Naja Marie Aidt writes about people. About what happens between people, and what happens to individuals when they undergo change or are put under pressure. She does this with a poet’s sense of language. Like few others, she can tell large stories of human conflict and emotion in the form of small, sometimes rather surreal texts. Moreover, she has an empathetic ability to understand and describe the human, particularly when it stretches out beyond what we so mistakenly call the “normal.”
Aidt (b. 1963) made her debut with a collection of poems called Så længe jeg er ung (As Long As I’m Young)(1991), which was published as a trilogy with two subsequent poetry collections Et vanskeligt møde (A Difficult Encounter)(1992) and Det tredje landskab (The Third Landscape)(1994). Naja Marie Aidt writes about change with a brutal honesty and vulnerability but also with a raw strength and luminous clarity. About changing from a young girl into a woman, from being a free, unattached female individual to being a mother, bound and tied to a time and a place. Aidt meticulously describes these shifts from one sphere of life to another in all their complexity, in their blend of joy, grief, overwhelming exhaustion, frustration and unarticulated, thudding sorrow. There is happiness in love, the security it provides and the fruits it yields, but there is also powerlessness and anger at not having more space, mentally and physically. Even loving relationships, when everything seems to have fallen into place, can be hard going, because how do you establish a developing adult world? The pain of losing sight of each other, of being unable to unite security and the untamed rush of life, is constantly present; and in Det tredje landskab, you sense a farewell and a growing frustration in the melancholy poetry. For “afsked er,/ som køkkenet,/en form for virkelighed” (“farewell is,/ like the kitchen,/a form of reality”).
In 1993, she published a collection of short stories, Vandmærket (The Watermark). The short stories describe people who are, in different ways, far out, who do crazy things with their lives, or are trapped in their own constricted thinking. They evoke at one and the same time a disturbingly concrete realism and an absurd surrealism. Reality is what you make it and, as a reader, you yourself imperceptibly feel, like the characters of the short stories, the anxiety of slipping out over the edge to be found only too late. Aidt certainly writes about people on the edge, who paint themselves or each other into strange corners, but she always does so with love for her characters. She never puts them on display or takes sides but shows in a down-to-earth way how this reality works.
Naja Marie Aidt’s second collection of short stories, Tilgang (Access), was published in 1995 and it, too, portrays people’s lives and destinies. People you could have met on a commuter train and whose lives Aidt spreads out before the reader. The collection ends with a mad, erotically-charged tale, “Ubrydeligt” (“Unbreakable”), about a set of twins, whose reflection and love is so strong that it ends up devouring them. Those around them react either by distancing themselves or with complete repression. The short story, which was re-written in 1996 as Aidt’s first radio drama by the same name, points in many ways right to the core of her own particular watermark. There where love is so strong that it spills over into the destructive. Where reflection ends in a claustrophobic cage. You become stuck in your own image – here, metaphorically expressed as twins, but it is at the same time a shocking picture of what can happen in any relationship. That you only see yourself in the mirror when you look at someone else and vice versa.
With the collection of poems Huset overfor (The House Opposite)(1996), there is a shift in Aidt’s poetic tools. It’s as if she opens herself up to a linguistic madness that has always been latent in her work. Now it is unleashed in a taut, surefooted lyrical form. Whereas Det tredje landskab was gloomy and almost graphic in its language, Huset overfor is rambunctious in a different way with words careening in wild turns and dollops of colour. The flower girl coyly twirls into the lining of her coat, but then she shouts with gruff bravura, and suddenly we see, clad in orange robes and small propellers, someone soaring over the city. There is the everyday, everyday words, clotted, anarchic but also with a surreal light, a giddy will, and an abrupt rhythm that elevates the texts. Huset overfor points toward the illustrated tale Balladen om Bianca (The Ballad of Bianca(2002), written in collaboration with photographer Kim Lykke, which dances in the same way, shrill and wild, in the city streets. In Balladen om Bianca, Aidt’s words and pictures from newspapers and archives create their own anarchic connection with stories from a small group of people on a Copenhagen street.
But before that came the poetry collection Rejse for en fremmed (Journey for a Stranger)(1999), which is partly based on the story of mad Joanna, who was crowned Queen of Castile in 1504 but, just two years later, declared mentally disturbed and removed from power. She was locked up in a convent as insane, where she lived until she died. The poet follows in Joanna’s footsteps and, as Aidt laconically notes, there is no proof that she was actually insane. The space of the poems shifts from the crowded city to the great, open landscapes of nature. Religious terms recur in the poems, which pointedly formulate the extremes of an inner journey that shift from the crowded city to the great, open landscapes of nature. In format, Rejse for en fremmed is a small collection of poems but also Aidt’s densest, where the nerves spread out across the whole surface of the language.
In 2006, Aidt returned once again to prose with a collection of short stories called Bavian (Baboon), for which she received the Critics’ Prize. With its short tales and its human vision, Bavian is a natural extension of her two earlier collections of short stories – though one senses that Aidt, thanks to her dramatic works, has an even better grasp of dialogue. Aidt is still empathetic with her characters, who are never explained or apologized for, simply shown with a precise and restrained linguistic economy with civilization as a thin veneer covering a deep, disturbing human impoverishment. It might sound as if love is ruled out, but that is not the case. It just doesn’t appear as a furious self-absorbed chase but as luminous moments. In 2007, Aidt was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize for Bavian.
In addition to poetry and prose, Aidt has a nice series of dramatic productions behind her; she has written radio plays, a libretto and several dramas. Moreover, she has written a screenplay, Strings (2005). She has even written children’s books and poetry for visual art – most recently, En drøm om mørke og fugle (A Dream of Darkness and Birds), 18 poems for Cathrine Raben Davidsen’s catalogue Voice of the Shuttle, 2007.
