as its counterpart.
Kavita Pillay: Remember the unease that my husband and historian Tuomas Tepora have when it comes to talking personally about sisu?
Kavita Pillay: Well, I wonder, this is a related idea and I wonder what you make of it, that if you talk about sisu, it’s no longer sisu.
Emilia Lahti: No, no that sounds like Fight Club, the movie (laughs).
Clip from Fight Club: “The first rule of Fight Club is, you do not talk about Fight Club.”
Emilia Lahti: Sisu has been very masculine. No wonder if there would be a saying like that because it would kind of be rising from this space where you’re supposed to be quiet and you don’t ask for help and you don’t discuss your problems.
Kavita Pillay: In 2017, I went to Finland to produce a documentary on the country’s 100 years of independence. One young Finnish woman I spoke with talked about her great-grandfather. He had fought in the Finnish civil war, but never talked about what he experienced as a soldier, and he later committed suicide.
Emilia Lahti: What we know from trauma psychology and people who have researched wars is that it takes about three generations at least, where there is a shift where the negative impact of it is not so overbearing. There’s almost like a reset, a new start.
Kavita Pillay: Emilia isn’t the only Finn intent on updating sisu from its masculine wartime associations. In my more recent reporting from Finland, the Finns who were most likely to bring up sisu during interviews were women. There was the female ice swimmer who evoked sisu; a young single mom who named her son Sisu — turns out it’s rising in popularity as a first name. Plus, the two books about sisu that came out in 2018, both are by women! And in a Helsinki department store, I even found a new sisu-themed line of face creams. Sisu can now be used to shield your face from pollution and aging!
Sauli Pillay: And in some ways, when you think about it, Finland has had hardship in the past, but these days, Finland is probably one of the easiest places to live.
Kavita Pillay: My husband Sauli isn’t likely to start talking about sisu. But he agrees that there is a shift in how sisu is being understood. And maybe that has something to do with how Finland has transformed.
Sauli Pillay: You know, government is working very well, you have long vacations, manageable work hours, you can trust the police, you don’t have to save up for your kids’ education. You know, it’s even the happiest country in the world.
Kavita Pillay: To survive from one generation to the next, everything has to evolve. People. Countries. Words. Especially words.
This episode of Subtitle was reported by Kavita Pillay. The podcast version of the story is available here and on Apple podcasts.
Subtitle’s sound designer is Tina Tobey.
This episode was edited by Patrick Cox.
Thanks to: Phillip Martin, Paul Peterson, Jeremy Helton, our partners at the Linguistic Society of America, the Hub & Spoke audio collective and The World public radio program.
Subtitle is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.