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CULTURE

Why one of Sweden’s most famous children’s book series is still so relevant

Gunilla Bergström's beautiful children's books about Alfons Åberg send a powerful message that even adults would do well to heed, writes journalism professor Christian Christensen.

Published: 26 August 2021 15:44 CEST

Why one of Sweden's most famous children's book series is still so relevant

Gunilla Bergström, the author who wrote the children's book series about Alfons Åberg, or Alfie Atkins as he is known in English. Photo: Lars Pehrson/SvD/TT

Few pieces of art sear themselves into our minds quite like books for small children. Anyone who has read the same story over and over to a child at bedtime knows how deep and profound can be the relationship between the characters and a young person.

And, of course, between the characters and the parent reading the story. The books, the words, the pictures, the stories, the worn and folded covers all become woven into the tapestry of your life. The security your child gets from hearing a beloved story, and the beauty the parent witnesses as the child drifts off to sleep in the company of a well-known literary friend.

So, it was with immense sadness that I heard of the death of Swedish children’s author Gunilla Bergström, the author and illustrator of 26 wonderful Alfons Åberg books (or, as he is known in English-language versions, Alfie Atkins). In the 50 years since the first Alfons/Alfie book came out, the series has been translated into 30 languages and sold 10 million copies worldwide, including 5.5 million in Sweden alone (no small number in a country of just 10 million). He is a Swedish icon.

Bergström’s genius was her ability to capture the joy, sadness, tension and wonder of childhood. Alfons/Alfie lived alone with his father, yet no explanation was ever given about what had happened to his mother. In real life, many things go unspoken and unexplained, and it was for the children who loved Alfons/Alfie to complete that part of his story.

Bergström herself said that she refused to tell children “sweet lies” in her books, and that she wanted to present “true stories about real people, just the way we are in daily life. Mini-drama at the psychological level”. When some readers criticised the fact that the father in the Alfons/Alfie stories smoked a pipe, thus sending a bad message to children, Bergström responded: “Pappa Åberg is no role model. He’s a p-e-r-s-o-n. I think it’s nice to present people with flaws. Why should all adults be perfect in children’s books when they aren’t in real life?”

The tone and feeling of Bergström’s work always reminded me of the “Peanuts” strip created by the legendary cartoonist Charles Schulz. In his lead character Charlie Brown, Schulz found meaning and depth in the small details and events of everyday life, and never shied away from highlighting the fact that children could have complex, melancholy internal lives.

This didn’t alienate young readers, rather it told those young readers that Bergström and Schulz understood them, and refused to talk down to them. That they would be told the truth, no matter what. Bergström, like Schulz, never hesitated to treat the young characters in her work, and the children who were reading or hearing her books, with respect. To present them as equals. To see them as members of a society.

Sweden has lost a giant. Gunilla Bergström, who wrote and drew the fantastic Alfons Åberg books, passed away. My kid, along with millions of others, loved her stories so much. Hard to think of a more wonderful legacy for any human being. pic.twitter.com/XOvX4oRaXo

— Christian Christensen (@ChrChristensen) August 26, 2021

The Alfons/Alfie stories also send a powerful message about the current era of disinformation, conspiracy theories and politics of hate and exclusion. Those corrosive elements of contemporary society are utterly dependent upon cynicism, alienation, dishonesty and mythology: things not only missing from the message of Alfons/Alfie, but actively combatted through Bergström’s reinforcement of the inherent value and dignity of every person and of the preciousness and value of truth.

It’s human to be scared or confused, Bergström told kids, but with knowledge and effort some of that fear and confusion will subside. Many adults would do well to hear that message.

Yes, these are books meant for children, but the fact that we see art produced for our younger citizens as somehow less serious or meaningful than art created for adults is exactly the type of self-centered, myopic worldview Bergström’s work attempted to shatter. Creating stories, loved by millions of children, about the simple act of being human is a wonderful legacy.

Christian Christensen is a professor of journalism at Stockholm University in Sweden.

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'Supply and demand, motherfxxker!': The real crime behind Sweden's gangster rap

When riots broke out in 2017 in Rinkeby, just days after US President Donald Trump had been ridiculed for talking about “Last night in Sweden” in a speech, the spark was an encounter between the police and an up-and-coming rapper.

Police had arrested the young man, Yasin Abdullahi Mahamoud, a few months earlier for carrying a pistol and so felt justified in stopping and searching him when they encountered him, together with his friend, Jafar Ahmed Sadik, outside the local underground station.

What they hadn’t taken into account was how much of a local celebrity he was becoming.

The police officers checking him were soon surrounded by young, masked men who began throwing stones at them. They panicked and fired warning shots, after which the situation escalated into a full-blown riot, with shop windows and cars trashed.

Mahamoud — going by the name Yasin, or Yasin Byn – would go on over the next few years to become one of Sweden’s biggest music stars, topping the Spotify streaming lists and winning top music prizes, with his friend Sadik, rapping then under the name Jaffar Byn and now JB, not far behind.

Whether Yasin has ever really been an active member of Shottaz, the gang whose conflict with the rival Dödspatrullen has been blamed for an explosion of violence in the suburb between 2018 and 2020, is disputed, although the police have argued that he was.

His music certainly refers frequently to the conflict.

“Me and Fayye in the backseat with a Glock-19”, starts his 2018 hit, “Chicago”. Fayye, one of the leaders of Shottaz, would a year later be shot dead in a gang execution in Copenhagen.

“Rest in Peace, Indiana”, comes a line a little later in the song, a reference to the 2016 murder of two young men in Rinkeby’s Mynta café.

This killing has been seen as the point the violent dispute between young men in Rinkeby led to a split into the two rival gangs.

Should gangster rap be banned for glorifying violence?

When Yasin, Dree Low (real name Salah Abdi Abdulle, from Husby), and Einár (real name Nils Grönberg), were winning music prizes at the peak of their fame from 2018 to 2020, there was a fervent debate in Sweden’s culture pages as to whether it was appropriate to celebrate a genre that glorifies violence and crime.

At the same time these rappers were earning big sums from streaming, they were in constant trouble with the police.

When Yasin topped the Spotify streaming charts in January 2020 with his song XO, which lauded the intoxicating combination of Rémy Martin cognac and cannabis, he was sitting in pre-trial detention for suspected involvement in a murder. When he received a Swedish Grammy the next year, he was again in prison, so could not pick it up.

Between 2019 and 2020, revenues from Dree Low’s music company, Top Class Music, went from 3.3 million kronor to 7.8 million kronor, bringing him a profit in 2020 of about 4.5 million kronor. The next year he was jailed for involvement in a robbery.

The Social Democrat minister Mikael Damberg in 2021 complained on Swedish radio about a “subculture among young people that glorifies gangster life”. Sweden Democrat leader Jimmie Åkesson, went one further, calling for gangster rap to be banned.

Mats Lindström, a policeman involved in fighting gang violence in the area around Rinkeby, told Aftonbladet in March 2021 that he thought the Swedish media should stop giving publicity to the young rappers.

“Aftonbladet would never interview a Nazi singer, or a person who praised Islamic State or religious violence,” he argued.

Even if you accept that Yasin and Dree Low were never fully fledged gang members themselves, arguably, by turning a real-life conflict into a crime soap opera followed avidly by teenagers across Sweden, their music raised the stakes for the actual participants.

“The rappers write lyrics about each other. We have impulsive boys who are easily offended,” argued Gunnar Appelgren, another Stockholm police gang expert. “Now there is a culture that focuses on violence for the sake of violence.”

In an interview last month with the YouTuber Victor de Almeida, Yasin acknowledged that Swedish gangster rap did have a relationship to crime.

“There’s no smoke without fire, they have their point. Stuff happens out there, we can’t deny that,” he said of the criticism. But he said the idea that banning gangster rap would bring an end to the violence was “bullshit”.

“To lay the blame on people and shout things right and left, you can do that, but how much it will lead to any actual change is another thing,” he said. “I’m not a politician, so I don’t know. But I just notice that we aren’t getting any more youth centres [fritidsgårdar] as a result of music publishers stopping giving prizes to rappers and people with convictions.”

In his new album, Pistoler, Poesi, och Sex (Pistols, Poetry and Sex), Yasin claims to be reporting a reality rather than glorifying it.

“I write what I see, but they would rather criticise what I write than criticise what I see,” he raps in the track Rap är ingen konst (Rap is not an artform).

The SVT journalist Diamant Salihu, in his book on the Rinkeby conflict Tills alla dör, agrees that gangster rap reflects an underlying reality rather than causes it.

He traces the Rinkeby conflict back to the decision in 2007 to fuse Rinkeby with the much richer nearby Kista district. Over the next few years, the offices of the Swedish Public Employment Service, the post office, the high street banks and the police all closed down.

“However much opinion-makers criticise their texts glorifying violence, however much the artists themselves promote their lifestyle, it doesn’t change the underlying reasons,” Salihu writes. “The more people I speak with, the more investigations I read, the clearer the connection between changes in society, closures [of government agencies], and poor school results which lead to exclusion, in the wave of violence we are seeing today.”

Rap, ghetto fashion, and the way young men pose in photos with weapons and luxury cars is “just a desperate attempt to make meaning out of the chaos”, he argues. “It’s a way of trying to take control of a hopeless situation”.

The main driver of gun violence in Sweden’s suburbs, Salihu told The Local in the Sweden in Focus podcast is the huge amount of money that can be earned from distributing and selling drugs.

“Everybody that buys a gram of cocaine or cannabis should know that their money is being used to buy the bullets and guns that are killing people in Stockholm,” he said.

As Yasin himself writes in his 2020 song “Pistol Whip”, a collaboration with his friend Jaffar Byn, the whole of Swedish society bears some of the responsibility.

“You asked us for this gangster shit. Supply and demand, motherfucker.”

Death toll

Mehdi Sachit (Dumle, Alawee) This 27-year-old rapper, known as Dumle, was shot dead in Rinkeby, one of the most troubled suburbs of Stockholm, on Christmas Day 2022. Sachit was reportedly with the 19-year-old rapper Nils Grönberg, known as ”Einár”, when he was murdered in October 2021. He was a convicted rapist and he was thought to have a central role in the Dödspatrullen gang. Find his track Våldsbenägen, meaning “prone to violence” here.
Nils Grönberg (Einár). Grönberg, was shot dead at a distance of 1.5m in a gang execution in October 2021. The son of the prize-winning Swedish actress Lena Nilsson, Grönberg ended up collaborating with rappers with tough backgrounds in Stockholm’s crime-ridden suburbs, breaking through in 2019 with the song Katten i Trakten, which won the Guld-priset, or “Gold prize” from Swedish Radio’s P3 channel for best song. In 2020, he was kidnapped and forced to perform for humiliating videos.
Ziad Elhassan (Debenz). This rapper from Borås, was shot dead in 2020, four years after surviving another shooting.
Rozh Shamal (Rozh). This rapper was shot and killed, aged 23, in an attack near his apartment in Blackeberg, Stockholm. Find his track Dras till problem, “Drawn to problems”, here.
Robin Cortas (Roro/RC). Cortas was shot dead in Varbergsgatan, Helsingborg, southern Sweden, aged 25 in June 2019.
Aiman Qabli, Aiman. Qabi was stabbed to death in an underpass at midnight in Alby, south of Stockholm, back in 2015.

Serving time

At least six of the big names in Swedish gangster rap — Dree Low, Yasin, Jaffar Byn, 1.Cuz, Haval, and Z.E — have been in and out of prison. They have often, indeed, been behind bars at the same time as their songs have topped the streaming lists on Spotify.

Salah Abdi Abdulle (Dree Low). Abdulle was arrested in 2021 on suspicion of robbing a shop of 5,000 kronor worth of snus, cigarettes and sweets, and in November 2021 sentenced to a year in prison. He claimed he had an agreement with the owner of the shop to take goods on credit, and he certainly didn’t need the money. In April 2022, he was charged again, this time for weapons offences, and sentenced to another year in prison that November.
Jafar Ahmed Sadik (Jaffar Byn). Sadik was sentenced to four years in prison in 2017 for serious weapons crimes, and released in October 2020.
Yasin Abdullahi Mahamoud (Yasin). Mahamoud was jailed for weapons offences in May 2018 and released in November 2019, after which he was arrested again in July 2021 for his alleged involvement in the kidnapping of Einár, sentenced and finally released in December 2021.
Haval Khalil (Haval). Khalil was jailed in November 2021 at the same time as Mahamoud for involvement in the Einár kidnapping, and, like Mahamoud, released that December.
Abas Abdikarim Bakar (1.Cuz). 1.Cuz served two years in prison, launching his career after his release in 2018.
Jozef Wojciechowicz (Z.E.). Wojciechowicz was jailed for robbery in 2017, like 1.Cuz only launching his career on his release. Wojciechowicz broke through with a collaboration with the singer Cherrie.

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