Good morning Capital, good morning blog. It’s a rather pretty sunshiny day. I am chirpy even though I slept four hours or so. I woke up by the door slamming and Landlady returning from the shops, in a white moment of fear I worried it was eleven o’clock or so. She said it was about twenty minutes past eight. And since then I have been up.
Even though we do disagree about my identity, even more so after discussions on femme and crip that took place yesterday, I really like living with her.
Even more I enjoy that she is (it seems) the only one unable to see my femme identity as a valid identity. I am glad so many glorious brainy femmes cover my back.
The time difference between Stockholm and London made things rather late last night, but so much fun had. And I am delighted to see that the much overdue episode of Fishy Femme Fiction is still coveted. And I’ll take images of close proximity muses with me all over today. I am sure I will be a smiling girl indeed.
In fact I am thinking my martial arts muses need to fight each other at some point. Oh, come on girls! It could be my birthday treat, please? Or for Christmas or New Year’s or whenever, any day is a partying day, right?
I am going back up north on Wednesday. I look forward to seeing my parents and my brother and his family. I long to see those mountains again, to breathe air free from smog. And travel through a country that is my heart, were the roads are my veins and arteries. Those roads are inside my skin now, dirt roads and crackling paving. The house. The strong tall trees that grow around these people for protection that protected me as I grew up.
I long for my father’s language, his storytelling. My mother’s fiery comments and loud laughter. My aunts’ care. Jesus. My grandmothers just steps behind me wherever I go.
I’ll rest when I am home, I might crash for real. I need to read a lot though. I figured I’d do most of it on the bus on Wednesday; four hours should get me far I think. I need to write a lot too. I wonder if I shall bring this laptop or if my parents stationary will do? Am I greedy if I want a tiny computer for my writing? Perhaps not. But I am not rich these days. For Christmas?
I have realised I need to write more cohesively in Swedish as well. As I have said earlier in this blog I have existed mostly in English these days. It’s nice, but of course a bit distancing at times. Even though it’s a language that’s close to heart it is not mine, as such.
I’ll need to work on that “Jesus-piece” for the stage too. That’ll be in Swedish so that will be good. I am thinking it’s well needed. The Pentecostal woman is all you never thought she would be. Indeed. Or more so I am perhaps.
I should get dressed now. I need to ‘femme up’ especially since I am having a meeting with a PA agency this afternoon. Two potential girls for me to interview, I really hope they want to work with me. My personal ass.’s as Kicko would say.
After the meeting I’ll have to sit around at Uni for ever to wait for my lecture. The taxi cards are a bit confining when they run low. I need to get hold of that man today too. Wish me luck.
Watch out for me while I am in you today Capital. I think I might like you now.
Visar inlägg med etikett rural-ness. Visa alla inlägg
Visar inlägg med etikett rural-ness. Visa alla inlägg
måndag 14 september 2009
lördag 12 september 2009
On stone-ness...
This post is inspired by Sassafras Lowrey’s post on stone-ness on The Femmes Guide.
The post, in case you’re too lazy to read it, in which case shame on you, is about stone-ness and the identifications of stone butches and femmes. Lowrey discusses the idea that the sexuality of a stone-femme is determined and decided by the link to a stone-butch, and ultimately the sexuality of said butch. That femme's who identify as stone-femmes and/or confess to being attracted mostly by stone-butches in doing so, are portrayed in relation to their butch partners rather than on their own. And reaches the conclusion, that (of course) that is not all there is to it...
In the end of the post there is a question.
So I thought I’d be a good blogger and answer that, plus it will give some extra time away from my University reading which I really cherish at this point. Lazy schoolgirl as I am.
So, my femme identity. It’s very much built upon force, and the force ascribed to the feminine appearance. This comes from growing up in an environment that very much credited power to femininity and strength to womanhood. In my rural matriarchy the woman was never inferior but seen on her own and valued separately from whomever she chose to part with.
My mother brought me up with a strong sense of dress, she knew that she was no less a woman wearing pants, and I was no less an emancipated young woman wearing skirts. She taught me to bring consciousness into the way I dressed.
To think about how I looked and how others saw me, and she delighted in me playing with that. Having the ruffled skirts collide with a strong sense of power and a sharp mind.
I would say that my femme identity is about contrast in many ways. It’s about a very girlie appearance paired with a demanding power; it’s about enhancing my crippled body and my crooked legs and tiny hands with alluring cleavages and tight fitted skirts. It’s about enhancing what is hot about my own body and what is hot about my mind. It’s about combining my giggling and my fondness for ruffles and flowery tops with those rugged pairs of jeans and that chequered short-sleeved blouse, the three top buttons unbuttoned.
It’s about embracing sexuality, sensuality and strength. But it's also about allowing me to find piece within the fact that my body is frail and weak, that it is petite and in need of shelter from others at times. My femme identity has helped me combined all these things into something that feels good for me, that there is no juxtaposition as such in being strong, girlie, and alluring.
I would call myself a stone femme.
But that doesn’t have anything to do with stone butches, or any butches at all.
I am a stone femme since femme is my major identity, it’s that umbrella under which all my other identities, my rural-hard-working-blue-collar-Pentecostal sense of self, my crip ideas of self, my power and ideas of dominances, my longings to be weak, to crash and be lifted sheltered and comforted, can exist without any problems.
On the latter part of that sentence, I think that that longing to be sheltered and picked up draws me to people with a butch aurora around them. That I know that they are stable and strong enough pick me up not only physically but also mentally.
However, as I have spoken so much about contrast. That sense of power and physical strength within another person also gives me the greatest urge to break that, to know that I am in control of that power and the strength, that it is used to shelter and protect me as I chose.
Furthermore, I thrive on sheltering my partners especially if they are butch-ey, I thrive on that person ‘giving in’ and showing me their own weakness. I long to be that strong sense of ‘home’ and ‘safety’ for another person, I love running my fingers gently over my lovers strong back and tell them that all will be fine.
As much as I long to feeling that persons arms around my own shivering body.
To argue that
Not to the femmes who describe their stone femme identity as an attraction to stone butches since it insinuates that the femme is only valid through the butch, and hence marginalizes the femmes and femme as an identity of its own.
Also, it’s not fair to stone femmes as myself. To which the concept stone is not valid in relation to any other person femme, or butch, or whatever, but solely as that centre of me. That place deep inside were I am at rest, where I don’t question myself but accept all that I am. Where all that I am co-exist in every breath that draw.
My ‘stone’ is a cave, a room, within my soul.
A room with a magnificent closet, where linen blouse and massive silver jewellery hangs alongside tulle skirts and tailored power suites, leather gloves and knitted mittens, tops with their sleeves cut off, all my push-up bra’s and my knee-high socks.
Where my heavy perfume and make-up sits next to the Bible and the icons my aunt brought me from Krakow, where there is a place for me to kneel and give praise, where there is a place for me to shout and embrace the fierceness and overthrowing power that my religious conviction is.
It’s a room where I can laugh ‘til I am a wet puddle on the floor. It is a room where I can rest, a room where I can lay down why a sweet soul brings me tea and salty snacks. It’s a place were I kept the secrets people tell me, and the ones I have told them.
It’s a room with a bed where the sheets are never neat, only wet and tangled. It’s a bed where backs are arched and shivering before the hit the mattress. It’s a room where my glitzy nails can make maps on backs, where they pluck gently at the soft hair of slumbering guests.
It’s a room where sun shines in from the window making golden squares on the floor. A room that smells of lavender and sits amongst mountains and fair green shadows. A room that throbs when my heart beats. A shelter, a refuge and the origin of all my dreams.
The post, in case you’re too lazy to read it, in which case shame on you, is about stone-ness and the identifications of stone butches and femmes. Lowrey discusses the idea that the sexuality of a stone-femme is determined and decided by the link to a stone-butch, and ultimately the sexuality of said butch. That femme's who identify as stone-femmes and/or confess to being attracted mostly by stone-butches in doing so, are portrayed in relation to their butch partners rather than on their own. And reaches the conclusion, that (of course) that is not all there is to it...
In the end of the post there is a question.
How about all of you, do you identify as a stone femme? If yes, how do you define it?
So I thought I’d be a good blogger and answer that, plus it will give some extra time away from my University reading which I really cherish at this point. Lazy schoolgirl as I am.
So, my femme identity. It’s very much built upon force, and the force ascribed to the feminine appearance. This comes from growing up in an environment that very much credited power to femininity and strength to womanhood. In my rural matriarchy the woman was never inferior but seen on her own and valued separately from whomever she chose to part with.
My mother brought me up with a strong sense of dress, she knew that she was no less a woman wearing pants, and I was no less an emancipated young woman wearing skirts. She taught me to bring consciousness into the way I dressed.
To think about how I looked and how others saw me, and she delighted in me playing with that. Having the ruffled skirts collide with a strong sense of power and a sharp mind.
I would say that my femme identity is about contrast in many ways. It’s about a very girlie appearance paired with a demanding power; it’s about enhancing my crippled body and my crooked legs and tiny hands with alluring cleavages and tight fitted skirts. It’s about enhancing what is hot about my own body and what is hot about my mind. It’s about combining my giggling and my fondness for ruffles and flowery tops with those rugged pairs of jeans and that chequered short-sleeved blouse, the three top buttons unbuttoned.
It’s about embracing sexuality, sensuality and strength. But it's also about allowing me to find piece within the fact that my body is frail and weak, that it is petite and in need of shelter from others at times. My femme identity has helped me combined all these things into something that feels good for me, that there is no juxtaposition as such in being strong, girlie, and alluring.
I would call myself a stone femme.
But that doesn’t have anything to do with stone butches, or any butches at all.
I am a stone femme since femme is my major identity, it’s that umbrella under which all my other identities, my rural-hard-working-blue-collar-Pentecostal sense of self, my crip ideas of self, my power and ideas of dominances, my longings to be weak, to crash and be lifted sheltered and comforted, can exist without any problems.
On the latter part of that sentence, I think that that longing to be sheltered and picked up draws me to people with a butch aurora around them. That I know that they are stable and strong enough pick me up not only physically but also mentally.
However, as I have spoken so much about contrast. That sense of power and physical strength within another person also gives me the greatest urge to break that, to know that I am in control of that power and the strength, that it is used to shelter and protect me as I chose.
Furthermore, I thrive on sheltering my partners especially if they are butch-ey, I thrive on that person ‘giving in’ and showing me their own weakness. I long to be that strong sense of ‘home’ and ‘safety’ for another person, I love running my fingers gently over my lovers strong back and tell them that all will be fine.
As much as I long to feeling that persons arms around my own shivering body.
To argue that
‘stone femme’/... / [is a] /..../ sexuality tied exclusively to that of /.../ butch partners /..../,is not fair.
Not to the femmes who describe their stone femme identity as an attraction to stone butches since it insinuates that the femme is only valid through the butch, and hence marginalizes the femmes and femme as an identity of its own.
Also, it’s not fair to stone femmes as myself. To which the concept stone is not valid in relation to any other person femme, or butch, or whatever, but solely as that centre of me. That place deep inside were I am at rest, where I don’t question myself but accept all that I am. Where all that I am co-exist in every breath that draw.
My ‘stone’ is a cave, a room, within my soul.
A room with a magnificent closet, where linen blouse and massive silver jewellery hangs alongside tulle skirts and tailored power suites, leather gloves and knitted mittens, tops with their sleeves cut off, all my push-up bra’s and my knee-high socks.
Where my heavy perfume and make-up sits next to the Bible and the icons my aunt brought me from Krakow, where there is a place for me to kneel and give praise, where there is a place for me to shout and embrace the fierceness and overthrowing power that my religious conviction is.
It’s a room where I can laugh ‘til I am a wet puddle on the floor. It is a room where I can rest, a room where I can lay down why a sweet soul brings me tea and salty snacks. It’s a place were I kept the secrets people tell me, and the ones I have told them.
It’s a room with a bed where the sheets are never neat, only wet and tangled. It’s a bed where backs are arched and shivering before the hit the mattress. It’s a room where my glitzy nails can make maps on backs, where they pluck gently at the soft hair of slumbering guests.
It’s a room where sun shines in from the window making golden squares on the floor. A room that smells of lavender and sits amongst mountains and fair green shadows. A room that throbs when my heart beats. A shelter, a refuge and the origin of all my dreams.
torsdag 20 augusti 2009
On living in the Capital
Here is an open letter to my new home town
Bye for now then new home, look out for me while I am in you.
Love, Kittin.
Hello Capital,
I am here now. But I am sure you have seen me around and out and about in you. I mostly get around in yellow cabs, but it doesn’t make me feel like a New Yorker. You may not have known that but I wanted to live in
I longed to grow up, I long to write whenever I wanted to – and have the chance for others to read it. I longed to walk down a street with red and yellow autumn leaves soaring above my head. To open the door to any kind of room where art happened, to step into the dark of theatre, the serenity of a writers den or the messiness of an artists studio. Then it was just as much the images that those ideas conjured within in me as the actually activity that took place in these spaces, that intrigued me.
And you see Capital, it’s happening now. I am here and I soar in cabs. I get asked to speak my mind at dress rehearsals of friend’s productions and I must say you, dear Capital, spark my imagination. I see people I want to tell about, I hear conversations I want to finish in text. There are places that need to be filled here. There are venues that I can use; there are people who want me to use them.
I feel awaited now that I am here in you Capital. People are happy to have me here. It feels good when actually getting to live here is still hard. Because you see Capital I am still struggling not only to survive here. But to live.
The people I have been in touch with have a hard time wrapping their minds around how I want to lead my life in you. They say:
“What… are you saying you don’t know how your days will be scheduled from day to day?”
“Ah meetings you say, talks about creative processes, lectures, rehearsals….and you want that to be flexible…oh yes…”
I don’t know in what kind of life these people live, if them and I even share the same city. Dear Capital, you for one should know, do we?
I want to ask them if they plan every day to the minute, if they would feel okay with not deciding about their own time.
It’s a struggle, this really is.
But I keep confidence that once all this struggle is over and I have finally settled down here. All will be as I wished. I long to make art in this city. I long to work with people who love me and respect me and se me for who I am. And I know I will…I know that the projects that I have planned and the subjects I want to dive down into with my studying. Thing are coming together really good in that sense.
And I think that is necessary to keep my head up during this time. There is an army for me and it’s a damn good army.
So Capital, for the two days that I have made you my home here a lot of things have happened. Good things and not so good things. I soon have my own home and I hope that once I really fight
I know this is a fight but I always fight – all art is fighting all fighting is life.
Other people have travelled this before, they have made it and I will make it. There are memories from these people sprinkled along the path, there is a history for me, voices produced by throats in bodies with tensed muscles that whisper “It can be done…and it can be done well.”
So for my next meeting with the
Bye for now then new home, look out for me while I am in you.
Love, Kittin.
onsdag 12 augusti 2009
On the joys of writing and "other" languages
Having picked up on blogging again just now, and through it being given the joy to move on with all my other writing which I haven’t taken time to write recently. I have come to realise again just how much I love writing. And I have realised just how important it is to have a space like this blog, where even though others can read what I write I am free to ramble as much as I want.
I am writing a new Fiction for the FFF project, or more so a new chapter to the initial story that made that project up. It has been resting for quite a while since there have been too much stress around to really get the chance to write. But as I write on it now, I see it might have been just what I needed when things were the most stressful, to escape in its purest form into a world that I know and that I create as I go along in it.
However, I know my process of writing is not like that. I need a pretty long time span to build up a world within in me, a world with places, rules and peoples that I can explore once I sit down to write (writing happens mostly in stream of consciousness, which is in itself a form of escapism) hence, I can’t write before I know at least something about what I need to find out while doing so.
While attending my creative writing class in Bollnäs (reminds me that I still haven’t told my teacher I can’t follow trough with that as well as University this autumn…must do that) we were often given tasks to write quickly, in ten, fifteen minuets or so. I always managed to do really well then and it’s puzzled me. It wasn’t that I went around with a mapping for several stories in my head just waiting for that ten minuet chance to spit them out. Usually, when being alone in front of my computer that approach wouldn’t have worked.
Then I realised it was about being forced to write. That when not given any escape route but rather a very blunt entrance into the world of words my mind was made blank. And through that blankness other thoughts, those I hadn’t planned and hadn’t thought about for nights on end when laying awake in bed, had the chance to emerge.
Having done it often enough while in class I now do it every day. Take ten to fifteen minuets to clear my mind and just write. I have found that there is a theme to all of these writings even if they shift with my mood for the day. Sometime I might look through them and make something of it.
One of them have already become a stage piece entitled “Är det där min kvinnlighet…ska jag betala för den?” (”Is that my womanhood….will you charge me for it?”) and was preformed early this spring. (See the blog post entitled “On absolute identities”)
I feel like I am wandering off. I wanted to say that having found that blank space in my mind is really such an advantage. Now I find I plan as much as before, but then enter that ‘blank’ space when I actually write. So that I have all the ideas within but make no deliberate choice about what comes when and where, the process of that is a true delight and such escapism it makes my heart flutter. Also, I find it gives me a much stronger lust for writing since I too want to know what will ‘happen next’, so to speak.
In this space, as well as in the fiction project, I write in English. I am a self-proclaimed linguistic anglophile, that is to say English as a language is my biggest ‘turn on’. The English culture not as much, mostly it puzzles me or makes me laugh nowadays. But written and spoken English has a very special place in my heart.I don’t fully know why it is so. I guess it has a lot to do with being born on the 4th of July and being told America was awesome when growing up because of it. But I think it lies even deeper within, that it is one of those things that perhaps I shouldn’t know the reason for. That it’s a quirk in some sense, something that constitutes me but on the other hand shouldn’t be looked into in search of “why’s” and “how’s” since there will likely be no reasonable answers. Other than it’s that escapism again. That English served well in a time when I daydreamed a lot (like I am not still…) that it created a parallel to the well known, but yet a space which I could learn to master.
I think of the two languages as two rooms that mirror each other. I find the two ways of expression very similar and in some ways I find that they mirror various sides of me, my thoughts and feelings. Usually I know if a feeling serves best to be described in one language or the other. I know some thoughts and feelings are only good in Swedish and the other way around.
Anyhow, it doesn’t matter how much pretentious rambling I build up around my fascination of the English language
(I wonder where the need to do that comes from. I suspect it come from an inherited idea of rural inferiority, a feeling of shame and guilt, like I am possessing something that is truly not mine and somewhat above me, when I speak of the English language as a part of me. I find I justify my likening of the language and my vivid use of it whenever I do, saying things like ‘it’s not cause I want to be cool, it’s a soul thing’. And it is…) when it comes down to the nitty gritty it’s all about pleasure. I love the sound that the English language makes when someone speaks it. I the love sensation of it as it rolls of the tip of my tongue. I love how’s it’s composed and how its words look when printed in ink or on a computer screen.
Mostly I love to try and tame it, to make it what I want it to be even if it’s not my mother-tongue. To be frank Swedish as I know of it now is not my mother tongue either, it’s a language full of “ô”’s and “he”’s and “je”’s.
“Je kan’t säga va sûm gjer Äng’skan tä ett tôcke vakescht språk,e. Me je vät att ho ä he.”
”I couldn’t say what it is that makes English such a beautiful language. But I know it is.”
I am writing a new Fiction for the FFF project, or more so a new chapter to the initial story that made that project up. It has been resting for quite a while since there have been too much stress around to really get the chance to write. But as I write on it now, I see it might have been just what I needed when things were the most stressful, to escape in its purest form into a world that I know and that I create as I go along in it.
However, I know my process of writing is not like that. I need a pretty long time span to build up a world within in me, a world with places, rules and peoples that I can explore once I sit down to write (writing happens mostly in stream of consciousness, which is in itself a form of escapism) hence, I can’t write before I know at least something about what I need to find out while doing so.
While attending my creative writing class in Bollnäs (reminds me that I still haven’t told my teacher I can’t follow trough with that as well as University this autumn…must do that) we were often given tasks to write quickly, in ten, fifteen minuets or so. I always managed to do really well then and it’s puzzled me. It wasn’t that I went around with a mapping for several stories in my head just waiting for that ten minuet chance to spit them out. Usually, when being alone in front of my computer that approach wouldn’t have worked.
Then I realised it was about being forced to write. That when not given any escape route but rather a very blunt entrance into the world of words my mind was made blank. And through that blankness other thoughts, those I hadn’t planned and hadn’t thought about for nights on end when laying awake in bed, had the chance to emerge.
Having done it often enough while in class I now do it every day. Take ten to fifteen minuets to clear my mind and just write. I have found that there is a theme to all of these writings even if they shift with my mood for the day. Sometime I might look through them and make something of it.
One of them have already become a stage piece entitled “Är det där min kvinnlighet…ska jag betala för den?” (”Is that my womanhood….will you charge me for it?”) and was preformed early this spring. (See the blog post entitled “On absolute identities”)
I feel like I am wandering off. I wanted to say that having found that blank space in my mind is really such an advantage. Now I find I plan as much as before, but then enter that ‘blank’ space when I actually write. So that I have all the ideas within but make no deliberate choice about what comes when and where, the process of that is a true delight and such escapism it makes my heart flutter. Also, I find it gives me a much stronger lust for writing since I too want to know what will ‘happen next’, so to speak.
In this space, as well as in the fiction project, I write in English. I am a self-proclaimed linguistic anglophile, that is to say English as a language is my biggest ‘turn on’. The English culture not as much, mostly it puzzles me or makes me laugh nowadays. But written and spoken English has a very special place in my heart.I don’t fully know why it is so. I guess it has a lot to do with being born on the 4th of July and being told America was awesome when growing up because of it. But I think it lies even deeper within, that it is one of those things that perhaps I shouldn’t know the reason for. That it’s a quirk in some sense, something that constitutes me but on the other hand shouldn’t be looked into in search of “why’s” and “how’s” since there will likely be no reasonable answers. Other than it’s that escapism again. That English served well in a time when I daydreamed a lot (like I am not still…) that it created a parallel to the well known, but yet a space which I could learn to master.
I think of the two languages as two rooms that mirror each other. I find the two ways of expression very similar and in some ways I find that they mirror various sides of me, my thoughts and feelings. Usually I know if a feeling serves best to be described in one language or the other. I know some thoughts and feelings are only good in Swedish and the other way around.
Anyhow, it doesn’t matter how much pretentious rambling I build up around my fascination of the English language
(I wonder where the need to do that comes from. I suspect it come from an inherited idea of rural inferiority, a feeling of shame and guilt, like I am possessing something that is truly not mine and somewhat above me, when I speak of the English language as a part of me. I find I justify my likening of the language and my vivid use of it whenever I do, saying things like ‘it’s not cause I want to be cool, it’s a soul thing’. And it is…) when it comes down to the nitty gritty it’s all about pleasure. I love the sound that the English language makes when someone speaks it. I the love sensation of it as it rolls of the tip of my tongue. I love how’s it’s composed and how its words look when printed in ink or on a computer screen.
Mostly I love to try and tame it, to make it what I want it to be even if it’s not my mother-tongue. To be frank Swedish as I know of it now is not my mother tongue either, it’s a language full of “ô”’s and “he”’s and “je”’s.
“Je kan’t säga va sûm gjer Äng’skan tä ett tôcke vakescht språk,e. Me je vät att ho ä he.”
”I couldn’t say what it is that makes English such a beautiful language. But I know it is.”
torsdag 23 april 2009
On ruralness
I made my way around some very well known surroundings today. My village.
It is all very rural - I describe it best by saying that it is a 15 minute ride by car whenever I want something from a shop. If I want a latte it's 45 minutes. There you have it.
I have lived here all my life, except 3 years in high school and 2 years away studying in other places. I choose to move out at age 16 thinking I wouldnt survive if I stayed. I assume I was right back then. In fact, I know for sure I wouldn't have emancipated the way I have now had I stayed.
Unlike others who moved out of here when I did, I always knew I would come back.
I look for houses now when I am on my way out again. Ask my father: who owns this? Who owns that?
I want to come back here with a caravan of people I have gotten to know while out and about in the world. I want to dwell here, bring my future partner and kids. Teach them about the bliss of silence.
Because it really is silent here, rigth now I only hear myself tapping the keyboard of my computer. If I listen carefully I can hear birds twittering. Nothing more. At night there's not even birds.
There are no street lights, no neon-signs, no cars roaming the streets. There is no street, mind you.
The silence is a bit of a fear factor for city people who visit my rural haven. They listen eagerly to hear if anybody's coming, when trees creek they jump high!
I laugh at the thought of silence being such a scary thing.
I have never been a city-girl. I have never enjoyed roaming streets for more than a period of time. Now, imagining myself living in the Capital, I must take this into consideration- it will never be silent.
How will I react to that? I have never lived in a city worthy of its name. I have always been a visitor. Always gone back to silence and untouched dirt roads.
Today when being out and about for one and a half hour I saw one- ONE- person. I know him. He has been around all the time when I grew up, he's the son of my neighbours. I said "Hi" he said "Hi".
Here no-one is anonymous. If you live here I know who you are. Who you parents are. Who their parents were. The chance is quite big they knew my grandparents, we might be related. In the end we all are. Unless you're a newcomer. Then I know of you as one.
It is all very rural - I describe it best by saying that it is a 15 minute ride by car whenever I want something from a shop. If I want a latte it's 45 minutes. There you have it.
I have lived here all my life, except 3 years in high school and 2 years away studying in other places. I choose to move out at age 16 thinking I wouldnt survive if I stayed. I assume I was right back then. In fact, I know for sure I wouldn't have emancipated the way I have now had I stayed.
Unlike others who moved out of here when I did, I always knew I would come back.
I look for houses now when I am on my way out again. Ask my father: who owns this? Who owns that?
I want to come back here with a caravan of people I have gotten to know while out and about in the world. I want to dwell here, bring my future partner and kids. Teach them about the bliss of silence.
Because it really is silent here, rigth now I only hear myself tapping the keyboard of my computer. If I listen carefully I can hear birds twittering. Nothing more. At night there's not even birds.
There are no street lights, no neon-signs, no cars roaming the streets. There is no street, mind you.
The silence is a bit of a fear factor for city people who visit my rural haven. They listen eagerly to hear if anybody's coming, when trees creek they jump high!
I laugh at the thought of silence being such a scary thing.
I have never been a city-girl. I have never enjoyed roaming streets for more than a period of time. Now, imagining myself living in the Capital, I must take this into consideration- it will never be silent.
How will I react to that? I have never lived in a city worthy of its name. I have always been a visitor. Always gone back to silence and untouched dirt roads.
Today when being out and about for one and a half hour I saw one- ONE- person. I know him. He has been around all the time when I grew up, he's the son of my neighbours. I said "Hi" he said "Hi".
Here no-one is anonymous. If you live here I know who you are. Who you parents are. Who their parents were. The chance is quite big they knew my grandparents, we might be related. In the end we all are. Unless you're a newcomer. Then I know of you as one.
To survive in the Capital I assume I will have to wear my rural identity on my sleeves occasionally. In periods, speak my dialect, sing my songs, wear my traditional clothing. I wouldn't talk about a Swedish identity since I don't what constitutes such a thing. But I would talk about being from Delsbo (or more so being a Dellbo) and being brought up in Hälsingland as my identity.
Language of course plays a big part in that. I didn't like my dialect when growing up, I didn't want to be made apart by it. I had a strong yearning to be a cosmopolitan person. Dialects don't fit that kind of personality, unless it's a cosmpolitan one, a mash of several ways of speaking.
In my posh, bilingual, high school English class I was asked how many languages I could speak. I said I spoke four. Swedish-English-French-and-Dellboska (my dialect). My teacher ,a scottish air-force officer made linguistic nerd was amazed. He wanted to know more about it and he encouraged me to ask my parents what their attiude to the dialect had been growing up, and if it had changed during the years. Never before had I encoutered a sincere interest in my rural identity, mostly since all the people I knew shared it.
Now I find myself an advocate for the children in my village and the area of our dialect, I speak our dialect with them, and I speak it anywhere I find fit.
I teach my brother's step-son words he has never heard of.
(He lives in the town 45 minutes away, so yes the area of the dialect is tiny)
Growing up I was always jelaous of children who could speak a foreign language, now I know I speak one. Below is a sample:
He gjänt nå öm du änt ferståår va jö sääger, ä.
Jö läär däg, ja'.
He ha vörte sa laangt mella' mäg å däg, hä ä f'att du änt ferståår va jö sääger.
Visseru!
(It's alright if you don't get what I am saying.
I'll teach you.
The distance between us is quite big, it's because your not getting me.
You see.)
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