On one of my nightly walks on Tuukalankatu in Mikkeli, I see a Soldiers of Odin sticker on a lampost. Since these types of groups are toxic and hazardous to society, I scrape off the sticker.
Now you see it, but now you don’t.
The cruel arm of Finland’s asylum policy is not only Migri (The Finnish Immigration Service) but too many politicians who lack the courage to show their humanity and empathy for others.
One of the consequences of one’s journey to Europe is not only many years of waiting and despair, but death.
In the rural region of North Karelia in eastern Finland, there is an island called n-word in Finnish. Yes, you heard right: n-word, according to Journalisti, a publication of the Union of Journalists of Finland.
But that’s not all.
In Finland, the n-word is inappropriate and racist. The island in North Karelia is not the only example of the n-word in Finnish geography.
The offensive word explains why the Union of Journalists North Karelia (PKJY), which owns the small island, applied to the Institute of Languages of Finland (Kotus) to change the name to Uutiseksi (News).
The proposal by PKJY, which approve the name change at a board meeting earlier this year, turned to Kotus but its request was turned down.
“Even if the n-word is used in a derogatory [and racist] manner today, the name cannot be changed because it makes some feel uncomfortable,” Kotus said in a statement.
Somebody should enlighten Kotus that the usage of the n-word today is racist and offensive, “not uncomfortable.”
The decision by Kotus is a good indication of how Finland deals with racism, or how it does nothing substantial to challenge it.
The island derives its name from lehtin-word, which was what some called journalists and people working for the media in the 1980s.
Finland puts a lot of effort into its integration program. Earlier this year, with the sexual assault cases in Oulu, we saw the then government of Prime Minister Juha Sipilä blame asylum seekers for not integrating and that our integration problem was a failure.
All of these accusations had one matter in mind for then Minister of Interior Kai Mykkänen and the National Coalition Party: the April 2019 parliamentary election. Mykkänen went as far as to suggest giving a test to asylum seekers about Finnish values.
As we all know, the suggestion of giving an integration test is only intended for public consumption. What are Finnish values anyway? Is one of them being a supporter of institutional racism?
What do you think white Finns teach asylum seekers about Finland at integration courses? Some may do a good job but at the end of the day, many teach asylum seekers to accept institutional racism by telling him or her fairy tales about our society. In effect, such teachers are saying that this is the way things are done and you must accept it.
One example is when such courses speak of gender equality. They do not tell women, who are asylum seekers, on how to combat labor discrimination. Moreover, they don’t give the students skimpy information in many cases about changing institutional racism.
If we are serious in turning people into active citizens, we must do away with much of our exceptionalism and superiority complexes we have of other people. Tackling all forms of racism should be a much higher priority.
The next question is why we don’t do that and with greater determination?
Perussuomalaiset (PS)* chairperson Jussi Halla-aho gave us on Yle Ykkösaamu his usual anti-immigration blah blah and why Finland should relax its hate speech laws.
In the interview, Halla-aho, who was convicted of ethnic agitation and breaching the sanctity of religion in 2012, defended the Nazi-spirited Suomen Sisu association and played down PS MP Juha Mäenpää’s description in parliament that asylum seekers are a non-human “invasive species.”
Mäenpää is the same politician who stated in 2015 that “God had answered his prayers” after an asylum reception center was razed by fire.
While these types of counterarguments by Halla-aho, who has steered the party in into the far-right ideological lap of leaders like Lega’s Matteo Salvini and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, have no significance because the PS leader would even find arguments to justify the rise to power of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler in 1933.
Helsinki University criminal law professor Kimmo Nuotio threw some cold water on Halla-aho’s claim that hate speech laws have no place in an open society. Apart from pointing out that the PS’ proposal is political, he did not consider the ongoing debate healthy for democracy.
Moreover, the number of ethnic agitation cases that reach the courts are still modest as the table below shows.
“Personally, I find this type of discussion harmful,” Nuotio said, “it’s an attempt to undercut the basis for these laws.”
One matter that the Ykkösaamu journalist should have asked is why do we have laws against hate speech? The answer is obvious. Without them, it would be open season for racists and parties like the PS openly harass, attack, label and socially exclude vulnerable groups like Muslims for their political gain.
The argument used by Halla-aho to not open Finland’s labor markets to outside the EU is equally deceiving. Adding the usual fear-mongering that outside the EU there are half a billion people who could come to work, he claimed that such workers would drive down salaries.
Possibly valid to some extent, such people in our labor market like now would force our authorities to do a much better job in regulating markets and ensuring that exploitation does not become the norm.
* The far-right Perussuomalaiset (PS) party imploded on June 13, 2017, into two factions, the PS and New Alternative, which is now called Blue Reform. In the last parliamentary election, Blue Reform has wiped off the Finnish political map when they saw their numbers in parliament plummet from 18 MPs to none. A direct translation of Perussuomalaiset in English would be something like “basic” or “fundamental Finn.” Official translations of the Finnish name of the party, such as Finns Party or True Finns, promote in our opinion nativist nationalism and racism. We, therefore, at Migrant Tales prefer to use in our postings the Finnish name of the party once and after that the acronym PS.
Green League MP Iris Suomela raised an essential question in parliament on Wednesday about rape. She said that there are “hundreds of thousands” rape cases in Finland of which 50,000 are reported annually to Victim Support Finland (RIKU).
“The end result of all this is that the police record about 1,200 [rape] cases [annually] of which around 200 get sentenced,” she said.
It is a very good matter that the government is not only changing sexual abuse laws, which include consent but aims to essentially improve how the police handle such cases.
One question that arises when looking at Finland’s present sexual abuse laws is if hate crime and hate speech are also underreported in the same way. If Suomela speaks of annually of about 50,000 rape cases that are reported to RIKU, what kind of ballpark figures are we looking at for hate speech and hate crime?
According to the latest figures, hate crimes in Finland during 2017 rose by 7.97% to 1,165 cases compared with 1,079 the previous year, according to the Finnish Police University College.
The report states that only 21% of harassment and hate-speech cases in 2016 were not reported by the victims, according to the ministry of justice. If this is the case, we are talking about thousands, possibly tens of thousands of cases annually.
Even if Finland has very good hate speech laws and laws that promote social equality, the question these above figures bring up is what MP Suomela raised: Few victims report such crimes to the police. We need a change in culture and to listen to the victim.
The latter claim is supported by some of the conclusions of a recent European Network Against Racism (ENAR) shadow report. “Most EU Member States [like Finland in the report] have hate crime laws, as well as policies and guidance in place to respond to racist crime, but they are not enforced because of a context of deeply rooted institutional racism within law enforcement authorities,” ENAR said.
Apart from institutional racism issues, another practical matter we should ask if there are enough police monitoring hate speech and hate crime in Finland and enforcing the law vigorously.
The Finnish police have at the most 10 Internet police officers who monitor hate speech, reports Yle, citing police inspector Måns Enqvist of the National Board of Police of Finland.
Ten is too few in light of the ever-growing hate speech and hate crime problem in Finland.
An Afghan student’s view of a symbolic weapon used by racists.
The history of this drawing: A student drew it from the top of his head and wrote “racists” on the upper right-hand corner.
Shirlene Green Newball*
You sure have heard of famous activists like Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks, Daisy Bates, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Coretta Scott King, and Angela Davis to mention are just a few black women who participated in the civil rights movement in the United States of America.
Black women have played a pivotal and heroic role in the struggle of civil rights and the rising of black movements by being activists and writers.
Black female writer’s involvement in literature dates back to the 1950s. Once they were aware of their powers and the liberation of themselves, they used them to depict and expand black literature as an alliance for the fight.
Margaret Walker, Ntozake Shange, Gayl Jones, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, Mari Evans, and others were part of the writers that built black literature in the USA to tackle topics such as gender, race, sexuality, violence, patriarchal, misogynist, immigration, and others.
It may be endless to compile in a single list all the distinguished black female writers because they are so many. However, after reading some of these writers listed below, I decided to extend my research for new ones and ask my friends for their recommendable black female writers.
How much literature written by black female writers have you read?
This list below contains 20 badass black women writers from different generations, countries, and continents who have influenced me because; there are women of the same race, have similar experiences like mine, and evoke emotions. I hope you can read one or more because they are all worthy of your time; choose your favorites, do your research, and share this list with others.
Ayòbámi Adébáyò (1988) was born in Lagos, Nigeria (Africa), but shortly her family moved to the state of Osun, located in the southwest.
In 2017, the Canongate Books published her novel Stay with Me that immediately was listed by Wellcome Book Prize, Baileys Women Prize for Fiction, and the 9mobile Prize for Literature.
Many of Adébáyó’s writings have been printed in magazines and anthologies.
The New York Times once wrote about her, “She writes not just with extraordinary grace but with genuine wisdom about love and loss and the possibility of redemption.”
This young writer studied with Margaret Atwood and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (1977), who is one of the most known black female writers globally.
She was born and grew up in the east of Nigeria, Africa, from an Igbo family with six children. She studied in the United States of America where she said: “My roommate had a single story of Africa, a single story of catastrophe and there was no possibility of being similar to her in any way.”
Her work has been translated nearly into thirty languages. She is the author of The Thing Around Your Neck, Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah, and We should all be Feminist. She also had publications in big journals such as The New Yorker, Financial Times, Granta, etc. She had received distinguished awards such as Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, National Book Critics Circle, Women Prize for Fiction, and others.
A year earlier, Zadie Smith (1975), also won the prestigious literary Women Prize for Fiction (the same Adichie won). Sadie Smith, her given name, is a contemporary novelist, essayist, and story writer born in the northwest of London from a Jamaican mother and an English father. She has four siblings.
Smith’s first novel was published in 1997; titled White Teeth followed by The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, and Swing Time. She also has a collection of essays Changing My Mind.
She received the Whitbread First Novel and Guardian First Book Award among many others. She has been twice listed for the Granta 20 Best Young British Novelists and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Smith’s novel NW was produced into a BBC television film. Likewise, two of Nigamerican writer Nnedi Okorafor (1974), works also have been adapted into short films.
She calls herself a Nigamerican (Nigerian-United States of America) writer because she is a descendant from Igbo parents that migrated to the USA and could not return because of the Nigerian Civil War.
Okorafor was diagnosed with scoliosis at teenage witch demanded intense therapy for her recovery. However, after she regained the ability to walk she was unable to continue with her passion for sport, so she took a creative writing class and published her first novel.
In her collection of novels and stories, she reflects West African heritage and her life in the USA. Some of her books and comics are Binti, Who fears Death, Zahrah the Windseeker, Awata Witch, Lagoon, She Shadow Speaker, Amphibious Green, Kabu Kabu, Hello Moto, Black Panther: Long live the King, Shuri, and others.
She has obtained remarkable awards such as The Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa, Africana Book Award, Carl Brandon Parallax, Andre Norton, Golden Duck, World Fantasy, among others.
Alike writer Audre Lorde’s (1934-1992), parents also were immigrants from the West Indies to New York, the USA where they procreated three daughters, she being the third.
Her career was fervent in voicing out sexism, racism, homophobia, gender, and classism as an instrument for action and change. While still being in high school, her first poem was printed in Seventeen Magazine.
Lorde is the author of The First Cities, Cables to Rage, From a Land Where Other People Live, Coal, The Black Unicorn, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, The Cancer Journals, A Burst of Light, etc.
She also wrote periodicals for Amazon Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Red War, The Black Woman, The Village Voice, The Iowa Review, and a lot of others.
Among awards and honors she earned the National Book Award for Poetry, National Endowment for the Arts Residency Grant, Woman of the Year Award, New York State’s Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1993, and Broadside Press Poet’s Award, etc.
Lorde was a lesbian openly known same as Roxane Gay (1974), who is bisexual, a unique writer, commemorator, professor, and editor who was born in Omaha, Nebraska (USA), from Haitian ancestries.
Her career began at age 12, as a consequence of the sexual harassment she experienced. Gay is the author of novels and essays An Untamed State, Bad Feminist, World of Wakanda, Difficult Woman, Ayiti, Hunger, and Not that Bad.
Her works have won awards such as Pen Centre USA Freedom to Write, Eisner, Lambda Literary, and others.
Gay’s writings appear in The Guardian, Best American Mystery Stories, Best Sex Writing, Tin House, The New York Times, and others.
In partnership with Medium platform, she created Gay Magazine and recently she started the production of a black feminist podcast labeled Hear to Slay.
Maya Angelou (1928-2014), is a renowned poet, storyteller, auto-biographer, playwright, journalist, and actress born in St. Louis, Missouri (USA), also shared a passion for radio journalism. She was a strong activist who contributed to the civil right movement and worked with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.
She published volumes of poetries, essays, and plays, as well as many children, cook, and picture books.
Her work includes seven extraordinary autobiographies: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas, Gather Together in my Name, The Heart of a Woman, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, A Song Flung Up to Heaven, and Mom and Me and Mom.
Moreover, on January 20th, 1993, at the presidential inauguration of Bill Clinton, she recited her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” this recitation is the second time at a similar event that something of this kind was done. (Robert Frost recited “The Gift Outright” at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration).
Several of her writings received merited awards and honors from over seventy universities like the University of Arkansas, Ohio State University, Atlanta University, and others.
*Shirlene Green Newball is an Afro-Nicaraguan journalist and feminist who lives in Finland.
Bibliography
Angelou, M. (2007) I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. London. Virago Press.
Adiche, C. (2017) Half of a Yellow Sun. London. 4th Estate..
‘Afeto fértil, fértil poema: a líria de Jenyffer Nascimento’. Literafro, 10th July 2007. Available at: http://www.letras.ufmg.br/literafro/resenhas/poesia/1059-afeto-fertil-fertil-poema-a-lirica-de-jenyffer-nascimento
Corriols M. & Rossman Y. (2014) 1st. edn. Hermanas de tinta: Muestra de poesía multiétnica de mujeres nicaragüenses. Managua.
‘Courageous Zimbabwean writer whose books addressed the taboos of her society’, The Guardian, 27th April 2005. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/apr/27/guardianobituaries.books
Chambers Website. Available at:http://www.veronicachambers.com
Evans, M. (1984) Black Women Writers ( 1950-1980). The United States of America.
Gay’s Website. Available at: https://roxanegay.tumblr.com
Habila, H. (2011). African Short Story. 1st. edn. Granta Publications. London.
Hurston, Z. (1998) Their Eyes were Watching God. HapperCollins Publishers. New York.
Henry, P. ‘Great Expectations: An Interview with Ayobami Adebayo’, El Paris Review 8 August 2017. Available at: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/08/08/great-expectations-interview-ayobami-adebayo/
Morrison, T. (1993) The Bluest Eye. Plume. United States of America.
Nndi’s Website. Available at: http://nnedi.com
Olaya, J.M. (2015) ‘Lucía Charún-Illescas, la primera novelista afroperuana’, Personajes afrodescendientes del Perú y América. Available at: https://afroliteratura.lamula.pe/2017/01/19/lucia-charun-illescas-la-primera-novelista-afroperuana/afroliteratura.lamula.pe/
Smith, Z. (2017) Swing Time. Penguin Books. United Kingdom.
Shirlene Green Newball*
In 2011, former President Barack Obama gave Maya Angelou the Presidential Medal of Freedom. A year later, it was presented to Toni Morrison (1931-2019), an icon of the black literature in the United States of America. She was born in Lorain, Ohio, being the second of four children from a middle African American working-class family.
Her novels include The Blue eyes, Sula, Song of Salomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, A Mercy, God Help the Child and The Source of Self-Regard. She also wrote articles for the Times Magazine, Black World, and Confrontation.
She was recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Pulitzer Prize, American Book Award, National Book Critics Award, and Pen/Saul Bellow Award, etc.
In her books, she captures the vivid life of African history in the USA and their cultural heritage. This topic unites Toni and Lucía Charún–Illescas (1950), a writer, journalist, translator, and activist born in Lima, Peru (South America), from an Afro-descent family being the oldest of seven siblings. Her passion for literature started at an early age by reading some of the famous writers.
Her novel Malambo plays an important role in the Peruvian literature since it is the first fiction book written by an Afro-Peruvian woman and translated to English and Italian. She also is the author of the book Latinoamericano en Hamburgo. Besides these books, Charún also has written articles and stories printed in several magazines.
She won the Lyra Prize for Short Stories. In 2013 the government of Peru awarded her with the Meritorious Personality of Culture Distinction.
For years, she has resided in Hamburg, Germany, about this she has said: “Soy y seré siempre limeña y no quiero que los lectores me crean una negra europeizada o agringada, que vive fuera de Perú hace cuchucientos años”.
In 2009, she participated in the seminary for Black Afro-descent Women and Latin-American Culture in Montevideo, Uruguay, along with Shirley Campbell Barr (1965), who is a renowned poet and activist from Costa Rica, Central America. She comes from a family of five daughters and two sons.
Her poems are compiled in Rotundamente Negra (Utterly Unequivocally Black), which, has been incorporated in the Costa Rican curricular education system. Her second book is Naciendo (Being Born). Her work has been printed in different magazines from several countries and translated into French, English, and Portuguese.
Another notorious Central American writer is June Beer Thompson (1935-1986), poet, painter, and activist born in Bluefields, Nicaragua. She grew up in a middle-class family of ancestral mixture roots (indigenous, afro, and other) being the youngest of eleven children.
The pride of her black identity, the culture of the indigenous groups and the Afro ethics, who are the minority population in Nicaragua; being female, and the love for her country, were revealed in her writings and paintings. The same figures from her painting were the ones that came to life in her poems.
Her poems, Love Poem, Walk in de Moonlite, Chunku faam, Resarrection a’ de Wud, and others were published in Wani, Sunrise magazine, and Hermanas de Tinta: Muestra de poesía multiétnica de mujeres nicaragüenses. Her poems were written in Creole, English, and Spanish.
Beer is an icon for the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua because she is the first black woman poet. Four of her paintings were declared a national patrimony.
From Nicaragua, the waves of the Caribbean Sea takes us to Nassau, Bahamas home of Marion Bethel (1953), a poet, essayist, attorney, human right activist, and filmmaker.
She is well known for her anthologies of poems Guahanani, My Love and Bougainvillea Ringplay. Furthermore, her work has also been published in The Massachusetts Review, The Caribbean Writer, and Junction.
In 2012, her documentary Womanish Ways: Freedom, Human Right, and Democracy 1934-1962, received the Award in Documentary at the Urban Suburban International Film Festival in Philadelphia.
She has received the James Michener Fellowship in the Department of English at the University of Miami, and CARICOM award for her contribution to gender and justice.
Marion also won the Casa de Las Americas Prize for her poetry. It is the same one that was achieved by Ana Maria Gonçalves (1970), a Brazilian writer, English professor, and publicist born in Ibiá, Minas Gerais.
In 2002, she decided to write full time which resulted with the publication of her first book Ao lado e à margem do que sentes por mim (Beside and at the Edge of What you Feel for Me). In 2006, her second book Um defeito de cor (A Colour Defect) was printed.
She was included in the newspaper O Globo list for the best Brazilian books from the previous decade.
A lot of her work has been encompassing in anthologies printed in Italy and Portugal. Gonçalves also was residence writer at several universities including Stanford University, the same college where Veronica Chambers (1970), had a John S. Knight Journalism fellow. She is awriter and editor born in Panama and raised in Brooklyn, NY.
She is the author of Mama’s Girls, Having it All: Black Women and Success, Kickboxing Geishas: How Modern Japanese Women are changing their Nation, The Go-Between, Quinceanera Means Sweet Fifteen, and other.
She also has edited essays, Meaning of Michelle: 16 Writers on the Iconic First Lady and How Her Journey Inspires Our Own and Queen Bey: A Celebration of the Power and Creativity of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter.
She is co-writer of Yes, Chef with Marcus Samuelsson that earned the James Beard Award; and 32 Yorks with Eric Ripert which, is one of The New York Times bestseller.
*Shirlene Green Newball is an Afro-Nicaraguan journalist and feminist who lives in Finland.
Bibliography
Angelou, M. (2007) I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. London. Virago Press.
Adiche, C. (2017) Half of a Yellow Sun. London. 4th Estate..
‘Afeto fértil, fértil poema: a líria de Jenyffer Nascimento’. Literafro, 10th July 2007. Available at: http://www.letras.ufmg.br/literafro/resenhas/poesia/1059-afeto-fertil-fertil-poema-a-lirica-de-jenyffer-nascimento
Corriols M. & Rossman Y. (2014) 1st. edn. Hermanas de tinta: Muestra de poesía multiétnica de mujeres nicaragüenses. Managua.
‘Courageous Zimbabwean writer whose books addressed the taboos of her society’, The Guardian, 27th April 2005. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/apr/27/guardianobituaries.books
Chambers Website. Available at:http://www.veronicachambers.com
Evans, M. (1984) Black Women Writers ( 1950-1980). The United States of America.
Gay’s Website. Available at: https://roxanegay.tumblr.com
Habila, H. (2011). African Short Story. 1st. edn. Granta Publications. London.
Hurston, Z. (1998) Their Eyes were Watching God. HapperCollins Publishers. New York.
Henry, P. ‘Great Expectations: An Interview with Ayobami Adebayo’, El Paris Review 8 August 2017. Available at: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/08/08/great-expectations-interview-ayobami-adebayo/
Morrison, T. (1993) The Bluest Eye. Plume. United States of America.
Nndi’s Website. Available at: http://nnedi.com
Olaya, J.M. (2015) ‘Lucía Charún-Illescas, la primera novelista afroperuana’, Personajes afrodescendientes del Perú y América. Available at: https://afroliteratura.lamula.pe/2017/01/19/lucia-charun-illescas-la-primera-novelista-afroperuana/afroliteratura.lamula.pe/
Smith, Z. (2017) Swing Time. Penguin Books. United Kingdom.
