Debate on the membership criteria of authors' associations
Right now, a debate is taking place in newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet. It started from Jonas Forsbacka's interview with Hassan Blasim (HBL Feb 11). In the interview and in a longer in-depth article on the same theme, he highlighted the issue of the conditions for authors who write in languages - other than Finnish or Swedish in Finland - an issue that we worked on during the years 2014–2018 through various projects in collaboration with, for example, the "non-dominant language" authors' project Sivuvalo - Sidelight. One of the shortcomings we already back then focused on concerned the membership criteria that Blasim mentioned. Writers who write in languages other than Finnish or Swedish cannot become members of Suomen Kirjailijaliitto or Finland's Swedish Writers' Association (FSF).
The day after Forsbacka's articles, Hufvudstadsbladet's cultural director Andrea Svanbäck continued in a column (HBL Feb 12) that the criteria "for how and what we read into concepts such as 'Finland-Swedish' need to be redefined and discussed. A flexible minority like the Finland Swedes should not turn inward".
A little over a week later (HBL Feb 20) the author Johanna Holmström opposed: "Being translated into Swedish is not the same as writing in Swedish. How should the quality assessment be made if the language style for the work in Swedish is not the author's?" Holmström criticized Blasim for passivity: "Sitting and waiting for others to fight for one's own cause rarely leads to anything."
The fact is, however, that the authors she referred to have been fighting this battle for over a decade and that the language and membership issue has been discussed and is well documented, as the author Daniel Malpikka reminded us in his debate post “Swedish-language literary institutions are not powerless” (HBL Feb 21). Various solutions to resolve the membership issue were presented, for example, in report Wandering words, Comparisons of the Position of Non-dominant Language Writers in Nordic Organizations (Korhonen & Paqvalén 2016) by Culture for All Service. Malpikka also questioned Holmström’s idea that the authors should found a third association that would be multilingual.
This problem does not exist in the other Nordic countries, as they have language-inclusive membership criteria. The above-mentioned report presents in detail how the Nordic authors' associations carry out quality assessments of authors' texts in languages other than the national one.
This news was written on February 24. The discussion at HBL has continued since then.
Debatt på HBL:
Artiklar om författarföreningar (directs to Hufvudstadsbladet)
More information on our projects on multilingualism and literary field
Project Multilingualism and diversity as a resource in the cultural field, with links to reports:
- Wandering words: Comparisons of the Position of Non-dominant Language Writers in Nordic Organizations
- My Language, My Homeland: Recommendations for the Improvement of the Kurdish-Nordic Literary Field
- A Writing Hand Reaches Further - ”Čálli giehta olla guhkás”: Recommendations for the improvement of the Sámi literary field
- A View of the Conditions of Arabic Literature in the Nordic Region
Project Kirjallisuus ilman rajoja
