The Women I Think About At Night by Mia Kankimäki

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There was a point I thought I had lost this book while camping in Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, and I frantically tried searching for it, heading up to our reception to ask if someone had seen it. After repeating the name, the staff member exclaimed “What a title!”.

The Women I Think About at Night by Mia Kankimäki caught my eye at my local Dymocks in Sydney, a few weeks before I was to embark on a 3 month journey around the world, the first stop being the south of Africa. Part memoir, travel journal and investigative piece, Kankimäki combs through history to present to us women who serve as her Night Women - women who defied tradition, forging their own path, often into the deep unknown.

Originally, I wanted to read about Africa before I visited, and I thought what better than a travelogue detailing the historical experiences of the continent I was going to. It did much more than offer a scout of the area.

Kankimäki blends introspection, streams of consciousness and painstaking research into her subjects to present a vivid palate that I thoroughly enjoyed eating. I considered it championing women, and urging those at the cusp of their great adventures some promising advice.

We follow eleven women each of whom accomplished things unheard of in their unique context, and glimpse at the power of passion, which transcended these figures into the heights they reached. Ranging from exploring the world when you needed a man’s consent, to surpassing the old masters in their painting ability to reach the ranks of ikMichelangelo, we observe a burning tenacity in these women who history has all to easily cast aside.

Women like Properezia, Alexandra, Mary, Isabella, Yayoi, Sofonisba, Ema Saikō, Lavinia, Artemesia, Karen Blixen, Ida, and Nellie.

I enjoyed this book, especially as I travelled on my own adventures.

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Karen saw her own life as an exhausting attempt to climb a steep mountain, as if she were constantly striving to attain some potential greatness in herself, something that could be—and she envied her siblings their contentment with ordinary everyday life. Right, Karen. Do we really have to be constantly striving for something difficult and scary? Why can’t we just lie in bed in our parents’ attic and watch the Nature Channel?

I’m ashamed to be ensconced here in this his beautifully landscaped, fenced in hotel territory which shields the best view in the region from the locals’ eyes - the people who live in clay huts just outside the fence, without electricity or windows.

• Reality of tourism, inaccessible to most locals around the world

We drive from giraffe to giraffe and the cameras whir-wow, wonderful, ama-a-zing-and the country-counters can check another item off their bucket lists. I turn away from them and think that I’d like to curl up on that sublime shore amidst the giraffes and just stay there, somehow mystically fuse with it all. I know, of course, that I can’t. If what you come here for is a primordial experience, some kind of connection with origins, with creation, you can get it-well, in the sense that you can look at it through glass. But you can’t join it. You can only look at it. I try to look with everything I’ve got.

• deep time, stop it all.

Writing, traveling, reflecting on how we want to live the few remaining moments in our lives. And the fact that we are finally free of waiting for anyone, is a gift.

• a fantastic line, how do you wish to live the remaining moments in your life?

I reflect on why a woman’s childlessness is always considered a tragedy, and why her actions are so often interpreted as compensation for a lack of children.

Or maybe it’s as Olli says: you experience all your feelings more powerfully in Africa, for good and bad. Everything is extreme: stunning nature, abject poverty, and the insanity of the whites.

But then, somehow, it began to pall on me. Was this all there was to life? Did life have nothing new to offer me? (Probably it was at this juncture that many of my friends started families.) I began to feel that I’d had enough of doing the things I was supposed to do. I’d been conscientious, decent, obedient, and sensible long enough. I didn’t want to be sensible any longer!

When I study the sepia-toned photographs she took in China at the end of the nineteenth century, I imagine her carrying her camera box along the shores of the Yangtze, developing her photos in the river’s current at night, in that dark room supplied by nature, as she so beautifully put it. Her photographs always remained a bit grainy, because no matter how she filtered the final rinse water, some fine-ground Yangtze sand always clung to their surface. I run my fingers over the cool pages of the picture book: they are smooth. The sand rubbed off somewhere along the way.

• love the imagery of the sand rubbing off somewhere

In her official explorer photograph, Ida is wearing a day dress in the style then popular in Viennese bour. geois circles, with a bonnet tied under her china style of headgear whose symbolic value cannot be overestimated. Looking a bit like a lampshade, the bonnet was also called the kiss-me-if-you-can hat: it blocked attempted kisses effectively. It also functioned like a horses blinkers: by restricting its wearer’s field of vision to straight ahead, it emphasized a woman’s virtue, fragility, and limited sphere of life. A woman dressed in a bonnet remained obediently inside the confines assigned to her (the home), and without looking to either side she proceeded down the path onto which her male guardian (father or husband) had set her (her family’s well-being). On top of everything else, lining Ida’s face on the inside of her bonnet is a thick padding of crimped lace, as if to say: Nothing to worry about, I’m here in my padded little reality, living by the book, precisely as you want me to live.

• I didn’t know the origins of the bonnet - so interesting.

Mary truly caught this individual fish that was born in some bend of the Ogooué River. This very fish she prepared for preservation with equipment that she had in her canoe; this very fish she carried with her through the jungle and finally on a steamship across the Atlantic to distant Liverpool, whence it has wended its way through the following 120 years to my computer screen in a studio apartment in Helsinki. Maybe she talked to it while it was still on the hook (okay, got you, little guy), maybe hummed a little while removing the hook from its mouth, or, how do I know, maybe you can’t catch a fish this little on a hook, maybe Mary scooped up whole schools of little fish in some bowl carved out of wood. (In any case, I imagine her being cheerful throughout.) Maybe she took one tiddler as a pet someone to talk to and gave it a name, Polly, or Myrtle, and took it along with her in a water container at the bottom of the canoe. …

• love the construction of our own stories when we see things. The trailing history.

“Little account is taken of a woman if she sacrifices herself on the domestic hearth, while should she follow in the track of men-frequently a much easier course everybody cries ‘How marvellous!”

*I was moved almost to tears. I have never seen anything so beautiful. When I came out, I had a heart flur-ter that Berliners call ‘nerves’: my life force had ebbed and I feared 1 would fall as I walked. … I was all a-tremble for two full hours.” He had experienced for the first time what came to be called the Stendhal syndrome—a powerful state of multisymptom confusion provoked by an experience of art.

• so interesting, time to research that.

Names

In honor of Properzia, I eat tiny plums and arrange their pits in rows I boil Alexandra’s tea and drink. I examine Mary’s fish to remind myself that any kind of passion can be meaningful. I think of Isabella, who always felt better when she had tickets in hand for a sea voyage. I think of Yayoi, who accepted life’s limitations and made money off them. I think of Sofonisba, who sat in her cabin belowdecks on a sailing ship en route to the court of Spain, her cassone filled with painting equipment. I think of Ema Saiko with her travel permits at the checkpoints, who’d rather go to Kyoto to drink sake and write poems than get married. I think of Lavinia in childbed, longing to hold a brush in her hand again, and Artemisia taking things in hand in a series of new cities. When I lie in bed with a migraine, I think of Karen and all the things she suffered through a hundred years ago, in Africa, alone. When I feel the pinch of dwindling finances, I think of Ida. And when it comes time to pack my suitcase, I try very hard to think of Nellie,

Created by Apurva Shukla.

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