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ABSTRACT
This article examines the existential grounds and experiential limits of an embodied and intersubjective being-in-the-world, in walking dialogue with the remembrances of Afro-Swedish subjects. To walk, wander, and roam in Sweden, particularly through the abundant green spaces that intrude upon and surround nearly every town and city, is a socially constitutive practice of everyday life. It is a sign of personal vitality, healthfulness, and a kind of being-with others predicated on a regular, vigorous, and widespread being-toward nature. Yet, for many Swedes of African descent (as for non-white Swedes more generally), such an imagined community of salubrious walkers is largely just that, a socially constructed fiction that perforce excludes them; an abstraction of urban planning that encumbers their movements, creating anomalous spaces of stasis and immobility; a caesura in the biopolitical field that indexes their black lives as matter out of place, beyond both culture and nature.
Acknowledgements
I would like to say ‘tusan tack’ (a thousand thanks) to Stevie Nii-Adu Mensah, Simon Matiwos, and Faaid Ali-Nuur for sharing their walking insights with me during my year of fieldwork in Sweden (August 2015–July 2016). For listening to an early oral presentation of this essay and providing useful feedback and encouragement, I thank Johanna Sellman and Sofia Andreasson. For helping me assemble sources and format this article, I thank my spring 2017 research assistant at the Ohio State University, Austin McCabe Juhnke. I first presented this work as an invited lecture at the Columbia University Center for Ethnomusicology on 24 January 2017. My thanks to Ana Maria Ochoa and Aaron A. Fox for inviting me back ‘home’, and to all of the students and faculty who asked great questions and offered astute comments that day, especially Monica Miller, who also took the time to read and respond to a later written version of this essay. I thank Ben Teitelbaum and the editors of African and Black Diaspora for their careful readings and astute feedback as the final version of this article came together. Finally, I am very grateful to Professor Sten Hagberg and the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology at Uppsala University for hosting me during the 2015–2016 academic year.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 A national report published in 2008, studying the nature, scope, and significance of ‘outdoor recreation’ (friluftsliv) in Sweden, shows that nearly 90% of the 1792 respondents associate hikes in the forest and mountains (vandring i skog och fjällvandring) with the idea of the ‘being outdoors’. Moreover, the report describes such recreational contact with nature as ‘a central part of our [Swedish] cultural tradition and national identity. It is for many people a very important element of their quality of life and health’ (Fredman et al. Citation2008, 7). Swedish ethnologists Jonas Frykman and Orvar Löfgren describe this notion of a typically Swedish appeal to what they call the ‘recreational landscape’ as rooted in the emergence of a middle-class, bourgeois conception of and engagement with nature in the nineteenth century (Citation1987).
2 See entry for ‘vill’ (a dated term in Swedish, meaning ‘lost’) in Elof Hellquist’s Svensk etymologisk ordbok for an etymology that links this term to ‘vild’ (wild), from the Old Norse ‘villr’ (Citation1922, 1123–1124).
3 Stories of children getting lost in the strange, scary, and creaturely world of the forest appear frequently in contemporary Swedish children’s literature. See, for example, Westerlund (Citation2012) and Lindenbaum (Citation2001).
4 Ola Larsmo, in a recently published history of ‘Swede Hollow’ (Citation2016), a slum on the outskirts of St. Paul, Minnesota, where more than a thousand migrant Swedes lived at the turn of the twentieth century, offers a fascinating counterpoint to the frequently romanticized narrative of Swedish migration to the United States, and Minnesota in particular. Larsmo’s book is also timely in relation to current debates about the recent influx of non-European immigrants in Sweden, showing how Swedes have also felt the pressures of migration, sought asylum and refuge in a faraway land, and faced discrimination and abuse as ‘foreigners’.
5 In a recent state-sponsored study of anti-black racism in Sweden conducted by Tobias Hübinette, Samson Beshir, and Victoria Kawesa, the authors estimate the number of Afro-Swedes to be approximately 180,000 (Citation2014, 16), noting, however, that this is likely a conservative figure. Indeed, more recent data from Statistics Sweden (Statistiska centralbyrån, a state-sponsored institute that tracks national demography) indicates that, in 2016, there were as many as 200,000 Swedish residents born in Africa, a figure that does not include children born in Sweden to an African parent or parents or Swedish residents and citizens with roots or heritage in the broader African diaspora.
6 Stevie Nii-Adu Mensah, interview with the author, 22 September 2015, Stockholm (Blackeberg), Sweden.
7 As Swedish DJ, public intellectual, and culture critic Nathan Hamelberg notes (in a recent Facebook post, 1 December 2016): ‘The program was a potpourri of contemporary pop culture, all in one place … everything from Twister Sister to Culture Club, or Limahl [of “Never Ending Story” fame], and, deeper still, Cabaret Voltaire’. Turning to the dance segment, ‘Freak Out’, Hamelberg notes that
much of what epitomized the [cultural] style of Plattan and Kungsan [two bustling public squares in downtown Stockholm] was covered in a few minutes: the leg warmer, robot dance, boom box, head band, sound from drum machines and synths, pastel colors matched with black.
8 It is worth noting the commentary on the Bromma municipality website regarding the relationship between Blackeberg township’s urban infrastructure and its forested environs: ‘Development in Blackeberg is skillfully and thoughtfully adapted to the natural environment. Rock faces and large forested regions have been maintained – One has build WITH nature and not AGAINST it’ (Bromma hembygdsförening, my translation).
9 Simon Matiwos, interview with the author, 1 September 2015, Stockholm (Husby), Sweden.
10 Ahmed Ibrahim Ali (aka Romário) was Swedish soccer player of Somali descent.
Ali had played with the men’s national soccer team in Djibouti, studied on a scholarship at West Hills College (USA), and been hired as gym teacher. He had even been active in the opening of a youth center in Husby.
11 A short online article (Mitt i Citation2012) describes the efforts of Swedish soccer player and Husby native Henok Goitom to have artificial turf installed at the ‘number three’ soccer field in Husby. The article begins by noting Goitom’s jersey number with the AIK soccer club: #36.
12 Text of ‘Systemets Vänterum’ in Swedish: Vi fastnade i systemets väntetrum / Tjugo vänner utanför svenska rum / Utomhus / Vi kallar det ‘centrum’ / Skumt / [Här] utanförskap centraliseras / Samtidigt som politiken marginaliserar / Håller vi på att bli enade? / Jag ser adeln göra det / Men när ska arbetarklassen bli förenade? / Hälften kastar stenar / Resten är förstenade / Jag pekar på problemen / Men ni är allt för upptagna att titta på min bruna hand / Har han blod på sin hand? / Har han snattat med sin hand? / Får man ens skaka hand med han?
13 “‘Jacco’ – Vår Betong (Official Video) + Lyrics.” 2012. YouTube video, 4:02, January 24. Posted by ‘ClynCes kanal’. Accessed 19 April 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mrk5skPpwAc.
14 In Swedish: ‘Som blommor falla / så naturliga texter växte / och väckte en publik’.
15 The panel discussion, in which I also participated as a guest speaker, can be viewed in its entirety at: urskola.se.
16 A 2015 United Nations ‘Report of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent on its mission to Sweden’ states:
There continues to be a general Swedish self-perception of being a tolerant and humane society, which makes it difficult to accept that there could be structural and institutional racism faced by people of African descent. The policy to ignore ‘race’ creates a gap in the understanding of the problem and preserves the status quo of racial inequalities.