Authors: Jonas Hassen Khemiri
Montecore (26 page)
Here your father’s sleep begins to become more and more sporadic. The nights become him a constant wake, a constant flow of historical pictures hover his interior and threaten his mental balance. He lies hour after hour, bathing in perspiration beside your peacefully sleeping mother. He observes her exterior. He tries to calm himself by stroking the softness of her forearm. He reflects whether the actions of his life were actually correct. Had he acted right to place his body in a country where he was not invited? Had he acted right to in addition place his sons in this context? Unlike you, he found no security in simple answers.
And you remember the headlines that
scream recession and the crown falls and the politicians panic and Dads don’t say anything, but whisper: Just when the studio has been stabilized the economy is going to crash, life is really typical. And by the way … Why do you continue to be with those … What are their names? Melinda and that fat Indian? Why are you never with other friends? Ordinary friends?
And you actually don’t understand what Dads mean, you just point out for the thousandth time that Imran is actually Baloch and not Indian.
Up until one day when you’ve eaten dinner and you’ve told about your plans to start an antiracist organization and it’s probably going to be called BFL, Blatte for Life, and Moms think it’s a great idea and little brothers ask if they can be in it too, and Dads?
Dads sit quietly.
Until dinner is eaten up and Moms do the dishes and close kitchen cupboards with the angry sounds, little brothers are playing with Dino-Riders in the living room, and Dads scratch themselves on their continuously growing guts and say with flaky wine lips and stifled burps: Hey … by the way. Why do you only hang out with immigrants? Niggers, Indians, and damn South Americans … Why no Swedish friends? Are you racist? Be careful of hanging out with the wrong people. Swedes are better. Immigrants just use you and use you and then, when you need them most, they stab you in the back.
And you must have heard wrong because the enemy is out there and the enemy has boots and shaved skulls, the enemy is New Democracy and White Aryan Resistance, Keep Sweden Swedish and Ultima Thule, SL inspectors and Sweden Democrats, red beach Volvos, Securitas guards, and the riot police in Norrmalm who beat up Fayola’s boyfriend for no reason. The enemy is Shell and American imperialists and Per Ahlmark and settlers and the CIA and Mossad. But the enemy can’t be in your own family because then things are probably going to be more mixed-up than expected.
NB:
Your father is
NOT
the enemy. He is only a man who is trying to guarantee the success of his children in a tradition-heavy country! He is a solitary modern cosmopolitan in a barbaric society. For this is the truth about the country we call Sweden, civilized on the surface but barbaric in the structure of thought. But he did
NOT
dare relate you this. He feared that you would be strengthened even more in your outsiderness thoughts. For the same motive he chose not to relate his family when his studio began to be attacked …
One Monday morning in the late summer of 1991 your father came to the studio and was met by black words that had been sprayed and trickle-dried on his store window. There were phrases like
WHITE REVOLUTION—NO MERCY, GOOD BLATTE
=
DEAD BLATTE
, and
DEATH TO COMMUSM!
(It actually said that.)
Not only your father’s studio had been attacked, but also the video store, the Chinese restaurant, and the completely innocent, Swedish-owned floral shop. A professional firm was engaged to glisten the panes. Everyone promised each other to keep better supervision of suspected individuals. Then Abbas closed his studio early and went home. Without informing his family of the attack.
Then comes August 2, 1991
, and the student David Gebremariam is shot on the Tropp Path in Stockholm and there’s already talk of a red light the next day and the papers dub the perpetrator Laser Man. Soon afterward Moms and Dads sit in pale TV light and watch election results and precisely what Moms joked about turns out to be exact reality. The conservatives take over and New Democracy enters the Parliament and they have the balance of power and a tear runs from the Palme picture on the wall and Refaat sighs in prison and Mansour still hasn’t gotten his dissertation approved and
Aziz is still working at SL and has sold his record collection with eighties hits and Sweden is changing and your nightly dreams get worse and once when you wake up you’ve sleepwalked out into the hallway and are met by Dads, who look at you as though you were a ghost. You are led back to bed and Dads sit beside you until you fall asleep again and it’s not until the day after that you ask yourself what Dads were doing up and dressed in the middle of the night.
Your father remembers that night well. It was a few days after attack number two on the studio. This time it was only Abbas’ store window and the Chinese restaurant’s that had been dirtied with political slogans. In addition, the photo studio’s keyhole had been prepared with chewing gum and in front of the door stood a pink ice-cream clown statue which smilingly waved Abbas’ arrival. Someone had stolen it from the pizzeria kiosk and it was not until your father had gotten all the way there that he understood its meaning. It was escorted by a wastebasket and the text that was spelled out of the smiling clown mouth was the usual: “Keep Sweden
CLEAN
.” A text that still today can be seen on thousands of wastebaskets outside of thousands of kiosks (but which for your father bears a constantly modified content).
In the following time, your father’s sleep was more and more sporadic. He was plagued by hazy childhood memories. He mourned the political loss of his parents. He was grieved by the growing political turbulence in Algeria. Instead of tumbling his perspiring body in the bed, he began to take nightly walks. It was on the way out for one such walk that he met your sleepwalking form. You gesticulated wildly with half-open eyes and auctioned that you wanted two lawyers immediately. Your father transported you back to your room and waited by your delirious side until you
fell asleep. Then he patted your cheek and levitated toward the stairwell.
Then it’s October
and two new attacks and first it’s Shahram Khosravi, who is shot in the jaw, and then it’s Dimitrios Karamalegos, who is shot in the stomach, and both are
blattar
and people are talking about a red light again like on a laser sight and people are starting to whisper that the Laser Man is a racist who is at large in the city and you and your friends join together and you feel how you grow in Dads’ silence, how your contours become sharper, how something is growing in you that won’t be able to be stopped.
During the same time, you go around town with Melinda and Imran and the security guards at Mega do their routine lookout and they follow your steps closely and smile when you walk toward the cashier to pay for the cassette tapes. You leave swearing and say that this is the last time we’ll go to Whoremega. Then past Åhléns and there it’s the same lookout gazes from a different security company and when you pass the CD register, constantly pursued, the alarm goes off and time stands still and everyone stares and the guards come running and you think: Shit, maybe I took something? There’s lineup for inspection and then: Shut up when you try to explain that it must be the cassette from Mega that set off the alarm. Then in a line to the special square room, stares and index fingers and someone who snickers and an old Swediot man’s serves-them-right laugh. There’s waiting and more careful inspecting and then instead of apology the girl guard who says: All right, you can go now. You’re already presenting the plan for counteraction
at the outer doors near the subway where warm wind is blowing and double mirrors turn you into infinitely many.
Two days later you’re back at Åhléns. You, Melinda, Imran, who invade the department store with shouts and maximum
blatte
accents. You yell: Hey, bro, whazzup! to alarmed perfume fags, you mack on scared student interns, you play mini-basketball in the sports department, and try on ladies’ coats in the clothing department. You fuck up signs and mess up folds and Melinda waves to the uniform guards who swallow nervously. The undercover tries to play invisible and it works pretty well up until Imran goes up and pinches his behind and introduces himself as Don Corleone. The alert is at the highest
blatte
level and you stay until you get the sign and then you sail back down the escalator and the guards escort you all the way out to Sergels Torg. Everyone lets out their breath. And of course no one has seen Patrik, who’s been hanging out in skinny Levi’s 501 jeans, borrowed glasses, and his stepdad’s sailing shoes farther away in the same department. Of course no one has seen his homemade alarm-deactivating magnet, no one has seen his growing Peak Performance backpack. And it takes maybe a half hour for them to notice all the empty shelves where there had recently been Champion shirts, NBA shorts, and piles of genuine Raiders caps.
Patrik comes out through the warm-air corridor with his cheeks red and his mouth whistling and you race away toward Kungsträdgården to split up your loot.
• • •
Your father continued his nightly walks all autumn. He wandered in a standardized circle. Night after night. Mostly he interpellated himself the same repeated questions. What am I doing here? How can this country note me as immigrated after so many years of taxable lodging? And why does my idiotic son take this insultation and exalt it as ideal? The sleeplessness forced him to thoughts of the character: And why are they attacking my studio when there are so many other immigrants who don’t behave properly? Perhaps it is other immigrants who are attacking me, with jalousie or location temptation as a motive!
Then it’s November
and Heberson Vieira da Costa is shot in the face and the stomach and it’s the fourth
blatte
in one autumn and once again it’s the red laser sight and this time the news becomes internationally big and there’s a description of someone in a beige trench coat and suddenly every Swediot in the whole city has a beige trench coat and everyone leers menacingly and everyone’s shoulders stick out in that suspicious way at the armpit like with a holster.
Then the fifth
blatte
is shot and this is the first one who dies, the student Jimmy Ranjbar, who’s shot in the head outside the same student housing where Mansour lived when he first arrived and there’s a moment of silence and demonstrations and torchlight processions and you remember how you start to see red laser light wherever you turn, it blinks red in the corner of your eye and what started as a funny game is suddenly super serious and you feel so threatened that Imran starts to carry a butterfly knife in his inside pocket and you and Melinda each get a CO
2
pistol and you never leave home without being strapped and you remember that
night at McDonald’s when Melinda accidentally drops her pistol on the floor by the register and how you run away laughing and you remember how you start to blink and startle when the green walk light turns red and you remember how the city’s traffic lights take on a whole new meaning and one night when you’re walking on Norrlandsgatan a car brakes beside you and the red glare from the brake lights makes you startle and almost duck and a second later you are so ashamed it hurts.
The
EXACT
same emotion was felt by your father! But why didn’t you ever talk about your common fear? Why did you never meet in discussion? Your father began to have his studio door constantly locked, he sat hidden inside among his props, he canceled appointments, he found himself paralyzed like in a dream. He stopped functioning but could not explain why. Still, on certain nights he left his home and took his walks. Despite his terror of nocturnal shadows with beige trench coats and aimed red lights. Everything was better than passing more sleepless hours in solitary battle with invading thoughts. And perhaps there was some bizarre part of him which he will never be able to explain that almost longed for a confrontation. He does not remember much more of that fall.
And you remember January 1992
, and it’s teenage emotion with sore forehead pimples and chafe-inducing jack-off habits. It’s the time when Dads start to get fuzzy contours, Dads are practicing ballet, Dads jump through burning rings in a leotard, Dads photograph pets and smile gratefully at the audience’s thunderous applause.
Dads refuse to choose a side.
Dads are cowardly betrayers.
Dads come, Dads go, and only Moms endure.
Because it’s only then, when Dads start to fade away, that you rediscover Moms. It’s as though Moms suddenly materialize themselves out of anonymity. Moms who have taken on the real responsibility, Moms’ invisible battles that have made everything possible. It’s Moms who hold down the fort, it’s Moms who never give up and who never betray. But now Moms are starting to get tired and sometimes you hear how she cries in the bedroom and sometimes she looks through Dads’ jacket pockets and one time she asks if you think Dads have a mistress. But it’s also Moms who still have everything under control and who only let her weakness show when Dads are in the studio or out on one of his ever longer “walks.”
Why “walks” instead of walks? What are you suggesting? Detail like this instead:
“That my father might have had parallel mistresses is of course an unthinkable thought, like that the sun might wake in the west or that Benny Hill might be uncomical.”
Hmm … this formulation would have piled me with pride in the beginning of our book. Now it just piles me with sorrow. Abduct it if you wish.
The Laser Man
is still sitting with his laser sight ready in movie theater balconies, huddling in front car seats, hidden behind light poles. There he is, you see? … No, there! Always behind you and to the side and sometimes it actually feels like you’re going crazy. On January 22, the student Erik Bongcam is shot in the cheek
and the day after the bus driver Charles Dhlakama is shot in the stomach and right after that the economist Abdisalam Farah is shot in the back of the head and the civil engineer Ali Ali and
SHNEYA LASERMAN?! EVERYONE
knows it’s a conspiracy, it’s going around the city that it isn’t one laser man but a gang of laser men, a group of racist combat soldiers who have banded together with the Security Service and the Norrmalm riot squad and the fucking Silvia whore in order to make all
blattar
super paranoid and make them leave Sweden. Dads sits quietly and it’s you, Melinda, Imran, and Patrik against the world, you against them, or fuck
YOU
, it’s
WE, WE
who wander through life and together are exceptions,
WE
who together refuse their rules and eat their pigeonholes,
WE
explode their categorizations because we aren’t Swediots or immigrants, we are the perpetually unplaceable. Our dads come from Chile and our moms are Swedish Moderate politicians and we are born and raised in villas in Täby. Our parents are chemistry experts from Nigeria and we have four sisters who are the world’s most immense bodyguards and our dads send fancy silk blouses from Singapore. We are born in Pakistan, we have steel-rimmed glasses and red-checked bandannas and dream of being the first in the world to rap in Balochi. We have Tunisian dads and Swedish-Danish moms and we are neither totally
suédis
nor totally
arabis
but some other thing, some third thing, and the insight about not having a simple collective grows us into creating our own pigeonhole, a new collective without borders, without history, a creolized circle where everything is blended and mixed and hybridized. We are the reminder that their days are numbered. We are the ones who take your disgusting
language and turn it around. We are the ones who will never accept a language that’s designed to screen us out (and which moreover calls the most beautiful part of the breast a
wart yard
). We are the ones who
jet
instead of leaving, we
own
instead of triumphing, we
bang
instead of making love, we say
five-o
when you say police, we
shine
while you rust, we soar while you land in the marsh, we sit on the back of benches and spit seas onto squares of sidewalk while you sit where you’re supposed to and sigh, we’re the ones who get that it’s actually called
an
assist in basketball and that
mecca
has nothing to do with bingo and that a
fine cat
has nice
boudies
and definitely no fur or pedigree. We are the future! and it’s Melinda who says this last bit and she smiles her glittering gummy smile and you remember her silhouette there in the dusk on the basketball court with her tangled Afro and her worn comb and it’s so cold that you’re playing with cutoff mittens and it’s right after her sister Fayola has died of cancer, she was twenty-two and Melinda rarely talks about her but even cancer is Sweden’s fault and more and more often Melinda says things that Fayola said to her and mostly it’s quotes by Frantz Fanon and it doesn’t matter that you don’t know who that is, it doesn’t matter that Melinda just repeats Fayola’s words, it doesn’t matter that you pronounce Frantz Fanon as though he were a Norrlander and Aimé Césaire as though he were an antique Caesar.
Nothing matters more than that you’re building symbiosis and instead of dads who are willing to fight you have each other.
January 28, 1992: The hot dog stand owner Isa Aybar. Five bullets, one to the head, two in the right, and one in
the left arm. The Laser Man continues to shoot
blattar
while Sjöbo politicians smile and the Norrmalm police take it easy and the politicians enjoy silence and skinheads celebrate through the night with cheers and
heil
s at the helicopter platform.
January 30: Hasan Zatara. One bullet to the head at Hägersten and you’ve all bought candy at his kiosk and Zatara loses the ability to speak and is paralyzed and the spring wanders on in constant terror and constant suspense.
Finally there are certain parents who choose the Fight. Some take a stand and roar their rage when Friggebo and Bildt want to join hands and sing “We Shall Overcome” in Rinkeby. Some arrange demonstrations and lead torchlight processions and organize national immigrant strikes. Some make their last names invisible in the phone book and say to their children: Study whatever you want as long as you can do it abroad because this whore country isn’t going to want to have us here in ten years, study medicine, study economics, then we’ll get out of here, start a big business in Great Britain, and laugh at our memories of this uncultured land of barbarians.
And then there are Dads. Who continue to smile kindly at Swedish masters who want their Pekingeses photographed. Who refuse to be a part of the
blatte
fight. Who just look at you with sadly cowardly eyes when you do your best to rouse their engagement.
