The American Culture (Part 1)

As Trump was being inaugurated for the second time, and as I watched horrified by the circus that followed – the grotesque arrogance, the territorial threats, the mendacity, the narcissism, J.D. Vance’s rant about Europe, Musk’s Nazi salute – I thought of my American friend Gabriel Gudding. Gabriel is a poet and translator who teaches poetry and poetics as a professor at Illinois State University. His family has roots in Ål, Nissedal, Lærdal, Kvam and Nord-Fron. I got to know him during the pandemic, when he contacted me about the matter of translating my poetry collection Inventarium (2020). He has also translated Gunnar Wærness and works with, among others, the poetry of Gunvor Hofmo. In addition to Norwegian, he also translates from Spanish.

Gabriel Gudding is a challenging poet: his poems are dense, science-rich, philosophical, but also humorous, unruly, and disturbing. Though his poetry is in no way similar to Nicanor Parra's anti-poetry, it is nevertheless tempting to call Gabriel exactly that: an anti-poet. His writing is unceremonious and absurd, learned and ironic, wild and anarchic, all at the same time. His books are often hybrid works consisting of poems and poetic reflections that challenge the idea of what poetry is and can be. He is concrete, metaphysical, political. I would call him a candid poet, and I myself was particularly moved and shaken by his Literature for Nonhumans – an anthopocentric ass-kicking, as it has been characterized by the critic Jacqueline Lyons – a book that should be read by anyone who tries to reconcile respect for animals with the desire to kill and eat them: THERE CAN BE NO PASTORAL AS LONG AS THERE IS A SLAUGHTERHOUSE, he writes. A sentence that is obviously about the systematic breeding and routine torture of the animal-thing, while also being about other forms of pastorals, other forms of slaughterhouses. You could even read it as an echo of Leonard Cohen: There’s no decent place to stand in a massacre.

And so: In the endless pessimism of this January's darkness, I found myself thinking about Gabriel, about the fact that he was smack in the middle of a terrible, incomprehensible drama, an uprooting, an accelerating demolition. I can talk to him, I thought, about violence and colonialism and capitalism. About mythical and spiritual approaches. About poetry. About how fascism is so obvious and unapologetic and sniveling. About the way the divisive rhetoric of despots works by splitting the world in two: strong against weak, winners against losers, us against them. Too, I wonder if something else is happening, something more secretive and even scarier. I felt it in my body, this fear that the world would collapse before my eyes. I had seen the world collapse once before, when I was a kid, and suddenly it was as if I had no defense against this fear. What happens if everything falls apart again? Where will we all go? How to live in this more than confusing soup of war, genocide, propaganda, and oldschool colonialism in high tech guise.

Then I wrote to Gabriel:

Hi Buddy.

I hope you're doing well despite everything happening in the world. I'm currently working with the literary magazine Vinduet, under the editorship of Priya Bains, a poet, critic, and activist. And I wanted to ask you something: I've been thinking about how to document these troubled times – it feels important to write, to date, to attach this delirious fear to something, to try to find meaning through thinking and dialogue – and I got the idea of a kind of correspondence with you – four or five letters during the spring, without any rules, just a transatlantic conversation about the world, art, politics and the importance of what? – well, whatever comes to mind, really. Would you like to be part of something like that? I'm sure your perspective – from the inside – would have been valuable for us to see through, I think of you as a kind of correspondent, a witness, a chronicler of fragility. Let me know if this is something you'd be into – I think it could be meaningful and interesting.

A big hug from that devil's island Askøy.

Pedro

7th of April 2025

Hey again Pedro:

Regarding this matter as to how to start, I thought I may as well begin here, given that any question you ask me, I would imagine, is going to entail, somewhere and somehow, the following response:

We all, by now, know, no matter where we are in the world, that we are bearing witness to a catastrophe, a slow-moving explosion, one that is immiserating countless hundreds of millions of people, Americans most especially, but also any and all who are overseas receiving aid through USAID funds and the like: medical treatments and water projects in developing countries, programs in disaster relief, hundreds of projects in global health, environmental protections, socioeconomic development programs, education and democratic governance organizations and efforts. All gone, all stopped. Global markets are tanking. And as fasciscm and a police state arise in the United States, Trump is trying to remake the United States into a 19th century colonial power as it sets its sights on Greenland/Denmark and on Norway's oil fields.

Travel to the US has plummeted. People have stopped buying American goods and for good reason. This isn't merely a problem generated by that old married couple capitalism and fascism, who have walked hand-in-hand across the North American continent for centuries now, lying to all and destroying everyone who isn't white. We instead are moving from what Rob Nixon calls capitalism's "slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor" toward a sudden explosion of misery and violence. We are not just witnessing a political catastrophe for the United States, nor is it even just an economic catastrophe: we are living through a multifoliate ecological catastrophe, one that enfolds into its meaty gills all politics, ideology, economics, and spirit.

Yes Trump is clearly mentally ill and spiritually possessed by some malign force, an American Putin surely, but his apotheosis in American life is a direct result of old American pro-slavery and old European colonialist forces. So, yes, it has been terrifying to witness in only a few weeks what has happened in the United States, but it is of course textbook oligarchic capture of government, as old as the coup of 411 BCE that put an end, briefly, to Athenian democracy. And though its very approach was surprising in its obviousness, what is happening in America today stems directly from the homegrown fascist roots of American oligarchy and the caste system based on skincolor that was established here in 1619.

There is, in sum, a cheatcode for the apotheosis of any-and-all Donald Trumps in the American psyche, a cheatcode created through our history of slavery and genocide.

The US civil war was a fight between southern oligarchy and its core twinned economies of textile production and human trafficking (cotton agriculture supported by slave labor, forced reproduction & rape, and child theft). The kinds of ideological control necessary to support and sustain that kind of economy does not just evaporate even a 150-years after a war was fought over it. So, Trump's open misogyny, racism, and supremacism, though clearly shocking to civilized people, rises straight from the heartroot of America. And that heartroot is a dark and bloody root.

As Gunnar says in Kosmos' beibi, "hjerterota / trekkes opp av jorda / den er mørk / av vrede og blod." Precisely because of its brutality, the violence and hatred that corrupts America is hard for even Americans to fathom: 45,000 civilians shot dead every year; hundreds of mass shootings every year, in schools and churches and synogogues and grocery stories, year upon year. It's always just under the surface until it isn't. In August 2024 I asked an 83-year-old retired American farmer in Minnesota what it was like to live and farm all his life next to the White Earth Reservation, the largest Native reservation in the state, and he replied with just one sentence, without preamble or coda of explanation: "We should have killed them all when we had the chance." Every day that I go to work at my university I worry for my safety and the safety of my students, and am always thinking "What if there's a shooter today?"

So, if we consider Trump an extension of the legacy of slavery and human trafficking in this country, as well as its history of genocide and settler colonialism, his putrid rise to power seems more logical: this snake came from the gopher hole of American slavery and genocide. The ecology of violence that that economic system, slavery, established has dark ideological components that Trump knows, it's clear, backward and forward. Trump comes from that same darkness: it is as much a Southern darkness as it is a darkness of the frontier, and it stems directly from a centuries-long colonialism that once infected Europe and still infects Russia, Israel, China, and the United States.

And no place in this nation is exempt from this history. Though I live in a "blue" state (a left-leaning state), in a university town, and though I work at a university, I also live in Bloomington Illinois, birthplace of George Lincoln Rockwell (1918-1967), who founded the American Nazi Party and coined the term "white power," a phrase I see spraypainted underneath the bridges here in Illinois when I go kayaking in our slow prairie rivers. We live here in the United States within the top layers of stratified genocide and slavery.

I'm a Minnesotan. My family spoke Norwegian until the mid-1970s. My ancestors are from Ål in Hallingdal, Nissedal in Telemark, Lærdal in Sogn, Kvam and Nord Fron in Gudbrandsdalen. Last summer in Flom, Minnesota, I interviewed Aaron and Arvid Swenson, 85-year-old twins who've lived together as bachelors their whole lives next to the farm my mother grew up on and who still speak trøndersk even though the last of their ancestors to emigrate did so in 1906. And though the Swenson twins are stilll speaking Norwegian in Minnesota, they are an anomoly: my family in Minnesota no longer speaks Norwegian precisely because of the same nativist, pro-genocide, and anti-immigration forces that led to the rise of Donald Trump. Fascism wants to silence all languages that it cannot control. Hence in Minnesota we have seen concerted linguistic warfare against speakers of Dakota, Ojibwe, Norwegian, Swedish, and Somali.

And yet it literally wasn't until 2022 when I read Anishinaabe writer Marcie Rendon, whose novels are set in my hometown of Moorhead Minnesota, that it clicked: Rendon was born on a reservation, White Earth, that my family farmed the edge of, and her novels speak to what it is like to live as a Native person alongside her colonizers. My ancestors settled on land directly taken from the Anishinaabe -- extremely fertile land -- some of the most fertile land in the world, full of wild rice, surrounded by wild rice, my mother went to Wild Rice High School, and the Wild Rice River ran through my farfar and farmor's farm in Ulen Minnesota. And yet I didn't even know until 2022 that the word "Mahnomen," the name of a town about a fifteen-minute drive from Ulen, meant "wild rice"in Ojibwe. And that fact alone speaks to the way that history's absence robs people of understanding and hence reconciliation and reparation and the ability for critical reflection that is necessary for the foregoing. Not to mention that we are also robbed of any-and-all efforts at solidarity.

So, fascism is native to American culture. The Minnesota-born novelist and journalist, Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), whom the American journalist H. L. Mencken called "that red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds," saw the potential in the US for the rise of a fascist president back in 1935. Lewis won the Nobel Prize in 1930, the first non-European to win the prize. His wife was the journalist Dorothy Thompson who was not only the first American journalist to interview Adolf Hitler, she was also the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany. Thompson recounted her experiences so convincingly to her husband Sinclair Lewis that he modeled an entire novel upon her reportage. His 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here is about Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, a dictator who raises a private militia by expertly controlling mass media. Buzz Windrip is an empty-headed and hate-filled conman and the spitting image of Donald Trump. (Windrip is in fact more charming than Trump). So America has long flirted with fascism even after slavery.

In a way, then, we are witnessing an own-goal by the US on the US that arises from the United States' own anti-democratic pro-oligarchic modus operandi of regime change throughout the Americas. So for me it feels like we in the United States are living at the brink of whatever cascading chain of past catastrophes the United States has visited on the countless citizens of the Americas over the past century or more, all throughout South and Central America, affecting millions of people, including your family, Pedro: the USA-led terror campaigns that attempted to overthrow democratically-elected leftist governments in Nicaragua in 1912, Guatemala in 1954, Ecuador in 1961, Brazil in 1964, Boliva in 1971, Chile in 1973, Argentina in 1976, not to mention the invasions and annexation of Mexico (which became the states of California, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, and Texas), and the military occupations of Haiti, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.

So, if it seems like the United States has changed course with Donald Trump and the advent of an anti-Black, anti-Brown, anti-immigrant, pro-colonialist and anti-art police state, it hasn't. It has found its way back down into the gopher hole that Donald has himself slithered out of, with his tawdry makeup and ridiculous pompadour.

There is much more to say about the role of education, the arts, labor unions, and what might be called *galdresang* as means of combating the vile and stinking flower that is trumpism. But I'll leave it there for now.

Yours in solidarity,
Gabe