When I grew up, I learned to be ashamed. Ashamed of who I was. ”You should live in a caravan, like your people do”, my relative said jokingly. “Your people” meant zigenare, tattare, Roma.

One of the first things I remember a relative saying was what they hated the most: “Gypsies and that super-religious group in town.” I was both. And none. The same person, a short time later, pawned all their gold jewellery, so they could afford that I, and the person that was to become my wife, could stay there. Disability pension is not enough for three. Instead of asking us to help with the rent, they emptied their small reserves.
My grandmother practiced magic when she was younger. She held a coven with other women, meeting to play cards and cast curses. I learnt how to play cards at her place. From the other side of my family, I got told that card games were from the devil.

My parents believed in manifesting, like many would call it today. They joined a prosperity theological church with a focus on “a man reaps what he sows.” But they didn’t have much to sow. My father worked as a bus driver. My mother stayed home and kept having kids, seven in total.

We could have been from Nigeria, Brazil, the Philippines, or Palestine – but we were white and joined the fundamentalist Protestant path: God, money, and the unwavering belief that Israel was always right.
A few months before I was born, my parents and siblings moved to Sweden. They didn’t understand how the Swedish system worked when it came to housing, so they took what seemed the easiest to get – a two-room apartment in one of the most socio-economically vulnerable areas. “It was close to the forest”. My life began there, as an immigrant, a minority, in a low-status neighbourhood, in the margins.

In my family, the boys were misfits, got into trouble at school and sometimes with the law. The girls overachieved, earning high grades in elementary school. But none, neither boys nor girls, pursued further education. They took the first jobs they could get without good networks.

When I grew up, I got beaten to tears if I lied. When I had gotten older, and heard my sibling cry, I threatened to take the adult’s life with a knife, ”I Will kill you if you touch them.” It wasn’t a lie.
I heard stories about the second world war. Holocaust survivors came to our school. At home we heard how our family was in the resistance and killed a German messenger at the Swedish Norwegian border. My family hid guns in the walls and jumped out of windows, not to get caught.

My relatives had endured trauma and war. They drank, and alcoholism, neglect, abuse and generational trauma is my heritage. They gambled away their kids and drank their sorrows away.

We moved to Russia, my dad worked pro-bono driving Jewish families to a big ship in the Black Sea, which would take them to Israel. “When the Jews return to the Holy land, Jesus will return.” Our family lived on the outskirts of the city, up the side of the mountain. The Russians I knew ate shashlik and belonged to minorities.

Digital collage, Simon Lindblom 2025.

Growing up, I was taught that Palestine was a filthy country and its people the scum of the earth. But I knew who the real scum of the earth was. It was me. I heard it in school, saw it online, and felt it in my family’s internalized shame. Once, my mother told me, “We’re not like the Swedes.” We always used to laugh at them, they looked ridiculous with their tracksuits and clogs. But not long after, she started speaking Swedish at home and started using crocs. The contempt shifted from Swedes to foreigners. Muslims were the worst, “they smelled”.
I heard jokes about hanging pork in buses to spoil the bodies of suicide bombers to prevent them from reaching paradise. I saw old maps of Palestine in school, The holy, promised land. The pre missiled land.

Another relative embodied the cultural erasure. When he grew up he was beaten frequently for speaking his language in school. He spoke Meänkieli. In Norway the group is called kven. Kväni, kväner or tornedalingar. He had to move south to find work, leave his home, leave his land, and when he eventually had children, he refused to teach them his language, which he considered ugly.

When my wife grew up, her father, who had another native tongue, also didn’t teach his children his ugly sounding language. His childish pronunciations, the consequence of only speaking it as a child, mixed with the shame of otherness. Neither did the mother teach them her language, so the children never learnt any of the languages. And they neither kept nor retook their non-Swedish surnames.

When my children are growing up. The same erasure happens before my eyes. We speak Swedish, and they are fluent in English, it is their second language.

I failed the basic Swedish course in school several times, and went to special education to try to pass. Yet I failed all national tests and had to take the courses again as an adult. Writing in Swedish still feels shameful. I need the distance and the educational lenses which I have gotten through English, to be able to filter my own thoughts. Colonialism, of the earth and of the mind, breaks us. It divides us from ourselves, from each other and from our roots. It forces shame upon us and fuels disbelief, hate, and prejudice. It takes our languages and our stories and tells us they are worthless. It makes us ashamed of those we are, of what we carry. It whispers that we are not enough and stops us from standing together.

But I see the bigger picture now. I see how these systems work, how they feed on erasure, destruction and removal, and the silence it demands.

The generations before me endured, I endured, but it continues in new forms. I don’t speak my first language, Norwegian, with my children. I can read it, speak a broken old fashioned version, but not write it. I speak Swedish, but I don’t feel comfortable dealing with traumatic experiences in text. My Swedish is one of the working classes, but my thoughts are hard to describe in those words. Whilst speaking Norwegian makes me fall back into defensive positions from my childhood. To resist this is to remember, to reclaim, and to rebuild. So that is what I do.

Today I see the same machinery at work, a colonial hand trying to erase a people, their history, their land, their language. I see how it is presented as rational, how the oppressed are framed as the responsible. I remember the stories I was told growing up, drenched in prejudice and hatred, teaching me to see an entire people as less than human. I see now how that narrative was designed, how it serves to justify the destruction of their homes and the silencing of their voices.

When I grew up, I learned to be ashamed. Now I learn to resist. And that to stand with Palestine is to stand against destruction in all its forms.