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Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia

Corso di laurea in Lingue e Letterature Europee e Americane

Tesi di Laurea Magistrale in Letterature Nordiche

The Implication within a Prefix

Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Works and their Problematic

Definition as invandrarlitteratur Relatore: Candidato: Prof. Massimo Ciaravolo Fabio Giuliari Correlatore: Prof.ssa Valerie Wainwright

Anno Accademico 2012/2013

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 05

METHODOLOGY AND PURPOSE 08

QUOTATIONS AND NOTES 10

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 10

CHAPTER I – The Writer 13

1.1 SHORT BIOGRAPHY 14

1.2 SOURCES OF LITERARY INSPIRATION 15

1.3 A POSSIBLE SOURCE OF INSPIRATION 17

1.3.1 Borta i tankar 17

1.3.2 Elixir 20

CHAPTER II – Blattesvenska or Halimiska? 23

2.1 RINKEBY AND RINKEBYSVENSKA 25

2.2 INVANDRARLITTERATUR AND RACISM 30

2.3 LANGUAGE IN ETT ÖGA RÖTT 33

2.4 JULIA GROßE’S “A COMPARISON” 40

2.5 HALIMISKA – A LANGUAGE TO FIND ONESELF 43

CHAPTER III – The Unreliable Narrator 51

3.1 MONTECORE, A NARRATOLOGICAL ANALYSIS 52

3.1.1 The style of the novel and the narrators 52

3.1.2 The time issue in the novel 57

3.1.3 The language 59

3.2 THE THEMES OF THE NOVEL 67

3.2.1 A different idea of integration 68

3.2.2 The eclipse of the father 75

3.3 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL LENS 79

CHAPTER IV – The Family in a Racist World 85

4.1 BOMBINGS IN STOCKHOLM – FACTS 86

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4.2 “JAG RINGER MINA BRÖDER”, THE GENESIS 089

4.3 JAG RINGER MINA BRÖDER 092

4.3.1 Narrator, voice, and point of view 093

4.3.2 Time 095

4.4 THE THEMES OF THE NOVEL 097

4.4.1 The family issue 104

4.5 THE BOOK REVIEWS AND THE POLITICAL LENS 108

CHAPTER V – Khemiri the Playwright 117

5.1 RECEPTION OF THE CRITICS 119

5.2 LANGUAGE IN INVASION! 122

5.3 INDIVIDUALITY AND IDENTITY IN INVASION! 127

5.4 SOCIAL CRITICISM 131

5.5 THEATRICAL DIS-ILLUSION IN KHEMIRI’S PLAYS 135

CONCLUSION 143 SVENSK SAMMANFATTNING 147

BIBLIOGRAPHY 151

PRIMARY SOURCES 151

SECONDARY SOURCES 152

REVIEWS, ARTICLES, AND INTERVIEWS 155

WEB SOURCES 159

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INTRODUCTION

During the summer of 2012, after surgery, I was confided to bed for a month. I spent

that tranquil time reading constantly, devoted to literature. In a month, I read a

substantial amount of books of various sorts. Among them, one book greatly struck

me: the Italian translation of Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Montecore. Its astonishing use

of language and its fascinating characters were greatly involving; I felt I had found

something I could work on.

A couple of months before, I had agreed with my thesis supervisor to write

my final essay on Swedish literature, focusing on contemporary writers depicting

familiar changes. A Swedish friend of mine suggested I read Khemiri’s Ett öga rött

(One Eye Red), which she found relevant for my project. Since my knowledge in

Swedish was basic at that time1 and Ett öga rött has never been translated in either

Italian or English, I read the only book translated in Italian of this unknown writer:

Montecore. I read it in two days and I thought it was a perfect fit for necessity.

Montecore is a story that deals with the relationship between the protagonist and his

father. Moreover, its brilliant style and its implications made the book even more

intriguing.

Shortly after my recovery, I went to Malmö to attend an intensive language

course. There, I bought Ett öga rött, and I started to read it. It took me three months

to read it thoroughly, enjoying every single page and the effort was well re-paid.

1 Since I attended undergraduate courses at the University of Padua, where Scandinavian languages were not offered, at the time I had studied Swedish for one year only.

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Halim and Otman were what I was looking for: a complex father and son relationship

that is very far from the familiar patriarchal ideal. Halim was rebellious, independent,

and outrageous, and on the other hand, his father seemed to have no influence on his

son’s education. I had found an appropriate writer to analyse and use to examine the

patriarchal crisis in Swedish literature. I remember I thought Sweden would be an

extremely open country, where traditional family values were challenged –

otherwise, why would the tender Swedish fathers who look after their children

surprise every tourist? “Sweden is the country of gender equality, and Khemiri

depicts a familiar transformation in his literature!” I thought. At the time, I did not

examine the deeper implications of Khemiri’s novels, the aspect that reveals that

Sweden is not as it appears. It can be racist and unjust. Perhaps I was too influenced

by the common external conception that Nordic countries are paradises on Earth.

Meanwhile, I moved to Gothenburg, where I resided for ten months with an

Erasmus scholarship. During the time I would study Swedish, take courses, and

research material for my thesis in an unfamiliar environment. I was still sure that I

would find extensive articles and essays about familiar relationships in Ett öga rött

and Montecore. When Khemiri’s last novel Jag ringer mina bröder (I Ring my

Brothers) was published, I reinforced my theory considering that a writer would not

use the word “brothers” in a title, if he was not interested in familiar issues. Jag

ringer mina bröder convinced me that I was on a right path.

It was then time to look for a solid academic foundation, but what I found

was not what I expected. Critics and professors wrote their papers on Khemiri’s

sociolinguistic and political implications, questioning his reliability as a reporter of

the suburbs. I was shocked to find that the critiques of Khemiri’s literary

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characteristics were solely based on his linguistic style, and that critics constantly

stressed the fact that Khemiri’s father is Tunisian, and therefore Khemiri has to be

considered an invandrarförfattare (immigrant writer). I had heard something about

these Swedish immigrant writers, including Theodor Kallifatides (1938), a Greek

writer who migrated to Sweden in 1964 and started to write in Swedish already

towards the end of the Sixties. So I double-checked Khemiri’s nationality, certain

that he was born in Stockholm. I was correct, but I could not understand why he was

labeled an invandrarförfattare.

I failed to understand why a Swedish native was considered an immigrant in

his own land until I read two enlightening articles written by another Swedish

novelist: Astrid Trotzig. The articles were “Makten över prefixen” (The Power of the

Prefix) and “Biografi som kategori” (Biography as a Category). I realized that

Khemiri was not considered completely Swedish because of his father’s Tunisian

origin, assuming a multicultural background. Furthermore, I realized that this

prejudice was what prevented critics from being objective. Khemiri was labeled as an

invandrarförfattare, expected to deal only with racism, multicultural backgrounds,

and the corruption of standard language. Indeed, why should a white Swedish critic

expect a writer, considered ethnically different, to write about Swedish families?

Why should this critic expect this writer to write about universal values and such

topics, if he belongs to a minority group? I discovered that the issue is deeply

connected with social bias.

These questions provoked my interest in a thesis that was different from the

one that was originally planned. Even after extensive research, I could not deny my

concern of predictive conclusions that invandrarförfattare write about minorities and

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suburb idiolects. I have always considered Khemiri to be an excellent writer, not only

because of his ability to master the Swedish language, but also because of his vivid

descriptions and explorations of personal human relationships. Thus, my thesis

developed into an effort to demonstrate the complexity of Khemiri’s literature, a

complexity which goes beyond what is socially, culturally, literately hinted and

defined by the prefix invandrar-.

METHODOLOGY AND PURPOSE

My thesis will primarily focus on three novels: Ett öga rött, Montecore, and Jag

ringer mina bröder. The problem of contemporary literature is that it is hard to find

critical material to support one’s hypothesis, making it essential to consider reviews

and interviews in newspapers and magazines. I have indeed decided it crucial not to

ignore any kind of source material.

Since I aim to undermine a consolidated view of Swedish critics, my thesis

might appear quite destructive rather than constructive. However, I want to point out

that my criticism could be considered a starting point for those students who want to

approach Khemiri’s novels from a new point of view.

The definition of invandrarlitteratur, as I will discuss, deals with three main

expectations: a) the language used by the invandrarförfattare is a reliable

representation of the idiolects used by people in Swedish multiethnic suburbs, b) the

invandraförfattare tends to create autobiographical characters, c) the most important

implications of the invandrarlitteratur (immigrant literature) are political, because

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the invandrarförfattare aims to undermine the white bourgeois establishment. These

assumptions have prevented Swedish critics from objectively analysing Khemiri’s

work. Through my analysis of Ett öga rött, I will demonstrate how the peculiar

language that the writer has used has many aesthetic connotations and it is not only a

mere misconception implied by invandrarsvenska. To do so, I will consider Julia

Prentice’s PHD research which compares the actual Swedish language spoken by

young second generation immigrants with the language which Halim, the protagonist

of the novel, uses in his diary.

Secondly, I will support the idea that Montecore is not strictly an

autobiographical novel, despite the fact that the main character is named after the

writer. On the contrary, an ironic intent is imposed by the author, and to prove it I

will refer to Troztig’s essays.

Finally, I will expand on how the political issue is as much relevant as the

other themes in Khemiri’s latest novel Jag ringer mina bröder. In this section I will

consider the reviews of the novel that merely focused on the political issue,

proposing an argument that the story would lose its deeper value if the attention was

not put also on the protagonist’s personal relationships and friendships.

After this analysis of the novels I will also write a chapter analysing some plays

written by Khemri, trying to give an overview of his great ability as playwright.

My thesis serves two different purposes: it primarily aims to present Khemiri’s

widely unknown works to the Italian public, and secondly to deconstruct the

prejudices that critics have against Khemiri. For this purpose, I will consider the

critics’ reception of Khemiri’s works in reviews and I will adopt a narratological

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perspective. My analysis of the narrative structure will mostly be based on semiotic

studies and it will refer to Elementi di teoria letteraria (1984) by Franco Brioschi

and Costanzo Di Girolamo, L’officina del racconto (1990) by Angelo Marchese, and

Il testo narrativo (2005) by Remo Ceserani and Andrea Bernardelli.

QUOTATIONS AND NOTES

Since I will often refer to and quote from Khemiri’s works, I have decided to indicate

the titles and the pages of the novels, and plays, in brackets right after the references

and quotations. This will serve to avoid useless and unaesthetic lists of the same

works in the foot-notes. When I refer to an English translation of Khemiri’s works

that is not mine, I will indicate the translator’s name, the title of the book and the

page in brackets.

For the notes and the bibliography of this thesis, I have referred to the Chicago

Manual of Style Online.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the course of writing this thesis, I have incurred numerous debts.

For my professors at the University of Florence, for their patience, passion, and

help, I am most grateful.

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Alessandro Bassini has been extremely helpful in finding sources, which I had

no chance to find. He has also helped me in understanding the intricate world of

translation and has given me priceless ideas for future researches. At the same time I

want to thank Julia Prentice who has given me material to work on and open access

to her research.

Advice given by Nico De Lillo has also been a great help in finding sources.

I am deeply indebted to Jonas Hassen Khemiri who has given me a version of

his play Apatiska för nybörjare (Apathy for Beginners) and for his wonderful novels

that gave me numerous moments of great pleasure. I hope I will meet him personally

in the future time.

Many thanks go to Lorraine McLaughlin, Vivian Oh, and Jacqui De Bono who

have corrected my first draft.

I am very grateful to Armando Cremona, for his encouragement and help with

the final summary in Swedish.

I wish also to acknowledge the practical help provided by Mario Meloni.

This thesis is dedicated to my parents, whose affection and support has enabled me to

follow my dreams.

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CHAPTER I – The Writer

Biography and Inspiration

The award-winning novelist and playwright Jonas Hassen Khemiri is very well

known in Sweden, however he is relatively unheard of abroad. Despite the fact that

his work has been translated into many languages,2 he is still an undiscovered talent

for many readers. Khemiri is a young writer with only a few publications, writing in

many different genres including novels, short stories and theatre. Khemiri is a skilled

artist but he is often difficult to interpret for two reasons: first of all his language

does not respect Swedish grammatical rules and many foreign and invented words

are used. Secondly, his stories deal with a specific Swedish background that is hard

to understand for those who are not familiar with Sweden and its society. Once a

reader can solve these initial problems, they will find themselves absorbed in an

original literature that is full of ideas and truth.

This first chapter gives the background information that is required to

understand the analysis made in the subsequent chapters. After a short biography,

there follows a brief description of two short stories written by Alejandro Leiva

Wenger, a Swedish writer who, through his collection of stories called Till vår ära

(To Our Honor), published in 2001, has in some respects anticipated Khemiri’s style.

2 Ett öga rött has been translated in Norwegian, Finnish, Danish, German, Serbian and Dutch. Montecore has been published also in Italy, USA, Hungary, France, but not in Serbia. His piece Invasion! has been played in New York, while his other theatrical works, his short stories, and his last book Jag ringer mina bröder has not been translated yet.

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1.1 SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Jonas Hassen Khemiri was born in Stockholm on 27 December 1978 to a Tunisian

father and a Swedish mother. His first book Ett öga rött (One Eye Red) was

published in 2003 and sold over 200.000 copies.3 From his debut, it was clear that

Khemiri was an interesting writer. In 2004, the Swedish newspaper Borås Tidning

awarded him with a prize for debut novels.4 The panel of judges described the novel

as “a smart and sensitive work which deeply investigates language and makes

Swedish shine as if it were new”.5

Khemiri studied at Södra Latins gymnasium6 and later international business and

literature at the universities of Stockholm and Paris. After graduation, he worked as

an apprentice at the United Nations Security Council in New York. Besides Swedish,

he can speak French and English fluently. In an interview for an Italian website,

Khemiri admitted that his personal experience in New York had intensely influenced

his writing.7 He finished his first book in the spring of 2002 while he was still in

New York. The difficulties he faced when speaking a language different to his own

mother tongue inspired him. Ett öga rött deals with the idea of feeling subordinated

to a language without knowing how to escape it.

3 Biographical information can be found at www.khemiri.se/biografi. 4 Since 2001 the Borås Tidnings debutantpris has been given to Swedish novel-writers or poets who stands out with their first published work. 5 Judges words are: “För en smart och hjärtevarm roman som drattar språket på ända och får svenskan att glänsa som om den vore ny.” “Borås Tidnings debuttpris”, Borås Tidning, last modified January 31, 2012, http://www.bt.se/kultur/bts_debutantpris/om-boras-tidnings-debutantpris%28348367%29.gm. 6 The Södra Latin is a selective high school in Stockholm. Many famous Swedish people went to this school, among them: John Landquist, Stig Dagerman, and Tomas Tranströmer. 7 Giovanni Pannacci, “Intervista a Jonas Hassen Khemiri”, Mangialibri, March 15, 2010, accessed February 20, 2013, http://www.mangialibri.com/node/6012.

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In 2009, Khemiri lived between Stockholm and Berlin, after receiving a year’s

scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service8.

Although it may seem pointless to list the prizes that have been awarded to Jonas

Hassen Khemiri, it is, however, of interest to mention a couple of them, since they

demonstrate the success he has gained.

In 2006 Khemiri received the P. O. Enquists pris (Per Olof Enquist’s Prize),9

and in 2007 he received the Stockholms stads Bellmanpris (Bellman’s Price of the

City of Stockholm).10 Additionally in 2007 he was awarded the Sveriges Radios

Romanpris (Novel Prize of the Radio of Sweden)11 and then in 2008 the Sveriges

Radios Novellpris (Short Story Prize of the Radio of Sweden)12.

1.2 SORCES OF LITERARY INSPIRATION

To date, Khemiri has published five books and written as many plays. As a young

writer, Khemiri’s writing style is constantly evolving. Consequently it is very

challenging to define the kind of literature that influences his work. Nevertheless, it

8 The DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst) is a private self-governing organization of higher education in Germany. More information can be found at: www.daad.org. 9 Another famous and talented writer who received the same prize is the Icelandic Jòn Kalman Stefànsson in 2011. 10 “Stockholms stads Bellmapris”, Stockholms stad kulturpriser, accessed April 30, 2013, http://www.stockholm.se/KulturFritid/Stod/Kulturpriser/. 11 “Sveriges radios romanpris”, Sveriges Radio, last modified March 6, 2007, http://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=499&artikel=1238939. 12 “Sveriges radios novellpris”, Sveriges Radio, accessed April 15, 2013, http://sverigesradio.se/sida/gruppsida.aspx?programid=1057&grupp=4169&artikel=2240398.

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is pertinent to list here the books and the authors which, according to his statements,

he particularly likes.

In a long interview with him published in the Swedish magazine Vi Läser

(2009), Khemiri was asked by Jonas Eklöf to list three literary models and three

unforgettable short classics. He answered: Marguerite Dumas for her obstinacy, Per

Olof Enquist for his sharpness, and Richard Pryor for his smart humor, respectively.

Moreover, he mentioned Aura (1962) by the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, Dix heures et

demie du soir en été (1960) (Ten-Thirty on a Summer Night) by Marguerite Dumas,

and The Thief and the Dogs (1961) by the Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz.13

In an article published in the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter (October 15,

2012), Khemiri stated that his favourite book is Per Olof Enquist’s Nedstörtad ängel

(1985) (Downfall: a love story).14

In addition, in an interview for the New Yorker Times (September 8, 2011),

Khemiri listed among his influences, besides Marguerite Dumas and Per Olov

Enquist, the Italian writer Italo Calvino, the Argentinian novelist Julio Cortázar, and

the rapper Nasir Jones.15

Thus we can conclude that both Marguerite Dumas and Per Olof Enquist hold an

intense attraction for Khemiri and that most of his favourite pieces were written in

the Sixties and, furthermore, that he includes among his inspirations a comedian and

a rapper.

13 Jonas Eklöf, “I väntan på inspiration”, Vi laser, 2009, accessed January 20, 2013, http://www.khemiri.se/assets/0000/0696/jhk-intervju-vi-laser-hosten-2009.pdf. 14 Carin Stålhberg, ”Jag skriver för att hitta nyanserna”, DN, October 10, 2012, accessed, January 20, 2013, http://www.dn.se/dnbok/dnbok-hem/jag-skriver-for-att-hitta-nyanserna. 15 Eric Grode, “Subversive Tongue and a Sharp Focus on Identity Politics”, review of Invasion!, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, New York Times, September 8, 2011, accessed March 15, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/theater/jonas-hassen-khemiri-the-playwright-behind-invasion.html.

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Moreover, it is fundamental to include Khemiri’s work in an innovative literary trend

that started in Sweden at the beginning of this century. Although it is premature to

define it as a proper trend, it is undeniable that some writers have chosen a particular

– and similar – stylistic and linguistic form in which to write their works. They use a

broken Swedish that might seem to represent the language spoken in different ways

by immigrants. The following is an overview of the first published stories that used

this peculiar language whilst from the second chapter on Khemir’s Swedish language

and style are analysed.

Alejandro Antonio Leiva Wenger published a collection of short stories in 2001

entitled Till vår ära. The later Snabba Cash (2006) (Fast Money) by Jens Lapidus,

and Kalla det vad fan du vill (2005) (Call it what the hell you want) by Marjaneh

Bakhtiari are other books that can be included in this trend, but these will not be

taken into consideration as they were published after Khemiri’s debut.

1.3 A POSSIBLE SOURCE OF INSPIRATION: ALEJANDRO LEIVA

WENGER’S TILL VÅR ÄRA

1.3.1 Borta i tankar

”Borta i tankar” (Lost in Thought) is the first of the short stories collected in Till vår

ära. It is a story about a young man who engages with a multi-ethnic group of

friends. He has recently changed high school, leaving the one where his friends are

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studying for a new one mainly attended by Swedish students. The story is about

loyalty and the rules that determine the dynamics of the group. At the same time a

parallel story in which the love affair between Felipe (the main protagonist) and

Julia, a young Swedish woman is told. As Roger Källström writes in “Literary Use of

Multiethnic Youth Language: non-inversion in Swedish Fiction”:

The conflict in the mind of Felipe between loyalty to his old friends and the multilingual setting where he lives, and loyalty to Julia and the middle class setting of his new school is the theme of the story. The story conveys an impression of the intense working of Felipe’s mind, when he is trying to sort out what has happened lately, thinking back and forth, trying to work out when, where and why things went wrong, and who he really is and where he belongs.16

The story is approximately twenty pages in length, but the style is complex and

varied. Jenne Maes describes the language as a “multnietnisk slang, ett exempel på

hiphopfrasering i både ordval och rytm”17 (multi-ethnic slang, an example of hip hop

phrasing in both word choice and rhythm). Leiva Wenger decided to insert two

separated parts into the text, in which capitalized and normal lines alternate to give a

distinctive stylistic effect. The language used in the text becomes an identity-marker,

defining the characters and their social background.18 In point of fact, the language is

a multi-ethnic Swedish slang that does not respect any of the rules of the Swedish

language; Leiva Wegner was the first writer to use a broken language that aims to

stand opposite standard Swedish. The whole story focuses on status and class barriers

that are adopted by a group of people who, despite the fact that they live in Sweden,

16 Roger Källström, “Literary Use of Multiethnic Youth Language: non-inversion in Swedish Fiction”, in Multilingual Urban Scandinavia: New Linguistic Practices, Ed. Pia Quist and Bente A. Svendsen, (Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2010), 147. 17 Jenne Maes, ”Våda Invandrare”, (Master Thesis, University of Gent, 2011), 28. 18 Monica Gomér, “shu len, vad händish”, (Student Essay, University of Gothenburg, 2008), 3.

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do not consider themselves Swedish. The language is consequently central to

defining who they really are. This concept has later been adopted by Khemiri who

wrote both Ett öga rött and Montecore paying particular attention to style and

language.

Moreover, significant interest is paid to Felipe’s name. The story is told in both

the first and the third person, consequently the protagonist is sometimes jag (I),

sometimes han (he). He is called Fällan (lit. the snare) by his friends, but at one

point Jaime asks him what his real name is:

- Fällan? – hon skrattade och knuffade till mej med armbågen. – Lägg av, vad är det för namn? - Vaddå, jag heter så – sa han. [...] - Så kan man inte heta, det är ju inte ett riktigt namn. - Jag kallas så, alla kallar mej så. [...] – Men vad heter du på riktigt?19 (- Fällan? – she laughed and nudged me – Leave off, what kind of name is it? - What? That’s my name – he said. […] - That can’t be, that’s not a real name. - They call me that way, everybody calls me so. […] – But what’s your real name?)20

The importance of one’s name here is pivotal. Our names define us, especially if they

do not conform to the society in which we live. This theme has also been developed

by Khemiri, especially in his novel Montecore, and in his play Invasion!. At the end

of the short story, Jaime tells Felipe what his name means “friend of the horses”. He

is given another name which is add to all the others:

19 Alejandro Leiva Wenger, “Borta i tankar”, in Till vår ära, (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2001), 10. 20 If not specified, translation is mine.

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- Hästvän? – sa Felipe, sa han, sa jag, sa Fällan.21 (- Friend of the horses? – Felipe said, he said, I said, Fällan said.)

The main character now has five names and all together they partially describe who

he really is. He may have many names, but he lacks an identity. In effect the story is

about his crisis. The message that Leiva Wenger wants to convey is that names only

partially describe who we are and likewise the language we speak. It is impossible to

express our identity in words, and no matter how hard we try to define ourselves, we

will never succeed.

1.3.2 Elixir

“Elixir” is the second short story in Till vår ära. The style adopted is the so-called

stream of consciousness: the narrative is told as a stream of words that represent the

“natural” expression of a character’s thoughts in the first person. Every grammatical,

syntactic and lexical rule is disregarded. The text consists of one extensive

paragraph, with no capitalization, and endeavors to represent the thoughts of a

protagonist.

One of the characters, Marco, has received a bottle in the post containing an

unidentified drink. When he samples it, he discovers it to be a potion that gradually

transforms those who drink it into a Swede. This is a slow process that commences

with a physical transformation (dark eyes turn blue and dark hair becomes blonde),

and ends by changing the drinker’s way of thinking. His friends, including the first

person narrator, try it. When the potion has finished, Marco receives a letter that 21 Leiva Wenger, ”Borta i tankar”, 27.

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reveals the ingredients and the recipe. Ironically and dramatically, they need cat’s

eyes to complete it. Once they understand that they are losing their identities in order

to become Swedish, they decide to desist. The story ends tragically: Marcela,

Marco’s girlfriend, drinks too much potion and is taken to hospital. The ending is left

open.

Particular examples of language gives a certain idea of what contributes to a

sense of identity:

“… du snackar fett som en svenne22.”23 (... you chat cool like a Swede.) “… han sa ord som svenskar kan.”24 (... he talks like Swedes do.)

Swedes and immigrants do not and cannot speak the same language. They are

represented as two separate and opposite worlds and when a person belongs to one,

the other is unattainable. This appears even clearer when they realize that there is no

way for them to maintain their identities when they are transformed into Swedes:

“...sen kom Flaco och sa han kunde inte komma ihåg nästan ett enda ord på spanska. vi sa fan den där läsken gör att man blir svenne. fan tänk om vi skrattade som fan men sen sa marco nej jag vill inte bli för jag är stolt över att va svarting och jag sa jag med för jag är det.”25 (... then Flaco came and said he couldn’t remember almost any words in Spanish we said fuck the drink makes one turn Swedish. Fuck, think of

22 The word svenne means Swede and it has been in used since at least 1968. It is an offensive term and often used by immigrants to insult the Swedes. Reference to AA.VV. Svensk Ordbok utgiven av Svenska Akademien, (Stockholm: Svenska Akademien, 2009). 23 Alejandro Leiva Wenger, “Elixir”, in Till vår ära, (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2001), 35. 24 Leiva Wegner, ”Elixir”, 36. 25 Leiva Wegner, ”Elixir”, 39.

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we fucking laughed but then Marco said no I don’t wanna turn ‘cause I’m proud of bein’ blackish and I agreed ‘cause I also am.)

When the young protagonists decide not to continue with the transformation into

Swedes, they show themselves to be loyal to their roots, and they understand that

they should be proud of whom they are. They fear that integration translates into

loss, and they do not want to renounce their identities. Some of Khemiri’s characters

seem to share this fear, but what is essential to understand is that, according to this

vision, there are two incompatible worlds: one for the Swedes and one for the

immigrants. These two opposites represent different realities and they use different

languages to express themselves.

However, Leiva Wenger’s story appears to contain a subtle critique. It deals with

stereotypes and classifications of immigrants and Swedes, and it demonstrates the

negative consequences of being prejudiced. Above all, the story criticizes the

inclination to see the two groups as ‘Us against the others’. 26

26 Maes, ”Våda Invandrare”, 29.

23

CHAPTER II – Blattesvenska or Halimiska?

Halim’s language in Ett öga rött

When Kehmiri’s first novel came out, most of the reviews considered the language

used by the author as a realistic multi-ethnic youth language.27 Khemiri was initially

defined as one of those writers who belong to a new wave within the wide group of

invandrerförfattare (immigrant writers). Until the end of the Second World War,

Sweden was essentially an ethnically homogeneous country where the few

immigrants were mostly Finnish. In the early fifties Sweden had to face a growing

demand for workers; many people (initially European) moved to this country seeking

employment and leaving behind the desolation caused by the war. Åke Nilsson

observes:

Flera faktorer påverkar hur många invandrare som kommer till Sverige. Några exempel är krig och oroligheter i andra delar av världen, arbetsmarknaden i Sverige och den statliga regleringen av invandringen. I början av efterkrigstiden, under 1950- och 1960-talet, kom invandrarna från våra nordiska grannländer, Central- och Sydeuropa.28 (Many reasons influence the number of immigrants who come to Sweden. Some examples are war and violence in other parts of the world, the work market in Sweden and the government immigration laws. Right after the Second World War, during the 50’s and the 60’s, immigrants came from our Nordic neighbouring countries and from Central and Southern Europe.)

27 Roger Källström, “Flygande blattesvenska”, Svenskans beskrivning 28 (2006): 147-157. 28 Åke Nilsson, Efterkrigstids invandring och utvandring (Stockholm: Statistik Centralbyrå, 2004), 7.

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A few years later, some immigrants started to publish their books, mainly in

Swedish. The so called invandrarlitteratur (immigrant literature) slowly became

established. Since then the number of invandrarförfattare has been increasing and

“among the Nordic countries at present Sweden produces the largest amount of

immigrant literature”29. Initially, these writers described the Swedish reality from the

inside, but from a particular point of view, due to their ethnic backgrounds.30

Another important aspect is that many of the children of this first group of

immigrants never learned their parents’ language properly, and a part of them started

to speak a very peculiar Swedish that is either called invandrarsvenska (immigrant

Swedish), or ungdomsdialekt (young people’s dialect), or rinkebysvenska (Swedish

of Rinkeby), or, more disparagingly, even blattesvenska.31 In fact, these four words

define a particular kind of Swedish which is spoken by a section of second-

generation immigrants in Sweden.

The aim of this chapter is, first of all, to give some more information about the multi-

ethnic youth language spoken in areas where the concentration of immigrants is

higher. Secondly, I will try to argue why the idea of invandrarlitteratur is in itself

29 Satu Gröndahl, “Invandrar- och minoritetslitteraturer i Sverige”, in Litteraturens gränsland. Invandrar- och minotitetslitteratur i nordisk perspektiv, ed. Satu Gröndahl (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitetet Press, 2002), 63. 30 Alessandro Bassini, “Chiamalo come diavolo vuoi – l’affermazione della lingua degli immigrati nella letteratura svedese contemporanea”, Linguistica e filologia 28 (2009): 112. 31 It is important to specify the meanings of the words blatte and invandrare, since they will be very used. According to the definition given by the dictionary edited by the Swedish Academy, an invandrare is a “person som invandrat till ett visst land” (person who has immigrated a certain land.) The definition that Wordreference.com gives of the word immigrant is almost the same: “a person who comes to a country in order to settle there.” The two terms invandrare and immigrant are therefore equivalent. It is more problematic the definition of blatte, which the dictionary edited by the Swedish Academy defines as: “(mörkhyad) utländks person” ((dark-skinned) foreign person.) The word has been in use since at least 1991, and is colloquial and often offensive. It defines every kind of dark-skinned people, from Africans to South Europeans, and it is not only used for people who emigrated to Sweden as the definition states. References to Svensk Ordbok utgiven av Svenska Akademien, and to http://wordreference.com.

25

racist. Finally, I will analyse Khemiri’s style and language in Ett öga rött, with a

view to demonstrating how the first reviews of his books were mistaken in defining it

as a realistic representation of invandrarsvenska.

2.1 RINKEBY AND RINKEBYSVENSKA

Rinkeby is a district32 in the borough33 of Rinkeby-Kista, located in the north-western

part of the municipality of Stockholm. The neighbourhood was built in the late 60’s

and was part of the so called miljonprogramm34. Nowadays, Rinkeby is one of the

neighbourhoods with the highest concentration of immigrants (almost 90%).

As previously mentioned, Sweden did not attract many immigrants before the

end of World War II. In the first half of the 20th century only intra-Nordic migration

was considerable in numbers, especially from Finland to Sweden. Furthermore, the

Finns represented the largest group of migrants to Sweden during the years 1945-80.

In fact, in 1949 Sweden abolished visa requirements for Finnish citizens, as it had

done earlier (1945) for Danes, Icelanders and Norwegians. The aim was to establish

an extensive open Nordic employment market.35 This large intra-Nordic movement

was facilitated by the mutual intelligibility among the Norwegian, Danish and

Swedish languages. Moreover some Finns who moved to Sweden were actually

Swedish native speakers, while many Finnish speakers had studied Swedish at

32 In Swedish: stadsdel. 33 In Swedish: stadsdelsområde. 34 It was a program that aimed to build one million flats in ten years (between 1965 and 1974). The program was supported by the Social Democratic Party. 35 Harald Runblom, ”Immigration to Scandinavia after World War II”, in Ethnicity and Nation Building in the Nordic Wolrd, ed. Tägil (London: Hurst & Company, 1995), 288-291.

26

school. Runblom notices that “among emigrants who came to Sweden during the

postwar period the Swedish speakers were strongly over-represented.”36 Besides this

linguistic advantage, in the post-war period immigrants were “easily” absorbed

because of their similar Nordic cultural roots. 37 Things changed totally in the

Seventies and Eighties, when “pressure from refugees and asylum seekers (from the

Third World) became heavier than at any time since the Second World War” 38.

Labor migrants and refugees showed different ambitions in preserving their cultures.

Indeed the latter revealed a stronger will to protect traditions (even language

traditions) in a country like Sweden which had, until that point, been linguistically

and ethnically homogeneous. Consequently, Sweden had to become more tolerant

towards new minorities, even though much effort has always been put into teaching

Swedish to immigrants. Bassini observes:

[…] con l’arrivo sempre più massiccio di rifugiati, le istituzioni adottarono una politica più tollerante […];; ciò nonostante l’apprendimento della lingua è rimasto una delle chiavi di accesso privilegiate alla società svedese. Una rete capillare di corsi gratuiti, SFI (Svenska för invandrare, ‘Svedese per immigrati’), mira a fornire le conoscenze di base dello svedese […]39 ([…] with the ever growing flow of refugees, institutions adopted a more tolerant policy […];; however, language learning held fast as a favored pass key to Swedish society. A widespread net of free courses, SFI (Svenska för invandrare, ‘Swedish for immigrants’), aims to give basic linguistic knowledge […])

36 Runblom, ”Immigration to Scandinavia”, 290. 37 Of course facts show that assimilation was not so easy. Many immigrants moved back to their countries after some time because of the difficult conditions they had to face. Especially the Finns were sometimes victims of open racism. It is also true that others have assimilated within one or few generations. On this, see: Altti Majava, “Finns in Sweden: Characteristics and Living Conditions”, in Finnish Diaspora I: Canada, South America, Africa, Australia and Sweden, ed. Karni (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1981). 38 Runblom, ”Immigration to Scandinavia”, 303. 39 Bassini, ”Chiamalo come diavolo vuoi”, 114.

27

Despite the availability of free Swedish courses, many immigrants did not succeed in

learning the language perfectly and over the years many peculiarities in their way of

speaking developed. Källström underlines that “för de flesta som lär sig svenska som

andraspråk är det svårt att komma ihåg den omvända ordföljden när påståndesatster

inte börjar med subjektet”40 (For most of those who learn Swedish as a second

language, it is difficult to remember the reversed word order when the main clause

does not begin with the subject.) Indeed, the word order proves to be difficult for a

learner of Swedish, 41 therefore Swedes tend to identify those who make such

mistakes in spoken language as immigrants, or as people who have grown up in a

multi-lingual background.42

At the same time the vocabulary of those who share a multi-ethnic environment

has acquired many words that come from different languages, e.g. Turkish, Arabic,

and Greek. Nowadays some of them are considered slang words and many are

understood by native Swedes. A few examples are: para (from Turkish; it means

money, pengar in standard Swedish), jalla (from Arabic, it means go/run, gå/springa

40 Roger Källström, “Litterärt språk på tvärs. Lite om språket hos Leiva Wegner och Hassen Khemiri”, in Språk på tvärs, ed. Malmbjer De Geer (Uppsala: Univesitetstryckeriet ASLA och författarna, 2005), 151. 41 In Swedish, the verb must be placed in the second position in main clauses. When the first place is occupied by the subject the verb follows it: e.g. “Han (s) skriver (v) brev” (He writes letters). This word order is called rak ordföljd (straight word order). However, the first position could be taken by an adverb: e.g. “Ibland skiver (v) han (s) brev” (*Sometimes writes he letters, i.e. Sometimes he writes letters);; or by a secondary clause: e.g. “När han har tid skriver (v) han (s) brev” (*When he has time writes he letters, i.e. When he has time, he writes letters). In these cases the word order is called omvänd ordföljd (reversed word order). Grown up learners tend not to respect this reversed order. Since the first position in a principal clause is very important in Nordic languages, it is often called fundament (foundation). The anomalous structure “Ibland han skriver brev” can therefore be called rak ordföljd efter fundament (straight word order after foundation). Källström, ”Litterärt språk på tvärs”, 151. 42 “Det tycks vara vanligt att svenskar identiferar den här strukturen med vad vi kan kalla utländsk svenska – svenska som på något sätt är präglad av att det är ett (ännu) inte fullständigt inlärt språk (inlärarspråk) eller påverkat av en mångspråkig miljö (t.ex. multietniskt ungdomsspråk).” Källström, ”Litterärt språk på tvärs”, 151.

28

in standard Swedish), habib (from Arabic, it means friend, kompis in standard

Swedish), and ade/ayde (from Greek, they mean come!, kom! In standard Swedish.)43

Evidently, a distinction between the language spoken by the first generation of

immigrants and the second has to be made. As Bassini observes:

Mentre gli errori commessi dagli immigrati oggetto di studio nei primi anni Ottanta erano errori ‘genuini’, dati dalla difficoltà di apprendere la lingua per scarso grado di istruzione o rado contatto con la popolazione locale, i giovani migranti di seconda generazione scelgono spesso questo ‘dialetto’ intenzionalmente. Pur sapendo esprimersi in svedese corretto preferiscono ricorrere allo slang per marcare la propria differenza etnica […].44 (While the mistakes made by those immigrants whose cases were studied in the early Eighties were ‘spontaneous’, due to their difficulties in learning a language because of their low education level or infrequent social interaction with the local community, the second generation young immigrants often choose this ‘dialect’ with intent. Even though they can speak proper Swedish, they would rather use this slang to stress their ethic difference […].)

While an earlier generation of immigrants spoke invandrarsvenska because they

could not do ‘better’, younger groups of immigrants decided that invandrarsvenska

was their language, despite the fact that they could speak proper Swedish. Initially

many researchers thought that these younger immigrants, like their parents, were not

able to express themselves in other ways. However, it could not be explained why,

since they were raised and educated in Sweden. They began proudly to claim that

they spoke rinkebysvenska.45

Even the non-inversion described above is a feature of this new multi-ethnic

youth language. In her research “Subject-Verb Order Variation in the Swedish of

43 Ulla-Britt Kotsinas, Invandrar-svenska (Uppsala: Hallgren & Fallgren, 2005), 242. 44 Bassini, “Chiamalo come diavolo vuoi”, 116. 45 Kotsinas, Invandrar-svenska, 238.

29

Young People in Multilingual Urban Areas”, Natalia Ganuza concludes that “the use

of XSV [rak ordföljd efter fundament] could not be explained simply as a learner

phenomenon” 46 and that “the use of XVS is [not only] part of some of the

participants’ more casual language repertoire, but also [suggests] that some of the

participants might use XSV more actively as part of a linguistic strategy with which

they may manifest their solidarity with their peers”47.

At the same time, this peculiar idiom has developed in other suburbs. Near

Gothenburg (the second biggest city in Sweden) and Malmö (the third biggest city),

two multi-lingual areas have rapidly developed since the 80s: Angared and

Rosengård respectively. As rinkebysvenska refers to the district of Rinkeby, so

rosengårdsvenska refers to Rosengård. However, the words invandrarsvenska and

blattesvenska are used more generally, without any geographical distinctions.48

Invandrarsvenska had only aroused interest in the linguistic and social fields of

study, until the publication of Leiva Wegner’s Till vår ära and Khemiri’s Ett öga

rött. Subsequently, it became a literary matter too. With these two works, the already

popular invandrarlitteratur started to use the invandrarspråk as an aesthetic device.

Nonetheless, many literary critics still defined the language used by the two authors

as a realistic representation of multi-ethnic language.

But what does invandrarlitteratur mean? What is an invandrarförfattare?

46 Natalia Ganuza, “Subject-Verb Order Variation in the Swedish of Young People in Multilingual Urban Areas”, in Multilingual Urban Scandinavia, ed. Quist & Svendsen (Boston: Multilingual Matters, 2010), 47. 47 Ganuza, “Subject-Verb Order Variation”, 48. 48 Bassini, “Chiamalo come diavolo vuoi”, 116.

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2.2 INVANDRARLITTERATUR AND RACISM

In a society that describes itself as a multi-ethnic reality, like the Swedish one,

considerable importance is given to culture produced by minorities. The

invandrarlitteratur represents this tendency in the literary field.

Invandrarlitteratur simply means ‘literature of the immigrants’ and it collects

“writers with immigrant backgrounds [who] often – although by no means always –

deal with topics related to their experience of immigration, with the meeting of

cultures, and with majority society seen from the margins.”49

Theodor Kallifatides can be taken as an example: he moved from Greece to

Sweden in 1964, when he was twenty-six, and five years later he published his first

book, a collection of poems in Swedish.50 He is now a very prolific and popular

writer who has addressed a large variety of themes and settings – as Ingeborg

Kongslien notices, Kallifatides has written only a few books that portray immigrants

entering Swedish society. Nevertheless he laments in his book Ett nytt land utanför

mitt fönster51 (A new land outside my window) that after many years and books in

Swedish he is still labeled as an invandrarförfattare. All his books are written in the

finest Swedish, which he learned to master reading classic Swedish literature, and

which represents his will of integration.

A second generation of invandrarförfattare (immigrant author) has started to

publish their works in the last decade. These writers differ from their predecessors

49 Ingeborg Kongslien “Migrant or multicultural literature in the Nordic countries”, in Nordic Voices, Literature of the Nordic Countries, ed. Jenny Fossum Grønn (2005), accessed April 20, 2013, http://www.eurozine.com/pdf/2006-08-03-kongslien-en.pdf. 50 Bassini, “Chiamalo come diavolo vuoi”, 112. 51 Theodor Kallifatides, Ett nytt land utanför mitt fönster (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 2001).

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basically because they were born in Sweden (or at least they came to Sweden as

children, e.g. Leiva Wenger and Marianeh Bakhtiari, or were adopted by a Swedish

family, e.g. Astrid Trotzig). Jonas Hassen Khemiri belongs to this second group. His

fiction is about characters who seem to be dealing with conflicting influences: they

are torn between their familiar roots and their Swedish upbringing. To make his work

even more original, Khemiri wrote Ett öga rött in a peculiar kind of Swedish, which

appears to imitate the invandrarsvenska. In 2003, the publishing house Norstedts

launched Ett öga rött as the first novel written in rinkebysvenska. Critics warmly

welcomed the book, suggesting that it was time for multi-ethnic Swedish to have its

literary debut.52 Källström analyses thirty-two reviews of Ett öga rött in his essays

“Flygande blattesvenska” and “Multiethnic youth language in reviews of the novel

Ett öga rött.”53 In all the reviews the language used by Khemiri proves to be a central

issue;; most of them consider it as a “realistically rendered multi-ethnic youth

language.”54 However, reviewers have used many different definitions to refer to this

language: rinkebysvenska, blattesvenska, invandrarsvenska, bruten svenska (Broken

Swedish), nysvenska (New Swedish), förortssvenska (Suburban Swedish), and

konstruerad svenska (Constructed Swedish).55 Apart from the last one (which has

been used in only three reviews), all these definitions connect the language in Ett öga

rött directly to the real one spoken by young people who live in multi-ethnic suburbs.

52 Källstom, “Litterärt språk på tvärs”, 147. 53Roger Källström, “Flygande blattesvenska”, and Roger Källström, “Multiethnic youth language in reviews of the novel Ett öga rött”, in Young Urban Swedish. Variation and Change in Multilingual Settings, ed. Källström & Lindberg (Gothenburg: Intellecta Inflog, 2011), 125-146. 54 Källström, “Multiethnic youth language,” 129. 55 Källström, “Multiethnic youth language”, 130, Table 1.

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Another writer who is considered to belong to the second generation of

invadrarförfattare is Astrid Trotzig. She was adopted from Korea when she was only

five months old. As she writes in her essay “Makten över prefixen” (The Power of

the Prefix), critics pay attention to her first of all because of her ‘exotic’ origin.56

Magnus Nilsson’s analysis of Trotzig’s essay highlights how the invandrarlitteratur

category tends to be both ‘discriminating’ (because it focuses only on certain

ethnicities) 57 , and ‘homogenizing’ (because it does not pay attention to basic

differences among writers)58. The definition of invandrarlitteratur itself has become

implicitly problematic, because it now defines writers who are not really immigrants:

the law says they are Swedish citizens; they are Swedish; they may even have been

born in Sweden; however, their names and/or their appearance still make them

invandrare.59 Motturi argues how even the language of the critics sometimes reveals

the racist structure of this classification:

Andra gånger är kritikern uppslukad av den etnotistiska strukturen. Nils Schwartz recension av Jonas Hassen Khemiris roman Montecore, är kanske lite väl tydlig när han hävdar att Khemiri inte är någon ’fullblodsblatte’ eftersom han har en ’tunisk far och svensk mor’.60 (Other times the critic is absorbed by the ethnic-centred structure. Nils Schwartz’s review on Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s novel Montecore, is maybe a little too clear when he claims that Khemiri is not like a ‘pure blood blatte’ because he has a ‘Tunisian father and a Swedish mother’)

56 Astrid Trotzig, “Makten över prefixen”, in ed. Matthis, Orientalism på Svenska (Stockholm: Ordfrotnt, 2005), 106. 57 Magnus Nilsson, “Literature and Diversity”, in Inter: A European Cultural Studies: Conference in Sweden 11–13 June 2007, ed. Fornäs & Fredriksson (Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press, 2007), 444; and Trotzig, “Makten over prefixen”, 107-108. 58 Nilsson, “Literature and Diversity”, 444;; and Trotzig, “Makten over prefixen”, 109-110. 59 Aleksander Motturi, Etnotism. En essä om mångkultur, tystnad och begäret efter mening (Gothemburg: Glänta Produktion, 2007), 29. 60 Motturi, Etnotism, 63-64.

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Despite the fact that Schwartz was being ironic, his words show how multi-ethnic

Sweden may reveal a rotten core, because “people have reinvented race as a social or

cultural rather than a physiological entity.”61

In Ali Fegan’s article “Dom tar våra ord” (They take our words), the author

smartly asserts that critics have a Swedish middle-class background and actually

ignore the suburbs and language use in them. Due to an exaggerated openness

towards other realities, which Fagan calls “friendly racism”62, invandrarförfattare

are sometimes over liked and their works are taken as accurate social and socio-

linguistic reports.

The overall impression is that all the writers who are defined as

invandrarförfattare are stereotyped, and that their heterogeneity is inexplicably

turned into homogeneity. Their works are thus necessarily seen as an expression of

their non-Swedish roots, and the truthfulness of their fiction is guaranteed only by

their ‘foreign’ origins.63 For these reasons critics considered Khemiri’s Ett öga rött a

reliable report-story and, with it, its language an authentic multi-ethnic youth slang.

2.3 LANGUAGE IN ETT ÖGA RÖTT

Halim is the main protagonist in Ett öga rött. He is a fifteen year-old Arabic-Swedish

boy, who, after his mother’s death, moves with his father, Otman, from Skärholmen

61 Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006), 16-17. 62 Ali Fegan, “Dom tar våra ord”, Arena 5, 2004, 40-43. 63 Källström, “Multiethnic youth language,” 128: “A recurrent target of criticism is the tendency of literary critics to let the authors’ biography become their main characteristic, overshadowing their work and establishing readings of their texts as realistic renderings of life, people and language in the multilingual suburbs”.

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(a multiethnic neighbourhood to the south of Stockholm, twelve kilometers away

from the city centre) to Södermalm (nowadays a more ‘homogenous’ Swedish

district of central Stockholm). Otman thinks this will help his son to integrate better

into Swedish society. Halim starts to rebel against his dad, his school 64, and the

society that tries to svennefiera (‘Swedify’) him. He becomes a rebel and finds

support from an old Arabic lady, Dalanda. She is the one that gives Halim a diary in

which he writes – Ett öga rött is the diary written by Halim. In addition, Dalanda

thinks that the Swedes have a radical “integration plan”, and Halim gradually shares

her idea until he starts seeing evidence of it everywhere.

Halim thinks that a way to fight this ‘swedification’ is to write his diary using a

very special variety of Swedish.

The book opens with this sentence:

I dag det var sista sommarlovsdagen och därför jag hjälpte pappa i affären. (Khemiri, Ett öga rött, 9) (Today was the last day of vacation and so I helped daddy in the shop.)65

This passage offers two clear examples of what is called rak ordföljd efter

fundament. The correct alternative would be “I dag var det sista sommarlovsdagen

och därför hjälpte jag pappa i affären.” Halim uses non-inversion in all the contexts

where inversion is used in proper Swedish. Standard Swedish is used only to report

dialogues among monolingual Swedes, when Halim talks with Swedes and, finally,

64 Almost only Swedish looking Swedes attend his new school: “Blattarna på skolan är inte så många” (Immigrants at school are not so many) Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Ett öga rött (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2003), 37. 65 Translation is mine, if not mentioned otherwise. Since I find extremely difficult to reproduce Khemiri’s style and since I ignore any immigrant socio-dialect in English, I will simply translate quotations in standard English to make my analysis intelligible.

35

when a dialogue in Arabic is translated into Swedish. Only one exception could be

found:

Den värsta möjliga gruppen (trodde jag). (Khemiri, Ett öga rött, 102) (The worst possible group (I thought))

However, this is defined by Källström as “sannolikt en lapsus av författaren” 66

(probably a lapsus by the writer), because according to Halim’s linguistic logic it

should have been “jag trodde”, which would represent for the umpteenth time a rak

ordföljd efter fundament. Besides this, non-inversion is used throughout the book.

On occasion, Halim uses slang words, such as guss 67 (instead of flicka/tjej, in

English girl/young woman). He even distorts and manipulates many idiomatic

expressions, producing interesting effects, for example when he writes that Dalanda

became “eld i lågor” (Khemiri, Ett öga rött, 30), while he should have written ‘eld

och lågor’, which idiomatically means ‘aflame, very enthusiastic’ (literally ‘fire and

flames’). Furthermore, Halim spells some words wrongly or writes adjective plus

noun combinations as one word, creating neologism, as in: “svårord” (Khemiri, Ett

öga rött, 28) instead of ‘svåra ord’ (difficult words). As well as this, Källström has

observed that the adverb också (also) is used in clause-initial position,68 which is not

possible in standard Swedish.69

The following is an event narrated in the book, which can be used as an example

of how Halim uses his language to discredit Swedish culture. One day Nourdine,

66 Källström, “Litterärt språk på tvärs”, 152. 67 E.g. Khemiri, Ett öga rött, 28, when the word guss is used in plural form: “när gussar ska föda barn”. 68 Like in the sentece: “Också en annan gång han spelade kebabsförsäljare...” Khemiri, Ett öga rött, 30. 69 Källström, “Multiethnic youth language”, 128.

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Otman’s friend, asks Halim and his father to help him with a theatre play for which

he wants to audition. The play is Peer Gynt, one of Henrik Ibsen’s most famous

plays. When Halim calls it Per Gynt, a first falsification is made. Halim adds: “Jag

tycker Per Tönt var bättre namn” (Khemiri, Ett öga rött, 28) (I think Per Jerk was a

better name). He defines the language of the play as ”tjockt skumt” (Khemiri, Ett öga

rött, 28) (very weird) and with these words he tells Peer’s story:

Pjäsen verkade fett konstig. Per-tönten raggade lite på några gussar och hängde runt med trollfamilj och träffade en snubbe som hette Böjgen (nej inte bögen). Sen han var på sjön och i öknen och i sluted han kom hem som gubbe och ångrade allt han gjort i livet. (Khemiri, Ett öga rött, 29) (The play looked super strange. The jerk Per chased after some chicks and went around with his troll-family70 and met a dude that is called the Böjg (no, not the fag71). Then he was at the sea and in the desert and at the end he came home like an old dude and regretted all he had done in life.)

When Nourdine recites some verses for his friend, Halim says he does his best with a

svennetollfall (the intonation of a svenne) but at the end he confides to his diary that

many other roles would have been better for Nourdine than “att spela flummig

norrman som heter Per” (Khemiri, Ett öga rött, 30) (to play a fuzzy Norwegian that

is called Per). Halim lists some old performances of Nourdine’s: he has appeared as a

taxi driver in a short movie and as a kebab seller. According to Halim, he should

perform roles suitable for immigrants and not perform as a Norwegian man. In this

instance, Halim shows how the world he describes and believes in is strictly divided

into two groups: svennar and blattar, and the one is necessarily against the other. By

70 In his journey, Peer Gynt meets the daughter of the king of trolls, who wants to marry him. 71 A good translation is here impossible. The Bøjg is a troll of the Scandinavian mythology, and one of the characters in Peer Gynt. His name sounds like bög, which means gay/fag in Swedish. It was impossible to reproduce the assonance without changing the name of Ibsen’s character.

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ridiculing Peer Gynt, he wants to defy the authority that such a play implies – with

his sexist, homophobic, and gross language, Halim wants to dissociate himself from

the Nordic culture which he feels does not represent him.

On three occasions, Halim hints that he can actually speak Standard Swedish:

1) ”jag använde töntigaste svenneton” (Khemiri, Ett öga rött, 165) (I used the most dumb svenne tone)

2) ”Först jag använde vanliga snacket och sen för att ingen skulle misstolka

jag puttade in lite svenneton.” (Khemiri, Ett öga rött, 229) (At first I used the usual talk and then so that nobody would misinterpret I put in some svenne tone)

3) Såklart jag skrev brevet på finaste svenskan (Khemiri, Ett öga rött, 235) (Obviously I wrote the letter in the most elegant Swedish)

Not only can Halim speak good Swedish, but he even knows in which contexts he

has to use it. Thus, his broken language seems to be a way to represent himself, or at

least the idea he has of himself, and to create his own identity. When his father finds

the diary (i.e. Ett öga rött), he angrily asks his son why he is writing in that way, and

Halim answers: “Vill du att jag ska snacka svennesnack? Jag vet i alla fall vem jag är

och var jag kommer ifrån” (Khemiri, Ett öga rött, 215) (Do you want me to talk

svenne talk? I know anyway who I am and where I come from).

Halim’s language and history seem – at this point – to reflect the blattesvenska

and the socio-linguistic context described above. Although rinkebysvenska does not

seem an appropriate definition, since the protagonist has never lived in Rinkeby,

Halim’s language does share many characteristics of blattesvenska: non-inversion is

38

always used; many non-Swedish words and expressions belong to the protagonist’s

register; Halim actively chooses his idiom to define himself and to disassociate

himself from whatever he considers Swedish. He willingly writes his diary in a

broken language that could be considered blattesvenska. But is it truly so? Does Ett

öga rött truly represent a realistic report of multi-ethnic youth dialect?

The protagonist himself suggests doubt about his authenticity when at one point

he refers directly to the reader:

Kanske du som läser texten bara tycker den är fett flummig. Vad kan jag säga? Jag skriver ärlig och om du hellre vill läsa falskhet du kan läsa annan text av töntsvennefilosof. Dessutom om du tycker, jag svär jag bajsar på dig (och hela din släkt). Jag äger dig! PS: Nu det är lite senare. Vill förklara så du fattar: Jag tänker det är viktigt man är riktig, och på samma sätt man måste tänka när man skriver. Men samtidigt visst, jag erkänner jag skriver into om ALLT. Till exempel jag skriver inte så mycket om runkishar. Inte för jag skäms utan mera för det skulle mest bli text om runka hela tiden. PS2: Ännu lite senare. Vill bara säga sista sak innan jag somnar: Du vet det där som jag skrev om larmet i parabolbutiken? Egentligen det var inte riktigt totalt hundrasant eftersom dom inte hade riktiga larm. Bara såna där fejklarmbågar vid utgången. Men om dom hade haft riktiga larm såklart jag skullle gjort det jag skrev. (Khemiri, Ett öga rött, 80-81) (You that read this book maybe think that it is totally fuzzy. What can I say? I write straight and if you’d rather read falseness, you can read another book by a dumb svenne philosopher. And if you think this, I swear I shit on you (and all your relatives). I own you! PS: Now it is a bit later. I want to explain so you understand: I suppose it is important that one is authentic, and likewise one has to think when they write. But at the same time I confess I don’t write about EVERYTHING. For example I don’t write so much on jerking off. Not because I’m ashamed but more because it would turn out to be mostly a book on jerking off. PS2: Still a bit later. I wanna only say one last thing before I fall asleep: You know that thing that I wrote about the alarm in the electronic shop? It was actually not one hundred percent truthful because they did not have a real alarm. Only a fake alarm-column near the exit. But if they had had the real alarm, I would have done what I wrote for sure.)

39

Halim suggests that he believes in truth, but he also admits he cannot always be

sincere. He even confesses that he had to exaggerate in one of the episodes he wrote

about, in order to give it a deeper meaning. Since the readers may, consequently,

start doubting the narrator’s reliability, should they not also start questioning whether

his language is as sincere and realistic as it appears to be?

This short excerpt has been taken as a declaration of authenticity of

invandrarlitteratur; 72 however, Magnus Nilsson suggests that “Halim’s ideal of

authenticity is constantly described ironically and parodically”73.

It is important to realize that the author and his character are not on the same

level and must not be confused, in spite of the fact that Halim writes in the first

person singular. Two distinct questions naturally emerge: what is the protagonist

trying to tell the readers with his peculiar style? What is Khemiri telling us by using

Halim’s idiolect? And also: how reliable are Halim’s narration and language?

Some effort has been made by the scholars Julia (Große) Prentice and Roger

Källström to analyse Halim’s idiolect in depth. In the following I will summarize

their points of view in order to support the idea that that the language in Ett öga rött

has mainly aesthetic and literary implications, notwithstanding that it could have

been inspired by the real socio-linguistic context, and that the novel does not

primarily want to depict a real multi-ethnic youth slang.

72 Wolfgang Behschnitt & Thomas Mohnike, “Interkulturelle Authentizität? Überlegungen zur ‘anderen’ Ästhetik der schwedischen ‘invandrarlitteratur’”, in Über Grenzen  : Grenzgänge der Skandinavistik  : Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Heinrich Anz (2007): 79-80. 73 Magnus Nilsson, “Swedish ‘Immigrant Literature’ and the Construction of Ethnicity”, TijdSchrift voor Skandinavistiek 31 (2010), accessed February 20, 2013, http://dpc.uba.uva.nl/tvs/vol31/nr01/art09.

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2.4 JULIA GROßE’S “A COMPARISON BETWEEN REALITY AND

FICTION”74

Julia Große (now Julia Prentice) is a lecturer of Swedish as a second language at the

University of Gothenburg. Her PhD dissertation shows a deep interest in

conventionalized expressions (even called idiomatic expressions) and figurative

word combinations in second language acquisition. Her work is based on a project

named Språk och språkbruk bland ungdomar i fleraspråkiga storstadsmiljöer

(Language and Language Use among Young People in Multilingual Urban

Environments). I will refer to this project with the acronym SUF from now on. SUF

collects data from 222 students from multilingual high schools in Stockholm,

Gothenburg, and Malmö.75 The idiomatic expressions used by eight of these students

have been compared by Große to some of those used by Halim in Ett öga rött,76 and

to standard Swedish expressions. While native speakers do not train the creative

potential of their language,77 second language learners tend to experiment with more

linguistic, lexical, and pragmatic possibilities. Indeed they often create new

figurative word combinations that could be either approximate versions of the

standard ones or simply contaminated versions. Here some examples are taken from

Ett öga rött:

74 Julia Große, “Fraseologiska enheter på flerspråkig grund”, in På rak sak. Om ordförbindelser och konventionaliserade uttryck bland unga språkbrukare i flerspråkiga miljöer, by Julia Große (PhD diss., University of Gothenburg, 2010). 75 The project was funded by the Riksbank and carried on by the universities of Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Lund. 76 Only the idiomatic expressions used in the first five chapters have been taken into consideration. 77 Alison Wray, Formulaic language and the lexicon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11.

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Fast egentligen maskinen bara stod på Nourdines rum och samlade på damm. (Khemiri, Ett öga rött, 10)78 (Though the machine was actually only in Nourdine’s room and collected dust on.)

In Swedish, one can say att samla damm (to collect dust) referring to those things

that are not used for a long time and therefore have been forgotten. In contrast, here

the preposition på is used, when not needed. However, the preposition must be used

when one wants to say att samla på something. This is an example of ‘wrong’

contamination between a conventionalized expression and a normal use of the

language.79

In the following extract a lexical difference occurs between the idiomatic

expression and Halim’s words:

[…] jag var oskyldig som värsta lamm. (Khemiri, Ett öga rött, 19)80 ([...] I was innocent like a real lamb.)

The expression att vara oskyldig som ett lamm (to be as innocent as a lamb) is

obviously used to describe somebody who is completely innocent. Here the use of

the word värsta (worst, which may mean riktig, real, in colloquial Swedish) implies a

lexical difference from the standardized expression. We can say that Halim’s

combination is an approximate version of the standard one.81

78 Italics is mine. 79 Große, “Fraseologiska enheter på flerspråkig grund”, 115 and 122. 80 Italics is mine. 81 Große, “Fraseologiska enheter på flerspråkig grund”, 115 and 122.

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When comparing the data from the novel and the data from the SUF project,

Große realized that the former are less complex than the latter.82 She observes that

“Liksom huvudpersonen Halim i Khemiris roman avviker de åtta informanterna i

SUF projektet i sin användning av fraseologiska enheter från det standardspråkliga

referensmaterialet men på ett delvis annorlunda och mer komplext sätt”83 (The eight

sources of the SUF project differ in their use of phraseological units from the

standard reference-data like the protagonist Halim in Khemiri’s novel, but in a partly

different and more complex way). Große found out that Halim distorts idiomatic

expressions on a lexical and grammatical level as the young speakers of the project

do, but the latter give them a new pragmatic use while Halim seldom, if ever, does.84

Consequently Halim plays with idiomatic expressions for a stylistic aim without any

practical intentions. This suggests that the narrator deliberately distorts the

language. 85 In a previous essay Große had made it clear that “Halimskan är

visserligen en idiolekt som konstrueras och används av en enda person, nämligen

Halim”86 (Halim’s language is indeed an idiolect that is built and used by one single

person, namely Halim).

Große’s work distinguishes Halim’s language from any real versions of

blattesvenska, underscoring how it only has a literary justification. Halim’s language

cannot therefore be considered as a realistic representation of a multi-ethnic youth

language.

82 Große, “Fraseologiska enheter på flerspråkig grund”, 125. 83 Große, “Fraseologiska enheter på flerspråkig grund”, 126. 84 Große, “Fraseologiska enheter på flerspråkig grund”, 126. 85 Große, “Fraseologiska enheter på flerspråkig grund”, 129. 86 Julia Große, ”Tankesultanen och den symboliska marknaden – Språk och identitet i Ett öga rött”, ROSA 11 (2007): 25.

43

Roger Källström, another scholar who has made a similar effort to analyse the

peculiar language used by Khemiri in Ett öga rött, comes to the conclusion that it is

only a literary version of Swedish, and therefore cannot be considered as a reliable

sociolinguistic report, even if it does find inspiration in real idiolects with many

sociolinguistic implications.

2.5 HALIMISKA – A LANGUAGE TO FIND ONESELF

Roger Källström has studied the reception of Ett öga rött in the Swedish newspapers,

discovering that the novel was generally seen as representative of the way young

people speak in multilingual suburbs.87 However, he spotlights that Khemiri himself

“repeatedly stressed that this main character’s language was representative only of

the character himself”88.

Källström has paid particular attention to the use of non-inversion in Halim’s

language, finding out that it is used in all the contexts where inversion is used in

standard Swedish. It differs only when the direct speech of Swedes is reported, when

Halim interacts with Swedes, and for Arabic.89 The use of non-inversion can thus be

seen to be exaggerated since Halim tries to reproduce blattesvenska rather than

actually use it. Each of its linguistic features is overrepresented in the young man’s

words, and this suggests that Halim’s use of invandrarsvenska has a very strong

symbolic connotation without serious pragmatic aims.

87 Källström, “Flygande blattesvenska”;; and Källström, “Multiethnic youth language”. 88 Källström, “Literary Use”, 142. 89 Källström, “Literary Use of Multiethnic Youth Language”, 146.

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It should not be forgotten that Ett öga rött is actually a diary written on purpose

by a teenager who has recently lost his mother and has moved to a new

neighbourhood. In his new school almost nobody is an immigrant and he has lost the

certainties of his childhood. Through his writing, Halim endeavors to understand

what is happening and who he is. Through his language he tries to define himself as a

person. We know that the particular idiolect he uses for his diary is not the one he

normally speaks; indeed when Otman finds the diary he asks his son why he is

writing so, and if he knows somebody who speaks in that way.90 His father did not

know the fact that Halim could master that language because he never uses it at

home. Halim tries to copy the dialect used by young people with a multi-ethnic

background, but since every imitation easily turns out to be an exaggeration, Halim

invents a distorted Swedish that represents nothing but his own search for

authenticity. When he says to his father “Jag vet i alla fall vem jag är” (Khemiri, Ett

öga rött, 215) (I know who I am anyway) after Otam has found the diary, he means

that his language is his way to try and understand who he is. Furthermore, Källström

makes it clear that Halim’s language is nothing more than his attempt to show his

pride in not being a svenne:

Om man ser den konsekventa raka ordföljden efter fundament som ett försök att trovärdigt återge andraspråkssvenska, ter den sig misslyckad. Men om man ser den som en del av Halims medvetna motståndsspråk är den ett lyckat drag. Hassen Khemiri använder ett av de språkliga särdrag som är mest iögonenfallande och känt av svenskar som tecken på utändsk svenska och driver det till sin spets: han låter Halim tilämpa det rätt igenom i de relaterande delarna av sin dagbok. Till bilden av den överspänt dagdrömmande Halim fogas på så vis en språklig dimension i konstruktionen av den ”superblatte” han drömmer att han är. Han tar stolt upp och överdriver medvetet och konsekvent ett av de mest osvenska och

90 “Varför skriver du sådär? […] Vem känner du som pratar så där?” Khemiri, Ett öga rött, 215.

45

stigmatiserade språkdragen som symbol för sin egenart (men bara i lönndom, i dagboken). (Khemiri, Ett öga rött, 152-153) (If one sees the consistent straight word order after foundation as an attempt to reliably reproduce Swedish as a second language, it proves to be a failure. But if one sees it as a characteristic of Halim’s consciously oppositional language, it is a successful trait. Hassen Khemiri uses one of the linguistic characteristics that is most evident and felt by Swedes as a sign of foreign Swedish and exaggerates it: he lets Halim apply it right through the narrated parts of his diary. In this way a linguistic dimension is added to the image of the overstrung daydreamer Halim in the construction of the “superblatte” he dreams of being. He proudly adopts, and deliberately and consistently exaggerates, one of the most non-Swedish and stigmatized linguistic traits as a symbol of his individuality (but only in secret, in the diary).

Halim’s language is a private way to find himself a place and an identity. In contrast,

blattesvenska is openly used by young people in real suburban contexts to express

affiliation and show solidarity.91

Halim must be seen as a normal teenager who wants to overcome his mother’s

death and find his place in society and life. He has significant linguistic resources

and he uses them as an act of resistance against his father’s desire to leave things

behind. It would be absolutely misleading to consider his language involving a desire

to affiliate with a certain group, since he often glorifies himself as a blatte-

philosopher and a tankesultan (thought-sultan), who is superior to all the other

blattar.92

It is apparent, however, that Halim is deceiving himself. In his writing he

pretends to be someone he is actually not. He succeeds in deceiving his father who is

described as angry and worried on finding the diary – Otam fears that his son has

become one of those blattar who speak blattesvenska, which he loathes. Otam is

afraid that his plan to help Halim to integrate himself into Swedish society has failed; 91 Källström, “Literary Use of Multiethnic Youth Language”, 154. 92 Källström, “Litterärt språk på tvärs”, 152.

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he furiously asks his son why he thinks that they moved. The father has been

deceived, but the reader should not be. It does not matter if Halim himself may seem

sporadically deceived by his own performance. The reader has to keep in mind that

Halim represents a distorted reality in his diary, even though it feels unquestionably

real to the young man himself. The feeling left to the reader at the end of the book

reminds us that language can be manipulative, it creates confusion, it gives deformed

versions of the truth. Notably, Khemiri himself described his character as someone

who “tries to recreate himself through the words that he chooses. Towards the end of

the book, we realize that Halim was actually born and raised in Sweden […] and the

authenticity of this self-proclaimed outsider is put into doubt”93. Moreover, in his

second novel Montecore, a semi-autobiographical character named Jonas Hassen

Khemiri admits his anger towards his publisher, who defined Ett öga rött as the first

book written in rinkebysvenska.94

It should be noted that Khemiri has often negated the description of his work as

a realistic report of the living conditions of immigrants. While many literary critics

considered and advertised Ett öga rött as written in blattesvenska, scholars have

demonstrated how Halim’s language and the real blattesvenska differ consistently.

Halim’s language is unique, and it could only be called Halimska because it is self-

referring. The invisible racial prejudice that permeates the Swedish world of critique

has inevitably influenced the reception of Khemiri’s work. His “exotic” name and

aspect have led the critics down the wrong path: they ended up defining his books on

93 Lucas, “The trickery of the truth teller”. 94 Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Montecore, En unik tiger, (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2011), 28.

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the basis of his non-Swedish background. His name has been taken as a guarantee of

textual manifestation of ethnic identity beforehand.95

The fact that Khemiri has, by and large, been only and wrongly considered an

invandrarförfattare, has meant that attention has been given mainly to his literary

style and his message about the formation of identity. This prejudice has restricted

the analysis and comprehension of Khemiri’s oeuvre, which in my opinion deals with

deeper and more universal topics. In the next chapters I will focus on these matters,

and explain why they have wide implications and cannot be considered as only

representative of a single ethnic minority.

***

Ett öga rött is a Bildungsroman. As Magnus Nilsson argues in his brilliant article

”Swedish ‘Immigrant Literature’ and the Ethnic Lens”, 96 Halim’s approach to

cultural diversity changes progressively and his psychological growth is extremely

important. The sensitive protagonist deals with cultural diversity through the novel,

and gradually abandons his conviction that one must be true to stereotypical ideas of

ethnicity. While the novel starts with a very inflexible Halim who expects people to

drastically choose between cultures, at the end this idea appears, to both the

protagonist and the readers, quite unappealing. Nilsson also suggests that the

marginal character Alex, a teacher’s assistant, plays a fundamental role in the

discussion about authenticity, since he insists in the deconstruction of the opposition

95 Nilsson, “Literature and Diversity”, 445. 96 Magnus Nilsson, “Swedish ‘Immigrant Literature’ and the Ethnic Lens”, Scandinavian Studies 84 (2012): 27-58.

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between the importance of assimilation and cultural separatism.97 The struggle that

Halim faces everyday at home – Otman strongly believes in assimilation, while

Halim stands for ethnic authenticity – finds a symbolic solution towards the end of

the novel, when father and son watch the Egyptian version of ‘Who wants to Be a

Millionaire?’ together. The compromise comes from both sides: Halim agrees to

watch a show which he had already defined as svenne-tv,98 and Otman agrees to

watch Arabic TV. Later, Halim writes in his diary that the Swedish and the Egyptian

versions of ‘Who wants to Be a Millionaire?’ do not differ too much, and Nilsson

considers that “This experience shows that the dichotomy underlying the conflict

between Halim and his father has, at least to some extent, been deconstructed.”99

Furthermore, the novel closes with a very tender reconciliation between father and

son which symbolizes a final solution to their conflict. On leaving the restaurant

where they have just eaten, Otman picks up a napkin with a sentence written in

Swedish and in Arabic – while the Swedish words only mean “Oriental Specialties”,

the Arabic words hide a political message: “We will return”. 100 Halim really

appreciates the political Arabic message and does not dislike the merging with

Swedish, and Otman says it is a beautiful napkin even though it does not hide the

Arabic roots of the restaurant’s owners. Nilsson considers this episode particularly

significant because it “shows that they have managed to supersede the dichotomy

between cultural separatism and integration/assimilation underpinning their

97 Nilsson, “Swedish ‘Immigrant Literature’”, 33. 98 “När jag kom hem pappa och Nourdine var klara med repetitionerna. Det låg stor hög med pistegeskal på bordet och nu dom tittade på Vem vill bli miljonär. [...] Istället för att kolla svenne-tv jag tappade ett bad [...]” Khemiri, Ett öga rött, 35. 99 Nilsson, “Swedish ‘Immigrant Literature’”, 32. 100 “På svenska srkiver dom ‘Orientaliska specialiteter’ och på arabiska ‘Vi kommer att återvända’” Khemiri, Ett öga rött, 252.

49

conflict.”101 Halim seems to give up his idea that one has to make a choice between

Swedish and immigrant culture, and the novel results in a progressive relinquishing

of his fundamentalism of ethnic authenticity in favor of embracing Alex’s idea of

individuality.

From this perspective, Halim’s use of Halimiska finds a new motivation: we

knew that it represents his way to express, through words, his need for ethnic

authenticity and desire to fight swedification. His language finds inspiration in the

real spoken social-idiolect, but it exaggerates its linguistic traits, as has been shown

by Große. With his diary, Halim artificially constructs an identity which is far from

being authentic, but which fulfils his adolescent need to give himself a strong and

fascinating personality – a riktig tankesultan in his case. The novel symbolically ends

when his conflict with his father results in if not a solution at least a truce, and this

might indicate that Halim no longer feels the need to corrupt his language since he

has accepted his authenticity, which does not require immigrant stereotypical traits.

With Ett öga rött, Khemiri firstly places ethnicity in the centre to later deconstruct it

and all its elements – among them language and ethnic identity – proving that ethnic

identity is often unauthentic because it cannot be prevented from resulting in

stereotypes.

101 Nilsson, “Swedish ‘Immigrant Literature’”, 33.

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51

CHAPTER III – The Unreliable Narrator

An Analysis of Montecore

While style and language are homogeneous in Ett öga rött, they are very

heterogeneous in Montecore: Khemiri’s second novel is written as epistolary

correspondence and streams of thought. The author interchanges standard Swedish

and a literary approximation of invandrarsvenska which differs from the one used in

Ett öga rött.

Apart from the story that the novel tells – about a Tunisian immigrant who wants

to integrate into Swedish society no matter the cost, about his Swedish son who

fights swedification as much as Halim in Ett öga rött, and about a Tunisian friend

who may be dead – Montecore implements many metafictional devices in order to

suggest that literature, an “autobiography” in this case, is always fictional. With this

novel Khemiri aims to undermine the idea of the writer as a truth teller and to firmly

make fun of all the critics that expect writers with multiethnic backgrounds to always

narrate their own story through their books.

The first part of this chapter is dedicated to an analysis of the novel, paying

particular attention to the coexistence of different narrators and to linguistic

elements. In the second part we shall discuss the father and son relationship that

Montecore explores and the problematic autobiographical aspects of the novel.

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3.1 MONTECORE, A NARRATOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

3.1.1 The style of the novel and the narrators

Montecore is an unique epistolary novel. The narrators are three in number but only

two of them actively participate in the epistolary correspondence, while a third

person interacts with them through the letters that he previously wrote to one of the

interlocutors. Their names are Jonas Hassen Khemiri, symbolically named after the

author;; Abbas, Jonas’s father;; and Kadir, a friend of Abbas’s. At the beginning of the

novel Kadir writes to Jonas, who has recently published his first novel, about his idea

to write a story about his father Abbas who has left his son to seek his fortune outside

Sweden. This is the initial input to a close e-mail correspondence between these two

men, and Kadir decides to share the letters which Abbas had previously sent him

with Jonas in order to be able to reconstruct a more vivid description of his father.

What makes the novel even more unusual is that Jonas’s e-mails are never

transcribed and his contribution to the novel is visible only when he adds his

thoughts in between the lines of the letters that he receives. He also intermittently

adds some notes that Kadir asks him to write about the memories he has of his father

or about his adolescence. However, in Kadir’s e-mails it is clear that Jonas responds

to his friend, but these responses are not included in the text – indeed the second e-

mail that Kadir sends to Jonas begins with these words: “Käraste hälsningar! / Tacka

ditt effektivt levererade svar!” (Khemiri, Montecore, 28) (“Dearest greetings! /

53

Thank your effectively delivered answer!” Willson-Broyles, Montecore, 17) 102

implying that a hypothetic answer from Jonas to Kadir’s first letter should exist.

Aside from the e-mails and Jonas’s comments and his memories, Montecore also

contains some pages written by Kadir about different episodes of Abbas’s life.103

This variety of forms, which is typical of the Swedish contemporary novel, 104 is

determined however by its epistolary construction. Since an epistolary novel does not

need an extradiegetic narrator, the events appear more realistic (as was true in Ett

öga rött, where Halim was responsible for telling his own story without any

mediator),105 and this realism has an important function, as we shall see. Indeed in

epistolary novels, confessional writings, diaries, and autobiographies the narrator is

homodiegetic, or in this case the narrators are homodiegetic.106 The use of different

narrators aims to change perspective, or point of view, and this is used by the author

to give as much information as possible about the story which he intends to

narrate. 107 Khemiri also uses the narrators to convince the readers about the

unreliability of what they are told, and this distrust reaches its climax when Jonas

wonders whether Kadir is actually his own father in disguise. In one of Kadir’s letter,

102 English translation by Rachel Willson-Broyles. Rachel Willson-Broyles, trans., Montecore. The Silence of the Tiger (New York: Knopf, 2011). 103 These brief stories are called by Kadir himself as Word-documents and give to the book a stronger sense of realism since they appear as documents attached to his mails, Montecore, 15. 104 In the last years many Swedish writers have brilliantly experimented the flexibility of the novel as a genre of narrative possibilities. Per Olof Enqvist’s novel for instance mix the story with the narration of the writer’s efforts to find evidence and sources for his story. The same kind of narration also characterizes Göran Rosenberg’s works. This flexibility finds however its root in the novel-genre itself, which, as Brioschi and Di Girolamo argue, “si rifrange in una molteplicità di generi e sottogeneri straordinariamente plastici, richiedendo al lettore una disponibilità ad assumere attitudini diverse quale nessun altro genere di discorso pretende da lui.” Brioschi, Di Girolamo, Elementi di teoria letteraria, 194-195. 105 “Un’altra caratteristica, da sottolineare, della narrazione romanzesca è la sua compatibilità con vari tipi testuali, come la lettera, il libro di memorie, il diario, ecc. Si tratta cioè di tipi extra-letterari di cui la narrativa si è servita, in epoche antiche e moderne, per evitare l’artificialità della narrazione “dall’esterno” e per costruire quindi una finzione di realismo.” Brioschi, Di Girolamo, Elementi, 167. 106 Bernardelli, Ceserani, Il testo, 77. 107 Bernardelli, Ceserani, Il testo, 80.

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we come to understand that Jonas has found his friend’s writing style too similar to

his father’s style: “[du] anklagar plötsligt din fars breviska skrivstil för att vara

”misstänkt lik” min?” (Khemiri, Montecore, 112-113) (”you suddenly accuse your

father’s letterish writing style of being “suspiciously like” mine?” Willson-Broyles,

Montecore, 92). Kadir explains that Abbas’s letters were of course written in Arabic

and that he had to translate them into Swedish, therefore it is understandable that

Jonas could actually think that they were written by the same person. Kadir also

reaffirms his honesty but also admits that Abbas’s “brev inte stått HELT objektiv

från min influens” (Khemiri, Montecore, 113) (“letters are not ENTIRELY objective

from my influence” Willson-Broyles, Montecore, 93). The whole novel could

apparently be considered as Abbas’s attempt to get in touch with his son, using the

name of an old friend. In fact Kadir knows a lot about Jonas’s life and strenuously

defends Abbas’s decisions, and this could make the readers think that Jonas’s father

is actually behind Kadir’s e-mails. Even in the epilogue of the novel Kadir insists one

last time about his reliability, but at this point his attempt is pointless because Jonas

has apparently done some research, finding out that his father’s friend killed himself

many years before. (Khemiri, Montecore, 358) Thus, all the e-mails and the texts that

he received from Kadir were in all probability sent by his father who wanted to

exonerate himself and justify the fact that he had abandoned his family. In spite of

this ambivalence, the alternation Kadir-Abbas bears a strong meaning throughout the

narration, since it reminds the readers that the whole novel is constructed upon the

idea that the narrators are not as reliable as they pretend to be. Even Jonas’s words

are sometimes negated by Kadir. This happens for example when Jonas recalls the

day when Abbas came back to Sweden after a long time spent in Tunisia. Abbas

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apparently interrupted a reunion of Jonas and his friends, but while Jonas asserts that

“ett stort gäng” (Khemiri, Montecore, 325) (“a big gang” Willson-Broyles,

Montecore, 278) came, Kadir corrects his words saying: “Men Jonas… INGEN

HADE JU ÄNTRAT STUDION! Det fanns inga “trupper”. Det fanns bara du och

dina tre förtappade vänner” (Khemiri, Montecore, 328) (”But Jonas... NO ONE HAD

INVADED THE STUDIO! There were no ”troops.” There were just you and your

three lost friends” Willson-Broyles, Montecore, 281). Throughout the story, Jonas

always exhibits a strong inclination to invent stories which he cannot later tell apart

from reality, and this makes it, of course, very hard for the readers to trust him as a

narrator. Thus, it results that none of the narrators are completely dependable and the

story seems to be more a complex web where real facts and imagination intertwine,

than a trustworthy narration.

The content of Montecore contradicts its epistolary form, which is on the

contrary often used to give an extra realistic façade to novels, thus highlighting not

only Khemir’s capacity to play with forms and language but also his aim to

undermine the idea of the storyteller as a teller of truth. When the journalist Eva

Lucas claimed that Montecore cripples the substance of a writer’s trade in showing

that language has scheming components, Khemiri meaningfully answered:

“Life would certainly be easier if we could just sit back and trust the words that we are constantly being bombarded with. But at the same time, we are all aware of the manipulative nature of language. Storytelling is always fictional and I guess I’m more interested in undermining than underlining the romantic idea of the writer as a teller of truth.”108

108 Quotation was originally in italics. Eve Lucas, “The trickery of the truth teller”, Exberliner, February 1, 2010, accessed September 25, 2013, www.exberliner.com/articles/the-trickery-of-the-truth-teller.

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This problem that is within the narration in Montecore could be also considered as

the author’s reaction to the reception of Ett öga rött by the Swedish critics. In a

letter, Kadir refers directly to the enormous success that Jonas has achieved after his

first book, and about the misunderstanding of his intention: “Trots dina protester

celebreras du för att ha skrivit en bok på ‘tvättäkta Rinkebysvenska’. Tydligen har du

gett liv åt ‘nvandrarens historia’ på ett språk som låter som om man ‘sänker ned en

mikrofon’ i valfritt invandrarområde. Skrev du inte att din bok handlade om

svenskfödd man som byter sitt språk med intention?” (Khemiri, Montecore, 39)

(“Despite your protests you are celebrated because you have written a book in

‘authentic Rinkeby Swedish.’ Apparently you have brought ‘the immigrant’s story’

to life in a language that sounds as though one has ‘dropped a microphone’ into an

immigrant area of one’s choice. Did you not write that your book was about a

Swedish-born man who breaks his language with intention?” Willson-Broyles

Montecore, 27). Khemiri’s attempt to draw his readers’ attention to the unreliability

of his narrator was actually already present in Ett öga rött. However, since the critics

considered Halim’s language and story to be realistic and reliable, when the author

preferred to explore “autenticitetstemat” as Kadir calls it (Khemiri, Montecore, 39)

(“the authenticity theme” Willson-Broyles, Montecore, 27), Khemiri overstressed the

unreliability of the narrators in Montecore.

Despite the fact that Kadir and Jonas are effectively unreliable, the implied

author does somehow sympathize with them. However, this sympathy is sometimes

very hard to define since there is no extradiegetic voice which can imply some

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comments about the characters.109 As we have said, the points of view are multiple

because of the large number of narrators, and this allows the author to tell different

versions of the same story. Considering also that none of the versions are more

reliable than another, they are all trustworthy and deceiving at the same time, and the

author does not give any hint to the readers about which of his characters, Jonas,

Abbas or Kadir, is more deserving of our sympathy. The three characters are

realistically represented, not because they are inspired by real persons who the author

may know as some critics would maybe argue, but because they are depicted with

their passions, limits, and virtues. Consequently, it could be that Abbas is a very

tender father who cares a lot about his son’s integration into society but he is also an

aggressive man who despises the other immigrants. It is also possible, for instance,

that Jonas is not only a young man who fights for people’s rights but also a

shortsighted teenager who cannot understand the pain that his father has suffered

being an immigrant in Sweden. Khemiri presents his characters as guilty victims:

none of them truly deserve their tribulations but they are also the cause of somebody

else’s pain, and their greatness is only determined by their humanity.

3.1.2 The time issue of the novel

Montecore begins when all the events of the story are already over. The

reconstruction of Abbas’s story occurs through a dialogical process in which Jonas

109 About the moral consideration that the author can imply through the use of an extradiegetic narrator see: Angelo Marchese, “Latitanza ed epifania dell’autore”, in L’officina, 80-83.

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and Kadir are the communicative partners,110 and since their aim is to write “en

biografi vigd åt [Jonas] far” (Khemiri, Montecore, 14) (“a biography devoted to

[Jonas’s] father” Willson-Broyles, Montecore, 4) the sequence of memories appears

as a work in progress where the two men try to write down their ideas about Abbas.

The novel is divided into five parts, each of which corresponds to a time period: the

first part is about Abbas in Tunisia, before he met Pernilla; the second part focuses

on Jonas’s first memories of his father;; the third part recounts Abbas’s attempts to

learn Swedish;; the fourth part is about Abbas’s economic success as a pet-

photographer;; and the fifth part is about Abbas’s departure and last period in Sweden

with his family.

In Montecore, there are two diegetic times which complicate the time structure

of the novel. While Jonas and Kadir’s exchange is contemporary and corresponds

more or less to the years after the publication of Ett öga rött, Abbas’s first letter was

written on February 2nd, 1978 and the last one on December 27th, 1985. However, as

we have previously seen, Kadir and Abbas are plausibly the same person, and their

narrations cannot refer to two diverse diegetic levels. It is more likely that Abbas

faked the letters to make his son, and the readers, trust Kadir’s version of the events.

What Khemiri expects of his readers is that they keep alert and mistrust what

they are told. As he did in Ett öga rött, Khemiri again intersperses some proof here

and there in his novels which the readers must find and use to figure out a story that

is more reliable than the one told by the narrator, but at the same time the story is

also designed to mislead the readers. In Ett öga rött, the readers were asked to find

110 Angelo Marchese gives a very fine definition of what a dialogical process in narrative is: “il confronto dialogico che comporta la ricostruzione e la comunicazione di un caso, di una vicenda a un partner comunicativo” Marchese, L’officina, 137.

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out whether Halim was actually Swedish and could speak standard Swedish, inspite

of the fact that he wrote his diary in Halimiska, and in Montecore Khemiri expects

his readers to mistrust Kadir’s innocence and to understand that he is Abbas’s alter

ego, even though he labels Abbas’s letters with previous dates. Through a deceiving

time structure, Khemiri’s aims to undermine the idea that story tellers can be trusted

without a critical and attentive approach by the receivers.

3.1.3 The language

A linguistic analysis of Montecore is extremely interesting, not only because the

novel employs a new, fascinating sort of invandrarsvenska, but also because the

language is one of the most important themes of the novel.

From a stylistic point of view, the epistolary form allows the author to use

different languages that fictionally represent the interlocutors and their styles.

However, since Abbas’s letters are said to be translated by Kadir, and also

considering that Kadir and Abbas are very likely the same person, their languages are

represented by only one style; Jonas, on the other hand, uses another very

characteristic language that is his own. It is thus very easy for the readers to

understand which character writes what, since Abbas-Kadir’s style really differs

from Jonas’s, and therefore the author is able to insert many comments in between

the lines of the reported e-mails, or as footnotes, without risking any

misunderstanding. The text switches continuously between the two sorts of Swedish

that characterize Montecore, creating a very beautiful linguistic play that really

appeals to the readers.

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As we have said, Kadir and Abbas have Tunisian origins and Swedish is not

their mother tongue. Therefore their language is characterized, of course, by the

mistakes that a Swedish learner would naturally make, such as semantic or

grammatical mistakes. However, since the only language that they know, aside from

Arabic, is French, what really distinguishes their language is the massive use of

Gallicisms that sometimes has hilarious results.111 For instance Kadir introduces

himself to Jonas as his “fars mest antika vän” (Khemiri, Montecore, 13) (“father’s

most antique friend” Willson-Broyles, Montecore, 3) using the adjective antik

(antique), which exists in Swedish, instead of gammal (old), which is what should be

used in this case. Of course the French vieux (FR, old) differs very much from

gammal, while antique (FR) is pretty similar to antik, and this explain Kadir’s

choice. However, a lot of Gallicisms have actually quite commonly been used by

Swedes since the eighteenth century,112 but many others do not belong to the spoken

language, although they exist in Swedish. The Swedish audience can indeed

understand Kadir, but they perceive his linguistic choices as unsuitable if not

completely inadequate;113 nevertheless, Kadir’s language is extremely charming as

well, since he constructs many weird but beautiful metaphors and invents idiomatic

expressions. When Kadir congratulates Jonas for the publication of his first novel, he

asks his friend: “Hur smakar din emotion? Som frasighetens Nutella-crêpes i solig

park? Som suprisens nackpuss i somrig syrenlukt? Som vind i hår när man cyklar

111 Bassini, “Chiamalo”, 133. 112 Such as chaufför (FR chauffeur, ENG driver). The spelling is often adapted to the Swedish alphabet and word-construction. 113 The reason why Kadir uses the French language much more than he does with Arabic is of course justified by the fact that very many French words exist in the Swedish vocabulary, and that he wants to give a sense of higher register to what he writes. This also depends on the fact that Khemiri himself can speak and write French, while his knowledge of Arabic is basic.

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handlöst nedför broar med solens läggning i siluett?” (Khemiri, Montecore, 39)

(”How does your emotion taste? Like Nutella crêpes of crispiness in a sunny park?

Like a kiss of surprise on the nape of one’s neck in the summery smell of lilacs? Like

wind in hair when one cycles hands-free down bridges with the laying of the sun in

silhouette?” Willson-Broyles, Montecore, 27). Kadir’s language is therefore not

simply the language used by immigrants, but is very finely constructed and often

highly poetic. Thus, it is wrong to simply consider Kadir’s Swedish as

invandrarsvenska, because he shows a personal inclination toward exploring the

playfulness of language which distinguishes his own Swedish. Since we have defined

Halim’s language as Halimiska, because it did not properly fit the characteristics of

the blattesvenska, we should call Kadir’s language Kadiriska for it does not truly

represent the language spoken by immigrants either.

Given what we have just said, it is not a coincidence that Jonas calls his father’s

way of speaking “khemiriska” (Khemiri, Montecore, 108), implying that its peculiar

characteristics define it as a language on its own. Khemiri seems so very interested in

the definition of the language that he creates in his works, and he disassociates it

from the definition of Rynkebysvenska that many critics have used for his previous

novel. In point of fact, in Montecore, Jonas pays much attention to the features that

distinguish his father’s language from any others’:

[…] bara pappor har sitt eget språk, bara pappor pratar khemiriska. Ett språk som är alla språk blandade, ett språk som är extra allt med glidningar och sammanslagna egenord, specialregler och dagliga undantag. Ett språk som är arabiska svordomar, spanska frågeordm, franska kärleksförklaringar, engelska fotografcitat och svenska ordvitsar. Ett språk där g och h rumlar långt ned i magen, där man alltid ska plockas upp från ”marken”. Ett språk där ”daccurdo” betyder okey och ”örtsalt”

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är synonymt med ”jättegott” (bara för att mammor älskar örtsalt på popcornen). (Khemiri, Montecore, 108) (“[…] only Dads have their own language, only Dads speak Khemirish. A language that is all languages combined, a language that is extra everything with changes in meaning and strangewords put together, special rules and daily exceptions. A language that is Arabic swearwords, Spanish questions words, French declarations of love, English photography quotations, and Swedish puns. A language where g and h rumble way down in your stomach, where you always “walk” abroad instead of traveling, where toys must always be picked up from the “ground.” A language where “daccurdo” means “okay” and “herb salt” is synonymous with “really good” (just because Moms love herb salt on popcorn).” Willson-Broyles, Montecore, 88)

Jonas lists here some mistakes that the Swedish learners make, as Bassini argues,114

but he also describes Abbas’s language as absolutely personal, highlighting what

makes it unique. There is of course a clear sentimentalism in Jonas’s words,

nonetheless this does not imply that he is biased and unable to objectively analyse his

father’s language. Jonas, and maybe Khemiri, are much more interested in describing

and emphasizes the peculiarity of the khemiriska rather than using it as a reliable

example of invandrarsvenska. In other words, Khemiri’s interest in depicting the

sociolinguistic implications of Abbas’s broken Swedish goes hand in hand with his

stylistic will to construct a language which is very poetical and very unique.

Abbas’s inability to speak correct Swedish has many social implications, and the

learning of Swedish soon becomes an important issue for the Tunisian immigrant.

His wife, for instance, often insists that it is necessary for him to study the language,

and in one of his memories Jonas recalls one summer when he helped his father and

Kadir to approach the language with a few unconventional language-rules. These

rules, which are reported in the novel (Khemiri, Montecore, 203-213), describe the

Swedish language through the use of its idiomatic sentences, instead of through mere 114 Bassini, “Chiamalo”, 133.

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grammatical explanations. Jonas’s rules are very beautiful and create interesting and

amusing links between the language and its use of metaphorical expressions, which

often refer to nature, giving the idea that Swedish is melodic and delightful. The

rules show that Khemiri is actually very curious about also analysing the so called

standard Swedish, and his capacity of linguistic analysis is undoubtedly fascinating.

However, these rules have the function to give Kadir a first approach to the Swedish

language – he has, in fact, at this point just moved to Sweden – and to encourage

Abbas to continue with his learning.

Besides the romantic description that Jonas gives through his rules, the Swedish

language is also a very harmful issue in the novel. In another of his memories, Jonas

speaks of the implicit power that Swedes hold over those who cannot speak their

language properly. Here is the passage when Jonas describes the sense of control that

his father was often victim of:

Pappor lär sig allt som finns att kunna. Men ändå. En enda felaktig preposition är allt som behövs. Ett enda ”ett” som borde varit ett ”en”. Sen deras sekundlånga paus, pausen som de älskar, pausen som visar att hur mycket du än försöker kommer vi alltid, ALLTID att genomskåda dig. De njuter av maktövertagandet och väntar väntar väntar tills precis när pappor tror sig vara besegrad. (Khemiri, Montecore, 239) (”Dads learn everything that there is to know. But still. One single wrong preposition is all it takes. A single en word that should be an ett. Then their second-long pause, the pause they love, the pause that shows that no matter how much you try, we will always, ALWAYS see through you. They enjoy taking the power and waiting waiting waiting until just when Dads think they are defeated.” Khemiri, Montecore, 203)

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Bassini argues that the word maktövertagandet (taking the power) is highly symbolic

and reminiscent of Pierre Bourdieu’s idea about the symbolic power of language.115

In his essay “Chiamalo come diavolo vuoi” Bassini explains that, according to

Bordieu, there is a standardized language which is imposed by the state and that a

person’s powerlessness can be measured by how much his way of expressing differs

from the norm. This kind of language oppression is not only felt on certain high

cultural levels, but at any level of society.116

At the same time, Montecore does not only deal with immigrants’ language but

also with Jonas’s. It might be useful to remember that Jonas was born in Sweden, and

is therefore Swedish. His fluency in the Swedish language is not questioned and

since his letters are not reported it is quite difficult to analyse directly his way of

expressing himself. Besides the fact that the novel reports his frequent stream of

thought, it is illuminating to have a look at the comments that Kadir makes

sporadically about Jonas’s language. In Kadir’s second letter, there is for instance a

reference to Jonas’s previous letter: “Att läsa din positive respons på mina bokliga

idé värmde mitt humor (trots din slarviga grammatik och frånvaron av versaler efter

punkt). Är ’Wzup dawg?’ en frekvent använd hälsningsfras i dagens Sverige?”

(Khemiri, Montecore, 28) (”To read your positive response to my bookly idea

warmed my humor (despite your sloppy grammar and the lack of capital letters after

periods). Is ‘wzup dawg’ a frequently used greeting in today’s Sweden?” Willson-

115 Bassini, “Chiamalo”, 134-135. 116 “Esiste dunque, secondo Bourdieu, una lingua standard imposta dalle istituzioni, una costruzione squisitamente politico-ideologica, alla quale ogni individuo, in qualsiasi asserzione, è costretto a rapportarsi; e tanto più marcata è la distanza da questo modello, tanto più l’asserzione avrà meno valore, perché sarà percepita come l’appartenenza ad un livello sociale lontano da quello istituzionale. […] la lingua “ufficiale” detiene una valenza di potere simbolico a cui non ci si può sottrarre nemmeno nelle conversazioni quotidiane.” Bassini, “Chiamalo”, 130 and 135.

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Broyles Montecore, 17). We can therefore understand that despites the fact that Jonas

can speak and write standard Swedish – he also shows it in his long streams of

thought, although his Swedish is often infiltrated by hip-hop, English and Arabic117 –

he uses an idiolect which does not respect the rules of standard Swedish on purpose.

Jonas’s case is therefore similar to Halim’s: his language results in being corrupted

not because he cannot express himself but because he decides to corrupt it. Like

Halim, Jonas finds Sweden and the Swedish language racist and adopts the idiolect

used by second- generation immigrants on purpose; Bourdieu would have explained

this with these words:

The transgression of official norms, linguistic and otherwise, is, at the very least, directed as much against the ‘ordinary’ dominated individuals who submit to them, as against dominant individuals or, a fortiori, against domination as such. [...] It is clearly among men, and especially among the youngest and those who are currently and above all potentially the least integrated in the economic and social order, such as adolescents from immigrant families, that one finds the most marked rejection of the submissiveness and docility implied by the adoption of legitimate way of speaking.118

As we have already said, the transgression of linguistic norms stands for a clear

social rejection. In fact, throughout the novel, Jonas shows in his behavior a strong

stance against the status quo, both social and linguistic.

After this brief analysis of the linguistic style of Montecore, it is clear that the

novel is built upon a multi-layered structure. Each of the languages that are

represented in the novel represents a different social group, and apart from the power

that is within the standard language – and to which everybody is subdued – Khemiri 117 Ander Monson, “Untamable Tongue”, New York Times, February 25, 2011, accessed April 25, 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/books/review/Monson-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 118 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Malden: Polity Press, 1992), 94-95. About the use of this quotation see also: Bassini, “Chiamalo”, 122-123.

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narrates the different reactions of these groups towards the status-quo. In his novel,

he implies many ideological and social implications that are within the real usage of

these idiolects, and this fact also refers to Bachtin’s idea of heteroglossia

(разноречие), which indicates the conflict of different variations that coexist within

a single language.119 According to the Russian critic, a novelist cannot use any of

these variations without also implying the strong connotations that they have in real

life.120 So even though Abbas’s language stands only for Abbas – which other

immigrant would use so many complex idiomatic expressions and word games? – it

is perceived by the readers as real invandrarsvenska, because of the social

implication that it reminds them of. In Montecore, Khemiri depicts the idea stressed

by Bachtin that language is never uniform, 121 and constructs his novel on the

linguistic expression of the “dominated”, as Bourdieu would say, consequently

making the heteroglossia issue very evident.

However, the languages used in Montecore cannot be considered as trustworthy

representations of invandrarsvenska and blattesvenska, because even though writers

may use a specific language that is naturally loaded by ideological and social

assumptions, they also adapt it to serve an aesthetic and narrative purpose.122 As we

have seen, for instance Abbas’s language is from a certain perspective similar to the

language used by immigrants – with its frequent grammar and semantic mistakes –

but from another it is the result of Khemiri’s linguistic experimentations with

119 Michail Bachtin, “La parola nel romanzo”, in Estetica e romanzo (Torino: Einaudi, 2001), 67-230. 120 “Il prosatore-romanziere non estirpa le altrui intenzioni della lingua pluridiscorsiva delle sue opera e non distrugge gli orizzonti ideologici-sociali (i mondi grandi e piccoli) che si rivelano al di là delle lingue della pluridiscorsività, ma introduce queste intenzioni e questi orizzonti nella propria opera.” Bachtin, “La parola”, 107. 121 “la lingua […] non è mai unitaria” Bachtin, “La parola”, 96. 122 “Il prosatore si serve delle parole già abitate da intenzioni sociali altrui e le costringe a servire le sue nuove intenzioni, a servire un altro padrone.” Bachtin, “La parola”, 107

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register, idioms and style – what “real” immigrant would use so many complex

idiomatic expressions, word games, and Gallicisms?

Although the linguistic complexity of Montecore is profoundly interesting, the

readers cannot only focus on this, without running the risk of considering the novel

only for its language and not for its story. The relationship between Jonas and Abbas

is worthy of the same attention and the reason why Khemiri chooses to give to one of

his characters his own name is likewise important. The analysis of these two topics is

the aim of the next paragraphs.

3.2 THE THEMES OF THE NOVEL – CONFLICTS BETWEEN

FATHER AND SON

As we have seen the core of Montecore is the reconstruction of Abbas’s life, which is

attempted by his son Jonas and the mysterious Kadir. We have also said that their

versions of the story may sometimes differ a lot, and this happens when the two

narrators try to defend their perception of what has to be considered really true. From

one side, Kadir defends Abbas and justifies his extreme need for integration, from

the other side Jonas often accuses his father of submissiveness and supports a certain

kind of resistance to swedification.

Their conflict however begins when Abbas completely devotes himself to work

and when Jonas starts to harbor a deep anger against Sweden as a consequence of

some episodes of racial discrimination. However, Jonas remembers his childhood

with nostalgia and describes his father with tender words drawing a clear line

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between a time when their relationship was built on mutual affection and another

when it was built on mutual incomprehension. Not only does their discord find roots

in their different ideas about integration into Swedish society, but as we shall see also

in Abbas’s extreme need for economic success which leads him away from the

home.

3.2.1 A different idea of integration

From when Abbas first settles in Sweden, he finds opposition at almost every social

level. Pernilla’s mother is very uncomfortable with her daughter’s decision to live

with a foreigner (Khemiri, Montecore, 96-97) and Pernilla’s friends, who pretend to

be extremely politically correct and open, irritate Abbas, treating him as though he

was only a representative of Tunisian ethnicity. In the letter dated 15th April, 1978,

Abbas writes:

[De] envisas med att ständigt fråga mig om mitt perspektiv på Mellanöstern och min vy av Sadat och... [...] Och varför envisas dom med att ständigt, ständigt påtala mig himmmelskheten i baklavas och djupheten i den förbannade jävla Profeten? [...] Varför vill ingen diskutera annat än Mellanöstern eller baklavas? Varför vill ingen diskutera Otis Redding123? Varför kan vi inte, bara för ikväll, släppa politikens boja, ignorera Afrikas svältande barn och investera vår samlade ekonomi i luxuöst bubblande bål? (Khemiri, Montecore, 94) (“[They] persist in constantly asking me about my perspective on the Middle East and my view of Sadat and... […] And why they persist in constantly, constantly pointing out to me the heavenliness of baklava and the deepness of The bloody goddamn Prophet? […] Why doesn’t anyone want to discuss anything but the Middle East or baklava? Why doesn’t anyone want to discuss Otis Redding? Why can we not, just for tonight, release the chains of politics, ignore the starving children of Africa, and

123 Otis Ray Redding, Jr. was an American soul singer. He is considered one of the major artists in blues.

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invest our collected economy in sumptuously bubbling punch bowls?” Willson-Broyles, Montecore, 75-76)

Abbas denounces the Swedes’ tendency to consider him as a mere spokesman of his

own cultural background, showing that even those who are interested in Abbas’

background are actually unable to see further than his ethnical origins. In addition,

when looking for a job as photographer’s assistant, he experiences resistance because

of his inability to speak Swedish, (Khemiri, Montecore, 89-90) and when he finally

obtains a place as an assistant to the Finnish Raino, he soon becomes more of a

servant than an assistant.

Despite the fact that he has always been discriminated against, Abbas describes

Sweden as a land of possibilities and Swedes as very nice people , always insisting

on his wish to integrate into Swedish society and to be accepted. When, in 1985,

Abbas finds out that Refaat El-Sayed, an Egyptian man who moved to Sweden and

achieved economic success after buying a small medicine company in 1981, was

nominated Swede of the Year by the news-TV program Rapport, he takes El-Sayed

as a model of integration, and starts to believe that all those who have a strong will

can achieve fortune and integration in Sweden. After this, financial success comes to

mean integration to Abbas and since what he craves most is to be considered a

Swedish citizen, he will sacrifice his family to become a successful photographer.

As we have said, integration also implies the learning of the Swedish language

which becomes a fundamental need after the birth of Jonas’s twin-brothers: Pernilla

insists that her husband takes a Swedish course in order to obtain a better paid job.

(Khemiri, Montecore, 100) However not even a systematic study of the language

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helps Abbas, who also tries to swedify himself by learning the habits that he

recognises as Swedish,124 to emancipate himself.

When Abbas understands that even his name can be an obstacle to achieving the

integration he craves for, he changes it to the more Swedish Kristen Holmström125.

He subsequently obtains immediate success as a pet-photographer, but the economic

crisis of the Nineties and the consequent racial hatred that spreads among the people

who regard immigrants as job-stealers, will diminish his happiness. In fact, Abbas’s

studio is burnt down and racist slogans are written on the walls, but he cannot

understand the gravity of the situation yet, blaming the immigrants who hate those

who succeed. (Khemiri, Montecore, 300) At the end of the novel, we have the

impression that Abbas’s extreme need for integration has blinded him, and we feel

sorry for him, even though he is often depicted by Jonas as very aggressive and

intolerant. However, the implied reader helps us to also sympathize with him and his

intolerable position as an outsider.

On the other hand, Jonas’s fight against swedification in Montecore is similar to

Halim’s rebellion in Ett öga rött, involving small acts of disobedience that are often

overstated in Jonas’s memories as they were in Halim’s diary. Like his father, Jonas

divides the world into two opposite groups: Swedes and immigrants, but he claims to

124 “Jag står till höger i rulltrappor. Jag borstar mina tänder kväll och morgon. Jag avtar mina skor innan jag äntrar lägenheter. Jag använder säkerhetsbälten också när jag sitter i bilars baksäten. Jag börjar snart förstå logiken i att pensionerad släkt ska isoleras på så kallade servicehem. [...]Jag exprimerar troppelt tack varje gång jag investerar en tidning. Jag prutar aldrig i affären. Jag kan diskutera väder och vind i timmar med en meteorologs precision. Varje gång jag är på väg att hälsa på mina grannar hindrar jag mig till tysnad med tanken på ordspråket: En svensk tiger. [...]Om man dinerar på restaurang är jag noga med att kvinnan ska betala sin del av notan. Dom gånger jag insuper alkohol slutar jag inte förrän medvetslösheten är mig nära. Jag exponerar aldrig ilska om någon alkoholiserad svensk på metron råkar insultera mig.” Khemiri, Montecore, 174-175. 125 Krister sounds exactly like Christer, while the last name is the last name is the anagram of Strömholm. Christer Srömholm was a very well-known Swedish photographer.

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belong to the latter proclaiming himself a blatte. However, in contrast to Abbas, who

claims integration only for himself and attacks other immigrants, Jonas tries to

involve his friends in his rebellion. It is not a coincidence that the word blatte is used

for the first time by Jonas in his memories to convince his friend Patrick of the

otherness that characterizes him because of his Latin American origins, despite the

fact that he has been adopted by a Swedish couple:

[…] när sluttexterna rullar säger Patrik som av en slump att hans riktiga pappa kommer från Chile. Är det sant? Visst det är sant för Patrik heter Jorge i andranamn och svenska pappan är bara låtspappa och i samma sekund som du hör det inser du att Patrick också måste vara samma sort som du, Melinda och Irman och du säger det till honom, du säger: Men då är du också blatte! Och Patrick tänker efter och kliar sin armbåge och säger: Blatte? Du säger: Visst. Blatte! Och Patrick ler nervöst och verkar inte veta om han ska bli glad eller ledsen. (Khemiri, Montecore, 252-253) (”[...] when the credits are rolling Patrik says as though by chance that his real dad is from Chile. Is that true? Of course it’s true because Patrik’s middle name is Jorge and the Swedish dad is just a stepdad and in the second you hear that, you realize Patrik must also be the same sort as you, Melinda, and Irman, and you tell him so, you say: But then you’re a blatte too! And Patrik considers this and scratches his elbow and says: blatte? You say: Of course. Blatte! And Patrik smiles nervously and doesn’t seem to know of he should be happy or sad.” Willson-Broyles, Montecore, 214)

Jonas, as much as Abbas, consider the name always loaded with a special value and

indicates to which group we belong or we want to belong to. To Jonas Patrik’s

second name Jorge is a guarantee of his immigrant origins and this makes him a

blatte.

In his memories, Jonas often remembers himself as a small leader who fights

against discrimination and swedification – which means accepting the racism of

Swedish society towards the young Jonas – and even though he is often disowned by

Kadir, he still presents himself as a socially committed adolescent. To better

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understand this, it can be helpful to have a look at one of his memories. Here, Jonas

actually refers to himself using the second person singular, as though he is telling

himself this memory as a means of remembering it, in order to reconstruct the facts,

and not let it vanish:

[…] i efterhänd är du lite osäker på vad som faktiskt sags men du minns att alla dom där sakerna som du börjat tänka men kanske inte formulerat färdigt plötsligt sprutar ut och du vrålar fiender är fiender och vänner är familj och bröder är brushor och systrar är syskon och vi måste stå strarka och inte låta oss separeras för rassarna blir fler och fler och jävla skinnskallar hänger på helikopterplattan och nassarna äger stan varje 30 november och det är vi mot dom fatter ni inte det!? Det är vit mot svart, det är svennar mot blattar och jag svär den blatte som bråkar med en annan blatte han är värre än värsta Bert Karlsson, vi måste sluta slåss med varran, vi måste enas och sprida kärlek. Och varje gång vi ser en blatte som åker förbi i lyxig Merca, BMW elelr Audi jag svär vi ska aldrig spela svennar och spela avundsjuka istället vi ska bara knyta näven i luften och visa respekt för det rassarna vill allra helst är att vi slåss med varann och det gör vi inte, shit vi ska till och med visa knutna respekthanden om det är en jävla snål selloutirani som kör en Volkswagen Passat, det spelar ingen roll, irani, asssyri, polski – blatte som blatte! (Khemiri, Montecore, 276-277) (”[…] afterward like this you’re a little uncertain what was actually said but you remember that all those things you started to think but maybe didn’t formulate all the way suddenly spray out and you roar enemies are enemies and friends are family and brothers are bros and sisters are siblings and we have to stand strong and not let ourselves be separated because there are more and more racists and fucking skinheads hang out at the helicopter platform and the Nazis own the city every November 30 and it’s us against them, don’t you get it? It’s white against black, it’s Swediots against blattar and I swear any blatte that fight with another blatte, he worse than the biggest Bert Karlsson, we have to stop fighting with each other, we have to unite and spread love. And every time we see a blatte going by in a fancy Benz, Beamer, or Audi I swear we never play Swediots and play jealous instead we just make a fist in the air and show respect because what the racists want most of all is we fight with each other and we won’t do that, shit we’ll even show the fist of respect if it a cheap damn sellout Iranian who’s driving a Volkswagen Passat, it don’t matter, Iranian, Assyrian, Polski – blatte is blatte!” Willson-Broyles, Montecore, 235)

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What must alert the readers is the beginning of this passage: “i efterhänd är du lite

osäker på vad som faktiskt sags” (afterward like this you’re a little uncertain what

was actually said). Jonas does not remember precisely what he said on that occasion

and tries to recall his words giving them a strong pathos and appeal which they

probably did not actually have. In the same way that Kadir’s efforts aim to justify

Abbas’s decisions, even the most deplorable, Jonas justifies himself, giving an image

of his personality that is far from reality but is instead shrouded in an exaggerated

charm. Besides this fact, we can still read between the lines Jonas’s idea of

integration, which is not based on class consciousness – as Abbas does when he

discriminates against poor immigrants and admires wealthy immigrants – but on an

ethnic consciousness.

As we have seen in the previous chapter, in the Nineties Fascist groups found

support thanks to a growing wave of racism which the economic crisis had spawned,

and this is the background of Jonas’s youth, when he radicalizes his idea about

integration. However, since he often uses the expression “det är vi mot dom” (it’s us

against them) we can consider that his concept of integration is contrary to the idea

of segregation, which finds no real sympathy in the implied writer. In fact, the author

seems to dislike both Abbas’s and Jonas’s ideas, and while the father will go back to

Tunisia because his dream of integration has been crushed, so the son will abandon

his endless war against Swediots. As we can deduce from one of the first letters that

Kadir writes, Jonas has accepted the praise of Swedish society for his first novel,

even though he strongly disagrees with their interpretation, and gives interviews to

those newspapers that he used to call “fucking jävla borgerlig brackartidning”

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(Khemiri, Montecore, 39-40) (“goddamn fucking bourgeois philistine newspaper”

The Silence, 27).

A parallel between Jonas and Halim must be drawn at this point. Because Jonas

sees the world as an open opposition of svennar against blattar, he even considers his

father as an example of blind integration and his group of friends as a reminder of his

ethnical origin. Halim’s perspective does not differ: in Ett öga rött Halim’s father

tries to convince his son of the importance of assimilation and Halim’s friend

Dalanda is the one who encourages him to adopt a non-Swedish identity. In both

stories the protagonists are asked to stand on one side – both Halim and Jonas attack

integration and defend cultural authenticity.

As we have previously said, Magnus Nilsson considers Ett öga rött a

representation of the Swedish belief that reality can be analysed through ethnic lens,

since everybody is considered to represent their own ethnicity.126 Since both Halim

and Jonas are immigrants’ descendants but have always lived in Sweden, they have

to reject their swedishness and choose to be true to their stereotypical ideas about

their ethnic cultures. Consequently, cultural authenticity seems to be the only

reasonable one. At the end of both books however, it appears that the protagonists

have reached the conviction that only individual authenticity is desirable, finding an

alternative to the ethnic lens which focuses on stereotypes and obscures

individuality. Nilsson, who argues that Khemiri does not like the idea of ethnicities

as pervasive categories, 127 considers that Ett öga rött expounds the idea that

“ethnicities cannot be viewed as homogenous and clearly distinguishable cultures

126 Nilsson, “Ethnic Lens”. 127 Nilsson, “Ethnic Lens”, 57.

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that determine every aspect of a person’s identity”128. The same analysis could be

used for Montecore where the extreme alternatives of complete integration or

complete segregation are losing and where the readers are left with the feeling that

integration into Swedish society cannot be achieved by either of the two methods that

the narrators support.

The harsh conflict between father and son finds its root in their different belief-

systems, and despite the fact that the implied author suggests that they are both

wrong in their ideas, there is no space for reconciliation in the time of the story.

However, their incomprehension radicalizes when Abbas neglects his family in order

to dedicate himself to his work and Khemiri accidentally describes in his novel an

unfortunately common familiar event that the anthropologist Luigi Zoja has called

“The Eclipse of the Father”.129

3.2.2 The eclipse of the father

In Montecore, Jonas describes his childhood and the relationship with his father

enthusiastically,130 at least until Abbas finds out that Pernilla is expecting another

child – who will actually be twin-children. At this point, not only does Abbas’s

dream to make money find justification in his ideal of integration, but also in a real

and pragmatic necessity. Until now Pernilla has been the one who economically

supported the family with her work as a flight hostess, while Abbas worked as a 128 Nilsson, “Ethnic Lens”, 57. 129 Luigi Zoja, “L’eclissi dei padri”, Allegoria 61, Per uno studio materialistico della letteratura XXII (2010): 141-152. 130 Khemiri, Montecore, 102-104.

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subway driver. In such a non stereotypical family, Abbas did not have to meet the

social patriarchal expectation which considers the father the one responsible for

financially maintaining the family.

Slowly Abbas changes from a present father, meaning that he is present for his

son and provides affection for his family, to a patriarchal absentee father, meaning a

father who is merely in charge of economically supporting the family without being

responsible for the education of his offspring. It is not by chance that while Abbas

evolves from a very caring father to a business man, simultaneously Abbas’s and

Jonas’s relationship falls apart, indeed in the novel’s logic blind devotion to work

and family happiness seem to be mutually exclusive.

It is very interesting to note that as Abbas loses his paternal side, he becomes

more and more rigid and aggressive towards his son. Luigi Zoja’s anthropological

theory “The Eclipse of Fathers” could explain the reason for this happening. Luigi

Zoja notes that the word “father” comes from the Indo-European root /pa/ that means

“nutrition, feeding”, and that a male parent is not simply the one who procreates the

offspring but the one who also looks after them, feeds and educates them. He finds

justification in what he says by analysing men and women’s different sizes: while in

other species the male is huge compared to the female – meaning that the strongest

individual is the one who can copulate with females and generate offspring – men

and women have almost the same proportion. As a result, the father of human

offspring is not the strongest but rather the one who takes care of the children, as

well as the one who has built a relationship with his partner and his children. When

fathers give up this role and give increasing importance to their careers, they

instigate a crisis of fatherhood. The distance which develops between the

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sons/daughters and the absentee fathers often leads to an increased aggressiveness by

the latter, who do not want to lose their leadership of the family which they consider

their right since they are the providers. Order and teaching within the family are thus

reestablished through strength and inflexibility.

Zoja’s analysis can help to explain Abbas’s behavior: the loving father becomes

progressively the absentee parent who thinks his duty is to guarantee mere economic

support. When Abbas realizes that his son has started to think independently and in

opposition to his own beliefs, he tries to reestablish his leadership through

aggressiveness and pronounced masculinity. While Abbas tends to verbally attack

Jonas, Jonas tends to ignore Abbas since he doesn’t recognise his role as a father any

longer. To support this hypothesis, one must pay attention to what Jonas writes when

he remembers his father’s change. He firstly writes that “Pappor försvinner”

(Khemiri, Montecore, 315) (“Dads disappear” Willson-Broyles, Montecore, 270) and

then symbolically “Pappor blir gasform” (Khemiri, Montecore, 317) (“Dads turn to

gas” Willson-Broyles, Montecore, 271), expressing the sensation that Abbas was

somehow disappearing from the family’s life and relinquishing his paternal role. It is

of course significant that in the meantime he overstresses his mother’s presence,

“Kvar i Stockholm finns mammor […]” (Khemiri, Montecore, 306) (“Back in

Stockholm there are Moms […]” Willson-Broyles, Montecore, 263), and his

grandmother’s presence, “Kvar i Stockholm finns också världens bästa mormor [...]”

(Khemiri, Montecore, 311) (“Back in Stockholm there’s also the world’s best

grandma […]” Willson-Broyles, Montecore, 266). Moreover when Jonas’s family’s

core has been irreparably crippled, he starts to identify his friends as brothers and

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sisters.131 The pain caused by his father’s loss induces Jonas, therefore, to form a

fictional new family with new members, or in other words the disillusion of an

unsatisfactory relationship with his biological relatives leads Jonas to seek new and

genuine family relationships and he replaces fatherhood with brotherhood. Family

should be a metaphorical place where one feels welcomed and protected, and its

physical place is the home. The opposition and incomprehension that Jonas feels

drives him to find support outside the home: his friends become symbolically his

relatives while his father ‘sublimates’. In this way Jonas gives a personal alternative

to the crisis of the patriarchal family, undermining the preconception that considers

only biological relationships as blood bonds.

The contraposition between Abbas and Jonas, which can be seen simply as a

conflict between two different ideas of assimilation, may also be taken to represent

the dissolution of patriarchal structures in Western society and the alternatives that

society has genuinely started to create. In this way the focus switches from the life of

immigrants in Sweden to everyday life in Sweden, making Montecore’s message

more universal. If readers only read the book as a (more or less) realistic report on

integration in modern Sweden, they would concentrate on the exotic and ethnical

features and miss every other argument in the story. The definition of Montecore as

invandrarlitteratur, in this respect, compromises the disposition of the reader, who

expects the story to deal with a certain reality without connections to universal

perspectives.

131 “VI ÄR BRUSHOR FÖR FAN” Khemiri, Montecore, 276.

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3.3 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL LENS

Matthew Jakubowski, an American writer and critic who serves on the fiction panel

for the Best Translated Book Award, wrote on The National 18th February, 2011, that

Montecore is “a deeply compassionate portrait of [the author’s] father”132. Similarly

Charles Harrison Wallace wrote on the website swedishbookreview.com that in

Montecore “one of the main threads is an autobiographical account of the author”133.

This shows that the idea of Montecore as an autobiographical novel is widely shared

and Montecore’s Jonas is widely considered to be Jonas Hassen Khemiri.

While the distance between Jonas and Khemiri may not appear to be significant,

what makes the biggest impression is that the direct association between character

and writer had also previously been done with Halim and Khemiri. Indeed since

Halim in Ett öga rött affirms at one point that there have never been any Jewish

athletes because money does not help in sports, Khemiri has been accused of anti-

Semitism by Ragnar Strömberg and Mats Gellerfelt.134 This proves that the critics

have always had a tendency to superimpose the protagonist with the author, ignoring

a basic rule of literature by which the writer creates his/her characters and gives them

a shape that stands on its own.

132 Matthew Jakubowski, “Words of my father: Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Montecore”, review of Montecore, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, The National, February 18, 2011, accessed May 10, 2013, http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/words-of-my-father-jonas-hassen-khemiris-montecore#page1. 133 Charles Harrison Wallace, “Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Montecore: en unik tiger”, review of Montecore, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Swedishbookreview, January, 2008, accessed May, 12, 2013, http://www.swedishbookreview.com/show-review.php?i=188. 134 Trotzig, “Makten”, 114-115.

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Astrid Trotzig135 considers this tendency of the critics a consequence of their

blindness towards those writers who have foreign origins, or bicultural backgrounds.

These writers are always expected to explore their double identity and to narrate their

real experiences in their novels.136 Trotzig argues that while certain writers can in

their works portray both themselves and the world in a universal way, the

invandrarförfattare are expected to depict their very personal point of view and no

weight is given to their capacity to explore and define society, but only to the ethnic

perspective which is only valid for immigrants or at most Swedes with multicultural

background.

In her essay “Biografi som kategori” (Biography as category), Trotzig argues

that the problem within the definition of invandrarlitteratur is that it defines writers

by association their biography.137 While ethnically Swedish writers are valued for

their individuality in style and experiences, all the others who have more complex

ethnical origins are labeled invandrarförfattare. Therefore each immigrant writer is

expected to strictly portray their life in their works because what is considered to be

most representative is their background and the critics tend to consider them from

this perspective. This explains why Halim has been considered the alter-ego of Jonas,

but does not help in understanding the reason why Khemiri deliberately chose to give

his name and some of his biographical characteristics to the main character in

Montecore.

135 It is worth remembering that Astrid Trotzig was adopted when she is was very little, and she has grown up in a middle-class Swedish family. In her essay she writes about Johannes Anyuru (who is a Swedish poet and whose father is from Uganda and whose mother is Swedish), Alejandro Leiva Wegner, and Jonas Hassen Khemiri. These four writers have extremely different background and stories, but they are still considered as an homogenous group because of their non-Swedish looks. 136 Trotzig, ”Makten”, 112-126. 137 Astrid Trotzig, ”Biografi som kategori”, Pequod 34 (2004): 23-27.

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The metafictional structure of Montecore suggests that Khemiri wants to explore

the reliability of literature. Even if there are no facts that support the idea that Trotzig

and Khemiri share the same beliefs, 138 Montecore attacks the largely shared

expectation that fictional characters and their writer are biographically linked. To

ironically reject this association, Khemiri gives Jonas his name and part of his own

history,139 whilst at the same time creating a fictional story that makes it impossible

to understand where the line between a realistic autobiography and an invented

character stands. We can assert that the most autobiographical feature that Khemiri

has given to Jonas – and to Halim also – is his imaginative capacity and his ability to

invent stories that may or may not be inspired by reality. At one point Kadir writes:

“Förstår läsaren att ovanstående stycken inte är sanningens realitet utan snarrare dina

fantasier?” (Khemiri, Montecore, 320) (”Does the reader understand that the above

passage is not the reality of truth, but rather your fantasies?” Willson-Broyles,

Montecore, 273), and with this question he draws attention to one of the most

important features of Jonas, which is his inventiveness. Khemiri recognises himself

in this more than in the semi-autobiographical life of his character, using Jonas to

highlight his own writing talent. The fact that Jonas has such a creative talent must

remind the readers that he is not necessarily reliable, or at least that he is not

completely reliable. Thus, since the narrator is not trustworthy, he cannot faithfully

represent the actual life and biography of his creator.

138 Trotzig’s essay was published in 2005, while Montecore came out one year later. Khemiri might have read “Makten över prefixen” and be influenced by it. We know however that Trotzig and Khemiri personally know each other, so they might have discuss about this. 139 In Montecore Jonas was born on 27th, December, 1978. Khemiri, the actual writer, was born on the same day. This little detail shows how much attention the writer put on the story, trying to mislead the readers and the critics, pretending that the novel tells his own story.

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Unfortunately a blind belief instigated by the critics has convinced many readers

that certain novels tell fully reliable stories, or, what is even worse, that certain

fictional characters may directly convey their creators’ ideas and experiences.

However, many others have better understood Kemiri’s aim, such as, for instance,

the writer Björ af Kleen, who reported a very interesting interview on the pages of

the newspaper Sydsvenskan.140 In this interview Khemiri argues that he sometimes

sympathizes more with Abbas than with Jonas, for example with his need to be

considered as an individual and not just as a representative of his ethnic background

–141 Khemiri also feels that he has to fight every day to be accepted as a författare

and not as an invandrarförfattare. In this light, Montecore appears as a novel that

wants to invalidate readers and critics’ expectations rather than confirm their right to

consider Khemiri, and the narrators of his novels, as reliable reporters. Indeed

Magnus Eriksson considers Montecore as novel which aims to undermine the

autobiographical expectation of the so called invandrarlitteratur, even though this

aim runs the risk of becoming lost in the many ironic filters of the novel.142

Hence, Montecore is a novel that criticizes many of the power structures that are

not only within society but also within the world of literature. However, it is also true

that Khemiri never gives a plausible alternative to what he deconstructs, and he

subverts our perception rather than reinforcing it. But most of all, Montecore attacks

140 Björn af Kleen, ”Hassen Khemiri vill uppfinna sig själv”, Sydsvenskan, February 4, 2006, accessed May 30, 2013, http://www.sydsvenskan.se/kultur--nojen/hassen-khemiri-vill-uppfinna-sig-sjalv/. 141 ”Det är att försvara rätten till självuppfinning. Den rätten är långt ifrån självklar. Pappan i boken kämpar för rätten att få hålla sig fri från sin etnicitet och kultur.” Kleen, ”Hassen Khemiri”. 142 Magnus Eriksson, “En grimas åt alla – och åt ingen”, review of Montecore, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Svenksa Dagbladet, February 6, 2006, accessed May 30, 2013, http://www.svd.se/kultur/litteratur/en-grimas-at-alla-och-at-ingen_32431.svd.

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the biographical lens used by critics to read his novels, proving that Khemiri is not

only a fine writer, but also a fine intellectual.

***

Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s second novel Montecore deals with racism, integration and

assimilation. Moreover, it depicts a father and son relationship which is built upon

mutual affection and mutual incomprehension, but this theme has often been ignored

by critics who have rather devoted attention to the social issues of the novel.

The complex language and the intricate style of Montecore proves Khemiri’s

ability to play with the Swedish language and his interest of exploring the numerous

paths that literature can offer. Because of its epistolary form and the absence of third

person narrators, the novel is experienced as an extreme realistic narration but

through many ironical filters the author undermines this perception, and, on the

contrary, implicitly supports the idea that narrative, even though semi-

autobiographical, is always fictional. On a diegetic level, the narrators “fight” against

each other to give their own idea of what is real and reliable, and at the same time, on

an extra-diegetic level, the implied author “fights” to defend his right to self-invent.

Montecore is thus an attempt to support Trotzig’s argument that the definition of

invandrarlitteratur is in itself misleading, if not discriminating, because it

indissolubly links the invandrarförfattare with their biographies, creating a

misunderstanding of their works.

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CHAPTER IV – The Family in a Racist World

An Analysis of Jag ringer mina bröder

Jag ringer mina bröder143 (I ring my brothers) is Khemiri’s latest novel, published in

2012. After the terrorist attack in Stockholm 2010, Khemiri wrote an article on the

Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, in which the narrator expresses his fears and

thoughts about the after-bombings.144 This short article was then used by Khemiri as

the basis for a more complex novel that came out two years later. The novel was very

highly acclaimed by critics, who paid a lot of attention to the political implications of

Khemiri’s text.145 At the same time they completely ignored a major topic, which is

143 Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Jag ringer mina bröder (Stockholm: Bonniers, 2012). 144 Jonas Hassen Khemiri, “Jag ringer mina bröder”, Dagens Nyheter, December 18, 2010, accessed August 2, 2013, http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/kulturdebatt/jag-ringer-mina-broder/. 145 The reviews that have been taken into consideration are the following: Lennart Bromander, “Hög puls bevarar omedelbarheten”, review of Jag ringer mina bröder, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Skånska Dagbladet, October 17, 2012, http://www.skanskan.se/article/20121017/NOJE/710179926/-/hog-puls-bevarar-omedelbarheten; Sinziana Ravini, ”Jonas Hassen Khemiri / Jag ringer mina bröder”, review of Jag ringer mina bröder, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Göteborgs- Posten, October 16, 2012, http://www.gp.se/kulturnoje/litteratur/1.1097163-jonas-hassen-khemiri-jag-ringer-mina-broder; Annika Koldenius, ”Recension: Jag ringer mina bröder av Jonas Hasen Khemiri”, review of Jag ringer mina bröder, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Borås Tidning, October 16, 2012, http://annikakoldenius.wordpress.com/2012/10/16/recension-jag-ringer-mina-broder-av-jonas-hassen-khemiri/; Karin Nykvist, ”Mörkrets alla nyanser”, review of Jag ringer mina bröder, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Sydsvenskan, October 16, 2012, http://www.sydsvenskan.se/Pages/ArticlePage.aspx?id=667633&epslanguage=sv; Magnus Eriksson, ”Platt text om bombdådet i Stockholm”, review of Jag ringer mina bröder, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Svenska Dagbladet, October 16, 2012, http://www.svd.se/kultur/litteratur/platt-text-om-bombdadet-i-stockholm_7584290.svd; Claes Wahlin, ”Om utanförskap inifrån”, review of Jag ringer mina bröder, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Aftonbladet, October 16, 2012, http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/bokrecensioner/article15625805.ab; Johanna Karlsson, ”Jag ringer mina bröder, Jonas Hassen Khemiri”, review of Jag ringer mina bröder, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, bokhora.se, October 30, http://bokhora.se/2012/jag-ringer-mina-broder-jonas-hassen-khemiri/.

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the relationship between the protagonist and his friends, showing again that their

prejudices towards Khemiri, even “positive” prejudices in this case, manifest

themselves in their tendency to recognise only those issues that they expect to be

dealt with in the novel. It was obvious that, because invandrarlitteratur is presumed

to always deal with politics and integration, the critics have not paid much attention

to how friendship and kinship are beautifully depicted in the novel, to its political

and existential dimensions.

This chapter aims to discuss both the article and the novel, and to highlight some

themes which are in the novel but have been ignored by the biased Swedish critics.

The chapter also includes a comparison between an open letter eventually written by

Khemiri to the Justice Minister Beatrice Ask 146 and the novel Jag ringer mina

bröder, for the reason that they present many similar themes.

4.1 BOMBINGS IN STOCKHOLM – FACTS

At 16:48 on 11 December 2010, an explosion occurred at the intersection of Olof

Palmes Gata and Drottninggatan in central Stockholm. A few minutes later, another

bomb was detonated nearby, where a man with abdominal injuries was found; it was

I have also taken into consideration the following interview: Stålberg, “Jag skriver för att hitta nyanserna”. 146 Jonas Hassen Khemiri, “Bästa Beatrice Ask”, Dagens Nyheter, March 13, 2013, accessed March 25, 2013, http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/basta-beatrice-ask/; the article has been translated in Italian by Alessandro Bassini, here is the link: http://lacittanuova.milano.corriere.it/2013/04/15/cara-ministra-per-un-giorno-scambiamoci-la-pelle/; Rachel Willson-Broyles translated the article in English: http://asymptotejournal.com/article.php?cat=Nonfiction&id=47. At the last linked page, one can find the article translated in many other languages (Indonesian, Japanese, Chinese, Dutch etc.)

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later discovered that he had blown himself up. Despite the fact that the city was filled

with a lot of Christmas shoppers, just two people were taken to hospital with minor

injuries and the bomber himself was the only fatality.

The bombing was immediately considered to be a terrorist attack, and a

threatening email sent to Säkerhetspolisen (the Swedish Security Service) and to

Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå (the most important news agency) proved the validity of

this theory. The email was addressed to Sweden and the Swedish people, criticized

the country’s military support in the war in Afghanistan,147 and referred to Lars Vilks

and his controversial drawing which depicted Mohammed as a dog in 2007.148 The

email contained two audio files, one in Swedish and the other in Arabic, which stated

that the Swedish people would continue to die until Sweden ended the war against

Islam and the humiliation of the prophet.149 Soon after the explosions, the Foreign

Minister Carl Bildt confirmed the hypothesis of the terrorist attack, adding that what

could have been really catastrophic had actually failed.150 In addition, the head of the

European Strategic Intelligence Claude Moniquet, expressed his concern about

terrorist attacks in general, saying that it is difficult to identify lone terrorists before

they attack.151

The following day the bomber’s identity was revealed: his name was Taimur

Abdulwahab al-Abdaly, a twenty-eight year old Swede of Iraqi origin. At the time of

147 Matilda E. Hanson and Catarina Håkansson, ”Man sprängde sig själv i Stockholm”, Svenska Dagbladet, December 11, 2010, accessed September 3, 2013, http://www.svd.se/nyheter/inrikes/man-sprangde-sig-sjalv-i-stockholm_5802915.svd. 148 Per Nyberg, "Explosions in Stockholm believed to be failed terrorist attack", CNN, December 12, 2010, accessed September 2, 2013, http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/12/11/sweden.explosion/index.html?hpt=T1. 149 Nyberg, “Explosions”. 150 Nyberg, “Explosions”. 151 Julian Borger, "Stockholm bombing: authorities ponder impossibility of policing lone jihadists", The Guardian, December 12, 2010, accessed September 3, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/12/stockholm-bombing-policing-lone-jihadists.

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the bombings he was living with his wife and kids in England, where he had studied

sports therapy.152 A detailed biography of the man, published in Dagens Nyheter by

Karoline Hoppe,153 described Abdaly as an extremely normal person. The journalist

also reported the shocked reaction of a young man who had played basketball with

Abdaly when they were young. Abdaly’s acquaintance described the terrorist’s

family as trevlig (pleasant) and “på intet sätt extrema i religiös eller politisk

mening”154 (in no way religious or political extremists). International newspapers

wrote many articles about Abdaly’s apparently happy life, publishing pictures of the

man with his wife, children, and friends.155 The bomber was depicted by the media as

a man who was above suspicion, and this particularly scared people who began to

mistrust Middle Easterners in general. Their fear was also fueled by Magnus

Ranstorp, a Swedish expert of terrorism, who declared that he did not believe that the

bomber acted alone. 156 As a result, the Swedes were afraid that a new, more

dangerous attack was about to come and because there was no possibility of

predicting attacks, many began to avoid people of Arabic appearance, especially

those carrying bags or backpacks, where explosives could have been hidden.

One week after the explosion, Jonas Hassen Khemiri wrote a poetic article about

this prejudice towards them in the days following the attack, or, in other words,

towards the people whose skin is dark enough to be considered terrorists.

152 John F. Burns and Ravi Somaiya, "Police Say Early Detonation of Bomb Averted Disaster in Sweden", The New York Times, December 13, 2010, accessed September 3, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/world/europe/14sweden.html?hp&_r=0. 153 Karoline Hoppe, “Svårt att förstå att det verkligen kan vara han”, Dagens Nyheter, December 13, 2010, accessed September 3, 2013, http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/svart-att-forsta-att-det-verkligen-kan-vara-han/. 154 Hoppe, “Svårt att förstå”. 155 E.g. Neil Sears and Nick Fagge, “Portray of a happy family”, Daily Mail, December 13, 2010, accessed August 2, 2013, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1339011/Stockholm-suicide-bomber-family-portrait-wife-parents.html. 156 Nyberg, “Explosions”.

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4.2 “JAG RINGER MINA BRÖDER”, THE GENESIS OF THE NOVEL

On 18 December Dagens Nyheter published an article by Khemiri, which was

introduced with these words: “Det har gått en vecka sedan terrordådet i Stockholm

city. I dag skriver författaren Jonas Hassen Khemiri om vi och dom, om dom som

säger dom – och om vad man ska vara rädd för”157 (A week has passed since the

terrorist crime in Stockholm city. Today the writer Jonas Hassen Khemiri writes

about us and them, about those who say “them” – and about what we should be

afraid of). The article is written from the perspective of a young anonymous narrator

and victim of discriminations, and while all media attention was focused on the

bomber and on new possible attacks, Khemiri looks at those who are unfairly

suspected of being dangerous and constantly have to prove their innocence.

The text is the chronicle of a person’s phone calls made after the bomb attacks

which shocked Sweden. It is highly poetical, since it is constructed around the

anaphora “Jag ringer mina bröder och säger:” (I call my brothers and say), repeated

nine times.158 It is unlikely that the calls were actually made by the narrator; it is

more probable that the repetition is an aesthetic device to introduce his thoughts and

feelings159. So the text is divided into nine parts which describe different perceptions

157 Jonas Hassen Khemiri, “Jag ringer mina bröder”. 158 There is actually an exception in the anaphora. When the words are repeated for the seventh time “säger” is replaced by “viskar” (whisper). The part that follows is the most important of the text and the exception draws the readers’ attention on its importance. The seventh part focuses on the narrator’s fear of being persecuted and discriminated against, and since the narrator is confessing his feelings to his friends, the verb “to whisper” better conveys a sense of closeness and affection. 159 At the beginning it is impossible to understand if the narrator is a man or a woman. This ambiguity aims to remind us that anyone could have said the narrator’s words to his/her friends, and makes the text all-encompassing. However, at the end of the text the personal pronoun han (he) is used and we understand that the narrator is a man.

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of what had just happened in Stockholm, from a very shocked reaction to an

increasing anger towards the new wave of racism.

To begin with, the narrator reports the facts and draws a symbolic line between

the terrorist’s and his own appearance.160 At this point, he imagines that his friends

could become victims of a hostile reaction and asks them to stay at home, or at least

to remain as invisible as possible.161 This first part can be considered as a natural

reaction of the narrator, who understands that the situation is highly unstable and a

single spark would destroy the fragile balance within society. Even if he

comprehends the stupidity of the prejudice that some white Swedes hold, he believes

that it is preferable to be silent and let time pass.

In the central part of the chronicle, the narrator changes his mind and suggests

that it is time to fight back, to demonstrate that they are not terrorists and that they

are no longer willing to tolerate the public opinion’s prejudice. This new stance

results from the narrator’s awareness that they cannot ignore the fact that they are

already a part of the Swedish society and that Sweden cannot go back to being an

ethnically homogeneous country. On the contrary the tensions within society have to

be faced, because they have already become outrageously dangerous – the narrator

refers to the cultural centre Cyklopen, burnt to ground on November 29, 2008;162 to

the people who shot immigrants through their windows in Malmö;163 to the fascists

160 “Det hände en så sjuk sak i går. [...] Vissa kommer försöka sammankoppla honom med oss. Hans namn, hans ursprung, hans hårfärg. Tillräckligt likt (eller inte likt alls).” Khemiri, ”Jag ringer”. 161 “Akta er. Ligg lågt i några dagar. [...] Om ni måste gå ut: [...] Smält in, gör er osynliga, förvandla er till gasform. Väck ingens och jag menar ingens uppmärksamhet.” Khemiri, ”Jag ringer”. 162 Mikael Bondesson, ”Brand totalförstörde kulturhuset Cyklopen”, Dagens Nyheter, November 29, 2008, accessed September 2, 2013, http://www.webcitation.org/5cp2Fd4ds. 163 Jens Littorin, Stefan Lisinski, and Andres Hellberg, “Kvinnorna sköts genom fönster”, Dagens Nyheter, October 22, 2010, accessed August 28, 2013, http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/kvinnorna-skots-genom-fonstret/.

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who are used to congregate in Salem 164 ; to the radical Islam people in

Drottninggatan; and to the extreme right wing party in parliament. The narrator of

“Jag ringer mina bröder” writes that the situation is scary and that it has got out of

hand. A metaphorical (but not only) war is being fought between white Swedes and

dark skinned Swedes, who mutually consider the other group to be aggressive and

dangerous, “Alla svartskäggiga män är potentiella bombbärare. Alla blonda män är

potentiella lasermän”165 (All men with a dark beard are potential bombers. All fair-

haired men are potential ‘lasermen’).

At the end of the article, the narrator admits to seeing a suspicious person with

dark hair, a face covered by a Palestinian keffiyeh, and an unusually big backpack.166

He then understands that he was looking at his own reflection – the article concludes

therefore on a very bitter note: the narrator himself has started to mistrust everybody

and has become a victim of the racist system that he would like to fight against. The

article results in being a collection of thoughts that lead the narrator from a state of

immobility to a strong and active reaction through many conflicting feelings. In

addition, the article represents a crescendo of awareness, which leads the narrator to

understanding that he is not immune to the racist virus which is contaminating

Swedish society.

Despite the fact that the article was based on facts, Khemiri was more interested

in people’s reaction to the bombings rather than reporting the actual events that had

recently upset Sweden. It is clear that the intent of the writer was to explore the

psychology of minorities suddenly involved in a silent war between themselves and 164 Salem is a municipality (kommun) in the County of Stockholm. 165 Khemiri, “Jag ringer”. 166 “[…] fick syn på en väldigt misstänkt individ. Han hade svart hår och en ovanligt stor ryggsäck och hans ansikte var täckt av en Palestinsjal.” Khemiri, ”Jag ringer”.

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the white majority, a war that is basically fought with the weapons of mistrust and

isolation.

Nearly two years after the chronicle, Khemiri published a new novel which is

also called Jag ringer mina bröder. From the previous article, the writer developed a

touching story whose protagonist, Amor, was presumably inspired by the narrator of

the chronicle. Furthermore some verses of the chronicle were used – taken literally or

slightly changed – to introduce the five chapters of the novel and to close the

narration at the end of the book. Again, the novel focuses on the protagonist’s

personal reaction to the bombings and only marginally reports facts. Jag ringer mina

bröder cannot be considered as a reliable reconstruction of external events; it is a

psychological novel that aims to depict Amor’s paranoiac mind whilst, at the same

time, telling the moving story of his friendship with Shavi.

4.3 JAG RINGER MINA BRÖDER, A NARRATOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

Jag ringer mina bröder describes a day in Amor’s life after the terrorist attack in

Stockholm city centre which upset Sweden in 2010. Amor is Muslim looking and he

immediately understands what could happen to people with his skin colour.

Therefore he calls his friends and tells them to be careful because they might become

the victims of a rage wave. He gives them instructions about their clothes and their

behaviour saying they have to be as anonymous as possible. The story develops

around these instructions which are actually taken (almost literally) from the article

“Jag ringer mina bröder.” As previously mentioned, the novel is divided into five

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chapters, each of which is named after a person who talks with Amor. Four of the

dialogues are real, while one is purely imaginary as the protagonist who talks to his

dead grandmother. Not only does Amor imagine this dialogue, but he also describes

actions and situations that can only be fruit of his paranoiac mind.

4.3.1 Narrator, voice, and point of view

The text takes the form of Amor’s thoughts, consequently, it is often difficult to

differentiate between what happens in reality and what actually only happens in his

mind. The narration is carried out by the protagonist, making the narration

homodiegetic.167 Since the novel is confessional in nature, the principal point of view

is necessarily taken from Amor,168 who describes his own perception of reality.

However Amor also reports the dialogues with his friends, giving utterance to other

points of view through the narration. The style (short sentences, direct dialogues, and

intense streams of consciousness which alternate in the text) enables the readers to

identify themselves with Amor.169 In addition, rhythm and silence are very important

because they recreate the pace of natural thinking.

The narrator issue becomes complicated at one point (in the chapter “Valeria”),

when a voice reports Amor’s movements in the form of military communication.

Here the story is told twice, by a homodiegetic and a heterodiegetic narrator:

167 Andrea Bernardelli and Remo Ceserani, Il testo narrativo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005), 77. 168 ”Punto di vista [...] gli eventi del racconto [che] ci vengono via via rivelati così come sono percepiti dall’esperienza di qualcuno” Franco Brioschi, Costanzo di Girolamo, Elementi di teoria letteraria (Milano: Principato, 1984), 179. 169 Bromander, “Hög plus”.

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Jag kom ut på gatan. Visuell kontakt, kom. Jag gick mot tunnelbanan. Han går västerut, kom. Jag tog fram min plånbok, drog mitt kort och åkte rulltrappan ned mot spåren. Han är på väg ned i tunnelbanesystemet, jag upprepar, han är på väg ned i tunnelbanesystemet, kom. (Khemiri, Jag ringer, 57) (I went out on the street. Visual contact, over. I went towards the underground. He is going westwards, over. I took my wallet, flashed my card and went down to the platform via the escalator. He is going down into the underground, I repeat, he is going down into the underground, over.)

It would however be wrong to consider this voice as another “real” narrator, since it

somehow represents Amor’s subconscious fears. This second narrator arises in fact

from Amor himself, who imagines that he is being kept an eye on. The reader can

easily understand that the protagonist has a strong inclination to perceive reality in a

very imaginary way, and that he invents stories and conversations that may seem

realistic at the beginning, but tend to end in very spectacular or adventurous ways.

The reader is then often misled, and finds it hard to understand where reality ends

and Amor’s imagination starts. This double narrator serves two different narrative

needs: firstly it reproduces Amor’s paranoiac perception of reality, and secondly it

represents a message that the implied author gives to the implied reader170. Indeed,

the two narrators tell two different versions of the same facts and this duplication

suggests that the readers cannot rely on the narrator, since he often “lies” or at least

exaggerates.

170 “[…] là dove manca un narratario, esisterà comunque un lettore implicito a cui l’opera si rivolge” Brioschi, Elementi, 174.

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The parallel narrator who is present in the text has also an ideological

function:171 he embodies the widespread mentality which fears Middle Easterners

and expects them all to be potential terrorists. A military style is used here, because

this portrays people’s need to keep all possible bombers under surveillance, and it

also highlights Amor’s fear of being constantly chased. This complicated interaction

of different voices expresses the author’s idea that our enemy is sometimes us, and

questions whether it is possible to separate our own inner voice from the social

expectations that we all bear.172

4.3.2 Time

Jag ringer mina bröder not only narrates one day in Amor’s life but, because the

main character often recalls his childhood and adolescence in a free association of

thoughts, it is filled with many flashbacks. Each conversation, real or imagined, is

used to recall the protagonist’s past, giving the reader a wider perspective of Amor’s

life. This constant alternation of present actions and memories recreates the natural

function of the brain which constantly oscillates its focus between memories and

present time. Moreover, the flashbacks are useful in slowing down the rhythm of the

main action, which is otherwise very fast-paced. Intertwining past and present time

serves to juxtapose the two different realities which are experienced by Amor with

contrasting feelings: childhood is always idealized (as it was in Montecore), while

171 “Se l’intervento del narratore nei confronti della storia non è semplicemente esplicativo […] ma prende la forma di un commento dell’azione, di un giudizio autorizzato, si può parlare di una funzione ideologica vera e propria” Angelo Marchese, L’officina del racconto (Milano: Mondadori, 2011), 183. 172 “Vad är den egna rösten? Vad är de andras? Hur hittar man gränsen mellan den egna och andras moral?” Ravini, ”Jonas Hassen Khemiri”.

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the present appears miserable and troubled to him. Time loses therefore its

objectivity and is loaded with a personal significance that can only be felt by the

narrator – and by the readers who are catapulted into his mind. As Angelo Marchese

remarks, it is a typical trait of contemporary literature to interiorize time, which

becomes difficult to “measure” and understand only from a subjective,

psychological, and ephemeral point of view.173

As Jag ringer mina bröder is a very psychological novel, it happens that the

main story-time stands still while the discourse-time runs on.174 This is of course the

consequence of Amor’s frequent cogitation, which takes some time to be described,

but is almost instantaneous on the diegetic level. This literary figure is usually

referred to as “pause”175 and implies a static story-time but a running discourse time

(ST=0, DT≠0) as we have already said. A narrative problem emerges when Amor

imagines talking to someone and he reports the dialogue as if it really happened. In

the last part of the book, “Tyra”, Amor apparently answers a phone call and chats

with his grandmother. Even though the implied reader has already been warned by

the implied author that Amor’s words are not always reliable, the conversation

appears absolutely real in the beginning. Grandmother and grandson talk for a while

without creating any uncertainties in the readers, until the moment when Tyra sounds

happy because one of her friends has died. Amor replies to her happiness by saying:

“Nej men vad roligt! Så då är ni där allihopa nu?” (Khemiri, Jag ringer, 115, 173 “[…] nella narrativa moderna il tempo si è interiorizzato, sciogliendosi dai rigidi binari della cronologia […] Le strutture delle narrazione prendono atto di questa rottura di un cosmo che non c’è più e si volgono alla resa del tempo psicologico, soggettivo, pulviscolare, relativistico” Marchese, L’officina, 130. 174 The story-time is “quello in cui si suppone avvengano le vicende raccontate,” while the discourse-time is “quello in cui la voce narrante ci viene riferendo gli eventi in cui, di norma, ha luogo l’atto dell’ascolto o della lettura” Brioschi, Elementi, 176. 175 “L’autore può […] concentrare la propria attenzione su un singolo episodio […] lasciando in sospeso una situazione narrativa – come in una specie di «fermo immagine» – mediante una pausa (descrittiva o riflessiva) che, inserendosi nell’azione, ne dilata la durata” Bernardelli, Il testo, 87.

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emphasis added) (Wow that’s fun! So are you now there all together?) This där is

clearly an allusion to an afterworld, and subsequently other references are made. The

dialogue, which was perceived as realistic, rapidly becomes imagined, initially

creating confusion as a result of the readers’ expectation that reported dialogues are

authentic. A direct dialogue is usually called “scene”, when the story-time and the

discourse-time conventionally coincide (ST=DT); 176 indeed the time needed to

converse on a diegetic level is perceived to be the same as the one needed to recount

the conversation on the discourse level. What is problematic here is that the dialogue

is only played in Amor’s mind, and everything that is in one character’s mind implies

the time scheme: ST=0, DT≠0, while a conversation implies the scheme: ST=DT. It

is clear that story-time and discourse-time cannot be equal and diverge at the same

time, therefore the readers feel initially confused when they subconsciously perceive

this temporal chaos, but the effect is highly remarkable because it helps again to

embody Amor’s imaginative mind.

4.4 THE THEMES OF THE NOVEL – THE RED THREADS

Besides the narratological value of the chapter “Tyra”, the conversation between

Amor and his grandmother has a highly symbolic meaning in the story. As we have

seen, Jag ringer mina bröder portrays Amor’s mind which has been upset by the

recent bomb-attack. Within the protagonist’s mind reality and imagination are

blended and cannot be told apart, tormenting Amor who cannot distinguish his real 176 “[…] il tempo della storia e il tempo del discorso coincidono nel dialogo: in questo caso parleremo di scena” Brioschi, Elementi, 177.

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enemy (racism) from the enemy he imagines (general persecution). This unbearable

fear of being discriminated against is a direct reaction to the others’ fear that a new

bomber could blow himself up: while many Swedes are afraid that the terrorist

attacks are not over yet, other Swedes expect to be discriminated against and

constantly fear being exposed to public disdain. Amor’s anxiety is one “red thread”

of the novel and finds resolution in the conversation between the main character and

his grandmother. When he asks her if somebody is staring at them, she tenderly

answers that people do actually look at them, but it does not matter.177 After this

support, Amor finds the strength to overcome his fear and bear in mind that “Deras

blickar kan inte skada oss” (Khemiri, Jag ringer, 120) (Their gazes can’t hurt us).

While he wanders in the city, Amor also faces an inconsolable sense of

loneliness. It is not a coincidence that the novel opens with Amor alone on a dance

floor while his friend Shavi is trying in vain to ring him. Not only does the story

describe the protagonist’s paranoia, but also his transition from his youth to

adulthood. The bröder of the title are Amor’s friends, who have all taken different

paths, finding their ways in life. Three chapters are named after these friends, who

are in order: Shavi, Ahlmen, and Valeria. Among them, Shavi is actually the most

important one since he is constantly present – he continually rings Amor who does

not want to answer and therefore the main character is forced to constantly think

about him – and plays a fundamental role in the resolution of the story.

Shavi is one of Amor’s oldest friends, and is described as a very conscientious

father who was previously a bully. The following is Amor’s first assessment of their

friendship:

177 “Tittar folk på oss? / Ja det gör dom. Men strunt i dom. Vi behöver inte dom.” Khemiri, Jag ringer, 119.

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Jag älskar honom som en bror. Korrekt. Han är min bror. Exakt. Nästan på samma sätt som mina bröder är mina bröder. Precis. Vi har varandras ryggar och varje dag vilken dag som helst vi skulle dö för varandra visst? Mm. Eller. Kanske inte dö. För mina bröder skulle jag dö. För mamma skulle jag dö. Men för Shavi? Kom igen nu kompis. Alltså. Vi är uppvuxna i samma kvarter. Vi känner varandra. Han har min rygg och jag har hans. Word. Och vilken dag som helst jag skulle försvara honom, ljuga för honom, ta en kula för honom. Exakt. Så länge kulan inte träffar ansiktet. Vilken dag som helst skulle jag ta en icke-livshotande icke-ansiktsträffande kula för honom. Och jag för dig kompis. Men samtidigt. Jag måste säga. Dom senaste åren. Ända sen han blev pappa så har han varit lite... Vad? Jag vet inte. Vi har glidit ifrån varandra. Han har förändrats. (Khemiri, Jag ringer, 12-14) (I love him like a brother. Correct. He is my brother. Exact. Almost the same way my brothers are my brothers. Right. We cover each other’s backs and every day, any single day we would die for each other right? Mm. Or. Maybe not die. For my brothers I would die. For my mother I would die. But for Shavi? Come on bud. In other words we have grown up in the same neighbourhood. We know each other. I cover his back, he covers mine. Word. And any day I would defend him, lie for him, take a bullet for him. Exact. As long as the bullet doesn’t get me in the face. Any day I would get a non-lethal bullet that doesn’t get me in the face for him. And I for you, friend. But at the same time, I have to say that the last years… Since he became a dad, he has… a little… What? I don’t know. We parted company. He has changed.)

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The beautiful reported dialogue, that Amor imagines, suggests that his friendship

with Shavi used to be stronger than it is now, and Amor feels somehow betrayed, as

when one brother departs to start his own family and the other one is left behind

alone. Shavi does, however, try to keep in touch with Amor, ringing him repeatedly

during the day, and these unanswered calls are used to hint melancholically at their

past relationship. Shavi is described as both the aggressive friend who would always

defend Amor,178 and as the sensitive person who could cheer Amor up when he was

caught cheating on his physics test.179 But since Shavi moved in with his girlfriend

and became a father, Amor has felt abandoned and has started to reconsider their

friendship.

Ahlem and Amor were also close friends (besides being cousins too) and their

relationship is told by the narrator in a similarly gloomy and nostalgic tone:

[…] när Shavi var på dansgolvet gick jag på toa själv och då kunde det bli knas, ibland var det något tönt som skulle läras en läxa, någons keps skulle ryckas och spottas i, någons freestylelurar skulle snos, någons knäskål skulle sparkas ur led av en fly kick och varje gång den personen var jag så tog jag ett steg tillbaka och sa: Ey du vet hon tjejen med krokig näsa som står i dörren? Den är min kusin. Och det var allt som behövde sägas. Här får du tillbaka kepsen, här är dina hörlurar, res dig upp vi skojade ju bara, du fattade att det var ett skämt eller hur? (Khemiri, Jag ringer, 42-43) ([...] when Shavi was on the dance floor, I used to go to the toilet alone and that could be dangerous. Sometimes there was a jerk that had to be taught a lesson, someone’s cap would be pulled away and spitted in,

178 ”Och om ens kusin blev tagen av civilare och först inte fattade att det var civilare utan trodde det var Manals bröder som hon hade lite beef med och därför gjorde motstånd och försökte fly och fick ett käckt näsben så sa Shavi: Din kusin borde ringt mig, jag svär jag hade backat henne, jag hade lagt kombination på kombination, jag hade boxerat grisens näsa tills det bara blod blev kvar.” Khemiri, Jag ringer, 15. 179 ”Och om man till exempel hade fuskat på fysikprovet och läraren såg och rykte ens prov och hotade med IG så kunde man gå ut på gården och där stod Shavi som bara: Vasskadu vara ledsen? So what? Vad spelar en IG för roll? Du kommer komma in på KTH ändå. Jag har IG i fyra ämnen och erkänn det kommer gå bra för mig?” Khemiri, Jag ringer, 14-15.

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someone’s free-style headphones would be taken, somebody’s kneecap would be kicked by a fly kick, and when that somebody was me, I stepped back and said: Hey, do you know that girl with a crooked nose that is standing by the door? She is my cousin. And it was all that had to be said. Here your cap back, here your headphones, stand up, but we were just kidding, you understand it was a joke right?)

Amor recalls this missed sense of protection at different times since he feels

particularly unsafe in post-attack Stockholm, but also because his friends and

relatives have now gone away and he cannot accept it. His rage comes out when he

rubs in Ahlem’s face their revolutionary dream, which was abandoned by the young

woman for serenity and peace through Oriental philosophy: “Spela inte dum. Vår

historia är antingen muslimsk eller kommunistisk. […] Du är precis som vi. Bara att

du inte vill erkänna det. Inga patetiska jävla flum-Buddha-citat kan hjälpa dig”

(Khemiri, Jag ringer, 38) (Don’t be stupid. Our history is either Muslim or

communist. […] You’re exactly as we are. You simply don’t want to admit it. No

fucking pathetic fuzzy Buddha’s quotes can help you).

Finally, Valeria is the girl that Amor fell in love with when they were young,

and she represents his teenage-crush who has now found another man. Through a

semi-real dialogue – one part is really said at the phone, another is merely imagined

– Amor recalls their old days and presents her as an idealized person 180 whose

departure meant more than Amor wants to admit. When he sadly realizes that time

has passed and they have grown older (Khemiri, Jag ringer, 77), he also understands

that the carefree days of his youth have passed as well and he has been left behind by

his friends.

180 Valeria asks Amor persistently to stop idealizing her: “Du måste sluta nu för den här personen som du har gjort mig till finns inte, jag finns inte, du har förvandlat mig till en fix idé och jag kommer aldrig kunna matcha fantasin som du har gjort mig till, kan du fatta det?” Khemiri, Jag ringer, 77.

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Shavi, Ahlmen, and Valeria bring to mind Jonas’s friends in Montecore, the ones

that had grown up together and shared many political dreams of social equality.

Therefore they are also named bröder, as in the previous novel, because they are not

simply friends but they have built a relationship which involves protection, sharing,

and tender emotions. In the optic of vi och dem (we and them), which is always

present in Khemiri’s novels, these marginalized young people tend to feel strongly

linked since they are treated racially as a homogenous group and discrimination

strengthens their bond. The strong sense of community, however, is broken when

Amor’s friends take individual paths; this not only hurts the main character’s

feelings, but destroys the family atmosphere that had permeated his youth. A

fundamental issue of Jag ringer mina bröder is Amor’s existential crisis and his

inconsolable sense of abandonment, and the time setting is used to exaggerate his

loneliness and not only to discuss social and racial problems that still remain,

however, very important in the novel.

This interpretation finds evidence in Amor’s constant need to establish friendly

relations with people. In a hardware store where he tries to have a broken drill

repaired, he expects to be helped by a dark skinned shop assistant – in Amor’s mind,

immigrants and immigrants of second generation should help each other to better

survive in the racist Swedish environment: “jag gick fram till honom som kunde varit

min bror och jag blinkade mot honom för att han skulle fatta att jag fattade att han

fattade att jag fattade” (Khemiri, Jag ringer, 89) (I went towards him who could have

been my brother and I blinked at him to make him understand that I understood that

he understood that I understood). Amor is naïvely sure that a blink would be enough

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to establish a connection between them. Indeed the man is very nice and helpful, but

when Amor uses the word brorsan (a colloquial form of bror, brother), he replies:

“Vad kallade du mig?” (Khemiri, Jag ringer, 93) (What did you call me?), and

Amor’s attempt to establish a friendly connection generates suspicion and coldness.

This undermines his illusion of the duality “we against them” which is later

discussed again by a conversation with an old school mate whose name is Golberg.

Golberg works for an association that fights for animals’ rights, Djurens rätt,

and calls people to convince them to become a member. She rings Amor randomly

and introduces herself with the Swedish name Karoline, but he perceives that it is not

her real name. Under Amor’s pressure to speak the truth, she admits that her name is

Golberg and Amor understands that she must use another name at work, pretending

to be ethnically Swedish. This issue of names, swedification, was also present in

Montecore, when Abbas had to change his name to attract customers. It is indeed

likely that a person uses a Scandinavian name in working environments if their name

sounds Middle Easterner, and this is once again due to Swedish racial prejudice.

Once more Amor is exposed to how racist Sweden can be and he gets mad at her181

because she accepts compromises (but what else could she do?) and somehow

nullifies Amor’s dream of a fairer society.

Not only is Amor lonely because he feels betrayed by his friends who have

abandoned their war against racism, but also because he cannot find new allies, new

bröder. Throughout the story Amor lacks familiar figures and affection and his

181 “Jag svär – alla ni fega som tror ni kan smälta in utan att bekänna färg, er domedag kommer, vänta bara. Jag kommer knulla er, hör du det? Jag kommer behandla er värre än djur. Jag kommer skjuta er som hundar, jag kommer flå er som katter, jag kommer klubba er som sälar, jag kommer, jag kommer, jag kommer stompa er som kackerlackor och raka er som minkar och...” Khemiri, Jag ringer, 99.

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peregrination is not just real, but also psychological and will lead him to find the

strength to fight his inner ghosts and his deep sense of loneliness.

4.4.1 The family issue

Swedish familism has always attracted scholars and sociologists because of its

nonconformity. Already in 1987, David Popenoe of Rutgers University portrayed the

Swedish family as the most different from the ideal-typical nuclear form in industrial

societies. Many years have passed, and it is important to refresh what an ideal family

meant at that time. Popenoe defined it as a “[…] monogamous, patriarchal family

consisting of a married couple living with their children, the man working outside the

home and the woman being a mother and full-time housewife.”182 In spite of the fact

that this definition may now sound outdated, this article shows how Sweden began to

challenge the traditional family from quite early on. At that time the marriage rate in

Sweden was the lowest in the Western world, while non-marital cohabitation and

family dissolution had the highest rates.183 At the same time, Popenoe pointed out

that Swedes, like other Western peoples, wanted to build a family, but did not want

others to tell them how to do it. It can therefore be surmised that the familiar

institution was not questioned, but the ideal type of nuclear family was debated.184

Since then much attention has been paid to this topic and family relationships have

182 David Popenoe, “Beyond the Nuclear Family: A Statistical Portrait of the Changing Family in Sweden”, Journal of Marriage and Family 49 (1987): 174. 183 Popenoe, “Changing family in Sweden”, 174. 184 “There are other indications, however, that suggest that the Swedish family, at least in some form, is ’here to stay.’ Almost all Swedish men and women seem still to want to live as a couple sometime in their lives; they have not turned against the idea of permanent, monogamous dyads, despite the instability of these dyads in practice. There appear to be few men or women in Sweden who are single by choice or whose single-minded pursuit of a career tends to rule out a family.” Popenoe, “Changing family in Sweden”, 181.

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changed immensely in every industrial society, but what Swedes have been showing

for several decades is a radical ability to continuously question and challenge the

stereotypical patriarchal family. They have indeed revealed a unique capacity to

reinvent familiar boundaries without erasing many positive values that family

involves.

This particular approach to what family means has influenced Swedish literature

since the nineteenth century. For instance, Giftas I (Getting Married I ) by August

Strindberg represents a colourful description of how traditional family was already

brought into question in 1884.185 He wanted to depict the many varieties of marriage,

and in 1886 he published another, more polemical and violent volume with other

short stories which had the same aim, Giftas II (Getting Married II). Due to

Strindberg’s irony and his ambiguous ideas on women his stories are often difficult

to understand, but his desire to portray the early inter-family changes of his time is

evident. This topic was fashionable in nineteenth century Sweden and has not

stopped interesting writers since then. However it does not have the same shocking

impact, and many new kinds of families (as single parents, LGBTQ parenting, etc.)

are more or less accepted by society nowadays. This assumed heterogeneous idea of

“new family” is often described in contemporary Swedish literature (very often in

children’s literature), but it is sometimes taken for granted and it has ceased to be a

core topic. This is the case of Jag ringer mina bröder, in which the author has

scattered many hints about an unconventional idea of family across the book.

Khemiri has probably not described Amor’s idea of family on purpose, but it is

interesting to analyse what he has written about it incidentally. The core of the novel 185 August Strindberg, Giftas I-II (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1982). Also online at: http://litteraturbanken.se/#!/forfattare/StrindbergA/titlar/Giftas/sida/3/etex.

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may be how the bomb attack of December 2010 has influenced the Middle East

looking protagonist, and Amor’s story may not primarily focus on his family history,

but I argue that it does deal with it in the background. And we may say that this is

not very marginal since the title itself includes the word brothers.

During the story, Amor just alludes to his twin brothers and his parents, while

his grandmother plays a main role in the last chapter, as we have seen, as a memory

that comforts and supports the lonely young man. He lives alone, and his home

represents a safe zone but seems to lack human warmth; compared to this the outside

world is rough and violent, it is where people judge and look at him with anger. The

home only partially satisfies Amor’s need for protection, and he longs for a place

where he can feel comfort, understanding, and joy. He does long to feel at home,

which means to feel that he belongs to something and/or somebody. His longing is

overemphasized by his identity crisis and by a society that opposes him. Amor is like

a chrysalis in transaction, he needs calm and protection to take the thorny step that

will change the perception he has of himself.

The novel seems to develop according to Claudio Magris’s stance on the lack of

family in contemporary literature.186 Magris claims that family has always been used

by literature to depict a place where its members are able to find true human

relationships, and protection. He also points out how the family from which one

comes from has attracted more interest than the family that one may establish, since

our roots employ invincible forces on us.187 If literature has the task to describe

186 Claudio Magris, “Il romanzo senza famiglia?”, Corriere della Sera, April 26, 2000, and in: Alfabeti (Milano: Garzanti, 2008), 33-38. 187 “L’ethos della stirpe prevale su ogni scelta personale, stringe con la necessità della natura;; l’amore può venire e passare, il matrimonio si può sciogliere, ma essere fratelli è un dato di fatto, epico e oggettivo, come il colore dei capelli. La letteratura è stata molto più capace di raccontare questa saga dei padri, della famiglia

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reality, nowadays it must tell the disaggregation of the nuclear family, which implies

a loss of its values. Furthermore, the disintegration of family erases a sense of

belonging and protection that can only be found in the hearth. Jag ringer mina

bröder seems to follow this idea: Amor reveals feelings of vulnerability and

disorientation. In addition, his friends have apparently abandoned him to wandering

in a malevolent city and falling prey to his fervent imagination. Amor has to admit

his sadness, and only then does he find the strength to react and to seek the protection

he needs. However, Amor finally calls Shavi and asks him to meet in the city. Shavi

doesn’t need any explanations and the novel ends with his promise to be there soon.

The need for consolation and protection which Magris connects solely to the hearth,

is represented by friendship in Jag ringer mina bröder. Family may betray us (as

Amor’s father seems to have), while friends are with us to stay and only they can

understand what we need and when we need it. “Jag skulle behöva… Jag vet inte.

Och Shavi förstod.” (Khemiri, Jag ringer, 124) (I should need… I don’t know. And

Shavi understood.) Amor’s words reveal a tender affection between the two friends.

Between friends comprehension is immediate and affinity strong, therefore

friendship can fulfil the important needs a broken family cannot satisfy. Magris is

right when he writes that we need to defend a certain role of family which “significa

la possibilità di sentirsi a casa nella vita e nel mondo.”188 (means the possibility to

feel at home in life and in the world), but he is wrong when he considers only the

nuclear family may engender this feeling. Khemiri wants to show that authentic

family values are not in danger because of the crisis of traditional family, but rather

d’origine, che non l’odissea – ardua e imprevedibile, affascinante e rischiosa – della famiglia che si fonda, dell’esistenza condivisa nell’amore coniugale, dei figli.” Magris, “Il romanzo”. 188 Magris, “Il romanzo”.

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they have been transferred to new alternative relationships. Friends (kompisar,

vänner) become brothers (bröder) because they satisfy those needs that we

habitually consider family prerogatives.

4.5 THE BOOK REVIEWS AND THE POLITICAL LENS

Swedish critics were very pleased by Jag ringer mina bröder, and reviews189 were

genuinely positive.190 All the reviewers focused on the novel’s poetic and special

style, which is said to be very fitting for the representation of Amor’s thoughts.191

They have all understood Khemiri’s desire to represent the struggle that is within the

main character and his complex relationship with a society which he belongs to, but

which also discriminates against him. 192 In the interview with Carin Stålberg,

published on Dagens Nyheter, Khemiri stresses his wish to represent a young man

whose self-perception is shaped by what people think of him – or, better, by what he

189 The reviews that have been taken into consideration are the following: Bromander, “Hög puls bevarar omedelbarheten”; Ravini, ”Jonas Hassen Khemiri / Jag ringer mina bröder”; Koldenius, ”Recension: Jag ringer mina bröder av Jonas Hasen Khemiri”; Nykvist, ”Mörkrets alla nyanser”; Eriksson, ”Platt text om bombdådet i Stockholm”; Wahlin, ”Om utanförskap inifrån”; Karlsson, ”Jag ringer mina bröder, Jonas Hassen Khemiri”. I have also taken into consideration the following interview: Stålberg, “Jag skriver för att hitta nyanserna”. 190 Koldenius, “Recension”. 191 Lennart, “Hög plus”;; Eriksson, “Platt text”. 192 Khemiri openly expressed his interest in blowing up the perception of a dual-divided society, where one could only feel belonging either to the victims or to the criminals: “På många hall innebar bombattentatet en ökad polarisering. Alltså folk tog tydlig ställning. Min text gör ju inte det. Den är snarare ett försök att förstå nyanser.” Stålberg, ”Jag skriver”.

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presumes they think about him.193 His craving for a trusted identity was emphasized

by all the critics, who ignored, however, the secondary characters – Amor’s relatives

and friends were in unison considered as mere interlocutors and they were presumed

to have no importance in the novel’s development. Amor became the symbol for

“alla muslimer, inklusive alla ‘som ser ut som muslimer’ i Sverige” 194 (all the

Muslims, as well as ‘all the ones that look Muslim’ in Sweden) and the novel was

endowed with such a political meaning that Annika Koldenius wrote on Borås

Tidning that “Jonas Hassen Khemiri är en politisk författare med en agenda, en

författare som undersöker perspektiv och sanningar”195 (Jonas Hassen Khemiri is a

political writer with an agenda, a writer that examines prospective and truths).

Khemiri too affirmed that his ambition is “att visa hur bedräglig en enkel sanning är.

Det är naturligtvis lockande att läsa en författare som gör anspråk på att berätta

sanningen, men jag älskar osäkerheten”196 (to show that one single truth is deceiving.

It is obviously tempting to read a writer who claims to say the truth, but I love the

uncertainty).

It cannot be denied that a political issue is present in the novel and Amor’s

desire to find self-definition is indeed a very important theme. Jag ringer mina

bröder deals with Amor’s anxiety to shape himself and to find a place that he can

call his own. Throughout the whole time of the story, the main character seeks

stability, comprehension, and freedom to express himself, which have been destroyed

by the recent explosion and his friends’ departures. Even if the city has recovered

193 “Amor är en man som vars självbild är beroende av andra tär beroende av andra tänker och tycker på honom. Eller rättare sagt, vad han tror att de tänker om honom.” Stålberg, “Jag skriver”. 194 Bromander, “Hög plus”. 195 Koldenius, “Recension”. 196 Stålberg, “Jag skriver”.

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fast, an extensive police presence on the streets shows that the situation is still

uncertain and paradoxically Amor feels more unsafe than safer.

Amor’s fear finds its roots in the perception that the police are not there to

defend people, but are rather a tool used by politicians to exert control over people.

Khemiri said that he, while writing the novel, remembered a series of abuses of

power that his friend and he had been victims of in the past.197 In Jag ringer mina

bröder, the police shows their fascist face proving that certain Swedes are treated

differently. One cannot forget, however, that what takes place in the novel happens

in Amor’s mind, and the police’s perversion corresponds to Amor’s perception of it

and not to reality. However this perception is based on real facts: in recent years, the

Swedish police have been indirectly authorized to discriminate against dark-skinned

people through orders to check if they are in possession of a regular residence

permit198 and to fight illegal immigration. These checks are regulated by the so called

REVA project, which became active at the beginning of 2012.199

Khemiri wrote an article200 on this topic in Dagens Nyheter in March 2013,

which explains the difficulties that some Swedes of foreign origins have to face.

Khemiri based his analysis on his personal experience explaining how he has often 197 ”När jag skrev boken så mindes jag en massa vardagliga händelser från min uppväxt. Piketpoliser som stoppade mig och mina vänner och frågade om leg, helt utan anledning, gång på gång. Dörrvakter som nekade oss på krogar. Butiksvakter som förföljade oss i klädaffärer. Det var helt normalt.” Stålberg, ”Jag ringer”. 198 In Swedish: uppehållstillstånd. 199 The REVA Projekt, which stands for Rättssäkert och Effektivt Verkställighetsarbete (Legal Certainty and Effective Enforcement), is a Swedish operation carried out by Police, Kriminalvården (Swedish Prison and Probation Service), and Migrationsverket (Swedish Migration Board). The project is co-funded by the European Return Fund and is active between 1st, January, 2012 and 30th, June, 2014. During this time police officers are allowed to check people’s residence permits to prevent illegal migration. In Stockholm, these checks have been carried out along with underground-ticket inspections. REVA has led to a wide debate since it appears to be based on people’s appearance and skin colour, but Police claim that the project is carried out within reason. However it is difficult to trust that the checks are not directly or indirectly related to people’s name, language, and origin, a form of “racial profiling”, as Khemiri claims in his article. 200 Khemiri, “Bästa”.

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been discriminated against because of his appearence. The article, which is an open

letter to Beatrice Ask, the current Swedish Mister of Justice, goes hand in hand with

Jag ringer mina bröder: while the novel fictionalizes events and feelings, the article

reveals how people are actually being treated by society, police, and politicians.

In his last novel and in his widely debated article, Khemiri discusses the same

topic, presented from a similar perspective: he focuses on what it feels like to be

treated unequally in your own country. However we cannot overlap Amor with

Khemiri, since the first one tells his story as a fictional character paying much

attention to the psychological consequences, while Khemiri pays much more

attention to the social, political, and economical implications in “Bästa Beatrice

Ask”. The author wants to provoke different reactions in his readers: Amor seeks

sympathy, while Khemiri seeks reasoning.

The article “Bästa Beatrice Ask” is first and foremost a reaction to Ask’s racist

statements on the radio program “P1 Morgon”, while simultaneously answering a

few questions about the REVA project:

Därför blev jag förvånad när du i torsdags fick frågan av ”P1 Morgon” om du som justitieminister känner dig oroad över att personer (medborgare, skattebetalare, röstare) hävdar att de har blivit stoppade av polisen och frågade på pass enbart på grund av sitt (mörka, icke-blonda, svarthåriga) utseende. Och du svarade: - Upplevelsen av varför någon har frågat mig kan ju vara väldigt personlig. Det finns tidigare dömda som uppfattar att de alltid är ifrågasatta, fast det syns ju inte på någon att man har begått ett brott. (...) För att göra en bedömming av om polisen arbetar enligt lagar och regler så måste man ha helhetsperspektivet. (Khemiri, “Bästa”) (“So I was surprised last Thursday when the radio program P1 Morgon asked you whether, as the Minister of Justice, you are concerned that people (citizens, taxpayers, voters) claim they have been stopped by the police and asked for ID solely because of their (dark, not-blond, black-haired) appearances. And you answered:

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“One’s experience of ‘why someone has questioned me’ can of course be very personal. There are some who have been previously convicted and feel that they have always been questioned, even though you can’t tell by looking at a person that they have committed a crime […] in order to judge whether the police are acting in accordance with laws and rules, one has to look at the big picture.” Willson-Broyles, “Open Letter”)

The article subsequently becomes a list of real incidents when Khemiri was the

victim of discrimination, thus proving to the minister that discrimination is not

simply a matter of subjective perception. Some of them had already been published

in previous articles or interviews, such as the time when Khemiri got stopped by the

police because he simply looked like someone else and he matched the

description.201 Referring to this event, Khemiri adds that he felt powerless and guilty

because he had no chance to prove his innocence:

I tjugo minuter satt vi där i polisbilen. Ensamma. Fast ändå inte ensamma. För hundratals människor passerade. Och de tittade in på oss med en blick som viskade: ”Där. En till. Ännu en som beter sig helt i enlighet med våra fördomar.” Och jag önskar att du hade varit med mig i polispiketen, Beatrice Ask. Men du var inte det. Jag satt där ensam. Och jag mötte alla förbipasserande blickar och försökte signalera att jag inte var skyldig, att jag bara hade stått på en plats och sett ut på ett visst sätt. Men det är svårt att argumentera för sin oskuld i baksätet av en polisbuss. (Khemiri, ”Bästa”) (“We sat in the police van for twenty minutes. Alone. But not really alone. Because a hundred people were walking by. And they looked in at us with a look that whispered, "There. One more. Yet another one who is acting in complete accordance with our prejudices." And I wish you had been with me in the police van, Beatrice Ask. But you weren't. I sat there alone. And I met all the eyes walking by and tried to show them that I wasn't guilty, that I had just been standing in a place and looking a particular way. But it's hard to argue your innocence in the back seat of a police van.” Willson-Broyles, “Open Letter”)

201 The fact is reported in Stålberg, “Jag skriver”.

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On that occasion Khemiri realized how powerful people’s stares are, and he admitted

that he had based Amor’s fear on this awareness202 – so it can be said that the social

issue the novel relates to is the shared racist perception that condemns some Swedes

as guilty by implicit racial bias. This in turn becomes a political issue when the law

allows the police to check somebody’s documents, on the bias of their name,

appearance, and skin colour, while ignoring others, because they are ethnically

Swedish. The problem is then both social and political since “Alla bara gjorde sina

jobb. Vacktarna, poliserna, tullstjänstemännen, politikerna, folket” (Khemiri,

”Bästa”) (”Everyone was just doing their job. The security guards, the police, the

customs officials, the politicians, the people.” Willson-Broyles, “Open Letter”). A

reference to Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil becomes very clear: evil (and so

racism) originates from ordinary people’s tendency to conform and obey without

critically evaluating the consequences of their actions, and the law cannot be trusted

to always be just and right.203

This complex situation makes it very hard for Amor to define himself, and while

the main character of the previous novels had rejected everything that was

Scandinavian a priori, Amor actually feels he belongs more to Swedish society. He

tries to combine his minority culture with the dominant one, showing an integration

attitude, which is the most adaptive according to psychologists John Berry and

Charles Westin. 204 In his essay “Young People of Migrant Origin in Sweden,”

Westin argues that individuals with foreign origins have to deal with both their

202 ”Han [Amor] finns bara i andras blickar [...] Hans blick på sig själv är aldrig nog. Det är ett drag vi delar, han och jag. [...] De där blickarna... de är så fruktansvärt kratfulla.” Stålberg, “Jag skriver”. 203 Hanna Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (London: Penguin Classics, 2006). 204 J. Berry, “Immigration, Acculturation and Adaptation”, Applied Psychology: An International Review 46 (1997): 5-68;; and Charles Westin, “Young People of Migrant Origin in Sweden”, International Migration Review 37 (2003): 987-1010.

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minority culture and the shared majority culture. They might recreate “four

acculturation strategies: assimilation (rejecting ethnic minority culture in favor of the

majority culture), integration (combining both cultures), separation (relying on ethnic

minority culture only and rejecting majority culture) and marginalization (rejecting

both cultures).”205 In light of this analysis, by living in a society which is at least

partly inclusive Amor should have adopted a winning strategy. However, Khemiri

reminds us that “det är omöjligt att vara en del av gemenskapen när Makten ständigt

förutsätter att en är en Annan” (Khemiri, Bästa) (“And it's impossible to be part of a

community when Power continually assumes that you are an Other” Willson-

Broyles, “Open Letter”). Since Sweden discriminates against some of its people,

these people will never be free to feel part of the community and will always be torn

between their expectations to be absorbed by society and the fact that they are treated

differently.

This perception of exclusion finds evidence in the text when Amor names

himself Unutrium (Khemiri, Jag ringer, 18). The chemical element which he chooses

to associate himself with is highly symbolic - Unutrium is a chemical element

synthesized in 2003, whose standard state and colour are still unknown. Furthermore

its properties have been predicted but not studied yet. 206 This means that Amor

considers himself an unnatural individual, whose features are unknown and who does

not fit in any pre-existent social group: his skin is too dark to be Swedish, but he was

born and raised in Sweden.

As we have seen, the political issue is very important to Khemiri and critics have

emphasized this aspect. One cannot deny that Jag ringer mina bröder deals with 205 Westin, “Young People”, 1006. 206 “Ununtrium”, accessed October 5, 2013, http://www.webelements.com/ununtrium/.

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social and racial discrimination – which is overstated by Amor’s paranoia – but it is

doubtful that a political reading is comprehensive of the different levels of meaning

of the novel. The critics’ obsession with the political issue is on the contrary the

result of a metaphorical lens, through which they read Khemiri’s novels, that enables

them to freely debate his work. Invandrarförfattarna are by definition expected to be

politically committed and their novels’ political implications are particularly

important to the critics, because they confirm their right to categorise writers’ work

as invandrarlitteratur. We may call this harmless prejudice a “political lens”,

because it overstates the social criticism that is within the text and minimizes the

other topics. Therefore as long as critics consider Khemiri as an invandrarförfattare

their reading will be partial and incomplete since their expectations will prevent them

from making a more comprehensive analysis.

***

It can undoubtedly be said that Jag ringer mina bröder is primarily the narration of

Amor’s existential troubles. His relationships with friends and relatives are the

central core of the novel while the Stockholm bombings represent the time and place

settings. The settings, of course, influence the narration and Amor’s individual crisis

is loaded with wider political and social problems. Amor’s story evolves on different

levels: on a personal level he has to face the loneliness that his friends and relatives’

departure has caused, and on a social level he has to bear his racist environment

which also leads to isolation. These diverse despondent feelings are finally overcome

thanks to his friend Shavi who proves his loyalty to Amor, and to Tyra’s forgotten

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teaching that reemerges in the protagonist’s mind. There is also a third problem that

Amor has to face within the novel, his difficulty in telling imagination and reality

apart. His fervent mind ferments his fears, but the final reconciliation with Shavi

suggests a rapprochement with real relationships and actual life.

In conclusion, Jag ringer mina bröder has unfortunately been stereotyped by

critics, who have tended to view Amor’s paranoia as a mere consequence of his

social exclusion. Despite the fact that reviews have been very enthusiastic, they have

shown a refusal to go beyond the political criticism of the writer, leveling out the

multi-layer structure of the novel.

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CHAPTER V – Khemiri the Playwright

Invasion!, Fem gånger gud, and Apatiska för

nybörjare

In the introduction to the anthology Teatro svedese contemporaneo, Claudio

Petrangeli claims that the Swedes love theatre as much as the Italians love

football.207 This humorous exaggeration aims to illustrate to what degree cultural

policies in Sweden have contributed to increasing the possibility for every citizen to

have access to theatrical culture in the last decades. Public support is given to all art

forms, but theatre is the most highly subsidized (almost 30% of public funds).208 For

this reason, contemporary Swedish theatre is particularly prosperous and attracts

many young writers who can prove to be good playwrights.

This was the case with Jonas Hassen Khemiri, who has written Invasion!209, Fem

gånger gud210 (Five times god), Vi som är hundra (We who are one hundred), and

Apatiska för nybörjare211 (Apathy212 for beginners). 213 Khemiri turned out to be very

207 Claudio Petrangeli, editor, Teatro svedese contemporaneo, (Roma: Gremese Editore, 2004), 7. 208 Petrangeli, Teatro svedese, 7, and Margareta Wirmark, “Sweden”, in European Theatre, Cross-cultural perspectives, ed. Ralph Yarrow (London: Routledge,1992), 165. 209 Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Invasion!, in Invasion. Pjäser, noveller, texter (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2009), 73-145. 210 Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Fem gånger gud, Invasion. Pjäser, noveller, texter (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2009), 171-248. 211 I have read and used a private copy of the play that Jonas Hassen Khemiri has kindly sent me. The text of Apatiska has been printed out as a play booklet by some theatres but it is hard, if not impossible, to find. Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Apatiska för nybörjare (Norsborg: Riksteatern, 2010); Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Apatiska för nybörjare (Göteborg: Folkteatern, 2011); Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Apatiska för nybörjare (Stockholm: Stockholms stadsteater, 2013). 212 The word Apatiska in Swedish is a neologism. It is constructed by adding the suffix –ska, which indicates that the linguistic unit refers to a language, to the word apati (apathy). For instance the word Italien (Italy)

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talented at and perfectly suited to theatrical work – Invasion! played two sold out

seasons at the Stockholm City Theatre and has been performed in Norway, France,

Germany, United Kingdom and United States. With his plays, Khemiri continues to

explore the power of words, the problems involved in defining our individuality, and

how our physical appearance and names bear strong connotations. In addition, his

work is imbued with a strong but subtle criticism of Swedish society’s false openness

and Nordic social exclusion.

Moreover, Khemiri’s theatre is determined by high-quality metatheatrical

techniques which are used to deconstruct the theatrical illusion and to expose its

deceitfulness. This is a method which finds its roots in Western contemporary theatre

tradition, most especially in Bertolt Brecht’s theatre, which aims to rouse the

spectators’ awareness about the social problems the plays deal with.

Although my thesis has till now focused on the family issue and on the

problematic human relationships in the novels – paying attention on the reception of

the critics at the same time – this chapter will deal with a slightly different topic.

Since Khemiri’s theatre tells the stories of many characters simultaneously – while

his novels rather focus on the story of one single main character – the familiar topic

is less debated. However the plays that I will analyse deal with other themes which

were very present in all the novels. This is the case of language as an expression of

can get the suffix –ska, therefore becoming italienska, which means “Italian (language)”. Khemiri plays here with the fact that many language courses for beginners are called indeed “[språk] för nybörjare” ([language] for beginners), for instance “Italienska för nybörjare” (Italian for beginners). As we shall see, this play is about the real story of some young immigrants who were actually sick, but the media and the Swedish politicians thought they were just pretending to be sick to get a residence permit for their families. Apatiska för nybörjare is thus a play that ironically suggests that the language of the apathetic children can be thought to those who want to become apathetic and try to get a residence permit in Sweden. 213 In 2013 a dramatized version of the novel Jag ringer mina bröderwas staged. It will not be taken into consideration here, since the novel has already been analysed in the previous chapter. Vi som är hundra will not be considered either, because it was not available neither in libraries nor on internet. So to say that this chapter will only focus on the plays Invasion!, Fem gånger gud, and Apatiska för nybörjare.

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individuality, the necessity to define one’s identity, and most of all the life of young

Swedes with multiethnic backgrounds. I will also take into consideration the

reception of the critics, pointing out when their reviews have been influenced by

their misconception of Khemiri as only an invandrarförfattare. Indeed, critics were

all more interested in the plays’ political element, failing to mention Khemiri’s style

which is not only distinctive but represents an important key to understanding his

theatre.

5.1 RECEPTION OF THE CRITICS

Theatre reviews on Khemiri’s works have been very enthusiastic. When Invasion!

debuted at the Stockholm City Theatre under the direction of Farnaz Arabi, Sara

Granath wrote in the Svenska Dagbladet that “Jonas Hassen Khemiri visar med sin

intelligent uppbyggda text att han inte bara är författare […], han är dramatiker

också”214 (Jonas Hassen Khemiri proves with his intelligently constructed play that

not only is he a writer […], but also a playwright), pointing out that language is

fundamental and “visar på den poetiska potentialen i bruten svenska” (shows the

poetic potential of broken Swedish). The same positive feedback came from the

pages of the newspaper Aftonbladet, where Jan Arnald asserted that the real

protagonist of the play was the name “Abulkasem”, 215 thus implying the

214 Sarah Granath, ”Känslostark utmaning av teatern”, review of Invasion!, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Svenska Dagbladet, March 11, 2006, accessed September 18, 2013, http://www.svd.se/kultur/scen/kanslostark-utmaning-av-teatern_298418.svd. 215 “Huvudpersonen i Jonas Hassen Khemiris debutpjäs på Stockholms stadsteater är ett ord. Det är inte ordet "invasion", titeln som snarare beskriver vad pjäsen utför. Nej, huvudperson är ordet "Abulkasem". Just

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predominance of language over the other theatrical features. Khemiri was indubitably

applauded as a great playwright and positive feedback came from all the countries

where Invasion! was performed. The play was enthusiastically welcomed by critics

in the USA as well and the reviews focused mainly on the manipulative power of

language that Invasion! represented.216 However, a review by Hedy Weiss published

in the Chicago Sun-Times on 6th August, 2011 was quite negative and contained

comments on racial profiling.217 Since Weiss argued that Khemiri did not think about

any practical alternative to the difficult topic of migration, the article opened a debate

in the USA about the political implications within the play.

The same kind of reception was received by Fem gånger gud: the critics were

enthusiastic but, again, only wrote about the fact that the play dealt with “våld,

rasism och Sveriges nazifläckiga förflutna”218 (violence, racism, and Sweden’s Nazi-

stained past) and of course with “språkets makt”219 (the power of language). Sara

Granath even admitted that ”Det kan ju vara tröttsamt att ofta höra talas om rasism.

Men det kan inte jämföras med att ofta utsättas för den”220 (It can indeed be tiring to

be always told about racism, but it cannot be compared with being often exposed to

ordet.” Jan Arnald, “Subversivt”, review of Invasion!, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Aftonbladet, March 11, 2006, accessed September 17, 2013, http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article10778290.ab. 216 Jason Zinoman, “A Slip of the Tongue Could Lead to Terror”, review of Invasion!, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, New York Times, February 23, 2011, accessed September 17, 2013, http://theater.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/theater/reviews/23invasion.html?_r=1&; Eric Grode, “Subversive Tongue and a Sharp Focus on Identity Politics”, review of Invasion!, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, New York Times, September 11, 2011, accessed September 18, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/theater/jonas-hassen-khemiri-the-playwright-behind-invasion.html. 217 Hedy Weiss, “’Invasion!’ arrives at divisive time in the world”, review of Invasion!, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Chicago Sun-Times, August 6, 2011, accessed September 19, 2013, http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/stage/21687599-421/invasion-arrives-at-worlds-divisive-time.html. 218 Sara Granath, “Inbilska elever speglar oss”, review of Fem gånger gud, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Svenska Dagbladet, October 5, 2008, accessed September 19, 2013, http://www.svd.se/kultur/scen/inbilska-elever-speglar-oss_1833621.svd. 219 Granath, “Inbilska elever”. 220 Granath, “Inbilska elever”.

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it). From Aftonbladet, Khemiri received a very clear endorsement for his second play

and was presented as Sweden’s most loved playwright.221

The fact that Khemiri has always been very dear to Swedish theatre critics does

not necessarily mean that his works were also fully understood, and when Apatiska

för nybörjare had its second debut in February 2013, Lars Ring could only find the

words “politisk teater”222 (political theatre) to describe this beautiful play. Of course

critics did not forget to mention Khemiri’s debt towards Gellert Tamas,223 but they

did not change their perception of the play, which had already been said, after its

first premier in September 2011, to be “en pjäs om civilkurage, om nödvändigheten

att åtminstone ibland lyssna till den inre röst som uppmanar till handling även när det

känns jobbigt och obekvämt”224 (a play about civil courage, about the need to listen,

at least sometimes, to the inner voice that calls us to action, even when it feels

awkward and uncomfortable).

It is undeniable that the critics are right in highlighting both the importance of

language – especially in Invasion! – and the political implications in Khemiri’s

theatre work but, on the other hand, what is perplexing is the reason why they only

221 “På bara några få år har Jonas Hassen Khemiri blivit hela teater-Sveriges favoritdramatiker” Jenny Aschenbrenner, ”Underhållning i dess mest intelligenta form”, review of Fem gånger gud, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Aftonbladet, October 17, 2008, accessed September 19, 2013, http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/teater/article11539900.ab. 222 Lars Ring, “Hela ensemblen lyser i viktig politisk pjäs”, review of Apatiska för nybörjare, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Svenska Dagbladet, Feburary 17, 2013, accessed September 19, 2013, http://www.svd.se/kultur/scen/hela-ensemblen-lyser-i-viktig-politisk-pjas_7921872.svd. 223 Gellert Tamas is a Swedish-Hungarian journalist and writer who wrote a book called De apatiska. Om makt, myter och manipulation (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 2009). His book narrates the true story of some young immigrant people, who were apparently apathetic and did not react to any stimulation. The parliament had to vote on whether these kids were actually sick or if they had had been drugged by their parents to get a resident permit, as someone claimed. The apathetic children were then sent back with their family and their cases were considered a deceit. Tamas recalled attention on this case, claiming that the Minister of Migration lied at the time and that the children were really sick. 224 Mikael Löfgren, “’Apatiska för nybörjare’ på Folkteatern”, review of Apatiska för nybörjare, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Dagens Nyheter, September 19, 2011, accessed September 19, 2013, http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/scenrecensioner/apatiska-for-nyborjare-pa-folkteatern/.

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focused on these characteristics while avoiding any analysis of the metatheatrical

structure of the plays, which is essential to understanding Khemiri’s idea of theatre.

One answer could be that daily newspaper readers do not have any interest in

speculation about critical elements. However, critics should understand when these

elements are fundamental and should at least explain their importance.225

It can, however, be helpful to have a brief look at the linguistic and political

issues that have been stressed by the critics, prior to concluding with a wider view on

the complexity of Khemiri’s theatrical structure, focusing on the reason why his

theatrical disillusion has important consequences on the meaning of his works.

5.2 LANGUAGE IN INVASION!

The linguistic complexity of Invasion! is the consequence of its complex structure of

sixteen different roles played by only four actors. Every character has to speak in a

number of distinctive ways in order to be distinguishable from the other characters

which the same actor plays, and diverse accents and idiolects render every part

recognizable. With a view to understanding the idea of this complexity, one has only

to consider, for instance, that actor A has to perform the role of a theatre actor, a gay

Lebanese dancer, a guide, a journalist, and an Iranian apple-picker. While the actors

have to prove their chameleonic skills, Khemiri has demonstrated once again his

interest in socio-linguistic diversity.

225 To be honest, something about the mise en abyme structure that labels Khemiri’s plays was mentioned in one of the previously quoted reviews – “there are plays within the play” Zinoman, “A Slip of the Tongue”.

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In the first scene, two young men who act and talk as suburban teenagers,

discuss how they turned a name into an all-purpose slang when they were at high

school. Their language is used as a social bonding, as Halimiska in Ett öga rött, and

they reveal to the audience how random words can become part of their idiolect.

After watching the romantic play Signora Luna by Carl Jonas Love Almqvist, they

agreed that it was terrible, but one of them admits that he liked the name

Abulkasem.226 From that moment on, Abulkasem comes to mean anything:

Och senare på terminen […] kunde Abulkasem betyda precis vad som helst. Det kunde vara adjectiv… […] Verb… […] förolämpning… […] komplimang… […] Det blev det perfekta ordet. Men ibland blev det förstås missförstånd... […] Men oftast fattade man av sammanhanget. (Khemiri, Invasion!, 85-86) (“And later on that same term […] Abulkasem came to mean anything at all. It could be an adjective… […] A verb… […] an insult… […] a compliment… […] It became the perfect word… Now and then of course there would be misunderstanding… […] Only usually you’d get it from the context.” Perry, Invasion!, 145)227

By playing with language, Khemiri reveals once again how words are submissive

and how one can use them according to one’s will. Abulkasem becomes a red thread

that snakes through society with a series of coincidences. It is firstly used by a young

man who does not like his name (Arvind), subsequently introducing himself as

Abulkasem to a graduate student (Lara) he hits on. She then calls a famous Muslim

film director, whose real name is Aouatef, Abulkasem. At the same time Arvind tries

to call Lara, who has given him the wrong telephone number, and leaves some voice

226 Abulkasem is the name of a pirate captain in Almqvist’s play. In Signora Luna, Donna Antonia falls in love with this Arab corsair but finds opposition in his aristocratic Italian father. The play was written in 1835 and is set in Palermo during the Middle Ages. 227 English translation of the play is by Frank Perry. Frank Perry, trans., Invasion!, in 6x Contemporary Swedish Plays (Stockholm: Svensk teaterunion ITI, 2006), 133-193.

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messages on an illegal-immigrant apple picker’s answering machine. Finally, the

refugee uses the name Abulkasem when the police detain him and in the last scene, a

character who plays Khemiri’s younger brother explains how he came up with the

idea for the play – while watching the news on TV, he sees the photo of an asylum-

seeking apple picker who insisted that his name was Abulkasem. The young brother

realizes that he had already seen the man in very terrible circumstances.

Many diverse social classes are depicted, and they are realistically represented

on stage through the use of appropriate linguistic style.228 The young students speak

blattesvenska, while the experts (who present their findings about a “real” terrorist

Abulkasem in three interludes), Lara and her friends speak standard Swedish. The

apple picker can barely express himself in Swedish and needs a translator. Moreover,

the young brother makes grammatical mistakes here and there since Swedish is not

his mother tongue, but in this linguistic chaos, the scenes are linked by the symbolic

name Abulkasem which is given a wider and wider meaning.

The problem of translation is also presented in scene number five, when the

Iranian apple picker’s words are translated on scene. Khemiri uses this stage

direction to describe the consequent dialogue: “TOLKEN kommer in på scenen. I

kommande parti är alla ÄPPELPLOCKARENS repliker på ett främmande språk

(arabiska/persiska) och tolkas till svenska av TOLKEN” (Khemiri, Invasion!, 114)

(”C comes on stage. ALL of A’s lines are said in PERSIAN (apart from the song texts

in English, of course) and interpreted into English by C” Perry, Invasion!, 176). As

one may imagine, the audience has mostly no knowledge of Arabic or Persian and 228 Khemiri might have found inspiration in the American playwright David Mamet. He is very interested in linguistic playfulness and his characters are definable by their language. Massimiliano Caprara notices that: “La più grande arte di Mamet è quindi quella di creare i personaggi a partire dal loro linguaggio; essi sono quello che dicono […]” Massimiliano Caprara, Il teatro contemporaneo (Roma: Ediesse, 2013), 108.

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they consequently trust the translation to be reliable. Reading the script makes one

aware that the translation is, not only inaccurate but, rather deceiving on purpose – a

stage direction indicates after several line of correct translation that “TOLKEN

börjar nu modifier hans historia” (Khemiri, Invasion!, 117) (“C now starts making

alterations to A’s story” Perry, Invasion!, 179). The two stories differ a lot, and while

the apple picker recounts his love for music, the interpreter tells a story of cruelty

and fundamentalism. Here the story told by the Iranian refugee (on stage, in Arabic

or Persian according to Khemiri’s direction):

Den enda trösten som jag har kvar är musiken... [...] Musiken har alltid funnits där och aldrig övergivit mig... [...] Jag och Saber, min yngsta bror, hade en popgrupp när vi var små... [...] Nu när allt är som tyngst, är musiken min tröst... (Khemiri, Invasion!, 117) (“The only thing that can still console me is music... […] The music has always been there and it has never abandoned me… […] Saber, my youngest brother and I, had a rock group when we were little […] Now when everything has become so difficult to deal with, I can always count on music to come to my rescue…” Perry, Invasion!, 179)

The interpreter changes the man’s story with these words:

Sverige är ändå mycket bättre än mitt hemland. [...] Jag kommer från en tämligen terroristisk bakgrund. [...] Jag och Saber, min yngsta bror, brukade leka självmordsbombare redan som små. [...] Min far var mycket ond, jag valde att vända mitt fadershat mot omgivningen. (Khemiri, Invasion!, 117) (“But Sweden is nevertheless a great deal better than my homeland. […] There was quite a lot of terrorist activity in my background. […] Saber, my youngest brother and I, used to pretend to be suicide bombers even when we were very young […] My father was very cruel, I decided to turn my hatred of my father against the world around me.” Perry, Invasion!, 179)

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The audience cannot be conscious of the deceit until intelligible words (such as

Pavarotti, Jussi Björling, Aida, Abba…) are used by the Arabic/Persian speaker, but

are not present in the translation. Moreover the refugee sings some lines of Abba’s

Mamma Mia and Bang a Boomerang, which are completely ignored by the

interpreter. Even the apple picker realizes that something is amiss and tests the

interpreter with a few other lines from Waterloo and SOS, none of which are

translated and he gives up recounting his story while the interpreter adds more and

more lies:

C/TOLKEN Jag skickade ut en hälsning till en annan stor man av handling... Hitler. Paus som hon väntar på att ÄPPELPLOCKAREN ska tala klart. C/TOLKEN Jag avslutade med att säga att attacken mot World Trade Center var en enda stor kupp av judiska konspiratörer, allt för att tvinga USA till krig mot arabvärlden. Paus som hon väntar på att ÄPPELPLOCKAREN ska tala klart. C/TOLKEN När videokassetten var klar spände jag på mig dynamitbälter och lämnade mitt hem. Paus som hon väntar på att ÄPPELPLOCKAREN ska tala klart. C/TOLKEN Jag tänkte saker som kvinnlig omskärelse – det är en trevlig tradition som borde spridas världen över. Paus som hon väntar på att ÄPPELPLOCKAREN ska tala klart. C/TOLKEN Jag tänker klotoris är verkligen som en rosenbuske... Den måste beskäras för att kunna blomstra! Paus som hon väntar på att ÄPPELPLOCKAREN ska tala klart. C/TOLKEN Jag tänkte: Om jag hade en son skulle han heta Saddam. Eller Usama. Eller både och. Som ett dubbelnamn. (Khemiri, Invasion!, 120-121) (“C I broadcast a greeting to another great man of action: Hitler. (Pause as though she were waiting for A to finish talking.) C I rounded things off by saying that the attack on the World Trade Centre was one vast plot on the part of Jewish conspirators, the whole thing orchestrated to make the US go to war against the Arab world. (Pause as though she were waiting for A to finish talking.) C When the videotape was finished. I fastened the dynamite belt around my body and left my home. (Pause as though she were waiting for A to finish talking.) C I was thinking things like: female circumcision – a lovely tradition that should be spread across the entire world. (Pause as though she were waiting for A to finish talking.)

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C I was struck by the idea that the clitoris is really like a rosebush… It has to be pruned if it is to blossom. (Pause as though she were waiting for A to finish talking.) C And I thought, if I had a son he would be called Saddam. Or Osama. Or both. Sort of like a double-barrelled name.” Perry, Invasion!, 182-183)

The refugee can at this point only endeavour to say that he does not agree with what

the interpreter has been stating but his insufficient knowledge of Swedish only

allows him to stutter: “Inte mera krig. Inte bra… Många krig, många våld… Talk

inte bra… […]” (Khemiri, Invasion!, 121) (”Not more war… Not good… Many war,

many violence… Interpreter not good… […]” Perry, Invasion!, 183). However, the

audience has already understood that the interpreter is not reliable and the effect is

impressive – the audience is certain that they have been misled but they do not really

know what the true story is. The acknowledgment of ignorance that is experienced

by the audience has to also be seen as a metaphor for the priggish Swedish society

which tends to assume immigrants’ backgrounds to be homogeneous and stereotyped

– since Swedes expect immigrants to have a common cruel and tragic story, they are

usually deaf to their individual diversity.

5.3 INDIVIDUALITY AND IDENTITY IN INVASION!

In the play Invasion! Khemiri has examined the meaning of individuality as he has

done in all his novels. The obsessively used name Abulkasem hints at the author’s

interest in identity confusion and disorientation: due to the fact that the name is used

interchangeably by very different people it loses its role as a marker of identity and

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according to Peter Leonard it becomes “highly marked as exotic and unusual, yet this

very exoticism allows it to stand for any and every Middle Easterner, from the “Turk

in the leather vest” at the up-and-coming female director. This polyvalence is […] a

symbol of the ambiguity and unsettled relationship between a Nordic society and

individual middle easterners, be they abroad, in refugee camps, or living next

door.”229 No one is immune to this generalization, and in the third scene Lara, who is

very annoyed by her friends’ prejudices, names a famous Muslim film director

Abulkasem, borrowing it from the young man who had flirted with her before:

Plötsligt får jag en blackout. Hennes namn är borta. Och istället hör jag mig säga: ”Ni har väl alla hört talas om... om... om... A... A-A-Abulkasem? Har ni inte?” Vad skulle jag göra? Jag var tvungen att säga någonting. Och först efteråt inser jag att jag lånat namnet från turken i skinnväst. (Khemiri, Invasion!, 104) (“… all of a sudden I get this blackout. Her name has gone blank. And I hear myself saying instead, “And of course you’ll all heard of… of… of… A… A-A-Abulkasem, haven’t you?” What was I supposed to do? I had to say something. And it was later on I realized that I had borrowed the name from that Turk in the leather jacket.” Perry, Invasion!, 165)

As prejudices nullify individual differences, so the name Abulkasem eradicates the

individuality of those who use it and there is no resistance to its contagion.

Abulkasem becomes the scapegoat that the experts use in scene six to justify the rise

in the number of rapes, the increase in insurance frauds, and even to explain the

number of pot-holes in the streets which continues to climb. This metaphorical

generalization is evident when the experts cannot identify Abulkasem in a picture

portraying some detainees: “[…] och Abulkasem är… Nu ska vi se… Det är lite

229 Peter Leonard, “Identity and its Discontents: Corporeal Indexicality in Claus Beck-Nielsen and Jonas Khemiri”, 7, accessed April 10, 2013, http://home.uchicago.edu/psleonar/identity-discontents-ku.pdf.

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svårt att se skillnad på dom men... Abulkasem är han… Det måste det vara… […]

Eller kanske han… Nej, han är det nog…” (Khemiri, Invasion!, 125) (”[...] and

Abulkasem is... Now let me see... I admit it is a bit difficult to tell them apart but...

That one is Abulkasem… That’s got to be him… […] then again it could be that

one… no, no that’s him right enough…” Perry, Invasion!, 185). The overused name

Abulkasem is also taken by the apple picker when he is caught by the police. The

refugee does not simply nullify his individuality by using a name that has been

overused in the previous scenes, but in addition burns his fingertips as an extreme

action to also deny his identity. Without his fingertips, he cannot be identified and

sent back to his homeland. Here, the idea of generalization and absence of

individuality that we have seen clashes with the opposing idea of diversification,

which stands for identity. The definition of one’s individuality implies the definition

of his/her inclinations, backgrounds, and psychology, while identity can be easily

reduced to a mere political concept needed by the state to control its people. So while

generalization and prejudices can spread around the country without creating any

serious damage to society, defining identity is a central problem for every

bureaucratic state, such as Sweden. Peter Leonard analyses Khemiri’s play in relation

to Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy of bare and political life, and in so doing finds

many interesting similarities.230 Through further development of an ancient Greek

belief about life, Agamben supports the idea that everyone has two forms of life: life

in a biological sense (zoe) and life in a political sense (bios). According to our

Western tradition, the most important of these two is actually bios, since this is the

one that sets us apart from animals. The bare life, which was originally situated

230 Leonard, “Identity and its Discontents”.

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outside the political life, started to coincide gradually with bios until they could no

longer be separated: for instance our political identity is determined by our

fingertips.231 Leonard argues that the apple picker is defined by the Swedish state as

completely outside the political system because of the impossibility of being tracked,

and he falls into the most basic category of politics: a mere body. Sweden, which has

the power to interfere with people’s bare life, can also define individuals as

completely outside of the welfare state and consequently a state which is supposedly

at the apotheosis of Western humanism also has a contradictory enormous

dehumanizing potential.232

In Invasion!, the name Abulkasem symbolizes exclusion and prejudice, and it

questions our responsibility in the systematic diffusion of stereotypes and racism.

None of the characters, not even the well educated Lara, found the way to stop the

diffusion of the name which spreads rapidly and without any opposition. The play is

therefore not only a stance against racism but rather a starting point for the viewer to

question him/herself on whether he/she has perpetuated segregation perhaps without

being aware. Within the play there are neither victims (except the refugee) nor

villains (apart from the interpreter), only a group of normal people whose guilt is

proportioned to their innocence. This realistic portrait of common people, who are

neither too good nor too evil, hints to the fact that Invasion! wants actually to open a

discussion about social issues and not simply to give an answer to these problems.

231 Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Torino: Einaudi, 2005). 232 Leonard, “Identity and its Discontents”, 11.

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5.4 SOCIAL CRITICISM IN FEM GÅNGER GUD AND IN APATISKA

FÖR NYBÖRJARE

While social criticism in Invasion! is partially implicit, Khemiri’s plays Fem gånger

gud and Apatiska för nybörjare explicitly criticize Swedish society.

Fem gånger gud is about a drama teacher, Rolf, and his four students, who in

turn direct a play within the play. Since each of them has the possibility to decide

whatever they want to do on stage, they all have the chance to play “god.”233 Idris

(whose name probably alludes to the Hindu god Indra) recounts in his scene what he

would tell god if they met on Earth. God, who is personified in the rapper MC

Hammer’s and performed by Olivia, is convinced by one of his angels, performed by

Rolf, that the only fair country on Earth is Sweden. They subsequently descend from

heaven and meet Idris, who argues why Sweden is not such an ideal land:

Jag ska berätta för er om det här landet. [...] Det här landet är en tvångströja. Det här landet är feghetens falskhetens kompromissens jävla helvete. [...] Om ni kollar noga så ser ni att det här alltså INTE är de tåg som rullade kors och tvärs över Sverige under andra världskriget. Och de fraktade INTE järn och stål till Nazi-Tyskland. [...] Och att järnexporten skulle ha varit 90% av vår utrikeshandel är en fullständig lögn. Nej nej, vi var neutrala här! [...] Det där är alltså INTE passen som Sverige krävde att Tyskland skulle införa redan före andra världskriget. Passen som enligt svenska direktiv skulle märkas med ett synligt J om man var jude. Passen som i praktiken gjorde det omöjligt för judar att söka skydd i Sverige. [...] Och snart ändrades faktiskt lagarna så att till och med judar fick komma in i Sverige. Redan 1942, faktiskt. [...] Vilken lång historia av öppenhet vi har i vårt land. Bara 12 år senare fick till och med zigenare komma in! [...] om vi tar vänster så ser ni en särskild barack där vi INTE samlar skriken från de 63000 människor som

233 Giving to each character the chance to direct a part of the play, makes Fem gånger Gud a beautiful pastiche of Strindberg’s Ett drömspel (A Dreamplay, 1902). Like Strindberg, Khemiri plays with the concept of time and its linearity, and the result is a dreamlike plot which goes from one character to another without any apparent scheming. Not only does the presence of God recall Indra’s voice in Ett drömspel, it also indicates the artist’s (in this case playwright’s) peculiar power to create something out of nothing – as much as God created the world out of chaos, a playwright can create a play out of apparently chaotic stories.

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svenska staten INTE tvångssteriliserade... [...] Det är alltså här som vi INTE har låst in Idris två frihetskämpande bröder och det var INTE för att de inte hade råd med advokat och dessutom var en av dem skyldig. (Khemiri, Fem gånger gud, 209-211) (I will tell you about this land. […] This land is a straitjacket. This land is the fucking hell of cowardice, falsity, and compromise. […] If you look carefully, you can see that this is NOT the train that rolled back and forth across Sweden during the Second World War, and they did NOT carry iron and steel to Nazi Germany. […] And that iron exportation was 90% of our foreign trade is an absolute lie. No no, we were neutral! […] Those ones are NOT the passports that Germany was requested to introduce by Sweden already before the Second World War. Passports which according to Swedish directive would be marked with a visible J if one was Jewish. The passports that basically made it impossible for Jewish people to find protection in Sweden. […]) And soon the law was changed so that even Jewish people were allowed to come to Sweden. Already in 1942 actually. […] Our land has such a long story of openness! Only 12 years later even gypsies could come here. […] if we take the left, you can see a special barracks where we do NOT collect the screams of 63000 people that Sweden did NOT sterilize… […] It is here that we have NOT imprisoned Idris’s two brothers who fought for freedom and it was NOT because they had no money for a lawyer and moreover one of them was guilty.)

Idris criticizes Sweden very openly and exposes the deep-rooted utopia of Sweden as

a neutral country. What Khemiri knows best is that positive prejudices may be harder

to eradicate than negative ones, and ridicules the priggish Swedish society through

Rolf’s annoying behavior. While Idris criticizes Sweden, Rolf defends his country

with ridiculous judgments on Swedish superiority:

Men här i landet har ni väl ändå kommit väldigt långt vad gäller jämställdhet och demokrati? Här kan man väl nästan säga att alla är så räddhågset politiskt korrekta att förtrycket nästan har vänts ut och in? [...] Jag vet inget annat land som är mer neutralt, öppet, jämlikt... (Khemiri, Fem gånger gud, 209) (But in this country you still have come very far as to gender equality and democracy, right? Here one can surely almost say that everyone is so fearfully politically correct that the oppression has almost been turned inside out […] I don’t know any other country that is more neutral, open, and equal…)

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In the play, a clear stance about Sweden is never taken: some characters highlight its

goodness whilst others represent it in a more negative way. Sweden does not appear

however as a land that is entirely despicable but the suggestion that the author seems

to pass on to his audience is that it is time to open a free and conscious discussion

about what works well in the country and what has to be changed. This need for self-

examination sometimes finds dissent in characters such as Rolf, who tends to

minimize the problems, over-applauding the democratic victories that people have

achieved in the Nordic countries. What the audience should perceive is that Khemiri

refuses the stances that are both too positive and too negative, because these do not

lead to any kind of productive discussion.

The playwright’s aim to represent reality and people as realistically as possible

is obvious in the play Apatiska för nyborjare. This play is about an investigator who

narrates his234 research about the case of an apathetic immigrant daughter of asylum

refugees in Sweden. The name of the little girl is Mariana Kaurova and she came

from Naltjik (Georgia). The investigator is often followed by a character called

rösten (the voice) who represents his inner conscience and continuously bothers him

to bring into question the facts regarding Mariana. Facts are narrated through a series

of flashbacks where different people tell different versions of the story. In scene 4,

the story of the immigrant office employee who worked on the case is narrated by

her son and daughters, and by the son of an immigrant family who she has helped.

She is described as a very strong woman who believed in a fair country, where

immigrants could have access to Sweden’s wealth. However, after meeting a refugee 234 In the characters list, the investigator is indicated as a man or a woman. However the indication for a woman is into brackets, suggesting that the investigator is likely to be played by a man. Moreover, since the play has been inspired by Gellert Tamas’ book, the investigator probably reminds of Tamas himself. From now on, the investigator will be considered as a man.

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who pretended to be in love with her just to get a resident permit, she became more

and more skeptical towards immigrants. She subsequently becomes the national

coordinator for the apathetic refugee children, named directly by the government.

She then starts a campaign to show that the parents had poisoned the children in

order to be able to stay in Sweden. In the play her son and daughters try to change

her mind, to tell her that she was wrong, misled by the support of other important

personalities of the time, such as psychologists and politicians. Finally, at the end of

the scene, she refuses to bear the responsibility alone for having sent sick children

out of the country, and her daughter says that she “kanske bara var en kugge i ett

större maskineri” (Khemiri, Apatiska) (was maybe just a gear in a bigger engine),

referring to the idea that evil cannot be done by just one person but that it is the result

of a complex situation where nobody can consider themselves innocent.

The same kind of generalization of guilt applies in scene 6, where the Migration

Minister is accused of having been wrong, and the actress who plays her role tries to

justify the Minister’s mistake with these words:

Men tänk om jag vill säga något helt annat? Tänk om jag vill säga det som alla sitter och tänker? Tänk om jag skulle försvara henne på samma sätt som jag skulle försvara mig? Vad exakt VAD är det som ni inte förstår? Världen består av sex miljarder människor. Vi har ett socialt trygghetssystem som knappt täcker nio mijlioner invånare. En miljard är tusen miljoner. Fattar ni inte vad som skulle hända om vi öppnade upp gränserna? Inser ni inte konsekvenserna? [...] Det sociala skyddsnätet skulle kollapsa. På två sekunder. Ni vet det. Jag vet det. Alla vet det! Den ekonomiska världsordningen skulle erövra ännu ett område. Inser ni inte att hon. Eller jag. Gjorde det oundvikliga? (Khemiri, Apatiska) (But think if I wanted to say something completely different? Think if I wanted to say what you all here are thinking about. Think I would defend her in the same way I would defend myself. WHAT is it exactly that you don’t understand? There are six billion people in the world. We have a social security system that barely covers nine million inhabitants. A billion is one

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thousand million. Don’t you understand what would happen if we opened the borders? Don’t you imagine the consequences? […] Our social security would collapse in two seconds. You know it. I know it. Everybody knows it! The economic world order would conquer one more area. Can’t you realize that I, I mean she, did what was inevitable?)

At this point in the play, the actress who plays the Minister switches from her role to

the role of a generic actress who wants to justify the Minister’s decisions. Doing so,

she describes the Minister as a person whose limits prevent her from being genuinely

good, but whose egoism is shared by everybody and is therefore impossible to

condemn. Khemiri aims again to represent realistic characters who are not idealized

but whose humanity inspires compassion in his audience. The problem with these

realistic individuals is that they cannot solve any of the social issues that the plays

present, and the viewers are requested to think about them without prejudices and to

awaken their sense of right and wrong.

5.5 THEATRICAL DIS-ILLUSION IN KHEMIRI’S PLAYS

The three plays which have been analysed here are political in the sense that they

discuss relevant public issues of contemporary Sweden. However, Khemiri raises

uncomfortable questions rather than proposing solutions or political visions. He is

absolutely political in the provocative way he unmasks shortcomings and hypocrisy

in the purportedly progressive and open Swedish mentality and social organization.

Khemiri does have strong views and beliefs about all this, although he is himself a

Swede and does not certainly want to dismantle the Swedish Welfare State. His play

are actually structured to give as few indications as possible in the arosen debate and

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Khemiri never gives any moralistic teachings, but rather wants to awaken his

audience’s awareness and in order to reinforce this awakening he has constructed his

theatrical work on stage disillusion.

It is important to consider that everything that takes place on stage holds a

special meaning that aims to be perceived by the audience. In other words we can say

that from a semiotic point of view, all the objects on stage are charged with a higher

significance than when they belong to everyday life.235 At the same time, every word

said and every movement made by the actors are designed by either the playwright or

the director to communicate a message to their audience.236

The fact that Khemiri’s plays lack any form of set design and that objects are

rarely used on stage is really powerful. This lack of significant objects increases the

importance of words enormously and the actors as mediums of significance – the

audience can indeed only focus on what actors say and do on stage. This once again

proves Khemiri’s intense interest in language, and although the author pays very

much attention on what concerns the performance (such as rhythm), he disregards the

scenographic element.

The power to communicate information is generally shared on stage by a

complex sign system, but this complexity is highly reduced in Khemiri’s work, for

instance the only scripted object in Fem gånger gud (a manuscript used by the

characters on stage) acquires extreme relevance – it constantly communicates to the

audience that they are watching theatrical fiction. Khemiri denies entirely the

Aristotelian idea of theatre which considers tragedy to be imitative and that presumes

235 Keir Elam, Semiotica del teatro (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988), 15. 236 Elam, Semiotica, 74-75.

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the actors to act and not to describe their actions. 237 According to the Greek

philosopher, tragedy arouses pity and fear and it is meant to effect catharsis, 238

moreover, as a consequence, the audience is expected to empathize with the actors

and to forget that they are looking at a performance. The spectator becomes then a

passive observer as long as the theatrical illusion remains intact, but Khemiri insists

on the lie that is beneath this idea, and through several expedients he breaks the

deceptive veil between stage and audience.

In Invasion!, two actors are asked to enter the foyer from the street and to

pretend to be part of the public. They are also explicitly asked to be loud, rude, and

gross:

I FOAJÉN YOUSEF och ARVIND kommer in i foajén från gatan, iklädda kepsar och mjukisbyxor. De har varsitt McDonald’s-sugror och några pappersservetter, blåser tuggade papperstussar på varandra. Puttar in varandra i andra åskådare, hotstirrar om någon säger till. Går runti i foajén, är högljuda, raggar på någon tjej (”ey bruden, du är fin, kom sitt med oss, vi har vip-säten, jao”.) (Khemiri, Invasion!, 76) (“IN THE FOYER Yousef (D) and Arvind (B) come into the theatre foyer from the street, dressed in baseball caps and track-suit bottoms. They are each holding a McDonald’s straw and some paper napkins;; they blow chewed-up bits of paper at each other. They knock one another into members of the audience; they look threateningly at anyone who answers back. They walk around the foyer, making a lot of noise, putting the moves on the odd girl (Ey, baby, you are so fine, come and sit with us, we know the guy what wrote the play,239 we’ve got VIP-seats, yo baby.” Perry, Invasion!, 137)

This smart device breaks the sanctioned wall between the actors and the public, and

the latter is here forced to actively interact with the characters. Yousef’s and

237 “Tragedia è, dunque, imitazione di un’azione elevata e conclusa […] la tragedia è imitazione di un’azione ed è compiuta da persone che agiscono […]” Aristotele, Poetica (Milano: Mondadori, 2011), 15. 238 Aristotele, Poetica, 15. 239 The sentence “we know the guy what wrote the play” is not actually present in the original text.

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Arvind’s aggressiveness is justified as a means to perpetuate in the audience the

rooted stereotype of vulgar and annoying immigrants – the actors have indeed to be

young (between twenty and twenty-five years old) and Middle Easterner. Even the

McDonald’s straws have a powerful connotation: since McDonald sells very cheap

food, it is associated with young people from city suburbs. If Yousef and Arvind

were real, they could have had dinner at McDonald’s before going to theatre, and the

author wants this situation to be as realistic as possible. The Aristotelian imitation-

rule is then ignored since the action is real, and their behavior, which is meant to

oppose any good rules of behaviour, reaches the climax when they interrupt the

performance. This interruption acquires more meaning if we consider that the

bourgeois theatre is based on the rule that while the performance is on, the audience

has to remain quiet (except for applauses and laughs).240

Furthermore in Fem gånger gud, a manuscript is often read by the actors on

stage, describing the action and anticipating their monologues and discussions. For

instance Rolf reads out loud the stage direction that describes how his character

should appear: “Det stod ju ‘nervös dramlärare som ingen respekterar’ och nu

spelade jag mer ‘nervös’ […]” (Khemiri, Fem gånger gud, 187) (But it says ‘nervous

theatre teacher that no one respects’ and now I pretend to be more ‘nervous’.).

Immediately after, Blanca tells Sanoj that he has to pretend to be a bench,241 explains

stage positions to the other characters242 and reminds them of their lines.243 The fact

that this play is about a theatre teacher and his students, of course, makes Fem

gånger gud particularly suitable for theatrical interferences, but it also serves an 240 Caprara, Il teatro, 57-58. 241 “BLANCA Ja, just det. Du spelar bänken.” Khemiri, Fem gånger gud, 187. 242 “BLANCA Den som spelar Rolf stör Blanca när hon förberender sig.” Khemiri, Fem gånger gud, 187. 243 “BLANCA Den som spelar Blanca säger: Varsågoda.” Khemiri, Fem gånger gud, 187.

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extradiegetic aim: the interruption of the theatrical illusion. Khemiri wants to avoid

his public being deceived by the power of theatre that makes what is actually only

fiction look real. We may say that he shares Bertolt Brecht’s fear that theatre could

cause the spectator’s to identify emotionally with the characters, without provoking a

critical response.244 Khemiri, as Brecht, employs various techniques that remind the

audience that the play is a representation and not reality – by focusing on the

constructed nature of theatre, Khemiri tries to cause a strong and rational reaction in

the spectators.

This fear is also explicitly referred to in the last scene of Apatiska för nybörjare,

where two old classmates of the investigator say that they have seen a play based on

his research. Not only is this a metatheatrical reference to Khemiri’s play itself, but it

also serves the aim to represent a possible audience reaction that Khemiri would like

to avoid. The classmates admit that they loved the play and that it was “bra att den

tog tydlig ställning” (Khemiri, Apatiska) (good that it took a clear position).

Immediately after, one of them suggests going to drink a glass of wine. These lines

ridicule both the reviewers’ habit of claiming that Khemiri’s play are political and

that the author takes a clear position in the social debates arising from his works, and

the audience’s habit of rapidly going back to their life and avoiding any critical

response to the plays. It is not a coincidence, that in the very last part of Apatiska för

nybörjare, the voice – which represents the investigator’s conscience, as was

previously mentioned, and maybe everybody’s conscience – screams

“HJÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄLP” (Khemiri, Apatiska) (heeeeeeeelp), recalling the audience’s

problematic apathy towards social issues.

244 Caprara, Il teatro, 90-91.

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In Khemiri’s theatre, metatheatricality serves the aim of awakening people’s

awareness and opening up discussions. At the same time, the author avoids giving

solutions, even though he takes a radical position against prejudices and

discrimination, leaving the spectators free to draw their own conclusions.

***

Through his plays, Khemiri shows to the audience some realistic circumstances

where the Swedish welfare state doesn’t guarantee dignity and independence to the

people. He brings on the stage some stories that prove that discrimination and racial

exclusion still exist in Sweden, although many Swedes consider their land as the

most fair and right country on earth. These people are the ones that Khemiri wants to

upset, and through a series of metatheatrical expedients he aims to awake their

undisturbed conscience. Each person of the audience is thus expected to start a

discussion and to reconsider their social responsibility and guilt, or at least to

consider their indifference to the important problems that are sometimes

underestimated.

Khemiri puts on stage young people that often have immigrant origins and are at

the edge of society. However, he does not want them to be pitied, and therefore his

characters are also realistic and always speak their weaknesses. Some of them are

even annoying to disturb the calm of the prig society.

Besides this social intent, it is also true that Khemiri cares very much about the

form of his plays (such as structure, rhythm, dialogue…). But this is an aspect that

has rarely been mentioned by critics who, on the contrary, have only focused on the

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political value of Khemiri’s theatre. Since the critics expect an invandrarförfattare to

be mainly a political artist, they have partially ignored the aesthetic features and the

existential questions that arise from Invasion!, Fem gånger gud, and Apatiska för

nybörjare.

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CONCLUSION

The Swedish critics have exerted an oppressive power by using the prefix invandrar-

to define some writers including Jonas Hassen Khemiri, because by doing so, they

have leveled out the many differences that exist among the so called immigrant

writers. Consequently, they all have become the representatives of a minority group

of second generation of immigrants, willingly or not. This thesis aims to seek the

consequences that the prefix invandrar- has had on the literary reception of

Khemiri’s works and on the author’s own strategies to reply to the assumption.

Khemiri's label as invandrarförfattare has prevented the critics from fully

understanding his works, because they could not get rid of three metaphorical lenses

imposed by the definition of invandrarlitteratur itself, that tend to enlarge some

literary features while they minimize some others. These lenses – that have been

defined as the sociolinguistic lens, the autobiographical lens, and the political lens –

correspond to the fact that the critics expect the invandrarförfattare to use a language

that directly represent the idiolects used by people in Swedish multiethnic suburbs, to

always create autobiographical characters, and to aim to undermine the Swedish

white establishment. The fact that the Swedish critics perpetuate these three

prejudices has been proved through the analysis of Khemiri’s novels.

As soon as Khemiri’s first novel came out, critics labeled its language as a

reliable representation of the Swedish idiolects spoken by young people in

immigrants suburbs. As we have seen they share indeed many features, for instance

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the rak ordföljd efter fundament (straight word order after foundation), but since

Halim tends to exaggerate the characteristics of his blattesvenska, we have argued

that he tries to reproduce such an idiolect in his diary even though he has not always

spoken in this way and is actually a Swedish native speaker. In other words, Halim

uses his significant linguistic resources as a conscious act of resistance against what

he calls swedification. On the contrary, all the critics who considered Halim’s

language as a real representation of blattesvenska have misunderstood the author’s

aim, even because in real life blattesvenska is always used by blattar to express

affiliation and solidarity to their mates, while Halim often glorifies himself as a

tankesultan who is superior to anybody else.

Similarly, Kadir’s language in Montecore could be perceived as a literary

transposition of the broken Swedish spoken by Arabic immigrants. But as we have

seen, Kadir’s language is too finely constructed and often too poetic, and this proves

that Khemiri did not want to depict the real invandrarsvenska but rather explore the

playfulness of language.

The novel Montecore has also been used to demonstrate how Khemiri rejected

the critics’ misconception of Ett öga rött, which expects his characters to be

autobiographical. To do this, we have considered Astrid Trotzig’s critical essays

which explains that ethnically Swedish writers are valued for their individuality, and

they are expected to portray both themselves and the world in a universal way

through their works. On the contrary, the invandrarförfattare are expected to limit

themselves to depict their very personal point of view and no weight is given to their

capacity to explore and define society and the world at large, but only to the ethnic

perspective, which is only valid for immigrants or, at most, for Swedes with

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multicultural background. The semi-autobiographical novel Montecore is thus a

stance against the misconception that indissolubly links a writer to his protagonist,

and from this point of view it is a form of protest against the critics who had

previously considered Halim as Khemiri’s alter ego.

Finally, with Jag ringer mina bröder, we have seen how critics tend to

categorise Khemiri’s works always giving a political reading. Even though Amor’s

story evolves on different levels (a social level and a personal level), the reviews

have showed an incapacity to go beyond the political criticism of the writer, leveling

out the multi-layer structure of the novel.

Not only does the problematic prefix invandrar- prove to be a social bias, but it also

prevents critics from more deeply analysing and understanding the so called

invandrarlitteratur. A certain need for schematization is implicit in the literary

critique, especially in the case of newspaper reviews, and therefore literary critics

have tended to classify writers according to their style, language, and topics. This

may be helpful to better understand the writers’ works and to give shape to the

chaotic world of literature, that would be otherwise almost impregnable. But such a

necessity can become problematic when it promotes an absolute categorization. The

real problem of the definition of invandrarlitteratur is indeed within the prefix,

because the prefix itself influences the reception of the literature it defines and it

distorts its meaning.

Although I do not personally like the idea that everything has to be labeled, I do

understand the desire to create certain categories in order to organize what is a

multifaceted reality. If Khemri was simply called a svensk författare (Swedish

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writer) instead of an invandrarförfattare, his literature would perhaps be analysed

more fully and it would not have to face oversimplifications. It is a pity that

Khemiri’s valuable novels and plays need a prefix to enter the sphere of

contemporary Swedish literature.

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SVENSK SAMMANFATTNING

När svenska kritiker använder prefixet invandrar- för att kategorisera författare

tycks det vara bevis på ett tryckande maktutövande. En person som ofta får denna

stämpel är Jonas Hassen Khemiri som inte anses vara helsvensk på grund av sin fars

tunisiska ursprung. Detta har i sin tur lett till att Khemiri företrätt andra generations

invandrare, om så frivilligt eller ej. Den här uppsasten syftar till att påvisa och

konkretisera de konsekvenser som prefixet invandrar- har och har haft i mottagandet

av Khemiris litterära verk.

Det problematiska prefixet invandrar- visar sig vara en social fördom, samtidigt

som begreppet också hindrar kritiker från en full förståelse av den så kallade

invandrarlitteraturen. Prefixet påverkar kritikernas uppfattning om litteraturen

samtidigt som det ger en snedvriden bild av dess innebörd, vilket pekar på att

problemet ligger i själva prefixet.

Vidare diskuteras att definitionen av invandrarlitteratur alltid för med sig tre

typer av huvudförväntningar: a) språket som används av invandrarförfattare är en

tillförlitlig bild av invandrarsvenskan som människor talar i svenska multietniska

förorter, b) invandrarförfattare tenderar att skapa självbiografiska figurer, c)

invandrarlitteraturens viktigaste konsekvenser är politiska, eftersom dess författare

syftar till att undergräva det vita och borgerliga etablissemanget. Dessa förväntningar

har hindrat svenska kritiker från att objektivt analysera Khemiris romaner och teatrar,

vilket framkommer i uppsatsen.

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I en genomförd analys av Ett öga rött (2003), har jag bevisat att språket som

författaren har använt består av ett flertal estetiska konnotationer som inte enbart

speglar invandrarsvenskan.

Vidare i analysen har det uppmärksammats att Montecore (2006) döljer ett

ironisk och självbiografisk uppsåt som skarpt slår ner på de kritiker som antog att

Halim (huvudpersonen i Ett öga rött) representerades av Khemiris alter ego.

Avslutningsvis förs en diskussion om Khemiris verk Jag ringer mina bröder

(2012), i vilken det har bevisats att det politiska temat är minst lika relevant som de

övriga temana. Faktum är att kritikernas fokus har utgått ifrån en politiska aspekt och

har helt missat de sociala, däribland huvudpersonens relationer och vänskapsband.

Även om den här uppsatsen mest ger en fördjupad bild av Khemiris romaner,

avslutas den med ett kapitel som enbart behandlar Khemiris teatraliska litteratur.

Kapitlet ger således en överblick i hans storhet även som dramatiker.

Eftersom det är svårt att hitta svenskt källmaterial angående den moderna

litteraturen, bestämde jag mig för att använda diverse typer av material i arbetet. Det

betyder att jag även har inkluderat intervjuer och recensioner i tidskrifter och

tidningar. Samtidigt har jag utgått ifrån ett narratologiskt perspektiv i min analys,

eftersom jag främst vill uppmärksamma de italienska läsarna om Khemiris okända

verk.

Jag har dock alltid försökt att följa två röda trådar som återfinns i Khemiris

romaner och teatrar: i första hand rör det sig om hans intresse för mänskliga och

familjära band, i andra om karaktärers behov av att definiera sig själva som en del av

världen.

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Den här uppsatsen visar också på min stora tillgivenhet för Khemiris litteratur

som alltid är skickligt skriven, intensiv och gripande. Förutom det som prefixet

invandrar- definerar och antyder, är Khemiri en utmärkt författare, inte bara på

grund av sin förmåga att behärska det svenska språket på en hög nivå, men också på

grund av sin förmåga att utforska den mänskliga själen i sina litterära verk.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary, secondary, web sources

PRIMARY SOURCES

- Khemiri, Jonas Hassen. Apatiska för nybörjare. Private copy kindly given by the

author.

- Khemiri, Jonas Hassen. Ett öga rött. Stockholm: Norstedts, 2003.

- Khemiri, Jonas Hassen. Fem gånger gud. In Invasion. Pjäser, noveller, texter, 171-

248. Stockholm: Norstedts, 2009.

- Khemiri, Jonas Hassen. Invasion!. In Invasion. Pjäser, noveller, texter, 73-145.

Stockholm: Norstedts, 2009.

- Khemiri, Jonas Hassen. “Jag ringer mina bröder”. Dagens Nyheter, December 18,

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