She suffers from post-traumatic stress after a brutal act of violence and sometimes sleeps under the coffee table to feel safe.
The woman in Naja Marie Aidt's novel is in her upper middle age, her three sons are grown and have moved out of the home. She has a job, but cannot work due to the post-traumatic stress syndrome that paralyzes her.
Before Aidt started writing, she went through the statistics for violent crimes committed against women in Denmark and other parts of the world. What she saw made her angry and desperate.
It is an enormous oppression of women that only continues because we happen to be born in a girl's body and not a boy's. If the consequences of this violence against women are not death, then what are they? Then they are trauma. We who are completely innocent become traumatized just because we are women, she says.
Female friendship
If men's violence against women is an important component of the novel, then female friendship is an equally important ingredient. The woman in the book is surrounded by female friends who, in addition to the professional help provided by her psychologist, gently support and guide her.
I do not think that professional treatment is enough, one also needs the human community around oneself when one is in crisis, says Naja Marie Aidt.
She speaks from her own experience. In the novel "Har döden tagit något ifrån dig så ge det tillbaka", which was published in 2017, she wrote autobiographically about the death of her son Carl. Then she described it as her language being broken by grief.
It was very frustrating to feel that I had also lost my language when I lost my child. I have always used language to understand the world, to understand myself and life, and suddenly I could not anymore.
"Great happiness"
It took five, maybe six years before she started writing something new again. The friends who rallied around her after Carl's death were an important explanation for why "Övningar i mörker" came to be, she notes.
To return to writing has been a great happiness for me. I have a feeling that it is my second authorship that I have started, that I am now starting from a new place, she says.
But one thing puzzles her. Despite the fact that "Övningar i mörker" has been critically acclaimed and award-winning, it is almost only women who come to her author readings.
When I published "Babian", there were lots of men, so it has been a little surprising that it is still like this "oh, it's that kind of female chatter! We can't bear to hear about menopause, hormones, and breastfeeding, childbirth, and female friends".
Born: 1962 on Greenland.
Lives: In Copenhagen, Denmark.
Background: Debuted as an author with the poetry collection "Så laenge jeg er ung" in 1991. Received the Nordic Council's Literature Prize in 2008 for the short story collection "Babian". In 2017, she wrote the noted grief book "Har döden tagit något ifrån dig så ge det tillbaka" about her son Carl's death. Awarded the Swedish Academy's Nordic Prize in 2022.
Current with: The novel "Övningar i mörker" which has just been published in Swedish. The book was recently awarded DR's novel prize. Aidt will be a guest at the international author scene in Stockholm on 4/9.
