Blasphemous Poverty

I watch Coco Schrijber’s film Bloody Mondays & Strawberry Pies and soon I feel uncomfortable. I don’t know what to think of the film’s monotony. The main character does her job well, but it is repetitive – and presumably ill-paid. Nevertheless, she is not unhappy in any kind of way that I could get in touch with. This world is strange to me and I notice that that is how I prefer to leave it. The permanent thing is some sort of outwardness. Boredom. Due to lack of opportunity to use it, the imagination withers. The important thing is to learn to be content. But is it always possible?

It is carnival time in Brazil in José Padilha’s film Garapa, and the poor families’ milk powder ration is nowhere to be seen. The government is busy, milk powder is available only after the feast days. The families’ lives are quarrelsome, for the future does not provide much hope and there is even too much time to look at despair. Children are running in everyone’s feet. The alcohol-laced parents’ killing threats have lost their edge as they are so commonplace. Risks are unaffordable, it is best to keep things as they are. Not everyone abide by misery, though: in Berni Goldblat’s film The Hillside Crowd, penniless people dig gold from the depths of Burkina Faso’s illegal mine. They dream of making it rich, and sometimes that happens for a moment. There is some sort of wild west freedom in the mine village, but many long for home. Is the possibility of commitment and belonging more important than freedom?

In these films, people are not amazingly beautiful, jewels against the dirty slums. They do not face an unexpected stroke of luck, no real turn for the “better”. These people form a dirty background. The films tell about poverty as it is. Poverty is not beautiful in any reality, and as I get off the tram at Helsinginkatu to walk the rest of the way to work, I think that its blasphemy is ever nearer. I am at the soup kitchen, the queue is longer than the last time. The Finnish lower class is gathered here. It is noticeable at the latest when someone opens his or her mouth. Teeth are in bad shape and the clothes are unfashionable quilted clothes from the eighties. A couple of small children queue in their parents’ arms. The faces eaten away by alcohol are numerous.

Someone has built of cardboard boxes an unsteady hut to sleep in. I stand there and ponder whether I should call an ambulance. The man among the cardboards looks dead. A quiet crowd circulates around me, soon food will be distributed. Nobody utters a word, no news are exchanged nor does anyone interfere with the trespasser’s business. Nobody even thinks of it, she will be gone soon anyway. After all, the important thing is the food. The man on the ground moves. I do not feel I belong here, but I am unable to move. I realise that this is a permanent state of emergency. Social apartheid has exploded in Burkina Faso and Brazil – but also in Holland and Finland. Increasingly many people are enclosed separate from the functioning society. And the rest is guided to pass by. We and they, those scary poor.

Next time, the cardboard box in Helsinginkatu is gone, but once again someone is lying on the ground, and it is January and bloody cold. The country’s government has tried to deny that the European Union food aid is needed, for it is embarrassing. The aid is shameful. This is failed politics, as poverty generally is, failed politics, which results in the suffering and eventually death of hundreds of thousands.

Jaana Airaksinen
Publisher, author

Translation by Sophy Bergenheim