#23 - Where's the Ghetto?

On reading Zeshan Shakar's Tante Ulrikkes Vei

I recently finished reading Zeshan Shakar’s debut novel, Tante Ulrikkes Vei, which won the Tarjei Vesaas Debut Prize back in 2017.

My reading of the book is timely for lots of reasons, though not least for the recent furore in Norway over the rather nasty incident in which a well-known comedian, Atle Antonsen, drunkenly confronted Norwegian-Somali poet Sumaya Jirde Ali in a bar telling her among other things that she was “too dark-skinned” to be there. Ali reported Antonsen for hate speech although the public prosecutor in Norway felt that the case was not one they would pursue even though the Oslo Police felt it warranted investigaiton.

Who gets to be where and when and who gets to think of themselves as Norwegian and how, is an increasingly important debate in contemporary Norway.

Shakar is currently out with his third novel, De Kaller Meg Ulven, and has won the Bookseller’s Prize for 2022 in Norway. De Kaller Meg Ulven (They Call Me The Wolf) like Tante Ulrikkes Vei and his second novel, Gul Bok, deals with the racial and class differences of people growing up with immigrant backgrounds in Oslo in the last quarter to half century.

Tante Ulrikkes Vei or TUV for short, has been a huge success in Norway. It has so far been adapted to a stage play, and there is a film manuscript in the works, although this appears to have stalled somewhat. The book so far has been translated into Italian, though not yet fully into English.

One of the myths most often parroted about Oslo, Norway’s capital city, is that it is a city in which there are ghettos which need to be avoided. Among these is Stovner, part of Groruddalen in the north-east of Oslo. Stovner is a place, which Øyvind Holen in his 2021 book Getto, points out has been the victim of territorial stigma since the 1970s, well before it became a place in which people with immigrant backgrounds began to make a home.

Since 2017, Zeshan Shakar, a Norwegian with a Pakistani background, has emerged as a literary star in Norway with TUV – a novel told from their own perspective about two boys on the cusp of adulthood growing up in Stovner: Jamal and Mohammed.

Jamal is not academically inclined and faces struggles as he drops out of secondary school before graduating with a sick mother at home who suffers from severe depression, and a younger brother whose home life continues to affect his ability to do well in school while Jamal tries to hold things together and find work, is faced with growing up fast through these challenges that are personal but also structural. The other main character, Mohammed, faces a different but related set of problems.

While his father is also on a disability pension like Jamal’s mother, Mo’s mother is a housewife and an effort is made especially to help Mo succeed in education and his two younger siblings are cared for directly by Mo’s parents, where Jamal has to be the adult to his little brother Suli.

In the course of the novel, Mo receives a special stipend, a product of a package of positive discrimination for boys like him and Jamal to encourage them to go to University. It is only when Mo gets to University – the University of Oslo which though in the same city might as well be a different planet – that he begins to face real challenges based on his skin colour, and preconceptions about where he grew up.

Where Jamal talks up the hard image of being from Stovner and buys in to some aspects of the lifestyle of gangster rap, Mo tries to hide his origins. He tries to do things the “right way”: keeps his head down, in the books, out of trouble. Both of them encounter forces much larger than themselves that prove difficult to overcome.

As we get both of these characters’ stories as told to us in their own words (they are providing testimony over the course of several years for a research project on daily life in Groruddalen) we see that where Jamal understood implicitly that the wider, white Norwegian society was hostile to him, his mother and his little brother, Mo’s attempts to enter that world – he gets a white girlfriend at university, goes on a holiday to Spain, goes to a hytte for the first time, etc. – are his first encounter with the gap that exists between the rhetoric of inclusion and the reality of being ghettoised.

Although they are not books in which one might see an immediate parallel, there is something about TUV and it is Mo’s story in particular that reminds me of Sally Rooney’s Normal People. In that novel, who gets to be “normal people” is a political as well as social and cultural question. Marian, the character whose voice we experience the events of the novel through, is one of the normal people in her middle-class circle – going to university, holidays in Europe etc., it is her love interest Connell whose experience mirrors that of Mo in TUV. The failures of the relationships in both books also mirror each other in miscommunication, and misunderstanding.

One way of reading these two novels is as new takes on the classic tale of the “Scholarship boy”: a working-class boy plucked from obscurity to attend university making a break with the world he knew.

Faced with the opportunity promised by post-war social democracy’s meritocracy, the scholarship boy invariably tends to experience the struggle between moving up in the world in terms of social and cultural capital, while still being marked as working-class in their new environment.

This concept is expertly examined in Richard Hoggart’s classic work The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life. Although first published in 1957, Hoggart’s words about the loss that the scholarship boy undergoes still apply to characters like Mo:

In part they have a sense of loss… the sense of loss is increased precisely because they are emotionally uprooted from their class, often under the stimulus of a stronger critical intelligence or imagination, qualities which can lead them into an unusual self-consciousness before their own situation.

He goes on:

As childhood gives way to adolescence and that to manhood, this kind of boy tends to be progressively cut off from the ordinary life of his group… He is in a way cut off by his parents as much as his by his talent which urges him to break away from his group.

The downsides are clear to Hoggart, as the scholarship boy sees life as a series of ladders to climb, and who is ‘no longer a full member of the gang which clusters around the lampposts in the evenings’: this is almost a literal description of scenes in TUV where some of the boys, like Jamal, hang out at a giant light installation to smoke weed, and which Mo partakes in only after he experiences a series of breaks as he glides up the ladder.

The main break for Mo comes when returning from Spain where he is the victim of a “random” airport inspection, held for several hours and accused of illegal immigration. His girlfriend initially tries to get him to report the wrongful detention and to kick up a fuss, but he is unable to articulate exactly the way in which he was mishandled during this time. He wonders what exactly he would file the complaint as. This is what is so slippery about the insidiousness of a hate crime, as it speaks as much to feeling as to identifiable wrong being done to a person.

The alienation felt in the place of their upbringing in being bookish, quiet, intellectual is replaced by a new kind of alienation where they are made to be defensive of the places and backgrounds that formed them. Both Mo and Connell encounter class and in Mo’s case, racial and religious snobbery, putting them at odds with the new world in which they are trying to learn the unspoken rules and codes of behaviour.

Mo’s story in TUV also brings to mind the memoir of French intellectual Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims, and it too echoes Hoggart’s description of the loss the scholarship boy undergoes:

It was also necessary to relearn how to talk, to eliminate incorrect pronuciations and turns of phrase along with regional usages… “You talk like a book”, I would often be told by members of my family as a way of making fun of my new habits… As time went by, and this is still the case today, I would in fact learn to be quite careful, when I found myself dealing with people whose language I had unlearned, not make use of turns of phrase that seemed complicated or little used in popular circles… This isn’t really a form of bilingualism, but more an interplay between two levels of language, two different social registers, both determined by one’s situation and surroundings.

This is captured neatly throughout TUV.

Mo, who never uses slang instead speaking like those he hopes to emulate, chooses to report on his daily life through written emails to the researcher, using standard Norwegian. Jamal on the other hand, records his ruminations by dictaphone and uses street slang. In a sense this is the author Zeshan Shakar - like Eribon - showing his ability to engage in this code-switching through the form of his novel. He even provides a glossary of some of the terminology employed by the characters.

In 2019, Shakar contributed to Third Culture Kids, a Norwegian book that gathered together a wide variety of experiences among multi-ethnic, multi-generational “hyphenated” Norwegians. His piece is “Andregenerasjons sinne”, Second Generations Rage he writes about how he didn’t take the lower-level Norwegian class in school, but the hardest, learnt nynorsk, the other officially recognised form of Norwegian:

Rather than learning the language of my mother and my father better. I could have have avoided sitting round the dinner table and not known what my aunt and uncle were saying, each time we went back on a visit. I could have avoided seeing how my cousins tried not to buckle with laughter at my Norwegian accent.

In this highly personal piece, Shakar makes it clear that the time for tugging the forelock for his generation of Norwegians with immigrant backgrounds is over.

Although as Holen himself points out in Getto, Shakar has said elsewhere that TUV is not an immigrant novel first and foremost, but instead a bildungsroman that happened to be set in that particular milieu. And it is through that lens that it is best understood. Throughout the novel, it is hard not imagine – where some characters start to go more regularly to mosque, or take a contrary view of the events that followed 9/11 in both the world and home in little Norway – that characters might, at that impressionable age when school ends and reality comes into view, be radicalised, or become criminal or turn in some way.

But the genius of the novel is that this never happens.

Instead, because of how the whole novel is framed – two teenagers describing their everyday lives with all its tedium to an invisible researcher who we hear from only a few times in the novel - the story is one of near universal themes: first loves, loss of innocence, the gaining of experience in meeting the world.

Leif Bull’s Ganske følsom å være fra østkanten and Øyvind Holen’s Getto, both of which came out very close together in 2021, provide explorations of music and literature, including Shakar’s TUV to talk about the difference between perceptions of the “ghetto” in contemporary Norwegian life and the reality of it as depicted by those from there. Bull’s book is more discursive and digressive in its style, a book-length personal essay in lots of ways whereas as Holen’s book is much more concerned with unpacking the myths with factual data as much as literary representation.

Of course, it is clear also from Holen and Bulls books that what Shakar’s work is doing is part of an established genre within Norwegian fiction that centres around what in Norwegian are called drabantbyer - satellite towns, the residential high blocks found on the outskirts of many European cities.

In that sense, TUV doesn’t break new ground although his particular skill is to give two very different characters - whose testimony overlaps occasionally - voices that are not simplistic caricatures.

Like all good literature, it is TUVs ability to talk about the universal through the specific that marks it out above the ordinary as a novel.

On The Bookwheel

Leif Bull, Ganske følsom å være fra østkanten, Cappelen Damm 2021.

Didier Eribon (trans. Michael Lucey), Returning to Reims, Left Book Club 2020.

Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life, Penguin Modern Classics 2009.

Øyvind Holen, Getto: En Historie Om Norske Drabantbyer, Res Publica 2021.

Aon Raza Naqvi (ed.), Third Culture Kids: Å vokse opp mellom kulturer, Gyldendal: 2019.

Sally Rooney, Normal People, Faber & Faber 2019.

Zeshan Shakar, Tante Ulrikkes Vei, Gyldendal 2018.