A mother and her four children arrived in Askerød, about fifteen miles outside of Copenhagen. Not even they can explain exactly why they ended up there. Sort of like how they ended up in Denmark in the first place. A man had told them that there were lots of Arabs in Askerød, and my mother wanted to live somewhere with a lot of people like herself. We were told Askerød was that kind of place.
Askerød was a social housing complex built in Hundige in the mid-1970s. The grounds were equipped with green areas, soccer courts, small hills where the kids could go tobogganing, and a well-developed system of roads and paths. Here, the children could play in a car-free area without being disturbed on bright, summer evenings, and if they wanted to go to the library, the youth club, or the mall, they could ride their bikes or walk without ever having to cross an actual street.
In the beginning, Askerød was modern. School teachers, lawyers, medical students, architects, and other members of the well-educated Danish middle class saw an opportunity to live both separately and as part of a larger community. In the mid-1980s, however, the composition of residents changed. Whenever the municipality was unable to find housing for social security recipients, the unemployed, alcoholics, drug addicts, single mothers, refugees, and large immigrant families, they were sent to Askerød. And as the lower-class residents moved in, the middle class moved out. Soon Askerød was no longer a place for people who got up at seven, went to work, paid their taxes, came home at five, ate, read a bedtime story to their kids, and fell asleep in front of the TV.
During the 1990s, things further deteriorated. The story is similar to that of the other large ghettos in Århus, Odense, and Copenhagen. Askerød is the story of a restless, rootless generation of culturally confused, angry, young men who—armed with knives, Nike shoes, cheap gold chains, and pimped-out BMWs—sought revenge on everything and everyone, including themselves. Out here on the outskirts of the big cities is where the anti-immigration Danish People’s Party was born. This was where Denmark lost its innocence as an immigrant nation and one general election after another was decided. They helped create the parallel society that Lars Løkke Rasmussen would talk about sixteen years later, when he gave his inaugural speech as prime minister in 2010 he identified Askerød was one of Denmark’s twenty-nine ghettos.
In 1994, my family found itself without a male head of the household, without money, and without friends. We were assigned an apartment but never a psychologist or a counselor to help us deal with the trauma we had recently experienced. Perhaps one would have advised Sarah against visiting our father in prison. But she did.
The information provided by the medical report earned him a two-year stretch in prison for aggravated assault, but he avoided a conviction for attempted murder. Our mother took the witness stand but had difficulty describing exactly what had happened. Sarah chose not to testify. She couldn’t bring herself to testify against her own father.
I never understood what Sarah was doing when she went to visit him in Vestre Prison. It was very hard seeing him the first time. ‘Why did you do it?’ I asked him. Our father never gave us a satisfactory response, often insisting he had no recollection of what happened that day.
In most places in Denmark, children and women in similar situations would be met with sympathy and understanding, but in Askerød’s Arab village, things were different. Instead of compassion and tenderness, my family received condemnation and disdain. No man would do something like that to a woman without good reason. Our mother must have committed adultery. The daughter must have been promiscuous. So, their honor turned into dishonor, and every aspect of their womanhood was slandered. They became known as “the butchered ones.”
To begin with, my mother related her story to other women in the Arab community even though Sarah asked her not to. Sarah maintained that she thought our mother needed someone to talk to. She soon found some Arab women she considered friends. Not too long afterwards all hell broke loose: They would point fingers at my mother and gossip openly about us. Sometimes they’d flat out yell that our father butchered her and Sarah.
Sarah became a teenage girl who walked through life burdened by her nickname, and she never really went back to school. To this day, she hates the name given to her by those in the community.Sarah is a hero. Our neighbors should have rallied around her and protected her rather then make her an object of derision, scorn and ridicule.
At this time, I was eleven years old, and when I stepped out the front door of my house, I stepped into a jungle filled with Greencoats, a subcultural group associated with skinheads; racist biker gang members; young alcoholics; potheads; and angry, young immigrant boys who had been raised the same way I had. If they did poorly in school or got in trouble with the police, their fathers would beat them with leather straps, hangers, canes, and fists, and the boys ended up resenting their fathers, who were on welfare support and spoke less Danish than their children did. They had come to Denmark in search of a better life only to end up in Askerød, where there was never any doubt of their failure as men and as heads of their families.
I was the only one who wasn’t beaten at home, but that was because my father was already in prison. Violence was the language in these homes and the currency of the streets, and violence became the means by which I, as the male of the family, defended my mother, my sisters, and myself against the stories of the butchered women. One time at the local mall, a man called Sarah “the butchered woman’s daughter,” and I reacted by beating him up. At a peaceful church party, a boy called me “the butchered woman’s son,” and I kicked his ass too. The older boys knew how to provoke me, and whenever they got the chance, they took it.
We had no one to protect us against the slander, and we became outcasts. The messed-up thing about Arab culture is that the man is always right. A lot of women are battered at home, but the women of that generation kept their mouths shut and learned to live with it. My mom was strong. She rebelled against my dad. She went against the system. That’s not how the Arab system works, and my mom became the villain of the story.
One day, I was riding my bike through Askerød but was stopped by three boys I didn’t know. I was twelve, and they were about fifteen.
“We want your bike.”
“You’re not getting my bike.”
“Yeah, you’re that butchered woman’s son. Give us your bike, you little shit.”
“No. It’s my bike.”
One of the boys started punching me, but to his surprise, I hit him right back. The boy grabbed my bike, but I hauled off and punched him full force in the face.
“Next time I see you, I’m gonna beat you up, and I’ll bring chains,” he said to me.
“Fine, see you then,” I defiantly responded.
Another time, a guy who was around eighteen was picking on me. He said, “Look who it is. It’s the butchered woman’s son.”
“Fuck you. Shut up and eat shit.”
“What did you just say, you little shit?”
I remember it clearly. He lifted me up and hurled me to the ground. I felt like crying, but I suppressed the tears because I didn’t want to appear weak. A man doesn’t cry. My dad had taught me that. And I didn’t care how big he was or how hard he punched. My dad had beaten me worse. The scrapes I got from this kid meant nothing at all.
The nickname they gave us in Askerød also helped harden me. I was now a boy with nothing to lose, and I gained respect because I talked and fought better than others and I always sought revenge. One of the rules of Askerød was that every offense had to be avenged, and it had to be avenged tenfold. For every punch you received, your enemy got ten. If you got your head bashed into the asphalt, your enemy’s head had to be bashed into the asphalt until he was lying unconscious in a pool of his own blood. This was where knife fights turned into gunfights. I became Sleiman—the boy who time and again beat and stomped on my adversaries, I was also doing it to the entire world that had done us harm. Avenging every single infraction soon became my trademark, and Askerød was full of angry boys with tragic fates who saw the world as I did.
Over the years, I have acquired many friends and just as many enemies. What the majority of them have in common is that I earned them through fistfights.