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Eva Ström has won the Nordic Council’s Literature
Award for a collection of poetry entitled Revbensstäderna
(The Rib Cities), which takes us down »Via Negativa«
But everything is double
BY JOHN BANG JENSEN
Eva Ström
The Rib Cities
Albert Bonniers Förlag. SV
What does electroshock therapy feel like? When she was a young
student of medicine, the Swedish author Eva Ström (born
1947) asked this question of a severely depressive middle-aged
man during a course in psychiatry at Karolinska Hospital.
As a declared opponent of electroshock therapy and supporter
of therapy forms based on a more humane and interactive approach,
she imagined that electroshock would feel like having all
your nerve endings burned. So she was very surprised at the
man’s answer. He said “I felt the kind of peace
I haven’t experienced since the Sunday mornings of my
childhood in Uppsala”. The young author of the future
was upset by the fact that her prejudices had been contradicted
in this way. She found it hard to accept that there were many
different realities in the world, many different truths in
opposition to each other.
Eva Ström tells this story in a short article describing
her doubts about becoming a writer in the 1970s, when she
was busy training to be a doctor with all that this entailed
(long, exhausting periods of duty, a chronic lack of sleep,
close physical contact with dead bodies when doing autopsies,
and contact with severely mentally disabled patients). Eva
Ström did not leave the medical profession to devote
herself full-time to her writing career until 1987. By then
she had already had her debut (1977) with a collection of
poetry entitled Den brinnande zeppelinaren (The Burning Zeppelin).
Two years later she had a breakthrough with a book entitled
Steinkind, the title of which alludes to a dead foetus in
the womb encapsulated like a stone child. In 1983 she published
a dark and disillusioned collection entitled Akra, describing
a frighteningly utopian place or state of mind ruled by great
senselessness and indifference. In addition to a number of
other collections of poetry, several books of prose, and most
recently a novel entitled Bröd (Bread, 1999), Eva Ström
has written drama pieces for both the stage and the radio,
as well as working as a literary critic. She has also published
a monograph on Edith Södergran.
Beautiful apocalyptic images
There is no doubt that her background as a doctor has influenced
Eva Ström’s writing career. Her latest collection
of poetry, The Rib Cities (2002) also draws extensively on
the hospital environment. Her point of departure is often
the human body, anatomy, the electrical processes in the brain,
the »willpower fibres«, as she calls the network
in people through which electrical impulses run – the
impulses that are the cause of everything from homelessness
to laws on euthanasia.
Images are Eva Ström’s great strength. Clinical
and medical material is converted into images of a modern
Man that has lost all spiritual values; images of a culture
in severe crisis. God is either “cruel” or a figment
of our imagination. Man lives according to a primitive, animal
principle, a “predator’s will”. The only
thing that gives any meaning is consumption, and life is lived
in the supermarket and on gaudy pedestrian precincts. It is
lived in meaningless and caricatured form, involving the determined
and absurd cultivation of physical fitness in gymnasiums and
keep-fit centres – while the homeless are lying on the
pavement on pieces of cardboard, wrapped in blue sleeping
bags that look like “round vowels dropped on the street
from a Christmas carol sung out of tune”.
Using this basic experience of the meaninglessness of life,
Eva Ström follows in the steps of Edith Södergran
and Gunnar Ekelöf down a via negativa, where anything
“positive” (ultimately the hope and vision of
anything meaningful) has to be drawn out through a series
of negations. A technique that is expressed most beautifully
in the first poem in The Rib Cities, entitled Översvämningarna
(The Floods), in which an apocalyptic flood scene is produced
from detailed descriptions of the things that have not happened
yet, after which the poem can conclude with a beautiful image
of seven swans floating on “a mirror of calm”.
Like Södergran and Ekelöf, Eva Ström has an
intense awareness of the dualism of life. “But everything
is double”, she says at one point; opposite forces struggle
against each other, light and darkness are in constant conflict,
happiness appears suddenly and unexpectedly and conquers depression
for a while. In one poem a question is asked about the justification
of art; while another poem (with a deliberate reference to
Ekelöf’s famous poem Euphoria?) says “It’s
so wonderful to scrawl something down on a piece of paper/To
let your pen run without thinking about what you’re
doing”.
Any readers lacking a sense of optimism in Eva Ström’s
work have probably failed to fully appreciate these poems.
With so much misery being portrayed with such beauty, it is
surely hard to demand any more. Gunnar Ekelöf’s
poetry exploded ultimately in a poetic-religious vision. The
Virgin Mary, who put an end to all contradictions, became
his third road, the “solution” to the conflict
between good and evil. Naturally, Eva Ström’s vision
is less clear – and the final poem in the book, talking
about a “change” that may never come, is very
far from being a happy ending. But there are undoubtedly sparks
of electricity along the way, as the poet wanders down her
via negativa. And speaking quite personally, I am happy to
accompany her wherever she goes.
John Bang Jensen is a Danish author
Translated by Nick Wrigley
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