by Jill Magi
Futurepoem Books 2007
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

Estonia Fragmented

Estonia is a small Baltic country of 1.4 million souls. Modern Estonia was founded in 1918, and had only twenty two years of independence before it was occupied by Russia from 1940-1991. Estonia is still creating and defining its own national identity. The Soviet era definitely meant suppressing cultural characteristics, language and ideas that were declared “too Estonian.” As a result of this oppression, most of the materials and documents of Estonian culture are fragmentary and hard to find, obligating Estonians to redefine their national culture through their own personal interests and efforts.

Threads by Jill Magi tells the story of her journey back to Estonia’s capital, Talinin, in the months after “the singing revolution” to try and understand her own family heritage. Magi’s father was a Seventh Day Adventist minister who fled Estonia to the United States during World War II. Jill Magi never lived in Estonia, and did not grow up speaking Estonian, nor is she now practicing her father’s faith. Guided by some maps and documents annotated by her father, she tries to piece together and understand her doubly distant heritage. The book vividly describes her halting efforts to learn Estonian, and to bring back poems by Estonian poets so that her father can help her translate them. “Dear Dad, if you can even vaguely translate,” is a refrain throughout the book.

The book contains artful images created by Magi herself of books and documents repaired with threads so as to emphasize the seams, the mismatched fit, those crucial segments of documents that have been razored out and replaced, or simply lost to time. Also interspersed are passages from a book describing how to bind books by hand. The idea of hand sewn bindings is doubly meaningful here, because any books preserving Estonian histories and poetry are presumed to be hand-bound for private use, to be hidden from the eyes of prying Russian authorities. Magi does a good job of evoking the preciousness, the rarity, the intentional duplicity and hidden-ness of these handcrafted objects and their highly idiosyncratic, personal construction and contents.

Magi’s lines are deliberately fragmentary, echoing the uncertainty of her task. Opening the book nearly at random, I find: “With water on all sides, I approach/ holding on/ to the only guidebook and a dictionary where to weep is pronounced/ nutma and wave is laine and threadbare is kulunud—” Magi is not seduced by easy answers, although, given the language barrier, stereotypes and the reassuring gush of tourist guides are scarcely available to seduce her. Or are simply ghosts. One of the most moving lines in the book is: “Feel a map as the phenomenon of a ghost limb: then there is no loss.” Accordingly, the book resists narrative closure. Some of the more interesting passages deal with the comedy involved with others clumsy attempts to stereotype Estonia:

“What is your nationality Miss?” “Really, I thought you were French.”
“Because (this is because ) I am from—” His accent and not myself.
          “This
is because my nose is not or my ears are so or not as blonde as my
          sister”
and “The Estonian’s humor is particularly dark.”

Earlier in the book is the line “”Sweden exiles Estonia sweetly, on the other side of perhaps” But ultimately, Magi’s efforts at even vaguely outlining the meaning of Estonia are not much less clumsy than those of outsiders, who think of Estonians as poorer Finns, even though Estonia is relatively wealthy.

Threads is a penetrating study of personal as well as cultural identity. It is filled with evidence of the power of naming, and the loss involved when previously named things become ghosts. Jill Magi’s book is peppered with lines like:

Phrasebook marked here.
I am
hello. My name unfolded from a backpack tightly

I’ll close with a disappointingly simple cliché, and because I can find no better way to say it, I say it with grateful relief: Threads is thoughtful and intriguing, and should be read.

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