IS THERE OR IS THERE NOT A LITERATURE OF MIGRATION IN DENMARK?

SØREN FRANK Since the end of the Second World War, perhaps even since the early 1900s, the migrant writer has been one of the defining figures of literary history. During the same period, the migration novel has occupied a role similar to the one Franco Moretti ascribes to the Bildungsroman in its heyday from the 1790s to the mid 1800s.1 However, there is considerable incongruity between this general international scenario and the specific literary situation in Denmark: one could claim, with good reason, that there are no migrant writers in Denmark and that the migration novel does not exist in Danish literature. And yet, Danish migrant writers are out there somewhere and migration literature does exist in a Danish context – that is, if one looks hard enough. These two seemingly contradictory statements – “there is not” and “there is” – will serve as the central points of discussion in this article, and I will show that their mutual exclusivity is in fact to be considered as two equally true – and potentially converging – assertions.

First, though, I shall substantiate my initial claims regarding the international importance of the migrant writer and the migration novel by listing a series of causes behind their significant contemporary global standing, and then by highlighting empirical evidence of the names of several internationally acclaimed writers with multiple roots. Subsequently, what follows is a characterization of migration literature’s distinctiveness, exemplified by a short analysis of a concrete work of literature. Finally, I will move into the Danish

1 Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (1987), trans. Albert Sbragia, London: Verso, 2000.

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context in order to examine how and why I can simultaneously claim the non-existence and the existence of migrant writers. This includes the introduction of a number of both migrant and native writers from the Danish literary scene and a couple of very brief analyses of some of their works.

The age of migration and the migrant writer The twentieth century and afterward is characterized by an intensification of migratory movements of people, commodities, ideas, and information across the globe, a development attributable to mainly three categories of events. First, political incidents, such as the two world wars, regional wars, Fascist and Communist tyrannies, dictatorships, decolonization, the collapse of Communism, and the construction of the EU, have all contributed not only to the uprooting of people, but also to the implosion of old nation-states and the emergence of new ones. Second, evolutions in transport technology – dating back to the sailing ship and the oceanic turn around 1500 (not merely the initial stage of the Age of Discovery, but also of what we today refer to as globalization), continuing with the emergence of steam ships and the railroad networks in the early 1800s, and culminating in the twentieth century with aeroplane traffic – have played a crucial role in overcoming (or at least minimizing) the frictions of specific, physical places, thus making movement easier, cheaper, and more convenient through the creation of what we could call a network of globalized corridors. Third, innovations in communication technologies, such as the telegraph, the radio, television, the internet, and cell phones have helped decrease people’s attachments to specific places, making it possible to be in contact with someone situated thousands of kilometres away and – at least virtually – to be present at any location in the world.

As Zygmunt Bauman rightly (but also ambivalently) claims:

All of us are, willy-nilly, by design or by default, on the move. We are on the move even if, physically, we stay put: immobility is not a realistic option in a world of permanent change.2

2 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998, 2.

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For Bauman, and I agree with him on this, voluntary migration, forced uprooting, and staying put basically amount to the same thing in our globalized world of rapid change: a life of mobility (what sets these three modalities of mobility apart are their different sub-consequences, which for example depend upon the degree of voluntariness and the material conditions under which one migrates). In that sense, and as Salman Rushdie once stated, “we are all migrant peoples”.3

I back these claims of an increasingly migratory world with facts: according to the United Nations, the estimated number of international migrants – that is, people living in a country different from their country of origin – rose from 155 million people in 1990 to 214 million people in 2010 (that is, from 2.9% to 3.1% of the world’s population). The figures for Europe are even more striking, as the estimated number has risen from 49 million people in 1990 to 70 million in 2010 (that is, from 6.9% to 9.5% of Europe’s population).4 Now, a little more than three per cent on a global scale and a little less than ten per cent for a European territory may not, on the face of it, hint at a migratory world. However, when considering migration’s impact on society, one should not forget the millions of people who migrate interculturally within one nation, for example between countryside and city (which often involves much more radical changes than an international migration between two metropoles), just as the many millions of second- and third-generation descendants of migrants should be taken into account as they are still defined by multiple roots. Finally, and as explained earlier, in our contemporary world, we are all to some extent migratory beings, constantly on the move.

Unsurprisingly, these political, sociological, and technological developments have had a deep impact on literary history during the twentieth century. In “Literature and Exile” (1959), the American comparativist Harry Levin urges us – in the spirit of Georg Brandes 3 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, London: Granta Books, 1992, 279. 4 United Nations, International Migrant Stock: The 2008 Revision: http://esa.un.org/migration/ (accessed 14 September 2011). In January 2011, 7.7% of the Danish population consisted of international migrants, compared to 6.9% in January 2008 (See Danmarks Statistikbank, FOLK1: http://www.statistikbanken.dk/ FOLK1/ (accessed 14 September 2011)).

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and his pioneering The Emigrant Literature (1872) – “to chronicle the literary migrations of the twentieth century on a scale commensurate with their importance in our lives”, an importance that Levin specifies by claiming that the migrant writer quite simply “speaks with the voice of our time”.5 Levin’s geographical dimension is mainly Western, though, and his temporal horizon actually transcends the twentieth century. Among the authors he discusses – some exiled against their will, others exiled by choice – are not only twentieth-century writers, such as Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Nabokov, and Samuel Beckett, but also Henrik Ibsen, Heinrich Heine, P.B. Shelley, Voltaire, Dante, and Ovid – and if we think about it, our exilic heritage can be traced all the way back to Adam.

However, if migration and exile have been metahistorical occupational hazards for writers, it is still reasonable to maintain – as I did in the beginning of this essay, and as Levin does, too – that migration, due to an increase in scale, has become one of the defining features (if not the defining feature) of literary history in the twentieth century. This is certainly true after the Second World War, when the political processes of decolonization kicked off and, among other things, initiated a globalization of the literary canon, which until then had been a purely Western canon. Writers from the peripheries – Miguel Ángel Asturias, Naguib Mahfouz, Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel García Márquez, Wole Soyinka, and Derek Walcott – suddenly found themselves neighbours with the Homers, the Shakespeares, and the Flauberts.

What is particularly interesting in our case is that many of these “peripheral” writers have been in close contact with the West through migratory movements or exilic sojourns, and in their artistic practice, they often draw on Western forms and combine them with local themes and experiences. This combination simultaneously gives their work a unique local inflection and a powerful potential for global reach: Asturias was born in Guatemala, but lived most of his life in Paris and Madrid, where he was influenced by European Surrealism and Modernism; García Márquez is from Colombia, but lived most of his life in Europe, as well as in Mexico City, and a strong influence on 5 Harry Levin, “Literature and Exile”, in Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature, New York: Oxford University Press, 1966, 62.

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his work is William Faulkner; Wole Soyinka now lives in Nigeria, his country of birth, but has lived in both the UK and the United States, and in many of his plays he merges European theatrical traditions with those of his Yorùbá cultural heritage; Walcott was born in the West Indies, but has lived in Boston for many years, and in his most famous work, Omeros (1990), he is structurally indebted to Homer’s The Odyssey.

What is common to Asturias, Mahfouz, Gordimer, García Márquez, Soyinka, and Walcott – besides originating from the periphery and contributing to the globalization of the literary canon – is their membership in the prestigious club of Nobel laureates. The Nobel Prize actually serves as an excellent example of the migrant writer’s contemporary prominent international reputation. Looking at the recent winners, say, from Günter Grass in 1999 to Mario Vargas Llosa in 2010, no less than ten out of the twelve laureates can be said to live and write in-between two or more cultures, nations, or languages: Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Peru, but has lived in Bolivia, Spain, France, the UK, and the United States; Herta Müller was born in Romania, but now lives in Germany; Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio is both French and Mauritian; Doris Lessing was born in Iran (Persia at the time) and lived for many years in Zimbabwe before settling in England; Orhan Pamuk is Turkish, but lived for several years in the United States; Harold Pinter was English; Elfriede Jelinek is Austrian; John M. Coetzee is from South Africa, but has spent several years in the UK and the United States and is now living in Australia; Imre Kertész is Hungarian, but lives in Berlin; V.S. Naipaul is from Trinidad and Tobago, has Indian roots, but has lived most of his life in the UK; Gao Xingjian was born in China, but has lived in France for more than twenty years; Günter Grass was born in Danzig, but was forced to immigrate to Germany at the end of the Second World War, and in the late 1950s he spent four years in voluntary exile in Paris before returning to Germany.6 Other internationally celebrated writers with migrant backgrounds are Milan Kundera (Czechoslovakia, France), Jorge Semprún (Spain, the Netherlands, France), W.G. Sebald (Germany, the UK), Czeslaw Milosz (Poland, the United States), Adonis (Syria, Lebanon, France), Emine Sevgi 6 See Nobelprize.org, “All Nobel Prizes in Literature”: http://nobelprize.org/ nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/ (accessed 14 September 2011).

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Özdamar (Turkey, Germany), Tahar Ben Jelloun (Morocco, France), Salman Rushdie (India, the UK, the United States), Amitav Ghosh (India, the UK, the United States), and Michael Ondaatje (Sri Lanka, the UK, Canada).

Well aware of the singularity of these authors’ artistic profiles, they all nevertheless seem to craft a literature of migration that is, in general terms, characterized by being simultaneously rooted and weightless, shaded in local colours and movable in global corridors, patriotic and cosmopolitan (in Kwame A. Appiah’s sense of these two words, that is, “patriotic” understood as non-chauvinistic and “cosmopolitan” understood as having respect for one’s local roots).7 More specifically, the issues at stake in migration literature are often related to questions of personal, national, cultural, and religious identity as a result of the migrant writer’s loss of one and (possible) acquisition of another place, language, or culture. To be transplanted from a familiar place, a first language, and a well-known culture into an unknown place, a strange language, and an alien culture automatically triggers a series of renegotiations of identity as the new enters into new dynamic constellations with the old. Metaphorically speaking, the vertical oak tree is replaced by the more horizontal banyan tree as a symbol of human identity. What used to be relatively self-evident and unproblematic identities become more hybrid, fluid, and open – not merely for the migrant, but also for the native who looks upon oneself and upon one’s country through the foreign and de-familiarizing eyes of the migrant writer.

As the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan notes in Space and Place (1977), the insider’s intimate perspective benefits from being supplemented with an outside perspective providing sharpness and reflection: “Long residence enables us to know a place intimately, yet its image may lack sharpness unless we can also see it from the outside and reflect upon our experience.”8 This fusion of intimacy and sharpness, of closeness and a necessary distance, is precisely what characterizes Joyce’s perspective on Dublin from his exile in Zurich, Trieste, and

7 Kwame A. Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots”, in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, eds Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, Minnesota: University of Minnesota, 1998, 91-114. 8 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008, 18.

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Paris, Grass’ perspective on Danzig from his exile in Paris, and Jan Kjærstad’s perspective on Oslo from his exile in Africa. I deliberately write “necessary” (in both an existential and artistic sense) because without this physical and mental distance they would never have embarked on the ventures that ended up as Ulysses (1922), The Danzig Trilogy (1959-1963), and The Wergeland Trilogy (1993-1999).

With its performative potential – that is, with its impurities, heterogeneities, and complexities – migration literature challenges the pedagogical aspirations of nativistic and nationalistic literature.9 The latter is characterized by centripetalizing forces that emphasize historical continuity as well as geographical isolation and distinctiveness, stylistically brought about through the accumulation and transmission of pure, national traditions.10 The former, on the contrary, is characterized by centrifugalizing forces that stress geographical interdependence and cross-pollination as well as the synchronicity of the non-synchronous – that is, the simultaneous presence of conflicting temporalities, geographies, and traditions: in short, a “muddyfication” of genealogies.

9 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, 145. 10 The xenophobic Heimat-Roman and Schollen-Roman in Germany prior to and during the Nazi years are obvious examples of nativistic literature, as is the work of South African writer Sarah Gertrude Millin. But also canonized writers, such as Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, William Butler Yeats, Chinua Achebe, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, lean towards nativism (however, the thing with canonized writers is that they are generally more complex and varied and thus more difficult to pin down). In nineteenth-century Denmark, two professors of art represented the dichotomy between nationalistic and international art: N.L. Høyen, who warned young painters and artists against foreign impulses, and Wilhelm Marstrand, also a painter, who believed that art was and should not be restricted by national borders. In literature, writers such as N.F.S. Grundtvig, B.S. Ingemann (above all in the Scott-inspired Valdemar Seier [1826]), Jakob Knudsen, for example with Rodfæstet (Rooted, 1911), Jacob Paludan, especially in Jørgen Stein (1932-1933), and Ebbe Kløvedal Reich, for example in Frederik (1972), a biographical novel about Grundtvig, are examples of nationalistic writers/writing. One could also mention Morten Korch’s novels as a counterpart to the German Schollen-roman and Millin’s South African novels. In Norway, Knut Hamsun’s evolution takes a direction towards nativistic art with Markens grøde (Growth of the Soil, 1917).

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The Satanic Verses An example of an aesthetics of “muddification” is The Satanic Verses (1988), undoubtedly one of the most prominent novels of migration, and one in which Salman Rushdie notoriously undermines the official Muslim perception that purity permeates the birth of Islam and the creation of the Koran. The authoritative version states that the transmission of the words of Allah to the archangel Gabriel (logos), from Gabriel to the prophet Muhammad (thought), from Muhammad to the scribe Salman (speech), and from Salman to paper (writing) is an uncomplicated translational process without any deviations or modifications whatsoever. Rushdie, however, pollutes each of these transmission links by insinuating or downright asserting that Gabriel is Satanic, that Muhammad is driven by selfish politico-economical motives (leading, among other things, to his temporary inclusion of the satanic verses, which is problematic in an Islamic context for two reasons: first, it allows for the admission of three goddesses into Islam alongside Allah and thereby introduces polytheism in a strictly monotheistic religion; second, even though the verses are eliminated in the end, the very inclusion/exclusion procedure questions the flawlessness of the Koran), and that Salman – wanting to test Muhammad, whom he suspects of being a fraud – successfully manages to replace certain words of the revelations without raising the prophet’s suspicion (ultimately meaning that the words of the Koran are not the words of Allah).

Rushdie’s rejection of uncontaminated stories of origin (and, consequently, of stable discursive formations) and the corresponding propensity for hybrid and fluid states also show through the novel’s cast of characters. The two protagonists, Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta, are characterized by a national and religious split, respectively. Saladin is divided between the India and Bombay of his past (which he desperately tries to ignore) and the England and London of his present (which he desperately wants to be part of), while Gibreel, more unwillingly, is divided between belief in Allah and disbelief. For both of them the split is the catalyst behind their continual psychological and physical metamorphoses: for Gibreel, unable to heal the rift, the personality split leads to suicide, whereas Saladin manages to reach some sort of equilibrium between his Indian and English roots, among other things because he reconciles with his

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Indian past and acquires a more nuanced and critical view on contemporary England. Again, as with Bauman: common condition (mobility and metamorphosis), different consequences (hybrid equilibrium/pathological schizophrenia).

Before reaching “wholeness”, Saladin’s fervent desire to become “a good and proper Englishman” results in the construction of an artificial mask of pure Englishness.11 However, the purity is sometimes disturbed because Saladin cannot escape his Indianness. This is what happens in the scene with the stewardess where the past resurfaces in Saladin’s way of speaking, which up until then had manifested itself as the Queen’s English, but now gives way to his old Indian-English idiom. When a stewardess wakes him from a slumber to offer him drinks, Saladin semi-consciously exclaims:

‘Achha, means what?’ he mumbled. ‘Alcoholic beverage or what?’ And, when the stewardess reassured him, whatever you wish, sir, all beverages are gratis, he heard, once again, his traitor voice: ‘so, okay, bibi, give one whiskysoda only’.12

The mental condition of Saladin is materially and formally staged here through linguistic hybridity, which reveals a psychological intermezzo between Englishness and Indianness, present and past, self-control and inevitable capitulation.

When Saladin earlier had decided to make a definitive break with his past and his dominant father, he asked his father to chop down the walnut tree planted in the family garden on the occasion of Saladin’s birth. The walnut tree symbolizes Saladin’s Indian rootedness, so the felling of the tree was a clear indication of Saladin’s escape from home, and Saladin is tormented by this symbolism throughout the novel. However, one day when he is watching a television programme featuring a grafted tree, he starts hoping for cohesion:

There it palpably was, a chimera with roots, firmly planted in and growing vigorously out of a piece of English earth: a tree, he thought, capable of taking the metaphoric place of the one his father had chopped down in a distant garden in another, incompatible world. If

11 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, London: Viking, 1989, 43. 12 Ibid., 34.

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such a tree were possible, then so was he; he, too, could cohere, send down roots, survive.13

The chimera becomes a symbol of the acceptance of both his English and his Indian identity, that is, of identity as an open network of roots spread out horizontally instead of either complete rootlessness or the more old-fashioned tree-like rootedness implying a pure monocultural and monolinguistic identity.

One last characteristic needs to be mentioned in regard to The Satanic Verses and migration literature in general. Besides thematically emphasizing the hybrid and migratory nature of human identity and of national as well as religious stories of origin, the literature of migration often sustains or intensifies its fluid and dynamic quality through formal strategies. Hence, The Satanic Verses is (as already implied in the example with the stewardess) characterized by linguistic hybridity, but also by enunciatory indeterminacy and compositional complexity: there are the numerous languages blending with one another; there is a multitude of tenses, foci, and perspectives; in regard to composition, the novel consists of 1) a realistic storyline with characters, environments, and developments; 2) fantastic sequences and scenes; and 3) dream sequences, which constitute fragments of a religious discourse with quotes from the Koran and more or less authorized, narrated sequences from it accompanied by comments. The form of The Satanic Verses not only reflects a migratory world, it is in itself a fluid and rhizomatic construction without a centralized perspective (something which undoubtedly contributed to the fierce reactions from certain fundamentalist fractions that had difficulties in understanding or accepting such an anti-authoritarian and hybrid form). For Kjærstad, who believes in the primacy of form – that is, who believes (with Georg Lukács)14 that literary form and composition express a Weltanschauung – Rushdie’s novel, which is ingeniously and artfully

13 Ibid., 406. 14 See Georg Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans (1920), Berlin: Luchterhand, 1965; also Georg Lukács, “Zur Theorie der Literaturgeschichte” (1910), Text + Kritik, XXXIX/40 (1973), 24-51.

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composed, thus becomes the leading representative for what he calls the impure novelistic tradition of the twentieth century.15

With this short analysis of an internationally acclaimed novel I hope to have exemplified what the literature of migration can be about and look like. An obvious question follows: is there a literature in Denmark that resembles Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses? In regard to Norway, Kjærstad (in his appeal to “bring on the impure”) accepts the somehow culturally determined difficulty in such a project, although he refuses to abandon the ambition to create a more epic and hybrid novel:

To Faldbakken, a ‘Rushdie novel’ about Norway – with references to culture, tradition, thinking, ways of behaviour – is impossible, because we lack the necessary myths and collisions of ideas – hate, for that matter. I see the point of his argument. A ‘magical realism’ applied to Norway easily becomes artificial. However, this is precisely the challenge – not to write about Norway like Günter Grass writes about Germany, Carlos Fuentes about Mexico, or Salman Rushdie about India, but to fabulate and evoke our own, original epic stories based on … well, on something completely different, something that we are yet to discover.16

Kjærstad’s own trilogy Forføreren (The Seducer, 1993), Erobreren (The Conqueror, 1996), and Oppdageren (The Discoverer, 1999) is a Scandinavian example of impure and fabulating literature. In a Danish context, I think one has to divide the answer in two: the Cartoon Crisis in 2006 showed that Denmark has had its own “Rushdie Affair”; at the same time, and as my brief survey of Danish writers below will imply, no Danish literary work matches the degree of thematical emphasis on metamorphosis and impurity and the extent of formal hybridity and transformation that characterizes The Satanic Verses. The story of a Danish discrepancy Shifting our attention to the Danish and Nordic literary landscape, and bearing in mind our earlier use of the Nobel Prize as a weathercock for tendencies and inclinations on the global literary scene, it is

15 Jan Kjærstad, Menneskets felt, Oslo: Aschehoug, 1997, 20-22; Jan Kjærstad, Menneskets matrise, Oslo: Aschehoug, 1989, 214. 16 Kjærstad, Menneskets felt, 23. – All translations to English are my own.

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striking that no author in the history of the Nordisk Råds litteraturpris – the most prestigious literary prize in the Nordic countries – has a migrant background. Ever since the prize was inaugurated in 1962 the winner has been a writer born and living in one of the Nordic countries, from Eyvind Johnson in 1962 to Sofi Oksanen in 2010 (the only exception to my knowledge is Sven Delblanc, who was born in Canada but had Swedish ancestors and lived more or less all of his life in Sweden).17 This remarkable contrast between the Nobel Prize (and many other prizes such as the Man Booker Prize, Prix Goncourt, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature), and the Nordisk Råds Litteraturpris is what makes my initial claim about the non-existence of migrant writers and a literature of migration in Denmark reasonable. In the first place and most radically formulated, the history of Nordisk Råds Litteraturpris indicates an absolute and astonishing absence of the migrant writer in the Nordic countries. Secondly, and closer to the truth, it tells of a literary canon and a literary establishment that historically have had no room for foreign perspectives, hybrid identities, and marginal voices – for what Kjærstad has called (and also urgently called for) “a brilliant piece of cultural heresy” – instead prioritizing what I earlier referred to as nativist and nationalistic narratives (although Sofi Oksanen, the latest winner, admittedly writes in-between the Finnish and Estonian cultures).18

It is difficult to pinpoint just one reason for this apparent lack of migrant writers in Denmark, so here are five attempts to explain the situation: colonial history, language, international reputation, literary quality, and the book market. In comparison to France and the UK, Denmark has not had a colonial history of the same magnitude as those two countries. Denmark’s “colonization” of Norway did not really involve interculturalism and ethnic issues, and where this was the case, as with for example Greenland and the Danish West Indies,19 the impact has, for different reasons, not been remotely close to what 17 See “Nordisk Råds litteraturpris”: http://www.norden.org/da/nordisk-raad/nordiske-priser/litteraturprisen/ (accessed 14 September 2011). 18 Kjærstad, Menneskets felt, 24. 19 The Danish West Indies consisted of the islands Saint Thomas, Saint John, and Saint Croix, annexed in 1672, 1718, and 1733 respectively by Vestindisk-guineisk Kompagni, sold to the Danish king in 1745 and then bought by the United States in 1917.

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countries such as India, South Africa, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Senegal, and Haiti have had on the UK, the Netherlands, and France.

In addition to the relative modesty of Danish colonial history, the Danish language – not only a minor language, but also a scientifically proven difficult language to learn – functions as a hurdle, perhaps not so much in terms of scaring off immigrants in general (for whom the Danish welfare model seems to offer a positive counterweight to the language problem) as to posing overwhelming problems of expression and creativity to immigrant writers in particular.

A third reason may have to do with a certain international reputation that Denmark has gained (justifiably or not) – especially since 2001 when the right-wing government came into power – for xenophobia and strict immigration laws. However, the relatively short history of this reputation cannot really be said to have had an effect on the historical lack of migrant writers in Denmark, although it may play a small part in today’s literary landscape.

The question of literary quality should also be taken into account. Publishers in Denmark admit that they receive quite a few manuscripts from aspiring migrant writers, but in many cases the quality is simply not good enough. According to Niels Beider from Gyldendal, this often has to do with poor language: “the reason why we haven’t published more literature by people with immigrant background quite simply is that the quality of the language hasn’t been good enough.” The lack of quality has no doubt also to do with a question of quantity, that is, with the low number of people from which to choose. As Marco Goli remarks:

The pool of talent is obviously not very big. We have 200,000-300,000 [persons] with immigrant background to take from, and many of them would never ever go down that road because of a lack of education and linguistic skills.20

One last reason I will mention is the size of the Danish book

market. In a small country such as Denmark – defined not only by a comparatively small pool of buyers, but also by a minor language spoken only in this country – a thematic and formal conservatism as

20 Aydin Soei, “Indvandrerforfattere: Dansk indvandrer-litteratur – har vi det?”, Information, 23 February 2006, 18-19.

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well as a suspicion toward experiment and newness naturally characterize the market. For a publisher, there is a big difference between a potential audience amounting to one million readers of a book in Danish and one billion readers of a book in English. If Denmark has been a relatively homogeneous nation-state throughout history, or at least has been so in the cultural imagination, and if the Danish literary canon feeding this imagination has been oriented towards nativistic and nationalistic narratives, it follows that the literature of migration can be considered a niche market in Denmark, and this may explain why publishers shy away from it – or at least used to do so.

However, within the last decade or so, certainly since the Cartoon Crisis in 2006, as issues of multiculturalism and ethnicity have come to the national forefront, this explanation is no longer valid, as we have witnessed a genuine and almost aggressive call for migrant writers from both publishing houses and the media in Denmark. This public appeal is another example of how my initial claim of no Danish migrant writers can be considered true, since the call would not be made, one should think, if there were migrant writers already on the market. One may speculate about the reasons behind this new awareness of migration and intercultural literature in media and by publishers. One obvious reason for the publishers is that they have sensed a new commercial avenue, partly inspired by the international trend where migrant writers are setting the agenda. In other words, Danish editors may have asked themselves if it was not possible to discover or create a Danish Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, or Hanif Kureishi if they looked hard enough or shouted loudly enough.

Another reason may be that both the media and the publishing houses have come to see an incongruity not merely between the Danish and the international literary scenes, but also between the Danish literary landscape and Danish society in general. I certainly see this incongruity myself, although I have also attempted to outline reasons for Denmark not being comparable to the UK and France. The incongruity argument is what one of the editors of the anthology Nye stemmer (New Voices, 2007), Naja Maria Aidt, emphasizes when she explains one of the motifs behind the anthology (which can be characterized as the most concrete outcome of the call from the media and the publishing houses, more specifically Berlingske Tidende and

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Gyldendal): “We are so much in need of new voices, who speak from new places.”21 The story of Danish writers with multiple roots While acknowledging the discrepancy, and thus contributing to the line of thinking that Denmark somehow lacks behind other countries (including Sweden and Norway),22 I will nevertheless emphasize the paradox inherent in the aggressive call for migrant writers by media and publishers by drawing attention to some of those migrant writers who actually do exist in Denmark. Back in the late 1950s, Maria Giacobbe, a young Italian writer born in 1928 on Sardinia, immigrated to Denmark where she has lived ever since. Love and marriage were the main incentives behind her decision to emigrate. She was already a writer when she came to Denmark – her prize-winning debut Diario duna maestrina (A Teacher’s Diary) was published in Italy in 1957 (and translated into Danish as Lærerinde på Sardinien in 1961) – and she continues to write most of her work in Italian, a typical example of literary bilingualism. In her Dagbog mellem to verdener (Diary Between Two Worlds, 1975), Giacobbe thematizes existential and geographical rootlessness – perhaps still an unfamiliar phenomenon in comfy Denmark in the mid 1970s – and in the following she outlines a sort of migrant typology:

Vanskeligheden ved at tilpasse sig de nye livs- og arbejdsbetingelser udgør et problem eller et kompleks af problemer som, på mere eller mindre dramatisk vis, rejser sig for alle dem, nøden river ud af deres naturlige milieu og kaster ud i nye og uvante omgivelser, til en ny og uvant aktivitet.

Nogle lykkes det heldigvis … at vænne sig til forholdene og slå nye rødder. Andre, måske de fleste, resignerer, men vænner sig aldrig til det nye liv og bliver … ved at være passive og triste fremmedelementer, plaget af evindelig hjemve og derved dobbelt

21 Nye stemmer, eds Naja Maria Aidt, Jens Andersen, Rushy Rashid, and Janne Breinholt Bak, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2007, 8. 22 “While the Swedes offer young stars like Marjaneh Bakhtiari and Jonas Hassen Khemiri, who sell hundreds of thousands of copies, and the English among others serve up Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith, we lag immensely behind in Denmark. The scene for literature written by Danes with an immigrant background is almost non-existent, even though immigrants have been part of street life since the early 1970s”, says Aydin Soei (“Indvandrerforfattere”, 18-19).

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fremmedgjorte. Andre igen vænner sig aldrig til det nye, men resignerer heller ikke. Hvis det er umuligt for dem at vende tilbage til det land, de kommer fra, er det dem, der slutter sig til skaren af utilpassede i det nye land, og som, via alle slags småfiduser, ender i professionel kriminalitet. Nogle af dem “får succes,” bliver mægtige, skaber “skoler” og “kongeriger,” det er Al Capone’erne, Joe Fusco’erne, Abner Zwillman’erne. Også de slår … rødder i det nye milieu. Andre, de svagere, bliver ved at være navnløse, eller omtales måske med et par linier i aviserne i de byer, som har huset dem og hvor man en dag har fundet dem døde, af vold, druk eller desperation.23

Giacobbe does not seem to place too much trust in the positive outcome of migrating – she only devotes two lines to the successful migrants and explicitly claims that they are far fewer than the unsuccessful – although she herself represents someone who has managed to put down new roots without abandoning her old ones. Among the unsuccessful, she distinguishes between those who never get used to the new life but settle into resignation (and suffer double alienation), and those who never get used to the new life but at the same time refuse to settle into resignation. Among the latter she counts both the successful criminals and the nameless victims.

23 Maria Giacobbe, Dagbog mellem to verdener, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1975, 135-36: “The difficulty in adapting oneself to the new life and work conditions poses a problem or a complex of problems that in a more or less dramatic fashion confronts all those deprivation forces out of their natural environment and throws into new and unusual surroundings, to a new and unusual activity …. Some luckily succeed ... in getting used to the circumstances and put down new roots. Others, perhaps the majority, become resigned but never get used to the new life and continue ... to be passive and sad aliens, haunted by an eternal homesickness and thereby double alienated. Yet others never get used to the new, but neither do they settle into resignation. If it is impossible for them to return to the country from which they originally came, it is these people who join the throng of unsettled in the new country and who, through all sorts of tricks, end up in professional crime. Some of them ‘achieve success’, become great, create “schools” and “kingdoms”, it is the Al Capones, the Joe Fuscos, the Abner Zwillmans. They, too, ... put down roots in the new environment. Others, the weaker, continue to be nameless, or perhaps they are mentioned with a couple of lines in the newspapers in the cities that have housed them and where one day they are found dead of violence, drinking, or despair.”

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In Giacobbe’s Eksil og adskillelse: 12 (+1) ikke så fantastiske fortællinger (Exile and Separation: 12 (+1) Not So Fantastic Stories, 2001), the general atmosphere is dystopic and marked by already-happened or yet-to-come catastrophes – physical or existential, local, global, or private – that place the characters in front of almost insurmountable hindrances and in completely new environments. However, despite the seeming hopelessness of their mental and geographical exiles the characters are endowed with an unbelievable endurance and tenacity that prepare them for and infuse them with faith in new beginnings.

Janina Katz, together with Giacobbe the most acclaimed migrant writer in Denmark, immigrated to Denmark in 1969 from Poland because of persecution by the Communist regime. Born in Krakow in 1939, she published her first book, the collection of poems Min moders datter (My Mother’s Daughter, 1991), more than twenty years after arriving in Denmark. Devoted mostly to poetry, Katz has also published prose works, among others the convincing Drengen fra dengang (The Boy from Then) published in 2004. It is a novel about Ania, a sixty-three-year-old Jewish immigrant in Copenhagen, who looks back on her former life in Poland and Germany in an attempt to piece together her identity, her past, and her lineage. The immigrant’s incoherent life and psyche, a result of traumatic events and experiences of uprooting, is mirrored in the novel’s fragmentary form that oscillates between confused memories of the past and present attempts, often unsuccessful, to understand them.

In 1974, after having fled from Chile in 1973 in the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup, Rubén Palma arrived in what he then considered a paradisiacal Copenhagen by way of Argentina. Palma, who was born in Santiago in 1954, began writing in Danish in 1985. He published his first book in 1990, Brevet til Danmark (The Letter to Denmark), a work that is equally marked by gratitude towards and defamiliarizing perspectives on Danish culture. His publications also include Møder med Danmark (Meetings with Denmark, 1993) and Fra lufthavn til lufthavn (2001), translated into English as The Trail We Leave (2004). In all his works, Palma refuses to portray the migrant as just a victim, instead emphasizing the privileging aspects of being transplanted into new soil. In an interview, Palma tells a funny anecdote about one of the five rejections he received on Brevet til Danmark:

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I think the book was ahead of its time. It was a period when refugees were supposed to be wretches who were miserable and missed their homelands, etc. ... I will never forget! The concerned publishing house wrote that the book didn’t express or describe how the situation of a refugee was. Now, that is amazing! Here was a Danish person with an assumption about how “it should be”. They didn’t even hide it.24

Palma’s refusal to victimize himself and the migrant in general – despite experiences of political danger and persecution – is in line with the political incorrectness of Joseph Brodsky’s (another migrant writer who won the Nobel Prize) provocative assertion in “The Condition We Call Exile”:

… what our exiled writer has in common with a Gastarbeiter or a political refugee is that in either case a man is running away from the worse toward the better. The truth of the matter is that from a tyranny one can be exiled only to a democracy. For good old exile ain’t what it used to be. It isn’t leaving civilized Rome for savage Sarmatia anymore, nor is it sending a man from, say, Bulgaria to China. No, as a rule what takes place is a transition from a political and economic backwater to an industrially advanced society with the latest word on individual liberty on its lips. And it must be added that perhaps taking this route is for an exiled writer, in many ways, like going home – because he gets closer to the seat of the ideals which inspired him all along.25

The fourth writer to mention is Milena Rudež. Born in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1958, she came to Denmark in 1992 as a refugee from the Balkan War. She made her debut in 1987 in Sarajevo with a collection of poems, Dnevnik slijepog putnika (The Diary of the Blind Passenger). In 2002, she published a bilingual collection of poems, Den blinde rejsende fra Sarajevo/Slijepi putnik iz Sarajeva (The Blind Traveller from Sarajevo).

Finally, Adil Erdem, born in 1964 in a small village south of Ankara, Turkey, the son of a Kurdish gæstearbejder (“guest worker”) in Denmark, arrived in Denmark in 1982, shortly after having 24 Kirsten Rødsgaard-Mathiesen, “Den chilenske dansker”, Berlingske Tidende, 1 November 2001, 4. 25 Joseph Brodsky, “The Condition We Call Exile, or Acorns Aweigh”, 1987, in On Grief and Reason: Essays, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995, 23-24.

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published his first book in Turkish, the novel Hayat dikeni para (Money, the Thorn of Life,1982). Erdem made his debut in Danish in 1991 with a collection of short stories, Som en dråbe i Norden (Like a Rain Drop in the North).

We can discern a few common traits in Giacobbe, Katz, Palma, Rudež, and Erdem. First, they are all migrants in the traditional sense, that is, they have all experienced proper uprooting from their native countries, either because they felt forced to flee (Katz, Palma, Rudež) or because they voluntarily chose to emigrate (Giacobbe, Erdem). Second, they are all involved in translation and in bringing about intercultural exchanges through the promotion of Danish culture abroad or the promotion of Italian, Polish, Chilean, Bosnian, or Kurdish culture in Denmark. Third, they all exemplify my point about the immigrant writer’s difficulties in acquiring the Danish language, indeed an issue that must be taken into account when discussing the low amount of migrant writers in Denmark: Giacobbe, already a writer when arriving in Denmark, has continued to write most of her books in Italian; Katz waited more than twenty years after her immigration to publish in Danish, and this was also her first publication ever; with Palma it took eleven years before he wrote anything in Danish, also his first attempt to write at all; a decade or so is also the case with Rudež and Erdem, both of whom had published before coming to Denmark.

The call for migrant writers by the media and publishing houses is primarily directed towards a younger generation of writers who do not necessarily have experiences of proper uprooting – that is, writers born in Denmark to ethnic parents or to a Danish parent and an ethnic parent, or writers adopted by Danish parents. One writer who actually carries painful migratory experiences in his luggage is the poet Alen Mešković, who participated (as did Milena Rudež) in Nye stemmer and published his first book in 2009, a collection of poems and short prose, Første gang tilbage (First Time Back). Mešković was born in Bosnia in 1977, but came to Denmark in 1994 having fled from the war-torn Balkans where his family were driven out of their home, and after a two-year stay in a refugee camp in Croatia. Første gang tilbage is about the author’s first visit to his childhood home and native country after immigrating, and the main theme of the book – a book that depicts homecoming as anything but a happy event – is mental

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and metaphysical homelessness underlined by a language and style that are simultaneously fragmentary and fluid.26 “A house is not a home unless one leaves it”, could stand as the motto of the book with its paradoxical blend of melancholy and hope.27

An example of a writer who is adopted and whose multiple rooting is creatively thematized is Maja Lee Langvad, who was born in South Korea in 1980, but came to Denmark when she was three months old. Langvad published Find Holger Danske, a collection of poems, in 2006 and is generally concerned with issues of belonging, roots, and personal and national identity – a concern that among other things shows in her recent long stays in South Korea. Additionally, Lone Aburas was born in Denmark in 1979 to a Danish mother and Egyptian father. She has published two novels, Føtexsøen (The Føtex Lake, 2009) and Den svære toer (The Difficult Second, 2011), in which her double belonging plays a significant role.

The last writer of double belonging I will mention is Birgithe Kosović, who was born in Denmark in 1972 to a Danish mother and a father from the then-Yugoslavia. She made her debut with the Blixen-inspired novel Legenden om Villa Valmarana (The Legend of Villa Valmarana, 1997), which was followed by Om natten i Jerusalem (Night-time in Jerusalem, 1999), the latter translated into Swedish, Norwegian, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Greek. Her latest novel, Det dobbelte land (The Double Country, 2010), explores the history of her father’s family in the former Yugoslavia during a period that includes the Second World War, Tito Communism, and the Balkan Wars. In that sense, the novel infuses Danish literature with an international dimension and introduces the grand political themes of uprooting, catastrophe, and war into a Danish context through a personalized history and voice. As Lars Bukdahl remarks in a commemoration speech: “Det dobbelte land is a completely un-Danish novel that in no way is about Denmark and is admittedly written in Danish, but a strong(ly) un-Danish Danish [‘et stærkt udansk dansk’], which is the opposite of a bad and sloppy Danish, that

26 In that sense, Mešković’s poems resembles Natasha Radojčić’s novel Homecoming (2002), which also problematizes returning home after the war. 27 Alen Mešković, Første gang tilbage, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2009, 11: “Et hus er ikke et hjem, medmindre det forlades.”

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is to say an extraordinary dense and dramatical Danish.”28 Bukdahl here touches upon a significant distinction between poor Danish language (what the publishers claim they often see in manuscripts from immigrants) and “a strong(ly) un-Danish Danish”, that is, a Danish suffused with an unmistakable twist of foreignness (and therefore very powerful). In Kosović’s case, brutality and eroticism particularly underscore this foreignness: “In Det dobbelte land one comes across some of the most maliciously brutal prose passages in later Danish literature and some of the most juicily erotic.”29

Brutality characterizes a number of intensely felt scenes featuring wife-battering, sister murder, foetal murder, war-related violence, or, as in the following example, animal slaughter:

Et hysterisk, infernalsk skrig får den hede, stillestående luft til at vibrere og sender en bølge af panik gennem drengen. Han holder sig for ørerne, mens grisen fnyser perler af blod ud af trynen, og de røde blanke pletter på terrassegulvet synes at indeholde hele det levende i sig, som de før var en del af. Med en forkølet prusten kaster dyret sig fra side til side, mens blodet spreder sig i fede stråler ud over halsen og plumper ned i karret under dets hoved .... Opgivende lader den store krop sig sprætte op. Huden glider til siden, med de gullige kanter omkring det glinsende blåviolette og blodsprængte kødsår. En hånd griber ind idet skjulte, der søges omkring derinde, og med et klask vælter en uformelig klump af indvolde ned idet andet kar. Fra mørket i de eksploderede pupiller stirrer grisen måbende tilbage på drengen, og det går op for ham, at den stadig er i live.30

28 Lars Bukdahl, “Den tvetungede stork”, Weekendavisen, 28 January 2011, 1. 29 Ibid., 2. 30 Birgithe Kosović, Det dobbelte land, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2010, 121: “A hysterical, infernal scream makes the hot, still air vibrate and sends a wave of panic through the boy. He protects his ears with his hands while the pig snorts pearls of blood out of the snout, and the red shiny stains on the terrace floor seem to contain all the living that they were formerly a part of. With a feeble grunt the animal throws itself from side to side while the blood spreads out over the neck in thick squirts and plumps into the tub under its head .... Despairingly, the large body lets itself be slit open. The skin slides apart, with the yellowish edges around the glistening purple and bloodshot flesh wound. A hand grasps into the hidden, looks around in there, and with a smack a formless chunk of entrails falls into the other tub. From the darkness in the exploded pupils the pig stares vacantly back upon the boy, and he realizes that it is still alive.”

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As to eroticism, the novel is both saturated with a general erotic gaze (Milovan’s) and full of explicit sex scenes:

Han tog fat om hendes underben oppe ved knæet og spredte hendes ben vidt ud, mens han så ned på hendes venusbjerg under trusserne, som hun stadig havde på, og trykkede sin pik ind mod det varme skød, der modstandsløst åbnede sig for ham. Han kunne forsvinde i hende, han kunne give slip på alt og overgive sig, og der ville ingen tid være mere, alt ville blive borte, mens han sank ind i hende, som ind mod sig selv, sin egen opløsning – men inden han nåede så langt, sendte hans pik kaskader af sæd ind mellem de yderste læber – som hvis han var en skoledreng!31

The woman with whom Milovan makes love here is not his wife. It is Lidija, his best friend’s pregnant wife who has just been told that her husband Nebojša suffers from a brain tumour. The point I want to make is that whether we speak of war cruelty, ethnic cleansing, wife battering, pig slaughtering, erotic gazes, or passionate sex, Kosović quite simply deals in brutality. Brutality is not simply related to violence, it is also an intrinsic part of eroticism: in the Lidija-Milovan scene, it is, among other things, brought about by the fact that they both betray the hospitalized Nebojša, and the fact that they have just learned of his brain tumour. However, it is further emphasized by the fact that the sexual culmination just described is immediately preceded by an initial and very passionate attempt at intercourse that was interrupted because Milovan suddenly became conscious of their embarrassing endeavour. But the termination of their lovemaking triggers a feeling of disgrace that feels stronger than the feeling of having done the right thing, so Milovan grabs Lidija’s legs and continues – that is, the brutality is here underlined because Milovan resumes the betrayal even after having been hit by remorse.

31 Ibid., 178: “He grabbed her lower leg just under her knee and spread her legs wide while he looked down upon her vulva under the panties, which she still wore, and pushed his cock against the hot womb that unresisting opened itself for him. He could disappear into her, he could let go of everything and surrender himself, and time would cease to exist, everything would be gone, while he sank into her as toward himself, his own dissolution – but before he got that far his cock send cascades of sperm in between the outer lips – as if he was a school boy!”

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If brutality in Kosović’s novel is part and parcel of not only scenes of violence, but also of eroticism, sensuousness is a strong component of not only eroticism, but also of scenes of violence. In slaughter scenes, war scenes, and erotic scenes, Kosović shows an acute sense for the physical detail as the semantic dimension of language is played down and supplemented with a pre-coded material intensity invoked through sounds and smells, light and tactility, rhythms and fleshy texture, substances and affects, things and sensations. In Kosović’s case we can neither speak of literary multilingualism (as in Giacobbe’s case) nor of textual multilingualism (as in Rushdie’s case). Rather, Kosović, who was born in Denmark and writes in Danish, is – and this is what Bukdahl refers to positively as “a strong(ly) un-Danish Danish” – a sort of stranger in her own language: she is polylingual or multilingual in a single language, she creates a minor language within her own language, a minor use of her own language.32

By disclosing her own personal relation to the novel’s story – a story that takes place far away from Denmark and thus possibly makes the Danish reader wonder what all this has to do with him or her – Kosović forces the reader to acknowledge that the Balkan Wars, the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, and the thousands of refugees from the war are part of a global history in which Denmark also plays a role. In an aesthetic sense, Kosović’s novel also qualifies as a migratory work of art (and this sense of an author taking the literary form seriously – this feeling of the author’s intense toiling with language, point of view, and composition, of the formally articulated artistic vision – is precisely what proves it to be a genuine work of art) as the thematic focus on individual displacements and national dissolution is reflected in a fragmentary form (mediated primarily through the chaotic consciousness of Milovan) consisting of intensely lucid and instantaneous images disconnected from each other. Therefore reader is never given a panoramic overview of the history of Yugoslavia; instead, Kosović reflects, expresses, and creates the national collapse through a self-doubting, broken individual. In that sense, Det dobbelte land is not so much a novel about the

32 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), Minnesota: University of Minnesota, 1986, 26-27; Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (1996), London: Athlone, 2002, 4.

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disintegration of the former Yugoslavia as it is a novel growing out of or placed in this disintegration.33

The banyanization of native writers A problem I have not touched upon is the question of categorizing. Many of the writers mentioned here are very critical toward the term indvandrerlitteratur (“immigrant literature”), which seems to be the preferred term in a Danish context. I have elsewhere argued for the use of “migration literature” instead of “migrant literature”, one reason being that “migrant literature” (like indvandrerlitteratur) refers directly to the biography of the writer and thus connotes a compulsory (and therefore very problematic) link between authorial background and literary theme.34 This inherent othering, stigmatization, and limitation of creativity are also the main explanations to why many of the above-mentioned authors, for example Rubén Palma, dislike the concept of indvandrerlitteratur: “there is a tendency to regard what you write as an indistinguishable part of the current debate on immigration.”35 What follows is an expectation of a general politico-moralistic and didactic literature where aesthetic questions receive no

33 Apart from those already mentioned, the following writers of double belonging also deserve to be mentioned as part of the Danish literary scene: Arash Sharifzadeh Abdi, Musa Ajmi, Muniam Alfaker, Murat Alpar, Alicja Fenigsen, Irfan Gevheroglu, Duna Ghali, Marco Goli, Jamal Jumá, Eva Tind Kristensen, Sofia Kuperman, Kim Leine, Paulina Nielsen, Morteza Seighali, Sara Mathai Stinus, Goran Todorovic, and Iboja Wandall-Holm. There are two more writers I would like to mention: Tabish Khair is a professor of English at Aarhus University and an internationally acclaimed novelist published by such renowned publishers as Picador (The Bus Stopped, 2004; Filming, 2007) and Harper Collins (The Thing About Thugs, 2010). Jamal Mahjoub is from Sudan and the UK, but has also lived in Denmark and Spain. Mahjoub has published several internationally acclaimed novels, and one of these – his first novel from 1998, The Carrier – actually takes place in Denmark in the seventeenth century and in the present. It is puzzling to me, taking the Danish publishers’ call for indvandrer-litteratur with foreign perspectives on Denmark into consideration, that no Danish publisher has yet published this excellent novel. For a brilliant reading of The Carrier, see Sten Pultz Moslund’s Migration Literature and Hybridity: Different Speeds of Transcultural Change, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 34 See Søren Frank, Migration and Literature: Günter Grass, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, and Jan Kjærstad, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 35 Rubén Palma, “Bio”, rubenpalma.dk, 23 November 2008: http://www.rubenpalma. dk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=118&Itemid=183/ (accessed 14 September 2011).

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attention. Another incentive for substituting “migrant literature” with “migration literature” is that the latter loosens the biographical link – what Rushdie once called “the confining myth of authenticity, that folkloristic straitjacket” – and points more toward textual immanence, that is, toward what actually takes place in the work itself independent of the personal experiences of the author.36 Finally, “migration” understood etymologically as movement and change37 possesses a certain explanatory power in regard to the formal aspects of this type of literature, characterized as it often is by fluidity, hybridity, and metamorphosis.38

If some authors have a critical stance toward indvandrerlitteratur, others – mainly among the younger generation – sense an opportunity in employing (and exploiting) a term that clearly has become in held high regard with publishers and media – and who can blame them? In that sense, we may be witnessing a reversal in hierarchy, where the nativistic narratives emphasizing the purity of national traditions, formerly the dominating genre (especially in the nineteenth century), one now replaced by a multicultural and impure literature. The danger is that certain expectations to literature in general and to specific authors in particular begin to infiltrate the literary system and dictate the way literature is written.

A result of loosening the link between authorial biography and literary content is not only that it becomes possible to imagine that migrant writers can produce literature that has absolutely nothing to do with migrants and migration, but also that it becomes possible – and this is the final point I will make – to imagine that non-migrant writers can produce migration literature. One reason for this is that writers are imaginative beings who can write many things that have no biographical grounding; another is that we live in an age of migration in which we are all, to some extent, migratory beings just as we are all

36 Rushdie, Satanic Verses, 52. 37 Migration originates from the Latin migrare (to wander, to move) and the Greek ameibein (to change). 38 The fact that “migration” also functions as an aesthetic-formal concept is precisely why “migration literature” is a better concept than “migrant literature”, “literature of exile”, “literature of globalization”, and “diasporic literature”, all of which lack the formal explanatory power, referring as they do only to biographical and/or thematic issues.

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immersed in a society that is more multicultural than ever before.39 In Denmark, we may have a literary scene short of canonized migrant writers, but some native Danish writers have begun to write about migration. Karsten Lund has thus written a novel about a Turkish immigrant arriving in Denmark in 1969, Skrønen om Erkan (The Tale About Erkan, 2010), and Olav Hergel, who, like Lund, has a journalistic background, has published two novels, Flygtningen (The Refugee, 2006) and Indvandreren (The Immigrant, 2010). In 2009, Carsten Nagel published Zehras flugt (Zehra’s Escape), a novel about a twelve-year-old Bosnian girl’s experiences of war and her subsequent escape to Denmark. Finally, Jens Christian Grøndahl, one of Denmark’s most acclaimed international writers, has written about an American and a Romanian immigrant in Copenhagen in his novel Piazza Bucarest (2004). Grøndahl’s narrator asks a question in the novel that could also be read as Grøndahl’s implicit answer to the discussion of nativistic versus cosmopolitan literature: “How could I restrict myself to writing about spoiled middle-class Danes’ heartaches while world history roared into my ears?”40 Well, the point is that even if that is what he really wished to do, he cannot avoid world history. However, the way Grøndahl incorporates the world in the novel is through the personal experiences of ordinary people: Scott, the American who first marries a Danish woman to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War; and Elena, the Romanian who then marries Scott to escape Ceausescu’s communist tyranny and live in freedom – a choice, however, that also means abandoning her child in Bucharest. Through Elena, Grøndahl manages to create an outside perspective on Denmark and the Danish people, and this helps qualify the novel as a migration novel: “Their normal condition was the smallholder’s fearsome, stockily glowering mistrust and only had the nit-picking spitefulness or the blustering joviality as poles in a

39 To claim that we live in a multicultural society in the twenty-first century does not necessarily mean that society was once monocultural and pure. It is a question of degree, which is meant to indicate a process of acceleration and intensification. 40 Jens Christian Grøndahl, Piazza Bucarest, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2004, 85: “Hvordan kunne jeg nøjes med at skrive om forkælede middelklassedanskeres hjertekvababbelser, mens verdenshistorien brølede om ørerne på mig?”

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basically dilatory and drowsy temper’s vacillations.”41 Whether Grøndahl has a point or not in letting Scott and Elena end up in the US and Italy respectively, thus potentially connoting a Denmark unable to accommodate or satisfy migrants, I shall refrain from answering.

So, to conclude, it is in a way reasonable to claim that the Danish literary scene is without migrant writers – they are, as we have seen, completely absent from the literary canon. On the other hand, there are a few migrant writers who have published books in Denmark, but the fact that Giacobbe and Katz are probably the best known of these writers only emphasizes the relative obscurity of the migrant writer in Denmark. However, there seems to be emerging two new dimensions of the field. One is that a younger generation with multiple rooting – some born outside Denmark, some born in Denmark – could be on the verge of a breakthrough (Kosović receiving Weekendavisen’s literary prize and, in a Nordic context, Oksanen receiving the Nordisk Råds Litteraturpris are perhaps a sign of this), although we seem to have passed beyond the possibility of a Danish Midnight’s Children moment (as when Rushdie in 1981 stunned and exhilarated Western critics and readers alike with his breakthrough novel). Another dimension is that core Danish writers are beginning (like for instance Jan Kjærstad has been doing in Norway since the 1990s) to tackle the issues of migration, interculturality, and national identity in their works. Both dimensions point toward a less rigid emphasis on authorial biography (although biography cannot and should not be completely bracketed) and a more work-immanent approach. It is now up to us, the scholars, to invent new and appropriate concepts and categories that are able to match the cultural phenomena of twenty-first-century global society.

41 Ibid., 69: “Deres normaltilstand var husmandens frygtsomme, undersætsig skulende mistro og havde kun den kværulerende trods eller den brovtende jovialitet som poler i for et i bund og grund sendrægtigt og dorsk temperaments udsving.”