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By globalistgirl, on April 1st, 2008

Integration help for Sweden

If anyone is interested in integrating themselves into Sweden (Herculean task, I must admit), reading Mig äger ingen by Åsa Linderborg will tell you very, very much about the Swedish people. It is a very well-written book and Linderborg won ABF’s literature prize in 2007 for it. Mig äger ingen is her autobiography of her working-class childhood with her father in Västerås, after her mother left them. Even though my sympathies for the Swedish working class got somewhat eroded during my life there (I am, after all, the daughter of a manager, which makes me a capitalist pig by association), it was very easy to sympathise with Åsa and to picture the environment.

Åsa’s father was very keen to keep their apartment good-looking from the outside and wanted others to look up at their window and think, “A really good woman must live there.” He told Åsa that the women would be so damn suprised if they heard that that’s no woman living there, that’s where steel hardener-master Leif Andersson lives. By following what social conventions and pressures her father is feeling and following, you can see a lot of how gender roles work in Sweden. You can already see it in how Åsa’s mother leaves her father, and how Åsa narrates the book such that you can see why she left, why it was the rational decision to leave, and how his family is different from hers in that regard. She packs up and leaves because it’s for the best. Her father doesn’t find anyone new, really, and the book implicitly explains what’s wrong with him from a Swedish point of view. Åsa herself goes through many boyfriends, as one does. The gender roles are presented so very naturally.

Leif Andersson worked at Metallverken (literally translated The Metal Works, a large steel producer in Sweden), the second large employer in Västerås in addition to ASEA, one of the constituent companies of ABB. She describes how her father biked down the hills to Metallverken to join hundreds of other workers, and the ‘ASEA stream’ of people flowing out of the ASEA gates at 4PM every day. ASEA is why we lived in Sweden to begin with. We just didn’t live in Västerås, the biggest ASEA production center, we lived in Ludvika, ABB’s power development center. Above all, she describes the political rhetoric and the lines of thought in Swedish politics very well. Her mother’s family are communist activists, and her father is a communist but so scared to be found out that he doesn’t dare sign a check with a red pen. Both lines of thought from the 1970s have created the climate in modern Sweden, and Linderborg has the courage (being a leftist political commentator) to show how some (in my opinion, many or even most) Swedish people talk about class oppression as a way to excuse themselves from doing anything about their own situation and actually standing up to authority. (Svenska Dagbladet just featured an article about an entire book to that effect.)

Of course, since it’s in Swedish, you have to be half-way integrated already to be able to read it. However, it helped even me to understand the political situation and how it might feel to be Swedish working class. (And in Sweden, that’s key cultural knowledge. Ignore the working class at your own peril. American Republicans, don’t say a word about your political opinions in Sweden lest you want to be made an example of. Learn some suitable rhetoric about class equality to use instead.) My experience of Sweden is filtered through being a third culture kid, and this includes being not a protagonist but an oppressor on the other side of the class divide. My parent’s friends are mostly engineers with well-used passports. They had some really local friends, but they were mostly open-minded or Finnish immigrants. (Large numbers of Finns moved to Sweden after the Continuation War, because job opportunities were so bleak in war-torn Finland.) No one spoke of class conflict at dinners. My experiences with the working class is being insulted and judged by people like Leif Andersson, and despite that, it was a very endearing read. If you need to know more about why Swedes are the way they are and how they think, read this book.

April 1st, 2008 | Tags: | Category: Betweening | 1920 comments

1,920 comments to Integration help for Sweden

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