Hør opplesning

Title:
There is always a black man getting off at grønland station (2009)

Author:
Victoria Kielland

Publisher:
tekstopia.no

Place:
Grønlands Basar in Oslo

Read by:
Anders Sundnes Løvlie

Registered by:
User:Anderssl

Grønlands Basar is a shopping mall in eastern Oslo built by combining a row of old, preserved working-class houses with a new, Pakistani-inspired Basar hall, intended to serve the area's large proportion of Asian and African immigrants. According to the writer of this text, the mall "has in its own little way become a mini-monument. This is a text about going home the way one has gone dozens of times before".

There is always a black man getting off at grønland station

The way things have gotten now makes it ever harder to come closer to what you think you want to say.
That's the way things have gotten now. Particularly now. Here. Here on the way home. I'm eating a cake on the way home. I almost never eat cake. I eat cake at family dinners, but never apart from that. Last time I ate cake they were singing psalms. Psalmcake tasting like blood pudding. Or liver, or just the feeling of the meat my American aunt prepares for dinner the day after Christmas Day. But here, now, on the way home, it is entirely unnatural for me to be eating cake.
Even to mention it. Erase all that doesn't move the story forward.
(Shush)
Where are you?
On my way home. Where?
Why aren't you moving faster?
I clean my nose on the napkin and there is blood on the paper and in my panties.
I finish the cake and pass the corner with my shoulders on high. The way home.
The shopping mall is a manifesto of architectonic everyday racism. Someone told me that once. Architectonic everyday racism. I thought that was the most striking words I had heard in a long time. He was talking about grønlands basar.
Today I drank three beers and told an old story. I am portraying my main character with rotten hands. I thought I had forgotten that story. The yield on the stories you tell doesn't give the best profit. Still you tell the same stories each time.
Where are you?
Right around the corner, by grønlands basar, there is someone with a lot of perfume,
but no smell which can remind me of something else.
Move further.