Roots

Those of you who enjoy these occasional leisurely rambles through the verdant pastures of the Swedish fells (weather conditions permitting) will recall the Swedish fascination with all things American.

To be fair, there is a lot to admire about the United States, so to call this an obsession is something of an injustice. Kurt Cobain, for one thing. Kurt Vonnegut, for another. I am sure you can easily add to the list, even if I needed only one hand to count the total. That said, this has to be balanced against Donald Trump and a general unswerving conviction that Americans know better than anybody else about virtually anything you could mention.

Still, who’s perfect? Not those members of my birth nation, for sure, which still prides itself on having lost an Empire that continues to sabotage international relations and emergent economies to this day. Nor those of my adoptive nation, whose major claim to fame at the moment is an ability to imitate the music of other countries – starting with Abba (a brand of fish-balls in Sweden) and ending with a whole series of Swedish composers, lyricists and producers who have mastered the art of reducing pop music to its lowest common denominator.

Which brings me, with a lamentable lack of elegance to the subject of today’s sermon, dearly beloved brethren (and sistren, if you insistren).

There are some Americans that have a corresponding passion for all things Swedish.

One of the most popular Swedish TV programmes of the last few years is called ‘Allt för Sverige’, or ‘Everything for Sweden’.

I’m not sure if the phrase has any particular significance. I half-expected when I researched the term that it would find a place in the Swedish national anthem or some similar Nordic call to war. I can find no such source. So I assume the producers chose the corniest title they could come up with. Happily we can blame the Norwegians, since they introduced the format and the name – though there it was called, predictably enough, ‘Alt for Norge’.

So what’s the show about?

Well, the overriding aim is to introduce a select number of Swedish Americans to their roots. To put that into perspective, it’s worth pointing out that in the 1800s about one million people left Sweden for the States, most of them in the last thirty years of the century. Given that there were barely 5 million living in the country for most of this time, this was a high proportion of the population. And given that most Swedish emigrants have been in the USA for quite a long time, root-tracing is no easy matter. So it’s nice for them that someone else has taken the trouble.

But in order to gain access to their family trees, the aforementioned Americans are required to compete for them. They do this by learning a little about Swedish culture and displaying this knowledge in a number of contests. The eventual winner is introduced to the surviving members of the Swedish branch of their family. Presumably the producers check there are surviving members for all contestants and that they haven’t all succumbed to the plague, persecution or privation that the emigrants themselves sought to avoid.

By now, no doubt the word ‘culture’ will have had some of you reaching for your gun-rack. So we’d better be careful about how we define it. Or rather how the show defines it. There is a narrower and a broader sense of the term, and I imagine most people associate the word with the first of these. To wit and to the Oxford English Dictionary, culture is:

‘the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively’.

Even those of you without gun-racks at home might not be tempted to tune into to such high-concept TV. And if you are, then you are not the representative of the mass market that the show is aiming at.

So let’s move forward to the second definition (also courtesy of OED):

‘the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group’.

This is closer – the nation in question being Sweden.

But it still sounds a little intimidating. So as we’ll see later, there are a number of ways SVT (Swedish TV, weirdly enough) tries to sugar the pill.

For a start, given the broadness of the topic and the lightness of the entertainment, it’s worth having a look at what version of Sweden and Swedishness they focus on.

When I’ve watched the show, there’ve always been a hell of a lot of cornfields gently swaying in the breeze, lush green meadows and forests, and cute little red-painted wooden cottages. As you’ll guess then, the show is shot in the spring and summer months. And as I guess, this is partly a matter of logistical convenience. But that hardly makes for a representative view of a country that for much of the year is battered by snow and rain. So you might be inclined to ask whether the main aim of the series is to attract people to spend their holidays in the country.

Even when the programme ventures into urban territory, we’re most often presented with a charming small town or village, where somehow there are at least some buildings that survived the architectural purges of the 50s and 60s building boom. Meanwhile with the bigger cities, we are largely confined to the more salubrious, picturesque and historically significant areas. We don’t get to see too much of the Swedish version of the banlieues, inhabited by marginalised Swedes and first-generation immigrants, even if an occasional deviation from the blond-haired and blue-eyed archetype is thrown into the mix for the sake of political correctness.

To be fair, though, these idylls are all part of an image that not only foreigners but also many Swedes themselves (and not only Swedes of course) would buy into – at least when wishfully thinking. Nostalgia for a pre-industrial past, carefully shorn of the hardships and indignities – the Stasi-like monitoring by the local priest, the casual brutality of the local master, the diet consisting mostly of turnips. After all, if those constitute the kind of past you’re longing for, what does that say about your present? But, when all’s said and done, that’s what the show’s about – Swedish Americans, buying into or, at least reclaiming a history, and Swedish Swedes finding the effort all very satisfying.

When we get down to the actual pedagogical element, then the contents of the syllabus often consist of more of the same backward-looking stereotypes. Food and drink are a favourite. But much of this is preaching (or teaching) to the converted (or already educated). After all, IKEA has made the Swedish meatball famous throughout the world, although it’s essentially the same as any other meatball from any other country. Pickled herrings and cinnamon buns have also become internationalised so it’s hard to see the specific Swedishness about them anymore, especially when they are often consumed by those Americans who have done so much to market them globally.

I believe even Kalles Kaviar has achieved a breakthrough abroad. This is emphatically not sturgeon eggs, but rather cod roe in a tube. People here love it, though I’ve always favoured the version that is deep-fried and still sold in some fish and chip shops in Britain. In the context of this blog, what’s most interesting is how the ‘caviar’ is marketed. The tube still comes with the original image of Kalle (Carl, son of the founder of Abba – the fishballs rather than the supergroup) and the typeface that was probably consciously retro in 1954 when the product first came out.

I’m being unfair again, of course. It’s not only Sweden that finds nostalgia marketable. But it’s surprising how much mass-produced crap is marketed here along the same lines. Pågen bakery, for example, uses a style of writing that harks back to the shop signs of the inter-war years as if to reassure the consumer that their bread is as genuine now as it was then and could easily have been by your great grandma in her own kitchen. The irony of that particular ploy is that the bread that was sold in those years was quite likely to have been adulterated with anything from chalk through plaster all the way to alum.

I’ve gone walkabout with the subject, I know. I also know that it’s not only Swedish marketing that employs these techniques. My point (if indeed there is one) is that the American guests are being sold a version of Sweden that may be out of date and may never have existed, but is also one that many Swedes have already bought into. On the other hand, we could reasonably ask which country pioneered such marketing techniques. What comes around goes around and hopefully bites you in the arse. Or rather, ass.

Still, even though they’ve heard of the Vikings before, our Americans get to find out more about them. (The sanitised Swedish version rather than the traditional British one.) And even if they’ve read about Pippi Longstocking in their childhood, at least they get to see where she came from.

And not everything’s idealised. It is, after all, hard to legislate for the behaviour of members of the Swedish public. And it is an integral part of each series that groups of the Ams will be released into the environment and required to fulfil a task – quite often shopping for a list of items they do not understand and so have to ask members of the public for help. It’s not uncommon for those that get asked, especially if they are elderly, to avoid the eyes and walk on, or to gaze in horror at the alien with the forked tail and the bastardised Swedish pronunciation before making a bolt for the safety of the street.

In this case, the competitors are learning something authentic about Sweden and Swedes. It still strikes me after more than thirty years in the country how uncivil Swedes can be, especially out in the countryside. (I suspect behaviour in towns has been improved by influxes of more sociable immigrants.) If you meet a stranger while walking down a country lane, you are lucky if you get a response to a meeting of the eyes and a ‘Hej!’. I’ve been known to punch the air in triumph when my presence on earth has been acknowledged by a smile and a greeting. So I’d like to think that seeing this lack of good manners towards uncomprehending über-social Americans serves as an ethical wake-up call to Swedish viewers.

Strangely though, such encounters can have the reverse effect. Some Swedes find the opportunity to interact with a foreigner in a different language to be a liberating experience, as if the contact with a foreign culture and tongue allows them to shed the inbred reserve and assume a more open personality. So when the American contestants meet someone that can converse in English (and many here do this very very well), that someone is often effusively friendly. Which must confuse our transatlantic cousins even more.

So much for the input.

But courses of education are usually obliged to monitor progress. And any form of light entertainment is enhanced by a competitive element. So each episode (barring the first) has a knockout competition that sees one of the contestants freighted back to the States with nothing more than the consolation prize of a potted history of their family in a large envelope.

One of the most challenging tasks for the producers of the show has got to be devising games that have some form of connection to Swedish history, geography, society and/ or culture. Now you could get them all to sit down in an examination hall under the unsmiling scrutiny of an invigilator and take a multiple-choice test. That might give a fair measure of how much has sunk in. But it wouldn’t be so much fun to watch.

An obvious alternative is to come up with wacky variants on the quiz format, like ‘Put those kings (and the odd queen) in the right chronological order’. (I wonder how many Swedes could do that? I’d have difficulty with the English ones.)

Fair enough. But still not very entertaining.

Something more’s needed. And that something takes the form of the most fiendishly conceived games. These seem to trace a lineal heritage from the fairground (coconut shies and rifle ranges), through ‘It’s a Knockout’, all the way to ‘Survivor’. (You know the one – guys and dolls marooned on a desert island fighting it out until one is left; known as ‘Robinson’ in Sweden.)

Sometimes this is good fun. Most often it borders on and then tips over into the ludicrous.

Let’s take an example. Our plucky contestants have visited the site of a Swedish borg – a hilltop ringfort, prehistoric in origin but surviving into the medieval period. The word itself lasted longer, of course, serving as the basis for many Scandinavian place names (Göteborg/ Gothenburg). Now our competitors have to demonstrate what they’ve learnt by walking in a circle for 7 minutes. They are allowed neither watches nor smart phones. So they have to count up to 420 Mississippi and hope they get close. I kid you not. I don’t know where they dug that one up. Presumably its progenitor is now engaged on more fulfilling employment in a local funeral home.

Marginally more exciting, though equally irrelevant are those games that require more activity and variety, such as fitting odd shapes into a frame, then charging over an assault course to retrieve a key suspended over a fire-pit, unlock a chest to retrieve a ball and use it to knock a coconut off a stick. Or something like that.

By now, I hope you’ve got the idea. All very silly. But amazingly enough, it’s also absorbing for the competitors, and exciting for the viewers. Including myself, I should be ashamed to say. But I’m not. I stand by my right to be as trivial as the next man.

And it’s perhaps here in the competitions that the Americans learn (subliminally) most about Swedishness. If it hadn’t occurred to you before, one of the starkest contrasts – genetic roots notwithstanding – between Americans and Swedes is their attitude towards the very notion of competition. So the games follow a regular format. They start as team events before the losing team moves on to the individual elimination stage. And so it comes to pass that American individualism has to find a place for and learn to love, Scandi-wise, the value of co-operation.

The learning curve is, at least once a series, helped on its upward trajectory by means of a little lesson. Anders Lundin, the genial, self-effacing and slightly goofy host without whom Swedish Television would probably go under, will induct the contestants into the rites of Jantelagen at an early stage in the season. Despite the name, this is not an exclusively Swedish phenomenon. It corresponds more or less to the brasher Tall Poppy syndrome of the antipodeans. Jante’s law says basically that you shouldn’t try to stand out apart from or above the rest, or think you are in any way special. It’s designed to underline the subordination of the individual to the group.

Similarly, the concept of lagom may well be introduced as a moral corrective. ‘Lagom’ means ‘not too much, nor too little but just the right amount’ and is equivalent, I suppose to St Paul’s exhortation to moderation in all things. To a foreigner, it can be an intensely annoying word, especially I imagine, if you are American. I have been to cinemas in the USA and asked for a medium popcorn and coke and been presented with two overflowing medium-sized fire buckets.

Nonetheless, as a lifestyle guide, it’s a sound and very Swedish principle. And one that your average American of the transparent emotions and the irresistible urge to express them at length can find difficult to assimilate.

Indeed some Americans find Jante-Lagom to be an adaptation too far. And it’s as immensely satisfying for the Swedish viewer to see the cockiest bastards get knocked out in the early stages as it is to see the most nerdish and un-self-assertive survive into the closing rounds when they are probably regarded as the least gifted human beings in their home country. The latter of the two types being those, of course, that conform most closely to the Swedish norms.

Or learn to conform to them. For it’s interesting to see how the attitude and even the characters of the contestants develop during each series (if they manage to stay in for long enough, I guess). The high fives become more sedate, the whoops of victory more modulated. Almost as if the Ams are learning lessons in lagomness or Jantility on the hoof.

But as I’ve indicated, it’s a two-way process. Americans wear their hearts on their sleeves much more than Swedes do. Indeed the prototype for Clint Eastwood’s ‘Man with No Name and Not Much of a Line in Conversation Either’ had to be a Swede, preferably one born some considerable way north of Stockholm.

Quite often of course, the emotions worn by Americans as elbow patches are as fake as vinyl. It had to be an American than invented the cosmetic service smile. And even when they are genuine, the tears tend to gush out in quantities that would shame the most generous water hydrant, and the laughter at a volume that would shame the largest woofer. What’s more, the level of the competitors’ enthusiasm would make the most ardent Swedish football supporter cringe with embarrassment.

Still, the openness of many contestants to displaying what they are feeling is a healthy corrective to the Swedish tendency to bottle it all up to the point where you do away with your irritating spouse with multiple stab wounds or with yourself by wandering off into the tundra. Indeed even the hardest-hearted could not fail to be moved by the reaction of many of the contestants when they have the (often heart-rending) history of their ancestors’ hardships revealed to them.

The competitors themselves, of course, are not required to replicate these hardships. Indeed, part of the aim of the programme seems to be get them to stuff as much Swedish food in their mouths as they can manage. There is, however, a certain level of discomfort to be borne, along with the indignities and embarrassments that go along with participating in asinine activities and putting your shortcomings on public view. Fair play though – the competitors generally put a brave and even a cheerful face on it. So the question remains: why do they let themselves in for it?

Well, part of the answer, I guess, might lie in the 15 minutes of fame that TV offers and that social media feeds upon. But that doesn’t really get to the heart of the matter. For a start, as far as I know the programme isn’t shown on American TV. So what’s the point of being famous in a country you don’t live in? A bit like being Big in Japan. Apart from that, such a reductive argument is grossly insulting to the poor sods that put themselves on the line. And I’ve insulted them quite enough already.

For it’s not only Swedish-Americans that feel the need to connect with their past. In a sense nearly every European these days is a migrant. Not that I’m claiming an Out-of-Africa sense of alienation here. But pretty much every European country has experienced large-scale emigration in the last two hundred years. And even within industrialising countries there was widespread internal migration – chiefly from rural to urban areas.

I can’t imagine that farm labourers, say, in eighteenth century England would have had any problems tracing their families back and identifying (with) their roots. They’d probably lived in the same area, perhaps even in the same house, for generations. In Sweden at that time, you would even bear the mark of your patrimony throughout your life in your surname – whether you liked your father or not. That all changed with the Industrial Revolution and the consequent relocation of vast numbers to the towns and cities. Hence perhaps the feeling of deracination that so many people, both migrants and emigrants, feel today – at least going by the numbers that try to research their family tree. Add to that the capacity of genetic research to aid and abet the search for your roots and you have both motive and means for digging up your past.

If you feel the need, of course.

I spent most of my earlier years trying to put as great a distance between myself and my roots, aka my parents, even if, in the grand scheme of things, they were better than most.

Along the way, I have been fascinated to learn that the family name descended from the illegitimate son of an Irish king (courtesy of an insurance agent with the same surname), from a cup-bearer to a Norman knight (my uncle’s theory) and by some labyrinthine path from the Earls of Northumberland (c/o my sister).

My personal favourite came from my mother who claimed that a Scottish ancestor on her side of the family died when he fell from a gantry and drowned in a vat of liquor – whisky, presumably.

All very interesting, I suppose. But never interesting enough, for me at least, to expend time and energy researching family trees when I could be doing something much more fun (like falling into a vat of whisky).

Still, in this respect (as in many others) I may be a freakish exception to the rule. But there’s something about this obsession with genes and genealogy that disturbs me.

It might indeed be the case that part of our identity, even the greater part of it, is located in our ancestry. Certainly the prevailing vogue is to explain everything in terms of genetic make-up. But I’m not sure this is a healthy preoccupation. The more influence you grant your DNA in determining your identity, the less scope you grant your own free will.

For my part, I reserve the right to take full responsibility for my own idiocies. However undignified a position they may leave me in, there’s a kind of dignity in accepting them as my own.

But that’s just me, I guess. There are obviously many out there who find this kind of knowledge life-enhancing. Like the Americans who sign up to take part in this programme.

And however cynical I choose to be about the synthesisation of emotion on either side of the Atlantic, there is nothing artificial about the emotions of the participants, either when they are presented with potted histories of their pre-emigration ancestors, or (in the case of the eventual winner) when they’re presented with the long-lost Swedish branch of their family. There’s not even a whiff of the fake detectable about that.

God bless ‘em. Even I’ve been known to take out my hankie at that point of the programme.

So maybe there’s something in the business after all.

Or maybe I’ve just inherited a streak of sentimentality and leaky tear ducts. Presumably from the permanently pickled Scots branch.