Kitschy history, Finnish style

Hard to believe that this is true, but it is - every political orientation has its own shop nowadays, and as I was browsing for some evidence on the 1930's
deportations of communists and social democrats
to the Russian border, I found a shop that sells
miniature MUILUTUS cars ("muilutus" means
forced transportation). The most famous MUILUTUS in Finnish history was the MUILUTUS
of ex-president Ståhlberg and his wife from Helsinki to Joensuu in October 1930 - a moderate Social Democrat politician with no close ties with the Soviet.

Now the descendants of Lapua Brownshirts can purchase these miniature cars for their kiddies, and the famous brown
shirt can also be ordered in ladyfit and baby size. Check:

http:// kauppa.lapuanliike.fi

Praise high capitalism, hallelujah!

Feresi - an Iranian-Karelian piece of clothing

I stole this image from someone's blog in the US - she had collected old Finnish postcards from the 70s. I assume this is a folk band, and I should probably know who they are. I don't and the image makes me grin broadly. In my childhood, this kind of Karelia folklore was really popular.

The dress the three women are wearing is not an official folk dress, but a feresi - the everyday dress of Karelian women, worn in the kitchen and cowshed. Interesting about the dress is that it has travelled from Persia to Russia and landed in Karelia. Another, more festive variant of it is the sarafan. Different parts of Karelia had different feresi fashions - the one seen here is a North Karelian variant. The ones from the Russian side of the border seem more flashy and "Oriental". The common colours in feresis and sarafans seem to be red, blue, white and black. Usually they are worn with headgear that shows the woman's marital status. Unmarried ones wear ribbons, married ones a sorokka or säpsä.

Feresis were almost disappearing in Finland in the 20th century, until 1960s when two women active in the Orthodox church, Tellervo Riikonen and Irinja Nikkanen, decided to revive the tradition. Nowadays feresis seem to be in particular church fashion, but I am sure they are also worn in Orthodox families at different family gatherings.

I first saw a live feresi here in Tampere as I attended the Orthodox church coffee hour a couple of years ago. I must say I found them odd in the beginning, but now I am always looking forward to seeing the feresi ladies serving the coffee. It would be nice to own one, even if it was worn once in five years. As a piece of clothing, it seems to allow more movement than the actual Finnish folk dress, and it makes you look less matronly, as the dress is made of lighter fabric. Feresi specialists in Finland tell that everyone can make a feresi of their own style. It should consist of the dress, a white shirt and an apron,  but all the rest is up to you to improvise.

In the US there are lots of fashion websites dedicated to "modest clothing". Here in Finland I don't think women dress up in feresis to highlight their modesty, but rather to celebrate family history and "roots".

The most poetic part of feresis is the Russian "soul warmer" (dusegreja), a festive jacket worn on top of it at wintertime and as a bridal specialty in weddings. All women deserve their own soul warmers. This is a tradition that truly feeds the soul.

Lähiövalaat/Suburban whales

Tehdessäni eilen etnografisia nettiseikkailuja eräälle tunnetulle maahanmuuttajakriittiselle foorumille, ja myös kestosuosikkini Johanna Tukiaisen blogiin, opin kiinnostavan uuden käsitteen, jonka olen ajatellut ottaa käyttööni: LÄHIÖVALAS. Termin synonyymi on TUULIPUKUVALAS, mutta mielestäni siinä on liikaa kirjaimia. Termi viittaa ylipainoiseen yksinhuoltajaan, jolla mahdollisesti on lapsia useammalle maahanmuuttajataustaiselle miehelle ja joka on luopunut ulkonäkönsä tuunaamisesta. Kolmas herkullinen sukulaistermi on SIDUKKAMURSU.

Koska lähiövalaat harvoin vikittelevät poliitikkoja, heistä on vaikea löytää kuvallista todisteaineistoa. Kaarina Hazard on saanut äskettäin kantaa kunnianimeä dissattuaan edesmennyttä Tony Halmetta. Mutta Kaarinan tapauksessa nimitys osuu vain häneen fyysisesti - ei suosittu mediakriitikko ja näyttelijä voi oikeasti olla lähiövalas, hänellä on siihen liian monta fania. Etsisin termin genealogiaa suomalaisesta viihdemaailmasta laajemmin. Eija Vilppaan esittämä Pirre teki tuulipuvusta suurta taidetta 80-luvulla, ja ohjelman nimikin on kuvaavasti Fakta Homma (vrt. Hommafoorum). Valitettavasti Pirren mies oli perussuomalaisen prototyyppi, ja hänen ruumiinmuotonsa on liian anorektinen, mutta Pirren asenne kelpaa.

While making ethnographic excursions yesterday to a well-known "migration-critical" internet forum, and also to my long-term favourite bloggist Johanna Tukiainen's diary, I learn an interesting new concept worth using and manipulating: SUBURBAN WHALE. The synonym is WINDSUIT WHALE, but I find the Finnish variant of it has too many letters. It refers to an overweight single mom, who possibly has children fathered by several men of migration background, and who has given up tuning her looks. A third delicious near-synonym is CIDER WALRUS.

Because suburban whales in this country rarely make passes at politicians, it is difficult to find pictorial evidence of their existence. Kaarina Hazard, a media critic and actor, who recently publicly insulted the dead extreme right politician Tony Halme, was given the badge of honor, but the term only describes her physically. Kaarina is far too popular and intellectual to embody the character. I would start looking for her in the genealogy of Finnish entertainment world more widely. The character Pirre (middle in the picture above) performed by Eija Vilpas, transformed windsuits into a work of art in the 1980s, and even the comedy show's name suits well the context of this decade. Fakta Homma and Hommafoorum (the extreme right site) play well together. Unfortunately in the series Pirre was married to a prototype of a basic Finn (image: seated on the right), and her body mass index was too anorectic. However, her attitude is perfect, telling a tale.

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.

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?

On Karelianism, feminism and stale egg-butter

I have recently joined a book club, and one of our passionate themes is Finnish women's writing focusing on Karelia. Last time we discussed with fervour three novels by Kaari Utrio: Vaskilintu (The Bronze Bird, 1993), Viipurin kaunotar (The Beauty of Viborg, 1972) and Piritta Karjalan tytär (Piritta the Daughter of Karelia, 1971). Not all of us had read them, but who cares, the coverage was lively and we managed to find the raunchy scenes anyway. All men seemed to have rough hands and a burning need to rip down the ladies' elaborate dresses. All sense was lost when desire was burning in the loins. We would have appreciated scenes with more ambivalence and even minor attempts to break down the heterosexual matrix, but this didn't seem to happen. Kaari calls herself a feminist and she is also an ambitious scholar of all things medieval, so we were disappointed by the psychological flatness with which she portrays men and women. So now she is a closed chapter in our club's genealogy. Time to move on towards new challenges.

But there's another author whose works keep haunting me, Eeva Kilpi. She recently gave a deep and thought-provoking interview to Mark Levengood on TV. Even this is telling of her case: her texts have inspired Mark, a gay Swedish-speaking man struggling with his identity in the 1980s monocultural Finland. Eeva's texts are not as obvious as Kaari's, she has always written boldly about sexual taboos, and in her sex scenes nothing is perfect or predictable. I have particularly enjoyed her poetry, but before this month I have never had the nerve to approach her prose.

Now I am one and a half novel wiser. I began with her latest novel of old age, Unta vain (Just a Dream, 2007). It is a narrative of polyamory, thematically not remote from Jennifer Fox's documentary series I reviewed some months back. The 78-year-old protagonist escapes from Canada and a marriage to a Canadian man to her country cottage in Finland to solve her identity problems. Kilpi uses plainer language and less Karelian dialect in this one than in the earlier texts. Philosophically, the text's simplicity even resembles Marguerite Duras' spartan sentences. The theme of a woman alone in her faraway hiding place, keeping house and managing her life through shopping lists, is also quite Duras-esque. Both women have produced brilliant studies of solitude and the conditions of leading a creative life.

The other novel by Kilpi, Elämän evakkona (Evacuated from Life, 1983), is perhaps her most known and prized work. Here her main contradiction as a writer becomes apparent: on one hand she is an avantgarde feminist writer of her generation, writing openly about sexuality, lifestyle choices, alternatives to common Finnishness, and on the other hand, she is unashamedly pro-Karelian, nationalist and nostalgically mythological about the past. She dares say: Bring us back Karelia, and confesses her hard feelings towards the Russians. For sure, it is her war-time generation's right to speak up about the past, and it is this split between the postmodern and the pre-modern that interests me. She almost ignores modernity - the instant cultural jump from simple farming life to vegan hippie multiculturalist pacifism is what interests me most in this text.

I was reading Elämän evakkona aloud to my family in a car at the weekend. Poor sods. There were all the clichés about Karelian food fads, the stale egg-butter, homemade jams, rice pastries that were left in the oven for Russians to eat, potato kettles that were still boiling, the ravaged kitchen gardens. And also, the eternal myth of the packed bags - how anyone with a Karelian background cannot travel without a few too many, in case the trip extends and a return home is no longer possible. One always has to carry the egg-butter too. I partly belong to this party, and I am not aware of roots behind the border. Only North Karelian roots, which is not interesting - these people never left anywhere, they don't share the same sense of drama as the evakko people have shared.

I wonder if one can claim Karelian roots as a sympathy vote, and if there is a Karelian feminist single mother's club one could attend, after I've done my compulsory readings.