The meaning of good news?

Jyskyjärvi Meteorology Station, Russian Karelia, Summer 2007

Good news is the umbrella we keep in our bags on a sunny day - it eliminates the possibility of rain. The bearer of good news is a non-character, her fate is to be invisible because goodness is something one is not supposed to reveal in today's society. Nobody is interested in those who don't cheat, lie or manipulate others; no-one wants to hear the story of a near-perfect, lifelong marriage.

I'm interested in the theme of good news, both philosophically and from the perspective of writing fiction. I want to know what happens to people who despite societal pressures to participate in the reality tv-type collective embarrassment insist on finding good news from their everyday surroundings. What could "good news" mean, if we divorce the concept from pure naïveté? Can good news consist irony, parody, even black humour? Can we laugh at ourselves and others while telling the good tale?

As someone whose mind is pretty bipolar, I'm allergic to positive thinking fans, who think goodness is a package one can purchase on a weekend course. I'm allergic to all kinds of born-again movements, in which healing happens in a moment's thunder and lightning. I love my moments of darkness afterwards, if they don't lead me doing things I will later regret. And I think arguing is necessary in all relationships, one just has to learn the arts.

Good news for me consist of surprises. They are moments that make us see the world in fresh eyes. Instead of giving the usual body count in Iraqi bombings, I would truly enjoy reading the news: "No-one died violently in the city of Baghdad today." This doesn't mean that we should avoid knowledge about human misery, but we should keep our perspective in balance. To be distantly upset about the state of the world is always a fake position, if it doesn't lead to concrete action. To not only think about misery means that we should always try to find the loopholes to laughter, even in the midst of civil wars, oppression and hand- to-mouth poverty.

So I'm writing a story about the bearer and receiver of unusual good news in a community in which such communication is not really tolerated. The setting could be 21st century Finland or 15th century Istanbul, it could be Mao's China or a refugee camp in Darfur. I'm studying what it means to tell good news to someone who is not used to hearing anything positive about him or herself; when good news about a friendship or a blooming love affair is easily interpreted as manipulation, a cunning effort to ask something bigger in return. And what has happened to us if we automatically expect someone else's good news to be something else in disguise?

I'm starting my journey from the premise that holding good news inside as a secret is like poison, it is near-criminal in a world that is dominated by catastrophes, emergencies and emotional neglect. The main character in the story is teaching herself to tell her positive feelings about people she truly feels for, and this journey is full of unexpected pain. She believes that she'll grow up as a happy old woman this way, but there are serious obstacles to her belief when people start treating her as a creepy opportunist. Many people cut ties with her after she's showered them verbally with compliments, and her love life becomes a terrible mess after she stops acting distant and hard-to-get. Good news often leads to a public loss of face, and public courage always has a price-tag hidden somewhere. It is a story of existential loneliness and an extension in our thinking about minorities.

Suljettu osasto/Isolated ward

Ikävää sulkea ovet foorumille, jonka tarkoitus on herättää keskustelua myös niiden parissa, joita ei vielä tunne. Shivanin keittiö on nyt suljettu osasto. Tiedän, että jotkut ihanat hullut lukevat tätä, siis puhukaa minulle suoraan tai hankkiutukaa minulle blogiystäviksi luomalla itsellenne omat sivut tänne. Voimme sopia kommentoinnista kutsumalla toisemme toistemme blogeihin. Haluan ja kaipaan palautetta, mutta en voi sallia rasistista materiaalia omalla saitillani edes kommenttiosastolla.

It's miserable to close doors to a forum, the meaning of which is to raise discussions also amongst those whom one doesn't yet know. Shivani's kitchen is now an isolated ward. I know some lovely crazy people out there reading my blog, so please talk to me directly or become my Blogger friends by creating your own pages here. We can agree to become each other's commentators by inviting one another. I do want - or actually crave - some feedback, but I can't allow racist material appearing on my site, not even in the Comments section.

Rasistisen vihapuheen linnakkeet

Olen harkitsemassa blogini siirtämistä suojatummalle saitille. On masentavaa palata tänne ja löytää joka kerta kommenteista rasistista vihapuhetta pursuavia epärelevantteja purkauksia. Niiden kirjoittaja spämmää ihmisten blogeja sadoilla eri tunnuksilla. Saatuaan jostain porttikiellon yhdellä salanimellä hän luo aina uuden. Hänellä tuntuu olevan yhden miehen pyhä sota maamme "monikulttuurisuususkovaisia" vastaan. "Monikulttuurisuususkovainen" on hänelle kuka tahansa, joka on tekemisissä Suomessa asuvien maahanmuuttajien kanssa tai ilmaisee kiinnostusta Suomen ulkopuolisiin kulttuureihin. Ja hänellä on aikaa ja rahaa värkätä satoja blogeja, häiritä hänelle tuntemattomien ihmisten sivuja järjettömällä hysteriallaan, jonka edessä Freud olisi joutunut luomaan aivan toisen kaliiberin teorian. Kutsua tätä hysteriaa "akkamaiseksi" olisi suuri loukkaus maamme naisenemmistöä kohtaan.

Jokainen Seppo Lehdon Blogspotissa julkaisema "mielipidekirjoitus", joissa hän heittää scheissea nimeltä mainittujen ihmisten niskaan, on törkeästi näiden ihmisten kunniaa loukkaavaa ja antaisi aiheen viedä kunnianloukkaussyytteen oikeuteen. Lehto pelaa likaista peliä hyökkäämällä ihmisten kimppuun suoraan puskasta. Hänen lukutaitonsa ei riitä niiden blogien lukemiseen, joita hän "kommentoi", vaan hän vain käyttää toisten sivuja oman autistisen paskapuheensa levittämiseen.

Mietin vakavasti, kuinka tälle maalle käy seuraavina vuosikymmeninä. Monikulttuurisuus ja monikielisyys ei ole Suomessa "monikulttuurisuususkovaisten" tänne väen vängällä tuoma etninen piriste, vaan poliittis-taloudellinen välttämättömyys. Me asumme Euroopan umpisuolessa ja me tulemme kuolemaan nälkään ja sukupuuttoon, jos aiomme pitää "Suomen suomalaisilla". Kaikki tulevaisuuden menestys riippuu talouselämän monikulttuurisesta lukutaidosta ja poliittisten päättäjien tahdosta katsoa kohti tulevaisuutta, ei kohti mytologista menneisyyttä, jossa puukko puhui enemmän kuin kaikki sanat yhteensä.

Olen taipumassa ajattelemaan, että äänekäs rasistis-natsihenkinen sodankäynti on merkki ihmisen torjutusta olemuspuolesta, jonka juuret ovat aina seksuaaliset. Miksi siis natseilla ei nykymaailmassa koskaan käy flaksi naisten keskuudessa? Miksi natsit viihtyvät parhaiten poikaporukoissa? Ja miksi emme pysty suoralta kädeltä mainitsemaan tässäkään maassa yhtään naispuolista maahanmuuttajien vihaajaa, heteroa tai lesboa, joka tekisi vihastaan itselleen työtä vastaavan toimenkuvan?

Vihan, pelon ja ahdistuksen politiikka sulkee kaiken inhimillisen ulkopuolelleen, kuten voitte lukea Lehdon tälle sivustolle postittamista "kommenteista". Jos annamme tällaisten ihmisten meuhkata vapaasti keskuudessamme, jos kohautamme olkapäitämme ja lakaisemme heidän vihansa maton alle toivoen salaa, että he päätyisivät joku päivä suljetulle osastolle, se merkitsee vihreää korttia avoimelle muukalaisvihalle ja rasismille.

Counterpoints

Today I'm miserable over the fact that after many years of dreaming, I haven't even yet reached the economic status of buying my own pianogrande. Or even the cheapest Russian piano available in local music stores, which would be enough to soothe my fiercest longings. Or even a used one from the Salvation Army store. But not an electric one - the bottom line goes there.

The sudden pain was caused, of course, by Edward Said, whom I'm reading again this weekend after some months' break. Edward the postcolonial theorist who makes perfect sense, and Edward the master pianist, who developed his methodological notion of contrapuntal reading while listening to Glenn Gould. Both men could be identified as masters of endless variations of a single theme.

The beginnings of contrapuntal reading could be traced from Said's dramatic biography. As a Palestinian exile in the US, his whole life was haunted by the idea of displacement. Said had no single home, but he had spent his childhood between Cairo, Jerusalem and his ancestral village in Palestine. New York was his most permanent home, and Columbia University the intellectual centre of his activities, but he never stopped writing as an exile. The benefit of this position was that it enabled Said to keep on resisting dominant patterns of thought, and dominant ways of reading a literary text. To read contrapuntally is not only to look at what went into the text but to learn to listen to its inner contradictions, and particularly silences. It is always more interesting what the text doesn't say than what it says. Here Said acknowledged indebtedness to French poststructuralist thought, particularly Foucault and Althusser. What was special to Said's understanding was the methodological rigor, his insistence that combining the intellectual energy of big poststructuralist theorists can produce a reading strategy - a strategy that can be applied in empirical studies. Said doesn't leave his students helpless - he always manages to offer ways of working in real life. Whether one agrees with his practical approach or not, at least within the realm of postcolonial theory one should notify that there is at least one iconic figure who was never hopelessly difficult. One can have the illusion of getting inside Said's head by doing some extra studies on his key informants (varying from Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Gianbattista Vico, Gramsci, of course Marx and Engels, Frantz Fanon, Raymond Williams etc. etc.). The same cannot be said about the other two iconic postcolonial writers, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. Not even swallowing a few university libraries helps to get you there.

Said's metaphor of "worldliness" explodes all attempts to form narrow academic ghettos, area studies or think-tanks. He means seriously that all students, disregarding their field, should have some basic knowledge of both Arabic poetry and the classical European novel. When I started reading Said in the 1990s I was overwhelmed and enthusiastic about what he promised in Culture and Imperialism (1993): it is indeed possible to read Jane Austen from a postcolonial perspective, and one can put William Butler Yeats, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Aimé Césaire side by side and find common elements of resistance in their works. When working with Said, I remember promising myself that I'm never going to become a single issue or area specialist, that such a self-definition would be an eternal burden. I think I've kept the promise so far - my interests keep changing with the flow of time and through encounters with people.

In private life, I'm currently more interested in Said's literary theoretical texts rather than the highly politicized ones such as Orientalism. I find the literary critical pieces inspiring from the perspective of creative writing. As a wannabe writer of fiction, like most amateurs, I am stuck with hundreds of budding stories, which I always have the energy to work for the maximum time of two nights. What he writes about beginnings is truly soothing: the novel is an institutionalization of the human intent to begin. So one never knows which one of our many beginnings carries the jackpot. I believe that one day one of my budding beginnings will have the narrative force to run to its conclusion, that the best stories always write themselves through the body of the author.

PS: The image was downloaded from Salon Magazine's website. Please notify me if I've done wrong - I don't know if it is common property or not.

Vaaleanpunaiset munat

Vietnamissa, ennen kuin kansalla oli varaa leipoa kakkuja, oli tapana juhlistaa lasten syntymää tarjoamalla koko kylän väelle keitettyjä kananmunia. Munat värjättiin vaaleansinisiksi tai -punaisiksi riippuen lapsen sukupuolesta. Eilen aloitin urani vapaaehtoisena suomen kielen opettajana ikääntyville maahanmuuttajanaisille. Toinen kursseistani alkoi kananmunajuhlilla.

Munan symboliikka on universaalia, siinä on jotain, mikä ylittää kulttuuriset detaljit. Me myös maalaamme munia, meillä on tuoreessa muistissa historia, jossa voita jatkettiin munahakkeluksella, yksi perinneruoistamme, karjalanpiirakka munavoilla, yhdistää riisin ja kananmunan. Mitä vastasyntyneen äidille on viety rotinoiksi, siinä on varmasti paljon yhteistä vietnamilaisten käytäntöjen kanssa.

Naisten ilo oli niin hersyvää, ettei minulla ollut varaa siinä tilanteessa laittaa kriittisen feministin silmälaseja päähäni ja kysyä, miksi tytön väri on kaikkialla vaaleanpunainen. Mitä pinkissä sitten on vikana, voisi kysyä vastakysymyksenä. Miksi ruotsalaiset miehet pukeutuvat mielellään pinkkiin kauluspaitaan siinä missä suomalaiset miestenvaatekauppiaat tietävät pinkkien paitojen päätyvän löytökoriin kuukaudessa? Onko pinkki muutakin kuin Barbie-maailmaa ja donitsien ylitsepursuavaa kuorrutusta? Tässä vaiheessa idolini Tori Amos varmaan kysyisi, mitä on pinkin alla (yksi hänen levyistään on nimeltään Under the Pink).

Pidän vaaleansinistä yhtä herkkänä värinä kuin vaaleanpunaista, liitän siihen samanlaiset unelmat, samanlaisen herkkyyden, viattomuuden ja koskemattomuuden kuin pinkkiin. Vaaleansinisessä ei ole tippaakaan äijäkulttuuria, se ei pullistele eikä näytä habaa.

Värit ovat värejä, jokaisen värin tehtävä on rikastuttaa tätä maailmaa, eikä mikään väri sinänsä voi olla ihmisen elämää rajoittava. Ongelman tuotamme me ihmiset, meillä on tapana koodata värimme suurilla merkityksillä, liittää niihin attribuutteja, jotka elävät omaa elämäänsä tässä sfäärissä, jota kulttuuriksi kutsutaan. Kun värit alkavat rajoittaa elämää esimerkiksi sukupuoleen liittyvien merkitysten kautta, silloin olemme menettäneet jotain ihmisyydestämme. Ongelma ei ole se, jos tyttövauva puetaan vaaleanpunaiseen potkupukuun, vaan se, jos tyttöyteen ei enää voi lukea myrkynvihreä-mustaraitaista asua.

Menipäs semioottiseksi, mutta menköön. Hauskaa oli ja naurettiin paljon, kaksostyttöjen kunniaksi, joista varmasti kasvaa upeita ja arvonsa tuntevia naiskansalaisia.

Turkish delights and postcolonial theory

Last week I visited Turkey for the first time in my life. Everything about Istanbul was mind-blowing, sophisticated and intriquing, but due to some extra-curriculum stress not caused by Turkey or the conference I visited, I came home devastated by the usual stomach flu, peppered with high fever, and basically had to take the whole week off.

Today is the first clear day I see after Istanbul, and tomorrow I'll start my lectures on Postcolonial Theory. This is already the second full course I give on the topic and xnd introductory lecture. However, I don't rely on last year's notes , they seem totally flat and outdated, as usual, so I have to start creating a new Product from the scratch.

In a panicky situation like this, one has to use the sassiest tools available. Yesterday, when I was still holding on to tables and chairs in waves of dizziness, I managed to read a truly clear-headed article by Irad Malkin (2004), "Postcolonial Concepts and Ancient Greek Colonization", in which he re-read the history of Greek city-states through the "middle ground" metaphor, which has also become fashionable in postcolonial theorizing, alongside with "creolization", "hybridity" and "contact zones". As a metaphor, "the middle ground" seems most suitable for any research approaches focused on narration and memory.

One of the great differences between Greek colonies and later European settlements was, of course, the polytheist-monotheist-axis: it is often not emphasized enough in postcolonial theory that most European imperialist projects were deeply Christian projects, and without the deep-seated "civilizing mission", or need to convert the poor heathens, European conquests may have had dramatically different agendas. Malkin, from his classical Mediterranean Civilizations"perspective, has the ability to shake postcolonial theory's conceptual domino game to unexpected horizons.

Today I got inspired by a visit to theorist-novelist Amitava Kumar's blog (www.amitavakumar.com), where I was hinted to get new novels to read and heard the sad news of a brilliant Indian woman writer, Qurratulain Hyder's, passing away. First I got to know about Kumar by reading his book Passport Photos (2000), which is a fascinating combination of theory, fiction and photography. It always warms my heart to find another academically based writer, who is not afraid to keep his writerliness in the closet, who has the ability to let go at least of some layers of conceptual snobbery. So I've been an on and off visitor in Kumar's blog for a couple of years now. In class, I use Kumar (alongside 10-20 other names) as an example of academic writing that can be also aesthetically pleasing and inspiring.

Malkin reminded us of the historical Mediterranean continuum towards the Black Sea, which was not considered as the frightening Other by the Greeks, but a part of oikoumene, the "inhabited" world. This commonness, the lack of epistemological barriers, between the East and West, came somehow flesh to me during the few days in Istanbul. When looking at the mosaics designed in the honour of Alexander the Great, I was reminded of the blonde and blue-eyed Pakistanis I met some years ago, who claimed ascendance from the great Greek forefather and his armies. The same kinds of shivers of recognition from the past happened in Istanbul, too.

All this crystallized on the last night in a discussion with two sophisticated carpet sellers, who were able to give to me the basic information I wanted to find about the Mevlevi Sufi Lodge. Now I know where to find the most knowledgeable young dervish in town, and where the buses to Konya leave. The many possible Silk Roads opened up in front of me. The Sufi wisdom is to pick the road in full consciousness, and to make one aware of the possible consequences of one's choice - but the sweetness about it is that you have absolutely no say about the stops on the way. And the final stop is the ultimate mystery.

Speechless in Istanbul

Bosphorus from the boat, August 30

Sultanahmet Gallery, August 31

The Blue Mosque in the afternoon, September 1

A Finnish racist has found my blog

It looks like one of Finland's leading racist, anti-immigrant NON-thinkers Seppo Lehto has found this site.

He argues that I should also find as my argument "Finland for the Finns" and that he is laughing at my profile.

A brief glance at his own website confirms my deepest fears about publishing in Finnish at Blogspot: there is no monitoring whatsoever, because no-one at the Blogspot administration understands the Finnish language. He would get thrown out immediately from any Finnish service providers sites. I checked the Blogger ethical rules, and although hate speech is strictly forbidden, Blogger makes it extremely difficult to complain about abusers.

Throughout his entries, he engages in violent verbal abuse against "the niggers" and "the ähläms" - the imagery is psychotic and repetitive, dull and draining. I don't even wish to translate in English what complete DOGSHITE he has managed to produce. After such a bitter slap in the face, one is reminded that anti-racist battles have not even yet begun in this country, and that the most extreme figures indeed seem dangerous for the national health.

And how is it so common in this country that these racist paranoias are connected with another unbelievable slogan, "Bring us Back Karelia"? Whose Karelia? Who the HELL are us?