Umayya Abu-Hanna

Who do you think you are?

An extract from the collection of articles, Sinut (‘On first name terms’, WSOY, 2007)

Umayya Abu-Hanna, a Palestinian Arab who has been living in Finland for twenty-six years, reflects on her experience of otherness, both in her native land and her adopted home

I experienced first-degree otherness before I left home. I was born in Israel into an atheist Palestinian Christian family. I am an Arab but not a Muslim; a Christian but not a believer; an Israeli but a Palestinian woman. For all practical purposes I have lived in Finland for my entire adult life. Today I am a Finnish Palestinian.

Belonging to a minority was nothing new to me when I arrived in Finland, and it has probably helped me adapt. I also believe that it is easier — once again, on account of the experience of belonging to a minority — for a woman to adapt to Finland than for foreign men, who almost anywhere else can belong to some secure-feeling majority. I call myself a Finn and an Arab and do not disparage myself in the least, either as a Finn or an Arab.

I have been asked to talk in seminars under the title ‘A foreigner in Finland’. That both amuses me and annoys me. With what right am I classed as a foreigner (not just in the title, but in real life it is my ‘official title’)? When I think about this role of mine as an official foreigner, I find myself wondering at the habit of seeing the world in terms of dichotomies. There is us, and there is them. It is perfectly clear who we are, and who they are.

Even after more than two decades I’m still a foreigner. How am I revealed as a stranger, an ‘other’, different, sight unseen? If language and country are left aside, how is this cultural background visible?

Cultures are matters of ways of looking at life, of differing truths. These tautologies are the basic elements of culture. Certain values link Arabs and Finns, as well as other peoples: peace, nature and honesty, for example.

Peace: for Arabs, peace is a very clear term. Peace is the opposite of hatred and war. In other words, when we are at peace, we are in a large group of people, but instead of arguing, we are sociable. We laugh, talk, are considerate toward one another (read: we talk and enquire how others are doing), dance and perhaps even kick up a fuss. For Finns, peace is the shutting out of others, or of the rest of the world. The more thoroughly you shut out various unpredictable factors, such as people, noises, work, neighbours, colours and so on, the more you are at peace.

Honesty: the Arab is honest when, in addition to the true facts, one discusses feelings and personal opinions. For Arabs, a person’s own honesty and openness are visible when he or she talks about personal matters and opinions, expressing his or her political and moral views. When a Finn says that it is not necessary to reveal one’s political stance in conversation, it sounds to an Arab both cowardly and dishonest as well as malicious. What does an honest and sincere person who has, through long thought, found his own conception of morality, have to fear?

Nature: when it is said that nature is extremely important to Finns, the Arab pities and grieves for people for whom their beloved and important nature is, for more than half the year, almost entirely beyond the reach of the senses: no waves, smells, rustling of trees, birdsong, colour or visible growth. For the Arab, nature is the way in which life makes itself visible and palpable in colour, movement and sound.

Let me pick a couple more examples to illustrate how different realities can be. Beautiful: restrained, simple, like nature (read: Finnish nature), modest, quiet, and minimalist in the Scandinavian sense. Ugly: garish (read: brightly coloured and therefore, for example, like nature in hotter climates), restless, confused and surprising. In other words, other.

Finland is a safe country, but safety is a relative concept. An Iraqi friend of mine returned from Berlin sighing about how safe and delightful it had been to stroll through the centre of town in the evening, unlike Helsinki. He had already been beaten up twice in the centre of Helsinki, and he is often shouted at and made fun of. This does not mean that Berlin is generally a safer place, but that there are so few ‘strangers’ in Helsinki.

Otherness is sufficient in itself as a reason for aggression. Robbery and rape are more democratic in Berlin. There is a smaller probability of mishap. Thus Helsinki is, to a stranger’s eye, rather a dangerous place.

The Arab characterises his culture as honest, hospitable, nature-loving and so on, just as the Finn does. The content these concepts receive may be a different matter entirely. There is one thing, however, that we cannot escape. If a culture legitimises only one correct way of thinking and being, that culture begins to curdle. Soured milk products — buttermilk, yoghurt — are useful for a long time, but not forever. Like me, many Arabs and Finns are fond of soured milk products, but not all.

The problems of foreignness and otherness always arise when a person moves from the place where they were born to a new place. But the reception of difference appears in different ways, produced by each country’s dominant culture.

*

Of the countries of Europe, only Albania has fewer foreigners than Finland. Not counting kindred nations, Scandinavians and other Europeans, the number decreases still further. Numbers are important in relation to the attitude taken by the majority to ‘others’, and also because the numbers decide how easy or difficult a ‘stranger’ will find a group to which he can in some way belong.

Only a select few of the citizens of most of the countries of the world can gain residence rights in Finland, and only by particularly stringent criteria. Groups of immigrants from the same country are small — in other words, people from the same background and similar experiences. Stereotypes develop easily. We have a distorted reflection of the globe. We have foreigners from a limited number of countries. These do not represent a cross-section of society, but similar people who belong to the same social group. This result is purely resultant from our policies towards foreigners, in other words from our own will. If our foreigners do not look diverse as a group, we can change this.

*

Because foreigners are few in number and groups are homogeneous, the foreigner in Finland represents, primarily, otherness — for better and worse. A ‘beauty or the beast’ attitude dominates both debate and everyday life. The foreign individual, the unique person, is lost in otherness. What the majority sees is essentially difference. Meanwhile, in public debate and the political system, the myth of Finnish homogeneity is upheld. ‘That’s what we Finns are like.’ In a monocultural cultivation of myth, it is hard to grow into an individual, either as a Finn or as a foreigner.

The myth of a single identity can be destructive. When ‘others’ are discriminated against, it is done in the name of the ‘Finnish people’, which does not want service with an accent, does not tolerate neighbours or listen to different music, does not like ‘different’ looking newsreaders, does not like strange tastes etc. Finnishness can be a narrow concept.

When adaptation means fitting a single, very narrow mould, in which what is allowable is tightly defined in advance, it is almost impossible for a foreigner to adapt. I will never be able to speak faultless Finnish, and if I could, I would never look ‘genuinely right’. Possibly I should give up my own aesthetic and cultural background, in order to have suitable and good manners and taste. The only way to minimise otherness is to be a second-rate clone.

‘Others’ and foreigners function, in Finnish society, more as mirrors than as bringers of new languages, cultures, innovations and historical backgrounds. Functioning merely as a mirror is extraordinarily hard work, because it robs one of one’s individuality. In an interview, the theatre director and long-time Finnish resident Neil Hardwick, a white British male, described how his foreignness has contributed to his depression. When there are few outsiders and the mainstream culture has a strong pressure for conformity, no originality, creativity or belief in life will in the end be enough to support life in a society that rejects you.

Beneath the surface of the foreigner/outsider there is always to be found a certain frustration which the majority population interprets as direct hatred for and dissatisfaction with the identity it values. That is only very seldom true. More usually, the truth is hatred and disparagement which are directed at oneself. The sense of discomfort is heightened when there is hardly ever an arena available in which one can be oneself. One does not recognise the person who speaks and appears in one’s own name. This person is always clumsier in terms of language, expressive power, general knowledge and style.

Naturally, the passing years teach both the Finnish language and other customs, but every day I feel ashamed and frustrated. A person who concentrates all her energy on basic self-expression is exhausted and sad, because she can never succeed completely. It is nice when one’s surroundings smile and forgive one’s comical mistakes. But my true self is neither comical nor clumsy.

I have never found the taste of mämmi [traditional Finnish dessert] or going to the sauna problematic. The basic problem is the loss of oneself, the attempt to recognise oneself in this individual functioning in Finland. Here I return to the fact that numbers are relevant. In large cities, in which many people from different cultures live, outsiders even to these, there is a greater chance of being heard, at least sometimes, as oneself. In such places the mainstream culture, too, has learned to interpret and see different ways of being and living.

I worked for five years as a presenter at Radio Finland without any problems. The programmes I made were two-hour live broadcasts in which the shortcomings in my use of Finnish were very obvious. But there were hardly any complaints. When I began as a presenter of a television programme, however, the problems began at once. I interpret the reason as visibility in an ‘incorrect’ area. There was no problem in my presenting a music programme, but when the subject under consideration was power, crime and political phenomena, the wrong colour and the wrong accent were no longer acceptable. The fact that a foreigner/outsider was commenting on this sphere raised reactions to a level that the directors of the television company could not tolerate.

When one has lived one’s entire adult life in this culture and feels oneself to be part of it, it is impossible to work if everything one does is seen from another sphere. Every media journalist feels it to be essential — and indeed is expected — to build society with his own perceptions, conclusions and pieces. Faults are criticised. From my perspective, my position is Finnish. Here is the greatest conflict: while I see myself as participating, as myself, in the discourses and construction of my own culture, I am in the eyes of some others breaking the unwritten or perhaps even written law according to which Finnishness is an unambiguous concept in which there is no room for me.

I am pleasant and harmless when I praise my surroundings. When I wish to participate by building and criticising, it is seen as harmful. If the world is perceived through a hierarchy in which western cultures belong to those who have made the goal, in which there are clear conceptions of good and bad, the outsider must merely learn and be grateful. Where public life is concerned, the most progressive ideas of multiculturalism recall the situation in South Africa before the end of apartheid. Blacks were permitted to live their own lives as long as they stayed in their own areas. Even in Saudi Arabia, women are equal, as long as they remember their place.

We live and work through our identities. A media journalist uses language. It is necessary to be able to call upon a knowledge of history and culture. The concept of general knowledge in Europe is an ethnocentric one. It is linked to one’s own local area. It is often the same elsewhere. Ethnocentrically speaking, every country and area has its own ‘general knowledge’.

As someone from the wrong hemisphere, one soon realises one remains outside civilisation, even though one knows one may be more educated in many fields than ‘us’ and blushes when members of the country’s intelligentsia comments on the ways of the world. This teaches us that civilisation is a matter of processing, the ability to deal with time and events in ways other than a command of the facts.

The time of identities of a single truth is over. We are all foreigners abroad. That experience gives us a new perspective to experience different and ‘other’ people among us. Soon a little foreigner will be living inside every Finn.

*

In March I stood staring out of the window at the morning rush-hour on Mannerheimintie Street. It was sleeting like mad.

I was on a twenty-year language course in which I had not yet learned the rules concerning the object.

Home is a place where you can feel accepted. At home. Even though I feel I have taken root, my surroundings push me away. Now it’s a day like today.

Home can also be a mental place. A place in which you are accepted, in which you belong to the mainstream. Because I come from a developing country in conflict, I know that I do not even have that. There is nowhere for me to escape to. When you struggle for your basic existence in your everyday life and there is no escape even in your imagination, your basic sense of security is under threat.

If you project everything that is good onto the culture of your old native land, the result is bitterness and you begin to mix your dreams with reality.

To become rooted in your new country, the only thing that helps is love. You must seek it everywhere. I am at home in the colours of the Karelians, the talk of the Savo people and the pride of the Sámi.

Then there are elements that I try hard to integrate into my life, to get used to them in order to learn to love them. I do not always succeed. What to do, for example, with ice? Even if you approach it amicably, it forces you to fall on your back, just like your new homeland. The only thing it gives you are bruises, pain and fear. If it finally opens up, it swallows you, drowns you.

How to love your neighbour, who will not meet your eye, but posts complaints about cooking smells through your letterbox. How to learn to love your surroundings, when not a single employer will take you on. How to love a society in which you are a monster or a clown, through your mere existence. How to love a spouse who will not learn your language. How to trust when the media make you a fearful figure and then try to persuade you that the Finns are the most honest and genuine people you know.

It is not easy, but there is no other way. When you change your attitude, your surroundings reciprocate. You demand love and respect by loving and respecting.

Immigrants have always brought the new. Even the second generation of immigrants are still called immigrants, and for them this is home, a source of love and security. Their surroundings murmur: you are different. And their parents shout: you’re not really ours, since you don’t know your roots.

The ‘lost treasure’, the native land you left behind, is a lovely thing, but you do not need to blame the children for the fact that they have learned to feel comfortable at least in one place. Such release/discovery is a treasure.

My self is my home, and it is made up of construing three places. My two homelands and their combination, which is my own world. I must admit the most important thing here: when the aeroplane lands in Europe, I feel safe. I feel this especially in large cities in which I am not ‘different’.

When I am exhausted, I go in my dreams to my homeland and listen to my native language. When war news at home become hard to bear, I speak Finnish inside my own head and imagine myself beside the statue of the Three Smiths in central Helsinki. My everyday home is a milk-shake of different places and flavours.

A migrant’s home is in his or her identity. It is an apple tree grafted with orchids. It can’t compete in beauty contests for either apple trees or orchids. At times the different branches look at each other with astonishment. At times the grafting sites become painful and swollen. But it is the truth I am telling you. It is fine and beautiful, as long as you remember to let the chickens crap on the roots.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins