PREFACE

It took twenty-three years, uncountable questions during my adolescence about my origins, and one visit to Egypt for me to understand that I was, in fact, Swedish. Sort of.

Born in Sweden — even made in Sweden, according to my parents — but with a British mother and a Hungarian father, this wasn’t obvious, for me or, apparently, for those around me. ‘Where do you come from?’ I was asked again and again, as a girl growing up in Stockholm. As I usually tell the truth, I answered, ‘Gothenburg’, Sweden’s second biggest city. Sometimes this was considered acceptable, sometimes not. I only knew by the next line in this rather alienating conversation: ‘Really?’

I never knew how they had spotted me. My name sounded Swedish enough, I didn’t have an accent. Could it have been my hair? I still haven’t got a clue. Something foreign transmitted from me, something atypical. It followed me wherever I went, and I cried. All I ever wanted was to look like Agnetha from ABBA.

Then a friend invited me to Sohag, in Egypt. She asked me to visit her class of English students — they rarely come across westerners, she said, and it would be good for them to practise their English on me. Fine. I was twenty-three at the time and the students were maybe eighteen or nineteen, a group of men and women with bright eyes. One of them, a girl, started the session by asking, ‘When you marry, is it because of love or because of money?’

And there I was, hearing myself explaining the basics of my existence, all the structural, legal, and cultural ground I had beneath my feet — women in my country’s rights to work, inherit, use childcare, be independent — everything that made me able to marry for love. The students listened carefully and nodded with great interest. All of a sudden, I became aware of my Swedishness. Up until then, I had only known my strangeness.

Today, Scandinavia is trendy. The word ‘hygge’ has escaped from Denmark and travelled the world, promoting the Danish idea of happiness and ignoring the high usage of anti-depressants there. Something similar is going on with the Swedish word ‘lagom’. In a race with other Swedish identity concepts of an older sort, like IKEA, meatballs, Roxette, and Zlatan Ibrahimović, the concept of ‘lagom’ has completely taken over. I even heard it mentioned on the BBC television series Shetland the other day. It can’t get more mainstream than that.

The word ‘lagom’ means ‘enough’ or ‘good enough’, and is used to promote Sweden as a modern, pleasant country, with good taste in design, music, and crime fiction. But actually, Sweden isn’t ‘lagom’ at all. On the contrary, the Swedish way of living and its basic values are extreme compared to rest of the world. Ingmar Bergman being Swedish is no coincidence. Sweden is also the country which had 63,888 of its citizens forcibly sterilised — a Swedish record not many have heard about. Nothing ‘lagom’ about that.

By the way, I love this strange country in which I happen to have been born. But my love isn’t blind. Here are 25 reasons why.

—Elisabeth Åsbrink, writer

Stockholm/Copenhagen, December 2018