Stieg Larsson, My Friend - Kurdo Baksi [33]
Then again, it is good to have a day on which to honour the millions of women who have been victims of male supremacy for thousands of years. For me personally, it is also a day to pay homage to my friend Stieg Larsson. So my thousand roses also direct my thoughts to him. He was always impressed by effective symbolic actions.
Most of the women to whom I present a rose are pleased. I am hugged by a lot of young and elderly ones. It warms the heart. But naturally, not everybody is pleased. Quite a few young women tell me, “Yes to equality, no to a rose.” In a way, I understand them. I even feel a bit embarrassed. Perhaps I ought not to continue doing this next year. After all, roses have thorns.
I am quite sure that Stieg and I hit upon this idea together. But then, maybe we should also have considered handing out roses to men, in an attempt to persuade them to behave better. To encourage them. Perhaps the thorns would have been more appropriate when roses were offered to men.
It doesn’t really matter. Like everything else, the distribution of roses has something egotistical about it. I enjoy buying them and distributing them. It turns my thoughts to the conversations Stieg and I used to have about everything under the sun. The oppression of women was something we often discussed, not least because it was a subject on which he was an expert. I don’t think there are many people who know more about how things came to be like that, and what horrific consequences this could have.
In the course of a few months at the end of 2001 and the beginning of 2002, two incidents took place that affected Stieg personally and emotionally, and were of great significance for his work. I am referring to the murders of Melissa Nordell in November 2001 in Stockholm and of Fadime Sahindal in January 2002 in Uppsala. The young photographer’s model Melissa Nordell was murdered by her Swedish boyfriend, who was older than she was, simply because he refused to respect her wish to break off their relationship. Every time Melissa’s name or fate was mentioned, Stieg’s eyes would fill with tears. There was no way he could accept that a young Swedish woman could be denied her freedom simply because she was a woman. He scrutinized all the accessible legal documents and newspaper articles about Melissa Nordell, and also contacted her family. Stieg even became a friend of Melissa’s mother and her stepfather, and invited them to a party for our employees in my office. I shall never forget my meeting with Melissa’s mother. It is an irony of fate that the last book cover Stieg was responsible for included a colour photograph of Melissa Nordell.
Alongside the picture of Melissa on that same cover was one of the young Swedish-Kurdish woman Fadime Sahindal, who was murdered by her father one cold January night in 2002. Fadime died for one reason alone: she wanted to lead her own life, go her own way. The murder of Fadime shook Stieg on many levels – personally, ideologically and as a journalist – and raised several questions: should he analyse it exclusively from the point of view of gender, or should he also take account of her ethnicity, genetic make-up, religion and culture? Stieg repeatedly told me that in his view it was the patriarchal regime that cost the lives of these young women. When I suggested that he should explain his point of view in articles for the daily newspapers, he told me that he would prefer to “write a book about the oppression of women in order to make my position clear”. In January 2004 he published the anthology Debatten om hedersmord (The Honour Killings Debate) under the Svartvitt imprint.
I recall a conversation Stieg and I had in January 2002. The horrific events had sparked off one of the most important debates in recent Swedish history: about honour killings and vulnerable girls in patriarchal cultures. The tone of the debate became more and more confrontational, and created two camps fighting each