As a 20-year-old, music writer Karolina Ramqvist traveled with a friend to the West Indies. 40 years after the revolution, they were supposed to go to Cuba, but made a detour to Jamaica, mainly to buy records, and stayed.
I traveled back and forth for maybe five years, it was a very long time. I had a life there, she says now.
The young woman in her new novel "The First Book" makes a similar journey – but alone – which also becomes crucial for her writing.
It probably reflects how it worked for me myself. A young woman in the world does not have unconditional access to all kinds of rooms. I could be in places and experience that I had the right to move around there because I wrote, but also that I betrayed something when I wrote about them.
Strongest Hold
The main character in "More Fire" becomes aware of Jamaica as a center for the transatlantic slave trade. Karolina Ramqvist has not read her debut novel again, but remembers the anger in the "report book" from the beginning of her writing career. In the new novel, the colonial history is more of a background. The young woman primarily experiences a passionate love affair with a black man.
Maybe this is the book I wanted to write then, but couldn't. I've never been trained as a writer, I've written and read my way to it.
Writing is a kind of law of maximum resistance – it's in the resistance that it burns. Last time it led to the autobiographical coming-of-age story "Bread and Milk", now to a fictional story about a young woman's growing up through a love that hurts but meets obstacles.
Love is always a kind of competition for power, but here it's perhaps a power relationship that is taken to its extreme, especially since she comes from Europe and is free to move around the world as she pleases, while he is not.
Real Violence
The main character's Swedish boyfriend on a tense visit fears the Jamaican violence – which, however, affects Jamaicans, not tourists like him. For the young woman, the violence becomes at least as real at home in the Swedish kitchen.
There are always parts that I may not want to write, but that write themselves, and it was very much so with this book, including this story about the white man's violence. In retrospect, I can see that it serves a function.
Erika Josefsson/TT
Facts: Karolina Ramqvist
TT
Born: 1976.
Background: Journalist, author.
Books: Debuted with "More Fire" (2002). Her novel "The Beginning of Everything" (2012) was selected as a Stockholm Reads book this year. Among her most notable novels are "The Girlfriend" (2009), "The White City" (2015), "The Bear Woman" (2019), and "Bread and Milk" (2022).
Currently reading: Eduardo Alfon, this year's Berman Prize winner, whose "Canción" is now being published in Swedish.
Tips for those who want to read about Jamaica: "A Brief Chronicle of Seven Murders" by Marlon James.
