Hello everyone!
My name is Amanda Werne and I am last year’s recipient of the Robespierre Prize. Now I have the honour to present this year’s laureate Fanny Klang!
She has published her debut novel Closed Institution, and I have read it. It evokes a great many thoughts and feelings about love and resistance in me. I think of the silent resistance, that which does not have to be preceded by theory, the resistance that is stirred up within us who are human in an inhumane system. The resistance can consist of something completely ordinary, something that you do not necessarily think is political. Something you would have done anyway. Like a crush, which crosses a line.
The spontaneous resistance, the unreflecting resistance, which is about living, the system can never catch up with. The resistance that is official, where you set your foot down and say here but no further, the system can respond to that, for example by firing you from your job as a prison guard. It takes a lot of courage to both fall in love and to speak up.
The advertising for working in the Prison and Probation Service has probably not escaped anyone. We know that practically anyone can be turned into a machine part. Made into a tool for the imprisonment. I think of when the life-sentenced Wallin asks the main character Jonna if she is free, and a hesitation arises. “Yes, but I would say so,” she replies. I immediately start thinking about the lack of freedom that goes beyond the role of guard or prisoner. There is a reciprocity in their conversation, which testifies that both are stuck in the same machine.
Closed Institution is a clear-sighted contemporary novel, which gives an apt picture of the society we live in. It speaks of a lack of freedom that is not specifically limited to the Prison and Probation Service but to society at large. The book is a declaration of love for the human, the genuine resistance, precisely because tyranny doesn’t care about the human. But it’s me, this is us, this is here, no reasoning is needed because resistance is natural when oppression is unnatural.