One of Us

by Åsne Seierstad

  When she caught up with Simon, down by the road, he looked up at her and asked, ‘Why are you shouting?’

  The boy hadn’t even noticed the elk. With his back to the wind Simon looked at his mother.

  ‘Don’t worry about me, Mum,’ he said calmly. ‘I’m a man of nature.’

  Young Dreams

  Journey with me

  Into the mind of a maniac

  Doomed to be a killer

  Since I came out of the nutsac

  Dr Dre & Ice Cube, ‘Natural Born Killaz’, 1994

  Anders had to find a name. Before he could write on walls, he needed to find a really good writer name. It mustn’t have too many letters, preferably between three and five. Some letters were cooler than others, and it was important that they looked good together, leaning on each other. He experimented in his room with felt pens and paper, producing several rough sketches.

  The more you wrote your name, the more the name became yours. He had admired the big boys’ signatures around the city. Bye-bye, dull, ordinary Anders, hello tagger. The name was supposed to express something of who you wanted to be, mark you out from the crowd.

  He chose a character from Marvel Comics. The Marvel universe was ruled over by the all-powerful Galactus. One of his henchmen had betrayed his race by executing his own people. This executioner was fearless and unscrupulous, filled with defiance and greed – qualities that appealed to the mighty Galactus after several of his henchmen had fallen prey to pangs of conscience on being obliged to kill their own. Galactus entrusted him with the job of head executioner and gave him a double-edged axe to carry out the death raid. The executioner’s name was Morg.

  M and O flowed nicely across the sheet of paper, the R was hypercool but the G was tricky.

  Anders left the narrow footpath between the apartment blocks in Silkestrå, looking for flat surfaces. In place of a double-edged axe, the thirteen-year-old had equipped himself with marker pens and aerosol cans. He had bought them with the money he’d earned delivering papers in the neighbourhood. The world beyond the blue garden and the copse lay before him, waiting. He discarded his childhood like an old rag. Suddenly there were lots of identities he could choose from.

  He was a tagger,

  a writer,

  an artist,

  a hooligan,

  an executioner.

  * * *

  It was 1992. He changed schools when he went up to secondary level. In his new form at Ris, the pupils came from a variety of different primary schools and only a few of them already knew him, so he could create himself all over again. The insecurity and hesitation of his childhood years were less evident. He was still quiet and cautious during lesson time, not one to put up his hand or try to speak, but outside the classroom he knew what he wanted.

  Four boys in the form found each other. One called himself Wick, another Spok, and then there were Morg and Ahmed. Spok was new in town and didn’t know anybody at the start of the school year. He had a round, childish face with freckles and his hair parted in the middle, and he thought Anders seemed nice, a bit shy. Wick was tall and lanky with a distinctly square chin and forehead. Both lived near by. Ahmed was Anders’s Pakistani friend from primary. At secondary school, he was still the only immigrant in the class.

  The four classmates found each other through a shared obsession.

  They entered their teens in the golden age of hip hop, and lapped it up. They listened to rap at home, on their Walkmans on the way to school, and they went to concerts at the punk club Blitz. Anders practised his breakdance spins in the blue garden. He overcame his previous reluctance to join in the dancing competitions in the basement, throwing shyness to the wind.

  The music originally created in the Bronx in the late 1970s took Oslo by storm. The breakbeat loops of funk, disco and electronica were scratched over and over again, with rhythms marked by drums, bass and guitar. ‘Hip hop, don’t stop’. DJs were the new heroes, and with the needle in the groove they moved the vinyl records back and forth; there was cutting and phasing, crossfading and sampling. The turntable had become an instrument in its own right, and local Oslo rappers gradually emerged, singing about their own reality of teen life in the city.

  The music was raw and fast, and frequently aggressive. The first rappers in the Bronx had an anti-violence, anti-drugs, anti-racism message, and hoped that hip hop would replace street violence. People would meet to party, not to fight. Later on, the music often came to validate and glorify street violence and gangsta rap was often sexist and racist in nature, its words riddled with references to drugs. Hip hop was a lifestyle with seemingly simple rules, as explained by KRS-One and Marley Marl, among the first rappers from the South Bronx: ‘Hip is the knowledge. Hop is the movement. Hip and Hop is an intelligent movement.’

  Anders strove to be both the hip and the hop. Hip meant being up-to-date and relevant. Keeping up, getting it, being shown respect. As for the hop part, he practised hard on the paved path that crossed the grass outside his block of flats. He tried breaks and spins but never pulled off a headspin or backspin. He hadn’t enough rhythm or body control to be a good dancer.

  Perhaps he could be a rapper? After all, he kept a diary, writing down his thoughts and experiences like the rappers did. But he hadn’t got the right sort of voice for rap; it was high and soft, like a girl’s.

  So he opted for hip hop’s third form of expression: graffiti.

  If breaking was visual rap in three dimensions, then graffiti was frozen breaking. The letters twisted, just as the dancing body did. To produce fine lines you had to let your body sway, readying yourself so the rhythm travelled from your body to your hand as it directed the aerosol paint can at the wall.

  Graffiti tapped into the pulse of growing bodies. The lines on the wall were like them: angular, hard, insistent. The motifs had to involve speed and movement, be tough yet playful. But it was also a culture of performance and achievement. Everything was judged and then approved or rejected. If you had a good style and some original designs, you could mark yourself out from all the anonymous urban youths and shine a little.

  * * *

  In the area where Anders grew up, the young people’s aspirations were strictly divided between tagging and tennis. It wasn’t here, in the land of nice villas set among old apple trees and peonies, that Morg’s role models hung out.

  Ris was a secondary school on the well-to-do west side of Oslo, with pupils from an area stretching from the ski jump at Holmenkollen to the lower ground at Skøyen. Most of them grew up with the self-confidence that goes with a big garden, and they spent their time outside school on the ski tracks, the football pitches and the tennis courts. At weekends they got together at home-alone parties or watched films in each other’s basement TV rooms. It was important to have the right logos on your shirt or padded jacket, like Polo, Phoenix or Peak Performance. Anders’s classmates were aiming for careers in law or finance. In the 8A class photo of 1993, most of them were wearing white polo shirts with the necks rolled down, under shirts or woollen sweaters.

  One boy in the middle of the back row stands out from the rest. In an outsized check shirt and a hoodie, Anders stands there smiling with earphones in his ears. The pose and the plugged ears marks his distance from the others.

  The class could broadly be divided into four groups. There was the contingent with the polo-necked shirts, the straights. They were the majority. Anders was never with them. Then there were a few with shaved heads who went round in flying jackets, turned-up camouflage trousers and black boots. They flirted with neo-Nazism and liked heavy metal. Anders was on nodding terms with them. They didn’t bother anybody, and nobody bothered them. They were against immigration, and since Anders had some foreign friends he didn’t hang out with them. Anyway, he couldn’t stand heavy metal. Then there were the hip-hoppers. They did a bit of tagging and were on the rebellious side, would-be gangsters. If the hip-hop movement once had a political message, it had got lost on the way to Ris. Ideo
logically, tagging had no particular aim other than to serve as a marker of freedom; it was essentially anarchic. That left the losers. There were a couple of them. They kept a low profile.

  Anders belonged to the third group. He had gained a kind of respect at the school, where he came to be seen as a troublemaking tagger, a bit of a bully. If you said anything wrong you were in for it.

  Anders now carried himself with confidence and was not afraid to speak up and say what he thought. He had acquired the right look at the hip-hop store Jean TV in Arkaden, Oslo’s first indoor shopping centre. He had Nike on his feet, outsize trousers and a Champion hoodie. Every morning he styled his hair in front of the mirror, parting his fringe in the middle and making several applications of hair gel so it would stay in place. The tough image was supposed to look accidental, but the troublemaking tagger was very vain and fretted about his big nose.

  * * *

  The gang of four started on a small scale, spending hours sketching on paper before they graduated to neighbourhood walls and fences, or crept into the school grounds in the evening. Later on they took to sneaking into the local bus station after the buses had stopped running for the night. They carried rucksacks full of spray cans and wrote their names in hard, angular letters.

  Once they had conquered the locality, Morg wanted to go further afield. He bought a map of Oslo and one day Spok came into his room, which was always in immaculate order, to find him sitting like a general about to go into battle. He pointed and outlined, indicating districts of the city, streets and buildings. He knew who the leading taggers were in the areas he wanted to dominate; he knew where they lived and relished the thought of his own signature adorning a wall in their territory. He had reconnoitred to identify the best times for a quick escape. It was as if he were planning a raid or robbery, with detailed routes that included exit strategies if the police turned up. Spok sat there with his innocent baby face, so often his passport out of trouble, quietly taking it all in. When Anders had presented the whole plan, Spok said he thought it was a great idea.

  The boys were still ‘toys’, novices. Though it seemed free and anarchic from the outside, the graffiti community was strictly hierarchical. You had to find which rung of the ladder you were on. Being a toy was fine, most of them were, but it was seen as uncool to be a wannabe, somebody trying to be more than he was.

  For the ambitious, the goal was to be a king. That was the title bestowed on the top writers, the ones who were both good and daring. To become a king you had to pull off a memorable stunt, like bombing a whole wall, writing over a whole underground train or tagging somewhere that was under strict surveillance. Your name should be visible in the city centre, the most closely watched place, in the main thoroughfare of Karl Johans gate or along the underground line that runs from the central station via the Parliament to the Royal Palace. There was no point being King of Skøyen.

  ‘How can I get to the top?’ Anders asked a classmate, one of the straights, when they were hanging about on the steps by Majorstua metro station after school one day. ‘What are they doing that I’m not?’

  ‘Well, I suppose you just need to tag in all sorts of places where people can see,’ said his classmate. ‘Like on that wall there.’ He pointed over to the jeweller’s shop on the other side of the road.

  Anders said nothing, simply crossed straight over to the exclusive jeweller’s with its white marble walls, whipped out a felt pen and wrote ‘MORG’ right across the wall. Then he turned on his heel and walked calmly away with his head held high, across the busy shopping street and out of sight. His classmate was dead impressed. There were heavy fines for tagging. Anders isn’t scared of anything, thought his classmate, who had been poised to run.

  To climb the ladder you also needed to keep in with the right people. One afternoon the four Year 8 students went over to the taggers’ hangout at Egertorget in the middle of Karl Johans gate. The steps down to the Parliament underground station served as their ‘Writers’ Bench’. They sat round in groups, almost all boys and anything from a handful of kids to around fifty, showing each other sketches, sharing ideas and talking about bombing raids. Here you could find everyone from ultra-reds of the Blitz community to young guys from broken homes, the odd petty criminal and plenty of wild cards. There was a larger proportion of immigrants than in most other gatherings of young Norwegians in the 1990s.

  All newcomers were treated with scepticism. You couldn’t just turn up at the Writers’ Bench. Someone had to vouch for you, someone had to know you. Otherwise you were told to get lost, and if you didn’t take the hint you would be forcibly ejected.

  If you wanted to stay, you had to prove yourself. You had to bomb your way up. To really earn some cred you had to pass the ultimate test: get arrested and show you wouldn’t squeal.

  * * *

  It all started so well. In the mid-1980s, when the graffiti trend crossed the Atlantic, it was seen as a new and interesting youth phenomenon. Norway’s first newspaper article on the subject, in the tabloid Verdens Gang, used words like ‘tremendous professionalism’ to describe a ‘work’ in the underground. The public transport company Oslo Sporveier referred to the writers as ‘graffiti artists’. The boys, their names given in full, proudly acknowledged their deed. The only thing the company asked of the youths was that they get permission before letting loose with their aerosol cans along the line.

  Over the years that followed, the language changed. It was no longer art but vandalism. Oslo Sporveier claimed the graffiti made its passengers feel less safe. Millions of kroner were spent on cleaning.

  ‘Increasing numbers find their property defaced by this scrawl. We need a swift and forceful response,’ said a Progress Party spokesman in Parliament, demanding action from Labour’s Minister of Transport.

  By the time Anders came on the street scene, words like ‘war’ and ‘hooligans’ kept recurring. ‘We’re fighting a mafia,’ a section leader from Oslo Sporveier told the media in the summer of 1993. ‘This mafia is well organised, with communication equipment, its own radio station and a magazine. I would call it a war, what’s going on between Oslo Sporveier and the graffiti mafia.’

  The Oslo Sporveier security guards went out of their way to make life difficult for the repeat offenders. The security guards employed by the Consept company were the ones the taggers found roughest. A few of them were former hired thugs, and occasionally meted out their own kind of justice.

  As the 1990s wore on, more and more young people were arrested by the police, and some of them were given prison sentences and astronomical fines amounting to hundreds of thousands of kroner, a debt to the state that would hang over the teenagers into adult life. Those with convictions could no longer go on tagging because the police knew their tags. The prison sentence was often suspended but would be reimposed if there were any further breaches of the law.

  When questioning their teen suspects, the police tried to get them to inform on each other. The interviewers tricked many into giving away their mates by saying they had already confessed. It wasn’t easy for a fourteen-year-old to stand up to experienced detectives.

  The police hunt changed the character of the graffiti scene. Guts started to matter more than talent. There was more daubing, less art. To produce what was called a ‘piece’, a picture of reasonable size with a number of different motifs and colours, took time, concentration and no disturbance. A successful piece was not something you could just spray up while looking over your shoulder. It became a case of ‘hit and run’. ‘A society gets the graffiti it deserves,’ commented one criminologist on the street galleries that grew ever scruffier.

  With the penalties now so severe, the taggers had to make extra sure to eject any potential squealers at an early stage, and it grew even harder for newcomers to join their circle. But luckily for the posh boys from Skøyen, Ahmed knew one of the older taggers, Minor. He provided Morg and friends with an entrée to that desirable set of steps.

  * * *


  In the winter of 1994, when Anders was in Year 8 at school, the camera lenses of the world were for once trained on Norway. The government wanted to highlight healthy living, and Members of Parliament appeared on television jumping up and down and slapping their arms to keep warm, under the slogan ‘A Fit Nation for the Winter Olympics’.

  The Oslo city authorities had a major push to make the city spotlessly clean and shiny, and ran aggressive campaigns to mobilise public opinion against ‘vandalism, violence and defacement of the city’ in the run-up to the Olympic Games. The Labour city council launched an anti-graffiti campaign that became known as ‘Taggerhead’. Posters on the underground showed a boy with an empty expression. The space where his brain should have been was filled with a ball bearing like those inside aerosol paint cans.

  The Lillehammer Games of 1994 generated a mood of national excitement, the Norwegian athletes won a string of gold medals and the whole country let itself be intoxicated by Gro Harlem Brundtland’s slogan: ‘It’s typically Norwegian to be good at things.’

  Anders, who had just turned fifteen, couldn’t have cared less about being good at skiing. He had nothing in common with the aristocracy in knee breeches, up on the hill. Since his last, truncated stay with his weekend parents as a two-year-old, no one had taken him on any Sunday trips to the forest. The city was his jungle.

  These were quiet weeks in the capital. It was bitterly cold all over Oslo. The days were an icy blue, the nights clear and starry. Morg did not let temperatures of minus twenty deter him from the only competition that mattered – winning the title of King. Several nights a week he climbed down from the balcony of his apartment to leave his signature on the city.