Tuesday, May 17, 2016

(4) ORHAN PAMUK, SNOW


















I have for long been allergic to books where the author tries to manipulate my emotions. Even the slightest danger of kitsch has made me angry.


When I was 20 years old I had my first anti-kitsch period. I admired, in a naive way, Hemingway's early novels, where the iceberg theory was still vivid - you only got to know the surface and the rest you had to imagine - and at the same time I was building, in a clumsy way, my masculine identity by thinking about Hemingway's protagonists as something admirable.


Lately Duras, Céline, Schultz and Gombrovitz have been meaningful. In Duras's and Céline's case you can talk about intellectual braveness. (In Céline's case he sadly forgot to think where his ideas could lead him.) The others are just alienated. But the most important thing for me was that I did not feel that I am sitting in a Hollywood movie while I read them. I felt uncomfortable with readymade emotions and experiences.


I can't remember what helped me out from the totalitarianism of the iceberg theory when I was in my 20s, but now it is at least very clear what made me come back to writing where 10-30% can be kitsch, even if the book provides artistic pleasure. I visited Istanbul for the first time in May 2015 and I started to read Orhan Pamuk. The idea was to get a sense of local culture, but the way the reader was led, like in a waltz, in a poetical, sometimes even a pathetic, tragical fashion through the story felt meaningful. Did I forgive the book first because I thought that even if it was Western literature it was at the same time something else, which I should be careful to not judge without understanding? I know that sentimentality has a different kind of role in many literary cultures where I am not at home.



Who knows. But Snow (2002) is a beautiful book. It is a story about two writers, the life of the first - he dies during the book - through the narrative of the second one, who in a way becomes a mirror image the of the first one. It is a story about Turkey, the clash between - the now politically visible - Westernized, modern Turks and the religious conservatives. Packaged like this it sounds like Nobel trash and it is really sad that Pamuk got the prize. It easily kitschifies readings of his books. Hemingway got it at the phase of his career where everything he wrote was just a criminally pathetic male fantasy. But Pamuk is really serious about writing (Hemingway was when he was young).


In Snow the Westernized protagonist Ka arives to the town of Kars after years of living in Germany. Kars is far away of the lifestyle of Istanbul, and even further away from Frankfurt. Ka intends to write an article of young muslim girls who have been committing suicides, but drifts into nostalgy, desperate love and an identity crisis. The stage is ready for a clash on many levels. In the end Ka gets shot when he returns back to Germany, as some radicalists see him as a traitor of the values of his country of origin. Ka's friend travels to Ka to tell the story, but ends up pretty much in the same maelstrom of love and identity crisis. The theme comes close to what Antonio Tabucchi does in his Notturno Indiano (1984), where a man travels to India to search for his friend who has changed his name, but ends up finding himself, in a personal crisis, which at same time is resolved.


Well, for me the narrative was not that important, although I learned a lot about how Westernized Turks can experience the religiously and culturally schizophrenic nature of their country. It is just fantastic when someone really can take you on an emotional trip and explain to you a cultural constellation you don't really know much about. The book operates in many ways between two worlds, but keeps the reader all the time on a well controlled track. I am happy that Pamuk took me for a waltz. And it is hard to be a tourist if the story gets forcefully under your skin.

Anyway, now I read emotional books again.

Thursday, May 12, 2016

(3) W.E.B. DU BOIS, THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK





I spent my early childhood in the suburbs of Stockholm, e.g. in Rinkeby, where over 90% of the inhabitants were immigrants or had an immigrant background. I knew I was "white" when I got punched in the face by the Africans in the Kindergarten and I knew that my destiny was to be Finnish as the Swedes kicked me in the balls when I went to school.


Most "white" people do not really experience their ethnic or racialized classification, but I have it tattoed in my soul. I am a "powder face" and a "finnjävel" (Finnish devil).


These experiences and the fact that my family is quite mixed (Swedes, Finns, Greeks, South American indigenous people) have made me react on a personal level to racist talk in today's Finland and Europe. I also remember the glass ceilings, the lady who quit talking to me when she noticed I am Finnish and the girl who quit smiling when she realized where I am from.


Three times have I updated my "whiteness".


As a teenager my family lived a couple of years close to a gypsy orphanage. I learned to play the guitar (without notation), I learned some gypsy language (kalo) - and I saw from close distance how hard it was to be brown in Finland in the 1980s and 1990s. I became a part of the community and I still use the same kind of trousers and suspenders that the local roma people did. And I got to hear, nearly every day, how stupid, ignorant, dirty and evil we white people were. I did not have a problem with that, though. I had seen the problematic situation and I realized the talk was not against me.


1999 I was a trainee in the Finnish Institute of London. I moved to the appartment of my ex girlfriend in Brixton, which at that time was not such a trendy suburb as it is today. It was a 70% West Indian slum. A racist terrorist had taken a bomb to the center of Brixton just a couple of days before I arrived and many locals had been hurt. On the streets people walked on me and while jogging I had to watch out for African European males, who tried to clash with me. I noticed that most "white" people living in Brixton performed the 'I am not a normal white guy' thing. I bought a FuBu sweater and I quit using my comb. I tried to look like Coolio. I knew that I had succeeded when the local dealer, who rode a mountain bike, stopped and said: "wicked, man". The rest of the summer I was left in peace.


The third update was quite philosophical. I was writing my PhD at Temple University, 2002 in Philadelphia. My teacher there, Richard Shusterman, was a jewish intellectual who had lived for a long time in in Israel. He was writing philosophical essays for the Journal of Rap Music, which had been established by some ex black panthers. At the university half of the students were of African American origin. My room mates never walked to the university even if you had to walk just a half an hour to get there. You had to cross a ghetto. Shusterman was an ex intelligence officer and very confident about himself so he sometimes walked to the university even if he was white. I decided that I'll do the same, to understand what America really was about.


One morning I left my credit card home and I walked to Temple. I could feel the pressure in my guts and bones. It was only a one mile walk, but I felt like walking through Gaza. You could see excretion on the street. Houses looked rotten. I felt so bad. I had never realized that the US was in a way a third world country. A tall man leaned on a trash can and looked at me. He said: "What's happening, big guy," and I really realized how I looked wrong in that context.


At that time it also happened that some academic philosophers (re)found the African American philosopher Alain Locke, and on the side of that W.E.B. Du Bois. Especially Locke had written a load in the early 1900s and touched upon aesthetic issues. In this context it wasn't hard to become interested in the texts of these two cultural philosophers. Du Bois was into arts and culture and he used a lot of literary quotes in a nice way. I liked his work immediately.


When I held a performance about whiteness with Khaled Ramadan, a Lebanese-Danish friend of mine, in 2013 - we were boxing and we showed clips from Muhammed Ali matches - I had to get back to read The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Du Bois was now again back in my life and we discussed him in this performance.


Last winter I started to think about his way of writing. I think what Du Bois was doing was quite what Marx did. Both wrote in a very poetical fashion. They did not build complex argumentation. They helped people to see how things are. This is one of the perennial responsibilities of philosophy.


The Souls of Black Folk is a literary work, but only to the extent that one can take seriously its societal and philosophical DNA. Du Bois writes against the idea that African people would not have a soul. (Locke, by the way, was against this way of writing about people as a group, he ran his cultural philosophy towards individualism.) Du Bois discusses the way the liberated slaves came to the Northern Parts of the US like Africans and Syrians come today.


W.E.B. Du Bois saw, wittily, that race and racialization (a concept he did not yet have) were going to be key questions for the 20th Century:


"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, - the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War; and however much they who marched South and North in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points of union and local autonomy, as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as know, that the question of Negro slavey was the real cause of the conflict."


Beautiful book. I cannot but recommend it.

Monday, May 2, 2016

(2) VENEDIKT YEROFEYEV, MOSCOW TO THE END OF THE LINE


It is hard to find a novel which would be more absurdist and carnivalistic than Venedikt Yerofeyev's Moscow to the End of the Line (or Moscow-Petushki, Москва Петушки, 1969-1970). And it would be hard to imagine that it would have been written anywhere else than in the Soviet Union, where the samizdat (dissident) culture was very poetical.


Like most underground books, Moscow to the End of the Line was first 'published' only as a pile of photocopies. In Israel it became a book in 1973. In Soviet Union this happened as late as 1987.


Moscow to the End of the Line's deliriumesque nature blew my mind already on the first 5 pages. An alcoholic worker gets fired because he has been distributing graphic charts, which show the connection between the drinking habits of his colleagues and their efficiency at work.


The sack launches a slippery slope. The protagonist drinks 100, 200, 300, 400 or 500 grams of Stolichnaya or Kubanskaya vodka, 'swims' in Shampanskoye, and meets nutcases, intellectuals, angels and even the devil on an intensiv train ride to Petushki (where he never arrives). Moscow to the End of the Line is like a psychedelic pastiche of Jack Kerouac's romantic (and in the end bourgeois) On the Road.


The book made me happy partly following my experience that the literary field is institutionally in a bad shape. I work in the so called contemporary art world (broadly speaking visual arts), where grassroot galleries and outsiderism are a part of the business. In my world of art we are not dependent on mainstream art journals, big art museums or art fairs. There is a dialogue between the center and the margins. And you never get the feeling that something has been overproduced. But literature, nearly everywhere, is stuck in its swamp of fairs, big publishers and editors who clean up the weird (but for me interesting) sidepaths from manuscripts. Not even the independent publishers or the literary journals seem to be able to save the margins and the outsiders, who remain in the shadows, somehow not 'legitimate' or not even a part of the world we point to when we utter the word 'literature'. It seems that literature is often really interesting only outside of the world of literature. And in the Soviet Union it did not take much to become an outsider. Then there was no broad reading public which had to be targeted, anymore. One could write for lovers of literature.


Of course, there is a long tradition of surreal writers from Gogol and Haarms to Bulkakov, who have worked on this type of writing in Russian literature even earlier. But still... One of my favorite living philosophers is Boris Groys, who started as a samizdat thinker - this can still be seen in his brave writing (I have actually been quite obsessed with outsider philosophy) - and my favorite European writer is Vladimir Sorokin, who began his career in the same way and who now writes ironical versions of dissident literature. Sorokin rides on the waves of chaos and he is not trying to control the powers of imagination, while contemporary Western novels are like design objects, made to please the audience but not to take it for a mysterious ride.


In Soviet literature one can see the how literature in the end could be an art in the same way as contemporary visual art is. Literature is of course not alone with its institutional problems. Film and theatre have in many countries as well a nearly hostile context which cuts the wings from brave authors and their works.


Moscow to the End of the Line is full of traces of an author. It is man-made and it gives you the kind of a pleasure you get from man-made food. I love the crazy dialogues and the way the protagonist is drifting into dangerous waters, foremost the margins of sanity. On the whole it makes no sense, but it gives you pleasure.

It felt therapeutic to follow the deliriumesque adventures of this lost soul. Like Kafka, Yerofeyev turns the everyday into a dynamic cocktail of chance, irrationality and the unconsious. And I love it.