glimpses of a fall: the play

In early November, I went to a play together with Hanna and Tora. It was a performance of Athena Farrokhzad’s poem Vitsvit (~ white suite), a monologue of sorts performed by three actors.

It was interesting.

It explored the immigrant’s experience, being born in another country than your parents, listening to the stories of past times and far-away landscapes. The trauma of war, of having to leave everything behind. The constant conflict between belonging and not belonging, the rootlessness, of growing up in a home where people longed back to a place that doesn’t exist anymore. But also how arbitrary that longing can be, only showing up when the local society doesn’t live up to your expectations of life.

It made me think of my mom and her aunts. They were not political refugees, like Farrokhzad’s parents, but I experienced some of that in-betweenness growing up. The Swedish and Finnish cultures are more different than what many people might think. And the memory of war, so dominant in my grandmother, but also as a shadow, an inherited unsettledness in my mother and all my aunts and uncles.

Yes, it was a good play.

Afterwards, there was a panel discussion. A girl in the audience asked the rest of us: My parents were immigrants, I can feel this. But for the rest of you, all you for-many-generations-Swedes, can you understand at all?

That comment scared me. Partly, because it suggested people cannot feel for anything that they haven’t experienced themselves. What would be the point of art, in that case? But it also made me realize how separated these two spheres of human experiences have become. The refugees, who come with their traumas experienced someplace far away, costing money (at least to begin with) and then with varying degrees being able to fit into our Swedish society. They are a group, and even if they all have their individual experiences, there are also similarities and that is seen as enough for them to be understood as a group. And then we have all the rest of us, some with family traumas and rootlessness and other things that could easily be related to the experiences of the so-called immigrants, but they generally aren’t. Those are experienced by individuals, and should be understood as particular, not belonging to any group.

I think, maybe, if we could start seeing the similarities in the human experience, how trauma and grief and suffering can be the same, despite the variety of guises that they come in, then maybe it would be easier to see the individuals. See what it is that we share, and feel with that, rather than being threatened. The European sense-of-self is in need of a serious re-boot. What the “refugee crisis” has done with us this fall is worrying, to say the least.

So yes. It was an interesting play. Yet another reminder of how important art is for getting us to think.