Näin unta jaavalaisista maskeista. Tiedän, että Jaava on Indonesian suurin saari. Tiedän, että indonesialaiset harrastavat varjonukketeatteria ja heillä on jännittäviä gongiorkestereita. Musiikkityylin nimi on gamelan. Sanasta ”Jaava” tulee ensimmäisenä mieleen kahvi ja toiseksi tietokoneohjelma.
Herään ja vietän hurmoksellisen aamun lukiessani ihmisten matkakuvauksia Jaavalta ja Balilta. Keitän itselleni jaavalaista mokkaa, vahvaa kahvia kaakaolla ja kanelilla maustetussa kermavaahdossa. Onneksi palan Jaavaa voi luoda itselleen melko halvalla sateisena sunnuntaiaamuna kylmässä Pohjolassa. Minulla on myös Tallinnasta ostettu intialainen maski, joka muistuttaa paljon balilaisten maskeja. Kuulemma tällaiset ”pelotusmaskit” laitetaan etuovelle karkottamaan demoneita. Omaan rappukäytävään en sentään uskalla tuota hurjimusta laittaa. Taloyhtiöltä saattaisi tulla nootti, jos niin tekisin.
Jaavalla nykykulttuuri on pääasiallisesti islamilaista, Balilla hindulaista. Hindulaiset vaikutteet ovat kuitenkin edelleen läsnä myös Jaavalla, ja vanhoja temppeleitä kunnioitetaan ja ylläpidetään osana maailmanperintöä.
Koko maailma halajaa Balin paratiisisaarelle, maailman aamuun. Halajan itsekin, mutta jos tuohon maailman kolkkaan joskus päädyn, aion käydä myös Jaavalla. Jaavalla pääkohteeni olisi Bandungin kaupunki, historiallisista syistä. Kolmas maailma yritti muodostaa oman blokkinsa Bandungissa vuonna 1955, se oli merkittävä askel globaalien etelä-etelä-suhteiden kehityksessä. Edelleen puhutaan ”Bandungin hengestä”.
Olisi niin coolia viettää pari viikkoa puuhun rakennetussa hotellihuoneessa ja hypätä aamuisin suoraan terassilta mereen. Bali tuntuu paikalta, jossa ei ole pakko suorittaa mitään kulttuurirasteja – kulttuuri on niin rikkaana kaikkialla, että pelkkä kadulla käveleminen riittäisi. Kaikkialla olisi lintuja, apinoita ja käärmeitä, lounasta syötäisiin käsin kansankuppiloissa joissa ei olisi kirjoitettua menuuta, vaan annokset tilattaisiin sormin osoittamalla.
Balilla ganjan myyjät muistavat Madventuresin hemmot, ja yrittävät kaupata suomalaisille ruohoa vetoamalla näihin kahteen sankariin.
Kai siellä on paljon muutakin kuin huumehöyryistä todellisuutta.
Itse matkaisin Balille piirtelemään kaikkea näkemääni ihmettä ja kummaa. Kulkisin luonnoskirja kädessä, tekisin ite-taidetta kaduilta löytämistäni sattumista.
Opettelisin sukeltamaan.
Tutkisin ihmisten koteja, paikallista ekologista sisustusfilosofiaa. Opettelisin luopumaan turhasta.
Pari viikkoa puumajassa taatusti muuttaisi tapani nähdä maailmaa.
Lennot sinne näyttävät maksavan n. 1400 euroa per lärvä. Tietystikään en haluaisi sinne yksin, vaan koko perheen kanssa.
Realistisesti tulen pääsemään sinne aikaisintaan eläkkeellä, mutta on hyvä pitää takataskussa kaunista ja kestävää unelmaa.
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.
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.
