To Forgive Our Aunties and Their Misguided Yet Well-Meant Advice

Last month, I visited a second-hand bookstore somewhere in Punavuori. I was looking for a book to buy as a gift for someone but couldn’t find anything. The few books in English were mostly classics and not in good shape. Somehow, on a top shelf, I came across a book in a tip-top condition called _Mister Pip,_written by Lloyd Jones. I didn’t know the novel or the author, but the book had a beautifully illustrated hardcover, and sometimes, it’s reason enough to purchase a book just because it’s pretty. So for now, I’m keeping it for myself and will not offer it as a gift to anyone, unless later it turns out the inside doesn’t measure up to the outside. In that case, I might just revisit my generosity.

Mister Pip opens on a remote South Pacific island, threatened by uprising, where young Matilda and her classmates find their lives surprisingly intertwined with those of a boy called Pip, the hero of Mr Dickens’s The Great Expectations. The book is introduced to the kids through a man popularly known as Pop Eye who is the only teacher left on the conflict-stricken island. He confesses on the first day of school that he is not a teacher and that apart from his love of _The Great Expectations_he doesn’t have much to offer. So as a solution he invites the family members of the students to each come to the class and share a piece of their knowledge, and tools they have gathered throughout their life to understand and enjoy their surroundings and to survive. They can talk about anything, about their love for the colour blue or learning to predict the weather by looking at the behaviour of crabs: “Wind and rain are on the way if a crab digs straight down and blocks the hole with sand leaving marks like sunrays. We can expect strong winds but no rain if a crab leaves behind a pile of sand but does not cover the hole.” I haven’t finished the book yet, and to be honest, I do find the general theme of a novel by a dead white man being the source of joy on a colonized island inhabited by Black people, quite problematic. But the glorification of cultural imperialism aside, I found the chapters about the ordinary people giving tips and advice and sharing their acquired knowledge on ordinary things as part of a school curriculum interesting.

What would I teach if I was given an hour to share the quintessence of all that I know? What advice would I give? Not on a remote island in the South Pacific, but here in the contemporary art scene of a small Nordic European country.

I majored in film studies in high school. I was and still am extremely passionate about cinema and my teenage dream was to become a film director, to be specific, I wanted to be the second coming of Martin Scorsese. However, being too shy, introverted and not being very good at standing up for myself in group projects didn’t make things easy. When I got my diploma and had to figure out a university plan, I went to one of my younger aunts for advice. She told me, “it doesn’t matter how talented you are, how much you try, how much you read, how many films you watch and how many exceptional scripts you write. You can never become a film director because you don’t have the personality it requires and you can’t acquire those necessary traits by studying and practising”. So I moved on to get a BA in painting as all it asked for, was me, my introverted personality, canvas, paint and brush.

A few days before I left Iran to move to Italy in 2013, I found a note from my mother attached to the mirror in my room. The note said, "Out there, you are going to face many who will tell you, “you can’t”. What you need to do is turn to them and tell them, “Just sit back and watch me!”. I took two things to heart from this note; the encouragement I needed to become a self-righteous bitch who takes joy in proving everyone wrong, and more importantly, the note was emblematic of my mother’s extraordinary level of care and strength. She was worried and scared about sending her only daughter to Europe alone. At the time, I was the only person in my family to ever move abroad. Before me, there were my mother’s cousins who left Iran before the 1979 revolution. One was mysteriously killed in the US and the other mysteriously disappeared in Germany. I know so many parents who would use all their power to stop their children, especially their daughters, from leaving, but no, not her. All she did was give badass advice that I tend to revisit a lot, as many times I have been made to feel invisible, irrelevant, unheard, incapable, or weak. As many times as I have been told, “you can’t”.

Image Caption:

The note said, "Out there, you are going to face many who will tell you that “you can’t”. What you need to do is to turn to them and tell them, “Just sit back and watch me!”

A few months ago, a friend called me to ask if I could read their grant application. Reviewing grant applications is something I gladly do for anyone that asks because I somehow feel like I’ve gotten the hang of things and I can offer solid advice here and there. This particular application though left me speechless, it was extremely ambitious and beyond the means of that person to be able to undertake at such an early stage in their career. To realize it, they’d have to pull in millions of euros and that just didn’t seem realistic to me. So I gathered my courage and all the tact I had at my disposal to tell them that “hey, you gotta start smaller, be consistent in your work, build a relevant CV, don’t jump from one genre to another, tone your literature down, make it easily digestible, imagine how you and your application comes across through the eyes of a jury member who is bored, impatient and hard to please, etc.” Basically, all the things I had been told by someone from the Kone Foundation who had been invited as a guest lecturer to the ‘Artist in Society’ course in our MA programme ViCCA. The general outcome of the course was to prepare us art students for the tough and uncaring post-graduation world that expects us. And boy, did she do a great job at that. At one point she told us “imagine yourselves as products, you have to learn to sell yourselves to us”. I’m paraphrasing, of course, but that was the gist she was there to impart. And although I despised the attitude and everything around it, I accepted it as a rule and not only accepted it, I now remind others of it. After fully deflating my friend with my so-called realistic and pragmatic advice, I hung up the phone and immediately felt like utter shit. I felt like I had just spent an hour on the phone telling someone “you can’t”. When had I turned into what my mother had warned me against? When had I turned into my aunt? I wanted to call back and apologize and tell my friend, “hey fuck everything and everyone, if you want to work on a million euro idea, a year into graduation from art school, then you do that and while you’re at it tell others to fuck off and watch you”. I thought about doing that for a while and how happy it would make me to be that person, but then, in the end, I didn’t do it. It didn’t feel like a responsible thing to do. I want my friends to be idealistic and ambitious when it comes to their artistic practice, I believe they indeed CAN do anything, but since we’re not living in an American dream-success story-trash Hollywood movie, chances are that our brilliant ideas will not get recognition in short term and therefore things will not always work out as we’d like them, especially if we are not white and upper-class, which is why I advise friends: “hey, you gotta start smaller, be consistent in your work, build a relevant CV, don’t jump from one genre to another, tone your literature down, make it easily digestible, imagine how you and your application comes across through the eyes of a jury member who is bored, impatient and hard to please, etc.” I suppose I CAN learn to deal with the self-loathing that this uninspiring advice brings upon me because I’m not telling anyone, “you can’t”.

Giving out tips and advice is all about what you know at the time, and what has and has not worked for you until then. After that, we are free to go to the beach and learn about the crabs’ behaviour on our own. All we’ve been granted is a nudge.