My Fulbright Year in Finland: Then and Now
Over 25 years ago, my Fulbright scholarship in Helsinki, Finland, gave me the freedom to work long hours on poetry – my ruling passion in those days. The poetry of Pentti Saarikoski, one of Finland’s premier modernist poets (whose stunning work I had come to know through English translations by the poet Anselm Hollo), made me entirely smitten. Saarikoski’s poems are without an American equivalent. His language is leavened with lyrics drawn from multiple sources, such as Heraclitus and Homer, but also with traces of the high modernism of James Joyce or Ezra Pound.
Even though I focused on poetry for my Fulbright scholarship, I had a very hard time with the usual tasks of reading and writing. Since I am legally blind, and at the time I also lacked personal advocacy skills, much of my studies abroad proved a slow and tiring process. I could see a printed page only by holding it to the end of my nose and scanning the script with my left eye. That eye, also hard to control, often moved around instead of staying focused in one place. Consequently reading poetry required a lot of hard work, especially because I had set an additional goal of reading Saarikoski in his native Finnish. I learned enough Finnish to work my way through two of Saarikoski’s last books. In the end, I put far more attention into the abstractions of literature than the realities of studying with a disability abroad.
My reluctance to disclose my blindness in my early years related to growing up in a strongly academic family that ironically couldn’t talk about my visual impairment in productive ways. I grew up hiding how poor my vision really was.
During my Fulbright year in Finland, when I told people about my visual impairment, they generally responded with kindness; yet, no technology or services existed to assist me with reading or getting around the city. People with disabilities were on their own. When I couldn’t see the blackboard or read the tiny print in a Finnish course at the university, the professor behaved as though my request for a personal reader and my inability to see disqualified me from learning in her course. Her briskness when she told me she couldn’t possibly help me, I still recall today. Nowadays this wouldn’t happen. Future Fulbrighters benefit from greater collaboration between the grantee, the host country institution, and the Fulbright Program managers to ensure that those with disabilities receive the necessary disability-related accommodations to ensure equal opportunity learning.
After the publication of my memoir, Planet of the Blind, some twenty years later, the Finnish Association of the Blind invited me to speak about the very topic I had downplayed many years earlier as a Fulbright student in Finland. I found myself back in Helsinki with an accomplishment – a book about coming to terms with disability, its particular struggles and remarkable beauty.
When I think about that Fulbright year I realize how far we have come as a global village. The United Nations adopted its international charter on the rights of people with disabilities. Nokia, the Finnish mobile phone company, produced a talking cell phone that also takes pictures of printed pages and reads them aloud for people who are blind or have low vision. Amazing advances have taken place all over the world where disabilities are concerned. Although more remains to be done, the doors have opened wider for people with disabilities. Young writers and scholars with disabilities are on the move participating in exciting times for international education. My year in Helsinki was one of the signature experiences of my life; I was lucky the Fulbright program worked to include people with disabilities over a quarter century ago. Today, as a professor of English at the University of Iowa, I still have connections to my Fulbright year – every time I teach courses that include the work of Pentti Saarikoski.
