Katja Malmborg

in transit (March 24)

I was sitting in the plane, reading a book about the age after the big pandemic, the story of an orchestra and theatre company traveling between the sparse settlements on the North American continent preforming Shakespeare after a flu killed almost every human on Earth. Title: “Station Eleven”, a gift from Natalia, my pop cultural soulmate.

I glanced out through the window and saw the sun casting long shadows behind the snow-covered mountains of southern Spain. The sky a blue-shifting haze, the airplane wing. Formerly, a sight that would instil a feeling of freedom and boundlessness in me. Now, it’s complicated. And with the book in my lap, the thought hit me: this might not be possible for much longer. The vantage point of Earth from above. The implications, an unsettling thought.

Later, waiting for my connection. In Casablanca, but still not quite. French and English in the too-loud loudspeakers. Originally, I was meant to fly through Brussels yesterday. A day after the departure hall was blown up. The world already is an unsettling place.

I’m in Casablanca, but I’ll only see the generic tax-free stores. As always, my feet were too big for the beautiful Moroccan slippers in one of the few not-boring shops. Just as well. It gives me a reason to come back. Casablanca.

Confession: Earlier, I ate soft blue cheese. I threw it into my bag while emptying the fridge at home, not knowing if the airport personnel would let me keep it. They did, and I carried it with me all the way to Casablanca. Here, I ate it, just like that, with a spoon straight out of the package. Strong, smelly, almost liquid from the heat. Probably the last piece of decent cheese that I will eat for a long time.

time lapse

It’s like I have this idea in my head. I need to write all my posts in chronological order, start with the earliest idea before I can move on to later ones. It’s like I fear the few readers that I have might miss out on something, not understand properly, in case I don’t write about the ideas and impressions in the order they came to me, as if they build on each other in an essential way. Spring cannot come before winter, and winter cannot come before fall.

I’ve realised that this is not a very constructive way of writing. Here I am, sitting in the early morning on a patio in Accra, with tons of stories to tell about my experiences with requesting data from ministries and how it is to be a young woman on your own in this very male-dominated setting in West Africa. But all I force myself to write about is my winter in Stockholm – which was, to be honest, quite dull.

No, this will not do. I will have to put the frustration-filled anecdotes about data cleaning and confusion on hold, and turn to my West Africa stories – which I think will be a lot more amusing to read anyway. I might return to the old stuff when I’m back home, if it still feels relevant. Or, I won’t, and the world won’t have missed out on anything amazing anyway.

Seasons can come in reverse sometimes, if you only let them.

migrations

Between January and March, four people who had become regular occurrences in my everyday life during the last three years packed up their things and left Sweden.

Kate, a former classmate and colleague from SRC, was first. In January, she moved back to her native New Zeeland for a prestigious job at the Ministry of the Environment.

In the end of February, Hanna, another former classmate, left for a blue ribbon internship at the EU Environment in Brussels. She will come back to Stockholm eventually, but still.

The heaviest blow came in the beginning of March. Lina, my roommate for the last three plus years, graduated in February, felt done with Stockholm, and moved to Delft, the Netherlands. It left an emptiness in the apartment, and in my everyday life, in a way that I couldn’t put my finger on. I got a new roommate just a week after Lina moved out, so physically the second bedroom was occupied. But the sounds in the apartment weren’t the same. And the new feeling will take time to get used to.

And then in mid-March, Jessica, a third of my former classmates and colleagues, went to Australia to start her PhD. She will also be back by fall, as she’s doing her PhD at both the university in Australia and at the SRC, but still.

With all these people gone, it’s like putting the last nail in the coffin of my master programme years. Ashley and Vivi are still around at the SRC. Linda, Elli, Matilda and Jonas are still in Stockholm, but with jobs and new responsibilities. Life has moved on to a new phase, and I have to create a new context for myself. True to my Nordic soul, I sometimes feel nostalgic for the old times. But I know it will pass, like most things.

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Kate and Jessica saying goodbye at Kate’s goodbye party.

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The last proper dinner party Lina and I hosted together in Skarpnäck, together with my former classmates Jessica and Ashley, and Lina’s former classmate Johan.

the Feminist Book Club

I’m aware that it’s in no way an original idea. But hey, clichés become clichés for a reason. Last spring, a couple of high school friends of mine and I started talking about forming a feminist book club. Several of us had come back to Stockholm from having gotten our degrees in different parts of Sweden (not me, obviously, I never made it out of Stockholm), and we all agreed that we had missed reading novels and discussing them, like in high school Swedish and English class. In September, we had our first meeting.

And I must say, it’s been a wonderful thing. During this year that I’ve had, my first as a professional, with responsibilities and time-schedules to get used to, the book club has been a safe place to come to. We meet in each other’s kitchens and discuss over dinner and wine. First a quick update on how everyone’s doing, but without delving, and then we talk about the book. Ah, I love talking about books.

The feminist theme is loosely interpreted to mean anything that could be discussed from a feminist point of view. We take turns choosing the book, so we’ve had a good spread. Two short Swedish classics, a Doris Lessing, a contemporary novel set in Somalia, a science fiction masterpiece and a reportage about the underground girls of Kabul.

I always leave these meetings invigorated. First having gotten the chance to immerse myself into a story that is so remote from my own existence, and then getting to discuss impressions and thoughts that came out of the reading with a group of intelligent women. We all have master degrees, so I guess in that sense we’re similar, but the fields that we work in have taken us to very different places, and we all have different stories to share.

Overall, I like where my life has taken me this far, but once in a while some distance is needed – and the feminist book club gives the perfect opportunity. In a bubble of novels and sisterhood, I get to take a break from myself once every six weeks. I love it.

Walking home through the Old Town snow, from another wonderful book club meeting, just tipsy enough from the wine to make an ordinary Wednesday evening feel exciting, and life seems to make sense again.

winter recap

The winter season this year was a bleak affair.

Christmas was pretty, with mom coming home from Liberia and going on a Christmas decoration shopping spree. Coloured lights in every window of the apartment.

But then it rained. And snowed. And rained. The path through the oak grove by SRC turned slippery. And I only managed to go cross-country skiing once. Matching time off and snow occurrence was impossible.

I also had many ideas for things to write about on the blog. Articles that I had read, things that workshops and seminars had made me think about. But they didn’t get written. I was too busy worrying about work. To be honest, now that it is behind me, winter is kind of a blur.

But I did go on a really nice Sunday walk with my aunt Kaarina in January. The setting sun turning the snow lilac.

the death of an idol

Let me take you back to the fall of 2006. I was taking a class in creative writing as one of my electables during my last year of high school. In that class, I had a friend called Sandra, who had a blog and who suggested I should start one too. I was already keeping a semi-public journal in the Swedish, pre-Facebook internet community Helgon.net. But I thought, Naah. Why did I need to switch? Why would anyone else except my (online) friends want to read what I wrote anyway?

I’ve always liked to hang out in libraries. For me, it’s like they have a gravitational pull. Being close to one, it’s almost impossible to not enter. Browse through the shelves, pick up a copy at random. The magic, the endless possibilities of an unread book. One November afternoon in 2006, while I was still resisting starting a blog, I sauntered into the small, stuffed library at my heavy-with-traditions high school, and picked up a square-shaped book with golden covers. It was full of short texts with lots of empty space on the pages, and illustrated with often quite poorly taken color photographs of a garden and odd objects. The uncommon format and layout tickled my curiosity, and I checked it out. Little did I know that that book, in a sense, would change my life.

It was Bodil Malmsten’s Hör bara hur ditt hjärta bultar i mig (Just hear how your heart beats in me). The short texts and photographs consisted of posts from her blog, and covered subjects ranging from sharp commentaries of the idiocy of politicians, though essay-like pieces about literature, to simple reflections about gardening. Everything soaked in Malmsten’s dark, witty sense of humor.

I fell head over heels. Now, this was something I wanted to mimic. I started a blog, aiming for the same mixture of personal, poetic and political. I don’t know how well I succeeded, but at least she got me started and blogging has followed me through the years, travels and studies ever since. And I continued to read anything I could get my hands on by her, novels, essays, logbooks and poetry. To be fair, my fervor has weaned over the years, switching to other authors and now completely being swallowed by scientific literature. But she is still the author whom I’ve read the most books by: Fourteen (which is not at all her entire bibliography, by the way). The next on the list is Tove Jansson, with ten – so Malmsten is safe on the throne.

But almost two weeks ago, Malmsten died. She had been suffering from leukemia for a while, and on February 5th, she passed away. The other day, I happened upon an eulogy in a newspaper while drinking a cup of tea in the kitchen at work, and it touched me so much I started crying – because its writer described the exact same kind of connection that I had felt with Malmsten’s writing. Colleagues who walked by my table stared, not sure how to react to my behavior, but I didn’t care. The Swedish language has lost one of its truly great literary minds, and I have lost one of my few idols. She was not afraid to feel, strongly, so nor was I.

So. I would like to honor her one last time by quoting two of my favorite excerpts from her books (that I’ve already copied at least once to that first blog), inexpertly translated by me. One is a tribute to libraries, mirroring my faith in their near-sacredness:

What the individual forgets exists in the library.

The libraries are the heads to the Earth’s body.

Each individual is a world, a universe, each book is a testimony of that.

There are as many ways to look upon the world as there are people and of that literature is proof. Into another’s mind you can only enter through the books.

Only at the libraries can you find the evidence.

from “Det är fortfarande ingen ordning på mina papper”

And the other is about love, its strength and diversity should be exercised, a practice none of us should ever forget:

I exercise my love, and not hate.

My hate cannot be developed, it is simple and slim. Head-on and directed at a couple of representatives of the power.

My love however, it lies like a cloud-cover over the mid-Norrland* countryside, it falls like snow with the constancy of the crystal.

The more you shovel, the more it snows.

from “För att lämna röstmeddelande tryck stjärna”

* The northernmost region of Sweden, where Malmsten grew up

passion and love as an agent of change

Another thing that Naomi Klein said during her talk in Stockholm in November, was that we have to remember love. Research is necessary for understanding what is happening, but no science in the world can make people change. Love is. Love for our people, for our homes. Love for Earth.

And love creates passion. And passion ignites agency.

I love cooking for people. I take care to use good ingredients, and I spend time on making the food, or the cookies, or the candy as good and as pretty as I can, because that is how I show the people that I love that I love them. And I think that is something you can taste. Food cooked with care and love is so much better than any other food.

I spent most of Christmas and New Year’s cooking for family and friends. It filled me up.

I think one of the necessary steps of turning our world toward a more sustainable trajectory is making people care more about the everyday things. Like food. How it’s produced. And shared. Finding that passion. And using it for the things and the people that they love.

when the world comes knocking on your door

Today, I’m angry at the world.

Yesterday, a group of Islamist militants walked into a hotel and a nearby restaurant in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and took everyone inside hostage. Security forces managed to demobilize the situation and free the hostages, but before that 26 people were killed, several were wounded, the hotel and restaurant were set on fire. An Al-Qaeda affiliated group based in Mali have taken responsibility for the attack.

Today, I’m angry at the world. I’ve eaten at the restaurant that was attacked. I’ve stayed at a hotel just next door. I have two colleagues who are in Ouagadougou right now. Both of them are safe, but they had planned to meet at the restaurant that was attacked just a couple of hours before the terrorists walked in. By chance, their plans changed.

Today, I’m angry at the world. Burkina Faso just had their first democratic elections in three decades this last November. About a year ago, a popular uprising led to the president of 27 years being forced to resign, and a peaceful democratization process was started. I witnessed it first-hand while in the country to do fieldwork. A democratization process that almost fell through in September when an officer in the former presidential guard took the interim president hostage and declared himself leader of the country. That lasted for one bloody, violent week before the national army surrounded the capital and the former presidential guard surrendered. The political situation is fragile, but hopeful.

Today, I’m angry at the world. The research project that I’m working in recently got dramatically reduced funding, due to the fact that so many European countries have chosen to use their foreign aid money for dealing with the refugee situation inside their borders instead of giving it to multilateral organizations. I think the refugees have a right to come to Europe and stay alive, and the fact that they are coming entails an initial cost to the European countries that they choose to come to. But isn’t it ironic that the money that is spent on taking care of these refugees originally was intended for projects that hopefully would have led to development of long-term stability and better welfare in the countries where many of the refugees come from, potentially preventing future countrymen and -women of the refugees from also fleeing. And now some brainwashed lunatics have made the situation worse also in Burkina Faso, thus far a relatively calm country in an increasingly violent region of Africa.

Today, I am so angry at the world. This twisted, sick, impossible place. Angry.

There will be no nice ending to this post. Because today, I am angry. Instead, here is a picture from last June, taken from the parking lot of the hotel where I stayed. To the right is the hotel that now is a burnt-out hole, and across the street you see the restaurant.

me and the budding sustainability professionals of the world

I graduated in June. I keep on telling this to people, from different perspectives, how I defended my thesis in the morning and after lunch attended my first official team meeting as a research assistant. How that’s a reason for why I’ve been feeling so exhausted this fall. How I didn’t realize until quite recently that I’ve actually graduated: Katja, MSc. How there simply hasn’t been any time for me to stop, breathe and have a think on where I want to go, now that the path that I’ve been on since high school has come to an end.

The past fall has been a roller-coaster. On the one hand, I can’t believe my luck for getting the opportunity to work with what I’m doing right now. But also, on the other hand, it is a really tough transition to go from being a master’s student to being a research assistant, with responsibility for a small, but not insignificant part of a project as unruly and shifty as the one I’m working in. I’ve felt lost, and incompetent at times, confused, frustrated, excited, inspired, exhausted. And now, I feel like the long Christmas break that I took meant I could re-boot. Get a new perspective. Take control. I’m not saying I’ve got it all figured out, no, but I feel hopeful about the future.

And today I had such an amazing day. I woke up feeling rested. I got a massage from the center’s visiting massage therapist before lunch. I had a cup of coffee, just because I felt like getting an extra kick, and then the afternoon just flew by while I played around in a GIS, something which most of the time makes me feel competent and awesome. I really do know how to deal with a GIS. And then I went to a gym class together with Jessica led by Linda, a former classmate of ours. It is a really intense class, but Linda is such a great teacher and once it was over, I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to go down the stairs to the women’s changing room. My legs were shaking. Luckily, Linda shared her orange with me and I slowly regained control over my muscles while Linda and I had a really nice conversation in the sauna.

High on exercise endorphins, walking home from the tube though the below -10°C cold, I felt exuberant, and so lucky that I had the master’s class that I had. And now, we’ve all graduated and are trying our wings out in the world. I am going to have such an amazing network of sustainability professionals to turn to, for support and inspiration and opportunities. It’s already started. Linda has founded a company together with her sister and two friends (Beteendelabbet, check it out!) where they are consulting on nudging and other science-based tools for changing people’s behaviors towards more sustainable practices. Today, Kate left Sweden to go back to her native New Zealand, where she is to start working for the Ministry for the Environment as a research analyst. Jessica will be off to Australia in less than two months to start her PhD on governance of marine resources.

And the list goes on. My classmates are spreading across the world, which is sad, but also amazing. We were 17 to start that master’s in September 2013, and now, still high on the day I’ve had, I’m excited to see where both I and all the others end up. I am sure it’s going to be awesome.

a soft start to spring

I’m back at work. I’m brushing up on my statistics toolbox and teaching myself programming in R. I found an online course, and today I watched three weeks worth of lectures. Granted, some of the lectures were very basic (I’m supposed to know the basics of R already, we had a 1,5 week module on it during the first term of the master’s programme). But when talk about programming environments and lexical scoping turns you philosophical, and makes you think of parallel universes and worlds within worlds, then you know it’s time to call it a day. The brain can only take so much.

I’ve also been reading a lot of scientific articles. I’m supposed to write up a report on where we’re at with the project, with complete Introduction, Theory and Methods and materials sections, and I’m collecting references. The range of subjects is insanely wide, due to the wide range of data that we’re planning to include in the analysis, and it is making my head swim. I feel like I’m a canister being filled with information. Or rather, like Hermione’s enchanted purse in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – on the outside, it looks conveniently small, but inside it’s enormous, possible to fit anything. But, the more you fill it, the trickier it becomes to find what you actually want. I wonder if I will ever be able to synthesize everything that I’ve crammed into my head. Right now, I feel like it’s just a huge mess.

But outside, it’s finally turned cold. The world is so beautiful when it’s snowing. It turns soft, breaking the darkness.