Jonas Khemiri - Montecore - The Silence of the Tiger

And your voice echoes between the box houses and some birds fly from trees and both Melinda and Imran stop short as you raise your voice and 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! Now shake hands.

Your friends look at you and you can’t explain where the yelling voice came from, you just know that you have suddenly gone from a regular person to something much bigger, you’re a U.N. diplomat, you are Malcolm and Gandhi combined, you are Palme reborn. Then come the laughs and they crack up and poke you in the ribs and Imran says: Wzup, Prophet! and Patrik says: Total Martin Luther King! But they do it with complete love and the best respect and Imran and Melinda make peace and they both say sorry and when you say goodbye in the dusk you feel like something has grown on the inside.

And now, afterward, when you’re writing these words in a poorly lit hotel room in Gothenburg after a reading at Högsbo library, you have trouble remembering why Dads always had to be defended and Moms always made dirty. Maybe because Dads’ positions were way too precarious to be tested.

Or maybe because your Dads were your eternal heroes who will never become anything else ?

Write me … You may certainly formulate yourself freely, but … the Swedish in the above sections seems me more unpolished than in the previous parts. Is this your intention or your carelessness?

At the parallel time I realized that your father’s position was more demanding than he wanted to admit. He feared that Sweden’s coming recession would threaten his studio. At the same time, he noticed how Swedes still observed him with the glances of suspicion. Despite his success they weighed him in a constant ambition of predicting his actions. He was still threatened by the smothering net of prejudices and in sympathy for all of this I forgave him the belated payment of my loaned economy. Oh, how tragically transparent are all those people in our lives who do not cement our prejudices!

I promised myself never to become one who does not forgive mistakes that people implement in their weak moments. Like a godlike reward for my amnesty, the poker cards began to stimulate me again; soon I had won back my debt, then I expanded it to a considerable profit and one evening I returned home with a capital that was adequate for investing the lot where since the days of my youth I had projected my hotel!

It’s the nineties and fallwhen the gaze of the world is aimed at Iraq for the alliance invasion. Soon you gonna start high school and it’s the time when you start reading the paper seriously and on CNN the war looks like in a film with trailers and American narrator voices and exact sights that hit exact targets and no innocents who die. On the front page of Dagens Nyheter is the photo of the aircraft carrier with the airplanes’ burning turbo motors and arrows show the simplicity of the attack and everything is static and blood-free, about like in Top Gun . You sense that something is wrong and try to talk to Dads.

But Dads have closed himself in the studio and only come out on weekends with a crooked back and red eyes and a constant tension headache. Dads have gotten a different smell and become mute and refuse to talk about the Gulf War. Something has happened in Tunisia that’s made Dads have to take Treo tablets until the metal tubes fill their own glass bowl in the kitchen and Moms watch anxiously from the outside.

Instead you talk with friends and in the evenings you start to hang out in the city and most often it’s you, Melinda, and Imran, because Patrik is starting to have problems coming into town because his parents have become worried about the change in his clothing style and his new vocabulary.

It’s you with the downy mustache that’s sometimes enough for you to buy near beer at 7-Eleven, the black synthetic jacket with the blue panther print on the back and worn-down Ewing shoes. It’s Melinda with a grown-out Afro and a special comb in imitation ebony, give-blood T-shirts from her mom’s job, and heavy, dragging LA Gear sneakers with double laces, black and white. It’s Imran with a shiny polyester shirt, red-striped bandanna, and black-and-white flannel shirt buttoned with one button at the top. Everyone’s jeans are supermega-extra loose with too-big waists, perfect for highest-kick contests and secretly placed brännboll bat. All of you have drawn tattoos between your thumb and index finger and around your necks are just-bought bling-bling chains, which look like shining gold at first, but after the first shower slowly but surely start to change color to green rust.

Together you sit on the backs of benches or at the twenty-four-hour McDonald’s and talk about all of those subjects that at that time meant more than anything. Is Dr. Dre really a real doctor? Is Paula Abdul really an Arab (as you stubbornly maintain)? Where exactly is Compton? Does Madonna have to have specially pointed boobs for them to work in that cone bra? Where do you get the cheapest fake ID? What’s up after school? Is it true that you get crazy drunk if you put sugar in beer? What’s the best practice for balling once it’s time? (Imran: I mean, I’ve heard, but I haven’t tried it myself, but apparently you can take an orange and make a hole in it and then boil it and then you can stick in your cock and it’s supposed to like feel totally like punani but remember like I said I haven’t tried it. You: You’d have to find a fucking huge orange. Both, with roaring voices: Yeah, really, huge-ass, super gigantic. Melinda: You are fucking insane. You: Maybe a melon would be better.)

Sometimes you get into politics and you agree that there’s something fishy about the pictures from the Gulf War and you keep talking Sweden and Melinda says she saw skinheads again at Slussen and Imran says a Swediot-alcoholic spit on the windshield and yelled Muslim whore when his mom dropped his sister off at handball practice last week. And you think about his beautiful steel-banged sister and say: Shouldn’t there be an organization that unites all blattar that makes it obvious that blattar must never fight with each other but should fight the system instead? And they nod and agree and while you’re finding unity Dads seem to be splitting in half.

Dads sit quiet at the dinner table while Moms try to tempt out Dads from before with wine and appetizers and her weekend face with makeup. You try to tell about basketball games where you ruled poor Swedelows and when it doesn’t work you tell about how Patrik made a scene when his shop teacher read his middle name wrong and called him Jörgen instead of Jorge. Do you know what he did then? He just bent his head back at the exact right angle and yelled: Orale vato loco! but he did it with just the right Spanish pronunciation and … Moms listen and little brothers listen but not Dads and then it doesn’t feel particularly interesting to keep telling.