“Women Became Free!” Activism, Feminism, Race, and Political Poetry of the Second Degree in Henrika Ringboms Händelser ur Nya Pressen 1968-1974

ABSTRACT

Author Henrika Ringbom’s collection of poems entitled Händelser ur Nya Pressen 1968–1974. Prosadikter (2009) is a rare piece of Finland-Swedish literature. Rewriting news from a Finland-Swedish evening press paper during the 1960s and 1970s, it offers a view on the colonial mind-set of the Nordic countries. The poems not only depict political events from various parts of a global world, they also open up an unmarked category in Nordic literature, that of race and whiteness. An essential part of Finland-Swede’s self-understanding goes back to its status as a minority. This applies even to Finland-Swedish literature. It also has a notable tradition of female feminist writing that runs through the 20th century. Finland-Swedish literature, however, belongs also to a majority when it comes to Western ideas of race and whiteness in a Nordic context.

In my analysis, I show how Ringbom scrutinizes events from a phase Tobias Hübinette and Catrin Lundström (2014) call the “white solidarity” (1968–2001), characterized by antiracism, anti-apartheid, social justice and gender equality, but also of color-blindness. I show how Ringbom contributes to the current discussions of political Nordic literature with a rich, complex, ambivalent and defamiliarizing way. The poems actively remind us how both political events and political poetry are complex and contradictory. Rather than offering a clear-cut poetic activism, Rinbom writes political poetry of the second degree, one that examines and reflects upon the conditions of politics, popular media, and political poetry.

KEYWORDS:

• Finland-Swedish literature
• Political poetry
• Whiteness
• Intersectional
• Minority literature
• Oppressed bodies

Introduction

“At the turn of the 21^st Century”, literary scholar Åsa Arping remarks in The History of Nordic Women’s Literature, “the personal becomes political yet again. Society reclaims poetry and poetry opens up towards the surrounding world.” (Arping, 2016) Arping’s statement raises questions regarding the relation between the political and literature. Is the political something inherent in works of literature, or a result of reading and interpretation? Are aesthetic and politics two distinct fields, which only at times come together, or should we think that literature in general has a political dimension because it is written, published and read in a social context? (Ladegaard, 2015, p. 228) These questions have been debated for long, and with no definitive answers. Nevertheless, many researchers of Nordic literature agree on Arping’s observation, and make similar conclusions in their studies of contemporary literature. (E.g. Hjorth, 2015; Jagne-Soreau, 2021; Malmio, 2019, 2020a, 2020b; Mønster, 2016; Stenbeck, 2017) Many also agree that works of literature are political in as much as they consider topics in the external world, depict recent social and cultural changes and challenges, give voice to subjugated minorities, and urge people to political action.

Since the 1990s, researchers have questioned the image of the Nordic countries as the most gender-equal societies in the world, and problematized the former presumably neutral categories of gender, class and race. For example, Tobias Hübinette and Catrin Lundström argue that Sweden today is a white nation in crisis. It embraces an official colour-blindness and multi-culturalism and imagines itself as having accomplished a post-racial utopia. However, Sweden has also rapidly become “one of the most statistically segregated and segmented societies along racial lines in the Western world, and particularly in the residential and labour markets.” (Hübinette & Lundström, 2014, p. 51). This kind of segregation and colour-blindness, also pertains to Finland Swedes.

Many of the Nordic literary scholars who focus on the political dimension of literature study poetry. Jessica Holmes explains the suitability of the genre as follows:

[P]oetry in particular is a literary genre, which has consistently lent itself to expressions of silenced or oppressed voices and bodies, in part due to its capacity to embody loss, fragmentation, and absence. Contemporary poems thus provide a useful foundation for rethinking narratives of anthropocentrism and revisiting discriminatory perceptions of oppressed or vulnerable bodies (both human and nonhuman). When engaged in such interventionary and reparative practices of thought, poetry constitutes a form of activism. Poems offer alternative methods of seeing or bearing witness to, remembering and assigning value to individual subjects. (Holmes, 2021, p. 229)

More specifically, poetry constitutes a form of activism, when “it actively strives against the ongoing erasure of oppressed bodies.” (Holmes, 2021, p. 239)

My points of departure are those of Holmes’ definition of the political and activist potential of poetry. In the following, I will study how a female poet belonging to the Finland-Swedish linguistic minority contributes to 21^st-century political poetry and activism. The collection of poetry I will discuss is Händelser ur Nya Pressen 1968–1974. Prosadikter (2009) (Events from Nya Pressen [New Press] 1968–1974. Prose poetry) by Henrika Ringbom. Here, Ringbom offers a rich, but defamiliarizing perspective on present-day political discussions of identity, gender, race, class, and privilege. By revisiting (her memories of) events she read about as a child, she rewrites history—on both a personal and a political level—calling into question a somewhat glorified era of Western activism and solidarity.

Finland-Swedish minority literature has a notable tradition of female feminist writing that runs through the 20^th century. You only need to think of authors such as Edith Södergran, Märta Tikkanen, or Agneta Enckell. This feminist tradition has taken two routes. On the one hand, there is a line of explicitly political poetry, which openly criticizes the patriarchal social order. On the other, there is a line of poetry in which the political message becomes visible only after thorough analysis. Whereas Märta Tikkanen’s lyrical texts from the 1970s and 1980s are excellent examples of the first type, Agneta Enckell’s poetry is illustrative of the second type. (See also Brandt, 2014) In contemporary Finland-Swedish poetry, Adrian Perera’s debut collection White Monkey (2017), describing the experiences of racialized persons in Finland, has been hailed for the “return of political poetry” and written “in the spirit of Märta Tikkanen.” (Lindqvist, 2017) Ringbom, as we shall see, combines the two routes. Her poems depict political themes, but resist a straightforward political interpretation. Her work is particularly significant in a Finland-Swedish literary context, as it, like that of Perera, critically examines race and racism, albeit in a less direct manner.

Ringbom raises her voice in Finland-Swedish but breaks with literary tradition, as she does not speak exclusively from a Finland-Swedish position. Here we come to a second concern of my article. Finland-Swedes are a linguistic minority and as such, their position in Finnish society is an ambivalent one. Swedish is one of Finland’s official languages, and the laws guarantee the linguistic rights of the Swedish-speaking minority. In addition, Finland-Swedes are a privileged group in social, economic and cultural terms when compared to many other minorities. (Malmio, 2020a; see also Klinkmann, 2017, 35–36) However, many Finland-Swedes experience linguistic oppression when they try to use their mother tongue for example in healthcare or in contact with official state institutions in Finland.

The hard core of Finland-Swedish literature has been its understanding of itself as a literature of a linguistic minority. (See e.g. Korsström, 2013; Warburton, 1984) This self-understanding can be found for example in interviews with Finland-Swedish authors (Jokinen, 2010), in the practices of literary reviews (Malmio, 2013), and in literary history writing (Möller-Sibelius, 2018). In an interview in 2006, Ringbom, however, opposed the idea of a unified Finland-Swedish literature and identity. She places Finland-Swedish literature at the border of both Finnish and Swedish literature, and states that it is always in the periphery of Swedish culture. That, she affirms, is not necessarily a bad thing. Rather, “in the margins your vision becomes sharper.” (Wallin, 2006) All in all, Finland-Swedish literature has traditionally been viewed as an expression of a linguistic minority and its identity. It has seldom, if ever, been scrutinized, from a majority perspective, which is what I propose to do here since in terms of hegemonic whiteness, Finland-Swedes belong to the majority.

A Minority, Which Also Belongs to a Majority

Race is one of the many basic dichotomies that constitute the foundation of Western thinking, besides those of male-female, culture-nature, and so on. (Leppänen & Svensson, 2016, p. 13) Whereas class and gender have been objects of analysis, race has among Finland-Swedes been an unmarked category. (See also, Hübinette & Lundström, 2014, p. 53) Finns and Finland-Swedes belong to a white Western majority that has constructed its identity, and forms of knowledge, in opposition to the colonies and the global south. (Merivirta et al., 2021) Similar to Swedes, Finland-Swedes and Finns “harboured the general Western colonial and racist fantasies and images of the non-Western world and of non-white people.” (Hübinette & Lundström, 2014, p. 57) The question is then, how to articulate race and whiteness and critically investigate its status as an unmarked majority position (Berg, 2008, p. 215).

In their analysis of Swedish hegemonic whiteness, Tobias Hübinette and Catrin Lundström discern three historical phases. They call the first phase “White purity”. It took place between 1905 and 1968 and was characterized by a discourse of scientific racism; Swedes were identified as the whitest of the white, and the grounds for Swedish whiteness were laid. (Hübinette & Lundström, 2014, pp. 54–57) This has relevance also for the Finland-Swedes. Historically, at the beginning of the 20^th century, some Finland-Swedish scholars were eager to take part in the up-to-date international research on “race hygiene”. As the historian Julia Dahlberg notes, they looked actively for the kind of pseudo-scientific criteria which could prove that Finland-Swedes belonged to the Scandinavian/German race and were therefore”white”, whereas the Finns were seen as belonging to a more primitive race. Swedes were the group Finland-Swedes wanted to identify with. (Dahlberg, 2021, pp. 23–25, 34; Edgren-Henrichson, 2022) These discussions of race became especially important at the beginning of the 20^th century when Finland-Swedes gathered and organized as a political group on linguistic grounds. (Engman, 2016, 16–22).

The second phase, “the white solidarity period”, took place 1968–2001 (Hübinette & Lundström, 2014, p. 52). Antiracism, anti-apartheid, social justice and gender equality characterize this phase. During this period, Sweden, as mentioned above, constructs itself as a colour-blind country and transforms racism into a non-Swedish issue. (Hübinette & Lundström, 2014, p. 58) The antiracist and feminist movements, comprised primarily of white Swedes, contribute to this thinking. (Hübinette & Lundström, 2014, p. 67) The kind of colorblindness that Hübinette and Lundström discern can also be found in a Finland-Swedish context. In an interview about his research, sociologist and gender researcher Otto Harju describes his ongoing PhD project on whiteness and feminism among young Finland-Swedes. He examines whether Finland-Swedish young feminists discuss a gender-based marginalization combined with a linguistic minority position and individual experiences of oppression differently than they debate whiteness. Harju refers to the current debates centring on racialization. They have resulted in a heightened awareness that Finland-Swedish feminism has been blind to racialization and extremely white. (Edgren-Henrichson, 2022) Hübinette and Lundström (2014, p. 67) discern even a third phase, called “white melancholy” from 2001 onwards. Characteristic of this period is a nostalgia for the past, “the idealizing and romanticizing of a homogenous past through the combination of the white purity and white solidarity periods of Swedish whiteness and constructed around the welfare state.” I will come back to this in the end of my article.

Händelser ur Nya Pressen 1968–1974 takes up race and whiteness in a way that urges us to consider how language, gender, class, and race have intersected historically. Here, we enter a kind of collective memory of those born and raised in the 1960s and 1970s. The book displays a part of the colonialist cultural context of Finland. Introduced to a time in the past through its texts, language, and worldview, Finland Swedes become aware of the colonial background and culture that have formed their mindset. Hence, Ringbom’s book opposes a contemporary cultural and political amnesia as it shows how many current political trends have their roots in the period depicted in the poems, i.e. Hübinette and Lundtröm’s “white solidarity period.”

Poems about Political and Other Events

Events are the obvious starting point for an analysis of Ringbom’s collection of poems as the book’s title centres on the word “event”. It immediately invites us to ask, what kind of events the collection depicts. A translation of the title would be “Events from Nya Pressen [New Press]. Prose poetry”. Nya Pressen was a Finland-Swedish yellow-press newspaper, first published as a morning paper 1882–1900, and then as an evening paper 1906–1974. The word “event” in the title is, however, somewhat curious. Nya Pressen did not publish events, it published news and articles. And “ur”(from) signifies that the events take place in the evening paper, not in reality. In an afterword, the author tells us that the poems are based on news and articles published in Nya Pressen 1968–1974, a paper she used to read as a child. By the time, Nya Pressen had a leftist political agenda. Ringbom rewrites events that have been hailed as the political events of the 1960s and 70s. She also depicts the leading figures of the political movements in the 1970s: Ulrike Meinhof, Martin Luther King, John F. and Robert Kennedy, Germaine Greer.

Händelser ur Nya Pressen considers activism already on its first pages as it opens with two citations. The first one quotes Ulrike Meinhof, the German radical leftist activist, later a terrorist, when she looks at a vase of tulips and asks “Why can’t one live like that?”¹ The second one is a freely formulated citation of Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian philosopher and social reformer: “Tell me, prisoner, who it was that built this insurmountable wall? It was me, answered the prisoner who had carefully built the wall.”² (Ringbom, 2009, p. 5) Both citations take up existential questions of why we live as we do. Both invite us to imagine another kind of life and reality. Meinhof, a female journalist and mother of two children, represents the Western world. Tagore, a male author, poet, philosopher, and winner of Nobel prize in literature 1913, who opposed imperialism and criticized Indian nationalism, terrorism, and religiosity, personifies the East. (Tagore, 2022) Whereas the former tried to reform society by using violence, the latter emphasized the importance of education. These two opening paratexts also represent the forms of writing united in the collection, i.e. those of journalism and poetry.

The tone of the poems is all but revolutionary. Rather, the style is reporting and enumerating, and a speaker is only indirectly present; through the selection of topics, events, scenes and citations from Nya Pressen, and through the order of poems and their titles. The opening poem has the title “Det byggs” [Building goes on] and “1968” at the upper part of the page marks the year of the events the poem rewrites.

Building goes on. A super-super-super-market. Express elevators, gigantic underground cold storage, computers, air conditioning. Dark parks, plans and mischiefs, frostbitten alcoholics. Plundering poisoning starvation. The threatening quicksilver. The world stands in front of a catastrophe. (Ringbom, 2009, p. 6)³

The poem has the form of narration in passive form; a super-super-supermarket is being built. Already in the second line, the opposite of construction, nearby destruction, enters the prose poem. The poem figures on the left-hand side of the book, and the poem on the right-hand side is entitled “Fredsförhandlingar i Vietnam?” [Peace negotiations in Vietnam?] Whereas the frostbitten alcoholics suggest that the first poem takes place in Finland, the next poem presents events and places on the other side of the world. This poem is constructed around the opposition of war and peace, and repeats the words “waiting”, “suffering”, “hope” and “excluded”.

Peace negotiations in Vietnam? Helicopters with laser beam bird of death new, ruthless new. A new military victory is inconceivable. Hanoi waits, bomb stop waits, everywhere waits, everywhere hits. No! It has not yet even. Not yet even begun, the battle over Saigon. They suffer horribly. A ten-year old girl suffers wounded. Wounded by shrapnel suffers lies on an operating table, waiting. Hanoi waiting. At last hope? Of peace and bomb stop? No! Peace excluded. Hope excluded. Bomb stop excluded. Vietnam worse, than ever before worse. Bombing beats the records beats, Hanoi increases beats, Saigon remains. Only remains. (Ringbom, 2009, p. 7)⁴

Ringbom turns newspaper discourse into poems that are like telegrams from the past, and the style used is that of a staccato. The poetic language is at times fragmented, at times openly repeating news. The poems are sometimes more straightforward narrating, sometimes more poetical in their way of using repetition and reverse word order. The first two poems also illustrate the way in which newspapers combine the trivial and the tragic. Super-super-supermarket meet war victims on the same pages of the same newspaper. The trivial facts tell about everyday life. The tragic news depict suffering victims of war and appeal to the emotions of the reader. We might ask why the author has rewritten precisely these topics into poems. There are many answers: the events depicted are so shocking, that they have invaded the young reader’s mind and memory. Many of the events have also become representative of the whole period. The author rewrites reports and testimonies from the 60s and 70s and turns them into critical commentaries on that period. Two opposite worlds meet; the Western world and lifestyle and that of Vietnam, Saigon and Hanoi. What unites these two worlds is the newspaper, the reading girl and human suffering and violence. Finnish alcoholics, in the 1960s often men who had been to the front in the wars with the Soviet Union in 1939–1945 and the little girl wounded in the Vietnam War stand side by side.

The order of the poems is chronological, and the starting point is the year 1968, which was politically a remarkable, even “mad” year. 1968 stands for events such as the Vietnam War, student riots in Paris, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the political murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Many of the events depicted in the poems take place in the US, and the world is truly global, steered by growing capitalism, consumerism, and technology as well as by wars, riots, and violence. One central theme is the collective struggle for civil rights, women’s rights, the struggle against racism, and the pacifism of 1960s and 70s. Another important theme is the growing importance and power of media and publicity, as well as mass entertainment and the role of women in it. Repeatedly, the author turns to news and articles that focus on women and girls.

In an afterword, Ringbom describes how Nya Pressen was her most important source of knowledge about the world. We come to know that the one reading the news is a child, a girl, sitting in the kitchen of her home in the capital of Finland, at the end of the 1960s. In a way, the style imitates the practice of a child trying to read words that are hard to understand if you have just learned to read. She reads about the enduring wives of the astronauts, murdered film stars, raped and murdered Finnish girls, international terrorists, and beauty queens. She looks at and describes the pictures of pin-up girls as well as female victims of war. She depicts her mixed emotions and the kinds of painful and puzzling impressions the news and the photographs aroused in her. She also comments on the role of women in the newspaper “I would like to know what I thought about the captions [commenting the girls], and the pin ups back then”, she writes.⁵ (Ringbom, 2009, p. 102) The perspective is dual. On the one hand, the viewpoint is that of a child, taking in the horrifying events of the world. On the other hand, we feel the presence of the adult author who now has the knowledge needed to notice how weird, grotesque and horrible the news and photos published in the newspaper actually are. A child’s confusion meets an adult’s awareness and distance in time to the events and the language used to describe them. In her final words, Ringbom explains her motives with the book: “I have wanted to listen to the little inquisitive girl I was then, thirty-five years ago. […] I cannot at all imagine who I would have become without it [Nya Pressen].”⁶ (Ringbom, 2009, pp. 104–105) “The personal is political” was one of the central ideas of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. Here, we are introduced to its opposite: the processes in which the political becomes personal, as the girl sits in her kitchen reading political news, which then become part and parcel of her understanding of the world.

Black and White, White and Black

The poems in the collection strive to fight an erasure of oppressed bodies, whether they are wounded small victims of war, frozen Finnish alcoholics, or racialized people who struggle for civil rights. Often poems use direct quotations from Nya Pressen. This makes it possible for Ringbom to open up the Western, colonial “unconscious” of Finland. The poems confront their reader with words that, today, are explicitly racist. Ringbom uses, and thus makes visible, the language of her original source, like in the poem “Europèerna spelar krocket” [Europeans play croquet]: “The Europeans play croquet while Blacks are judged and hanged./In Capetown professor Chris Barnard operates. ’Black or white, it does not matter.’ A calf’s heart becomes her heart. N—s smell better than five years ago, but at the same time they have become somewhat more stupid.”⁷ (Ringbom, 2009, p. 10) Nya Pressen was a liberal newspaper; nevertheless, it articulates the colonial past of the Western world. Simultaneously, however, the poem also carries a political and activist agenda. It is structured around an opposition of life and death. The uttermost inequality and injustice between “the Europeans” and “Blacks” comes to light, leisure and violence take place simultaneously. The famous South-African cardiac surgeon states the obvious fact that people, no matter race or colour, are similar. To whom the last sentences in the poem belong, is unclear. If they are the words of Barnard, they make obvious that physiological facts or higher education do not make a human being free of stereotypical thinking. Here, Ringbom invites the reader to study a worldview, and confronts her with the language use, knowledge and understanding the sentences reveal. The cruelty and injustice of the first sentence find their counterpart in the racism of the last sentence. The reader witnesses the absurdity of this thinking, and its lethal consequences.

In the poem on the left-hand side (page 10), racialized people are objects of violence and racism, on the right-hand side (page 11), the reader meets a black political actor. The poem has the title “Den ende som kunde” [The only one that could] and describes the murder of Martin Luther King in Memphis. He is about to start a new march for the poor and oppressed, he holds a speech and addresses the listeners as his friends. He is then shot, and the poem continues “[…] He was the only one. The only one that could. The only n—leader that could continue a dialogue with the whites. The apostle of non-violence numerous times stoned. The apostles of violence Black Power and Black Panthers. Now they push. The young perspicacious men. The time of non-violence has ended. […]”⁸ (Ringbom, 2009, p. 11)⁹ The repetition frequently used in the poems is like stuttering. It contributes to the desperation and fear expressed in the poem. It is as if the narrating subject finds it difficult to express herself in the terrible situation. The poem communicates the despair of those for whom King was the only one who could continue a dialogue with white people, and their fear of what will happen next. The activities of Martin Luther King disrupted the ruling social order, not least in his programmatic antiviolence and struggle for the civil rights of racialized people. He embodies the utopian, collective idealism of the “White solidarity” period. The poem first gives voice to a collective of Black people that tries to find their way in a struggle that is a joint dangerous enterprise, to stand for the rights of the oppressed. Then, the poem describes the end of the non-violent activism and the beginning of a new time when “America will burn.” (Ringbom, 2009, p. 11) A utopian dream turns to its opposite.

The poems above are polyphonic (see also Stenbeck, 2017, pp. 213–214) as they offer both a child’s and an adult’s perspective, and at times a passive outsider speaking in the poems turns into a collective “we”. What more, the poems also allow for the simultaneous presence of contradictory voices, as in “När vi kom var vi hippies” [When we arrived we were hippies]. The poem has citation marks at the beginning and the end; it recites somebody’s utterance. A collective “we, the hippies” explain that they have arrived to “this continent” because people at home looked down on them. “WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN RIOTERS! Against our will. We came here against our will. N—s came, came against their will. In that way Blacks and whites came [alternatively: ended up] in the same boat.”¹⁰ (Ringbom, 2009, p. 29) The poem plays with the meaning of “being in the same boat”. The hippies express solidarity with “Blacks”, and compare their own conditions to those of racialized people. However, the boat with which the racialized people arrived, and the level of “against their will” certainly were not the same for Blacks and hippies, nor were the conditions of arrival. Then, in the middle of the poem, the perspective or the speaker changes from the hippies to somebody, who is critical of the hippies and liberation movements. The speaker starts to describe people of different kinds “in this country”, and turns to capital letters: “And then there are. Those. WHO DO NOT WANT TO WORK! WHO DO NOT WANT TO EARN MONEY! The root of it all, of hippies, free love. Of all this talk about sex. The root is the women. The women who became free! Like the n—s became free!”¹¹ The capital letters signal agitation or aggression. In the speaker’s eyes, hippies, women, and people of colour make up a unified group that threatens the speaker and the nation because they demand freedom.

The citation marks signal that the whole poem refers to the same “we hippies”. Line by line however, the utterances expressing opinions about the hippies become contradictory and mixed and we meet at least two opposing views. What more, the utterances have, first, been cited in the newspaper, and then, been rewritten into poems. In this process of mediation, the politics of the 1960s and 1970s become defamiliarized. Events that have been hailed as very progressive in their time and context are reported, opposed, and show strange sides. The contradictory forces within language, and between worldviews, become visible again; the stereotypical picture of the civil rights movements is problematized when we are confronted by the words of the time. This all, takes place within a collection of political poetry. The view on the politics of the 1960s and 1970s becomes blurred and problematized.

The Fates of Female Bodies: Gender Issues Reconsidered

A wide range of females find their ways into the pages of the evening paper, and into Ringbom’s poems. Young girls, raped and murdered teenagers, women who get plastic surgery, notable feminists, politics and housewives, pinup girls and activists, subjects and objects, agents and victims, foreigners and Finns enter the pages. Feminism is one of the topics of the 1960s and 1970s. The second-wave feminist slogan “the personal is political”, is present in many of the poems depicting Western women.

Ringbom uses contradictions as one of her poetical and political strategies. Individual poems are constructed around opposites, and often the left and right side of a page depicts contradictory scenes. This also applies to the portrayal of the female figures. The conditions of women in various parts of the world are compared in a manner characteristic of the “white solidarity phase”. On the left side of pages 80–81, in a poem entitled “Den nioåriga flickan som sprang” [The nine-year old girl who ran], the narrator reports of a girl from the Vietnamese village, who runs naked towards the camera, her back on fire. Twenty-four years later, the poem tells, the girl with the burning back and the soldier that had planned the bombing, meet and she forgives him. On the right side, in a poem entitled “Det som vi flickor har” [The thing we girls have], a “we” states in a consumeristic tone that the back is the most beautiful and interesting part of a woman. “We are now about to enter the year of the naked back. The splendours of the back, its elevation. […] The back that gives a lady her personality.”¹² A back that is burning meets a back as an objectified part of a woman’s body to be shown and admired. The conditions of the two female bodies are the opposite, but also the same: in both cases, her body is the object of somebody else’s actions. In this way, Ringbom effectively makes visible the conditions and domination of women through various forms of oppression. Simultaneously, she again displays the absurdity of the fact that both scenes occupy space in the pages of the same newspaper, and that our world is constructed in such a way. Once more, the tragic and trivial meet, and clash.

One woman, who gets several poems, is Ulrike Meinhof, an activist, who entered a political struggle, and tried to change social conditions. Ringbom’s poems show her in situations where she, as a feared activist, is the object of a hunt, or a prisoner. The narrator ponders her actions and the psychology behind them, and describes her feelings and thinking as if the narrator could enter her psyche. Here we meet the tulips from the beginning. Meinhof has come to the point where everything is a symptom of capitalism, even flowers. What, the narrator contemplates, if somebody had asked her to think like a cloud, or a leaf on a tree that thinks? Had it then been possible for her to go out, to something else, the poem asks. (Ringbom, 2009, p. 77) Instead of portraying her as a feared terrorist, or a heroic activist, she is presented as a prisoner of her own thinking and worldview.

In a later poem, the narrator first draws conclusions of Meinhof’s actions as a terrorist to her “soul”: “Ulrike Meinhof shot. She shot in panic and she blew up without consideration. Her soul became isolated. Her soul became isolated and she was hunted. Her hunted soul lacked trust more and more and she was locked up more securely than anybody else.”¹³ (Ringbom, 2009, p. 86) She sits isolated in prison, waiting for her trial, refusing to speak. She then becomes the object of medical examinations and media exposure. The doctor wants to study her mind; he thinks she has brain cancer, which is the reason for her criminal actions. The poem reflects the way Meinhof becomes an object in the news. Her political activism is not present in the reporting on her, rather, she is depicted as having acted without a plan. She refuses to speak. Still, the title of the poem “Hon känner sig själsligen frisk” [She feels herself spiritually well], pretends to report her own words. Obviously, the description of how she feels does not come from her, but from the authorities that hold her prisoner. She has used violence, now the authorities use violence against her.

Another example of the ambivalent and reflexive way Ringbom examines political issues is the poem entitled “Oss alla [Us all], which depicts Germaine Greer. The title and the presence of the notable feminist raises immediate expectations of ideas connected to collective responsibility and solidarity. It starts with the following words: “We are all frightened of freedom. It is huge.” The year is 1972. The collective dimension of the struggle for freedom is emphasized by using a “we”, and Greer’s words and rhetoric resound in the words used in the poem. Constantly, the perspective fluctuates between Greer and those opposing her. “Germaine Greer urges. She urges freedom. She will be accused of urging irresponsibility. But is anybody, is anybody able. Can somebody be. More irresponsible than her. Who has not chosen.”¹⁴ (Ringbom, 2009, p. 65) Immediately, her perspective and arguments are questioned. However, the poem also exposes the logic of her opponents. She has not chosen; therefore, she is irresponsible. The narrator asserts that Greer has handed over all responsibility to the father, to the one in power, to the king, to the computer. Again, the perspective shifts back to words that sound like Greer: “Sexuality is her enemy. Even feminists say so.” And immediately in the next sentence, again a voice opposes her, this time from another direction: “She has hair on her head. She has hair nowhere else. She has no odour of sweat.“¹⁵ The political and the personal meet, but in a non-feminist manner as a trivial detail about her body is used as an argument against her ideas. The struggles for the minds of the women in the 1970s is present in the contradictory arguments of Greer, those against her, and those reporting her views. At the end of the poem, the narrator goes back to what concerns “us all”. First, in the form of a question without a question mark, which then, through repetition, turns into a statement: “Do recipes concern us. Do thousands of women in Bangladesh concern us. Us concern. Us concern the thousands of women in Bangladesh. They are raped, tests are made. New abortion techniques are tested on them. That concerns us all.“¹⁶ This is a forceful plea for solidarity, even more accentuated by Ringbom’s repetition and elaboration of the two words “us” and “concern.” However, the parallels between recipes, an everyday dimension of private life, and the conditions of thousands of women in Bangladesh, make the plea for solidarity ambivalent. Recipes, and the sexual rights of the women in Bangladesh, are rendered as comparable, which creates an impression of the superficiality of the solidarity of “us all”.

Conclusion

This article has studied how the Finland-Swedish poet, Henrika Ringbom writes political poetry by taking her point of departure in news and political events of the 1960s and 1970s as they were reported in a leftist newspaper. Obviously, Händelser ur Nya Pressen, shows the utmost complexity of political poetry. The words, sentences and worldviews of activists and their opponents clash in the poems, and ask for the readers’ attention on similar terms. Händelser ur Nya Pressen struggles against the erasure of oppressed bodies; including pinups, victims of war and rape, poverty-stricken Finns, and racialized bodies in the US and South Africa. The poems depict important scenes of the political struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, events that many contemporary political fights go back to. However, an ambivalence runs through the poems. The struggle for equality is fraught with problems and violence; the voices of those fighting for it meet the voices of those questioning it. There is no final opinion to lean back on. Ringbom actively shows us how both political events and political poetry are complex and contradictory, and questions a general view of 1960s as mainly progressive and egalitarian. Rather than offering a clear-cut poetic activism, she writes political poetry of the second degree, one that examines and reflects upon the conditions of politics, popular media, and political poetry.

Händelser ur Nya Pressen depicts the “white solidarity” phase, characterized by antiracism, anti-apartheid, struggles for social justice and gender equality. (Hübinette & Lundström, 2014, p. 52) In a poetical way, Ringbom’s work concurs with Hübinette and Lundström’s Swedish analysis. Nya Pressen was a Finland-Swedish newspaper; nevertheless, the description of the characteristic traits of the white solidarity phase covers the worldview that Ringbom’s poems go back to, and rewrite. The colonialist mindset of the Western world is clearly present. Simultaneously, the many worldviews of the time confront each other in fragmented and repetitive poems. A child’s perspective on the news and the contradictory way in which the narrator connects the bits and pieces of the world defamiliarize the news made into poems, and the global world depicted. In addition, Ringbom’s poetry raises ethical questions when it shows how newspapers take up the trivial and the tragic side by side. Händelser ur Nya Pressen depicts a Western worldview in crisis, and is written during a period Hübinette and Lundström calls “white melancholy.” There is however no nostalgia for the past in the poems. Rather, the book urges the (Finland-Swedish) reader to acknowledge her own involvement, then and now. “In the margins your vision becomes sharper.”

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Varför kan man inte leva på det sättet?

2. Säg mig fånge, vem var det som byggde denna oöverstigliga mur? Det var jag, sa fången, som med omsorg byggde muren. All translations of Ringbom’s poems into English are my own.

3. Det byggs. En super-super-super-market. Snabbhissar, gigantiska underjordiska kylrum, datamaskiner, luftkonditionering. Mörka parker, planer och busliv, köldskadade polityrgubbar. Plundring förgiftning svält. Det hotande kvicksilvret. Världen står inför en katastrof.

4. Fredsförhandlingar i Vietnam? Helikopter med laserstråle dödsfågel ny, skoningslös ny. En militär seger är otänkbar. Hanoi väntar, bombstopp väntar, överallt väntar, överallt slår. Nej! Det har inte ens. Inte ens börjat ens, slaget om Saigon. De lider fruktansvärt. En tioårig flicka lider skadad. Skadad av en granatskärva lider ligger på operationsbordet, väntar. Hanoi väntar. Äntligen hopp? Om fred och bombstopp? Nej! Uteslutet fred. Uteslutet hopp. Uteslutet bombstopp. Vietnam värre, än någonsin värre. Bombningen slår rekord slår, Hanoi ökar slår, Saigon återstår. Endast återstår.

5. Jag önskar att jag kunde få veta vad jag tänkte om bildtexterna då, och om pinupporna.

6. Jag har velat lyssna på den lilla vetgiriga flicka som jag var då för trettiofem år sedan. […] Jag kan inte överhuvudtaget föreställa mig vem jag skulle ha blivit utan den.

7. Européerna spelar krocket medan svarta döms och hängs. I Kapstaden opererar professor Chris Barnard. ’Svart eller vitt, det har ingen betydelse.’ Kalvens hjärta blir hennes hjärta. Negrer luktar bättre än för fem år sedan, men i gengäld har de blivit något dummare.

8. Han var den ende. Den ende om kunde. Den ende negerledare som kunde fortsätta med de vita en dialog. Icke-våldets apostel otaliga gånger stenad. Våldets apostlar Black Power och Svarta Pantrar. Nu trycker de på. De unga klarsynta männen. Icke-våldets tid, nu är den förbi. […] Amerika kommer att brinna.

9. It is important to remember that the N-word is used both in racist and non-racist ways in the 1960s. I am grateful to my reviewer who pointed out this to me that M.L. King used the word in his famous Washington-speech.

10. VI HAR ALLTID VARIT UPPRORSMAKARE! Mot vår vilja. Vi kom hit mot vår vilja. Negrerna kom, kom mot deras vilja. På så sätt kom svarta och vita i samma båt.

11. Och det finns de. De. SOM INTE VILL ARBETA! SOM INTE VILL FÖRTJÄNA PENGAR! Roten till det hela, till hippies, fri kärlek. Till allt detta sexdalt. Roten är kvinnorna. Kvinnorna som blev fria! Liksom negrerna blev fria!

12. Vi står inför ryggen, den nakna ryggens år. Ryggens härlighet, dess upphöjelse. […] Ryggen som ger en dam hennes personlighet.

13. Ulrike Meinhof sköt. Hon sköt i panik och hon sprängde utan hänsyn. Hennes själ isolerades. Hennes själ isolerades och hon jagades. Hennes jagade själ saknade förtroende mer och mer och hon låstes in strängare än någon annan.

14. Rädslan för frihet finns hos oss alla. Den är stor. Germaine Greer manar. Hon manar till frihet. Hon kommer att anklagas för att mana till oansvar. Men kan någon, kan någon. Kan någon vara. Någon mer oansvarig än hon som. Som inte har valt.

15. Sexualiteten är hennes fiende. Till och med feministerna säger det. […] Hon har hår på sitt huvud. Hon har hår ingen annanstans. Hon har ingen svettdoft.

16. Angår oss matrecept. Angår oss kvinnor i Bangladesh. Oss angår. Oss angår tusentals kvinnor i Bangladesh. De våldtas, det testas. Det testas nya abortmetoder på dem. Det angår oss alla.