OCTOBER IN SWEDISH DEPRIVATION

October In Swedish Deprivation

By Susanna Alakoski

I’m retracing my own steps for the first time. The biography is entering my life, even though it takes place far after the biography. The biography enters the steps, unblessed it pushes aside the repressed. It doesn’t make excuses. It doesn’t explain either. It’s true that I some days see the dead. We’re always in the same kitchen, the same living room, hallway, bath room. There’s always blood there. Or newly baked bread. Mum is bruised all over. Or she’s not. Dad is in one of his stages. We have a small kitchen table, four chairs and a stool. I’m the one sitting on the stool. We lived in big chops and changes. It was heaven or hell, it was the heaven in hell. Is it possible to write without hurting? Is it possible to remember without hurting someone else? The scars are mine as the pen, and the one who writes is the one who remembers, and the one who writes is also the one lifting words out of the story, directs the light, erases and saves. The others, the ones writing the scars, the ones who are subjects of the text, how can they answer or defend themselves? It’s barely doable, they’re strangers or dead or gone of other reasons.

In her October journal Susanna Alakoski describes how she tries to approach her adolescence. She spends time in the town where she grew up, she travels through Sweden, and with the difficult work remembering and writing she sees a society where there’re still the same patterns: people live in poverty, homelessness and invisibility.