from Där ingenting kan ses (Where nothing can be seen)

[Notes 2005: I translated this novel into English myself but nothing more came out of it, and none of my books has been published in its entirety in any other language besides Swedish. (Single poems has been interpreted and published in anthologies in several other countries.) The most interesting thing with this work was seeing how the poems changed in the process. They still expressed the same thing, but the dimensionality increased enormously, both because of the melodiousness of the English language and because of its richness in synonyms.

To interfoliate the narrative text with lyrical “outbursts” like I did in the two first autobiographies seemed to me like a rewarding way to work at the time. Descriptive prose has never been my forte, and it felt like the prose was a house that I build with floor, walls and ceiling. Then I decorated the house with poems that functioned as art on the walls. In this way the result was two books in one. I do feel even today, upon reading the poems given below in one sweep, that of course they belong in their context, but reading them standing alone by themselves is also quite conceivable, as a posy of evil flowers.]

[Anmärkningar 2005: Denna roman översatte jag själv till engelska men mer än så blev det inte, och ingen av mina böcker har i sin helhet utgetts på något annat språk än svenska. (Enskilda dikter däremot har tolkats och ingår i antologier i flera andra länder.) Det som var mest spännande med detta arbete var att se hur dikterna förändrades av att få en ny språkdräkt. De uttryckte fortfarande samma sak men dimensionaliteten ökade enormt, både på grund av det engelska språkets sångbarhet och på dess rikedom på synonymer. Jag tog mig därför friheten att lägga in ett urval av dem här så att den som vill själv ska kunna jämföra.

Att som jag gjorde i de två första självbiografierna interfoliera den berättande prosatexten med lyriska ”utbrott” kändes då som ett fruktbart sätt att arbeta. Beskrivande prosa har aldrig varit min starka sida och jag upplevde att prosatexten var ett hus jag byggde, golv, väggar och tak, som jag sedan dekorerade med dikter som fick vara konsten på väggarna. På detta vis blev det två böcker i en. Jag tycker nog idag när jag läser nedanstående i ett svep att visst hör de hemma i sitt sammanhang men de är också fullt möjliga att läsa fristående, en liten bukett av onda blommor.]

•

Far away from You who love me
I look at a picture of a child,
knowing that I did not survive everything.
Parts in me died and my hands
only have four fingers.

Time does not heal, only hatred.

•

Kiss the hand, kiss
the leash you carry,
kiss the future.
Slow is the destruction,
slow the rebuilding.
What we sow in you
will be hard to uproot.
It winds
and suffocates.
Wherever you go
we are in your steps.
If you look at your hands
we live in the fingers.
If you try to sleep
we are in the darkness.
Here is your place.

•

What did I do
unforgiven by you?
Nothing been given,
nowhere been driven,
nothing been learned,
nothing discerned.
Stood like a jester,
always to pester,
chained to a fence
to make amends.

Such was I then
pecked like a hen.
Love, sweet and blind,
was elsewhere to find.

•

The smell of perfume
the smell of perfume frightens me
all the smells frighten me
the smells come at night
in the dream, streaming
like water into the mouth
of a drowner in a
sinking city
early in life, late
at night in the air
that runs out and then
there is nothing

•

The doll that you sewed
had my face. The needle
went in and out of my skin,
drips of blood trickled forth,
white hair and grey eyes
visible between swellings.
You were too old to have
a toy of your own, you took me
between your knees, humming
and patching contentedly.

•

Those in whose hands the blows are
live their lives and die their deaths
without afterthought. Everything
is their right. All is below them.
Nothing stands between them
and their happiness.

Violence can be your nourishment
all the way to the last, irreversible
blow. When you’ve taken, you’ve got to have more
until your hand gets red, hot and tender
and obediently lies down in your lap.
You have no power. You have nothing.
You hit me but you can never kill me.
I don’t know if I’ll ever survive
but I’m alive right now, saying that my own
hand will never strike but be opened
and that we all die but with
or without honour.

•

You gave me a name and a life
who were not mine
an origin in your cold womb
a reversed value in your denial
and a hatred that never ceases
Rest in peace forged picture
unrest in peace

All I wanted
was getting to ask for mercy
A name in the waken
a sleep in the forgotten
and the mercy
of knowing everything.

•

The circle closes. The children
must not go anywhere, cannot
go anywhere. No-one is to see
their lives and thoughts, see their marks,
Bones are easier to snap
than twigs.

I perch on my head
sticking needles in it.
I say: How can you?
They were good and misled.
They kept pets for us.

Yes, I had rats. My cat
they beat to death and buried
in the woods.

•

I was a child, thinking
the thoughts of the adults. Carried them
over their failures. Was carried
forward myself toward new days,
awakenings, moments of bliss and terror,
by my own fear deep within theirs.
There were no god to see me,
no angels stood by my bed,
no language for deaf ears
and the sacred family
had locked its doors
upon its secrets.

Liberation came
slowly, was bought dearly
for innocence.

•

Then pain made
all shiny, not hurting.
Then I did say to me: Come,
let us rejoice here
in these pleasant domaines
where nothing can be seen
of what is inflicted on us.
Here we will rest in grass,
by sea and shore
and the sun warms
tired children.

Thus said I and took my soul
away from my body who left alone
its punishment did bear. And memory died
inside the head a day in May
and seen is seen and then
I saw no more.

•

In the promised land
everything falls down around you, fades,
burns, howls and surrenders.
Nothing is worth nothing there, all
is expendable, all can be sold
for a trifle. You stole my treasure,
you sold my me, you stole
all I owned of value, you took
my childhood away.

I became your apprentice,
I did all you had done,
said all you had said,
went berserk
in a ravaged garden.

I have a future.
I’m not planning on dying
and each day I live
is a well-aimed kick
in your rotten face.

•

Two snotty kids carry out
a dead sparrow, bedded
in cotton in a cigar box
to bury it on the yard.
Someone sees them, chases them away
to the deserted lot where they dig
a shallow pit under the lilac bush.
We all find our space.
One of the children thinks of death
and of own domains and rooms,
seeing they are peaceful.

One of these children
will be like dead,
the other will die and rise.

•

The grownups have words and weapons,
the children only their hands
The grownups have knowledge and law,
the children only their thoughts
The grownups have cities and days,
the children only their nights

Give them chainsaws
give them fire
Let them kill
and be freed

•

Sick children are helpless,
children are helpless, take
from them what is needed, don’t
give them any leeway, don’t
miss your aim. Law and order.
They are bought with cells,
pain and work, don’t
let them ever forget, don’t
geve them a moment’s peace
on god’s green earth. Then
tell them heaven doesn’t exist.
See how they die
with crumpled letters
spasmodically closed
in their hands.

•

The nights. My body
is something I don’t understand.
What does it know that I don’t?
Where is it going? It aches,
it fails me, it speaks
with double tongues, it betrays.

The days. I am hardly visible.
I am like a shadow. My mummy
tells me I smell badly. Am I
dead already? When did it happen?
I stand in front of the sink,
scrubbing my skin pink, hot,
red, bleeding.

•

I never dragged my feet
behind me. I sneaked
along the walls like
an animal in agony, fleeing
the hunters. The flight
was not in sleep,
not in the wake,
not in the world of senses.

I sang to myself, quietly:
I have a land of my own,
my native land, without
a king, without a queen,
I know that it will be all right
and nothing is
when I go there.
I sang to myself:
I will not be seen,
I will not be heard
I will not be seen,
I will not be heard.
I did not do it.

•

Kids’ dope. The tongue
withers in the mouth, the words
tumble over themselves
like fences torn down. Lovely.
You fall down on the floor
when you’re getting up,
you lie as a carcass.
Now noone can ask anything.
Lobotomy. Amnesty. This
is what I call agony.

To slowly but steadily make
the body it’s own prison,
deny tracks and marks, hide
your head in the toilet bowl, wait
for the moment when death
becomes a possibility and unneeded
because the brain is already torn
to pieces, bits, shreds
by its own rhymes and rigmaroles,
by its own inverted power.

•

All is your fault. Your
being powerless is your fault.
Your looking the way you do
is not our fault. Take this
knowledge and build a house
of shame and guilt, hide
in it from the looks of the world.
The house is not to have windows.

You only have us. Look up
to us for you own sake,
be always afraid, when we sleep
we cannot frighten you,
we will teach you how to guard
on yourself, not giving oneself
a minute’s peace. One day we will be dead.
Then all will rest on you,
the watchkeeping, the terror,
the atrocities,
then you will be your own executioner
and best friend.
The only freedom you will have by then
is the freedom to choose
your own moment of death.

•

O sacred humiliation,
hallowed be thy pain, to
gratefully receive your gift,
brothers and sisters over the world.
Freedom through rearing, knowledge,
strokes on the forehead, away goes
all those who doesn’t break.
I who have learned sit here,
bent over a diary
with pages torn out. I remember
nothing.

•

The mummyface

Like a resting face
swept in evil and time
I feel you
inside my forehead.
By fools you are carried forth
in the procession.
You told me: As far
as my arms reach you can go.
Farther away you will starve.
Poisoned I lived thereafter
with my head full of machines.

•

Outside the world

Outside the world in the world
in a windowless room.
Traced me there.
Found me there.
In submission.
In the bonds of breath.
In order.

I murdered minutes
I invested in extinction
I worked in the long run
I was shadowed.

This is what it looked like:
Like a pyramid letter
Like a drunken brawl
Like a fire burned out
Like a family feast
Like a blasphemy
Like a caged eagle
Like battered eyes.

You.