Jonas Khemiri - Montecore - The Silence of the Tiger

Are you serious? Do you want to write that you “start to be ashamed” of him in the book about your father? SUPPRESS this NOW! Both of us must be ready for compromises. I can, for example, imagine that you were indignant when in my earlier commentary I was allowed to say:

“The Koran? Your son? He is as Swedish as a potato!”

This has now been renovated. Instead I say:

“The Koran? Your son? He is as Swedish as herring!” Is this experienced as more adequate?

During your father’s break in Tabarka, I often did my mediator and tried to overcome him to return to Sweden.

“Come on, my friend. At least call them! Respond their letters! Contact your oldest son, because I see how much it pains you to have lost his relation!”

Your father did not respond me. Then I uttered something that I suspected would have an effect:

“Return to Sweden. Or do you really want to practice the same mistakes that your father made with you?”

Some weeks later, your father booked his return journey to Sweden. His mentality was fixed: He would seek his family’s excuse for his absence. He took my farewell with the words:

“I will miss you, but my hope is still that we do not see each other for a long time. I will now seek my retreat to my family!”

I wished your father’s success and waved his farewell.

That same night he was back outside my door with an alcoholic odor and the excuse that something unfortunate had happened on the way to the airport.

“What?” I wondered.

“A sign of fate,” responded your father and rolled up his eyes.

The postponation of your father’s journey home was repeated like a tradition. The whole time it was a sign of fate that stopped his departure. The sun sifted wrong through a chestnut tree, a chestnut had clinked alarmingly against a pocket coin, a news headline had said something about a … chestnut? Parallel to your father really wanting to return, he could not return. Do you have this double ambivalence in your experience?

Dads disappear.

Dads turn to gas.

Paradoxically enough, it’s in his absence that Dads’ presence grows stronger than ever.

Because suddenly Dads’ silhouettes are sitting there behind helicopter windows. There are Dads, hunch-running out of the rotor eddy and shaking hands with presidents and heavy-shouldered generals. Then Dads climb up to platforms, wave the cheers from the masses, promise new antidiscrimination laws that will actually have consequences and companies that discriminate will be self-destructed and presidents applaud, generals salute, the people rejoice, and sweat-runny Dads dry their foreheads with cloth napkins and are led past the troops’ attention swords toward the refrigerator-cold limousine backseat.

And there are Dads training in lightbulb rooms. Dads pump iron and eat oat pasta and punch themselves sweaty against sandbags that have Keep Sweden Swedish logos and Bert Karlsson’s face. Dads measure biceps and thigh muscles with doubly extended measuring tapes, oil their Glocks, file their bullets (carefully carefully) to get the right explosion effect. Dads teach their sons all the kung fu pressure points and deadly finger combinations. Dads hit the bull’s-eye on skinhead dolls, they assemble a group and hunt for skinheads and Sweden Democrats and of course they will find that damn cunt in the southern suburb who shone red laser light at passersby right when Laser Man paranoia was at its height, and presumably laughed when panicked blattar threw themselves down on bike paths and scraped up their chins. And look there! There are Dads coming home again and opening the studio, and instead of photographing pets they start to document the police’s blatte abuse, racist doormen, and the Sweden Democrats’ tax cheats. Or? What are Dads really doing during this time? No idea.

Does the reader understand that the above passage is not the reality of truth, but rather your fantasies? Does the reader understand that your father never WANTED to leave his family, but was forced to this by the modification of the Swedish society? Does anyone at all understand anything about a story that is not their own? Doubt has begun to stretch my breast.

During the months ahead, your father supported himself by photographing tourists with a Polaroid camera on the beaches of Tabarka. He prepared himself for his journey home. He thought of your mother.

If you are brooding about how he could let himself be separated from Pernilla, I must detail you: Certainly he missed your mother. More than anyone else. There is no more delicious, more intelligent woman in this universe, this is his strong conviction. Still. But at the same time, it is the tragic fact of life that all love one day finds a normalized routine. Even love that was launched with ground vibrations and artificial sky explosions and a man who comes into a paillote night after night shouting: “Her name is Bergman! Pernilla Bergman!” Even love that seems to pulverize all walls just to have the possibility of existing. One day you wake up and the person who gave you a nervous tongue cling and perspirations of desire suddenly stands heavy-hipped and slack-breasted beside you in a bathroom mirror with a ghastly grimace to clean her teeth with floss. One day you wake up and the beautiful youth who cited poetry by torchlight and burned his life to modify Art is suddenly a somewhat corpulent photographer of pugs. Such is the tragic passage of life and your father accompanied such thoughts in preparation for his journey home.

In the end, what got your father to pile his courage and return was a letter from your mother. She wrote that she had stifled her rage, that she partially understood your father’s going away, but that a divorce was now obligatory. She also wrote that she was worried about you. You spent more and more nightly time roaming around the city. One night you had been transported home by two police, who accused you of metro vandalism. Your telephone conversations with your friends were acted in more and more broken Swedish, and faced with the upcoming November 30, your mother was worried that you would participate in the traditional conflicts between racists and antiracists.

“I beg you. Come home so we can arrange the divorce. And you can talk reason with your son.” Your father packed his bags, strongly decided to finally go home. I wished his success and waved his farewell. Naturally I would have stopped him immediately if I had known the tragic consequences his visit would have …

The year is ninety-threeand Dads have been gone without a trace for a year and a half. November 30 is approaching. The happy day for racists. They will have processions past the palace and leave wreaths of flowers at the statue of King Charles XII. They will honor the Laser Man and New Democracy, they will bellow national anthems and spit snuff and heil and stamp their boots. In our city! In Dads’ absence you’ve grown up and started a war. The organization Blatte for Life has been founded and we have waited long enough. It’s us against them, we the unidentifiable creoles, the blend of everything, all the pigeonhole-free border people. And them? The ones who seek security in simple black and white, the ones who want to defend Thou ancient, thou free, thou joyful bullshit.

What was once Studio Silvia and then Krister Holmström Abbas Khemiri’s photographic pet studio has now become Blatte for Life’s meeting center, the organizational headquarters for the new generation of soldiers who will NEVER go the betraying way of Dads. It’s here everything joins together, people from the suburbs meet inner-city kids, feminists hook up with dreads activists, homos with heteros, anarchists with Zapatists, niglows with Swedelows, blattar with palefaces, Chechenies with Russkies, Kurdish with Turkish(!), Iranis with Arabis with Jewish(!!). All on the same side, totally without self-loathing.