The Orientalization of Ranya ElRamly

A solstice in Finnish prose

Ranya ElRamly
Solstice or The Position of the Sun
Otava. FIN

BY TAPANI RITAMÄKI

”There are times when God reigns and common sense is burnt at the stake. And there are times when common sense reigns and God is burnt at the stake.” That is the opening of Ranya ElRamly’s first novel, Auringon asema (roughly Solstice or The Position of the Sun), and it has caused certain reviewers to conclude that this is a book about the relationship between God and common sense. A less philosophical approach is perhaps to be recommended, and so is reading more than the introduction. While it is true that the novel describes a relationship, it is in fact the relationship between a Finnish woman and an Egyptian man.
Finland is evidently catching up. Something which has long been a fact of life in other Western European countries is only now emerging here; immigrants are entering the arena of high culture, including literature.
Actually, of course, Ranya ElRamly is not an immigrant, she is the daughter of an Egyptian father and a Finnish mother. She has expressed consternation in interviews concerning some of the interpretations put on her work, saying that she is not at all the ‘post-colonial’ writer that some people have tried to make her. In fact, she always felt that she was rather Finnish – until the publication of her book turned her into an Egyptian. In any case Egypt was never a Finnish colony, surely.
But the ‘Orientalization’ of Ranya ElRamly is not entirely unfounded. Her novel is different, not just because it contains interesting observations from a living room in Cairo, but also because it is hotter than most Finnish prose today in a purely stylistic sense.
Although the novel is a family story in a way, it has none of the characteristics we have come to expect of a Finnish Bildungsroman, especially when written by a young woman writer, such as a conflict-ridden adolescence of window-shattering intensity. Young, fierce prose has been written by Anna Lassila, Kreetta Onkeli and Maria Peura, to mention a few of the Finnish women writers whose first novels appeared in the 1990s. One wonders to what extent these texts are actually based on a harsh reality and to what extent they simply represent a certain literary genre, established by Rosa Liksom about 20 years ago.
There are tragic elements present in Auringon asema, too, but unlike the Finnish topos it is the kind of tragedy that draws on everyday life rather than police reports. It is nothing more dramatic than a marriage which is slowly torn apart, two lives that are ruined.
The starting point of the story – with the daughter as narrator – is the moment when the father, who is Egyptian, opens the door of a train compartment where the mother, who is a Finnish tourist, is sitting, and falls in love at first sight. But this is not Yin meeting Yang on a train from Cairo to Assuan; instead, the differences in temperament, habits and world view only revert to their original state after many years, becoming barriers again.
But ElRamly’s analysis is more hopeful than that. As long as the differences are equally strong, there is a standoff or balance, and it is simply a question of trying to make sure that neither side gets the upper hand. That may sound more like a description of the delicate balance of power between the USA and the former USSR during the Cold War, but actually it is quite simple and tangible. The marriage works as long as the parents do not live in the native country of either of them, but when they leave neutral territory (first Libya, then India) to live in Finland and then Egypt, the balance is disturbed, and one parent is rendered helpless, the other an expert.
Children are often forced to choose sides when their parents argue. In Auringon asema, it is the mother who holds the admiration of the daughter for a long time, while the father is a more distant figure. But in a moving scene towards the end of the novel, he regains his place. The parents have separated and contact with the father consists of long letters from Egypt. The daughter realizes much later that the boring, extensive cuttings from Egyptian newspapers always enclosed with these letters actually represent a labour of love.
On the one hand, the novel is a Bergmanesque account of scenes from a marriage, while on the other hand it is an exploration of the fundamentals of life for a person who is made up of opposites: God and common sense, fire and water, Egypt and Finland. In this sense, the daughter is a central figure. Her situation is illustrated by an image which keeps recurring throughout the novel: the image of how to peel an orange, elegantly like the father or efficiently like the mother.
The novel finishes on a harmonious chord. The solution is to sometimes peel the orange elegantly, sometimes efficiently. It sounds simplistic when you put it like that, but it is an insight gained at great personal expense.
The book is mainly set in Egypt and it contains many useful bits of information. For instance, we find out how to deal with the heat (passive resistance is best) and how to remove sand from flowers. A lorry bringing children to a building site is mentioned in passing – a throwaway remark containing an entire world.
Another thing that is different with Ranya ElRamly is her narrative approach, which is something like a combination of The Arabian Nights set in Helsinki and perhaps Aleksis Kivi’s Seven Brothers set in the desert in North Africa. In terms of stylistics, she strings together long lines of sentences with the connector ‘and’. The result looks like something that the Finland-Swedish Modernist poet Gunnar Björling might have written if he had decided to write prose. ElRamly also frequently uses repetition of nouns and sometimes entire sentences, and also deliberate contrasts. The final result is a text which gives a strongly poetic impression – at times almost too strong – but in contrast to many other prose poetry writers, she never rambles. The billowing rhythm of ElRamly’s text is punctuated with sober observations of her father’s business card (senior water resources consultant), the kind of stark unpleasant moonlight that is associated with imminent night-time bombing raids in the Middle East, and so on.
And if you read the text closely, you will find a writer who dares to be vulnerable, and who writes of both sickness and death in a way which – surprisingly – embraces life.

Translated by The English Centre/Monica Sonck and Nicholas Mayow