Sofi Oksanen: ‘We know about British colonialism. Russian colonialism is not well known’
This article is more than 9 years old
Interview byLuke Harding
On the eve of her latest novel’s publication in English, the Finnish publishing sensation talks about divided families, the double occupation of Estonia and ‘Putin’s poodles’
Luke Harding
Saturday 18 September 2015
For a Finnish writer to be translated into English is an unusual event; over the last decade, only 40 or 50 Finnish novels have appeared in the US and UK – a “strange” state of affairs, according to Sofi Oksanen. But Oksanen isn’t merely a Finnish writer who has broken through. The author ofPurge(2008), which sold over a million copies, is an international publishing sensation, frequently likened toStieg Larsson. Only one Finnish author outsells her, Oksanen jokes: the lateTove Jansson, creator of the lovable, bohemian Moomin family.
The Celtic Tiger boom and bust has cast such a shadow over Irish life since the late 1990s that it is no surprise its effects have featured so prominently in Irish fiction. Economic, cultural and personal turbulence have been explicitly explored in, or implicitly provided a backdrop to, work by Anne Enright, Roddy Doyle, Colm McCann and many other writers, not least Paul Murray, the 40-year-old Dubliner whose second novel Skippy Dies was a breakout success in 2010, and whose three books together span the years before, during and after the crash.
'I wanted to write about looking at the world, so this book is about helping people to see what is around us, both the marvellous and the terrible'
Nicholas Wroe
Saturday 23 April 2011
On Good Friday in 2008 John Berger went to the National Gallery in London to look at, and to draw, Christ Crucified by the early renaissance artist Antonello da Messina, a work he describes as "the most solitary painting of the scene that I know. The least allegorical." Berger placed his small shoulder bag on the attendant's chair in the corner of the room and began to draw with ink, wetting his index finger to smudge the lines and correct mistakes. Before long the attendant returned and asked Berger to remove his bag. Berger placed it on the floor at his feet and resumed drawing. The attendant said he couldn't leave it on the floor. Berger explained that if he held it he would be unable to draw. The dispute escalated, and at some stage Berger exclaimed "fuck". A supervisor was called who told Berger he had insulted a member of staff doing his job and had "shouted obscene words in a public institution". He was escorted from the building: "I take it you know the way out, sir."
‘I think in my work, and in my life, I’ve always been attempting to, as they used to say, stick it to the man’ … Miriam Toews. Photograph: Jennifer Roberts
A life in fiction
Interview
Miriam Toews: ‘I needed to write about these women. I could have been one of them’
Between 2005 and 2009, more than 130 Mennonite women were drugged and raped by men in the community. In new novel Women Talking, the ex-Mennonite tells their story
Katrina Onstad Saturday 18 August 2018
Miriam Toews describes her latest book as an “imagined response” to crimes perpetrated against Mennonite women in Bolivia. Toews (pronounced “Taves”) grew up in a small Mennonite town called Steinbach in the prairie province of Manitoba, Canada, somewhere that wasn’t as closed to the world as the Bolivian colony but was still rigid and righteous – a place for an aspiring writer to flee, as Toews did, at 18.
She was living in Toronto, in 2011, when a trial revealed the horrific extent of these crimes: between 2005 and 2009, more than 130 women had been repeatedly anaesthetised with a sedative spray meant for animals and raped in their homes at the ultraconservative Bolivian Manitoba Colony. The women would wake bloodied and aching, but when they spoke up, they were told that perhaps the devil had attacked. Or maybe nothing had happened, and these tales were merely an invention of “wild female imagination”.
“I felt an obligation, a need, to write about these women,” says Toews who, like the Mennonites in Bolivia, is descended from the Molotschna colony in what is now Ukraine. “I’m related to them. I could easily have been one of them.”
Rigid and righteous … the Mennonite Heritage Village in Steinbach, Manitoba. Photograph: Alamy
Toews’s eighth book, Women Talking, is a fictional account of eight women gathering in the wake of the men’s arrests to decide a course of action. It’s a dense, eerie, darkly funny novel that reads like a tightly constructed short story. The slim book drops into the cultural conversation around sexual assault like an exclamation mark: “#MennoniteMeToo” remarked one reader. Comparisons to the newly hot The Handmaid’s Tale were already likely (not just bonnets but the patriarchy) and became inevitable when Margaret Atwood tweeted: “Don’t miss this one! ...Could be right out of The Handmaid’s Tale.”
But the timing of the release is coincidence, not prescience, because the novel was a long time coming. As Women Talking sat nascent in Toews’s mind, her sister Marjorie killed herself on the railway tracks in Steinbach where her father, Melvin, had done the same 12 years earlier. The Bolivia story was set aside as Toews answered an urgent need to write All My Puny Sorrows, a tragicomic story of one sister’s life and death, told by the one left behind.
That book became a bestseller in 2013, nominated for the Folio prize and the Wellcome prize. But Toews never stopped thinking about the women of Manitoba Colony. She kept wondering: “Then what?” What do the women do after they learn the truth of these violations, this attack of body and faith? In her version, they meet secretively in a hayloft, perched on milk buckets, and talk – and talk, and talk. In a place where, as one of them puts it, “women live out their days as mute, submissive, and obedient servants. Animals”, simply gathering without permission is an act of subversion. Engaging in a two-day long Socratic dialogue on forgiveness, innocence and love is flat-out transgressive.
“I’ve always been trying to challenge the patriarchy, specifically of my Mennonite community, but I’m concerned with the suppression of girls and women especially, and any place in the world that falls under fundamentalist, authoritarian thinking,” says Toews. “I think in my work, and in my life, I’ve always been attempting to, as they used to say, stick it to the man.”Toews is barefoot in her Victorian home in downtown Toronto, a fact born of a hot day, but which somehow feels like a reference to her book’s opening, where the women wash one another’s feet in a ritual cleansing before the debate commences.
The decision to start with this healing gesture rather than depicting the rapes was in part an effort to avoid salaciousness. “I don’t like the media phrase ‘ghost rapes’,” says Toews. “It’s not accurate, obviously, and it perpetuates the ignorance around the attacks. It echoes what the elders were saying to the women. Some of the women had begun to think that way themselves: ‘Could it be demons? Satan? Punishment? Ghosts?’ Using the term makes the whole thing sound like a cartoon.”
When she heard about the attacks, Toews says: “I was horrified but not surprised. The details were shocking but these types of crimes have always occurred in places like this. Extremist, closed communities are ripe for violence.”
The women in her novel talk of a three-year-old with a sexually transmitted infection who is denied medical treatment. They talk also of her mother, who retaliates with a scythe (and then must ask the men for forgiveness). One woman defends these conversations: “There’s no plot, we’re only women talking.” It’s a brilliant meta-line that functions as a pre-emptive strike against critics. And the “only” is sharply ironic: in this place – as has often been the case throughout history – women talking is not a small thing, but is in itself action and hence plot.
A Mennonite community in Bolivia. Photograph: Lisa Wiltse/Corbis via Getty Images
“I’ve spent a lot of time with Mennonite women, and there’s a certain kind of natural, inherent, storytelling capacity,” says Toews. “Not to the point where they’re being disobedient. They know their roles and they play them. But when they get together, there’s a lot of laughter and their own kind of coded, rebellious exchange. I wanted to get that into the book.”
She does. Funny tangents include one about how to get a cherry stone out of a child’s nose (suck it out). But mostly the women debate their options: do nothing, stay and fight or leave. Their choices are tragically curtailed by illiteracy and limited understanding of the larger world – they literally don’t know where they are in it. None of them can read a map, leading to a radical idea: “Perhaps the women can create their own map as they go.”
This optimism comes from Ona, the book’s axis, a middle-aged woman with a poet-philosopher’s mind, unmarried and impregnated by a rapist. She is also the object of infatuation for the narrator, a teacher named August Epp, appointed by the women to take minutes. August is their sole male ally, profoundly respectful and locked in a lasting, hopeless love for Ona. When her skirt grazes his leg, he’s sent into rapture. August has lived, briefly and disastrously, outside the colony. Because of this, and his erudition, he is barely tolerated, set apart from the men. The impossible love story between these two misfits is the tiny fire that warms the novel.
“August is inspired by my own father, especially his gentleness. My dad was a teacher, too,” says Toews. “[To others], there was always something suspect about him. He was considered effeminate, or demasculinised. Men’s options are so limited, too.” As August puts it, they are all together “trapped in the crucible of this crushing experiment”.
G
rowing up in Steinbach, Toews recalls, one of the worst things a young woman could be was “wild” – a word used for the kind of girl who dared to buy a Led Zeppelin record or wear short shorts. In Women Talking, and in news reports of the trial, the phrase “wild female imagination” is deployed to erase the rapes, reminiscent of other he-said-she-said dismissals of female experience, such as “hysteria”. “Wild is a word used to discount and discredit what women do and say,” Toews says. “But the wild female imagination is also the stuff of art.”
Toews never thought of herself as wild: “I was just feisty.” Her parents were both well educated and unusually progressive. Her mother, Elvira, once decided to run for mayor (her father begged her not to, and she didn’t), and later in life became a family therapist. At 18, Toews skipped her high school graduation and left on a train for Montreal.
In her 20s, she had a son and a daughter and worked in journalism, publishing her first novel in 1996. WithSummer of My Amazing Luck, a gambolling story of a single teen mom in a Winnipeg housing project, Toews debuted a career-defining light touch with the darkest of subjects. Her breakthrough novel was 2004’sA Complicated Kindness, where she cast her gaze on the repression that props up a world of buggies and butter churning; any romantic notions of ye olde ways are undercut with a machete. In the novel, another teen girl protagonist, 16-year-old Nomi Nickel, roils with hormonal fury at a dangerously finger-wagging town that looks a lot like Steinbach. Familial death – characters grapple with ghosts of mothers, sisters, fathers – hangs over Toews’s books; but she can be laugh-out-loud funny, too.
The early novels were composed mostly in Winnipeg. Toews’s husband was a street performer, and the family often followed him in a 1969 VW van across Canada while he ate fire in front of crowds. They split up a few years ago, and Toews, at 54, has an eight-month-old granddaughter, another grandchild on the way and lives with her partner, the writer Erik Rutherford.
This expansion of Toews’s family brings palpable joy – “I love being a grandmother,” she beams – but it brings other absences into relief, too. After her sister killed herself, she says, “I didn’t think I’d ever write anything again. I didn’t even know how I was going to get out of bed in the morning.”
Eventually, All My Puny Sorrows emerged from the grief, but Women Talking was written in a different kind of anguish. The weight of responsibility to get it right, combined with the book’s unusual structure and chorus of voices (“Oh God, all those names!”) made it one of the most difficult works she’s written. “I don’t know if a brain can explode in one’s head but I really thought it was going to happen. I had to finish it just so it wouldn’t kill me.”
She is aware that Women Talking has landed in a politically charged climate. “I know the book could be viewed as me making a political statement through a fictional narrative, which wasn’t really my intent. My goal is always to tell a story and to create characters that will move the reader. But I’m of course a feminist. I have a need to challenge that status quo that I’ve experienced,” says Toews.The men who were charged were convicted, but there have been reports of other alleged assaults in the colony. “I’ve seen the warmth and love the Mennonite community can provide,” she says, “but there are deep problems. I feel that I can be, I have to be, self-critical.”
In her 2000 memoir, Swing Low, Toews writes her father’s story in his voice, a poignant interior exploration of an honourable man’s struggle with manic depression in a community at once absurdly restrictive and demonstrably kind. Over two decades, she has been fiction’s most renowned gatekeeper of a world that remains, to most readers, mysteriously curtained. Her young female characters are our guides therein, such as Irma Voth, the eponymous 19-year-old heroine of Toews’s 2011 novel who is expelled from a Mexican colony. “I thought I could get the Mennonite thing out of my system earlier on, but now I feel like, ‘Oh no. I was wrong. It’s even more in my system than ever.’ I don’t really know how to stop.”
‘How do you tell a story of intellectual passion while making it warm enough to be accessible?’ Richard Powers in the Great Smoky Mountains, Tennessee. Photograph: Mike Belleme
Interview
Richard Powers: 'We're completely alienated from everything else alive'
After writing novels on artificial intelligence, neuroscience and genetics, Powers’ has turned to trees. While on a hike through the Great Smoky Mountains, he talks about environmentalism and not having children
Emma John Saturday 16 June 2018
To reach the Great Smoky Mountains in eastern Tennessee, you must first pass through the lurid streets of Gatlinburg. Hokey attractions line the route – theme parks, rollercoasters, mini-golf – in a shock of honkytonk tourism that ends only at the gateway to the national park. “Why would you come to the Smokies and think, ‘What I really want is a Ripley’s Believe It or Not?’” says Richard Powers, “There’s more believe-it-or-not here than there is in that place!”
Leïla Slimani: ‘Everyone asks me, “Why do you choose such subversive or shocking themes?”’ Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
A LIFE IN WRITING
Interview
Leïla Slimani on her shocking bestseller, Lullaby: 'Who can really say they know their nanny?'
Her murderous nanny thriller gripped France, winning its top literary prize and the attention of President Macron. With Lullaby now out in English, the author shares her thoughts on motherhood, #MeToo and being a Muslim in France Fri 26 Jan 2018
“T
he baby is dead. It only took a few seconds,” so begins Lullaby. First we had the murderous perfect wife, Gone Girl, in 2012, then the murderous perfect husband, The Girl on the Train, in 2015, and now the murderous “perfect nanny” – the US title for the Goncourt-winning French bestseller, published in the States and the UK this month. Lullaby is ménage à trois as domestic noir; the relationship, as intimate and intense as any affair, between a couple and their nanny. It was “like love at first sight”, says Myriam, the mother, of their first meeting. Until, like a “wounded lover”, the nanny stabs the two children in the bath, before slitting her own throat. This is not a spoiler: it’s all there in the devastating opening pages.
“I tried to use all my deepest fears and all my nightmares: losing my children, living with someone I think I know, but actually I don’t know her at all,” says Leïla Slimani, who has a six-year-old son and a six-month-old daughter (and, yes, a nanny). “So at the same time as it was frightening it was also a relief because I could give all my anxiety to my reader, to you!” she laughs disarmingly.
A novel that skewers gender, class and racial stereotypes, but so gently we barely notice, Lullaby looks set to become a publishing sensation, having already sold 600,000 copies in France and with film versions in France and the US under way.
Petite and engagingly expressive, the 36-year-old Moroccan-born author has become something of a poster girl for a re-energised France: “Leïla Slimani Superstar” shouted French Elle beneath a striking photo on their cover (surely a first for a Goncourt winner), while giant pictures of her appeared on bus stops across Paris. President Emmanuel Macron lived up to his bookish reputation by signing her up as an ambassador for Francophone affairs (she reportedly turned down his offer of the role of culture minister). “Everyone was exhausted with these old men giving us lessons,” she says of the new political regime. “It is very refreshing to see this new generation: a lot of women, a lot of young people.”
Infanticide, female sex addiction (the subject of her 2014 first novel, Dans le Jardin de l’Ogre, inspired by the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal) and a non-fiction book of first-person testimonies about the “sexual miseries” of Moroccan women – Slimani’s oeuvre is slim, but fearless. “Everyone asks me ‘Why do you choose such subversive or shocking themes?’, but when I’m alone in my office, I’m not like, ‘OK I’m going to shock’. I want to write about a character who fascinates me, someone who I don’t understand.”
Lullaby might begin with the murders, but she set out, rather more mundanely, to write about the ambiguous figure of the nanny. “Who can really say, ‘I know my nanny’?” Slimani asks, sending a chill through every working parent’s heart. “Everyone tells her, ‘You belong to the family’ but everyone knows that she doesn’t.” She grew up in Rabat and her family had a live-in nanny, whom she called her Mouima, little mother, “but I knew she was an employee. If she did anything wrong, my mother or father would tell her, ‘You have to go’.”
Slimani with President Macron. Photograph: POOL/Reuters
But the nanny’s lot, it turned out, made boring fiction: “You go to the park, you make food, you change nappies, so after 100 pages I was like, OK and now?” The “and now” turned out to be the discovery of the real-life murder of two children by their nanny in New York in 2012. “Woah! I thought, I have to start with this,” she says, revealing more than a splinter of ice. “Now the reader is going to be very interested in this very normal family.”
Slimani’s Greek tragedy – we know it ends badly – creates a powerful double perspective: the reader’s terrible foreknowledge undercutting the parents’ fatal ignorance as they entrust their whole world to this “miracle” nanny. It’s hard not to read the novel as a symbolic punishment of the mother and father’s reluctance to relinquish their old lifestyles. Was that deliberate?
“No, not at all,” she insists. But she did want the reader to ask the question. Her character is known only by her first name, Louise, after the British nanny Louise Woodward who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the US in 1997. She remembers the implication made by the defence lawyer in that case, that if the mother, a doctor, had “wanted her children to be safe, she should have stayed at home”. By making us complicit in casting judgment on the parents, Lullabyprobes our enduring fears and prejudices about working mothers.
“We are the first generation of women to whom everyone said: you can have it all – you can have a career, you can have children, you can marry or not marry, you can divorce. Wow, it’s so amazing! But no one gives us the mode d’emploi, the way to do everything. It is too hard,” she says.
Here are the messy contradictions of motherhood: the intensity and the boredom; the hunger for your children and the sense that “they are eating me alive”. Slimani wanted to capture “the anxieties and claustrophobia of being a mother”, and the book’s suffocating pull leaves the reader longing to come up for air.
“When you are a little girl everyone tells you that when you are a mother you are going to be so fulfilled with love, you will never feel lonely any more, you will want to give everything to your children,” Slimani says. The reality, of course, is that there is also “a lot of anxiety, moments of depression, moments when you just want to have a break and go out of your house and be someone else, become who you were before. But it’s a kind of taboo.”
While the novel shines a “light here and there” on the nanny’s sad backstory, it was important that she remain a mystery at the end. Significantly, Louise is white, while Myriam, like the author, is from Morocco – although this is carefully understated, just part of the casual racism and snobbery at play in unexpected ways. “I felt it very important to say that sometimes the boss is an immigrant, and that sometimes the poor are white,” she says. “This made it violent as a social relationship.”
As the only white woman, Louise is the stranger among the already estranged community of immigrant nannies. “When she goes to the park, she’s always alone because she doesn’t speak the same language, she doesn’t come from Africa, or from Ukraine, and I think that is why she commits this act, because she belongs to nowhere and no one. She is at the bottom of society, she is a woman and she is poor. She is no one.”
The bleak depictions of the park will give anyone who’s shivered by the swings a pang of recognition. And it was here that Slimani first had the idea for the novel: “As a writer you don’t only work in an office, so in the afternoon I wander in my neighbourhood and I go to these playgrounds. In the winter it is very sad because you can see all those African women in the traditional dresses but with a big coat on and they are very cold and the children are very cold in those dirty playgrounds.”
Slimani came to Paris to study when she was 18, and fell in love with the city, “but not with the romantic Paris. What fascinates me is the loneliness, the poverty, it’s a violent city. There is something very dark here, especially where I live in Pigalle. It is the district of sex, of eroticism, there’s a lot of immigration. I wanted to show this place.”
Although a date is never mentioned (the external world is glimpsed, filmy and distant, from within the bubble of looking after small children), this is Paris 2015 – at dinner parties, people talk about “their jobs, about terrorism and property prices” and Myriam forbids the children to watch television after the terror attacks in the Bataclan concert hall and elsewhere in the city. “It was a very difficult year,” Slimani concedes. “It was very violent. Being an immigrant at this time, being a Muslim at this time was a very particular experience, sometimes very sad, sometimes you could feel very humiliated by the way people talked about origins or Islam. How can I use all this atmosphere to build Louise and her loneliness and her madness?” she asked herself.
Slimani worked as a reporter for the weekly journal Jeune Afrique, which was useful training for becoming a novelist, she says, because you have “to observe people, pay attention to details”. Following the birth of her son, it seemed it was finally time to make good her mother’s prediction that she would be a writer one day. Her family enrolled her on a creative writing course, and she gave herself two years.
Her first novel, written in the wake of the Arab spring and set in Morocco, was refused “by every editor in Paris”. They were right, she says now, “it was a total failure”, but that setback freed her from the burden of identity politics. She wrote Dans le Jardin de l’Ogre about as far away from “camels and deserts” as it’s possible to get. “The public and the critics were a little bit surprised that as a Moroccan young woman I was writing about sex and about a French woman in Paris,” she says.
Slimani has been criticised (in her former paper) for choosing such provocative subjects, but following the publication of the non-fiction Sexe et Mensonge: La Vie Sexuelle au Maroc (2017), she also received “tonnes” of grateful letters from Moroccan women. The book was published just before the emergence of the #MeToo campaign, and she says: “It is very important for women to break the silence and to stop being ashamed, because the silence is always good for those who harass, for those who are violent, for those who dominate.”
Reading Lullaby feels like a nightmare from which you emerge, as Louise wakes from a heavy sleep, “feeling sad, disoriented, your stomach full of tears”, and the experience of writing it was draining. But its success “is a dream that came true. When I was a little girl and people would ask me what I wanted to be when I got older I always used to say I want to be paid to think. So for me to dream, to think, to write – it is wonderful.”
She is working on another novel, but isn’t telling … Is it going to be shocking? “I hope so!”
Writing has been a profoundly liberating experience for Slimani. “For me, it is freedom, freedom from everything: when I write I’m not a woman, I’m not a Muslim, I’m not a Moroccan. I can reinvent myself and I can reinvent the world”
‘
