I just finished “An Elegy for Easterly” by Petina Gappah. It’s a collection of short stories about life in Zimbabwe. It is a nice collection, depressing, sure, but a good read. Zimbabwe is doing catastrophically, but life goes on and people have their failed marriages or shattered dreams or finally have their greatest wish come true in the unlikeliest of ways.
But it makes me wonder. According to the author bio, Gappah is a lawyer with degrees from Cambridge, Graz University and University of Zimbabwe. She lives in Geneva. Still, she writes about people who live in the shanty towns outside Harare, people who can barely get enough food for their children. I’m not questioning her, I believe it when she writes her stories, but I just wonder: how does she do it? How does she know?
I’m securely middle-class. Both my parents have university degrees. I grew up with divorced parents, moving back and forth every other week, and they both lived in apartments in the suburbs. Skarpnäck and Bagarmossen, the suburbs where I grew up, are both quite average as far as Stockholm suburbs go, slightly lower yearly salary than the municipal average, the unemployment a bit higher and 41,3 percent of the population are immigrants, compared to the 33,5 percent average in Stockholm. They are both suburbs, but not at all with the same segregation issues as in some of the areas north of the city. My family isn’t rich, but I know that in a crisis, I can always turn to them and they will be able to help me, both economically and otherwise. My mom is an immigrant, but physically you wouldn’t be able to tell, not even in my name. My parents chose good schools for me. I’ve traveled. I go to university. Most of my friends go to university too.
I have very little knowledge about what life outside this safe middle-class bubble is like. I am certain that my experience of Sweden is way friendlier than that of many other people – people that I wouldn’t even know how to meet. Often, when discussions about the ‘real’ Sweden start, I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t know what life is like for an immigrant, for an unemployed youth, someone living in the segregated suburbs or small towns, someone in need of social welfare, someone who is struggling to make ends meet. I don’t feel I have the right to an opinion – barely even to speak for the middle-class experience. Because I don’t really fit in there either.
I feel odd everywhere (and now I don’t mean in the oh-I-am-so-unique kind of way, but rather that I don’t feel I can speak for anyone but myself), and my lack of experience makes me doubt my opinions all the time. As a teenager, my biggest dream was to become an author, but now I don’t know anymore. What would I have to tell that would be relevant for anyone but myself?
And that makes me wonder. How does she know, Gappah? How will I ever be able to tell a story that isn’t only mine?
Katja Malmborg 