Med och till Konrad Karlsson. May 2024_June 2025. You can read the first part here.
TW: childhood abuse, though without details. Spoilers for All Of Us Strangers (Haigh, 2023).
đč Sometimes, as I dozed off on the bus from Krumme Lanke to my room in Schlachtensee, I found myself thinking back to the child I was: this intruder, this unknown, this obstinate dissonance in my story, a âhimâ refusing being dealt away with. I had just changed my name, my tongue, my home. One year before I met you, before MĂ„rran or Troll I Kulisserna, I found myself stuck between this sudden need to remember and the scarceness of my memories, the hardness of those that had coagulated around silence, unspeakability. I started looking for a frame for him, something to hold him in place, together, before he disappeared again. I watched Petite Fille and I found a her, then something else, running alongside him, children and phantoms sharing the same game, the same running. The semester you and I met was quite calm; in the following, I read about queer temporalities for the first time and, at the QTTT workshop, I found out that it had already been written about the child. It was what I needed â for myself, for him, for Mignon.
On September 9th 2022 we went on our first date. We had been texting for two weeks before that; you wanted to wait until you felt better in order to meet and I appreciated your patience, you asking me for the same. One of our running disagreements is about when our relationship started. You mention May 2023, when we verbalized, semi-contractually, its begin. But I knew on September 10th, when you woke up at my place and we went to get breakfast, that I wanted to be with you, as well as that weâd end up together. To honor that feeling, in retracing the steps, I donât waste any time and let the story begin the day we met.
Fifteen years before that, queer theories had discussed the meaning of the future. Leo Bersani and Lee Edelmann, arguing for other, more positive investments of queer life energy, both interestingly argued against the child as well, seen as the political vanguard of conservative, homophobic thinking: an obstacle to queer futures. At the same time, José Esteban Muñoz tried to redeem the value of the future (and hope and utopian feeling) and Kathryn Bond Stockton focused on the child itself, asking: what is a child, after all, before its political instrumentation? What is a child really, to itself? How can we think about children inside the frame of queer theory?
Stocktonâs discourse begins with a fundamental distinction between child and Child [^1]: between actual, living (âhistoricalâ) children and the ideological category of the Child, the shared, general idea of what a child is, can, and should be. Every real living child is confronted and understood in comparison with this fantasy of an ideal Child. Going back to Edelmann, in his book âNo Futureâ he actually takes a stance not against children, but against the Child, which he sees as a political plan to secure the future exclusively through (heterosexualist [^2]) reproduction, in terms of literal, biological continuation of the human species. This Child, objective and symbol of this plan, is shaped after the ruling political class whose survival it must safeguard: undoubtedly white, cissexual and straight, imagined as a powerless, a-sexual being in need of constant protection (from the threats of contact and violence from people different by race, sexuality, gender identity and expression, class). I imagine this Child as a smug, well-educated, white suburban child (the likes of which Iâve never seen, who exist mostly in movies). Any other child: racialised [^3], sexual, non-straight, non-conforming to rules of gender, is not granted this security, is excluded (at all or at times) from the category of the Child, from the white matrix, denied general, widespread empathy, care, protection[^4]. KĂ€nde du dig trygg i din barndom? Who protected you, and from what? I mustâve been safe because I am white, passed as straight. But it still didnât feel safe. PĂ„ vilka sĂ€tt kĂ€nde du att du tillĂ€ts vara ett barn?
As much as Edelmann argues for worthwhile resistance against the Child and its political underpinnings, it is Stockholm I feel really drawn to, because she centers the life and experiences of real, living children in her discourse; because, in doing so, she brings me much closer to the child I actually was. I want to understand him, I want to bring him back, I want to do something of childhood, with childhood, I want its passing to not have been in vain.
But even once we separate child from Child, we still are no closer to understanding what it really is. This is because âchildâ is itself an ineffective definition: it works only in negative terms, indicating a non-adult characterized by innocence (understood in a more or less secular Christian way as absence of sexuality, then of sin). What is a child, then? Who is that person I remember, who I mustâve been, at some point? The more questions are asked, the clearer does it become that this reduction of meaning we call a âchildâ cannot account for the complexity of the life of that which we were: the «pleasures and terrors we recall»[^5], the shadows of (pre?)sexuality, the tangled, inexplicable feelings that are too big for words, which almost seem to take one outside of childhood. Which maybe did so back then already. A child is a simplification, but it didnât feel like that in its time, when childhood was a body and a succession of days and not a memory, a more or less disjointed piece of fossil. Somewhere between being a child and remembering the child, in growing up, the transmission of meaning goes wrong: we grow out of childhood, we forget what that felt like, the names we called ourselves with and, as we settle on the placating definition of âchildâ, ett misstĂ€nksamt klimat, obeskrivligt, förlust, svĂ€var fortfarande över den faktiska barndomen vi haft..
Looking for clues in a childâs understanding of itself seems to be in vain, too: self-definition is obstructed by legal and social traditions that decide what a child is and should be (that is to say, shaping the idea of the Child). This becomes even harder for those we, backwardly, call queer children: when the vocabulary of queerness, of sexual difference, is not made available to the child (reeking, as it does, too strongly of sex, of perversion, which are adult prerogatives), how can a child express its perceived difference with its surroundings? Stockton finds a surprising abundance of emotional identifications and metaphors flourishing from children, lapping on this very impossibility: one calling himself «a homosexual seagull» (1), another identifying with a butch plumber in an ad. These weird and aslant expressions do their best to evade the cage of the Child, of childhood. Vad sade du om dig sjĂ€lv? Var âbögâ attraktivt eller kanske sĂ„rande för dig?. I stayed in the safety of being unnamed as long as I could. I measure the extent of the violence also by this fact: that I already knew, always knew, that to give yourself a name or allow yourself to be named is to be made visible, and to be made visible is to be revealed, to be put in danger. I still ask myself how could I have known this. Was the threat so widespread as to inform every thought and behavior, or is there an opposite to growing up - time travel? Did I, as I am and know today, somehow go back and explain to myself the rules of survival? Isnât this the God Augustine calls to â the one who calls back, this conscience that is most easily explained, and experienced, in writing? FörstĂ„r du var jag menar? Ser du vem du var tydligare nu?
These are the hardships we face if we try to define what a child is. Because of them, Stockton asks: is there, actually, such a thing as a child? Can we really find a definition for it? Du - kĂ€nde du dig som ett barn? Vad betydde det för dig? Whatever way we approach it, there is an essential complexity to childhood â a contrast between memory and experience, between experience and its understanding, between complexity and the simplification (with all of its underlying violence). Stockton concludes there is only one possible definition of the child that bears witness to this complexity: a child is «precisely who we are not and, in fact, never were» (5). She writes, dishearteningly: it is nothing but «the act of adults looking back» (5, emphasis mine).
It is exactly this gesture, this failure, this holding of complexity, which interests me, because it risks explaining what I felt. Ultimately, Stockton articulates the identity of the/a child by marking its distinction from the Child, yes, distinguishing between being a child and what it is wanted to be, but, most importantly, in and through the architecture of memory: in the difference between who we are and who we remember. Children, confined in straightjackets of definitions, explained only through negations, with their own words being obstructed or not listened to, suffer severe consequences: «such a child, with no established forms to hold itself in the public, legal field, has been a child remarkably, intensely unavailable to itself in the present tense» (6, my emphasis). We cannot understand what a child is to itself, because the child itself doesnât know. From the vantage point of memory, a child appears as a strange being between adulthood and whatever comes before it, caught between its own perception, its own attempts at self-definition, and the invasive gaze of others: a changeling, the bortbyting of which the stories of your culture are full of. For some of us (for myself) at some point during the life of a child the body, the space of feeling and experience, becomes inaccessible, and itâs a lifeâs work to regain it. What we call a child is ultimately the result of a «backward birth» (6): this act of looking back into the being we were and are no more, a retroactive creation installed in the processes of recollection, between the layers of this one body which becomes double. The layers of childhood multiply not just because of the unavailability of the body, but because of the split between child and Child.
I am trying to articulate here, through Stocktonâs essay, a definition of childhood as a «membrane»: an interstitial space, a void in-between, a mezzanine which is barely accessible to the child, but «largely available to adults as memory» (5). During this time the Child imposes itself like a second skin[^6], hardly distinguishable from the first one, with all of its pressures and limitations, dictating what a child is, what it must not become. A troubling degree of voyeurism haunts this definition: the child spies through the keyhole of the Child (its body and its memory) into others, different children and the space of living they are afforded, into the mysterious life of adults, and into itself, its own life, body, experiences. As I move across my memories, I try to revive them, to make sense of what happened, to access this membrane of childhood, the «pleasures and terrors» woven in its fabric â the memories, real or not, of the Mumin beheading, which were formed in my adult years, that vast blue silence I can still remember, all of the things I canât say yet â jag Ă„tervĂ€nder inte till barnet, utan uppfinner det." That child was not accessible to himself, is not accessible to me now. I cannot find him, but I can create the next-best thing, a rhetorical chimera half memory half speculation, as I describe him with a vocabulary of feeling and identity that is available only to me, only in the afterwards, having reached âadulthoodâ. Jag skriver nu för att hitta det barnet.
And the child changed too, over the years â depending on the time of access, as my understanding of myself changed, as it became necessary to either install or rescue strands of emotions and thought that I either see continuing now, in the aftermath, or remember the isolated ones, existing in the vacuum of childhood. Said with Stockton, the child is ultimately an effect of memory, as intangible as the latter is, an ever-imperfect attempt to resolve this complexity we feel, as well as the first queer autobiographical question: «when did you know?» (2). This matter can hardly be settled, and approached only retroactively, by turning oneâs gaze towards the past which couldnât be defined in the time of its presence. Only as an adult can I look back; and this child must die, give way to me, to the adult years, for me to be able to call him queer. His death must be accompanied by another death: that of what Stockton calls the âstraight childâ, an aspect of the Child structure with a particular highlight on the pressures and expectations that are supposed to catapult the child from its presumed a-sexuality to open heterosexuality (the only accepted outcome). In order for me to even attempt the retrieval of the queer child, to face the grief and loss which trouble his face in my memories, I must declare the death of this straight child. And still, I find nothing but the aftershades of an unknown who lived desperately, proficiently, in lack and in need of words, in hiding. It is only at a basic removal, at some distance â an international move, so many years of forgetting â that I might be able to reconcile myself with him, to give him the space he needed. Hur lĂ„ngt mĂ„ste jag gĂ„ för att hitta dig - bortbyting.
There is, of course, a significant amount of arbitrariness to this. How can I say with any certainty: jag var queer som barn? Var du? Kan nĂ„gon vara det? Every language proves insufficient, every vocabulary fails. I always had, like most children, complex desires for touch, proximity, affection, and they extended to both little girls and little boys. I donât know if thatâs enough to invoke queerness. I cannot know of my gender, either; if my sense of being non-binary today (this refusal of loud, brawling masculinity, of the violence it prokes and sustains, this move towards gender expansion) can be traced back to my little games and aversions; I donât know if I can extend my current understand of myself this far into the past. Looking back, Iâve found hints, not one proof. I canât say anything for certain â whether I was or wasnât a boy, if I wanted to be; if boyhood ever meant anything to me or if it was just the hide that would keep me the safest. Mina minnen skiftar och spills ut som vattenfĂ€rger, och jag vet inte vart jag skall börja. Stocktonâs discourse, in her intentional, sweeping generalization of childhood as queer, pays the just tribute to the complexities of childhood; to the very real experience of layered and conflicting feelings, oblique and cross desires that (this somehow I remember so clearly) occur daily in a childâs mind, before we must learn to give it confines, before the walls are made to rise, so much taller than us.
In this light, recollection appears as the process that not only brings memories back to ourselves, but as the desperate attempt to re-inhabit the space between who we were and are, between the remembering adult and the sought child, and also the membrane between the child and the Child, the space of experience of the child itself, where feelings were felt and the memories (which now constitute our access point) were produced. But we must declare this process impossible, too. Recollection always fails: as in the double story of Troll i Kulisserna, the memories are volatile, ever-changing, prone to defect, corruption. The child remains unexplainable, inaccessible.
(I believe in this. But I know thereâs different degrees of unfathomability to childhood. Maybe there are some truths about yours: memories you feel you can trust. But thatâs not true for me, and I know Iâm not the only one. I have forgotten (had to) so much that was essential to my sense of who I was, and the few memories that remain are all terrible, and I canât look at them yet. All of this - my work on childhood, my relationship with myself, with you, with that child - rests on a simple fact: Jag Ă€r osĂ€ker pĂ„ vad som hĂ€nde. Or: I was made not to be sure of what happened. I had to forget, to distance myself from the event, from memory.[^7])
In trying to define childhood as a membrane, in looking at the process of remembering/creating the child, I do not mean to prove an essentialist[^8] sense of queerness, a timeline in which childhood leads directly into my present now. I do not care to call that child queer because I want to understand myself as queer now â but because the queerness I believe in is a way of kinship, of connection. If I were a queer child, what (or who) can I connect that child with? What memories suddenly make sense now, when linked with my understanding of queerness of today? What theories might I use to understand him - what do they say, productively, helpfully, about him? Vilken historia kan jag skriva om honom? I do not remember enough. I need a hook and Iâm using theory as one. (Among others: Mumin, writing, you). The result is this impossible answer â or rather, this multiplication of answers, all imperfect, all temporary, which give way into these words I try to give you.
Sharpening a definition of child that accounts for this complexity, for the apparently perverted games that children play, for their âpleasures and terrorsâ, also makes space for the desire my generation, as the last one that grew between the offline and the online, when the Internet was still mysterious, both infinite and very small, for finding the scary and the traumatizing in the medias of our childhood, between proto-Youtube and school courtyard tales. I cannot claim any of the Mandela effects that couldâve been accessible to me as an Italian kid growing up in the early 2000s, but I remember other moments: reading scary stories online on Italian blogs (bad translations, still effective), being terrorized by forcing myself to watch late-night TV documentaries on the seven apparitions of Mary, the Mothman or reptilians; accessing the chunky Youtube page of the time to watch videos about Lavender Town, always looking over my shoulder to not be caught, being scared sleepless of its implications, that I would die of frequencies that only a child could hear. Then, years later, I would find out about Troll i Kulisserna/Mumintrollet and invest in it so deeply that I couldnât help but write about it â the draft from which all of this started. Vad sĂ€ger det om mig, om min barndom? Vart tar jag vĂ€gen hĂ€rifrĂ„n?
Nothing brought me back to my body as efficiently as night sweats, extending my eyes into the room at night to see what I wanted to see, what I feared I would see, what I needed to protect myself from. Terror var det enklaste sÀttet jag kunde nÄ mig sjÀlv pÄ. Playing with turning the TV on and off, closing and opening the creepypasta blogs - fort, da. Mask on, off.
Stockton touches only lightly on trauma, and does so in reference to Freudâs theory of NachtrĂ€glichkeit, his original understanding of trauma as a âdeferred actionâ, an impression, an event that is impossible for the (child) brain to process and incorporate, and consequently remains hidden in the mind. This unprocessed knot of feelings and memories can later be activated during a similar traumatic event or during psychoanalysis (in the classical, Freudian sense of analysis of the deep). Only through this activation is the original traumatic event constructed, retroactively (nachtrĂ€glich), as traumatic, and its latent effect (protecting the psyche by avoiding situations that could have reopened the wound) becomes seen, understandable, and possible to integrate and overcome. Like the child, trauma is created posthumously, in the afterwards, by remembering, looking back. Stockton remarks a fundamental difference: the child can be aware of this state of deferral, of its delay â it might « await only (the right to claim) a word, not a mental state of being, withheld from them in childhood. » (15).
Som barn var jag sĂ„ förfĂ€rligt sjĂ€lvmedveten. I was desperate, reckless, to grow up: I walked away from anything childish, from any diminutives, any -ino (from myself, too, as a bambino); I insisted on inflating my vocabulary with big, abstruse words, and delighted when the adults, halfway buying my performance, confided in me. I was trying to grow up as quickly as possible. I shifted into a space within me where, in hiding, I could observe children and adults, studying their mannerisms, the topics of their conversations, to learn how to emulate or avoid them. The result of my efforts was a grotesque parody of an adult, something somber, saddening and slightly troubling â more bortbyting than child. I started to think of myself as an adult in a childâs body, because (I reconstruct now) there was no space for me to hold my feelings and remain a c/Child. Today I canât help but see the dangers of being perceived as older. Jag vet inte om det var en konsekvens av misshandel eller en inledning till det. Eventually, when the first hairs started poking out of my upper lip, I celebrated a sad victory â already knowing that, though an era of powerless was coming to its end, becoming a boy would bring its unique and terrifying consequences, too (how could I have known already?). That it wasnât over.
When I look back to my memories, my point of view hangs far above my eyes, somewhere above my head. Itâs always been like this. I cannot tell whether this is a consequence of the emotional and physical dissociation that that child experienced or an aftereffect of my distance as an adult, which I now install into the past. I see myself as if I were walking by his side, a vaporous conscience above him. I cannot define who he was without acknowledging where Iâm throwing my gaze from now, and that there wouldnât be an adult without a child who, despite everything, including himself, made it through. There wouldnât be a child without me to remember him. We create each other, depend on the other to exist.
Being a child, living inside this membrane, i samma stund inuti och utanför barndomen meant living halfway here, halfway then. Never fully in one place, never able to produce a clear, incontestable memory. This membrane, the space he retreated inside of, the difference between me and him, becomes the access point to the life I had, to the dreams we sheltered inside there. He dreamed of the man he would become, of the year he would escape. I dream of being able to save him. But what happened did. Jag förlorade barnet, jag förlorade minnet.
đč We talk about this. We spend a long afternoon, then a long evening, trying to translate all of this into your first tongue, rushed by a deadline I wasnât careful enough to anticipate. I sit on the sofa, or on the bed, you are at your desk, working away. Sometimes (sometimes only) you ask me what I mean with this or that. I try to tell you, but the afternoonâs fight still weighs on my ability to explain myself. I donât want to do this anymore. You insist, I tell you.
Every other time we talked about me writing about my childhood, about us, and you translating it, you sounded excited. I was happy to see you involved, interested in my work. But this is not what I wanted. You resent me for this. I donât feel much already anymore.
It will take me a long time â after this, after Gotland â to realize that I had messed up my expectations, the workload. That I hurt you as much, if not more, as I hurt myself. Because I couldnât just tell you: will you look at this thing I wrote? Itâs for you. Itâs about you. I want you to be part of it, too. I want our names to exist together, next to each other, on the page. See what happens next.
đč We fought once and, in the crying and reconciling that comes afterwards, you were pointedly honest and said something that I hadnât thought would hurt me. Then, to my surprise, a breathlessness rose in my chest and I observed myself running to the bathroom, locking myself in there. The camera of memory follows me from above, like nature documentary. Du sprang efter mig och vĂ€ntade utanför, förskrĂ€ckt. Inside, I dealt with the first panic attack of my life. In the mist-like texture between memory and experience, the words you said on the sofa had curiously mixed themselves with my motherâs voice. When I got out, you looked at me with so much sadness in your eyes and apologized. I was delighted. The panic your words caused in me proved two things: first, that our relationship had alchemized that unique balance of safety and challenge which allows us to keep moving; secondly, the existence of something true inside myself, a feeling of hurt so deep and unquestionable that it had to mobilize the whole body to work through it. It proved that I have been hurt â that the memories were not wrong; att dom kunde vĂ€ckas till liv - av dig.
đč I never really looked at that picture. We had plenty at home but this is the only one which, for some reason, I have on my computer, which means, with me after the move. In it, heâs playing a little violet plastic piano, my brother a silver saxophone, also plastic. I canât tell if Iâm smiling, smirking, or looking a little afraid at the camera. It changes every time I look. The more I do, the more that face distorts into a vague disturbing blankness.
We are standing in front of our desk, right in front of the one that, years later, would become mine. We never changed them. At sixteen he would go on to write his first stories on that desk then, a few years later, prepare for the German exam that would allow him to leave. He used to hide under there as a kid. I would put my face against the little space between the desk and the wall, where a little cold air draft would come through, and breathe really slowly. So as not to make a sound.
I cry for a few seconds, then itâs over again.
đč Notes for another attempt, another life: a child is a mumin and a mumin is a child.
đč I am in the room. Itâs the haunted house up the hill, the ruins of the farmhouse he dreamed of. In classic house horror fashion, the walls are alive and semi-transparent, beating softly like a heart: I can see the flickering of a flame in the other room, moving in rewind, I hear an inverted breath, a voice counting from ten to zero, or the other beings that walk the halls. For decades, faces have been appearing all across the house on the walls, on its rocky floors, slightly shifting shade, expression, and nobody really knows whatâs going on, if Iâm making them up or not. A team of researchers has finally come to prove me wrong, but I do not care. I just let them in.
I have gotten to the final room, the basement or the attic, the revelation of the secret, the twisted logic behind the story. I rest my head against the wall which is is a womb and a thick membrane and, through the blood, the amniotic liquid, the light sometimes shines through. But the revelation reveals nothing but itself, and whatever the secret is, I do not know its language. There is no step forward and no step back.Â
On some nights I see him looking back at me; watercolors of him, never the whole. He can see me too - how far Iâve come - but not enough. I hope itâs enough to vaporize into hope for him, what we used to call destiny, or the god of broken cobblestones. A few floors below us, Azzurrina sings in forgotten tongue, and a team of researchers is trying, and failing, to record the terror of her chorus, while others, in studying the mystery of the faces, are failing to get to the fundamental fact, which is that my life is happening on the other side of them and I canât get through. Iâve been very careful with drawing out their map because Iâve stored my memories into another room and, though this little mnemonic trick helps me be wary of them, I do not wish for them stumble into it. I cannot take it, tonight. The documentary will come out on public television either way. The demonic voices mustâve been artificial, in retrospect, and the faces were suspicious smudged. If they had found you back then, put the microphone towards the voice, you wouldâve just said you didnât want to die. Now most of the times the bortyting keeps quiet and I know heâs there only because of the way the light hits his figure, casting a terrible shadow. Some nights I find itâs myself, not him, to be wailing. Thereâs always a wailing, always a calling - alltid ett kall som sĂ€kerstĂ€ller att, pĂ„ andra sidan, Ă€r det nĂ„gon som lyssnar. In the hours before dawn, as the candle flame dies and darkness in the house becomes perfect, Padre Pio begins to roam the corridors, with boxing gloves covering his stigmata, Mothman takes a dive into air like butter and I can no longer distinguish between the child in the other room, who will manage to survive childhood, and me whoâs survived. We both stand with an ear or a mouth to the wall, listening.
«Meaningful plenitude»[^9] is denied to both of us. We canât see whatâs happening in the other room - what has or will happen. We make the best of ourselves out of the glimpses we catch, call them hope or a liability, incorporating them into bigger narrative that, with time, we must learn to shed, like snakeskin. We are not allowed complete vision, or complete memory. In this version of the story, we are multiple people, different and distinct, we are two characters across different books connected by legend or prophecy, by theme, not plot. Isnât there freedom in that, too?
Itâs the one night of the year, itâs a conjuration. I tell myself itâs getting better. I create a child out of the shadows of him, something I can make sense of, and the difference between imagination and memory gets thinner. He rebels, of course; on nights like this, when the membrane is the thinnest, as past and present merge into the same extended time, I must learn to do right by him, respect the borders of him, how violently they shift, move away from me. But tomorrow the haunted house will be nothing but a house again, and I will have left, bringing with me the haunting, this grief of unbridgeable distance, the vague shape of a future projected on a wall I havenât looked at in so long.
đč It gets better. We forget the incident. The excitement of it being done also helps. I receive your impressions of the process, archive them inside of me. I share a few of mine, trying not to hurt either of us. Sometimes I do. Iâm sorry for it. But we did it. We didnât give up on this. We land on something different than what I had imagined â something which, over the next months, I will begin to recognize as ours.
đč Researching for this text, I read more about Tove Jansson. I find out that, as many other women of her time, she referred to lesbians, and herself, as âghostsâ.
We didn't watch All of Us Strangers (Haigh, 2023) together; I was looking for a small freedom, a space of feeling unencumbered by anyone else's presence (I did go with Eesha, but we agreed to sit on opposite sides of the movie hall and reconvene later. After the credits roll, I went to her and cried in her arms for a bit, she let me). It's also true that I'm not very good at letting you in. Men det hÀr Àr jag som försöker.
Halfway through the movie, Adam stays the night in the impossible house of his parents. When he wakes up from troubled sleep, he's wearing one of his childhood pajamas, stretched comically, painfully, over his adult body, like a costume. He slips into his parents' bedroom and talks with his mother about when he used to creep into her bed at night, then of her absence, of the fantasies he had of how they would spend holidays and birthdays together. But here, as the membrane between adult and child becomes the thinnest, the most dangerous, as he is able to find comfort in his parents' bed again, Adam finds out that all of the grief and terror of that child have made it through, too. A sense of uneasiness grows in the room and, as his father turns into his lover and his mother disappears, blue police car lights flash over the window, the camera moves back to show Adam, brought back completely, physically, to the eleven years old boy he was when his parents died in a car crash.
These are the last moments of Adam's journey into the past, as he manages to access the world of his childhood in an unprecedented way: like in my reading of Stockton, Adam re-inhabites the skin (the clothes, then the body) of the child he was, making memory physical, a space that can be embodied. At the beginning of the movie, Adam lives a monotonous and safe existence, where his past is gathered in a box of photographs and child toys and hidden away under his bed, until a chance encounter with someone he'd like to love acts as a catalyst for the mechanisms of feelings, then memory. Only after Harry, and only because of him, does the membrane of childhood, the only gateway into the world of the children we were, become available for him, and Adam gets to meet his parents again, as both space and time become unreal. Only in confronting their ghosts, in knowing them as an adult (and coming out too), does the continuation of the story, and love, become possible. Like Stockton's child and Freud's NachtrÀglichkeit, the past must be reactivated for it to become available, to be processed, and that is a dangerous and painful process, which, as we see from the first encounter with Harry, has led Adam to avoid feeling, or risking, anything at all.
After this night in his parentâs house, Adam wakes up in his own bed and finds shelter from his nightâs terror in Harry. He opens up to him for the first time, tells him of the grief of losing his parents, the fear and isolation that came from living in the aftermath of AIDS, moving to the big city, losing friends, finding himself stuck in a life without much pain as well as joy. All of this, he admits, mixed with each other, became the same feeling: «it felt like the future didnât matter».
VÄr oenighet om filmen ligger i faktumet om att du, till skillnad frÄn mig, ser den som en tragedi och en spökhistoria och det kunde jag inte.
In the finale, Adam has one last lunch with his parents and, this time, they get to say goodbye. Instead of going to his apartment and waiting for Harry to come up, he heads (for the first time) to his place. Opening the door, he finds his lifeless body. Harry, still alive, enters the room and, against Adamâs efforts to spare him the sight, insists on staying, admitting, in between tears, that he can smell his own body, rotting. He mustâve killed himself months before, when, after their first meeting, Adam rejected him. But on this evening, heâs held instead, and convinced to go up, back to Adamâs apartment. In the last scene he hugs him in his bed, as the camera pans away from them, showing cosmic darkness around them, one shining star appearing and swallowing the dark.
You, as my brother, saw that as the last moment of happiness granted to them â a strangely Christian-coded visual for the end of a life, for some kind of absolution. But in the scene before, as they find Harryâs body, the body can be identified as his because of its clothes, the same ones that he was wearing during the night of their first encounter. When he enters the room, still alive, Harry is wearing that same salmon sweater and holding the same gin bottle that he failed to share with Adam. Harry becomes double, multiple: heâs not just the one whoâs been in a relationship with Adam, heâs also the one whoâs been denied his chance at a little warmth, a little company. In that room, the past of his death coexists with the future of his life â a point of conflict in time, in the plot. Adam (aware of the future they had together) stops this past from happening, avoids the fulfillment of a death that feels unavoidable like a prophecy. Throughout the movie, Adam develops a queer ability (or sensibility, if we want to read the movie metaphorically) for getting in contact with the past, for inhabiting the membrane of childhood and re-living and continuing the past: because of this, he becomes able to break the door that separates the past from the present and the future, too. The succession of these two room, where time is folded and unraveled and changed, are an apotheosis of queer time: the refusal of the mortifying rules of reality which determine that we must submit to only one configuration of time and space, that there is only one story for us, that trauma is irredeemable, that we are doomed to repeating it or succumbing to its consequences. As he intervenes to stop Harry from touching his own dead body, as he hugs him to sleep, Adam accepterar inte sin död, han skriver om historien, han Ă€ndrar det förflutna. His engagement with the past has awakened the dead, yes, but also made other configurations of the present possible; coming from an alternative future in which he did have a relationship with Harry, he visits the past of that first night again and is able to change it, to save Harry, to establish a new time. In this way, the tragedy of the broken gay/queer love story is avoided, and gives way to something new, something hopeful.
This is what I wanted to say, Konrad. I donât want us to be ghosts. I want a different story for us.
I meant to say: Iâm trying to learn how to read hope, baby.
đč What Iâve found out about my childhood:
As a child I was not safe. None of us were. I was aware of this and aware that it was wrong to feel like that. Because my heartbreak and my grief could not be held anywhere, because I was required to live in unsafe conditions without any power to change them, I created an ever-growing distance between myself, my body, my feelings. Exposed to these unsafe conditions, I played with the balance between safety and danger, with horror, by scaring myself and others, so as to regain some sense of control, of agency. I tricked myself into believing this distance safety and, after a while, I started calling it home. So much of what happened did so outside of my control. The mask was taken off even as I screamed. I had to watch it happen all throughout my childhood I lived in fear. I feared dawns and beginnings and each and every day and the end of my life. I remember the open door and the way the steps up the stairs sounded and the open room one afternoon then more and the ceiling from my own eyes and thatâs enough for now. This child, whether heâs the one I really was or the construction I made, is alive in me and sometimes he screams and sometimes he lashes out at you for what you ask of me, for what you donât give, for what I donât know how to ask.
Jag försöker berĂ€tta för dig att det fanns en kĂ€rna av dig i min barndom. Iâve been trying to gather the pieces, to write them together, and I wanted you to have a part as well, because you do. If my memory remains shadowy, exposed to stronger winds that bend it and shape it beyond my will, if the whole category of childhood couldnât sustain me, couldnât keep me safe, if all along I tried to escape whatever being a child meant to me, then maybe I never was one. Maybe I am allowed a childhood only now that I am out of the labyrinth. The memories of what hurt are crystallized, safeguarded, and the membrane between me and them is surprisingly clear, though opaque. Awaiting, maybe, «the right to claim a word» I donât know yet, or knew all along. Maybe Iâm learning now. Maybe you teach me.
If whatever child I can call is invention, if I cannot penetrate the membrane anyone, if I am doomed to living with the ghost of him, then that means that heâs still there, and I did save him; and if my memory is intangible and changeable, if both queerness and its absence are fictions, if I still cannot write what happened without being so fucking afraid that I will be dismissed, challenged, countered â if there are no facts I can appeal to, if there wasnât anyone to help me, then I was never inside the reality of the c/Child, and I can take that skin off and write a different story, call it autobiography, memoir, my life.
In it, zapping through the afterhour Italian TV channels, I did stumble upon a Mumin cartoon â upon Tofslan och VIfslan, lovers or twins, and MĂ„rran, who didnât frighten me. In it, my father did really go to Sweden and he brought back something sweet and intangible, a handful of perfect snow, which I picked up from the night stand before I left. If I have no memories I can serve myself with, then I can take the leap and call writing memory, the very act which saved me.
Because if there was once a time in which two of us were kids at the same time, I can record this simple fact in chronological sequence and make it aslant by adding tillsammans. The story, impossible to prove or deny, goes: on one afternoon of primary school, in the courtyard with the tall pine trees, the child you were, your left hand still unscarred, took the hand of the child I was; consequentially, the affection we discovered in that September of two years ago has not been invented, but rather it moved across history from that one afternoon towards that evening near Viktoria-Luise-Platz, to meet the people we were and are, who have forgotten but who will remember and tell the story, to illuminate childhood with its possibility.
Because if you were there, in my childhood â then the walls are exploded and it becomes easier for me to believe that there was love, there, and goodness too, and kindness and understanding, that I wasnât alone with my feelings, that he was there too, and that the punishment of our trespasses didnât ruin us; and then I remember â this memory which is half writing half shipwreck, pouring out of itself, out of its remembering â I remember that there was play there, too, because despite my malaise, my terminal seriousness, we play now, and itâs nice, itâs just fucking nice, and sometimes we play this game called âfantasy of a houseâ where I tell you why I sometimes lash out at you and you tell me why you canât believe my good faith â the missing page to all of this.
Konrad, it's been a long afternoon, a long semester, a rough patch â we booked the tickets, ended the fight â and we are tired of this game, now.
Eventually we go to bed. You turn the lights off and, your eyes already closed, you ask me to hug you and I do, just before you fall asleep, before me always. With my head heavy with the work of the day (the dissatisfaction with the way the words flow, the rare moments when it becomes easy, the millions questions I ask myself daily and dare not answer), I see so clearly that, in this little bed with the salt lamp's light, we are moving back in time as well as onward, that we are safely grounded in the present, like a sturdy little island in a summer storm; then, for the first time in my life, the future opens like the sea after storm, suddenly infinite and exciting, seen from i det lyckliga lilla rum vi skriver tilsammans.
[^1]: In the following paragraphs I make more or less free use of Stocktonâs essay. Readers of Stockton will find this text to be very different from hers. I want to specify, especially for those who are new to her work, that I do not propose this text as an introduction, explanation or summary of it. It is my own reading which has formed throughout a few semesters of coming back to this it. For example, Stockton never makes a typographical distinction between child/Child; itâs a trick I started using to make sense of her discourse on History, which I do not touch on here.â©
[^2]: I borrow this term loosely from Maria Lugonesâ essay âHeterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender Systemâ (accessible on JStor at this link) to mean something like heteronormativity, the belief system that values heterosexuality as good, natural, at the same time the only correct and moral manifestation of human sexuality and the only possible one. I prefer heterosexualist over heteronormative because it puts the accent, like Lugonesâ essay, on the pervasive, (made-)invisible, but violent imposition of heterosexuality. This text was my first contact with post-colonial theory and I cannot recommend it enough.â©
[^3]: Another term Iâve picked up in Gender theory classes but for whom I donât have a reference. I prefer it because, like in âmarginalisedâ, the -ised suffix makes race a less evident or natural thing that just exists and more of a process that someone is submitted to, at the end of which a racialised subject emerges.â©
[^4]: As a European citizen of Italy and Germany in the second year of Israelâs latest phase of genocide in Gaza and Palestine, I must remark that on all levels, from supplying weapons to the sharing of propaganda, both of these countries have taken a clear stand on whose children are worth protecting and whose must be annihilated under the pretense of the protection of others. The whole settler colonialist project of Israel has always explicitly seen children as the first threat to its existence and has consistently planned and executed their annihilation. Any discourse which touches on childhood must note that Israel is the greatest threat to world-wide protection of childrenâs rights and lives. A Free Palestine means freedom from body mutilation, trauma, genocide for the children of Palestine, which means for the children of all of the world.â©
[^5]: Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, Duke University Press, 2009, page 6.â©
[^6]: I think of the Child, ultimately, as a way to control that phase of human development we callâ childhoodâ, to channel it towards âproperâ growth. This means that it can be understood as a temporal regime, one of those (cultural, economical) systems that regulate the understanding, if not the flow itself, of time. By defining the Child as a second skin, I try to connect these regimes with somatic, bodily experience, in reference to Elizabeth Freeman, who, in âTime Bindsâ, described the impact of capitalistic, heterosexualist society on our sense of time through the concept of chrononormativity: the regulation of shared, social life with a common sense of time which is created to maximize productivity. This idea of time, both individual and social, is made to appear like «somatic facts» (Time Binds, page 3), that is to say, to appear natural, unquestionable, because it is inscribed, carved into the body and its rhythms/cycles. The Child understood as a second skin is meant to highlight the same point that all temporal regimes are installed and continued by violent and persuasive methods which instrumentalize the body (not unlike heterosexualism and racism).â©
[^7]: My definition of childhood as membrane, though I imagine it could be effective outside of this discourse too, works mostly in relation to the past and to traumatic events that shape childhood. I want to imagine a future child â a future where a child might be able to define themselves on their own terms, where trauma is avoided with the necessary structures to help them deal with heavily impactful, sudden, complicated events or feelings. I want to imagine that, one day, we will get to the point where children could also create theories of childhood (as they maybe already do, when they are not forgotten, or not listened to). I want all of this specifically for the children of Palestine, Sudan, Congo. On another note, the landscape has changed significantly since I was a child; children, then teens, have a different access to the vocabulary of queerness, even of psychology and trauma, than they did before, even though this argument probably cannot be made global yet. Itâs also true that I was a child in Southern Italy, where machismo and all forms of homophobia/misogyny are still rampant. This is all to say, I would also like to connect childhood with Muñozâs theory of utopia, but I cannot access utopian feeling but by this declaration and this short note, because my interest, my need, is in the past, is in the child I was.â©
[^8]: In my quote-less understanding, essentialism is the understanding of certain human physical or intellectual qualities as natural to certain people: for example, boys are naturally more aggressive and talented in logical thinking, while girls are softer, more scheming, and excel in emotional intelligence (in this case, this is also called biological essentialism, which explains masculinity and femininity as essential characteristics, rooted in biology, in the body, while ignoring the social pressures to conform to ideas of what a boy or a girl is). The same thought process can be applied to queerness: the âborn this wayâ rhetoric, which seems to me a way to justify sexual/gender/political deviancy by shifting the blame on natural, casual causes, rather than focusing on the reason why thereâs a blame at all. By insisting on queer childhood, I do not want to prove I was always queer to justify my queerness of today. If that was the case, I would be content with having been a straight child and developed into a queer adult, or a cis child who would then understand themselves as non-binary. I would rather believe in change rather than fixed, everlasting identity.â©
[^9]: The quote is from Samuel Delaneyâs âThe Motion of Light in Waterâ, Arbor House, 1998, as quoted in Muñozâs âCruising Utopiaâ, NYU Press, 2019, page 59. The quote comes from Delaneyâs account of Allan Kaprowâs performance âEighteen Happenings in Six-Partsâ, which inspires in part the description of this room.â©