Authors: Jonas Hassen Khemiri
“I will miss you, but my hope is still that we do not see each other for a long time. I will now seek my retreat to my family!”
I wished your father’s success and waved his farewell.
That same night he was back outside my door with an alcoholic odor and the excuse that something unfortunate had happened on the way to the airport.
“What?” I wondered.
“A sign of fate,” responded your father and rolled up his eyes.
The postponation of your father’s journey home was repeated like a tradition. The whole time it was a sign of fate that stopped his departure. The sun sifted wrong through a chestnut tree, a chestnut had clinked alarmingly against a pocket coin, a news headline had said something about a … chestnut? Parallel to your father really wanting to return, he could not return. Do you have this double ambivalence in your experience?
Dads disappear.
Dads turn to gas.
Paradoxically enough, it’s in his absence that Dads’ presence grows stronger than ever.
Because suddenly Dads’ silhouettes are sitting there behind helicopter windows. There are Dads, hunch-running out of the rotor eddy and shaking hands with presidents and heavy-shouldered generals. Then Dads climb up to platforms, wave the cheers from the masses, promise new antidiscrimination laws that will actually have consequences and companies that discriminate will be self-destructed and presidents applaud, generals salute, the people rejoice, and sweat-runny Dads dry their foreheads with cloth napkins and are led past the troops’ attention swords toward the refrigerator-cold limousine backseat.
And there are Dads training in lightbulb rooms. Dads pump iron and eat oat pasta and punch themselves sweaty against sandbags that have Keep Sweden Swedish logos and Bert Karlsson’s face. Dads measure biceps and thigh muscles with doubly extended measuring tapes, oil their Glocks, file their bullets (carefully carefully) to get the right explosion effect. Dads teach their sons all the kung fu pressure points and deadly finger combinations. Dads hit the bull’s-eye on skinhead dolls, they assemble a group and hunt for skinheads and Sweden Democrats and of course they will find that damn cunt in the southern suburb who shone red laser light at passersby right when Laser Man paranoia was at its height, and presumably laughed when panicked
blattar
threw themselves down on bike paths and scraped up their chins. And look there! There are Dads coming home again and
opening the studio, and instead of photographing pets they start to document the police’s
blatte
abuse, racist doormen, and the Sweden Democrats’ tax cheats. Or? What are Dads really doing during this time? No idea.
Does the reader understand that the above passage is not the reality of truth, but rather your fantasies? Does the reader understand that your father never
WANTED
to leave his family, but was forced to this by the modification of the Swedish society? Does anyone at all understand anything about a story that is not their own? Doubt has begun to stretch my breast.
During the months ahead, your father supported himself by photographing tourists with a Polaroid camera on the beaches of Tabarka. He prepared himself for his journey home. He thought of your mother.
If you are brooding about how he could let himself be separated from Pernilla, I must detail you: Certainly he missed your mother. More than anyone else. There is no more delicious, more intelligent woman in this universe, this is his strong conviction. Still. But at the same time, it is the tragic fact of life that all love one day finds a normalized routine. Even love that was launched with ground vibrations and artificial sky explosions and a man who comes into a
paillote
night after night shouting: “Her name is Bergman! Pernilla Bergman!” Even love that seems to pulverize all walls just to have the possibility of existing. One day you wake up and the person who gave you a nervous tongue cling and perspirations of desire suddenly stands heavy-hipped and slack-breasted beside you in a bathroom mirror with a ghastly grimace to clean her teeth with floss. One day you wake up and the beautiful youth who cited poetry by torchlight and burned his life to modify Art is suddenly a somewhat corpulent photographer of pugs. Such is the tragic passage
of life and your father accompanied such thoughts in preparation for his journey home.
In the end, what got your father to pile his courage and return was a letter from your mother. She wrote that she had stifled her rage, that she partially understood your father’s going away, but that a divorce was now obligatory. She also wrote that she was worried about you. You spent more and more nightly time roaming around the city. One night you had been transported home by two police, who accused you of metro vandalism. Your telephone conversations with your friends were acted in more and more broken Swedish, and faced with the upcoming November 30, your mother was worried that you would participate in the traditional conflicts between racists and antiracists.
“I beg you. Come home so we can arrange the divorce. And you can talk reason with your son.” Your father packed his bags, strongly decided to finally go home. I wished his success and waved his farewell. Naturally I would have stopped him immediately if I had known the tragic consequences his visit would have …
The year is ninety-three
and Dads have been gone without a trace for a year and a half. November 30 is approaching. The happy day for racists. They will have processions past the palace and leave wreaths of flowers at the statue of King Charles
XII
. They will honor the Laser Man and New Democracy, they will bellow national anthems and spit snuff and
heil
and stamp their boots. In our city! In Dads’ absence you’ve grown up and started a war. The organization Blatte for Life has been founded and we have waited long enough. It’s us against them, we the unidentifiable creoles, the blend of everything, all the pigeonhole-free border people. And them? The ones who seek security in simple black and white,
the ones who want to defend Thou ancient, thou free, thou joyful bullshit.
What was once Studio Silvia and then Krister Holmström Abbas Khemiri’s photographic pet studio has now become Blatte for Life’s meeting center, the organizational headquarters for the new generation of soldiers who will
NEVER
go the betraying way of Dads. It’s here everything joins together, people from the suburbs meet inner-city kids, feminists hook up with dreads activists, homos with heteros, anarchists with Zapatists, niglows with Swedelows,
blattar
with palefaces, Chechenies with Russkies, Kurdish with Turkish(!), Iranis with Arabis with Jewish(!!). All on the same side, totally without self-loathing.
What was once an embarrassing pet studio is now something much, much bigger.
Write me … Do you realize now how comical it was that you, in your ambition to minimize your Swedishness, started to attribute such a crucial weight to the value of ethnicity? Because what is more “Swediotic” than to attach people to their ethnicities? Who does this better than Swedes? And who becomes a better pet of racists than people who accept the existence of an us and a them? Who is more toothlessly harmless than the
“blatte”
who accepts his existence as the
“blatte”?
At the time of writing I realize that “comical” should sooner be replaced by “tragic” (the boundary between them seems grayer and grayer to me).
Your father landed at Arlanda in November 1993. For the first time in his life he succeeded in passing the passport check
WITHOUT
attracting the looks of suspiciousness! For your father, this was a sign in a good direction. Once at Centralen, he parked himself at his antique café of habit in order to enjoy a little nostalgia. The
interior of the café had been renovated, a great many types of coffee were now offered, complete with matching ciabattas and pasta salads. Smoking was strictly illegal and none of the old Aristocats were visible. Your father interpellated the waitresses if they knew news about Mansour or Mustafa or maybe Aziz. They all side-shook their heads.
Before your father dared to seek your mother’s excuse for his absence, he wanted to examine the status of his studio. He wandered his steps to the commuter train, passed the barriers, and remembered his old work position at SL. On the way out of the city he nostalgized all the days you shared in the cockpit of the metro, all the weekends in Tanto, all the hours in the little bathroom lab. The train swished him farther out over the bridge with a fantastic view of Stockholm’s autumnal loveliness, glittering half-frozen water, red-hissing leaf forests, and a multitude of small garden houses. The view calmed a little of the nervousness that rumbled his insides.
From a distance, Abbas noticed that the sign for his studio was abducted. He unlocked the door and gazed into the darkness. In encountering the studio’s new color, your father recoiled and fanned his hand in front of his nose as though the sight were a painful scent. The state of the studio was not at all like before. Certainly it was half renovated from the fire. But instead of classic white, the wall color had become light blue! The walls were decorated with illustrations of people like Malcolm X and an assortment of hip-hop Negroes. (One was that Ice T or Ice Cube or Ice Man or Ice Cream? Your father does not recall.) The floor was filled with pillows and blankets, well-filled ashtrays, and dried apple skeletons. On a table lay worn books by names unknown to your father, like Malek Alloula and Patrick Chamoiseau.
All the ruins from your father’s business had been localized in the storeroom. The traces of the fire were also still evident there. As usual, you had renovated on the surface but not managed the
whole way. Your father paged through his antique material and was hypnotized by his old photographs. There was everything in a mixed mess, smoke-damaged pet photos, heat-bubbled negatives of your little brothers disguised as Batman and Superman, burned-black pictures from the dog days of the Stockholm Exhibition, yellowed motifs of your mother’s goddessish silhouette exposed to a romantic sun laying. All this life that was now reduced to slowly fading memories. Your father may have teared his eyes. Hours may have passed. Suddenly a key was heard in the door. Someone invaded the studio.
Your father carefully glanced out from the storeroom and first saw only a shadow. Then an erected person in a black-and-white keffiyeh, frequent facial pimples, shaved skull, and an army jacket materialized. He stood out in the studio and hacked his throat, making notes on a pad while at the same time thoughtfully picking his nose with his thumb. It was you.
BFL has called a general meeting
at Headquarters and I come first because I am the self-appointed General of the Fight (code name: I-on Carry-on a.k.a. Dow Jonas a.k.a. the Head Khmer). I’m the one with the key, I’m the founder of the network. I’m the one who’s written all the regulations and decided on the super-secret knock. Soon Imran comes, then Melinda, and last Patrik. B
FL’S
innermost circle, the central quad. We’re the ones who start every meeting by updating the map of Sweden where pins mark
WAR
organizations and KSS centers and towns where New Democracy got too many votes. We’re the ones who put up new enemy photos on the bulletin board, write battle manifestos, and write up outlines for the future.
Then we sit on the floor, roll a spliff, and plan the
evening’s meeting and the night’s action. Only sometimes do we send Patrik out to scout for suspicious security police cars on the street. Melinda lights up and the spliff is passed around. The green does its thing, our chests get that calming chirpy feeling, and the air clouds. We wait for the others, what time did we say? Eight, but you start to hear the knock combinations on the studio door fifteen minutes early.
Here they come, everyone who’s dedicated their lives to the Fight. Polyester sisters, basketball brothers, shining siblings, million-generationers. First the Melinda sisters, waddling down the stairs, and then Imran’s whole basketball team, and then Hanin, who’s the leader of the Malmö force, and Chia, who’s in charge of the youth troops. Then some of the Aristocats’ kids, Elif and Daphne, Kai and Mine. Then Mohamed from your grade, who has promised to dismantle the drivel of the integration debate.
Your father heard knocks, loud voices, the door which was opened and closed again and again. He carefully closed the door to the storeroom so he wouldn’t be discovered.
Then comes a big gang
who all got the five-to-eight train: the journalists all together, Oivvio and Lawen, Devrim and Vanja. There’s Shang waving—she’s responsible for the laws—and there’s Emma and Farnaz being welcomed—they’re going to expand the theater—and there’s Pontikis, who’s going to take over the film industry. There’s Ernesto, who’s going to infiltrate the Ministry for Foreign Affairs along with Davor and Julius in
data support. Macki controls the offensive on the business school, while Reena storms the political science department. There’s hugging and greeting and Wzup Moses how’s it going with the director post at the Royal Institute of Technology? and Kifhalek Karim! with his sights set on becoming a professor of philosophy. And there’s Nadia, the future director of Swedish Television, and there’s Zvonko, soon to be editor in chief of
Dagens Nyheter
. And there’s Cengiz and Goran and Mustafa and Golbarg and Ksenia and Behnaz and him and her and them and you and us …
Finally everyone’s sitting in a group on the crowded floor, the air warm and the windows steamed over. Melinda gets up and declares the meeting open. She summarizes the results of the latest actions, and everything is a success and letter bombs have been sent to neo-Nazis and nighttime visits have been made to the skinhead who assaulted the Kurd in Lerum, pinioned him, and left him in the flaming vegetable shop. The Swedish commander in chief will soon regret that he dismissed Carl Gustaf Belmadani as a chauffeur for the minister of defense for the explicit reason that he was dark and had a strange name (last name, that is). Skara Sommarland is being boycotted for having a racist owner. The paper
Expressen
is being boycotted for the news bills where they wrote: “What the Swedish people think of immigrants: Drive them out!” The racist town of Sjöbo is besieged. Vivianne Franzén is put under constant surveillance.
Everyone cheers and applauds and toasts and back-thumps.