Luin juuri välipalana lukupiirimme kuukauden kirjan, Anna Gavaldan Pakomatkalla (2009, ranskaksi L’échappée belle). Anna on uusimmassaan palannut alku-uransa uskolliseen minimalismiin – edelliset romaanit ovat olleet järkäleitä.
Muistan selailleeni kirjaa jo aiemmin, ja mieleeni tarttui lause, jossa irvokas sukulaismies laskeskelee joka toisen työpäivänsä menevän verorahoihin, joilla ”Mamadu pistää 10 neekerivaimoaan paksuksi”. Lause jäi mietityttämään monikulttuurisuuden tutkijaa: tästäkö koko eurooppalaisessa oikeistolaisessa politiikassa on kyse?
Vaikka romaani ei suorastaan kerro äärioikeiston noususta Ranskassa, se on silti kärkevä kuvaus eri yhteiskuntaluokkien komplekseista. Kertoja-Garance etsii lohtua sisaruksistaan, joiden kanssa voi jakaa samat musiikilliset, elokuvalliset ja kaunokirjalliset viitteet, ja peilaa boheemia porvarillista kasvualustaansa toimihenkilömentaliteetin omaavan kälynsä maailmaan. Käly on farmaseutti, jolla on bakteerikammo ja alemmuuskompleksi suhteessa miehensä sukuun.
Romaani on neljän sisaruksen road movie, jossa kolme karkaa kuolettavan tylsistä häistä vieraillakseen veljensä luona, joka on hankkinut itselleen keskiaikaisen linnan ja esittää turisteille aatelista varsin menestyksekkäästi. Linnassa ei ole vettä eikä sähköjä, ja veli murehtii huonoa flaksia naismarkkinoilla. Myös veljen lähipiirissä on häät, joihin sisarusparvi pääsee kuokkavieraiksi. Näissä häissä on tarjolla tölkkiviiniä ja morsiamen sukkanauha ryöstetään pingispöydän päällä.
Romaanissa eniten nauratti ranskalaisten maalaistollojen samankaltaisuus suomalaisten kanssa – myös haute couturen maassa on tyyppejä, jotka pukeutuvat havaijipaitaan nahkaliivin kera ja koittavat iskeä naisia kertomalla vitsejä huorista, jotka eivät suostu ottamaan suihin.
Kiireinen maailmamme tarvitsee Gavaldan kaltaisia kuplivia kertojia, joita voi ahmia julkisissa liikennevälineissä tai vauvan yösyöttöjen välissä. Kadehdin hänen kykyään tiivistää monimutkaisia maailmoja kirkkaiksi, pureviksi lauseiksi.
Mun tämän syksyn Finlandia-hevonen on Alexandra Salmelan romaani 27. Muita listattuja kirjoja en tosin ole lukenut, ja tuskin ehdinkään. Alexandrankin kirjasta kuulin kaverilta, joka valitsi sen lukupiirimme seuraavaksi keskustelunaiheeksi. Mutta joo, fiiliksissä olen, en pelkästään tämän mamu-kirjailijan loisteliaasta kielen tajusta, mutta ennen kaikkea hänen ilkeästä yhteiskunnallisesta satiiristaan, joka kohdistuu koko maamme hiippahuppukansaan.
Viimeistään nyt ymmärrän, että loistavan romaanin kirjoittamiseen tarvitaan outoja kertojia, kuten lapsen pehmolelupossu tai Opel Astra. Jos olisimme kuulleet suoraan kompostintuoksuista keski-ikäistä pariskuntaa, Piiaa ja Markoa, romaani ei olisi saanut lainkaan siipiä, vaan olisi jäänyt ennalta-arvattavalle tunnustukselliselle tasolle. Maailmalla on ihan tarpeeksi keski-ikäisiä keskiluokkaisia kirjailijoita, jotka antavat äänen yhteiskunnallisesti tiedostaville, omaa itseään pelottavasti muistuttaville protagonisteille (mieti esim. Siri Hustvedt ja Paul Auster, pariskunta, joka vuolee kultaa) ja näissä romaaneissa itseironia on niin hentoista, että sitä tuskin tunnistaa. Maailma tarvitsee kirjailijoita, jotka osaavat yhteiskunnallista ironiaa ja itseironiaa sopivasti yhdistäen nyrjäyttämään ihmisten sovinnaisia käsityksiä siitä, miten kunnon ihmisen kuuluisi elää.
Yleensä en pidä eläinhahmoista, mutta Salmelan Herra Possu, joka tarkkailee maailmaa parivuotiaan juuri puhumaan opettelevan Pikku Papsun kainalosta, oli se syy, miksi haluaisin tämän kirjan voittavan Finlandian. Herra Possu puhuu juuri sitä suomalaisten lastenohjelmien tekopirteää kieltä, johon tuoreet vanhemmatkin valitettavasti taantuvat. Herra Possu puhuu markettien käytävillä, kun kultalusikalla syötettyjä natiaisiamme kärrätään muovisissa autonmuotoisissa kärryissä ja vanhemmilla on liian kiire tutkia aamiaismurojen lisäainepitoisuuksia. Ja sitten kassalle: "Jono oli pitkä ja pikku Papsu alkoi itkeä, koska hänen vaippansa oli märkä ja hänen vaaleanpunaiset enkelisukkahousunsa olivat kastuneet. Yhtäkkiä Pikku Papsun äiti huudahti:
"Voi ei, linssit!" ja lähti juoksemaan takaisin kauppaan." (s. 82-3)
Tässä kohtaan aloin kadehtia Salmelaa, joka ehti kirjoittaa ennen minua kaikesta siitä, mistä olen itsekin halunnut kirjoittaa: tofusta, linsseistä, spelttikekseistä, kuukautiskupeista, hamppupaidoista, kangaskasseista, komposteista ja ihmissuhteista, jotka alkavat rakoilla, kun arki muuttuu mahdottomaksi loputtomien elämäntapaneuvottelujen keskellä. Romaanin pariskunta ei käy töissä, vaan keskittyy täyspäiväisesti kuluttamaan toisensa loppuun. Vaikka kyseessä on rankka satiiri, kaikki sen ainekset on revitty elävästä elämästä tässä ja nyt. Me kaikki tunnemme monta Piiaa ja Markoa, joille vaihtoehtoisuus on pyhä asia, ja jotkut meistä tunnistavat itsessämme tuollaisia siemeniä.
Kirjan toinen juonne, tsekkiläisen Angien rock'n'roll-pakkomielle kuolemasta 27-vuotiaana jää minun luennassani ohuemmaksi narratiiviksi kuin suomalaisen maatiaisen ekoperheen surkuhupaisa elämä, mutta Angieta tarvitaan kutsumattomana vieraana, joka tahtomattaan aikaansaa perheen kriisin kulminaation.
Odotan innolla vastaavaa pankin räjäytystä aasialaisen tai afrikkalaisen kirjailijan kynästä. Jos tsekkiläinen kirjailija saa näin robustia jälkeä aikaan opiskeltuaan suomen kielen perinpohjin, millaista kritiikkiä saisi aikaan sellainen kirjailija, joka ei ole ennen tänne tultuaan koskaan käyttänyt pankkiautomaattia tai esiintynyt julkisesti uima-asussa?
Anne Enright's Booker-winning novel The Gathering (2007) fell into my hands last Wednesday, and since then I've been wondering about her talent, the cruel precision with words. Now since the 1990s, when Irish writing was my full time business, I have taken my distance, and cannot really remember if I read her early stuff back then. Something in her style reminds me of the Irish radical feminists I met in the flesh in the early 90s - there is a passionately angry subtext, dealing with women's rights to contraception and divorce, and the so-called Catholic family values.
The ingredients of the novel are arch-Irish: the Hegarthy clan is burying an adult son who has committed suicide, and old memories of sexual abuse committed by someone close to the family pop up. The protagonist has given birth to only two daughters, and is becoming severely alienated from her husband. She sleeps during daytime when the family is out, and in the nights takes weird pleasure in driving around Dublin, emptying a bottle of wine in the car as she moves around the eerie "hoods". One would not expect that it would be possible to win a Booker with such a simple tale. But in Enright's case it's the alchemy of words, the strange constellations, that count more than the actual storyline.
The novel reminds me a lot of the two postcolonial writers with whom I am most attached to, Jamaica Kincaid and Sara Suleri (Goodyear). All three women engage in remembering the dead in a laconic, matter-of-fact, almost violently detailed way. The way the protagonist Veronica remembers grandmother's marital bed, her naked groin, may sound disgusting to some. Enright writes obsessively about the triangular drama between Veronica's grandmother, her grandfather and their landlord, who treated the tenants as his property. There is very little Irish history embedded in the story, although it stretches back to 1925, the early years of the Free State. The characters seem oddly devoid of political passions. Or, Enright has no interest in taking the role of the history teacher. The reader has to dig the politics from underneath many layers.
Enright uses the Biblical phrase from Jesus, "Noli me tangere" (Don't touch me), in the contemporary context to get into the core of the problems of a dysfunctional family. These guys are truly avoiding getting too close to one another. The Catholic kids have been taught the phrase as "Nolly May." In the wake and the funeral, Veronica and her siblings are all trying to get together without really meeting one another; drinking becomes one way of protecting oneself from too extreme emotions. In Finland, we have a special word "suojakännit" (protection drunkenness) to describe this tendency. The Hegarthy clan never drinks together, but everyone hides their own bottles and glasses during family meetings. How familiar reading this makes to us Finns! Also in this country the most appropriate place for the bottle has been under the table, close to the table leg. True "closet drunks" (kaappijuopot), on the other hand, hide the drink on the kitchen sink like in Enright's novel.
The Gathering needs to be read several times, it is not one of those books one devours in one sitting. What I loved most about it was the mixing of the philosophical and the everyday, like in the passage where Veronica loiters at Gatwick Airport, where she has stranded alone without her family, but is gathering the courage to return to them:
"And I think we make for peculiar refugees, running from our own blood or towards our own blood; pulsing back and forth along ghostly veins that wrap the world in a skein of blood. This is what I am thinking, as I stand in the queue in the Gatwick Village branch of Accessorize with my two pairs of flipflops, that sport at the plastic cleft a silk orchid for Emily, and for Rebecca a peony rose. I am thinking about the world wrapped in blood, as a ball of string is wrapped in its own string." (p. 258)
With this passage in mind, I am already looking forward to reading her non-fiction book on motherhood, Making Babies. Probably not a pink and pale blue-hued celebration.
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.
I first run across Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Purple Hibiscus some time in the mid-2000s, and as I happened to be planning a course on Afro-Caribbean women’s writing, I decided to include the novel in the curriculum right away. The intensity of her prose, and the difficulty of the intimate relations she was describing, struck me as something worth investing our time on. My international students loved it, and especially those who had received a Catholic upbringing could relate to the subject matter very well.
In all Chimamanda’s books the university city of Nsukka appears as one of the focal points. The university of Nsukka was established as the first “indigenous” university of Nigeria following the independence in 1960. It has particularly excelled in astronomy, medicine and law. The country’s first university has always been the University of Ibadan (the local Oxford or Cambridge), but Nsukka has tried to differentiate from its competitor by profiling itself as the more African alternative. For anyone from the Finnish deepwoods this makes perfect sense. We greet warmly all such initiatives. I don’t even think of it as a coincidence that Biafra adopted Sibelius’ Finlandia as their national hymn during the independence war. Small nations always find one another, no matter what the odds.
Chimamanda grew up in an academic family on the campus of Nsukka, and in her writing, the town looms larger than life. For someone also born in the shadows of an “indigenous” university, this autobiographical emphasis doesn’t seem strange. I salute it. Through Chimamanda, I have seen vivid bits of Nsukka. It is a place with a noble nationalist history and a present that unfortunately promises too little. Her third book, the short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck, reveals the realities of campus life in the 2000s: mob violence on the campus is rampant and any degree can be bought too cheap from the examiners through bribing. It is difficult to relate this to my own “indigenous” campus experience. There probably the most daring thing one could think of would be to cycle naked around the campus at full moon – but I can’t even confess having done that.
The second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, became an instant hit in many European countries soon after first publication. I first got hold of the book in Swedish two years ago, and sorry to say, I could not enter its universe in that language. Nigeria in Swedish was too remote to me then. I also hesitated approaching the Finnish translation, on the same grounds. Now on my holidays, I liberated an English copy of the novel on the isle of Lefkada in Greece, where someone had left it untouched at a book recycling joint. After this, her art has truly started making sense to me. I was accidentally “bounced back” to her.
Chimamanda is only a “small girl”, in her early thirties, and critics worldwide have already rated Half of a Yellow Sun as a global classic. In the literary beehive, she has sucked all the honey too prematurely, and she may have to bear also the negative consequences of such instant fame. In my country, she is being read everywhere in local flower hat aunties’ well-meaning book clubs. I can find a Finnish translation of her novel on every petrol station of this country.
The novel does reflect deeply upon the horrors of the Biafran war and the ethnic divisions of Nigerian society, but first and foremost it is a document of post/colonial gender relations, in a situation where modernity and tradition clash violently. The novel has five protagonists, “her children”, as the author calls them, all of who experience lapses and doubts in their intimate relations. It offers every reader a possibility to identify with someone – not pinpointing at any character’s innate moral superiority. Everyone in the novel makes fatal mistakes, everyone is rough and edgy.
It is a novel about heterosexuality, written in a way that doesn’t make too rigid boundaries between Africa and the West. Black and white protagonists intermingle creatively. Things happen, between the races and in-between. The notion of “race” is easily dismantled. Neither does heterosexuality mean much to the protagonists. Chimamanda offers no simple “boy meets girl” stories. This fact alone renders her writing apart from the majority of European literature. Much of recent European literature is much more heteronormative and racially confined than this.
In Chimamanda’s world, all relationships are defined by intricate complexities. She writes: “ Olanna gently places a pillow beneath her head and sat thinking about how a single act could reverberate over time and space and leave stains that could never be washed off. (p.245) ” In this passage, Olanna is making a decision against all odds to return to her partner, who was too easily seduced to illicit sex during her short trip elsewhere. It would be difficult to think of an European Olanna, wife of a university lecturer, adopting the fruit of her husband’s lapse to brief rash lust. Chimamanda writes very open-mindedly about common law marriages, infertility and adoption, to my understanding against the stream of everyday African sensibilities. The twin girls, Olanna and Kainene’s liberal lives seem very bizarre to me, based on the stories African friends displaced in Finland have told me about foolproof patriarchal heteronormativity and their less privileged families. The twin girls’ avant garde attitudes would have been extreme even in the Finnish 1960s – a time when “women were still women and men were still men”.
Chimamanda insists on portraying the fringes of Nigerian society, the kinds of possibilities available if people broadened up their minds to accept the multitude of the human condition. She is positively “well ahead of her time”. I am not sure if this kind of loosening of family morality is what mainstream Africa is welcoming in this millennium. Chimamanda does not proscribe this, she only pokes at “possible lives, possible futures” pending somewhere in the future. Having already been exposed to other kinds of sets of life, other norms of organizing everyday life, other forms of reasoning, the relationship puzzles Chimamanda brings us may be Africa’s unavoidable future.
Yesterday I bought a DVD copy of Neil Hardwick's musical "If You Love". A friend of mine, with whom I shared formative years at Birch Village, where a great part of the film was cast, recommended the film to me. I didn't remember to go and see it at the movies. Now it entered my life at the point when I am writing my own multicultural drama. Glad I saw it, glad to have shared it with a local of that landscape- but I also have some critical comments to make:
1. Starting from the obvious: the film openly criticizes, in my opinion in a classical leftist way, the contemporary polarisation of class divides in Finnish society, and plays on old leftist classics, such as the key tune "If You Love". It really tries to make some political points, but fails to convince anyone, when you read from the cover that it's been sponsored by Hesburger, Oriflame, National Lottery etc. The presence of the sponsors in the film was too obvious, leaving the viewer with very little imagination to fill the gaps.
2. I felt empowered by the way Hardwick sees Birch Village. His way of playing with the locality was one of the strongest points of the film. I believe it's a continuing prose poem to a landscape that rarely gets positive attention in the media. I used to live for two years in one of the monstrous towers the film portrays (the red student house, not the Blue Gazebo), but as the scenes have been filmed on sunny summer days, they really don't bring the worst out of the "hoods". There's a lot of light and hope in the imageries. If compared to some other recent films and TV series depicting Finnish suburban life (Jari Tervo's Mogadishu Avenue, Johanna Vuoksenmaa's Nousukausi), this film doesn't exoticize the "hoods" or make them look more miserable than they are in real life. Hardwick actually humanizes Birch Village. But upon doing this, I believe he uses very conventional methods that point out towards middle-class tastes and values. There is an artsy red-haired auntie living in the Blue Gazebo of Birch Village, but when the film shows her apartment from the inside, it looks rather like a posh loft apartment in Eira. In real life, Birch Village apartments do have grey plastic floors and worn-out beige cupboards. I would have preferred to see a bit more of the council house aesthetics in the film. (The African restaurant scene was, on the other hand, the most beautiful scene in the whole film, and the only passage where I truly enjoyed the stylicization. I would love all our suburbs to have restaurants like that!)
3. A lot of the dancing was just crap. No need to explain this any further.
4. The history of Finnish pop/rock music appeals to Finnish audiences, but very little to the "Mamus" who have not lived here long enough to witness that history. Because the film has a strong multicultural theme, I would have wanted the film to show more of the multicultural realities of the people. In this case, it would have required some further studies on Nigerian aesthetics. If the people in the film have real Nigerian names, then there should have been more cultural details. The love couple's meeting remains now a bit shallow. In real life, people discuss the cultural differences in vivid details, and these discussions can be empowering.
5. I also felt that there were too many songs, introduced in a chaotic and haphazard manner. My favorite musical scene was Afia's performance of Eppu Normaali's "Joka päivä ja joka ikinen yö" on a typical Birch Village playground. That scene spoke to me deeply. It showed the possibilities of hybridity, performed in a creative manner. A lot of the other music and dance acts left me cold.
6. There is a big difference between commercial films and artsy films. Kaurismäki films mainly employ character actors, who may not be the prettiest and sleekest in physical appearance. "If you love" employed many kinds of actors, some of whom shone out with their outstanding personality (for instance, Mervi the single mother nurse), but others were cast only on the basis of good looks (Ada, the main character). The migrant actors definitely beat many of the Finnish ones. Ada and her blonde friends were a great disappointment. Tony (Chike Ohanwe) was promising in his debut in the film world, and I would love to see him in a completely different role in the future. Romantic Romeo role is not the ideal role for him. He is too talented to play that kind of role.He would do better in a more ironic role.
7. I would like to know how much Hardwick has been watching Bollywood films as of late, and how much of that tradition he thinks he has introduced to the Finnish cast. I see a very strong Bollywood component in the film, and cannot compare it with any other experiences of watching (European) musicals. But then, in Bollywood there's a certain degree of professionalism, which was absent in this film. I was very puzzled about the genre, and cannot yet say if the puzzlement is positive or negative.
Last August I saw a vivid dream about the Queen of Soul visiting us in Tampere. In the dream, I had been recruited to host her and attend to all her needs, and I was quite stressed out by the task. She was wearing African clothes, not the ones in the Amazing Grace album cover, but similar ones in blue and brown shades. The photo attached here is the only picture I have found of Aretha from her "African period", which I believe took place in the early 70s. In my dream Aretha was already in her 80s, and much slimmer than she is today. She was glowing with health and good energies. This is why I started calling my dream "a goddess dream" - rarely have I woken up feeling so excited and empowered by my own nocturnal filmmaking.
The goddess dream has not left me. Every now I return to it and wonder about its meaning. After having the dream, I spent days reading about Aretha Franklin's life. And I noticed that I had forgotten her recent performance in Obama's inauguration ceremonies, which I did see and was moved by her singing "My Country ´Tis of Thee".
Maybe the most meaningful Aretha song to me was her duet with Annie Lennox: "Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves". I wonder where strong feminist pop music has disappeared. Especially the kind of feminist music that can cross cultural barriers. Global feminist music. Possibly Aretha doesn't call herself feminist, but her singing has empowered women on all continents. By sharing my goddess dream, I would like to celebrate that dimension of her music and life.
