Saisio, my mother and me
For the past two weeks I have been listening to the biography of a Finnish author, Pirkko Saisio. Her story has taken me from the working class Helsinki of the 50s to the present day, and the journey has been very thought-provoking. I will write some of them down here to not forget.
Saisio is the same age as my mother but has walked a very different path. While Saisio was the only child of communist parents in the heart of the swinging Helsinki, my mother was one of eight and grew up in a farm in the north of Finland. Saisio then went on to the theatre school, became a writer, and was openly homosexual when it was still illegal, while my mother took the more typical route of marrying young and having kids.
This juxtaposition makes me think about nature and nurture. Surely the horizons of opportunities were different for Saisio than for my mother, but she also seemed to have some internal force driving her, or maybe even preventing her from following in the footsteps of her parents. I don’t mean everyone has what it takes to become a writer, but from very early on she thought she could become one, while my mother could have never entertained such foolishness. Saisio also thinks acting is a great profession, while my mother clearly found my father’s actor cousin somehow unfitting and inappropriate (‘sopimaton’ which is also the title of Saisio’s biography).
In all honesty, Saisio’s younger years sound more like mine, except that my generation was ironically postmodern and could not fiercely commit to anything, let alone an ideology. But we both hung out in bars, met weird characters, and were unabashedly excited by the conversations, our teachers and each other.
The difference is that she does not seem to carry the burden of shame that her working class background could have given her. She has never been afraid to take the stage or demand her rights unlike me and my impostor syndrome. Although she might not be the easiest person to be around, I envy this about her. Saisio is perfectly unapologetic and publicly so with her autobiographical books, which reveal even things she is probably not proud of.
A couple of years ago Saisio was a part of a social media shitstorm. She made the mistake of criticising the extremes about not being able to meet in the middle to have a conversation. Most likely, she was asking for nuance like many, but as often with social media, polarisation win. Some years later, she asked for some compassion towards a director who was involved in a metoo scandal, which caused another cancellation.
In some ways, being deemed irrelevant may be worse than being cancelled. If you are used to your opinions being listened to and valued, not having that stage is probably horrible. In our culture of youth worship, this seems inevitable (albeit sad): we do not appreciate older people but we also seem to appreciate history less than before, and rather talk in the language of psychology and meditation memes.
The saddest thing for me though is that I think I know more about Saisio than my own mother. Shame shuts our mouths and we do not connect beyond our roles on a human, more intimate level.
