“Here I No Longer Apologise”
Here I No Longer Apologize is the title of Nelli Ruotsalainen’s debut poetry collection, a book that met with enthusiastic reviews praising its candor and astute societal criticism. This book deals with a range of topics, including sexual violence towards teenagers, queer/sexual identity, and intergenerational connections between women. Ruotsalainen said she was drawn to these themes because they were a part of her life and a part of the lives of many of her friends.
“I wanted to write about sexual violence because I wanted to partake in the act of dismantling the shame around it, and to encourage survivors to never blame themselves for what happened. I wrote about queer identity because I wanted to sort out some of my own complicated feelings around it, namely the feelings of internalized bi-phobia as they relate to homonormativity. I wanted to say that a person can be “queer” in many ways, even in ways they themselves don’t have language for yet, or in ways that are changing, and that that’s ok. It was important for me to feature the intergenerational continuums of women to illuminate the cycle of intergenerational trauma and how it might affect us. There is also a lot of strength in these continuums, especially in the ways that knowledge is passed down and adopted by new generations.
It is challenging to write from a place of trauma, Ruotsalainen said, because “we are not the sum of our trauma”.
“It is challenging because it is exposure, which can make a writer vulnerable. However, it was incredibly rewarding to receive the embrace of feedback as it began trickling to me from social media and from reviews. What I wrote about, and how I wrote about it, resonated with many readers who had had similar experiences of harassment, sexual violence, and being belittled on the account of being a girl/woman.”
Her new poetry book features the theme of childbirth and the post-partum period, and she wrote the first draft immediately after the birth of her child, Ruotsalainen said, speaking ahead of her appearance at the 6th EU-China International Literary Festival.
“Childbirth and becoming a parent in the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic catapulted me into a crisis. I say crisis, but it was not necessarily an entirely negative one. Yet it has forced me to dig deep and take stock of what is important to me. This rupture at the dawn of something new is also intensely corporeal for those who give birth. We grow a human we must expel in order to survive. Childbirth is perhaps the most “natural” occurrence as it happens all the time, yet it was totally otherworldly for me. I do not feel that our society equips new parents, especially the ones who are pregnant and give birth, with the tools to make a smooth, loving and supported transition into caring for a tiny human.
“I wrote about this time in order to capture that liminal space of becoming a new parent, but also to draw attention to the embodied contradictions that underlie it. My friend Hanna Tyrväinen, who is the artist behind the images of my last book, is also working with me again to help visually capture the feelings of being unmoored from the postpartum body, flooded with hormones and aching with love towards a baby.”
Ruotsalainen work stems from a feminist consciousness, and she said she was drawn to a feminist way of thinking since she was young and faced an uneven playing field.
“I played competitive soccer but I did not see women playing professional soccer, being celebrated on TV and making a lot of money like the male athlete superstars. I knew that I practiced at least as hard as the boys I knew but still society enforced the message that “women’s soccer” was somehow ‘less than’. When I became a teenager I entered the world of being objectified and sexualized.
“As an undergraduate I signed up for a Women’s Studies class and realized that there are brilliant thinkers who have articulated and analyzed what I sensed and felt around me. Through my studies, I found a framework to analyze gender inequality and its intersections with racism, classism, ageism, colonialism, transphobia, homophobia and other forms of oppression. I remain drawn to this work because the world that we live in has been built on exploitation of people and the land. We have to heal our relationship to the earth and to each other, and it begins with having a nuanced and evolving analysis of power.”
Some of the key feminist issues in Europe today, Ruotsalainen said, have to do with border politics, gender-based violence, the backlash on the rights of women and gender and sexual minorities that have gained foothold in some European countries.
“Europe must assess its colonial and neocolonial role in global politics and assume its responsibility when people seek refuge at its borders. Europe must end violence towards migrants and grant asylum to those who seek it. A feminist politics on migration must also entail an adamantly anti-racist stance. A key feminist issue has always been gender-based violence, and the EU needs to ensure minimum protection for survivors regardless of country specific legislation. Each member state needs to sign on to eradicating gender-based violence and one way to do this is to fund the work of doing it and to shed light on how prevalent the issue is. In regards to the backlash on the rights of women and gender and sexual minorities, the EU needs to take a stance on ensuring that reproductive rights are realized in all member states. The rights of LGBTQI+ people are still very unequal across Europe and according to ILGA-Europe, the legislative progress on trans rights stagnated across Europe last year.”
Beyond being a writer herself, in 2018 Ruotsalainen co-founded a feminist publishing platform called Pesä (now known as Raikuu Collective) which has been a big success.
“When we founded Pesä, we had zero ‘credentials’, we just did it because I wanted to publish my poems without asking for permission or waiting for acceptance from established publishers. Small press poetry is important, because small presses spring up to challenge the existing hierarchies in publishing. These hierarchies are tied to power, influence, and conceptions of what is ‘good’ literature and what will allegedly sell the most copies. As a small feminist press we built our own audience through social media because we didn’t have any money for marketing. We were able to find our audience and support. Our audience was largely readers who didn’t see themselves reflected in dominant narratives. Small press poetry takes space for marginalized people and the digital era has made it easier for us to find each other. However, relying only on social media marketing can be taxing for writers, because social medial algorithms prefer sharing pictures of people and their faces. Social media often operates under the logic of having to share personal stories and to be hyper visible, which is taxing for people who are writing personal narratives about their experiences with oppression. It also makes us targets for harassment and things like shadow bans and censorship.”
In the publishing world autobiographical writing is enjoying popularity around the world, Ruotsalainen said, but added that for feminists telling their stories it has not always been so.
“One of the cornerstones of feminist theories is that ‘the personal is political’, which means that if you are writing from a position that has been marginalized by society, speaking your truth is a radical, political act. It is often a truth that the political status quo chooses to ignore because listening to it would require reckoning with the injustices baked into our societal structures. It is also true that works by women are more consumed by women, whereas works by men are read by both men and women. Therefore, a woman writing autobiographical material is seen as writing for women, on matters that relate to women, and men write on topics assumed to be universal. This argument is of course more nuanced, but I align myself with Katie Roiphe when, writing for Slate, she asked if Karl Ove Knausgård’s autobiographical/autofictional work would ever have achieved its popularity, if it had been written by a woman. A woman writing about her feelings and her domestic frustrations rarely makes it to the bestseller list and this bias impacts whose work gets published and recognized.
“The appeal of this genre for me is in learning about different people and their lives, and of course how they choose to tell them. In my reading I prioritize work by women and gender minorities of color and try to read outside of the western canon. I rarely pick up books by white, western men because they are read enough as is, our canons and much of our world view have been built on them. When I say this out loud I often get baffled and agitated responses, but then I ask the person to list the last five books they read to examine their own biases. It usually works!”