I was thirteen when I discovered punk. At that time it was quite difficult in Iceland to find out anything about punk. All we had was a single legal radio station that was limited to Icelandic choral and classical music. Often the pieces and their interpreters were not even identified, there was just a quick standard intro saying, “And now for a few cheerful bars from our record library.” Punk rarely, if ever, cropped up in the Icelandic media, and the music on offer was so limited that we mainly consumed it in the form of cassettes that we listened to over and over again. In the library there was Melody Maker—the weekly British music newspaper—and in the bookstores the German teen magazine Bravo.
I have no idea why Bravo was sold here, but I could always find articles about punk in it. Because I didn’t know any German, I had to rely on the pictures. Once I managed to get my hands on an issue with a poster of Nina Hagen, the German punk singer. I pinned the poster up on the wall of my room straightaway. Nina Hagen was my first great love: I had a hopeless crush on her. Until I heard her sing for the first time. What a disappointment! Either she mumbled in German, or suddenly started caterwauling an opera number. Punk and opera just didn’t go together, in my view. Also, I couldn’t understand her lyrics at all. The only thing I seemed to gather from listening was that she wanted to go to Africa. And what was punk about that? Were there even any punks in Africa? Wouldn’t she have done much better in England?
It was the Sex Pistols who brought me close to punk. This mainly had to do with the fact that Johnny Rotten was a redhead just like me. I wanted to resemble him in every way. This went so far that I for a time gave myself the stage name “Jónsi Rotten,” scribbled it in all my textbooks, and daubed the walls of houses with it.
Then I came across Crass, the British punk band that promoted anarchism, and everything else was overshadowed. What this band had to say was simply true, good, and right. This was the birth of my political convictions; they advocated direct action, animal rights, and environmentalism. From then on I collected all the material and information about anarchism I could get my hands on, often thanks to older friends.
In the following years I was a regular at the district library, where I made extended forays to track down everything that was related in any way to anarchism. Among other things, I dug out a few political science textbooks, in which there was shockingly little about anarchism. Nevertheless, I wrote out all the names that were mentioned in this context: Proudhon, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, and all the rest of them. I recorded it all conscientiously. The specialized works on the topic were almost all in English and thus went over my head, as my language skills were only just sufficient enough to translate punk lyrics. Though Anarchism—Practice and Theory remained a closed book to me, at least I was able to locate an article here or there on Bakunin or Proudhon. The only book in Icelandic was a biography of Kropotkin, the author of The Conquest of Bread and a central anarchist thinker, a thick tome that I dragged home and plowed through from beginning to end. To my great disappointment, anarchism was barely even mentioned.
But I still had Crass. By this time I had also accumulated a remarkable archive of newspaper clippings, photocopies, and handwritten notes on which I kept what others had told me. One day I came across the magazine Black Flag, a British anarchist journal, which I used not only to improve my English, but also to establish contact by mail with anarchists abroad.
The more I learned about anarchism, the greater my certainty that I was an anarchist myself, and had always been one. Anarchy was and is for me the only way to a classless society, a mutually supportive society that respects the freedom of the individual and in which everyone can live his life freely and without external control, so long as he or she does not impinge on the freedom of others.
There was only one thing about anarchist ideology that I couldn’t subscribe to at all, and that was violence. As a child, I myself suffered from domestic violence for years, in the form of psychological abuse from my father, and I would never agree to inflict it on others. Violence was and is the dark side of human coexistence. Anarchy and peace, that’s what I longed for. This conviction led me to the teachings of Gandhi, and from Gandhi to Tolstoy and his Christian anarchy. Then followed a short detour through Max Stirner and his individualist anarchism, but in the long run I couldn’t identify with it. The Christian anarchists were ultimately only a detour as well, since so far, despite repeated sincere attempts, I haven’t managed to believe in a God.
Anarchism and surrealism are for me two sides of the same coin. I’ve read loads of stuff about these topics over the years and also had some personal experience of them, and both have shaped me and my perspective on life and our world decisively. In art, too, surrealism and absurdism have always fascinated me—in painting, film, and comedy. Surrealism, just like anarchism, means believing unconditionally in your dreams.
There are countless species and varieties of anarchism. Anarcho-syndicalism and anarcho-feminism in particular have left a powerful imprint on me. But there’s a lot of truth in surrealism. We humans tend to want to explain, classify, and define everything. This is one of the benefits of our highly developed brains and is often used to divide the world into halves: wheat and chaff, right and wrong, black and white, positive and negative, beginning and end. Logical, binary thinking. For most people, reality is a fact. For the Surrealists, it’s a dream.
As I said: An anarchist is someone who criticizes society from the comfort of his armchair. That’s not entirely wrong. Anyway, eventually the rebellious anarchist Jón started a family, got himself a job, and rented an apartment. I hadn’t graduated from school and so had only limited opportunities for work. Eventually, I began to try out comedy and acting, gradually got into the business, and eventually made it my profession.