This autumn, both the rap duo Karpe and writer Zeshan Shakar tell us about their fathers. They are melancholic declarations of love to a down-on-their-luck generation. And they made me think of another book, which takes place far from Norway in 2022. In the novel “Station Eleven” by Emily St. John Mandel, the world is hit by a pandemic that kills almost all of humanity. The few who are left must build a civilization from scratch. When they encounter objects from the world as it used to be, which they are not used to, these objects become mysterious, almost magical. Some start a museum where they exhibit things from the time before the pandemic. There, people can walk around and look reverentially at credit cards and smartphones. I thought of this fictional museum when I read Shakar’s new novel “They call me the wolf”. The I person is half Norwegian and half Pakistani, like the author himself. And when his old father decides to go back to Pakistan, it triggers an avalanche of thoughts and feelings in his son. UNDERSTANDING FATHER: In Zeshan Shakar’s They Call Me The Wolf, the main character tries to understand more about his own father before he goes back to Pakistan. Photo: Håkon Mosvold Larsen / NTB Because there is so much about his father and his background that is still a mystery to him. He looks at the few objects his father leaves behind in Norway, and thinks they resemble exotic souvenirs. Without the father’s knowledge of these things, without his natural association with them, they are cold and strange. “They call me the wolf” and “Hjertet i to”, journalist Yohan Shanmugaratnam’s book about Carp, revolve around the same themes. He has long been concerned with the void that occurs in minority Norwegians when the parental generation falls away. For them, it’s not just the parents who disappear, it’s also a channel to one of the cultures they belong to, which closes again. These books are part of a trend, which also includes VG commentator Shazia Majid’s “Out of the Shadows”, where she retold her own mother’s story, among other things. Presumably they are coming now because the parent generation is getting old, and that the children realize how much they will take with them when they are gone. At the same time, many members of the next generation are heavily and confidently present in the Norwegian public. They can expect to be listened to when they tell about this distinctive and significant piece of modern Norwegian history. MOTHER’S STORY: VG commentator Shazia Majid’s “Out of the Shadows” is about the author’s mother, among other things, and is one of several books about those who immigrated to Norway in the seventies. Photo: Terje Bendiksby / NTB “They call me the wolf” and “Hjertet i two” are also surprising portraits of the generation that immigrated to Norway in the early seventies, to create a better life for themselves and their children. That alone can contribute to making the relationship between the generations tense. As Shanmugaratnam writes: The children should be the confirmation that the parents did the right thing when they chose to leave. Then there is one thing or another that becomes difficult to say, and difficult to ask about. Three father figures are central to the books. The father in “They call me the wolf” is absent, always at work or out on organizational work. On weekdays, the son has gone to bed before the father comes home from work. But the warmth he has for his child radiates from the pages. He speaks a mixture of English and Norwegian at home, and deciphering this becomes part of the interpretive work that the son must do in order to understand his father, to get a little closer. He stands and looks for the man who disappears into the security checkpoint, and is not at all sure that he has succeeded. The father of Magdi Abdelmaguid Ytreeide in Karpe is a different figure: a prolific and power-critical writer and journalist who once interviewed Saddam Hussein. But this son is also full of questions for his father, about why he lives the way he does and allows his health to decline; questions that are difficult to ask. Magdi, with her Norwegian mother and Egyptian father, speaks both Norwegian and Arabic, and sees how her father becomes a simpler version of himself when he has to speak Norwegian, rather than his mother tongue. But he also sees how the two cultures he himself belongs to will not be represented in his children in the same way. The Norwegian will be the implicit, where they have all the tacit knowledge, where they travel with a naturalness. There will be little left of Egypt in them. Magdi’s partner in Karpe, Chirag Patel, belongs to an Indian family that had to flee Uganda in 1972. The father becomes silent when the son asks about the past. Unlike Magdi, Chirag speaks a mixture of several languages with his parents. Where the first family is characterized by two purely linguistic worlds, something new, a hybrid, has arisen in the home of the second. Chirag notices how uncomfortable the parents are when he takes them to a function at the Grand, where the codes and rules of the road are foreign to them. He himself reacts with disgust when they are in India and the flies settle on his arm, while his father hardly notices. Parents and children are familiar with different worlds. Shakar, Patel and Abdelmaguid Ytreeide try, each in their own way, to ensure that what is left behind by their parents does not become like the museum in “Station Eleven”, where references and objects that were handled easily and naturally become something exotic and unusual. But it is not so easy to know how to proceed. What do you do if you want your children to have a conscious relationship with the fact that they are privileged, without exposing them to discomfort or danger? How do you behave in the face of your parents’ decline in status in the new country? The narrator in “They call me the wolf” notes with satisfaction when they are at the pizza shop, and the man behind the counter speaks to his father in reverent terms. “I liked that he was big for someone,” he writes. The three men are friends, and Shakar has done a longer interview with Karpe for the magazine Konkret. There they discussed the extent to which they should or should explain what they do when they use words and references from their non-Norwegian side, and talked about their slight irritation when the majority population expects to understand everything they write and rap. ASKING QUESTIONS: Chirag and Magdi i Karpe have started to use their parents’ generation’s stories and references more in their music. Photo: Heiko Junge / NTB As Shakar points out: When he uses slang or understood expressions, it is perceived as a tool by white journalists, something he uses calculatedly, and not what it actually is: something from his own personal history, which he uses without to adapt it to the outsiders. A sad paradox arises here. When the three artists use the full range of their own history, when they bring in their parents’ culture and words and expressions that some in the audience will know and others will not, they require an extra effort of interpretation from many of those listening. At the same time, they themselves stand there and look at their parents and try to interpret them, what they think and feel about the life that became so different from what it originally was. If they are proud of their children, who have made such a success in the new country, but who still know the ropes, those who pass through the parents’ generation and tie them firmly to countries and continents far from Norway. Also read:
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