One early morning in Liberia, I wrote this on my phone:

There is a smell, in the tropics in the morning. Right when the sun is about to rise and the air is just perfectly warm. Before the heat and the bustle of the day has made the air dusty and sweaty. There is a touch of sulfur, I think, maybe from the highly weathered rich soil. It is made soft by the humidity, and fresh by the long starlit night.

I remember going to school in 1999 and 2000. I was living in Tanzania with my mom, and every morning at 06:45, I left home on foot, walking the short distance to school with Veronica, our maid. I was 11 and 12, and I woke up every morning to that smell.

Now I’m 25, waking up to the smell of the tropics in the morning again. Kind of like closing a circle.

Morning by the oil palm plantation in Grand Cape Mount.

I just saw a TED talk with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about the importance of telling many stories, and not just one. That for many westerners, there is only one story of the continent of Africa: the story of catastrophe. That more stories are needed, told by people with different experiences. And it made me think of this text I wrote a couple of years ago after visiting Rinkeby, a suburb in northern Stockholm that is most known for being an area of the city where immigrants move when they arrive. My visit was part of this series of texts I did about different suburbs of Stockholm, as an effort of mine to explore parts of the city that I hadn’t really been to. They were supposed to be a little bit funny and silly and mostly about city planning and architecture, illustrated with my photos.

Well, as a comment to this text about Rinkeby, someone wrote a comment saying that I sounded just as the colonialists might have sounded two hundred years ago in Africa. Implied: I’m such a privileged, white middle-class pseudo-open-minded brat. I remember reading that comment hurt. I rarely get any comments on this blog, even though there are at least a couple reading it every day, so when I got a comment like that I felt it must be true.

It probably was. I’ve lived such a sheltered life.

Some time later, I took a course in research ethics. This was to prepare for the field trip to Namibia we were about to go on, and we read a lot about post-colonialism. How even the research conducted in Africa, South America and parts of Asia becomes completely distorted and not at all true because it is done by white, western researchers who apply their western perspectives onto their research. This made me think that maybe I shouldn’t even be going to Namibia. What could I, as a white, middle-class daughter of academics possibly understand anything about life in Namibia?

Well, I went anyway, did interviews in a shantytown and wrote a paper about it.

And I’m confronted with it again, now, when I’m trying to decide how to write about my experiences in Liberia. Because I want to write about it. But I don’t know how to do it without misrepresenting it. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m making the poverty and the traces of the civil war into something exotic. Which is hard, because for me, everything about Liberia is exotic. I don’t want to give a two-dimensional picture of this very complex country. I don’t want to give myself the right to know anything after two weeks in a place.

That’s what made traveling in Canada and the US so easy. I could write my odd and shallow traveler’s reflections without having to think about my view point. In the US, there isn’t that history – – – or of course there is. The first nation people, the ones the Europeans killed when they arrived in North America. This just becomes more and more complicated.

Maybe I should just publish some photos. Of trees and pineapple breakfasts. I don’t want to tell a story that isn’t really mine to tell.

I’ve been reading a book about Charles Taylor, the Liberian school teacher turned business student turned activist turned rebel leader turned president of Liberia and then finally turned convicted war criminal in the ICC. Charles Taylor and Liberia by Colin M. Waugh. It is a book about the complex person Charles Taylor, but also a book about the troubled modern history of Liberia. 

In the last chapters, Waugh describes some of the war crimes that were conducted by the rebel groups during the civil war. It was common for them to recruit child soldiers, and Waugh tells this story of what happened when the child troops of the rebels clashed with the Nigerian peacekeeping force ECOMOG:

Later, ECOMOG forces used loudspeakers to call to the advancing children, offering them toys, sweets or the longer-term inducement of the chance of a home and a school to go to, which in some cases proved effective in getting them to lay down their arms and defect.

I was sitting on the subway when I read this, and it made me cry. I could see the children in front of me, desperately dropping their weapons with crushed childhood innocence in their eyes. I thought of all the children who gathered around me and wanted me to take their picture, of the boys at the beach in Robertsport who tried to teach me to surf, the young men who told me I was beautiful and asked me for my phone number.

Of course war is a terrible thing. But it should be something abstract for me, a theoretical horror that I can’t understand. Still, it always makes me feel so devastated, reading about it. I think it makes me think of my grandfather, alone in the dark, icy Finnish forest, fighting the Russians. Or my grandmother, running out in her nightgown, desperately holding on to her baby brothers hand, looking for cover under the pine trees to hide from the bomber planes. 

I don’t understand how a people ever can survive such a trial. I ache, and I cry, and I’ve never even been close. 

It’s night and I see that name on the screen. I hate that he is there. That he sits by a computer somewhere, across town probably, simply existing. Without realizing how it affects me. 35 minutes away on the subway, and still completely and so utterly inaccessible. Facebook is a source of much unhappiness and frustration.

And I know I write these things a lot. Excepting the travel journals and book reviews, the cryptic texts about some kind of crush hang up are probably the most common here. Even more so lately. If you follow my blog, you might get the impression that I always carry around on some unrequited love. And maybe that is true, in a sense, that I have a kind of longing in me that just changes direction from time to time.

But it does not consume me. Not anymore. Not like when I was 17. I do other things, I spend my days being happy and content and excited about things, lately even more so than usually. I learn things. I go to meetings and feel important. I spend my weekends taking walks with my friends or the nights dancing with them, feeling pretty and full of life. I plant seeds and watch them stick up their tiny little green heads from the damp dirt. I go running every morning, listening to podcasts and marvel about the beauties of the Swedish spring. I plan eurotrips and hand-write letters to friends across the sea.

I do things. But I don’t write about them. It’s at night, when I sit by my computer before going to bed, when it’s dark outside and I’m a little bit tired. That’s when they hit me, these recollections and frustrations and that’s when I feel the need to write. Why write about the happy stuff? It’s already perfect.

No, write about the heart-ache. Because that is a condition that can improve.

After writing a page on my thesis this morning (I ate breakfast with Hannes too, he spent the night here on the couch after playing board games with me, Lina, Frida, Kirke and Felix last night – awesome evening, seriously, this board game party idea of mine was brilliant and it will definitely become a thing in my home), I went into town to meet up with Jenny.

Jenny is one of those wonderful people who I meet, like, three times a year, because she lives in another city and I’m so Stockholm-centric that I’ve actually never visited any of my friends who study in other Swedish towns. Except in Uppsala. But Uppsala is like a suburb to Stockholm, so that doesn’t count. (Instead, I go to visit them in Edmonton and Brussels – that’s much more convenient!). Jenny and I went to high school together, and I always have a nice time when we meet, talking about politics or the state of the Swedish school system or our futures.

Well, anyway, what I was supposed to write was, that at the end of our walk we went into the Kulturhuset library by the central station. She had to catch a bus, but I stayed at the library, walking among the books, picking them up, feeling the roughness of the pages, imagining. I haven’t been in a library for ages, except for the university ones, and they don’t really count because they are so tightly associated with studying and I can’t fully relax in them. In a real, fiction-filled library, probably not since I came back from the States, I can’t remember.

But it is like pushing a button. I become a child when I am around books. All the infinite possibilities. It is freedom.

I know I’ve written about my love for libraries before. But the fact that it surprised me so, this feeling that hit me between the shelves, just confirms that memory is a tricky thing and that I need to repeat these library love letters with regular intervals in order to remember what a free and genuinely not-harmful-in-any-way happy pill I have in libraries.

Last Christmas, I worked in that old reception and found Abbie’s blog. Abbie, the wonderful, architecture loving girl from Minneapolis who could talk about Tolstoy with me at Duckworth Farm in Sebastopol, California. She had written a little bit about me on the blog, and I so clearly remember this afternoon, by the pond:

Katja just got in the water, and, breast-stroking to the other side, she giggled. I asked why. She replied, “I was thinking about intelligence, and how I could have been an engineer, as I’m still quite good at math. But then I remembered, as the philosophy student that I used to be, that we don’t really have free choice. You could have had the chocolate cake instead of a peach. But you didn’t. It’s not relevant. And that made me laugh.” Nothing I could possibly say in reply would have been nearly as good.

And I think that sometimes, you need the clear sight of a stranger to see your own occasional brilliance. What could I have done differently? Nothing, really. I’m here.

At the newly renovated subway station at Hornstull, they’ve made one of the pillars into a piece of art.

It’s a tree with human features. It makes me think of Catherynne M. Valente‘s The habitation of the blessed and The folded world. Her living trees. I wonder when the last book about Prester John is coming. I feel I need some of her magic.

There is something about it, the tree at Hornstull. It aches in me. I dream dreams about revelations and wake up feeling empty. I need something.

This thesis is destroying my life and slowly relieving me of my sanity.

There are so many things to distract me from studying. Like the flowers. Every morning, right after waking up, I go running. To wake up, you know, and get some air. I started with this right after I got home from Liberia, which has given me the amazing opportunity to see the process of all the spring flowers starting to blossom on a day to day basis.

At first, there was only a couple of hepaticas showing their lovely faces. Then, entire hills were covered in blue.

And now, the entire forest is covered with wood anemones. Like a carpet, white and refreshingly green.

They require my attention. I can’t run when I’m surrounded by this fairy tale landscape. Instead I walk, and marvel, and yet another hour of my day goes to doing something else than writing my thesis.

I told you about the seeds that I planted last week, right? On Wednesday, 1st of May, instead of going to the demonstrations in town or writing on my thesis. For a while, I thought I had killed them, watered too little or too much, used the wrong kind of soil, put them in the wrong kind of sun-affected spot in my living room. You know, all the worries a city girl with barely any gardening experience at all might have when planting her first little test herb garden.

Well, who could have guessed, I hadn’t killed them after all! Yesterday morning, a couple of small shy leaves looked up from three of the basil pots and two of the cilantro pots. And today, there were leaves in all the basil and cilantro pots. Nothing in the mint, melissa or parsley, but hey, they still have time to show up. And what if they’re dead? At least I’ll get to have MY OWN basil and cilantro in my food this summer. Those are my favorites anyway.

My dear little baby basils.

My brave, crazy cilantro toddlers.

So, of course, inspired by my sudden burst of gardening genius, I just had to fix the gazebo too. All apartments in my building have a balcony, except us and one of my first floor neighbors. We have big, white, wooden gazebos standing on tall wooden poles – that we have to cross the exterior corridors of my floor to get to, but still, they’re nice. And big. Perfect for some in-pot gardening. I’ve just never really had the time before.

But now, this spring, I feel like, aah, I have to do something about the gazebo. I found some great free, awesomely colorful furniture to put out there and now, gosh, you should see it. Today, I replanted the spider plant babies, hung up one of the old ones from a hook in the roof, took out the lavender that I bought last week and I think it’s going to be the perfect spot for every sunny breakfast, lunch and dinner I’m going to have this summer. I’m so excited!

Unfortunately, this meant that I didn’t get that much done with my thesis today either. I’m afraid it’s going to suck, big time, if I ever manage to finish it. It’s this anguish that it creates in me, I can’t concentrate and getting earth beneath my fingernails just makes me feel so childishly happy.

Was I really, REALLY, supposed to become an academic with student loans and a job in an office? Maybe I have missed my true calling: making baby plants grow and decorating gazebos with recycled furniture!

 

 

I decided that today I should get done with the first part of my map analysis thing for my thesis. But then it was so sunny, so I walked to the market garden and bought lavender, basil and silantro in pots and seeds for five different kinds of herbs – and then I spent the afternoon planting them. That kind of planting needs to be done now, if I want to be able to get any crops to harvest by summer. And since my thesis is about agriculture, planting seeds isn’t completely off track.

But still. I’m already behind. So, when the sun had gone down and dinner was eaten, I decided to go back to my maps and really finish them this time. I thought it would take, like, an hour or so.

Now, almost five hours later, all fields in the municipality of Upplands Väsby in 1952 have been digitally recorded and coded. I will feel like shit tomorrow. But at least I’ve reached the first real milestone in my map analysis.

I’m so sick of ArcGIS. How am I ever going to finish this?

I shouldn’t sit up this late for other reasons too. My self-resolves weakens at night. I get urges. Like sending text messages to the wrong people. Or writing pubertal pseudo-poetry. Things that I’m too old for. Way too old. I should be done with this thesis already!

Tomorrow, I might take the time to write something about Liberia. We’ll see.