Telling your story through art at VEMU

Her father, Johann Bernhard Haljaste, was a colonel in the Estonian military and the head of engineering service in the 22nd Estonian Territorial Corps. On June 14th, 1941, during the infamous June deportations, he was seized by the Red Army due to his outspoken political opposition of the Stalinist regime and notoriety as an Estonian nationalist; he died the following year as a political prisoner in Norillag, Norilsk Corrective Labour Camp. My great grandfather’s capture, and the subsequent occupation of Estonia by the Soviets, made refugees of the family he was forced to leave behind. Familial records tell me that my grandmother, her brother, and their mother immigrated to Canada in 1949, after eight years in displaced persons camps around Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. The rest is history. My grandparents fell in love and birthed a daughter, who eventually birthed another daughter. That’s me.

I know all this not only through photographs, historical documents, and obscure profiles on Ancestry websites made by estranged family members; oral histories were a large part of my growing up, of how I came to understand the mechanics through which my family came to be situated on this land. I was raised on old Estonian, German, and Russian songs – and though I remember their words to this day, as a non-Estonian speaker, their meaning is lost on me. I grew up with tales of fortune-telling nomads that predicted my grandmother’s emigration and folklorian myths of gnomes, faeries, and other mythical beings. I used to write plays for my grandmother and me to perform together, infusing Eastern European mythologies with contemporary themes. From a very young age, I learned to express myself through songs and stories, to use art as a vessel of self understanding and realization. My grandmother passed away when I was sixteen years old, in August of 2013 and, for awhile, the stories stopped.