In Berlin before World War II, there was a Swedish colony of residents, people visiting or lingering in the city. How did they relate to the development of the society? Critical media at home, in Sweden, were few and there was no visible anti-Nazism collective. Speaking up, boycotting, departing from the masses, organizing in counter-movements did not become a celebrated generic reaction until after the war.

Today, the developments in Germany would have been questioned by the public. Writers, associations, networks woul have written critical articles, made statements, organized travel boycotts, demonstrated outside the embassy, demanded of people to openly take a stand. A solidarity association would have been formed, as well as social media groups; a convoy would have travelled to Berlin to support the country’s democratic forces.

Presumably. Whether people today would have understood what was happening and acted accordingly is not easily assessed.

But Swedish Nazi resistance in Nazi-German did exist. A clear and teeming testimony is found in the historian, cultural writer, and cultural personality Vilhelm Scharp’s memories of Germany and Nazi Germany in the 1920s and 30s, collected in Labyrinten [The Labyrinth] and edited by historian Andreas Åkerlund.

Vilhelm Scharp, born in 1896 in Stockholm, was only ten years old when, after the family split, he was placed at Lundsberg’s boarding school. Recurrent depressions led to writer’s block, self-sabotaging perfectionism, and interrupted studies. Despite failing health, Scharp managed to get a bachelor’s degree in literary history and history – followed by a degree in poetics and history.

This kind of exam, a master’s degree, earned Scharp the right to seek positions at universities and the professional title historian. On recommendation, he was offered a position as a foreign lecturer at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, at the time one of the world’s prestigious universities. From Berlin, Scharp described what happened in the streets, in parks and at election rallies where Nazis gave public propaganda speeches.

He gained insight into and participated in the verbal and strategic battles among foreigners in Berlin, at the embassy, and in the Church of Sweden, where he was chairman of the youth association.

A second home was the Italian restaurant Taverne on the corner of Courbière-Strasse. Various Nazi critics and other skeptically minded personalities met here between 1930 and 1938. The regulars at the tables under the obligatory portraits of Mussolini and Hitler – expanded by the restaurant owner with a cosmopolitan selection of other portraits – consisted of students, university teachers, diplomats, artists, art dealers, foreign journalists, film, and theatre people.

The restaurant milieu included Arnold Zweig, author of the first great war novel Sergeant Grischa, and friend of Freud, who called Scharp ‘the prevented writer’, and singer Ingrid Wiksjö from Frösön in Jämtland, then celebrated soprano, ’Die schwedische Nachtigall’, who entertained Taverne’s guests with her knowledge and stories.

As a good listener, Scharp became closely acquainted with Jakob Bollschweiler, better known as the artist Bollsch. Acute financial problems had contributed to his assumption of office, gaining Hitler’s favour and a rapid career. Something he did not want to discuss, but rather told the anecdote about a rich lady’s assertion of dogs’ natural play ability. The artist had countered the lady by placing himself at the lady’s feet, barking, implying that dogs could not play; after all, they were predators who practiced for the natural hunting deprived of them by their matron.

The argument and act, of course, says more about the Nazi-infested artist than about the lady and the dog. And it shows the Nazis’ questionable perception: the phenomenon of ‘play bow’ in dogs – the ability to play physically and mentally, to fight playfully and not seriously – was verified, symptomatically, not by Nazi German quasi-research but by American ethologists (much later).

According to Scharp, Bollschweiler, like many artists of the time, was ’politically clueless, but responsive to flaming appeals and promises’, unable to withstand ‘a giant wave of audiovisual propaganda that washed over Germany and especially its capital’ after the half-takeover on January 30, 1933. Fortunately, Bollsch’s art was not affected by ‘the muscularly heroic aesthetics of the Germans’, ‘pre-buried Baroque, a woody Düsseldorf romanticism, postcard-dry act models’, when he died in a plane crash in 1937 and was thus saved ‘from withering away among the court decorators of the Third Reich’.

After the seizure of power in 1933, uniformity began through bootstraps, military music, and the songs of the youth movement the Wandervogeler movement, obligatorily placed flagpoles on homes, balconies, and balustrades – an ‘operatic decoration effect in the cool spring breeze’, ‘a numbing mass wave of mass suggestion’, testifies Scharp. How Nazi propaganda could be experienced by people unaccustomed to advertising is illustrated by how a Jewish lady, a relative of Arnold Zweig, and friend of Scharp, despite her rejection of Nazism, during a passing Nazi parade, had to put a handkerchief in her mouth so as not to tune in to the cheers of the crowd.

Among the 60 percent eligible who did not vote for Hitler in the 1932 Reichstag elections were those who felt both despair and hope. And among those who experienced the latter, there were many who wanted to keep themselves unaware of the fact that the party atmosphere was being paid for with brutal abuse and hate campaigns. Foreign tourists reported home that the Germans had rallied behind Hitler. Thus, it took only a few years to stage the rearmament, violate the Treaty of Versailles, and occupy the Rhineland.

The European parliaments, horrified by the Bolsheviks in Russia, buried their heads in the sand – or, secretly, preferred Nazism to communism. For the establishment, Nazism could emerge as a useful tool against the ‘red threat’. The combat pilot Göring made many visits, behaved believably, and was admired by chivalrous English opponents as a guarantor of Hitler’s nobleness.

The Chancellor of the Weimar Republic, Frans von Papen, the man who persuaded Hindenburg that Hitler could be controlled, ambassador in Vienna in 1938 and in Ankara from 1939 to 1944, also participated with charm in international hunting parties – also in Sweden, Scharp says. Not many managed to see through the intricate deceptions of the Nazis. For example, one of the more reputable newspapers in England, the London Times, in a high-profile editorial hailed Hitler ‘as an honest guardian of justice and moderation’.

Journalists who wrote from Berlin to wake up the non-vigilant could be called ‘horror painters and journals’ and were dismissed as hysterics and victims of the ‘gruel propaganda’. Some sought to reach out to the public using irony, but many were censored by their editors. Critical journalists reporting from Nazi Germany had their articles rejected, Scharp recalls. The exception was the American editorial boards.

American journalist Edgar Mowrer reported analytically and with knowledge on the political situation in a series of articles in the Chicago Daily News in 1932, whereupon he was ousted out from the Third Reich – and awarded the Pulitzer Prize in the United States in 1933. The American Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker, journalist, and author, nicknamed ‘Red’ (because of his hair colour), wrote cluelessly about Italian fascism and Mussolini – however subsequently showed insight with revealing and well-written reports about Nazi Germany, a series that, unsurprisingly, led to his deportation.

But most English-speaking journalists were not in the right position to understand what was happening, Scharp says. William Shirer came to write an extensive and widely circulated historical work on Nazism – The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) – in which the Nazi ideology is portrayed as unique to Germany; this interpretation of uniqueness was, according to Scharp, a delusion: Nazism was rather one of several cases of totalitarianism that arose in several European countries.

In this context, Scharp mentions the often-overlooked Swedish advertising cartoonist and sports journalist Rune Carlsson; as very knowledgeable he, according to Scharp, authored ‘the best introduction to the rise and world of ideas of Hitlerism in Swedish’: Tredje Rikets herrar och andra, 1945 [The Lords and Others of the Third Reich]. It may be added that Rune Carlsson is featured in Barbro Alving’s (the signature Bang) documentary book Det kom aldrig i tidningen (1963), in the chapter ’I skuggan av en stövel’ [‘In the shadow of a boot’], p. 52, about reporting from Nazi Germany in 1937.

In the spring of 1933, cultural celebrities from other countries were invited to testify to the supposedly positive development of society. Some were pre-excluded, including Elsa Björkman-Goldschmidt, Swedish Red Cross delegate in Russia 1916–1918, director of Save the Children’s activities in Vienna 1919–1924, journalist in Vienna 1928–1938. Elsa Björkman-Goldschmidt later became a member of the Samfundet De Nio in 1950 and editor of the Swedish Literary Journal in 1958.

The female names are otherwise not many in Scharp’s memories, which is why those mentioned should be remembered: Helga Stene, lecturer in Berlin, rock-solid against Nazi overtures, resistance woman and feminist during the war, is one such person. She lectured in Sweden and Berlin and fought against the Nazis in the characteristic organization Parents resistance. The Swedes Sven Hedin and Fredrik Böök, on the other hand, served, Scharp argues, as ‘reconciles for those Germans who, out of their own eyes’ testimony, had begun to doubt the pentecostal gospel speakers, swastika banners and bootstraps’.

Since his years in Uppsala, Scharp was friends with Karin Boye and Herbert Tingsten; all had been active in the Clarté movement. Scharp, Karin Boye, the sisters Märta and Ulla and a number of other intellectuals published the magazine Spektrum in 1931–1933, in which Scharp introduced André Gide and Gunnar Ekelöf’s translation of his play Falskmyntarna [The Counterfeiters].

In January 1932, Karin Boye visited Scharp to engage in psychotherapy; during the stay, Boye and Scharp, and a couple of other friends, went to listen to Göring’s propaganda speech for Hitler as a presidential candidate. Swedish tourists in Berlin, clueless or positive about what was really going on, could then be seen strolling around with blue-and-yellow swastika buttons on homemade ill-fitting SA uniforms, and appeared ridiculous even to those who wore the original.

All the while circles in Sweden, for instance the newspaper Dagsposten, to which the German state provided financial support, and with the Swedish-German Association as a platform, prepared for accession to greater Germany. Scharp experienced how Nazism grew and sought to sound the alarm in Swedish newspapers. In Nya Dagligt Allehanda he described 1934, under a pseudonym, since he was then a state employee in Hitler’s Germany, the seizure of power and ‘the night of the long knives’ (June 30 and July 1, 1934).

Public opinion in England and Sweden were thoroughly affected by Hitlerian human discrimination. Swedish cultural life was well infiltrated; in October 1935, the Berlin University Chorus was welcomed at the Stockholm Opera, citing ‘noble German theatrical traditions’. The choir played Aeschylus The Persians, the classic drama of the victor’s compassion for the defeated – ‘a cynical and planned cultural political hoax action’, ‘a deceitful celebration of the victor Hitler’s noble courage against his beaten enemies’, comments Scharp.

This occurred three weeks after the executioner’s cut in the Nuremberg Law’s Aryan clause when Germany’s Jewish population was excluded from civil rights, and this ‘in a country’, Scharp writes, ‘where they, for generations, have made contributions to cultural and social life’.

The production at the Stockholm Opera literally played into the hands of the Nazis. There was also a micro level of cultural propaganda: German language teachers were sent as fellows to Scandinavia and England to spread Nazism in an appetizing and deceitful way with language examples à la ‘The Führer has created order’ (in German). The fellows then reported home on various social circles and their attitudes towards the Hitler Empire. As Scharp writes, the system was carefully thought out. For the propaganda, ‘grammar examples had a higher coefficient than swastika pamphlets’.

William Scharp and other Nazi critics in Berlin behaved professionally; sometimes spectator-wise, sometimes with direct protest. At first, Scharp sought to maintain strategic contacts within the Nazi Party, and in 1931 he tried to get an interview with Goebbels and sketch out a study plan for Göring’s son, which, however, resulted in Göring trying to get him removed from the lectureship. Herbert Tingsten shared Scharp’s opinion on Hitler’s Germany and visited the friend in Berlin until 1936. Through contact with Göring, Scharp was able to arrange a meeting between Tingsten and Göring, according to Tingsten in an article in Dagens Nyheter 8/7 1962, ’Möte med nazismen’ [‘Meeting Nazism’].

Although Scharp’s teaching at the university was supervised by a uniformed SA student, it seemed, by its own admission, as ‘fresh air vents for responsive misfits in the realm of the new community of people’. In Scharp’s eyes, Germany was a problem child of Europe whom it was dangerous to allow to isolate, and he warned against abandoning the democratic forces in the country.

Together with the Vicar of the Church of Sweden, Scharp acted against the Ministry of Propaganda, and especially two Swedish-German friendship associations that conspired to make a Nazi coup in the Church of Sweden in Berlin. Daringly, Scharp also sought to correct Nazis. In 1933–1934, he published three articles in their own periodicals with content that runs counter to the view the Nazis often had of Sweden. The message is directed against racial ideology and the right of the strong and advocates a Swedish democracy practice with roots in Engelbrekt.

The lectureship in Berlin lasted until Scharp was fired by the Nazis in 1936. The dismissal was preceded by the interruption in 1933, when, on Göring’s initiative, he was to be replaced by a Nazi, but after critical publicity in Swedish newspapers was allowed to keep the position. When he finally lost it, he had experienced the Weimar Republic for five years and the transition to the Nazi dictatorship for three years. Back in Sweden, Vilhelm Scharp took the position as grammar schoolteacher at the newly built Sveaplan gymnasium for girls in Stockholm.

With anti-Nazi purpose and on behalf of the Foreign Ministry, Scharp made eight trips to Berlin after his repatriation. He became involved in the anti-Nazi associations Nordens Frihet and The Tuesday Club – one of the lectures he gave at these associations is included in Labyrinten [The Labyrinth]– and participated in helping exiles, including his wife Isabel Neuberger, who at the end of the war fled Berlin with her valuables sewn into her clothes.

Scharp acted as a reporter and consultant to the Swedish government on Nazi German propaganda in Sweden and on the Swedish Nazis’ contacts with the country and he became active in the governing body of the Cooperation Board for Democratic Construction Work (SDU), founded in 1943 by Alva Myrdal, Torgny Segerstedt and Herbert Tingsten. On the board, he was active with study circles, courses and lectures that taught Swedish-style welfare state democracy to refugees in Sweden.

After 1945, Scharp took a seat as a member of the Swedish Institute’s lecturer council and in the 1950s he wrote several articles for Dagens Nyheter, such as ’Hitler som fredsängel’ [‘Hitler as angel of peace’] and ’Gäster hos diktaturen’ [‘Guests of the dictatorship’]. Scharp also criticized Swedish historical research for a lack of interest in the refugees, the German emigrants to Sweden must be interviewed, he said, as they had gained insight into ‘the most skilled and effective political counterfeiting workshop that has existed to date’.

In 1944, Scharp began working on a retrospective documentary book that would depict the memories of the rise of Nazism and its ideological roots, a book on the historical evolution of Nazism: How could a civilized, liberal, and democratic country like the Weimar Republic become Nazi?

The thesis Scharp wanted to champion highlighted, among other things, the importance of Wandervögel – the youth movement that propagated independence, against discipline in school, against nationalism and chauvinism, but which after the First World War began to celebrate the opposite: honor, duty, uniforms, and obedience, as well as learning to use weapons as toys at an early age. The movement developed rapidly in an anti-humanist, primitivist direction and turned into easy prey for Nazism.

That’s how Scharp understood the development of Nazism, says Andreas Åkerlund. The publisher Wahlström & Widstrand expressed interest in publishing the script, but sadly Scharp died (1978) before the project was completed. Andreas Åkerlund further believes that Scharp’s position was indeed actively anti-Nazi – but based on what we know today about Nazi German policy and its methods, it can still be called naïve.

It should be borne in mind that it is only in the late 1960s and in the 1970s that to openly take a stand on burning international issues becomes an exemplary compassionate attitude. And then partly as a reaction to the general appeasement during World War II.

The collection contains, in addition to the essays, an extensive interview from 1929 with Vilhelm Scharp’s generational comrade Erich Maria Remarque, the author of the soldier testimony of World War I, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929).

• Vilhelm Scharp, Labyrinten, Minnen från Tyskland under 1920- och -30-talen och andra skrifter, utgivna av Andreas Åkerlund, Stockholm: Kungliga biblioteket, 2016.
• Föredrag av Vilhelm Scharp, Sveriges Radio, 1963.
• Barbro Alving, Det stod aldrig i tidningen, Stockholm: Bonniers, 1963, se Litteraturbanken.
• Rune Carlsson, Tredje rikets herrar och andra, Stockholm: Sohlman, 1945.

Originally published in Swedish 5 December 2021 AAM #18

© Arimneste Anima Museum # 21/22

Författaren Jack London från Kalifornien besökte den brittiska huvudstadens fattigkvarter i tre månader. Sannolikt inspirerad av Nellie Blys artiklar nästan hundra år före Günter Wallraff hade han tidigare skildrat sina erfarenheter av att arbeta och bo i perifera miljöer. Resultatet blev Avgrundens folk från 1903 – ett reportage som ställer naturlivets hårda men delade villkor mot stadsmisären där de boende tvingas utstå nio ton sot och tjära varje vecka i luften från fabrikerna. Människor av vilka var fjärde slutar sitt liv på fattighuset, arbetshuset, fattigsjukhuset eller dårhuset.

Människor som pådyvlats oduglighet genom förfärliga arbetsvillkor. Nedbrutna kroppar av murbruk och damm som ansamlar sig i lungorna och blyförgiftning som skördar fler än kulor och kanoner. Krukmakare, kalkarbetare, stenarbetare, stålarbetare, blyvittsarbetare; sömmerskor, skotillverkare, borsttillverkare, blomsterarbetare med dubbel börda som maka och mor i hemmet. Låga löner, trångboddhet, felnäring, undernäring, brist på rent vatten. Utplundrade arbetare – ja, lika illa som arbetsdjuren – någon sitter och rider på hennes rygg, utropar Jack London indignerat.

Argumentationen är genomskådande och pedagogisk. Femtiofem procent av barnen i det fattiga East End överlever inte sin femårsdag – en värre siffra än under Herodes härjningar. Vore det inte väl att följa den gyllene regeln och inse att ett ställe där en inte skulle vilja att ens eget barn växte upp, knappast är ett ställe för något barn att växa upp? Författaren skapar kamratlig kontakt och talar till läsarens sunda förnuft och goda hjärta. Det är patos, hoppfullhet – och politik. Samhället bröstar sig över att ha ökat sin produktionsförmåga, men det har inte ökat vars och en levnadslott. Något är fel med den civilisatoriska förvaltningen.

I höstas utgavs Londons socialreportage på nytt på svenska. Men hur skulle en ny översättning kunna överflygla Maj Frischs lysande tolkning? Pondusen, fräschören och klarheten. De idiomatiska fraserna hon hittar i svenskan. Meningsbyggnaden som förmedlar textens schwung. Översättningen är virtuos och ger känslan av att Jack London vistades i Sibirien eller på Söder i Stockholm – inte i Londons East End som var fallet i verkligheten.

Sedan tidigare har jag källan People of the Abyss från 1903. I den ser jag att platsöverföringen verkligen beror på Maj Frischs stilöverföring, inte på att texten skulle vara mindre trogen originalet. På endast ett par ställen har hon ansett bisatsen olämplig. Christian Ekvalls nyöversättning följer källspråket i kommateringen, reportaget genomgår inte en förvandling som vore det en berättelse om Stockholm i nutid. Läsaren blir påmind om det främmande, orden strikt valda efter betydelsen.

Jag lägger originalet People of the Abyss bredvid de två översättningarna: Så var det menat – och så blev det. Ritning (äldre) möter byggtekniker (av senare slag) och farkosterna flyter. Men att avgöra vilken av dem jag föredrar – där går jag bet. Läser jag vid detta tillfälle för att njuta av språket? Reflektera över resonemangen? Föreställa mig en annan geografisk plats och dess invånare?

Eller i första hand för att jämföra med dagens förhållanden och debatter? Visst kan en mena att författaren London turistar i eländet – som privilegierad kan denne lämna platsen så snart materialet samlats in. När People of the Abyss gavs ut klagade The Globe 11/3 1903: ”Varför ska en amerikan komma hit och skriva om något som redan dokumenterats till leda?” Pall Mall Gazette däremot ansåg att det handlade om ”en unik och fantastiskt kraftfull essä”.

John Griffith ”Jack” Cheney London (1876–1916) växte upp som enda barn till en ensamstående förälder. Fostran av Jack anförtroddes åt Virginia Jennie Prentiss, afro-amerikansk granne med erfarenhet av slaveriet i den amerikanska södern. År 1901 ställde han upp som socialistkandidat i borgmästarvalet i Oakland, och igen 1905 – samma år han ingick äktenskap med feministen Charmian Kittredge. Och så småningom blev han, mera känt, en av USA:s främsta bästsäljande författare.

Så hur förhåller sig Avgrundens folk till tidigare facklitterära verk av vita manliga författare som attackerar sekelskiftets brittiska misär? Jag konsulterar min bokhylla, skummar litteraturlistor och noter i verk från samtiden – och hittar George Robert Gissings The Neither World från 1889, George Haws No Room to Live från 1900, Jacob Riis How the Other Half Lives från 1890 (nyutgiven på engelska 2021) och H.G. Wells Anticipation från 1901 – samt det tio år äldre verket Merrie England från 1893 av Robert Blatchford, en för mig okänd författare som citeras flera gånger i originalupplagan av People of the Abyss.

Liksom Jack London växte Robert Blatchford (1851–1943) upp i ett hem med en förälder. För att bidra till försörjningen sattes han att tillverka skoborstar; senare tog han värvning för att undkomma livet i slummen, varefter han lyckades ta sig in i tidningsbranschen och grunda Clarion, en unik veckotidning som fortlevde i över ett halvt sekel. Merrie England var hans debut och gavs ut i en ordinarie upplaga, därefter i en billighetsupplaga. Denna utgåva – en bok, en penny – bekostades av författaren själv och måste sälja i 600 000 exemplar för att gå jämnt upp.

Vilket överträffades – totalt sålde boken i två miljoner exemplar. Jag får tag i titeln på ett antikvariat i Essex i UK, och efter ett par veckor singlar den in genom brevinkastet, en tunn sak som förlorat sitt omslag, men som fängslar med doft av tryckåret 1908. Eller om det är det gångna seklets anhopning av dofter. Bäst att bläddra försiktigt i de tunna sidorna! Vad har denna bok, köpt av så många, att erbjuda?

Dra er till minnes Annie Besant och andras kamp mot slaveriet på engelsk mark. 1870-talets lärlingssystem där de upproriska bland barnarbetarna satt med järnringar som spikats fast runt fotleden, fästade i långa kedjor som nådde upp till höften. Hur de tvingades att arbeta och sova i dessa bojor; unga kvinnor, flickor och gossar. Minns Fabriksarbetarrörelsen, Lord Shaftesburys ansträngningar och Miss Elizabeth Barrett Brownings dikt ”The Cry of the Children” från 1843! Dokumentationen i parlamentets officiella inspektioner och undersökningsrapporter och de blå böckerna. Barnen som leddes ut i ljuset – magra och snedväxta på grund av arbetet sedan tidig ålder liknande deras siluetter krokiga bokstäver mot himlen.

Blommor växer inte utan ljus och vatten, påminner författaren; men om människorna inser vi inte att samma sak gäller; att människor blir olika på grund av omständigheter och behöver mer än nödtorft: ledighet, bildning, självkänsla, strävan. Varför ska just kolgruvearbetaren, vävaren, järnvägsarbetaren dömas till tråkigt och förfärande 53–70 timmars slit och släp var vecka? En fjärdedel av arbetet skulle kunna ge hela befolkningen ett fullt tjänligt liv. Varför denna överproduktion – måste arbetarfamiljen pådyvlas simpelhet – smaklös kost, smaklösa kläder, smaklösa möbler och dito nöjen? Ska inte också landets arbetare få ta del av kulturen, naturen, känna sig förfinade och vara bildade?

Betänk all misshushållning med människokraft och människoliv, och hur obehövligt det fortsätter att vara. Inga tjänare och få arbetare är så hårt ansträngda och så illa betalda som den brittiska arbetarhustrun – hennes liv är ett enda slaveri! Allmänna bad, tvättstugor, matsalar, offentliga teatrar, parker, konserthallar, gymnastikhallar, höghus, trädgårdar skulle kunna befria henne och barnen som borde ges gratis kost, kläder, uppfostran, musikskola, föreläsningssalar liksom järnvägarna, posten och godstrafiken borde vara avgiftsfria på samma sätt som redan broarna och landsvägarna.

Så ger författaren sig på Manchesterskolan, den ”kommersiella skolan”: Förespråkarna har fel när de hävdar att utan fri tävlan och handel skulle det inte finnas något för britterna att leva på. Det behövs ingen kamp för tillvaron, ingen kapitalism, ingen tävlan för att skapa ett drägligt liv för alla; Englands natur ger möjligheter att föda en tre gånger så stor befolkning; landet kan använda vattenkraft och klara sig utan fabriksskorstenar, utan mammonsdyrkare, avfall, sot och svavel!

Men det handlar inte om att med våld ta de rikas egendom och dela ut den bland de fattiga, poängterar författaren. Förändringar ska inte kuppas igenom. De ska spridas genom folkbildning och via ett politiskt parti som ivrar för reformer som ger alla arbete, pensioner, självhushållning, bostäder, förkortad arbetstid, bättre löner, avskaffar naturförstörelsen och inför statlig kontroll av jord och produktionsmedel. Vad England ännu saknar är arbetarrepresentation: Bland landets 27 miljoner människor finns i parlamentet inte ens en liten del arbetare, nej, inte ens ett dussin!

Det är bestickande hur Avgrundens folk delar Merrie Englands värderingar, resonemang och stil; protesten mot det samtida konkurrenstänkandet, fabriksarbetets socioekonomiska elände, förstörelsen av naturen. Båda titlarna använder ett effektivt du-tilltal för att nå den stora allmänheten: Merrie England riktar sig till en Mr Smith, men polemiserar mot fabrikörer och deras försvarare i parlamentet; Avgrundens folk talar direkt till den anonyma läsarens bättre jag. Båda använder modernt språk – så rättframt och rappt hade väl knappast någon lagt fram saken tidigare!

Kan alltså Blatchford sägas ha varit profeten och Jack London vittnet som brukade Blatchfords idag förbigångna bok som karta? Ja, så framstår relationen. Verket levererar även ett handlingsprogram för arbetarrevolution genom parlamentarism. Och ja, i Laurence Victor Thompsons biografi Portrait of an Englishman från 1951 läser jag att Blatchford kandiderade till det brittiska parlamentet – år före Jack London försökte sig på den politiska banan.

Men Jack Londons bok är inte ett traktat, utan ett reportage. Alltså jämför jag två lika läsvärda titlar, med liknande innehåll, från samma tid – som nyttjar olika genrer. Men är det enda skillnaden? Blatchfords essäsamling översattes till tyska, spanska, nederländska, hebreiska, italienska och walesiska – och till svenska av SAP:s förlag redan 1896: Det glada England, samhället sådant det är och sådant det borde vara, 237 sidor, översättning A.F. Åkerberg med efterskrift av Hjalmar Branting.

Jag beställer från ett svenskt antikvariat där jag lyckosamt nog hittar boken som förstautgåva. I efterskriften hyllar Branting bokens ”gedigna plädering” för ”Ruskins konstnärssocialism”, utmaningen av ”Manchesterskolans” industrialisering och frihandel: ”[E]n inblick i hur modärn socialism tar sig ut, sedd genom engelskt temperament.” Men hos Branting finns också en reservation mot bokens ”öfverdrivna känslosvall inför de ideella motiven, det stora Målet”.

I hemlandet kom Merrie England att anses ”ha gjort mer för att sprida arbetarsaken än något annat skrivet verk” (Aberdeen Press & Journal 18/12 1943) och dess författare ha varit ”en av den brittiska journalistikens mest virila och övertygande pennor” med ”en elegans, charm och skärpa som överträffas av få författare i världen” (Liverpool Echo 20/12 1943). Så varför har inte Det glada England – såsom Avgrundens folk – levt vidare in i vår tid?

Jag läser om de båda författarna som personer i offentligheten: Jack London var internationalist, men ska ha tagit med sig en rasistisk hållning gentemot Japan efter att ha tjänstgjort vid fronten under första världskriget. Han ska även ha ställt sig positiv till rashygien – en allmänt accepterad åsikt i tiden. Robert Blatchford förhöll sig avvisande till rashygien, tog tidigt och öppet ställning mot Tyskland under världskrigen, men var negativ till immigration. Båda författarna uttryckte sympati för kvinnors kamp för lika rätt.

Men min spårning gäller två verk, inte författarnas politiska åsikter såsom andra bedömt dem. Ett svar på frågan om Merrie Englands död finner jag ett femtiotal sidor in i den svenska översättningen. Plötsligt studsar vådliga schabloner mot mig; om penningutlånare, och lägre och högre människotyper. Har jag missat dessa meningar när jag läste boken på engelska? Jag letar i de tunna sidorna i pennyutgåvan från 1908. Förvisso har jag missat ett märkligt Carlyle-citat, men formuleringarna går inte att finna eller är annorlunda skrivna.

Så varifrån kommer de? Jag hittar originalet från 1894 på nätet, och kan konstatera att översättaren inte varit självsvåldig; styckena står där verkligen. Förvisso ges här även råd om att inte förakta mindre ansedda minoritetsgrupper – vilket föreslår att författaren i första hand brukat de fördomsfulla schablonerna i retoriskt syfte. Men tyvärr är det något som bara hjälper marginellt: andra stycken hävdar mänsklighetens uppdelning i höga och låga typer.

Alltså är 1908 års upplaga, billighetsboken jag läste först, en korrigerad version. De vådliga styckena har ändrats eller ersatts med kosmopolitiska exempel och litterära citat; att boken utgavs på egna förlaget Clarion bör ha underlättat redigeringen. Och den svenska översättningen? Vad hände med den? Jag ser att titeln gavs ut på nytt 1906 och att Stockholms universitetsbibliotek har ett exemplar tillgängligt.

När jag slår upp sidorna sjunker hjärtat: texten är densamma som i förstaupplagan. Var det så allmänt förekommande med rysliga fördomar att ingen noterade dem ens vid en nyutgåva? Läsarten sådan att det hela ansågs vara uttryck för folklig litterär jargong? Vilken betydelse fick slik rasism en passant för de stämningar och åsikter som kom att utnyttjas före och under andra världskriget? Hur många tog till sig en arbetarhumanistisk bok som i små doser förmedlade anti-semitism och hierarkiskt rastänkande?

Jag letar i förlagets protokoll och verksamhetsberättelser på Arbetarrörelsens arkiv och bibliotek i Huddinge: utgivningsåret 1896 hade översättningen ”en strykande åtgång” och bidrog till att sätta fart på broschyr- och bokutgivningen och medlemsantalet. Men någon försäljning som i England och USA handlade det aldrig om. Andra upplagan 1906 trycktes i tretusen exemplar och sålde i snitt trehundra exemplar om året.

Fyndet av Robert Blatchfords Det glada England förnyar mitt intresse för Jack Londons Avgrundens folk. Boken är utan nedsättande meningar; dialogen i polemik mot rådande främlingsfientlighet; det inledande stycket i kapitlet ”Oduglighet” solidariskt med judiska immigranter.

Men Merrie England har historiskt värde. Som föregångare i ärende och litterär stil; som exempel på hur vanligt förekommande det var med inflikade fördomar i övrigt progressiv facklitteratur. Dess upplagor gör saken synlig och får Avgrundens folk att lysa som undantag. Som författaren ska ha yttrat, enligt Thompsons biografi: ”Det är inte bara nödvändigt att vi förbättrar våra villkor – vi måste också förbättra oss själva. Dessutom måste vi börja med oss själva.”

• Jack London, People of the Abyss, replica of the original published by Macmillan in 1903, New York: Cosimo Classics, 2021
• Jack London, Avgrundens folk, översättning Maj Frisch [ny utg.], Stockholm: Norstedts, 2014
• Jack London, Avgrundens folk, översättning Christian Ekvall, Lund: Bakhåll, 2021
• Robert Blatchford, Merrie England, 1894, London: Clarion Press, internet PDF
• Robert Blatchford, Merrie England, by Robert Blatchford, editor of the Clarion, London: Clarion Press, 1908
• Robert Blatchford, Det glada England, sådant det är och sådant det borde vara, översättning A. F. Åkerberg, Stockholm: SAP:s förlag, 1896 samt andra upplagan, Jönköping, 1906
• Laurence Victor Thompson, Robert Blatchford, Portrait of an Englishman, London: Gollancz, 1951

25/3 2022

Publicerad i en kortversion i Syre 5/5 2022.

© Arimneste Anima Museum #20

the rediscovered suffragette

Emmeline Pankhurst with daughters Sylvia, Christabel, Adela? Time magazine once named the suffragette leader one of the hundred most important people of the 20^th century. Millicent  Fawcett? Not as well known, but yes, of course – the one who led the law-abiding branch of the same movement.

And Charlotte Despard? Although famous among reformers of her time, not least as the founder of the most long-lived of the British women’s suffrage organisations, this fighter has largely fallen out of history. Perhaps the omission has to do with the fact that Charlotte Despard declared herself to be a socialist, and that the suffragette movement, despite the different demands of the overall women’s movement, is often portrayed as a bourgeois matter?

Or, on the contrary, that as a defected Victorian lady, she cannot be imagined as a suffragette? Maybe prejudice about age comes into play? The fact that Despard was well over forty when she started her activist career and nearly seventy when she formed the Women’s Freedom League (WFL) to promote the situation of female workers as crucial arguments for women’s suffrage?

Whatever the reason: highlighting Charlotte Despard is not only valuable in itself, but it also makes the image of the women’s suffrage movement more whole. Margaret Mulvihill’s Charlotte Despard, A Biography (London: Pandora 1989) and recently Lynne Graham-Matheson and Helen Matheson-Pollock’s Mrs Despard and the Suffrage Movement (Yorkshire: Pen & Sword History 2020) contribute to this.

The latter, in particular, follows Despard’s activism – which began at a time when a woman of her social class and age was expected to wait for the end of life in a corner of a private garden. All in contrast to old men who could look forward to increased activity and more powers in public life. One line of hers shows how she tackled  the question: ‘When I was twenty, I was older than I am today.’ Uttered, by the way, long before Bob Dylan and Back pages’ ‘I’m  younger  than  that  now’ – and the author Dorothy Carnegie’s ‘Don’t  grow old – grow  up!’

At just over 40, Charlotte Despard’s husband died, and she  was widowed. By law a woman of majority, she dressed in long veils and sandals – eventually her hallmark – and moved from a large house of servants to the poor quarter of Nine Elms in Battersea, London. Here, she used her husband’s capital to serve nutritious vegetable food, offering reading events and other activities to single mothers and their children, meaning most people in the area.

In Battersea, an urban counterculture arose; labour rights, women’s rights, poor care, prisoners’ rights; animal rights, vegetarianism; the independence of India and Ireland respectively; Charlotte Despard was elected to sit on many committees and became a valued speaker who used poetry to reach the audience. At one point, she was knocked over and hit in the head by a rock from an anti-voting mob – however, this did not stop her from entering the stage. In Margaret Mulvihill’s  biography, she is photographed as a passionate eighty-nine-year-old speaker at a major anti-fascist rally in Trafalgar Square in 1933.

Like many women’s rights campaigners, Charlotte Despard engaged in writing as well. The bibliography includes nine novels and a number of titles of non-fiction, including a 1913 title on women’s economic conditions. Statistics showed that the majority – seventy-two per cent – of the poorest consisted of women and children, who were not infrequently industrial workers. Labour struggle was therefore a struggle for women, and the revolution in the form of a flurry of gradual reforms, must be about overturning patriarchy. One way was to employ the ballot box. In 1918, when women became eligible for Parliament, Charlotte Despard stood for the Independent Workers’ Party in a campaign led by John Archer, neighbour of hers in Battersea, the first black mayor in London and one of the first in Great Britain.

After the country’s government ignored the demands of the suffrage movement in 1912, and several suffragettes died as a result of police violence on the streets and force-feeding in prison, a faction began to resort to guerrilla methods: fires, sabotage, and destruction of state and private property. The Women’s Freedom League, largely the work of Charlotte  Despard, and formed in 1907, offered alternatives to the path taken: civil disobedience in the aftermath of Hortensia in ancient Rome, Thoreau, and later Gandhi, who in turn was inspired by the suffragette movement.

In addition to female workers, the WFL gathered the movement’s vegetarians, artists, writers, non-heterosexuals; encouraged creativity in the fight and, as an organisation, distanced itself from violence. The association organised tax resistance, actions of civil disobedience in Parliament, hikes, and tours across the country and – perhaps most worth noting – boycotting of the 1911 census. More than 10,000 people left home and work and gathered in public places in protest of the misogynistic laws.

Unlike Pankhurst and Fawcett, during World War I, the WFL and Charlotte Despard continued to work for the equal suffrage of all women. She advocated pacifism and welfare policy and founded several peace organizations in defiance of public opinion and the government’s line.

In 1918, women over the age of 30 received the right to vote, given that they owned or rented a house or had a university degree. Ten years later, in 1928, equal voting rights were introduced for most groups of men and women over the age of 21. Residents in the female category in the empire overseas were still left out of the suffrage reform. In India, women were only given the right to vote when the country gained independence from The United Kingdom (1947). Charlotte Despard’s  WFL was then the only remaining voting association. The organization lasted until 1961.

When the Soviet Union was debated in England in 1930, Charlotte Despard and a number of sympathizers went there to make an assessment of their own. To be presented with realized ideals seems to have been overwhelming – in any case, the group did not manage to detect any problems. In their eventual defence, one may say that they did not know what we know today about the use of fraudulent propaganda.

Charlotte Despard belonged to a radical political direction on a spiritual basis in opposition to all forms of cruelty and injustice to man and animal. As a Catholic, Republican, vegetarian, suffragette, pacifist, socialist, and anti-fascist, she made many friends during her 50-year career – but also enemies. It would be strange and sad if this fact – she died abandoned and without resources – would lead to her work and methods of struggle being forgotten. Charlotte Despard has a place in public education next to Pankhurst and Fawcett – and along with the many who gave their all for a better society.

• Charlotte Despard: A Biography by Margaret Mulvihill, London: Pandora, 1989
• Mrs Despard and the Suffrage Movement by Helen Matheson-Pollock and Lynne Graham-Matheson: Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Books, 2020
• Earlier book: An Unhusbanded Life, Charlotte Despard, Suffragette, Socialist, and Sinn Féiner by Andro Linklater, London: Hutchinson, 1980
• Time Magazine, article by Marina Warner, June 14^th 1999.

Published in Swedish in Syre 10 September 2021

Photographs:

• Charlotte Despard and Mrs Cobden-Sanderson arrested waiting to hand over a petition to Mr Asquith at 10 Downing Str., London. Unknown photographer, halftone postcard print, August 19^th 1909, Public Domain
• Charlotte Despard as President of the Women’s Freedom League, portrait by Mary Evans/Fawcett Library; illustration no 5 in Margaret Mulvihill’s biography
• Mayor John Archer, November 10^th 1913, Public Domain

© Arimneste Anima Museum # 18

A since long missing witness account

As a documentary writer one has to make an existential decision: If that which one is documenting appears to be an assault; ought one allow it to continue? Or should one interfere? What, more precisely, may decide which?

For one and a half century, non-humans have been objectified in slaughterhouses without being guilty of anything other than having been born. In post-industrial society it is a conundrum: Why has the meat industry not yet been transformed to attune with what is today known about the needs and rights of animals? How can it be that slaughterhouses are still operating? How is it possible that this phenomenon, the original model of concentrations camps, is allowed today? Is the reason that the public is not demanding the truth to be disclosed; that the drama of slaughter all too seldom becomes the object for muck-racking articles, critique, and performative representation?

Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle about the conditions in the slaughterhouses of Chicago was published in 1906 (in Swedish 1906, 1925, 1928, 1945, 1950, 1977, 1983); Ruth Harrison raised awareness about the industrial aspects in Animal Machines 1965; the artist Sue Coe defied the industry’s prohibition to take photos, by drawing, in Dead Meat 1995; the investigator Gail Eisnitz interviewed slaughterhouse workers in Slaughterhouse 1997; Timothy Patchirat researched by participation in Every Twelve Seconds 2011; the poet Ted Genoways conveyed the story behind American pork in The Chain 2014.

In Sweden, the journalist Gun Lauritzson wrote about the working conditions in Aftonbladet 1980; the organization Djurrättsalliansen has several times documented the factories; the photographer Erik Lindegren exhibited Walls of Glass; Scenkonstgruppen played Grismanifestet at Theatre Brunnsgatan fyra; the veterinary student Felicia Hogrell called out in Expressen this autumn; Norun Haugen disclosed the Norwegian pork business 2019 (recently aired on Swedish television) by asking: If the animals are treated as humanely as is asserted, why am I not allowed to come and see them?

To this not enough noticed tradition the veterinarian Lina Gustafsson adds a witness report that until today has been missing. The veterinarian as testifier finds herself standing in the middle of skin parts, throats, hearts, cut up organs; concrete evidence for deeds, however not perceived as such. The matter is depicted hyper realistically without fauna metaphors – ‘under my boots some part from a trachea has got stuck’ – and forms a three months long moment of arthritis, inflammation in the breast, bronchitis, abscesses and cancer in limping, coughing beings showered to be taken down in the dysphonia and panic of carbon dioxide before they are cut with a knife to blead to death and transform into sausage, cutlet, pork loin.

The speed and the stress are on the maximal while at the same time all is standing still. Bodies are forced, beaten with tools, screaming, collapsing in acute stress reaction, trying persistently to escape, resisting. It is aridity and tragedy: big-raised bodies equipped with social capacity, mental ability, and olfaction – sharper than Canis lupus familiaris – in constant process of production.

The course towards participation is relentless. From the first pig leaving the crowded transport, scrutinized, and slaughtered without interference, to the first signature soon becoming many more, and then without a thought. The veterinarian resists and tries to keep her capacity for empathy and sympathy intact; to see and assist the individuals, but the pace and the high numbers thwarts her exertion. She counts the days as if she were scribbling them down on a prison cell wall: one, two, three until the last eighty fifth day.

Here, there is no achievable animal welfare, only degrees in hell. More or less sickness, many or not so many beatings. The only thing that can be done is to kill the animals “a little earlier”. Since the wrongdoing is fundamental, everything with the aim of solving or alleviating becomes absurd and the workers, without exception of male gender, may “thump” the all too familiar objects as an honest and logical act: nice ordinary people situated in a paid behavioural role, and the fellow being, the animal, is transformed, from creature to anonymous thing. So, the rational mind begins to demand responsibility: Who am I doing or contributing to this? Where do I stand in this production apparatus of death, this microcosm of doom?

After the second world war, strategists within the American military discovered an effective method to do away with the human resentment for hurting others; let the soldiers shoot digitally while listening to their favourite music in headphones. The method was employed in industrial assembly line production, assisting workers in coping and even performing well in jobs with the highest employee turnover. Headphones with music in the ears of the workers facilitated the late modern slaughtering business.

Thus, hell could be perceived as tolerable workday. With emphasis on perceived: In the study Killing for a Living from University of Colorado, USA, 2015 Anna Dorovskikh found that slaughterhouse workers risk being affected by a specific type of post traumatic participatory stress. The PTSD Journal explains: “These employees are hired to kill animals, such as pigs and cows, that are largely gentle creatures. Carrying out this action requires workers to disconnect from what they are doing and from the creature standing before them. This emotional dissonance can lead to consequences such as domestic violence, social withdrawal, anxiety, drug and alcohol abuse, and PTSD.”

The last chain in participation afflicts the consumer. In the 1870s the patriarchal upper class meat production was scaled up to become people food; leading to large areas of forests being felled to meet accelerated land and water demands (herding and fodder), emissions of nitrogen, ammoniac, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane (evaporation and excrement), animal-transferred epidemics and pandemics (zoonosis) such as COVID-19. Commercial killing in slaughterhouses became intimately connected with the planetary crisis.

Today, the consequences are acute: the risk of getting COVID-19 affects vulnerable groups (the elderly, the sick, refugees, prisoners, workers), imply lost jobs, large societal costs; countries, continents, and cities in quarantine. In February, China inaugurated a ban for consumption and trade with wild animals. To be able to evade new viruses, the international and Swedish animal agricultural politics must follow suit, give support to the alternatives (pea protein, mushroom protein, tempeh among others), and in this way hasten the much-needed structural transformation.

The author Maja Ekelöf’s Rapport från en skurhink [Report from a cleaning bucket] from 1970 was by Karl Vennberg written about as the hitherto most lucid and incontestable image of Swedish low pay workday during the 1960s. The same may be stated in reference to Lina Gustafsson’s image of Swedish workday in a slaughterhouse 2020. The truth is revealed, and the emperor stands naked.

However, for the book’s testimony to gain full significance, there is need for media commitment, and a veritable people uprising. According to the organization Human Rights Watch, slaughter work is a crime against human rights. And yes, not having to kill for commercial purposes ought to be a human right. And not having to be raised to be killed ought to be an animal right. A lot more is on the line than we used to think.

• Lina Gustafsson, Rapport från ett slakteri, en veterinärs berättelse, Stockholm: Natur & Kultur 2020

Translated from the Swedish, published in FemPers 23rd of March 2020

© Arimneste Anima Museum # 14

Historical Amnesia and Progression

The historic opening of academia in Europe, to a large extent driven by social movements, making attendance possible for the categories of women, people of enslaved and manual labouring descent, other categorized groups, and dissenters/non-compliers, will continue to revolutionize knowledge and research by transforming traditionally conceived notions of epistemology, methodology, and the history of science. Still, there are far-reaching perspectives that remain to be generally embraced as urgent areas for research. In this article, such an issue is highlighted by focusing on texts by a historical person who was defamed and convicted because she explored topics in her time that were subjected to formal or informal censorship; women’s rights, the abolition of slavery, and the human – non-human relationship. I find it fruitful to use the concept ‘category of women’ and/or ‘female category’ to emphasize that the term woman has existed and exists as a legal category maintained by influential societal forces and institutions. Of specific relevance to my topic are the circumstances during the French Revolution when the binary and hierarchical classifying of people according to sex and gender was continuously utilized to formally exclude people in the female category from active citizenship and political organizing.

‘But the conservative avoided her and her book as social plagues. Many people would not even look at what she had written. Satisfied with the old-fashioned way of treating the subjects therein discussed, they would not run the risk of finding out that they were wrong,’ said Elizabeth Robins Pennell in her book Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (Robins Pennell 1884: 173). Robins Pennell was referring to Mary Wollstonecraft, but the same could be said about Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793). Olympe de Gouges wrote The Rights of Woman (Les droits de la femme) containing the Declaration on Woman and the Female Citizen (Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne) in 1791 and Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 1792. Perhaps the two political philosophers met in Paris during the French revolution: Wollstonecraft on a long visit from England, and de Gouges as a playwright journeying from one social class to another in the big city. Or did they know of each other from hearsay? The way they had heard about the North American Attakullakulla’s questioning of ‘the imbalance, disorder, and violence of white colonial society’ when he negotiated with the British: ‘Where are your women?’ (Moore, Brooks and Wigginton 2012: 179). And, perhaps, in the way the two literary activists embraced the universal humanist declaration stated by the chairperson of the Cherokee Women’s Council Nanye’his, echoing across the revolutionary Atlantic world, to the white men in 1781: ‘[W]e are your mothers. This peace must last forever. Let your women’s sons be ours, and let our sons be yours. Let your women hear our words’ (Moore, Brooks and Wigginton 2012: 180). And, perhaps, in the way de Gouges had read Hannah More’s long anti-racist poem Slavery from 1788:’ Does then th’ immortal principle within / Change with the casual colour of a skin?’ (Moore, Brooks and Wigginton 2012: 213).

Which were the possible contacts and philosophical trajectories of the European proto-feminists Wollstonecraft and de Gouges? Besides Lisa L. Moore’s, Joanna Brooks’ and Caroline Wigginton’s anthology Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions, not many have employed such a perspective. And, if one can speak of a body of Swedish Wollstonecraft-research, one can hardly do so in respect to de Gouges. The Swedish Library catalogue Libris’ list of titles gives a hint of the difference in attention: 8 titles in Swedish (of in total 49) for de Gouges, and 119 titles in Swedish (of in total 970) for Wollstonecraft. That is, almost fifteen times more interest for Wollstonecraft compared with de Gouges. What does this difference imply? That English nowadays is the academic language of priority and that the French language (and the Swedish language) is not? That most scholars prefer to use sources and research questions that can be reflected upon and published in English, thereby leading to increased chances of reaching more readers and getting more citations? Perhaps, but there are also other answers.

Probably the earliest text in Swedish about Olympe de Gouges (by a women’s rights champion) was written by Ellen Hagen (Hagen 1925). De Gouges’ Declaration on the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen has been translated into the Swedish language and published a few times, starting in the 1970s (Schimanski 1972; Ambjörnsson and Eriksson 1998; Österholm 2006). In our time, Kim West has translated the foreword to de Gouges’ play L’esclavage des nègres (Gouges 1789/2012) and I have translated a paragraph often left out both in Swedish and in English translations of de Gouges’ Rights of Woman (Gålmark 2013: 19; 2016: 17−18). De Gouges’ other texts, including her dramas, have not been published in Swedish. In recent years, magazine articles have been published about Olympe de Gouges in Swedish (Jarlsbo 2007; Kåreland 2010; Gålmark 2016b), however, in recently published Swedish collections of historical political key texts on women’s gender and sexuality, de Gouges’ Rights of Woman is missing.

A contributing factor to why de Gouges is not included in the Swedish canon of European gender history today may be that de Gouges’ texts do not suggest a given reading. The political publications – essays, pamphlets, posters – are both personal and political, inserted with short and amusing scenes taken from de Gouges’ own life. The texts appear naturalistic, freely created, full of temperament. The richness of associations, suggestions, didactic, and polemical points makes them entertaining – and difficult to interpret. However, there is a unique Olympe de Gouges-tone and a ditto style. Janie Venpée suggests that de Gouges’ political writing may be read as a theatre script of the author’s life drama (Venpée 1999). In Olympe de Gouges’ pamphlets, she is the hyper-talented and engaged author acting in a world in flames. In her Declaration… she is the expert of state with the constitution in her hand, a brilliant paraphrase of the Declaration of Human Rights from 1789, which in 1791, and to de Gouges’ disappointment, did not include people in the category of woman, people in the slave category, nor did it include men with a low income, male servants, or men under the age of 25.

Olympe de Gouges’ political texts oscillate; sometimes they are progressive, sometimes conservative; often they are marked by her autodidactic education of classical texts. Her work pushes, slows down, and evolves in relation to the revolutionary process. To read a proposition by Olympe de Gouges is to wait for the next text and the next event. It is telling that her Rights of Woman contains a post-script written from the contemporary cab (a horse-drawn carriage). In opposition to the rules of patriarchal society she moves around freely; in various rooms, and categories, by turns profound, by turns polemic and ironic; between the theatre and the home; between the city and the countryside; between dramas and pamphlets; marginalization and fame; slander and recognition. Between her ‘many small mistakes’ and her subsequent revisions (Gålmark 2016a: 9).

The French language was de Gouges’ second language after Occitan (a distinctive Southern French language group) and de Gouges was basically self-taught. Above all, de Gouges was enfant naturel, a child of nature, only in part born within marriage (according to de Gouges: not acknowledged by her father) and as such legally recognized during the French revolution due to activist politics from, among others, de Gouges herself. Olympe de Gouges’ fearless political ambition was not a coincidence; she held the distinct opinion that the voice of a human being is not to be corrected. Wrongs and mistakes belong to human nature – and nature is wonderful. The human being, as the most diverse and varied in colour, is the most beautiful animal; however, when the ’human’ is perceived to be ’a white man,’ the human is transformed into ‘the most stupid animal’, in French, ’Le plus sot animal’ (Gålmark 2013: 19).

Here is where we get to the heart of the matter: Olympe de Gouges’ use of nature as an inspiration for a philosophy and politics of equality: Nature and animals do not suggest divergent rights for men and women; nature does not suggest slavery of human beings; nature is richer and more diverse; and, furthermore, it is in general impossible to distinguish the sex of an animal only by looking at the exterior form. De Gouges points to the doubtfulness in using simple arguments about animals and nature in disputes over human relations; however, she does not hesitate in her over-arching view: Nature shudders before slavery of all sorts. In relation to the wealthy colonizers of her time, de Gouges appears fearless in her political philosophy. She picks holes in the arguments of the slave owners in the assemblies of politics, in cultural forums, in the homes, on the ships, or on the plantations on other continents, proclaiming that the reason for the existence of slavery is not found in Nature, but in the economic interests of the colonizers. Prior to the outbreak of the revolution, Olympe de Gouges is the only person in the female category who has the courage to accuse plutocrats and colonists of their doings; most likely she is the first writer to use the word capitalist (Gålmark 2016a: 111).

Olympe de Gouges declares: ’I am an unparalleled animal. I am neither man nor woman, I have the characteristics of both vanity and courage’ (Gålmark 2013: 21). With just a few sentences, de Gouges touches upon later times’ humanist discussions about the theory of evolution, for instance Edith Södergran’s stanza in ‘Vierge moderne’ (Hästbacka, Johansson and Johansson 2016), and Jacques Derrida’s ‘L’animal que donc je suis’ (Derrida and Mallet 2008). Her paragraph recognizes, affirms, and refuses the categories. De Gouges was keen on emphasizing her affiliation to the female category, declaring: ‘it is a woman who poses the question’ (Cole 2011: Appendix 5); however, she also expressed opposition to what we today would call a cis-normative gender perception (a socially constructed normal female body), and a critique of the, even today, prevailing making invisible of mankind’s residence in Metazoa (the whole crowd).

To interfere with the binary categories of gender order, and to question racism and the excluding human definitions, is provocative also in our time. In translations of Olympe de Gouges’ texts, the paragraphs where she employs the word animal to assert equality are often left out – and many of the readings of her work consider her texts paradoxical. However, if an interpretation of inclusion is opted for, de Gouges’ animal- and nature discourse becomes logical and comprehensible. Indeed, with an animal-embracing interpretation, based in a resistance to the ancient ideal being/citizen as equal to the exterior form of a white able-bodied privileged male human (anthro-androcentrism, Gålmark 2005), the view is strengthened of de Gouges as a consistent justice-aiming and truth-endeavouring author and proto-feminist ahead of her time.

Although Olympe de Gouges’ journey upwards on the class ladder proved successful, it was continuously met with problems. During her most prolific time as an author and playwright de Gouges was subjected to sabotage, slander, and physical attacks. According to Janie Venpée, de Gouges was the only woman (human in the female category) during the revolution who was prosecuted – and sentenced – with reference to the content of her publications (Venpée 1999). The disparagement of Olympe de Gouges continued after her execution. In patriarchally marked depictions of the French revolution, de Gouges was heckled by the most prestigious of French male historians – Bretonne, Michelet, Guillois, the brothers Goncourt – in similar wordings as the male revolutionaries used when de Gouges lived. Predictably, the politically constructed female category was often left out in standard narrations and interpretations of the French revolution, not the least in Swedish. Although the category of women had asserted itself as a revolutionary protagonist, it was perceived as a force that hindered the revolution, and thus became marginalized, or overlooked. And this although the exclusion, in the case of Olympe de Gouges the extinction, took place during the terror laws of the Republic. As we know, the majority of the executed were not aristocrats, but male craftsmen, poor people, women of all social classes, and famous and cherished revolutionaries of a different political leaning than the one of the prevailing regimes.

The misunderstandings of de Gouges became predominant, even though de Gouges’ critique predicted the Republic’s suicide (the violence against their own), and even though de Gouges died without imagining that her literary work could be read as something else than truly revolutionary. It was not until over a hundred years later that de Gouges obtained redress as a literary activist, by the feminist and socialist Léopold Lacour’s portrait Trois femmes de la Révolution, les origines du féminisme contemporain. It should be noted that Lacour unfortunately did not manage to appreciate Olympe de Gouges’ literary aesthetics. Lacour mentions possible translations of his book into Swedish and Norwegian; however, the book seems never to have been translated (Lacour 1900). In the Libris-catalogue, a copy of the book from the French edition was received by the Swedish National Library (The Royal Library) over a half century (1956) after the book was published in 1900.

Most likely, the lack of success for Lacour’s book contributed to the, even today, minimal interest in Olympe de Gouges in Swedish. Lacour’s title contains the word feminism, used by Frida Stéenhoff three years later, in Feminismens moral. What had happened if Lacour’s portrait of de Gouges had been widely read in Swedish? Had the debate over the rights of women and the feminist movement progressed earlier if it had been possible to read Stéenhoff in dialogue with Lacour? If the image of the French revolution’s people in the category of woman had appeared more favourably and less burdened with guilt? If it had been known that the French feminist of the 19^th century, the labour activist and editor Jeanne Deroin – before Léopold Lacour published his book – asserted the women’s rights heritage of Olympe de Gouges and the French revolution? (Scott 1996: 86; Gordon and Cross 1996: 137–139, 149).

In a radio program in Swedish from 2003 with invited scholars, Mary Wollstonecraft is discussed as the ‘creator of the first feminist manifesto’ (Sveriges Radio 2003). The word manifesto may be defined in various ways; and titles without the word may be perceived as manifestoes, for instance feminist texts by Qasim Amin (1893), He-Yin Zhen (1903), Elsa Laula Renberg (1904) Luisa Capetillo (1911), Mina Loy (1914). Alternatively, feminist texts may contain the word manifesto: Valerie Solana’s Scum Manifesto (1969), Black Women’s Manifesto (1970), Radicalesbian Manifesto (1973), Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1984), Queer Nation Manifesto (1990), Emi Koyama’s Trans Manifesto (2001), Alison Kafer’s Crip Manifesto for Social Justice (2013/17). However, in the context of the 18^th century, yet holding Wollstonecraft in high esteem, for those who have read Olympe de Gouges’ Declaration of the Rights of Woman with its evident form of public announcement, political programme or speech, there is little doubt who wrote the first European women’s rights manifesto of that period.

It seems curious that a proto-feminist of animal-defending and anti-racist leanings, for long slandered due to her revolt against the social role for people in the female category, would be perceived as too transformative in relation to the discussions of today. However, the image and preconceived notions of a person’s oeuvre may become so established that they remain so despite facts and accessible primary sources. A name or a movement may lack prestige of association and become affected by conservatism due to earlier investments in research. This is not remarkable; the academic world, as we know, often prefers referring to the already established and researched. To relate to earlier works, and to highlight the not yet accepted, or forgotten, or made invisible, or defamed, ought to give, but does not always give the same prestige as the studying of aspects of the established. Rather, such endeavours may meet obstruction, a circumstance not unfamiliar to gender scholars.

Why, there is reason for asking: How to recognize themes that enter the stage after one’s own ideas have been accepted as subjects of concern? How to evade hindering research questions that have been affected by historical amnesia and are perceived to dislodge established research? And when the patterns of perspectives expand borders for what traditionally is included in the humanities, in gender research, and historical research? (Regarding this matter, Maria Jönsson’s sentences, in Subjekt Södergran 2016: 90, are gratifying and worthy of imitation.) In an article in Tidskrift för genusvetenskap from 2010, Ulrika Dahl speaks of when the perspectives of intersectionality were introduced in Swedish; how a phenomenology of stopping emerged, aiming to conserve prevailing outlooks and power relations (Dahl 2010: 72). Dahl discusses the initial resistance against whiteness-studies; however, the tardiness within academia in relation to new thoughts and transforming perspectives may be regarded as a general problem.

Which is why the lack of interest in other topics and social patterns other than the dominant ought to be acknowledged as a continuously existing phenomenon also in forums where it may be least expected. In contemporary texts in Swedish concerning the topic of future feminisms and feminist terminology, power-critical gender perspectives in relation to the ‘animal’ category are missing. Which are the possibilities for critical questions regarding humanity’s fellow non-human beings, including power-critical analysis of social and political constructed ‘animal’ and ‘nature’ categories in the politics and culture of human relations, historically and today? In what way does the revolutionary process take place for not yet established research questions within the humanities, and within gender research? And the problem I would like to discuss in an ulterior text: How may the process be criticized and changed in a constructive way?

An open-minded approach to feminism will, in my view, continue to push the humanities forward, becoming humane/ities, admitting the human being as queer, converging normality and non-normality into variation and difference. Such an insight will entail an understanding of the human being as the one agent power on planet Earth with the ethical responsibility to give space to every human being to bloom in whatever way s/he* wishes while also acknowledging, taking into consideration, respecting, and giving space to humanity’s fellow non-humans (other beings, and nature).

A wider feminist critique of the standard image of the French revolution would open for new interpretations, new questions and perspectives, and thereby more profound knowledge. A broader interest would also support the development of history as a field of study and education. Olympe de Gouges, and the historically defined women categories with their plethora of voices, discourses, travels, and self-images have for too long been disregarded in teachings both in schools and at universities.

References

Ambjörnsson, Ronny and Eriksson, Gunnar. Europeiska urkunder (ed) (1998) Stockholm: Natur och kultur.

Cole, John R. (2011) Between the Queen and the Cabby: Olympe de Gouges’ Rights of Woman. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Appendix.

Dahl, Ulrika (2010) Rapport från Vithetshavet. Tidskrift för genusvetenskap 31(1–2): 70−74.

Derrida, Jacques (2008) with Mallet, Marie-Louise (ed) The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York: Fordham University Press.

Gordon, Felicia and Cross, Máire (1996) Early French Feminisms 1830−1940: A Passion for Liberty. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Gouges, Olympe de (1789/2012) Ur De svartas slaveri. Danius, Sara, Sjöholm, Cecilia and Wallenstein, Sven-Olov (ed) Aisthesis: estetikens historia, del 1. Stockholm: Thales.

Gålmark, Lisa (2005) Skönheter och odjur: en feministisk kritik av djur – människa-relationen. Stockholm and Göteborg: Makadam.

Gålmark, Lisa (2013) Antroandrocentrismens giljotin – exemplet Olympe de Gouges. Sosiologi idag 43(2): 9–36.

Gålmark, Lisa (2016a) Revolutionens rosenvatten: Olympe de Gouges feministiska humanism. Stockholm: Dela förlag. In English: Rosewater of the Revolution, Olympe de Gouges feminist humanism. Stockholm: Dela, 2020

Gålmark, Lisa (2016b) Revolutionens frihetsmän valde att tysta Olympe de Gouges. Feministiskt Perspektiv, November 20th.

Hagen, Ellen (1925) Pionjärer: Marie Olympe de Gouges och Markis de Condorcet gestalter från franska revolutionen. Tidevarvet 3(7): 4–5.

Hästbacka, Elisabeth, Johansson, Anders E. and Johansson, Anders S. (ed) (2016) Subjekt Södergran: om jagen i Edith Södergrans poesi. Stockholm and Göteborg: Makadam.

Jarlsbo, Jeana (2007) Feministen som slogs in i döden för slavarna. Svenska Dagbladet July 28th.

Jönsson, Maria (2016) Jaget som randupplevelse. Subjekt Södergran: om jagen i Edith Södergrans poesi. Stockholm och Göteborg: Makadam.

Kåreland, Lena (2010) Den franska kvinnosakens glödande elegant. Dixikon 12 maj 2010.

Lacour, Léopold (1900) Trois femmes de la Révolution: Olympe de Gouges, Théroigne de Méricourt, Rose Lacombe: les origines du féminisme contemporain [Tre kvinnor från revolutionen: Olympe de Gouges, Théroigne de Méricourt, Rose Lacombe: den moderna feminismens ursprung]. Paris: Libraire Plon, Plon-Nourrit.

Moore, Lisa L., Brooks, Joanna and Wigginton, Caroline (ed) (2012) Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Robins Pennell, Elizabeth (1884) Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

Schimanski, Folke (ed) (1972) Kvinnan och revolutionen: texter om 200 års kamp för kvinnlig frigörelse. Staffanstorp: Cavefors.

Scott, Joan Wallach (1996) Only Paradoxes to offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Sveriges Radio (2003) Mary Wollstonecraft. Filosofiska rummet 9 mars.

Venpée, Janie (1999) Performing Justice: The trials of Olympe de Gouges. Theatre Journal 51: 47–65.

Österholm, Hanna (ed) (2006) Feminismens idéer. Lund: Studentlitteratur.

Published in a shorter version: Gålmark, L., ”Historical Amnesia and Progression – the Case of Olympe de Gouges” in Journal of Gender Research 39 (1):  107−114.

Photo: Liberté (1793) by Jeanne-Louise Nanine Vallain

© Arimneste Anima Museum #14

Do holy principles exist? Is it possible to weigh principles against conditions? Alternately, combine them with parrying practice? In a foreword, the author Dalton Trumbo tells the story of how he, during the second world war, refrained from republishing his classic anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun from 1939, written in 1938. The decision was made after a Nazi supporter had sent Trumbo a fan letter thus proving that the message of the book risked getting employed in American Nazis’ propaganda for peace and pacifism.

Nazis as negotiators and peace-makers? Hardly the image most people have of the Nazis, but that is how they desired to appear both in Europe and the USA. Nations and persons and minorities refusing to comply with the dictates were, according to the Nazi propaganda, against peace and were depicted as guilty of invasions and persecutions. An infamous illogical politics: If you do not abide to us invading you, we are forced to invade you. If you do not abide to us obliterating you, we are forced to kill you. Everything is your own fault, we only wanted to keep “the peace”. In the USA, Nazis could be seen demonstrating in the streets of New York carrying signs with pacifist catch phrases stolen from the peace movement.

Yes, a passive USA had without question played into Hitler’s hands. Something Dalton Trumbo in the name of art and politics did not want to contribute to. The passing of time and events changed his book, and the political forces could mishandle the new readings. In this way, in the moment, self-censoring was the bestselling peace appeal’s destiny. In order not to turn into a useful idiot for the Nazis, Trumbo considered facts about the surrounding world. A decade later, following the end of the second world war, the political situation was different – and the novel was republished (1959 and 1970).

When Dalton Trumbo realized the state of his novel, he, as a political leftist, had already unveiled the intentions of the Nazis and their false message of peace. However, not everybody was as politically aware, erudite, and up-dated. Many people were fooled – or let themselves be fooled. Almost everyone may be deceived by deceitful main figures. Today, with strong reactionary forces around, armed with old and new strategies for old and hidden agendas, this is something to keep in mind. Not everything is what is seems to be, and that which seems to be, may in actuality be the case.

Whereupon today resting argumentative books become up to date. In Denying the Holocaust (1993), the American historian Deborah E. Lipstadt, recently on a visit to Sweden to present her new book Antisemitism Here and Now (2019), shows how right wing figures, since the second world war, have acted to present Nazism as conceivable and on the level. Lipstadt discovers a new tactic: At first, they made attempts to exculpate the Nazi German politics and the Holocaust, then, when the attempt failed, they started to deny the facts. Interestingly, she also finds that these extreme right people generally encompassed anti-feminism with outspoken misogyny as a central ingredient.

For her critical and sharply written book, Deborah Lipstadt was sued in Great Britain by denier and historian David Irving – a trial she won and related in her book History on Trial (2006), adapted for the screen by Mick Jackson as Denial (2016). Beyond the offending of the victims, Holocaust denials are in itself a strange phenomenon. How may one contradict something so certified and researched? How may anybody want to reveal themselves as fact resistant beyond all reason? Unfortunately, they know what they are doing, says Deborah Lipstadt. By repeating lies over and over again, they are able to plant seeds of doubt. In this way, they manage to create confusion simultaneously as they may be perceived as standing on “the other side of the debate”.

People less familiar with science and knowledge – the public, journalists, politicians – risk being blindsided, says Deborah Lipstadt, by these abusers of freedom of speech clad in well-tailored costumes and fashion blouses. In the Canadian documentary Prosecuting Evil (2018) by Barry Avrich, the Chief Justice of the trials against Einsatzgruppe, Benjamin B. Ferencz, tells about a Nazi officer’s humanitarian facade. It is a short sequence spotlighting the Nazi camouflage tactic. The officer’s pleasant manner facilitated the deceits more effectively. Look here, our intention is to take care of you; our strive is the absolute peace.

That is, peace under the boot heel. Fascism and Nazism’s modus operandi. The total lie, the complete indecency. The Nazis named the suburb of Auschwitz, Theresienstadt, “the city that Hitler gave the Jews”. Clean, neat and perfect, nothing offensive close to the curtain, nothing seen near the fence. A scene hiding a reverse reality. When it was too late, the truth was revealed. The smiles and the peace were a grimace. And the benevolence and helpfulness the first step towards exploitation and killing.

About this method of fraud has been testified many times. So, what happens if the slipping in of horrible ideologies and practices happens later on, when they are conceived as decidedly illogical and forever discarded? A situation Lucía Punezo describes in the fiction movie The German Doctor (2013), based on a factual event in Argentina during the 1960’s. The movie begins in what constitute everyday smoothing between human beings – trust, empathy, and rationality – and shows how these essentials may be deployed to mislead and break others.

In the Nazi and Fascist obstruction, confidence in the other person is eroded and belonging to the female category implies being perceived as the most desirable object. And, thus, being exposed to existential horror. Is there on the whole anybody that I may trust? May anything at all be taken as a given? Once ordinary confidence is broken, each and everyone is left to moral and political suspicion, doubt, and confusion.

Which then is the practical conclusion? How may fascist forces be met and resisted – with remained human feeling? One sustainable answer is that lectures in democratic values and history must be given continuously and start early in life. For the public discusson, Deborah Lipstadt gives the advice not to debate deniers of facts, especially not Holocaust deniers, since to be seen on the same arena make them appear as legitimate opponents and contributes to spreading their message.

Deborah E. Lipstadt’s recommendation is as follows: do not forbid their speech, let them speak, oppose them. But do not assist in giving them a platform. Do not give them space, do not legitimize them as a counterpart. Participating in a panel is a kind of commission of trust, which is why freedom of speech for everyone is not on par with a place in the panel. Deborah Lipstadt’s solution combines self-defence, arriving from historical and today’s facts and experience, with the honouring of democratic and humanitarian principles. An advice that fits our time.

Original article in Swedish

• Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun, New York: Bantam, 1989
• Dalton Trumbo, Johnny var en ung soldat, övers. Kerstin Gustafsson, Stockholm: Prisma, 1987
• Deborah E. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust, the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (1993), Penguin, 2006
• Photo of Benjamin B. Ferencz

© Arimneste Anima Museum #13

Anno 2006

The swine, the pig, is the image of that which one ought not to be, and ought not to behave. Nobody wants to be compared to the swine, not even the abominable Nazi. “Hang the bloody swine,” Hitler is said to have exclaimed about his former private doctor at the final stages of the war.

“Vote in the church election – or any pig may win, and anything may happen,” a political youth organization’s slogan stated before the church election, in a 2004 campaign illustrated by a picture of a pig clad in Hitler moustache.

“Men are animals,” said the chairwoman of the country’s rescue centres for women and children who have been beaten up by their male relatives, in an uppercut a year ago. In World Cup-Germany, a Swedish weekly paper directed a well-meaning campaign against trafficking and brothels: “Don’t be a pig”.

Don’t be a pig. Don’t be like a pig. What is a pig like?

Presumably, few pigs have incited mass murder on members of their own species (nazism/racism) or practised systematic denigration of their own with reference to gender (sexism). Rather, these acts seem to be specifically human; to strive to prevent and work against.

Yet, it is not humans who commit enormity that we are told not to imitate. It is pigs that we are told not to imitate.

Foul language exists to offend. Foul words may be pointed downwards, against those who are disparaged and oppressed. They may be pointed upwards, towards those who disparage and oppress.

Parables in Western societies have played a significant role as a linguistic tool to subordinate humans. Humans on other continents were said to be animals, or like animals. Women, workers, the functionally divergent, children were perceived to be more closely related to animals, and, like animals, were thus expected to be subservient.

These groups differed from the norm of the fully valued human-male in power position and could be treated as animals were already treated (forced labouring, unilateral usage, slavery, or eradication). The relation to the animals, nota bene, not the animals themselves, constituted a model for how humans may or ought to shape their interpersonal relationships.

The historical strategy of the Master trickled down. The man above the wife/woman, the wife/woman above the maid, the farmhand above the maid, the maid above the child. And the animal at the bottom, tied up in the barn as the forced body manifestation of power, to be consumed in unison at the family dinner table.

“Don’t be a pig.” Don’t be an animal. Don’t be like an animal. The Swedish paragraph against hate speech does not include animals, however it most probably ought to.

Each time the image of an animal is used for disparaging and stigmatizing purposes, whether it is righteously pointed upwards, or abominably downwards, the historical model for dominance and division of humanity is made invisible. Each time this image is used deprecatory, the factual conditions of animals are overlooked, even though these conditions comprise the very prerequisite for the disparaging to be effective.

Which is the reason for, presumably, not even pigs wanting to be “pigs”. Which is the situation of our genetic relatives the pigs? How many know what it is to be a pig under human power? How many want to know?

Since the human being is an animal as well, the animal image, used as a weapon, constitutes, and expresses, self-contempt.

A self-loathing hampering people from realizing that the blow with the already beaten is a threat against all subordinated. The choice of weapon, the animal, upholds the basic thesis of fascism; despise the dominated and those who have been dominated, and, in this way, maintain the fear of being weak, or the fear of being exposed as weak or vulnerable.

It exhorts: Support your own fear of weakness, deaden it with contempt: “Don’t be a pig”. When it ought rather say: Imagine the disadvantage (whoever it is). Imagine the pig.

Published in Aftonbladet Culture 24th of June 2006, translated from the Swedish

Photo: LG

© Arimneste Anima Museum #8

Reading animality in the fiction of Coetzee

During the 1960s and onward to the beginning of the 1980s the South-African apartheid regime administered one of the most comprehensive censorship policies in the world. Not only books, magazines, films, theatre plays, but also children’s toys, key rings – everything that might contain unwanted messages – were examined. How state censorship affects literature is discussed by the South African author J. M. Coetzee in his anthology against press censorship: Giving Offense, Essays on Censorship, University of Chicago Press (1996).

An author subjected to scrutiny sharpens their means of expression and finds ways to get past the censors. But they cannot eschew the effect of internalised monitoring – an unaware gagging doing the job for the censor. Mentalities that must be the dream come true for all state censors: Citizens watching over themselves! The philosopher J. S. Mill observed an additional level: ’censure’, the prevailing public opinion as social tyranny, implying intolerance against deviant feelings and opinions, and thus silencing debate.

A few years ago, in the year 2000 – six years after the abolition of the apartheid system – J. M. Coetzee was criticized for having written pessimistically about the Rainbow nation’s possibilities to survive (the possibilities for blacks and whites living together). A Member of Parliament raged at the novel Disgrace (1999), interpreting it as a murder on the dream of equality in South Africa.  Today the book is used in the South African schools. For a writer, whose authorship is marked by subtle – read censorship smart – criticisms against apartheid, the attack must have felt like cruel irony.

In several of J.M. Coetzee’s books there is an overlooked theme: the relation between humans and other animals, and the ethical questions this relation gives rise to. It can hardly be asserted that animal ethics discussions are exposed to conscious censorship directed by the state. Nevertheless, animals are exposed to comprehensive legal exploitation in the meat- and pharmaceutical businesses, and of this exploitation there seems to be general acceptance. Thus, there is a risk for Mill’s ’censure’: neither the state nor the public has an interest in validating questions about the plight of animals. Interesting, then, is the role the animal theme plays in the drama surrounding Coetzee’s novel Disgrace.

In an article in Journal of Literary studies (2001) the South African literature scholar Wendy Woodward shows how animals in the novel Disgrace may be read as being real beings, rather than, as is usual, as mere metaphors for human lives. And suddenly the terms change for the kind of political interpretation Disgrace was exposed to.

Only if the animals in the novel are read exclusively as metaphors, the interpretation ’murder on the dream of a rainbow nation’ becomes conceivable; and the last sentences may even appear as scornful:

’Bearing him [the dog] in his arms like a lamb, he re-enters the surgery. ”I thought you would save him for another week,” says Bev Shaw. ”Are you giving him up?”

”Yes, I am giving him up”.’

Is the dog one with the dream of equality in South Africa? Has the dog a value of his own? Or are both readings important? If the animals in Disgrace are seen as real individuals, the text is transformed. The tone in the novel changes, another dimension is added, and the death of the rainbow dream becomes unjust, and sad. The protagonist, the aging white man, becomes a disillusioned participant in the murder/murders of the homeless animals, and his daughter’s pregnancy (she keeps the child, the result of a gang rape) becomes the – however tragic – seed to the realisation of the Rainbow dream. Not side by side but in coexistence.

Who would have thought this? That forgotten dogs could lead Parliament Members astray? Without animals, there exist no chances for an equal future.

The interpretation of Coetzee’s animals as bearers of real life rather than as only metaphors is strengthened by Coetzee’s and Amy Gutmann’s book The Lives of Animals (1999) where the situation of animals in the grip of human power constitute the main theme. The book consists of two lectures given by Coetzee at Princeton University about the fictional author Elizabeth Costello, who in turn gives two lectures on the subject of animal ethics at an American university.

Who is saying what? Is Costello Coetzee? Does Coetzee with his form experiment show awareness of the conditions for discussions on animal ethics? Is the hybrid form of the book a way of evading the informal censorship, J. S. Mill’s ’censure’? Coetzee’s texts have been commented upon by four scholars. The question from literary scholar Marjorie Garber captures the essence of the book’s theme: Are these lectures in fact not about animals but about the value of literature?

However: Why not both? And: Why not also about ’censure’? The significance of the animal theme in Coetzee’s authorship is strengthened once more by Coetzee’s recent title Elizabeth Costello, eight lessons, where the author’s texts in The Lives of Animals are included as the longest lessons, 3 and 4. Here the role of animals in literature and in human society is of importance not only to the interpretation but also in relation to the authorship as a whole. In the Swedish edition, the two lessons have disappeared, and the subtitle ’eight lessons’ has been changed to ’six lessons’ – without any information about this in the book.

In other words: A novel (the English original edition) has become a completely different novel (the Swedish edition) under the pretence of being the same. An illusion is created. The field of vision and the interpretive variations have been curtailed. The protagonist, the author and feminist Elizabeth Costello, has been reduced and the animal chapters (the texts in themselves and the animals in them) have been transformed; from being alive, to being invisible, non-existent. And all of this happening under the utmost silence.

So, the significance of the animal theme becomes once again a kind of politics. In this case there is a soothing paradox: as absentees it is hard to play a greater role.

Translated from the Swedish

First published 6th of February 2004 in Stockholms Fria Tidning

© Arimneste Anima Museum #3

Hur kan litteraturen tillvarata och gestalta undanskymda vittnesmål och berättelser? I Konturer av den dag som nalkas, nominerad till Goncourtpriset 2006, låter Léonora Miano ett enskilt barn vara protagonist och berättarröst, nioåriga flickan Musango i kamp mot en mors religiösa föreställningar i det fiktiva landet Mboasu. I därpå följande Sorgsna själar, från 2011, fördelaktigt läst i dialog med Ngugi wa Thiongo’s teaterpjäs från 1968, The Black Hermit, gestaltar Miano den unge Antoines desillusionerade strävanden och uppgörelser med sig själv och sin omvärld i jojo-existens mellan en subsaharisk storstad och en europeisk dito. Sorgsna själar börjar som smart satir, nära Robert Musils Mannen utan egenskaper, fortsätter som skröna, för att till sist ända som sedelärande saga.

Mianos fjärde översatta roman från franska till svenska, Skuggans årstid, utgår istället från ett verkligt källmaterial av muntligt traderade kollektivberättelser. Likt Nattens inre, debutromanen som kan läggas bredvid Chinua Achebes världsberömda Allt går sönder (till svenska 1967), är spelplatsen ett landområde nära kusten i nuvarande Kamerun. Men århundradet är ett annat: Nattens inre är sent 1900-tal, Skuggans årstid utspelar sig flera hundra år tidigare. Främlingsfolket i båtar från havet kännetecknas utifrån sin klädsel, och hudens färgnyans existerar inte som identitetskategori. Som Mianos tidigare romaner kretsar Skuggans årstid kring etiska konflikter: människor med sina olikheter och likheter, onda och goda handlingar, tvärsöver vad som idag kallas klass, kultur, könstillhörighet.

Romanen följer tio kvinnor från Mulangofolket, särskilt Eyabe och Ebeise, efter att deras män och söner mystiskt försvunnit från byn. Kvinnorna förvisas till en särskild hydda i byns utkant, utses till syndabockar och blir onämnbara: ”Kvinnorna vars söner aldrig blev hittade”. Skickligt skildrar Miano hur människor kan vara såväl offer som förövare; hur den förtryckta är eller blir delaktig i det som drabbar hen och andra. Var är männen? Hur försvann de? Vem är skyldig och varför? Vem kan en lita på? Finns det sätt att undslippa katastrofen? Hur kan en överleva under de redan ansträngda livsvillkoren och maktspelen?

På en fråga från Hubert Marlin Jr på Flashmag 16/10 2013 om Skuggans årstid svarar Miano att det är viktigt att skilja på historiska minnen som handlar om vad som hände i den afrikanska kontinentens mitt, och historiska minnen om människohandel som kom att höra till andra kontinenter västerut. Människor i södra Sahara bär på traderade minnen och de måste börja berätta, menar Miano. Ändå är det få som vill, trots att det var den västerländska och inte den afrikanska historien som gav upphov till kategorierna svarta och afrikaner. Förfäderna och förmödrarna i södra Sahara definierade inte sig så. ”Att människor härifrån själva börjar berätta och dokumentera hur saker och ting utvecklade sig i deras land och hur de genomlevde historien är mycket angeläget.”

Vad som behövs enligt Miano är saklig komplexitet och djupare analys, och mänskliga hellre än rasifierande läsarter. Rasifierande tolkningar blir i detta sammanhang detsamma som att överta förslavarnas tolkning, menar Miano. Människor i södra Sahara, i äldre tid och idag, var och är människor som alla andra. Att människor begick och begår brott är sådant som hör till det mänskliga, betonar hon apropå den historiska forskning om trafficking som bedrivs av kamerunska forskare: ”Varför skulle vi utesluta oss själva från mänskligheten genom att hävda motsatsen? Jag träffar aldrig kaukasier som skäms över sin existens på grundval av att Hitler och Stalin var kaukasiska monster. Det är oerhört viktigt att ta itu med detta nedvärderande medvetande som får oss att skämmas när vi hör att svarta har gjort någon orätt. Jag kan erkänna att jag inte hyser något sådant komplex, det tillåter mig också att se vilken sanning som helst i vitögat.”

För Skuggans årstid tilldelades Miano Prix Femina 2013. I Crépuscule du tourment, ”Skymningsplåga”, Mianos senaste och ännu ej översatta roman från 2016, ger fem kvinnor av idag uppriktiga – och skoningslösa! – vittnesmål om en och samme närstående man; upplevelser och åsikter som vän, dotter, syster, älskare, fästmö. Presentationen av Crépuscule du tourment i Le Monde 24/8-16 betecknade verket som ”feministiskt och postkolonialt”. Men det riktigt intressanta med Mianos författarskap är det envisa synliggörandet: Vad återfinns bakom etiketter, identiteter, omständigheter och bevekelsegrunder? Mianos verk lyfter av människor deras förklädnader och blottlägger deras individuella och kollektiva manöverutrymme. Så avtäcks en djupare och mänskligt förenande dimension: Vilken handling är den rätta? Vilken handling tvingas jag eller vi utföra? Vilken handling har jag eller vi möjlighet att välja? För de mina, för andra, för de andra, för mig själv?

Romaner av Léonora Miano till svenska, samtliga översatta av Marianne Tufvesson:

• Nattens inre, 2006, Sekwa förlag, 2007
• Konturer av den dag som nalkas, 2006, Sekwa förlag, 2008
• Sorgsna själar, 2011, Sekwa förlag, 2013
• Skuggans årstid, 2013, Celanders förlag, 2016

© Arimneste Anima Museum #2