For those who enjoy Marmite on their ice cream

A friend hinted Anita Brookner as an inspiring literary figure for anyone planning to publish her first novel in middle age.

I may have once tried to read her novel, but found her writing style too dry (and arch-British?) and the characters too miserable to make it to the end.

Now I gave her a second try, and while still holding onto my initial observations, this time, at this point in life, I begin to understand her fans. Her novels are not the most common comfort food, but serve fantastically those who enjoy Marmite on their ice cream.

I started this time with Hotel du Lac (1984), the Booker prize winner and thinnest one of them all. Although Brookner published her first novel at 56, she has already written 24 novels – and I believe all of them deal at a certain level with existential solitude.

Hotel du Lac takes us to a well-established Swiss hotel, which does not have to advertise itself, as the clients have been returning there generation after generation. The hotel is a discreet hiding place for recent widows, too senile relatives, or people who for one reason or another have lost face in front of their nearest and dearest.

Edith Hope, an author of romantic fiction, is running from a wedding she cancelled at last minute. While moping in her cardigan in the lifeless village off holiday season, she writes letters to her true beloved David, who is happily married elsewhere and intends to remain so. She describes to David the everyday encounters with the odd hotel guests in painstaking detail, but never sends the letters. Another suitor appears on stage, offering her the kind of establishment a respectable woman writer would obviously need, in order to be taken seriously by her publisher and friends. It is an odd tale of love, written in such an ironic tone that one barely remembers the romance.

I have understood that most Anita Brookner protagonists are sexually inhibited, confessional and distant at the same time, and obsessed with self-analysis. They are happiest living their lives in the familiar quarters, greeting the same shopkeepers from thirty years back, and although they dream about escaping, somehow they don’t get it done. In the novels it rains too often, and the characters try to solve their problems by taking long walks.

From a postcolonial perspective, it is peculiar to read European novels, in which all characters are white Europeans. This is becoming rare even in today’s Finnish literature. Funnily enough, I find affinities in Anita B’s writing to two other Anitas: Anita Desai from India and Anita Konkka from Finland. The writing styles of all three women may differ, but their protagonists have something in common. Anita D. has a more positive view of humanity than Anita B., and Anita K. flirts more with alternative lifestyles and feminism, but all three Anitas offer the reader a world that has not been fully chewed and digested on her behalf.

Though Brookner is a contemporary author, writing of her own times, there are deep historical layers in the characters, as if they had been born to the wrong decade or century. There is something fascinatingly displaced in all of them, a “far out” psychology that allows interpretations sensitive to other times and places.
Now I am starting a second journey with Anita, through the novel Latecomers (1988). The third one waiting on my table is Family and Friends (1985). Let's wait and see if I come to the end of the famous Brookner walk one day.

Abi Morgan's "The White Girl": the politics of looking back

Last Tuesday the Finnish YLE1 showed the prize-winning and according to some sources "controversial" TV drama, "The White Girl", written by Abi Morgan. The film took us directly to the Pakistani quarters of Bradford, where a white working class single parent family had been emergency housed after a violent marriage. It is a story of ethnic separatism, and of white "outsiders" who are no longer privileged in the eyes of the migrant community.

The film has been received with wildly mixed feelings. Morgan has been accused of political correctivism, social pornography, or a tendency to show the white working class life as more scum than it could possibly ever be, anywhere in Britain or even Europe. It does not transcend the class divide, her critics claim.

I don't read the film first and foremost as a commentary about the British working class in peril, but for me it worked as a powerful reminder of the politics of looking, the politics of gaze, and counter-gaze. In the film, the white family's eldest daughter Leah approaches Islam, and finds comfort in daily prayers, while her mother is focusing on destroying herself through alcohol, drugs and a violent on-and-off relationship with her ex. The film shows clearly the rationality of a person's search for spirituality in a turbulent life situation. It could be any religion, but in this case it is Islam. Leah's choice to start imitating the daily acts of her classmates and neighbours has not been exoticized, but it is shown as the most likely and most intelligent choice a minority child can do. I understand that in the UK there are several Muslim-majority public schools, in which the curriculum has been Islamicized in the way Morgan portrays. In such a school, a white girl is an exotic bird.

It is true that Islam in the film is idealized, and shown in the most poetic, aesthetic form. All the Muslims in the film were sympathetic characters. Not all adult whites were bad, but morally ambivalent and weak in willpower. Very cleverly, Leah's mother was portrayed, amongst all other deviant characteristics, as illiterate (shaking the myth of the illiterate Muslim housewife). And the film's aesthetics bordered on ghettoization and third worldization. It showed the everyday life of a part of Britain that has for long been underprivileged and at the same time contains many other worlds.

To the film's critics I would like to pose a counter-question: if the film's perspective was so upsetting or irritating, isn't that a sign of something happening in the minds of the viewer? And isn't that what filmmakers are supposed to do, to choose a point of view and stick to it? I at least enjoyed to travel with Leah into the local mosque and experience with her the first steps of practicing a new faith. I enjoyed the acting, the dialogues, the dramaturgy, and the details of the settings, and the camera technique. I have never been to Bradford, and have not quite seen similar "third-worldization" of European housing areas in my own eyes. I have for many years wanted to travel to Bradford. Now this film caused in me a strong impulse to fulfill this idea.

But even more importantly, the film succeeds in showing, not only through the white family members' perspective, but also from the perspective of the local Muslim community, what the white working class neighbours' life might look like. In Finland, all the so called multicultural novels and films focus on the migrant experience as minority experience, and the emphasis is on how to integrate in the clean, punctual and orderly Nordic society. This film does something else, it turns around all the questions and shows us the possible future faces of Europe. I have rarely seen a film that manages to condense a social and political conjuncture, a turning point, a knot of signs in such a powerful package.

Cash or Sodexo vouchers?

There has been a lot of discussion in the Finnish media lately about asylum-seekers' income support. At the moment, Finland seems to pay most generously for asylum-seekers in the whole EU. The fact that Finland continues to pay in cash, whereas some bigger EU countries only donate goods, vouchers or a social services credit card (called Azure card), causes a lot of bitterness and jealousy amonst the so-called "migration critics". In reality, the income support schemes in all countries are complex and not directly comparable. One should also remember that Finland has the highest food prices in the whole EU, and it is not possible in the winter months to pick anything edible from the nature. Warm clothes, too, are an expensive necessity. Food banks operate somewhere, but one cannot count on them.

Cash is the humane alternative that brings people (at least at a marginal level of everyday exchange=shopping) to the same level of respect with the locals. Giving people vouchers or charity store freebies sets them dramatically apart. It is a very robust way of interpellating people as denizens, second-class citizens or even non-entities.

Britain has unsuccessfully introduced the Sodexo voucher scheme already twice in the 2000s. In the second modification of the scheme, vouchers are given to "failed" applicants who are waiting to be deported. The general public is disgusted and outraged; there are many humanitarian campaigns all over the country to outlaw this section 4 paragraph for "failed" asylum-seekers. Many ordinary Britons are trading the vouchers with cash, some out of charity, others to reap benefits to themselves. They don't mind becoming stigmatized at Tesco checkout; they voluntarily use the vouchers on behalf of the asylum-seekers.

One could think of the voucher scheme as an innocent example of everyday mathematics. But to give coupons to some people is a form of Othering. At a more philosophical level, how can we think of living in a country where some people are at the government level diagnosed as "failed"?

In Finland, the benefits are not generous for anyone, not for migrants nor natives, considering the high expenses of living. Migration minister Astrid Thors is pressurized soon make a suggestion for the future. It is highly likely that the benefits will be dramatically cut, because of the degree of the public outrage. The Sodexo voucher/Azure card option may also become a reality next year.

This citation from the magazine Egypt Today, in an article "Welcome to Finland",
http://www.egypttoday.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=8708

written by journalist Dina Basiony, hit the migration-critical nerve big time:

"Like most immigrants, Ahmed and her husband took advantage of the free Finnish language lessons offered by the government, which pays immigrants 8 (euros) per day to attend. The government also provides immigrants with a free home, health care for their family and education for their children. In addition, they get a monthly stipend of 367 (euros) per adult to cover expenses until they start earning their own living. The government is able to pay for these services due to a progressive tax rate that can exceed fifty percent of a person’s income. Even so, officials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed that Finland needs immigrants and that, in the long run, they are not a burden on society."

The notion of monthly "stipend" is quite funny. No-one in their right mind would conceptualize income support as "stipend" in this country. Dina Basiony's story is a classical honeymoon article, describing a polished version of the official Foreign ministry rhetorics of both countries. Finnish "migration critics" read it as a piece of propaganda written for the Arab world to invite more asylum-seekers into the country. Others may read differently. I read the citation as black humour.

I want to ask from everyone supporting a possible voucher scheme, how they position themselves as possible future welfare recipients. Because once the food coupons have been introduced to one group of people, it won't take long until they become a powerful mechanism of differentiation cross-cutting whole society. Who will come next? Pensioneers, those in a wheelchair, caretakers of the terminally ill?

Asylum seekers are human beings just like anyone else. If we fail them by giving them freebies, coupons and vouchers, we fail all of us.

Lola Rose and Cookie

Further book blurb on two Jacqueline Wilson books. I seem to have a slight addiction, meaning I read them before my daughter gets hold of them, and she is too old anyways, if we think of proper age slots. I don't belong to any slot, which means I can freely read them anywhere, anytime, also in public places without feeling embarrassed.

Lola Rose is a Jacqueline Wilson classic. Having read four-five of her novels, I'd recommend Lola Rose for the beginner. That and the earlier reviewed The Illustrated Mum rob my points for originality - in the storylines of both novels, there is something spectacular. Play with contingence, class analysis, positionality.

In Lola Rose, the mother gets to leave an abusive partner by winning a prize in a lottery. It consists of hard core social commentary on schools, the desired addresses, and the less undesirable ones in British everyday life. Lola Rose is registered to a London school where the principal gladly shares a ciggie with the girl's mother. It is the only school in the neighbourhood that accepts new students in the middle of the school year. Lola Rose lives in temporary council housing, which the mother-daughter couple tries to revamp as home. There is a younger boyfriend, whose feelings turn cold after the mother is diagnosed of breast cancer.

I wonder if Jacqueline Wilson's mission is to prepare the youngsters to cope with the realities of everyday life. I have liked her robust narratives, but after reading a few, I start expecting a thematic graduation (which so far doesn't seem to have happened).

The latest novel, Cookie, is a variation on the theme of Lola Rose. In both books, women and children are on the run from abusive men, never to return. And both display portraits of late capitalist consumerism, taken to the extremes. In Cookie,, there is a deeply insecure builder father, who tries to buy friends to the plain-looking daughter by hiring caterers and limos to her birthday party.

Wilson's boys and girls, men and women, are to a great extent cartoon characters, who bring the coarse point home about the ills of society, but after reading some of her books, I start expecting deviations from the bestseller scheme of things. Are the power relations in families really so polarized as Wilson likes to show us? And what about multicultural families, queer families, single parent families in which the parent is not interested in new girl- or boyfriends?

I am expecting from Wilson in the coming novels a widening of themes. The kids cannot forever be reading Thelma and Louise type of runaway dramas. She is a realistic writer and needs to study further the complexity of today's families. Many couples don't split up because of the other's abusive narcissism, or infidelity. She offers us a study of families on the move, but the study doesn't extend far enough. I would also like to read about polite, nice families breaking up.

People eating tofu, drinking soya milk and contemplating treks in the Himalayas do it, too.

Sodexo sucks

It makes me very angry to think that there's a Sodexo restaurant on our Tampere Uni campus. I only discovered the global connection of Sodexo to UK deportation centres last autumn, when I was doing some background study for my forthcoming novel. I ended up reading for a whole month about mass deportations in the EU.

Sodexo runs Britain's largest deportation centre at Harmondsworth near Heathrow Airport. It's been constantly in the British media for bad treatment of inhabitants and even suicide cases. I know we should have started complaining about this years ago, but such is life in the peripheries - we hear the bad news always somewhat belated.

The food at the local Sodexo restaurant is awful, so I know many people boycott it for mere reasons of taste. But this makes me think seriously about our common European futures: how many years will it take until the whole of Europe's reception and deportation centres will be privatized? Can anyone estimate what Sodexo's current profits in the deportation business are?

I'll try to write about this in one of the local papers soon, but I first have to calm down for a few days for my article to become a bit more civilized.

Thanks to a special muse who suggested me that I should write about this, while sitting at the Amica café. Wonder what the global corporatist connections of Amica are?