a blog by Peter Leonard
I stayed in Stockholm after the educational fair to attend a production of Utrota varenda jävel, a play based on Sven Lindqvist's non-fiction prose volume from 1992. The play was performed at Stadsteatern Skärholmen, a suburban outpost of the Stockholm city theater that tends to do edgier, more political works. Lindqvist's book took its name from a phrase out of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness ("Exterminate all the brutes") and treats the history of European colonialism in Africa, though in a very specialized way: more personal than a historical narrative, but farther-reaching than an individual polemic. Lindqvist covered the history of the Belgian Congo years before Adam Hochschild's excellent King Leopold's Ghost made the subject well-known to English-speaking audiences.
Lindqvist's work is epic in scale, which is both its strength and weakness. It makes what by now is a relatively well-accepted claim, which is that the history of genocide did not begin or end with Nazi Germany. But it was perhaps one of the first to make that claim in a book explicitly aimed at the popular market. It's hard not to see Lindqvist's work (knitting together African colonial history, WWII genocide studies and contemporary European racism) as informing much of the progressive activism behind the myriad anti-Globalization movements in the West.
The decision to dramatize a work of non-fiction prose is an interesting one, and despite the valiant efforts of all of the actors at Stadsteatern, I think the resulting play works best as a spur to discussion rather than a stand-alone work in its own right. Perhaps in recognition of this, Stadsteatern has been running symposia after the play every Thursday night in November, with authors and historians taking the stage after the play to discuss various themes with the audience.