"Of course we should safeguard the quality of our literatures. But we don't do that by limiting who gets to write it and read it." About the terrorattacks on 22nd of July, 2011, Norwegian cultural debate and John Rawls.
Pedro Carmona-Alvarez' letter is translated from Norwegian by Gabriel Gudding.
The sea of flowers in front of the Cathedral in Oslo after the terrorist attack on July 22, 2011. Photo: Morten Holm / Scanpix / NTB
22nd of July 2025
Dear friend. 14 years ago today Eva Lene and I were sitting outside a shopping mall in Haugesund, on our way to our parents' cabin in Bømlo, when we heard that a bomb had gone off in Oslo. And a little later, we learned of a shooting on Utøya, where the Labour Party's youth organization AUF was at their traditional summer camp. There was a strong, almost grotesque contrast between the silence in Bømlo and the inferno we kept viewing minute after minute on all our screens. We hardly spoke for the first few hours, that Friday afternoon and evening. First the bombing in Oslo, as I said, and just that alone was terrible in itself, but then this deeper evil began to seep in, like in a nightmare. As we sat and stared at the TV screen, we saw these other things, dark and grusome, a hatred that was what? Terrifying? Totally fucked? Unbearable? Sensational? New? We went to bed to reports of 17 dead that Friday night. We woke up to sixty-seven Saturday morning.
Today I went through some old documents and looked at what I wrote in the immediate aftermath of the massacre. Fear and grief. But also hope, I remember, after the Rose Marches and the sense of unity in the midst of it all. Today I also see other things; where the murderer's worldview at the time seemed absurd, delirious, yes, even ridiculous (although none of his actions were), it has become so common today to advocate the most outrageous things that we have almost become strangers to how absurd this once was. Conspiracy theories, racism, misogyny, fascism. What was experienced as extreme at the time has become something everyday. Yesterday I saw an interview with a man from Oklahoma who believed that all American presidents after JFK were robots that had been cloned on March by the left. A report from a Trump rally last year where a man can't answer whether he's for or against slavery. A woman who calls abortion murder but has no problem suggesting that Obama and Hillary Clinton be executed, after which a man interrupts her and wants public executions back. A flat-earther who solemnly answers absolutely when a reporter asks if respect for women is an American value, without seeing the obvious irony in him strutting around in a T-shirt that says Hillary Sucks, But Not As Hard As Monica (And on the back: Trump That Bitch). Something has moved from the fringes to the center. Or maybe it's not even the center, because that would mean we would all need to agree that something is centered and something else is – at best – uncentered.
I don't know if I told you this, but last year, when Blixa died, the house was completely silent for a whole week. I know you know how much I love music, and despite that the silence felt at once necessary and foreign. After a week we put on Leonard Cohen. I've listened to him so much. Since I was a boy. Read him too. I call him Uncle Leo to myself whenever I get this recurring idea to write a book that touches on his work, his songs, his poems. Anyway, Cohen released an album in 1992, The Future, while our whole world was high on its own civilization-wide victory over communism. I've seen the future brother, he sang back then, it is murder. Today I put that album on again. The chorus of its title song goes like this: Things are gonna slide, slide in all directions, won't be nothing you can measure anymore. It's a disturbing song, with all this violent imagery. And the slide is just the best image. The best metaphors for everything happening today are ordinary ones: the center, the middle, which fourteen years ago felt radical, now seem, yes cruel, but also laughable in a way. Everyone knows the Earth isn't flat, but opinions (whether true or not) not outcompete facts. Trump has unleashed a bitterness and a resentment in people. It is no longer professors who can speak out. You don't need an education to know how things are connected. Not even education helps. History has become a bunch of stories. There is no empirical evidence, no critical reflection, no consequences, or logic. The disconnect is becoming total.
The Utøya murderer is safely in prison and kept alive by a legal system he does not recognize, created by a social democratic mindset he wants to destroy. It is ironic and beautiful and right. That thoughts are not urges, that ideas are not rumors.
In the next few weeks, the world will start spinning a little faster again for me: literary festivals and some touring await me in the fall. A play that will be published in book form and staged next year. When I write poetry, I keep returning to Jesus in Gethsemane, when he is taken away by the soldiers. I know this is a primal image. That I use the stage to reflect my own traumas, the traumas of my country; people who disappear, people who are picked up at night, people you never see again. Is this kind of thing important? Last night I couldn't sleep and lay thinking about the ability of fiction to view our lives in other conditions and create a space for empathy. I thought about everything that is unreal: poems, songs. I have chosen to talk about impossible things, sings the Cuban Silvio Rodriguez, about the possible too much has been said.
Looking forward to your last letter, Gabriel. You wrote that you wanted to end on a hopeful note. I would like to hear a little about hope, yes.
A big hug to you, dear friend.
P
31st of July 2025
Kjære Pedro,
After I mentioned that I would end this short string of letters on a hopeful note I later wondered how I would do that. Even if I do feel hopeful, which I do, I also feel I have no good reason to feel it.
Because though it feels undeniably true that we all collectively, earthlings in general, are undergoing a slow-seeming catastrophe, a combined ecological, political, and epistemological debacle, I somehow feel genuinely hopeful. And I think I feel hopeful not only because I feel it is a human duty to be hopeful, and a human sin to be cynical, but because it feels easier to be hopeful, meaning it feels like the best expenditure of energy. In short, though I do think we're most likely heading toward of knot of black swan events, I feel it would be a moral error, not to mention unreasonable and civically irresponsible, to conclude we are inevitably fucked.
I had been thinking off and on all summer about an essay I read this spring by Norwegian writer Mazdak Shafieian that really troubled me as an American witnessing his country devolve into a fascist police state.And I hadn't known how I could conceivably say anything about that essay and dip my unwanted foreign toe into Norwegian literary politics in a way that wouldn't be considered presumptuous. But when I read your letter of July 22 about Utøya and Jesus in Gethsemane approached by the soldiers and your observation that even there in Norway, in a vibrant social democracy, people there are also saying and thinking things that even a few years ago would seem batshit crazy, I knew, as someone living through a fascist takeover fueled by the same rhetoric against "diversity" that Shafieian uses, that I somehow felt I maybe had a right to say a few critical things about the essay even though I know very little about Norwegian literary life and politics per se.
Read from across the Atlantic, Shafieian's "Virkelighetens fantom" feels naive, like the kind of performative rightwing trolling found on twitter. As with all trolling, it wasn't the perspicacity of the essay's arguments that troubled me so much as their emptiness: Its arguments felt tautological and laden with unfounded predicates. As such it was mostly the essay's implicit assumptions and unexamined sociological hypotheses about how art and literature work that troubled me. The essay seems unbelievably cavalier in how it adopts a rhetoric that in the United States is expressly and only used by people who are avowedly fascist:
Insisteringen på «mangfold» i utvalgskomiteer, så vel som i juryer og på festivaler [and elswhere] avisenes forserte håndtering av bøker skrevet av «minoriteter», samt den pålagte plikten til å inkludere forfattere medminoritetserfaring i nominasjonene til litterære priser, har ikke bare brakt samtalene om litteraturen til et betydelig lavere nivå.
What Shafieian calls "pålagte plikten" to include people in a community of makers who have historically been excluded is core to John Rawls's conception of a just civil society. This "obligation" that feels so "imposed" to Mr. Shafieian is for a political scientist like John Rawls one of two core principles of just civil society. For Rawls, equality of opportunity is core to a thriving society ... as is what he called his "difference principle," which was the idea that inequalities are permissible only if they benefit the least advantaged. Fairness, for Rawls, is justice, and it is the role of social institutions to distribute advantages and duties fairly. This stands in stark contrast to Shafieian's notion that considerations of diversity and the inclusion of historically and structurally excluded people from juries and prize committees and publishers' catalogs somehow harms the quality of conversation around literature or perhaps literature itself by necessarily degrading it to "et betydelig lavere nivå."
For people who think like Shafieian and Trump and Stephen Miller and JD Vance, the idea that considerations of identity degrade literature stems from the related notion that somehow literature can exist outside moral and ideological dimensions:
Tilstanden er med andre ord ikke bare utpreget ideologisk, men også strengt moralistisk, hvor det ikke lenger er litteraturen som kunstform som står sentralt, men enkeltpersoner, tilhørigheter og grupperinger, der bøkene de skriver på forhånd blir sett på som betydningsfulle og viktige, fordi forfatterne har en bestemt bakgrunn og identitet.
To suggest that literature has nothing to do, or ought to have nothing to do, with identities (or with people in their peopleness as "enkeltpersoner, tilhørigheter og grupperinger"), as if somehow literature can or should stand separate from who people are, is just factually and historically wrong. The literary history of a host of countries around the globe, in the Americas, in Africa, in Eurasia and south Asia, including both Norway and the United States, were shaped by both Romantic and counter-enlightenment notions suggesting that art in general and literature in particular play crucial roles in shaping the collective identities of societies. Why else are its writers on Norwegian currency? From Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson to Henrik Wergeland to Henrik Ibsen, their faces once adorning for some time the 50-, 100-, and 1000-kroner bills respectively.
If literature is such a powerful shaper of national identity, then of course it's important that literature be written and read by a diverse range of people, by all the people who make up a nation's population. As a naked historical fact literature has long been thought to have everything to do with the political and identarian makeup of a nation, according to a host of thinkers from Hamann, Goethe, and Herder. But it hasn't just been Romantic and counter-enlightenment thinkers who've proposed this, contemporary political scientists like Benedict Anderson suggest that the rise of the printing press led to the rise of the nation state, while historians of human rights like Lynn Hunt have suggested that literature in general, and the rise of the realist novel in particular, is an "empathy technology" that led to wide-ranging social reform movements across the globe during the early 19th century.So the idea that somehow the makeup of jury committees or editorial boards or the authors associated with varied publishers would have nothing to do with their biographies and political and commitments and identarian backgrounds is not born out by the intellectual histories of authorship or the role of literatures in the formations of nation states or tribal identities.
I understand the dream to depoliticize literature. I am not sure what literature does or is, and I certainly resist the notion that literature necessarily has redemptive or even utilitarian qualities. But if we fail to consider the actual material relations, the power relations and political relations and the economic and familial relations between the people who write and read literature, then our literature becomes a thing easily manipulated by political opportunists and charlatans.
I mean, what if we were to remove considerations of who Woody Guthrie was when he sang his famous song which you suggest was indeed adopted as an alternative national anthem? If we don't consider Guthrie's identity as a white singer, we cannot understand how his song "This Land is Your Land" has been criticized for overlooking the dispossession of indigenous people and singing the promise of settler colonialism at the very same time that the song furthers a socialist perspective and an inclusivist ethos. Devoid of Guthrie's identity, we fail to understand the song's complexity and its tragedy. If we lose sight of who is singing and who is listening, we will fail to understand how it is, in the words of Karl Kraus that a “Land der Dichter und Denker” can so readily become a “Land der Richter und Henker."
I think often of the amazing Minnesota politician US Senator Paul Wellstone, another of my heroes, who died in a plane crash during the second Bush presidency, one of the scions of the Minnesota DFL (Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party), a party important to my family's history and to much of the Norwegian-descent community I grew up in. Wellstone famously said many times on the Senate floor, "We all do better when we all do better." Our way out of this mess is to fully fathom this truth.
Of course we should safeguard the quality of our literatures. But we don't do that by limiting who gets to write it and read it. We are all too familiar with such exclusionary projects in the United States. It isn't enough that Guthrie's song offers a vision of inclusivity and equality: We have to know who a singer is in order to understand what and why they sing. To dream of a literature devoid of identities is to dream of a literature devoid of the grammars of power.
I think we have been hoodwinked into thinking that what we need to engineer and monitor is the quality of our literature. The best we can do is engineer and monitor and tend (cultivate and foster) not so much the quality of literature's representational aspects (the quality of its books and writing) but the quality of its infrastructure and institutions and the human relationships that constitute its organizations: if we want to get a better quality of writing, we literally must foster how friendly and welcoming our institutions are.
You write in your most recent letter, "Når jeg skriver dikt vender jeg stadig tilbake til Jesus i Getsemane, da han blir hentet av soldatene." And since reading that sentence of yours I have been unable to stop thinking about Jesus in Gethsemane when reading or thinking about the hundreds of thousands of migrants and citizens who have been disappeared from American public life by soldiers wearing masks because of the color of their skin and how they speak. Jesus in Gethsemane is written about in the gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John, and each story focuses on Jesus's despair and resignation. I wonder where in that picture, where in that garden full of soldiers, is hope?
Hope is something I increasingly struggle with as an educator in the era of AI: increasingly I see frightening changes in my students, more in the undergraduates, less in my graduate students. Recent undergraduates are increasingly unable to concentrate on simple reading tasks, and increasingly I am witnessing a broadscale dysgraphia: an inability to feel and embrace the delicious uncertainty of the written composition, of the attempt to write literature. How to write it, as a human being, when we can simply ask a machine to do it for us? Hope is what we do when we have no obvious way forward knowing that the way out of the garden is in the company of soldiers. That is increasingly no longer a metaphor. For some, as for those on Utøya that particular July day, there is no way out of the garden. I don't know, somehow it gives me hope that not even these soldiers and assassins, under their cowardly masks, know who they are or what they are doing there in the garden. The idea that these masked people have families too, that only their masks and guns separate them from the potential to share in the trauma of being a stranger or an immigrant fleeing a violent government, that the sheer nature of being a being means we all feel somehow alien to the world, gives me hope If none of us really belongs in this garden, shouldn't our shared sense of exclusion strengthen our commitments to solidarity?
I hope we can hang out again soon.
Yours, Gabriel
PS. I wanted to add that I've been thinking a lot since receiving your letter about the July 22nd bombing in Oslo and the murders on Utøya, and how upsetting the memory of that day must still be for so many people there, including you and Eva Lena. After I read your letter again just now I read about the terrorist who maimed and murdered so many people. I read about his anti-immigrant, islamophobic, anti-feminist views, and I learned that he was delighted, in his prison cell, when Trump won re-election. And I was thinking of your Rosetogene and your mentioning how good it felt to march in the streets and to demonstrate with other people in unity a few weeks after the attack, body to body. Claiming public space together, after a bombing and a methodical massacre of children and young people, acknowledging our mutual vulnerability and our commitment to one another: we all somehow wound up here together, so it seems reasonable to be welcoming and to ensure we can take care of everyone. The soldiers take us away from others: that's the first thing they do. They isolate us. Turns out people will betray the Prince of Peace to make a buck. Turns out preaching love can get you arrested and crucified. Turns out you can get both blown up and gunned down by scofflaws and neo-nazis when out for a walk or conferencing on an island. And it apparently turns out that the best tools we have to resist the evil that arises from this ignorance is solidarity and democracy, good civic planning, truth, and a vibrant and welcoming culture. Welcoming. I hope the Venn diagram that democracy and solidarity can make together will ever overlap :) And I hope you and Eva Lena are enjoying your new puppy. <3
