Humour as a weapon against prejudice

Mateus Tembe's role as Muhammed in Mogadishu Avenue plays with Finnish clichés

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By Terhi Pietikäinen
     
      How should a Finn be and behave, in order to be accepted as a Finn? The man's name is Turakainen, there's a portrait of war-hero Mannerheim on the wall, and his son is being tutored to become a tango idol.
      But there's a catch...
      When the man's first name is Muhammed and he's black, and has adopted his Finnish ex-wife's surname, there are bound to be collisions and altercations in a multicultural suburb. In a fictive sense, at least: this is a slice of life from the suburb depicted in Mogadishu Avenue, which opened recently on the commercial channel MTV3. The series holds a wry mirror up to "Finnishness" through the tragicomical encounters of immigrants and native Finns in an apartment block.
      "Muhammed is not just a victim, he also causes problems of his own. But nobody in the series is downright bad - everybody does their best. It's just that shocks keep happening", notes Mateus Tembe, 32, who has taken on the role of Muhammed Turakainen.
     
The name of the series, with a screenplay provided by popular author and TV-face Jari Tervo and direction from Mikko Mattila, hints at the nickname generally given to Meri-Rastilan tie in Vuosaari - "Mogadishu Avenue". A good many Somali families live in the area (see linked article).
      The character of Muhammed, working his socks off in a determined attempt to become Finnish with a capital F, pokes fun at national clichés that are ultimately superficial in the Finnish experience. The concept of cultural assimilation is of itself not awfully politically correct.
     
Tembe himself regards humour as a means of fending off and defusing prejudices. Sometimes when one is talking seriously, others are scared to come out and say what they are really thinking. The prejudices remain latent, but they do not go away anywhere.
      "But when you try to play with things, it can be easier to understand one another", he believes.
      Tembe, who hails originally from Mozambique, moved to Finland six years ago. He is not actually a resident of the 'burbs, but lives in the centre of Helsinki. He is currently working on his master's thesis at the Helsinki School of Economics.
      Mateus has by no means been plucked from acting obscurity for the MTV3 role: he has acted in Mozambique since the early 1990s and has also worked in the theatre in Portugal for a while.
      "My elder brother built a guitar and taught me how to play it. When I started making music, I ran into people in the arts. I think my first stage role was as a rabbit in a traditional Mozambique fairy-tale."
     
At the age of just 16, Tembe and a couple of friends founded the M'beu theatre-group. During the 1990s he was also active in another company, called Mutumbela Gogo, and also in his own Mutxeko theatre troupe, as a scriptwriter and director.
      In fact he had contacts in Finland through his theatre work well before he decided to apply for a student place here.
      M'beu were among the guest artists appearing at the World Village Festival in Helsinki in 1997, while Mutxeko took part in the Teatro, Agora! theatre workshop development project in Mozambique, with funding from the Academy of Finland and the Ministry of Education.
     
On his arrival in Finland, Tembe ran up against the cultural differences in small everyday matters: people do not cook at home here as much as in his homeland, and sometimes the silence - and the silences between people - can be deafening.
      "Finns have a sense of humour, of course, but I wondered what it was that they laughed at, or where they laugh. If we tell jokes among a few friends, there will always be a couple of Finns who don't laugh at the gags. And then a bit later they'll come out and say it was a good joke", says Tembe, shaking his head and smiling.
      Prejudices are also a two-way street.
      "Sometimes I think we're like two operating systems, Apple's Mac OS X and Microsoft's Windows, and not all the same programs will run on each of them. Tolerance is all about giving the other guy another chance to try, and not giving up at the first attempt, even if you don't quite comprehend one another." .
     
Mateus Tembe has done his networking well - he has created an extensive set of contacts in Finland and he has already set up a couple of businesses.
      Now he is involved in Somebazar, providing consultancy services to new business start-ups, and the Chestor Group that he helped to found aims to help Finnish and Mozambican companies to get together and cooperate.
      "Acting is a nice enough hobby, but as a profession it is rather unreliable. Here in Finland they make so many historical films and biographies. I mean, I'm not exactly likely to get picked for the role of Jean Sibelius or Mannerheim, am I?" laughs Tembe.
     
He believes that in the future he will live in two countries.
      "I shall buy a summer cottage in Finland and a house in Mozambique", he plans.
      Not so VERY different, after all, from those older-generation Turakainens who fly south in the winter and return to their cottages and the mosquitoes in the summer months.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 6.11.2006


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Cultural diversity on "Mogadishu Avenue" in Helsinki (7.11.2006)

Helsingin Sanomat