Katja Keisala - Kuubalainen serenaadi naisille jotka unelmoi

When I was a girl, merely fifteen I used to lie in the cabin below deck in my fathers boat and read Harlequin novels and feel the mysterious tingle as I read. I still remember the descriptions of the red dress and Mattheo, the dark handsome Italian. I remember how the cheap harlequin novels made me feel. It was clear to me that I would marry a man from some exotic place, a dark handsome stranger because I myself was strange, the unpopular wallflower, a dahlia sprung up from frozen Nordic land. 

The idea of post-modern love was that love like our meals where fast and soon one should be hungry again and preferably live in perpetual hunger with one man, the right man. In early 2000's the discourse on multiculturalism in marriages was beginning to take form in conversations among women in Finland. Katja Keisala, was among the scientist interested in this theme questioning what is so special in multicultural marriages, what distinguishes them? To her disappointment the quest produced little variance to the relationships between those of the same culture. Men behaving poorly towards their wives is not a cultural thing. I'm presently reading Jane Austen and once again I'm struggling to get excited, though I watched the BBC adaptation of Emma to get into the plot before reading it. Rather I picked up Katja Keisalas book Kuubalainen serenaadi naisille jotka unelmoi (2021) This was entirely the best book I have ever read in Finnish a five out of five. The story is based on the authors own experiences having been married with a Cuban man. She skillfully tells the story of a Finnish woman emerging from the margins, drawn by the dream of love into motherhood and learning what true love is all about. Previously learning about the mother wound by Bethany Webster I first realized the association between colonialism and feminism. Keisala's book gave me so many new insights on what genre roles mean and how they can be played to balance inequality for example, Cuban ladies may be needy to great extremes in order to divert their men from egotism. 

I reflected a lot on the differences between Cuba and Finland as Keisala's book read in an auto fictive way, her experiences where real, her observations acute. The intellectual and physical laziness in the heat of the sun on la Isla bonita and how similar Cuban realities are with real life in Ghana. I reflected upon the collective responsibilities of mankind and how no culture or place should be exempt form making a safer and better future for children except, maybe the idea of collective responsibility is a western conception, falsely presumed also in the case of southerners being collectively poor but happy. Perhaps our Western idea of collective efforts in bettering the society we live in is a past idea inspired from ancient Greece when in reality it always was and until kingdom come; every man for himself, some men take it as far as moving to another country, as the Cuban father in this book. Perhaps propriety and commonwealth or the Nordic welfare state and it's assumptions are a glitch in the system or self-deception. 

Katja's story is one of survival, how to survive a egotistical, immature man who fails to take responsibility of his actions or doesn't know how to, at first, she has no instinct of survival she is all heart. I understand her, we've been born and bread on the idea of valiant true love, fed by Harlequin novels and MTV ballads, in our mind we're far removed as women of the modern day, or post-modern, I should say, from all that Jane Austen tried to convey but her voice didn't broadly resonate from beyond 200 years, Sense and Sensebility would have personally been a far better read for fifteen year old me, than Taberman's poems or the story of steaming hot Mattheo.  All men are not valiant, this has been clear since the time of King Arthur. Katjas book is a story about love and survival, I really took it to heart and gave it five out of five.

Here's Frida Kahlo's painting, perhaps one interpretation could be life at marriage and life after divorce, one still has to nurture the new woman with the old heart, after all, she emerged from the old one. "The new me" they say...yet the same old heart. I could speak about women's heart aches in great length, about the broken heart syndrome and a great read I am yet to make, Dr. Nikki Stamps book Tunteva Sydän or my own experiences with cardio issues but let's not skip a beat, maybe I'll get writing about that later.