barndomsfragment 1 (lilla huset part I)

With and for Konrad Karlsson. May-December 2024.

25 ‎May ‎2024, ‏‎12:37:

Du berättade aldrig om Troll i kulisserna för mig. I found out about it last year, in one of those August afternoons I spent lazily browsing on my computer while you worked in the other room. The play, the second official Mumin theatre adaptation written by Tove Jansson and directed by Vivica Bandler, is known today mostly because of its beginning, in which the Mumin actors enter the stage with usual, intact costumes to then remove their fluffy heads – unmasking, amongst others, the perfectly childish smirk of Lasse Pöysti, playing Moomintrollet. This was ostensibly done to give the actors more freedom with voice and facial expressions, but a dark-internet myth has gathered around the play: children in the audience terrorized by this quasi Mumin decapitation, revealing horribly out-of-place humans inside their white, rotund bodies. With the following performances and the TV broadcast the incident was repeated, making the play into a uniting traumatic memory for generations of Swedish children.

When I started writing this in May, I wanted to talk about childhood – mine and yours, or rather, the projection of mine on yours, because you don’t like talking about the past and I try to respect that. In the following months, with the following rewrites, I set out to find more information on this play. I was hoping to see the taking-off of the masks – to hear, if not see, the children’s reaction – but I haven’t been able to find any clips of it. In the (unofficial) Mumin wiki, which my research history states I consulted, this ‘decapitation’ is mentioned without any horrific undernotes. Were children really scared? Where did I get the idea that they were? I can't find any other hint in my web search chronology or online. While the absence of proof solidifies the status of the event as a myth, there must’ve been another source, expanding on the story to prove, once more, the Internet’s strange passion for finding the grotesque, the uncanny, the not-quite-right, the traumatising in children’s stories. And that I hadn’t just invented it.

You have, of course, no memory of Troll I kulisserna. You were born too late; the Mumin stories you grew up with were different, safe, an uncomplicated background: there, but never essential. Med fanns det någon annan marginell skräck från sagor som fängslade dig när du var liten? You became uneasy when, during one of my marathons, I showed you the ’70 Mumin episode in which Mårran appears for the first time. After asking me to press stop, you told me of how deeply unsettling it was, as a child, to see her towering over Sniff; mysterious, cold, silent. A creature one couldn’t make sense of, couldn’t speak to. Did you have to distinguish, then, between what your eyes just saw and the child’s memory, enlarged, made stranger against the backdrop of your mind?

Whether I came up with it or someone else, the question is: what feelings, fake or real, were activated and subsumed into the memory of the Mumin beheading as it was passed on, shared, confused, installed in the precarious architecture of recollection - which «njutningar och fasor», otherwise unspeakable, found their expression in it?

🌹 I was gifted the complete edition (översatt) of the original Tove Jansson Mumin strips for my eighteenth birthday, long before I met you. I was only a little into them, mostly fascinated by Snufkin, but it was the gift of a friend trying to share her passion for them with me. When I told you, did you feel that I was being ungenuine, maybe inventing, doing too much - or that I was trying to steal from the cultural depository of your childhood? Is this how you felt about the latest 3D animated series, made for an international audience with puzzling British accents, that also moved me?

Or did you just not care - had it been that long?

Ändå gav du mig en Snusmumriken-kopp i födelsedagspresent förra året. Were you letting me in on the secret, your childhood, the one thing we cannot share, no matter how much I’d like to - were you welcoming me into it or just indulging me and my childish desires?

🌹 Jag minns inte mycket från min barndom, och det är en de få saker jag kan säga med säkerhet. Another one: you weren’t there. But then again, I wasn’t either. And not just in the sense that I, the person I’ve come to be, do not and cannot live there anymore - the basic fact that the membrane of childhood doesn’t allow trespassing: «my infancy is long dead and I am alive»[^1] ; but because I barely lived in that house, consumed by the business of survival, which makes ghosts of us all. My memory, the second house, made into a broken sieve, unfit for my purposes, the tasks of life.

🌹 I look through my notes, I look back. But I find nothing - neither proof that someone else did write about Troll i kulisserna's traumatic past, nor that I, for some reason, invented it. Reading this again, I think: if the Internet had been as it was ten, fifteen years ago - could I have started something? Do you think that someone would’ve believed me? Troll i kulisserna could’ve been one of those stories in which Internet subculture, with its inclination towards morbidity, interacts with the loose fabric of memory, which is all the looser in childhood, remaining malleable, mobile, decades after its imprinting.

🌹 Writing about myself is easy, as long as nobody sees. Writing about us is hard. I’m looking for a frame for us, a crowd for this room. Generations of queers have gathered in private places[^2], celebrating newborn tongues and attending to the wounds of the first years, when everything passes through the skin, that unfit membrane. When we met I went in headfirst because I felt that you could take it, that you wanted to - och jag hoppas att du kände likadant. I felt myself falling in love with you (clearly, secretly) when you sat on my bed and told me of the child you were, of the story behind the scar on your left hand. I wanted to pick it up and kiss it; I don’t remember if I did. We had known each other for less than two weeks. Somewhere on your phone you have a screen recording archiving our first chats and witnessing a miraculous fact: that, in that often crude place where we met, the first pictures we sent each other were of the seas of our hometowns. There, amidst the yellow and the black, I saw the shores of Gotland and thought: I’d like to go there. Then: I think he gets it; «… den smärta / som är så otröstlig, the loss of one’s shore …»[^3]

Var det enkelt att höra om min barndom? In the beginning I wanted to tell you of the places I had escaped so that I could come to this city, where I would meet you. I wanted to put everything in sequence and see what meaning would come from it. What role you could play. Now this retroactive act is necessary to both of us, because it explains me, my resistances to you. In truth - only in telling does the pain become evident, and I can begin. Unlike Augustine, I have no God to call to, no omniscient eternal perspective to allow the retrieval of childhood under the image of eternity, the beginning act of the Western autobiography. I do not know where to begin. I need another context, an excuse - a song, a movie, a book. Du, som lyssnar.

🌹 I’m reading about queer memory. It’s shaping up to be a weird semester: pausing uni, trying to get therapy, writing about something new, somewhat more, somehow always less. After a few months of not approaching theory, I started reading Castiglia and Reed’s sad and exciting essay, If Memory Serves, on the effects of remembering and (institutional, collective) forgetting in the aftermath of AIDS. I think I need to go to the roots - of queer temporalities, of queer theories, of us, somehow, because we all exist in a world irrevocably shaped by it. Jag försöker lära mig. Jag försöker förstå.

I’ve always known that my personal memory was tattered and broken; I am starting to see that I never accessed a social, generational one as well. I have been severed not just from myself, but from an entire history of queerness - of Italian queer and trans activists (Porpora Marcasciano, Mario Mieli) who created the space in which I could’ve found rest and solace, had I dared to. But I couldn’t. The business of survival cut what remained of the thread of memory, it required me to disconnect from myself and the stories before and around me. When I walked to my high school or across the tiny streets that suddenly give way into big squares and churches in Naples, when my father drove me back home late at night, I looked away from the trans women strutting by. Was that survival again? Wasn’t that immediate fear which struck at the sight of them the beginning of this betrayal to myself, my history? This happened much later, when I wasn’t a child anymore. But I always knew where to look and, most importantly, where not to. And how can I draw a clear line between the child and the teen, when that child never died and was never really there and I live in the long aftermath of him, too?

(I can’t say what was that severed. I can’t say yet.)

🌹 Maybe I did invent this story about Troll i kulisserna in those anguishing days of August, as I crashed at your place because my housing contract was done and I couldn’t find anything else, when our patience for each other was so thin and so much damage was done.

In trying to make sense of this, I realize that what I find so fascinating about this mishap is its shift in logic. Although the removal of the Mumin masks has a practical explanation, that moment can be read also as revealing a raw materiality in the otherwise intact body of the Mumin. The consequences, which are immediately understood by children, are: their soft skin can be taken off; their fluffy bodies can be emptied out and inhabited by something different; this, of course, if it wasn’t a costume, a decoy, all along. This revelation raises a morbid question: what is a Mumin, actually? Is it an animal that can be killed and whose hide can be worn - or a strategy of prey? Who hides, then, in their big, friendly bodies? Why is Lasse Pöysti’s smile so unsettling? Fora i Mumindalen - the safest of places. Through this logic, the familiar and inconspicuous bodies of Muminpappa and Muminmamma become en hud - ett membran, as changeable as memory itself, the unstable resource for this story: mine, unable to find my sources anymore, and that of those children who, writing about it online, would’ve re-membered the event years after its passing, bringing that fear back to themselves; not unlike you, unable to stand the sight of Mårran.

🌹 In that same August, you picked out a dub of the original 1969 Mumin anime with the original finlandssvenska accent for me, the one you grew up next to. My childhood didn’t have an accent. We watched Italian dubs of anime with the pedantic, impersonal Italian that doesn’t really belong anywhere. It was the first hint that there is not such a thing as Italy, but I wouldn’t get it until, in Berlin, I noticed that my longing called for the seas of my hometowns, Napoli och Pozzuoli, not for whatever sea touches the nation. I was ashamed of liking these shows publicly because of the kinship they inspired - Dragonball with the rowdy boy friends of my childhood, Marmalade Boy with the girls I had fragile and tentative friendships with. (I’m older now and I’m trying not to be ashamed of what I like. I bought myself a green fleece pälsmössa-like hat with a Snufkin design for my birthday; when things got dark in August, I watched the Mumin anime you had shown me - three, four episodes in a row, at times.)

Talking about Astrid Lindgren and Tove Jansson at our first dinner, your mother got teary-eyed. My father, too, would get emotional about the Carlo Collodi stories he read as a boy. When I approached those heavy hardbacks, with their distinctly old design with a suspicious interest in order, I found them too Christian, too moralising, the language too old, too distant. My childhood, the real one, the one that came and went, wasn’t sustained by any Italian narration of childhood. The entrusting of stories from one generation to the next didn’t happen for me in the same way it did for you and maybe that’s why I latched on to yours so strongly - so strangely, so backwardly, years before I met you.

🌹Sometimes, out of nowhere, I get worried that your birthday passed and I didn’t get you anything. But I wrote you a letter. I always forget I did. I won’t repeat what it said, but I did tell you that writing a letter to you was a way to let you into this place, the only home I have; to solidify your place in the architecture of my mind, to make you part of the energy that sustains me. I sometimes think, out of the blue: there’s a queer future ahead of us. Whatever that means, it begins with a paragraph which features us both, under the rubric of an unlikely ‘us’. I know it exists because I will it - I write it.

But for this to work, I have to trust you. Jag måste lita på mig själv - min röst – till dig.

🌹Under min uppväxt brukade min pappa berätta om den gången han var ung och stannade till i Sverige under sin pilgrimsfärd till Nordpolen. He told me people got naked as often as possible, were very sexually open and every meal was served with jam and milk. This, as well as a few other hints like IKEA names and midsummar poles, was the context I evoked to make sense of you. But when I told you, you just laughed and said my father must’ve been somewhere else. It hurt me a bit to hear. I still repeated this anecdote over the second dinner with your parents, to be conversational and pleasant. I thought of my parents then - what language they would use to talk with you. The bravado that my father would summon to put together the very few English words he knows with whatever linguistic souvenirs of this mythological trip he could resurrect, in the spirit of that specifically Neapolitan brand of arrogance, the unfounded belief that, with their hand dialect and scraps of English, they can make themselves understood across any linguistic divide. I have no idea what my mother would do. She would probably ask me to translate, or count on her grimaces, kept alive by working with children, to communicate with you. But I won’t allow for the three of you to sit at that kitchen table; the pictures that my father took of this alleged Sweden rest somewhere in his nightstand, and I remember taking another look at them before I left - proof that, even shortly, one of us could leave. Two years ago, I asked him to send some of them to me. Det var den nödvändiga uppbyggnad som behövdes för att jag skulle berätta om dig för dem. But he forgot, I didn’t press him, and then I stopped answering the phone when he called. Trying my hardest to make something different of my tongue, to twist it in different sounds.

🌹A memory is a chance and a liability. Allowing it invites pain in and pain always brings you back to yourself, the small confines of your body, and for the longest time I couldn’t be in that room, because it was the least safe. I’m learning how to be there - how to just be. To overcome the haunting, make the space habitable. Att ha en extrasäng till dig när du sover över.

🌹 Then finally I figure it out.

Looking at the Mumin wiki again for answers, I find this passage, ignored until now: The same practice would return to great controversy in the 1969 show. I follow the hint and it all begins to make sense. In the 1969 TV broadcast series “Mumintrollet”, a king gets hay fever by looking at the Mumin through a telescope, and orders for their snouts to be removed. While in the first episode they move (quite goofily) across the Muminhuset in their usual costumes, in the second episode a secondary character keeps Mumintrollet tied down after having tied his head to the door knob, so that when Muminpappa enter the room, the camera shows his head flying towards him. Again Lasse Pöysti’s face appears underneath, visibly shocked, touching his eyes and face, lamenting the loss of his näsa.

This is, somehow, much worse than what I had thought - the closest we can get to a real decapitation in a Mumin story. As I had to make peace with the idea that I came up with the story, I am shocked at how closely what I wrote about it resembles the actual show, which I had not seen before. The web results for ‘Mumintrollet 1969’, though scarce, report on screaming children, making it mandatory, for all following theatre and TV adaptations, that the Mumin wear their heads and never, never again reveal the actors hiding in their bodies.

Does this answer everything? Can I close this chapter, now?

🌹At the first dinner with your parents, as you and your father got busy talking and switched to your tongue, I leaned in towards your mother and showed her the picture of Tove Jannson I have saved on my phone. In it, she swims blissfully in the water before her sanctuary in Klovrahun: immensely beautiful and serene, balancing a flower crown on her head. The water looks deep but she’s smiling. I’ve had it saved for years, I told her.

I showed this to her to demonstrate the extent and the duration of my devotion, to retrace the same connection which, at the next dinner, a few months later, I would highlight with the unfaithful tale of my father’s trip. Jag visade den till henne som en slags talisman, Medveten om att hon förstår dess kraft. Både ett minne och en profetia. Att försöka få henne att förstå att jag förstår, att jag försöker förstå.

And that I’ll take care of you.

🌹I think of you, as a baby, left outside in the Gotlandic winter to get acclimated to the cold. I don’t center my doubts that it works or even the curious, sudden memory that, as a child, I was always cold. I imagine you moving your tiny hands in the stroller, losing your soft gaze from snowflake to snowflake, falling in slow unending time. Everything moves quietly and you are not afraid; du gråter aldrig.

No image of my childhood, real or fabricated, trasmits me this much peace.

🌹When I first met you, I had the feeling I knew you already.

🌹I want us to meet here, in this imperfection - the mess of history and timelines, us trying to make sense of it, to put the words one after the other and balance our respective powers over language. My words, your tongue. My time and your time. Men jag litar på dig. I’m deciding to trust you. I trust that you’ll take care of me.

🌹Tiden är kärnan i det jag skriver. Jag antar att det är för att jag, på ett sätt, alltid försöker gå tillbaka. Ju mer jag skriver, destå mer kollapsar den gamla paradigmen; linjär tid och rak tid, lögnen om att allting pekar mot något syndaförlåtande vilket, om vi skall vara ärliga, vi inte kommer kunna se; att vart och vem du varit är annorlunda än platserna som du flyttar till och människorna du kommer träffa och bli mer lik. Ju mer medveten jag blir om det, destå lättare blir det att tänka mig att förlåtelsen är här redan, att ingen kommer att rädda oss och att allting är smord. Destå klarare ser jag linjerna som sträcker sig från där jag står, som ankrat fast sig i framtiden och som struntar i det förflutna, att dom är raka och enspåriga. att jag inte placerat dom än, att dom inte kan beskriva mig eller någon jag älskar; för att linjerna är egentligen huller om buller, och du kommer inte tro vart dom slutar: because the past and the future are actually communicating vases, if you dare, and the present is more than just the place between them; because time is a road with multiple lanes and the atom crashes that ensue are those moments of wonderful clarity when you stop and think about the trajectories, the absolute causality and necessity of everything - de första dagarna av försommar, det första vårropet...

🌹Do you see what I mean?

🌹I’m sorry I haven’t learnt Swedish yet, baby.

🌹There’s a story I’ve been thinking about for a while. I never wrote down even a word for it, except for a note, titled “Mumin X Kafka”, which dates back to my last birthday. Här kommer den. A guy wakes up from restless dreams to find himself turned into a Mumintroll. As he looks down on his body, he finds it particularly white and soft, with a new, distinctive roundness, so he gets up to look for the mirror. In it, he finds big Mumin eyes staring back at him from a big, white Mumin head. The change is registered with a mixture of glee and terror, and the new Mumin falls back on his bed, unable to go on with his day.

It’s the details that are hard to get down in this story - why glee, why terror? Then, is there a job the man has to attend to? Will he call in sick or commute in this new body, will it get dirty with the city’s smog? Where does this person’s consciousness reside - what crawlspace between body and mind? Which ultimately means: vad är den egentliga skillnaden mellan känslan av att vara i en muminkropp eller i en muminkostym, när du inte är en? Again, just what is a Mumin? I wanted it to be a story about this: finding out what it means to be a Mumin in a non-Mumin world, being exiled from Mumindalen, never having been there.

I never wrote it down because, even stealing the tone and effect of the Metamorphosis, I couldn’t figure out a disguise effective enough to hide the obvious fact that it was a story about waking up in your childhood bed and not being the child you once were.

I sista scenen så har det nya mumintrollet, som hittat sitt mod, lämnat sitt rum och tagit av sitt muminhuvud för att konfrontera sin far, rökandes i köket, sista timmen innan soluppgång.

🌹Which words belong to whom, now? Are you stumbling over mine, will you ask me what I mean? What’s happening to my word choice, my weird English? Which words are you using - what do they remind you of, who did you speak them with? What past comes back to you now, as we mix on the page, as we spill, as we speak?

In the world of conversations outside of here, I try to reply to your worries: it’s not about my words anymore, but ours; not my point of view, but yours - not about fidelity, or accuracy, but what happens when you bring me into your language, that house of yours I can’t access. It’s about what gets lost, yes - but also about what you can add, what and whose hands hold us, now, as we speak together. Your family, the ghost of mine, forbidding me my hometown, the tongue I thought safe.

🌹Two years ago, when I read Stockton’s essay for the first time, en gång frågade jag om du som barn var queer. I forgot your answer, but it was just the beginning, fragile and necessary. More follow: how did you think of yourself? What words did you use to describe yourself? I know you don’t want to tell. I ask you to listen, then. Det är så mycket lättare att prata, när jag vet att du lyssnar.

🌹Genom historien om din barndom, kommer jag närmare min.

🌹 I did not invent this story about Troll i kulisserna.

But I still fabricated around it, mixing plays together, the effect of one on the other. Why did I do that, why did I feel compelled to imagine terror and locate it in childhood?

Why can't I remember anything, not even this? Why has Troll i kulisserna, this story between memory and imagination, ingrained itself into my mind like a secondary memory, vivid though unreal - a distant relic of a childhood that wasn't mine, not even yours, but running alongside, sideways, to the one I had?

Silence echoes from the other side of the membrane. Changing memories, changeling child.