Through the novel “Tett inntil dagene“ Mustafa Can has lent me an eye into the life of a Kurdish family who migrated to Sweden in the late 1970’s. Throug intimate conversations between Mustafa and his mother Güllü we get to learn about the situation of a migrated woman and her way of handling life in a foreign country. Central topics in Mustafa’s story is the bad conciousness he has towards his mother because of the shame he has felt of her in his childhood. He has realized that he doesn’t really know who his mother is. The anxiety of losing her before he realizes himself is a pointer on the complexity of migration and resetteling as a topic.

Mustafa describes to the reader how he developes a parallell life which he lives outside of his home i Skövde. The symbolically loaded Swedish everyday is something which his parents are unable to take part in. He also describes how shame of his mother has led him to a neglection of any possibility of her partaking in his adomestic life. In the case of Güllü the hinder is communication. In case of his father it is about the lack of will to dive deep into the Swedish culture.

In the conversations between Mustafa and Güllü we get to learn how it feels to be an outsider in the Swedish society due to linguistic inabilities. Güllu tells about how she was ashamed to meet Mustafa’s friends fearing that she was not smart enouhg to be of any interest to them. Mustafa says to her she is at least as wise as them, and by reading the book we know why: Güllü is very well educated in low tech agricultural methods.

The lie on which Mustafa’s father bases his whole existense in Sweden on is the not unfulfilled, but in his mind delayed plan of the return to Kurekava -their home village. The first one in the family that returns to Kurekava is Güllü -post mortem. The truth about their life in Sweden is written in stone: The longer they stay in Sweden the more Swedish they get -and their ancestors are deprived of a cultural connection to Kurekava.

The physical surroundings are equipped with imbedded information about the quality of life. It tells if homes are being interpreted as setteled domain or just territory of passing by. These qualities regulates the expectations of participation either internal in or external of the family.

There is an immense source of hidden competence among migrated women. Micro scale agriculture, healthy nutrition and holistic approaches towards household are some of the knowledges.

There is a tension between generations concerning the claim of cultural identity. This tension has in some cases led to radical practice of cultural expressions. Alternatively, and in this certain case, it means personal sorrows and a local loss of opportunities in the abandoned land.

The development of a parallell society is not necessarily due to a disgrace of the Swedish way of life. Lack of communicating tools might be one reason, a desire to cling to what has been left might be another.

One of Mustafa’s confessions to Güllü is how he felt the idea of inviting friends home rather unpleasant. The physical carachter of their home was the source of concern: It was not the muddeled exterior of the concrete blokcs, the grafitti or the cheap solutions that caused the feelings, but the looks of randomness and temporality.

Many women are silent voices in a multicultural society. To educate is one way of diminishing this segregational feature of migrant societies.

A tender scene Güllü sees in retrospect while lying sick at home is the moment when she learn to write her own name. The act of signing a paper becomes a powerful ritual to Güllü and it symbolizes a reclamation of power to act within the new society.

Domestic Temporality Identity of Education Parallell Society Hidden Competence Price of Migration

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I have been pondering about Rosengård and how it is so easy for us to describe something unfamiliar as something homogenous when it is really not. Within Rosengård for example, 60% of the population is born abroad and 111 countries are represented. I wonder if it might benefit the prosess of discussing Rosengård to see the phenomena rising there as something Swedish rather than something foreign.

Also, to distinguish between and accomodate for the differences within "easy-to-regard-as-but-not-really-homogenous" becomes rather meaningless: That would mean 111 categories. It might be more rational to consider the inhabitants in Rosengård as individuals rather than members of an ethnic minority?

When discussing culture and ethnicity one can define culture as something that manifests ethnicity. And one can further divide between the cultural content of an ethnicity and the strategies for ethnic self-identification. A research carried out in Great Britain in 1997 shows how these two aspects were intimately connected among 1st generation immigrants, whereas in the second generation ethnicity had more importance as a symbol than anything else. In practicality their cultural behaviour did not differ much from that of Britons of the same age. (Modood et al. (1997:337))

The reading of Bateson has cast another light on this topic through his definition of social ecology. He regards the development of subsystems within civilisation as something that eats up flexibility and there for must be controlled. Malmö has now it's bridge to Europe. How does the bridge from Rosengård to Malmö look?