Why It's Not So Bad

I can't remember if it was one conversation or a series of intermittent dialogues spread out across the days I sat bent on the concrete floor reading one of the books you'd brought (I finished my own in the first few days in Salvador). Sometimes I'd be alone and I recall heating up the coffee our host had not finished before he left for work early-early and that it felt like a betrayal and so tasted delicious (other peoples' homes are the only places the coffee is sweetened). Your old, old phone left on the table playing white birch while I composed long letters about nothing in particular (a horse in the mountains; monkeys playing in the trees like armed robbers). I remember being bored at times and I remember that it tasted too-sweet like something slightly rotten but not dangerously so; a kiwifruit left a day too ripe, alcoholic and dizzying in its exaggerated fruitness. 

We talked about what we'd do and I had, as usual, a million plans (not one) that I'd been working on before coming to meet you: I'd apply for a scholarship to Japan and I was going to a residency in Iceland and another in Italy, I only needed to apply and I was putting together my portfolio and gathering letters of recommendation and so on and so forth. I was so busy and so occupied before coming, and now I was doing nothing, with you. I remember crying, I think because of this, on a hard wooden bench you'd slept on weeks prior, perhaps I felt that I was trying to touch too many things.

I probably got a bit mad with you when judged for having such expansive and impossible ambitions. As if it was a bad thing, something tasted sour and I didn't know how to explain to you or defend myself. Whenever I think about coming back to Norway after my degree, there's one moment in this little house in the jungle that keeps coming back to me, as if that was when I decided not to do, but to try to be. 

I think I betrayed myself a little bit there, but it's like I've ignored it. When I meet old friends I explain, with a self-deprecating laugh, that I'm living at home as a 22-year-old. Somehow that fact seems so fragil and young that I rush to its defences without even stopping to listen, and then what I hear is that so is everybody else. They're all living at home, and they all feel somewhat weird about it, but the thing is that my weirdness comes from other ideas of who and what I should be and aspire to be. It doesn't need my protection, my little situation, and it doesn't need my ego getting in the way of what it needs to be doing. 

About Anger

I'm a pleasant person to be around. I get along with people, play nicely, and tend not to provoke, cause problems, disagree or fly into fits of rage. I rarely argue and am, all in all, a bland and likable fellow. This is, at least, how I think about myself most of the time, because this is how I am to myself.

I know they say that traveling's really all about you. It has little or nothing to do with the actual country you're traveling in, since introspection is the main souvenir you want to bring home. You've learned something about yourself, perhaps you can't put it into words yet and perhaps it doesn't really show in any significant way when you still get up and have a comfortable and relatively peaceful breakfast back home, but it's there. The hidden knowledge about yourself, something gross, perhaps, or beautiful, who knows?

Just a poor, innocent tuk tuk driver, not knowing that this crazy white woman is soon to descend upon him... 

The point of this is that seeing a slum, or even better, touring a slum and speaking with (not to) the locals, makes you a better person. This isn't just traveling and it certainly isn't tourism, it's Traveling and Education and Becoming A Well-Rounded Human Being With Regard For Others And An Understanding Of The Unfairness In The World As Well As His/Her/Their Own Privilege.

I knew this, as I have a quite privileged education. And since I am a pleasant person it was my goal to remain this way WHILE also Traveling in India (note the big T, folks).

Pleasant people do not yell at taxi drivers. Pleasant people also don't get unreasonably mad when someone who's obviously a million times poorer than you is trying to cheat you out of what's actually less than $1. Neither do pleasant people lose it with the tuk tuk driver who obviously doesn't speak English and probably didn't understand where you wanted to go in the first place.

Looking at this gorgeous and superbly scenic photograph of a Kashmiri landscape it's quite hard to believe that this was the Indian state where I was without a doubt most angry!

So I'm a terrible person, I guess. But jokes aside, it was actually very unsettling to see how I reacted in a way I just didn't think was... me. Obviously I can justify myself and say that I was extremely annoyed by constantly getting unwanted attention from people, in some places more than others. Kashmir, for example, is a prime example of a place I will never go again without crossdressing since we (being two young women WITHOUT the company of a Responsible Adult Male) would not be able to walk down the street without hearing "Where are you from?" and "How are you?" from almost every passing male. 

Then I'm supposed to say that it's a courteous and hospitable culture (which it was/is, in some parts more than others) and that those men were simply being helpful and welcoming. And I was a visitor, which I get, I know it's not Norway where nobody will talk to you EVER unless you're closely related by blood, in which case you'll be bound together forever. 

I know this is the age-old question of How-Am-I-In-Another-Culture-And-Can-I-Even-Complain-About-This? Maybe it's not very original either, but I just don't know how to think about this. Do I store that version of myself away from other situations when I feel harassed? Is it more okay to be harassed in a foreign culture because I, after all, chose to go there, and is it less alright for me to be upset about it? Do I adjust my expectations because I'm traveling in a place where women are thought of differently? If so, how? 

After this extended rant about other cultures not being like my own, let's just throw in a picture for good measure of myself doing all the wrong things in India. Spot the vices!

An Attempt At Somewhat Honestly and Less Bitingly and Guardedly Sarcastic Entry On My Trip To The Indian Subcontinent

Trigger warning: I'm trying to be a little less joke-y because it's becoming a little bit annoying to me, but it's honestly so hard to write about my trip to India without making it unbearably sarcastic or dripping with some sort of Wisdom. 

I remember coming to India and thinking I'd never tell both romantic and true stories about the trip. I was standing in my friends' apartment looking through the gritty steel bars out at Chennai and thinking I'd been someplace like this before, and it was too easy to compare. In my mind I've got categories that spell out Undeveloped Nations ("Busy", "Crowded", "Colorful" and "Chaotic But With Its Own Beautiful Logic: I'll Never Judge But Will Definitely Buy Your Overpriced Mugs, Native Woman" are tags for this) and Developed Nations (hereunder we find the Ugly--almost the entire United States, let's be real--and the Beautiful--most Western European cities). These might not be correct or fair or Right (often confused with Righteous), but years of indoctrination, cultural influence and lots and lots of stereotypes have made me so, or I have made myself so. 

  

My sweaty forehead to show you I went to a Hot Place. There isn't much more to say about this, except that it was taken at the Qutub Minar outside New Delhi.

I remember coming to India and thinking that I wanted to learn something, and I wanted to change. There wasn't anything in particular about myself that was bothering me at the time (I know it's a horrible sentence, just bear with me and try not to read it out loud), except for perhaps my tendency to make everything self-reflexive and Life Lesson-y. 

This is a filler picture since I don't have any emblematic photographs of my Thoughts or Reflections, so this is a pretty and interesting bowl filled with something gross that still managed to be surprisingly photogenic. From a coir factory on our way to Alppuzha, Kerala.

When I came to India it felt as if I was split in two consecutive personalities or ways of reacting. The first Johanne (J1) would always think something about a situation, and then the second Johanne (J2) would sweep in to save the day and tell the first me that I should be more culturally sensitive, that every other White Female Tourist probably thinks the same, and that I'm obviously seeing this from an imperial standpoint (though to be fair we Norwegians never colonized. Except for the Vikings, but that HARDLY counts, since it was more a sort of doing stuff (raping, pillaging, burning villages) and then just leaving. And for my American friends, we were the first to get to you but left after non-hostile interactions with Native Americans. I know I'm back home in Norway when self-righteousness feels natural and perfectly good to me!).

So I've got two Johannes, and one of them is heavily censoring the other one, telling her she should be more appreciative of the culture and yada yada yada.

J1 would be thinking that it was staggeringly noisy and messy and why is everybody staring at me?, while J2 would remind J1 that I'm a guest after all and this is their country and I should merely be a passive observer, and then J1 breaks through the door and I'm My Own Woman Goddamnit, I Deserve Some Respect, and Look I'm Even Wearing Indian Clothing No Such Tank Top Business! 

My mind = complete chaos. I wonder if this is what every traveler to India experiences. 

I also remember the months before I went there, and how I'd inevitably get two types of responses from everyone I told; either they'd be terrified and more or less tell me I'd be raped a thousand times before my first sunset on the continent, or they would explain to me that India was their spirit animal or country or whatever and that it was a very special place (told in a sort of seductive/drowsy whisper). Let me also mention that these were reactions post-India, even after I'd try to explain my side of the story, in which I tried not flattering either opinion. I probably came across as a terrified, PC tourist with an expensive education that taught her how not to say things as straightforward as possibly. 

This is also from the Qutub Minar, I think. I just love lawnmowers because they remind me of home and summer, but here it seemed somewhat absurd. Plus the green grass UNCUT seems so much nicer and fresher than the dry and bristly grass that's been mowed.

Honestly, I haven't really talked that much about it since coming home either, and it's been quite a few months. Though that might also be because I'm an antisocial hermit that shies away from people I'm not related to by blood, and I'm suddenly sounding like I'm from the Norwegian equivalent of the Appalachians... 

People ask (not just the Oh-how-was-India-let's-talk-about-your-mother-now, but actually ask), and I say "Weell, I don't know... I really don't know..." and then they know it's not going to be pretty or something, either way they don't seem to want to continue and so we leave it. And so I've just left it. I've left most of my thoughts about India, my real thoughts, somewhere behind, perhaps in the diary I was trying to maintain while there. The only times I've gotten to take a somewhat closer look at what I really thought has been while talking to the friend I traveled with for the entire trip, but it's satisfying in an attention-seeking way to also vent those frustration in a more or less public space.

So I'll try. I'll try to write something about India that isn't just about how you can get SUCH a good mango lassi there for like NO money at all and how people are SO friendly although they are SUPER poor because that is rot. This is a start. 

Some as of lates's

Couple of tidbits: I'm organizing a show of my own work in Norway in about four weeks time!

This is obviously thrilling and seems completely counterintuitive, and lots of second thoughts are announcing their arrival but I guess that's the regular gist of it. 

I even went totally professional and used part of my grant to get postcards printed. If you can't see that's my gorgeous eye peeking out at you. The grant money was given to me by Trafo, a lovely little organization in Norway that supports young artists by arranging workshops, offering mentorship by and feedback from professional artists, as well as GIVING OUT MONEY TO DO STUFF, which is the best part. So thank you!

I naturally went all out and post-ordered beads. 

I have also seen Ai Wei Wei! In London! He has a giant show up, and I was lucky enough to see it. Enormously impressive, though parts of it were kind of flat, in my opinion. Video about steel bars and earthquake top-notch, though!

Hope to be updating more soon, but for now the show is consuming most of my time not spent in school!

Tidbits and Norwegian habits

I have some new goals, and though I'm hesitant to share them here (or share too much about projects I'm working on, as they will change plus involve others... better to wait, methinks), I'll say some few things: 

I've gotten a grant to do a project related to the beadings, which is both TERRIFYING and absolutely thrilling. I feel very lucky, and very un-Scandi to be bragging about it here. I have some ideas, and it will take a slightly different form than this I hope (it should develop anywyas). More to come on that. And in that vein I'm also planning to show these works FINALLY, and this will likely happen in December but THAT IS STILL SECRET.

Funnily, second piece of "news" is that I am super super super bored of the beadings that I've been so proud of on social media and here on this famed blog AND have gotten money to do more of. And I'm sick of them. Serejuslay, so tired. But that's okay, I'm thinking it's just downtime or something. Moms with newborn babies have that, right? Like, tired periods? Where that baby is just... crying so much. Well, not to equate my "burden" with theirs, all I'm saying is that making art with only ones own deadlines is 1. challenging and 2. supa liberating.

Can't remember what was supposed to be here... I'm working on some more, uh, daring? pieces now, but don't really want to show them because I've suddenly realized that NOTHING LEAVES THE INTERNET and I LIVE IN NORWAY WHICH IS SUDDENLY MUCH SMALLER and it feels like I'm related to everybody, so I'll keep that a secret too! For the time being. 

There are more exciting projects for next year also, for which it seems I'll be needing a ridiculous sum of money. I don't know if that's really good or really bad... As in, does it make me more of a real artist that I'm planning to apply for at least 25,000 Norwegian kroner ($3700 roughly)? Or more I-come-from-a-stupidly-rich-country-that-still-has-half-decent-arts-coverage?

Ok.