More Fire - Karolina Ramqvist 2002 and Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid

Ever since Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm I've been longing to go back to the Caribbean islands then there was Jean Rhys with Wide Sargasso Sea, yet another fictive island like Atwood's and now via listening Malou interviewing Karolina Ramqvist on Swedish television I was sure, that I just had to read Ramqvists debut novel More Fire.

Despite of the English title book is written in Swedish with a hint of Jamaican Patois here and there. The story is marketed as "a story of violence, sex and love on the verge of the first and third world." It is understood that it's Karolina herself who is the reporter that ventured out to the island of Jamaica, fell in love with a Jamaican man named Ganzie and ended up in an abusive relationship with him. Like in Bodily Harm the imminent threat of violence from any man close enough overshadows the life of the main character. 

I don't believe that Karolina herself is the protagonist even if the style of writing first leads you to believe that at first, the name of the main character eludes me, since it's now some weeks ago I finished reading it, it might have been Malin, but by the time this becomes clear, one already reads it like a first hand account. In Ramqivsts other little booklet about being an author Det är natten she writes that she's received negative anonymous critique for touching upon topics of abortion as if she herself had overgone the procedure whereas she only wrote in a very personal style about it. Ramqvist has a way of blurring the personal and the collective experience of being woman and I think that is what makes here not only a great author but also a great feminist. In the interview with Malou after nine program Ramqvist explained that her type of feminism does not include the woman who lives perfectly beyond all abuse but that she writes about the woman who also stays and endures and prevails through hardship, that her idea of feminism is also the woman that is dependent and chooses to stay is something that western classical feminism or modern radical feminism does not encapsulate.

In the beginning the heroine in More Fire wants to leave Jamaica because of the abusive boyfriend. He says "unthinkable things" to her and these things makes her want to leave. He's rash and lashes out in the middle of the night, demanding for large sums of money for the fish that he cooked for them, she gives the money and leaves the next day to find a Swedish friend, an older guy who lives on the other side of the island. 

At the countryman's house a German film producer convinces her to make a documentary about life in Jamaica, she accepts. We follow her as she films her friends in Kingston's wildest clubs where musical battles are fought out, we trace the tourist ridden smaller towns and find ourselves on a terrace listening to Shania Twain where "Malin" is interviewing a woman twice her age, a European woman in her mid forties who decided to stay and to remain with a Jamaican boyfriend even though much like Ganzie, he too wasn't a good man after all. Malin asks why she didn't leave, why so many years on Jamaica with the man. The older woman smokes her cigarette and looks at her interviewer "You don't understand do you? You look at me with the same contempt as others do" She shakes her head and smiles "What do I need to to do to get you to understand? You should understand this, understanding this lies in your best interest...It is better to really have loved and been defeated than to be so cold as to have had to been the one who inflicts the wounds." 

Pinpoint this, the discussion on the terrace mid day in the scorching sun under the shade with a camera rolling and the point she was trying to make. 

Here I pause and introduce the next book I read: Lucy by Jamaican author Jamaica Kincaid. Now Jamaica from the perspective of a brown girl, Lucy, she travels to the U.S. to be a nanny in the wealthy white family of Maria and her cheating husband. Lucy develops a closeness and fondness of her hostess Maria, a girl of nineteen and a white western woman nearer to forty become friends. 

Time and again Lucy asks herself and outright of Maria "Why are you this way?" Lucy fails to understand how Maria can overflow with empathy for sea turtles and buy an antique table from Finland and have it shipped to America, how she operates and thinks in these grand gestures but fails to the the disaster at home: her husband is having an affair with her best friend. Lucy feels affection and love for her hostess. Maria emanates love and soft compassion, she's a feeling woman all wonders about the world, comfortable yet unloved. Lucy is a coming of age novel where she tries to understand her mothers cold rational survival tactics and Marias privileged way of life. Lucy fails to feel deeply for any man, as the marriage of her hostess ends she eventually leaves the family it remains clear that the women are in two different worlds still: Maria is in the first world, Lucy in the second and her mother in the third. The thin see through curtain dividing their lives is not that of color but that of how life is experienced and lived out. 

The island life shapes you like the waves ever washing unto the shore, the premises of life are not good only naturally beautiful. It was mentioned in one context or another that this is because during colonial reign as families where separated society became exceedingly raw and individualistic (true to this day).

I think upon reading Lucy that much of the tension between first and so called "third world" as expressed from the white female perspective is our own reeking wound, femininity and life as a woman has for the western world been a crisis since our own times of colonization. For example, not much is know of Finland's history before the year 1000, but I believe that what happened after surged womanhood into deeper and deeper crisis still. The feminine ideals that we imposed on the women of the Swedish colony of St. Bartholomew in the 18th century were surely ideals that Nordic women had struggled to come to terms with over centuries until then. 

When I was in Stockholm this summer I saw the exhibition called Släkten och Slavarna The family and the slaves by Carl Johan De Geer who is an author and a cultural person who quite recently discovered that he is an ancestor to slave traders. De Geer who seems like a really sympathetic guy came to grips with this gruesome past by processing his thoughts or rather "trauma" by this exhibition. Yet again, perhaps only a white privileged male can afford to process his trauma of knowing by putting on a show at the City Museum of Stockholm. From the museum shop i bought Anna Laestadius Larssons book Alla dessa Djäfla Qvinnor recounting three prominent 18th century feminists.

When did the subjugation of women began? Why are the terms of being a woman so gruesome in Jamaica and in the Caribbean islands, and why isn't the white woman healed now, why must she enquire into feminisms again and again though her socio economic standpoint is far better now. Why is she, like some mad woman interested to save turtles from drowning in plastic ocean waste but not aware of her own situation. She looks on others and acts like a bodiless mind trying to put her arms around the world. In fact I dare say much of Atwood's authorship was dedicated to this feeling precisely, a feeling of not having a body, of being just eyes, and of recent (in 1906 in Finland when females gained the right to vote) also a mouth. I'm interested in this female quest of understanding my own sex and it's existence in the world, but more than that, if we are to think of human right's let's think of children's rights, children are the number one group of people in this world that needs advocacy as their rights juridically are very slight an poorly throught the world. 

Now we teleport back to Ramqvists Jamaica early 2000's where both she and her older European female friend have the possibility to leave but don't. Suddenly on the news is told about a German young woman who disappeared in Jamaica, a successful journalist living in New York, she had come for a vacation and the disappeared. Our protagonist is on an off with her boyfriend Ganzie, and Ganzie now suggests that they try to find the missing woman in hopes of a monetary reward. The documentary project takes our protagonist to another small island where she meets two Swedish couples. She spends the evening with them dining and drinking close to their yacht. She's disgusted with their economic and imagined social superiority one of the men call over a service personnel by using the degrading expression "Boy!" as the men's wives go out for a moonlight swim the two males start making out on the beach. That's when our protagonist steals their money and calls the police on them, as homosexuality in the islands is a grievous crime punished by law. So Malin has also learned to turn the tricks of islanders and exercise gain. 

Nothing is really solved or completed, the relationship issues, the documentary it all just is as it is. The protagonist realizes that she has the power to come and go, leave at any time and leave Ganzie behind, knowing that he could never gain entry to her world in the West. But she loves him, and so she decides to let Ganzie destroy her passport, she decides to disappear. 

Isn't the essence of feminism that she get's to decide? That her freedom is in her hands, she may do as she pleases? Most, even radical feminists of our day would find Karolinas story most appalling, the elements of it, and much like the protagonist at first, struggle to understand. I think Ramqvist is right, there are elements which we can't control, and there are weaknesses in ourselves and dependencies as a woman, needs and strings attached that are not easily altered or broken. Everything comes at a cost, and so what the older woman was trying to say at the terrace when she was interviewed was that weakness is acceptable, to feel the taste of life and all it's hardships is a part of being alive. 

What we as western women understand as abuse, is a part of very many women's lives abroad. It's a problem. A life with abuse is a life I can't accept perhaps, but non the less a part of many peoples lives. I'm fascinated by how female and male lives in the Caribbean's can be so different, and I want to learn more. 

My summer reading has not gone to plan, both Emma and Invandrarna is on my DidNotFinish also Donna Tartt's Secret History is and will remain on that list due to it's occult elements etc. 

I finished one e-book Kari Hautamäki's Et sinä (vielä) kuole and Ilkka Raitasuo & Terhi Siltala Kellokosken Prinsessa (Like) for now I'm still at least two books behind on my Goodreads goals for this year but I realize that things I "must" read are things I won't read, so I will follow intuition and interest.