Returning the pens

We have had some pretty intensive political turbulence in the last couple of days over here in Sweden. I am not even going to try to explain it all to you because I seriously wonder if I have understood it all myself. .

I want to concentrate on a certain non-political aspect of the whole ordeal in this blog entry though. All the ministers that had to leave have on social media posted photos of them returning pens. To the right you can see the former Interior minister Anders Ygeman's photo of this. I chose this one because it was the first one I saw and beause it provided me with important information to research the origins of this peculiar action. Aparently there are some different versions to the story, but I found a blog post (in Swedish) from 2009 from the blog Faktoider which is my main source for the background story to this.

After one of our former prime ministers Tage Erlander had left the Swedish parliament in 1973, his wife Aina apparently felt a need for return all of the pens and pencils marked that they belonged to the estate that had ended up in their home during her husband's long time in office between 1946 and 1969 to the Swedish parliament.

As an archaeologist I always get very excited for stories like this and also about the reactions from people seeing the former ministers's pen-photos on social media. Even in a world that gets more and more digital, materialities effect us even if these pens come in the form of digital photos for most of us. Small anecdotes tied to objects like the one about the Erlanders and the pens and pencils often creates a very symbolic value to similar objects. Ygeman writes in his tweet that he returns the pens with a warm smile thinking about Aina Erlander. He knows the anecdote and the symbolical nature of what he is actually doing. But it is not only the ones who know that that reacts to it. There have been lots of people asking about it on social media since all the photos started to occur. People seem to realise there is some kind of symbolism and/or tradition to this, but it is not common knowledge to someone not involved in the Swedish Social Democratic party. This causes curiosity and from what it seems also a sense of "I need to know what this is all about". Perhaps a little curisosity also comes from the fact that it is such a seemingly insignificant (and rather cheap) object that most of us does not really reflect so much on.

What Aina Erlander thought when she decided to return them to the parliament we will never know (She died in 1990 so it is a bit hard to ask.). Perhaps she had a strong sense of what is mine and what is yours and she could overlook having all of the parliament's pens and pencils in her home when he worked for it (I can imagine a prime minister always having to be ready to head into work if something happens.), but not when he retired. Or perhaps it was purely symbolic to her as well. Her husband had worked in the parliament for such a long time and been a very public figure as the prime minister for 23 years after all and she was relieved that it was all over. Anyway I am really glad that the former ministers invited us all to be part of the symbolism and tradition and I had a lot of fun doing the research for it. You learn something new every day after all.

Terry Hayes - I am Pilgrim

I cannot recall anytime when I have been as confused by what to feel about a book as I was about I am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes (I read the Swedish translation by Örjan Sjögren.).

The plot surrounds "the Pilgrim". He is a super rich white American secret agent traveling the world catching bad guys. His "archenemy" is an islamist that he has to capture. Both of their backgrounds are explored in detail. I mean, there are even backstories to the backstories!

I had a teacher once who had worked as a taxi driver. He sometimes told us anecdots about the clients he had had during those days and what he had learned about people from them. One of them, reagarding male and female conversation did I find particularly interesting for a description of the writing in I am Pilgrim.

My teacher said that, based on conversations he had overheard from the backseat of the taxi as he was driving people around he could decipher two types of conversations. One could generally be ascribed to men and the other to women. The male one can be seen as a pretty straight line (one topic). It might from time to time deviate from it, but always got back to that first line pretty soon afterwards. The female conversation however is rather unstructured, meaning women tend to jump much more between topics and might also be discussing many topics together at the same time. If ever they do go back to the original topic, it can take quite awhile, when every other subject has been discussed. Since he told my class this, I have thought about it watching others have conversations and often find it to be true. What is interesting about I am Pilgrim is that it is written rather much like a female conversation. There are a lot of different anecdots from different times in the main character and his archenemy's lives, not always told in chronological order and after a while you start wondering when it is ever going to return to the bathroom with the dead girl that opens up the entire book.

One of the back stories within the backstories turned out to be the most interesting part of the book for me. It is when the Pilgrim tells us a story of how he and his adoptive father visited a lesser known concentration camp, Natzweider-Struthof, on the border between France and Germany in his youth. The Pilgrim talks about how emotional he got by a photo of a mother and her children as they walk to the gas chambers and I think we can all relate to that. Photos of the Holocast tend to leave a sense of horror and emotions in most of us. As an archaeologist however, I find his adoptive father's reaction to the pile of everyday items even more intriguing. The adoptive father says something about he never knowing how powerful simple things can be (Because I read the Swedish translation of the book I won't quote it because as can be seen by Google Translate Sings on Youtube, translation back to the original language might not work so well.).

Archaeology is all about researching how people are interaction with materialities. We have always interacted through them and we continue to do so. They are history in physical form. They make us remember. They make us reflect. They make us feel emotions. They can even make history more human and close! In a word that turns digital and immaterial more and more by the minute, I think it is important that materialities are used to keep us grounded in "the real world". I am not against digitalization. I think there are a lot of benefits. However it happens too quickly and unreflectively. I rarely blog about my profession, but this is something I think even non-archaeologists should be aware of and reflect upon from time to time.

But back to I am Pilgrim. Even though it got me hooked, I still cannot shake the fact that it is very much a tale about a white man written by a white man. Even the title indicates as much! It is good that Hayes tries to make him more "human" by having him react to a photo of Holocaust victims and he says he has no problems with female being the hitmen and he shows sympathy for the Romani people (Because I read the Swedish version I have no idea if the more degrading term for them was used in the original book as it was in the Swedish.). Hayes also give the islamistic sort of "archenemy" a (too) well-described backstory with a thoroughly explored motivation for going all extremist. It felt refreshing against the all too normal Hollywood "because they are evil"-approach. However as he describes himself as a super rich, super intelligent, super competent super secret super agent who makes a lot of mistakes (seriously every other chapter ends with him telling about a new one), but who people still think is the best at his job and who is the youngest boss the super secret super agent bureau has ever heard of, I cannot help thinking he would be completely dismissed as a Mary Sue character had he been a woman.