Solanas: The Scum Manifesto
In the fall of 2002, Sara Stridsberg traveled to Cambodia to visit a friend.
She had planned to write her second novel there after debuting with the story of Sally Bauer, the first Scandinavian woman to swim across the English Channel.
But
SCUM
fell into their hands
, the overwhelming manifesto of the then semi-forgotten
Valerie Solanas.
Radical feminist heroine for some, mentally unbalanced man-hater for others
, Solanas became infamous for trying to assassinate Andy W.
arhol.
"I was expecting a boring feminist pamphlet. It seemed quite the opposite: a wild text, desperately funny, with a great sorrow that throbbed under the utopia it proposes.
It was like a lightning strike on me
"recalls the writer from Stockholm. Stridsberg knew that Solanas had been a prostitute most of her life and during her stay in Cambodia" the reading of
SCUM
and the daily vision of child poverty and prostitution "affected him deeply." I don't think I went a single day without crying.
I became obsessed with understanding his experience, marked by abuse, "he confesses. The result of that arose
The Faculty of Dreams
(Nordic), a poetic and unconventional love letter to Solanas that loosely recreates her troubled life starting at the end: the first scene is that of her death in a decrepit hostel in Tenderloin, the prostitute district of San Francisco.
It's April 1988 and Valerie is dying of pneumonia on a dirty mattress between urine-filled sheets.
What follows are some of the episodes that will mark his tortuous existence:
his time at the university where he studied psychology and at the Factory, his traumatic relationships with men
, an absent mother and a deep hatred of the system that was creeping up on years and fueling her paranoia or extreme lucidity, depending on how you look at it. "What fascinates me about Valerie is that she was not interested in logic or being rational, despite what clever it was.
She didn't believe in family, religion, motherhood, politics, or psychology.
I didn't believe in anything.
He was not obedient.
Writing the novel was like forcing me to forget everything I knew, "Stridsberg recalls. In Dream College, Stridsberg gives Valerie what she never had: friends, a loving mother, and a girlfriend, Cosmo Girl.
SCUM
Solanas advocated exterminating men to free women once and for all.
Specifically, it urged: "to overthrow the Government, eliminate the economic system, establish total automation and
annihilate the male sex
", whom he saw as" an incomplete woman, a walking failure. "Although the text parodied Aristotle, Plato and Freud (
"It is a satire, it spoke of men in the same way that it was spoken in some parts of women
"recalls Stridsberg), the forcefulness of her ideas caused the manifesto to sell like hotcakes after Solanas shot Warhol while she was locked up in a mental sanitarium. Before, Solanas herself had photocopied and distributed
SCUM
through the streets without much success.
Warhol had included it in one of his films.
He had promised to shoot a script of his,
Up your ass
(about a lesbian prostitute), who ended up losing, to Solanas' anger.
He stopped answering her calls.
June 3 of the tumultuous 1968
Solanas went to Warhol's new offices in Union Square with a Beretta and shot him multiple times.
Warhol was about to die
He spent two months in the hospital and was never the same again. When Stridsberg traveled in 2002 through Florida, Maryland and New York doing research to write his novel, hardly anyone remembered her.
"Where they hadn't forgotten her is at the Chelsea Hotel.
Speaking his name was like talking to the devil himself
, they hated her.
Of course, they still had a very large picture hanging on the wall of Sid Vicius, who killed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. "What would Solanas think of the MeToo today?" Actually, she was so back from everything that she was not too interested in the gender equality.
It's hard to put it in a contemporary context.
He would have loved it but I suppose he would have stayed out of it all.
It was always a
outsider.
She is more of a poet than a policy
". Stridsberg believes that Solanas, deep down, was a pacifist." At one point in the manifesto, she says that the most important thing is not to harm others.
But his life was much more complicated than theory.
Everything about her is paradox: she was an intellectual whore, a feminist who denied the feminist movement, a pacifist who tried to assassinate someone
"Should we care more if he tried to kill someone?" The culture of cancellation is not my favorite culture.
Every day I give thanks for the fact that books are not banned.
Reading a book can change your life, or it can make you want to change the world.
Something like this happened to me when I read
SCUM
.
Books are like little wild animals that we carry in our purse.
Some are really dangerous.
When you look at them on the shelf, there, so silent, they seem innocent.
But when you start reading them, anything can happen.
They can even cross borders without anyone stopping them, not as happens now with people, "he reflects. Stridsberg was a member of the committee that decides
the Nobel Prize in Literature
when the sex scandal broke out two years ago that left the award void in 2018. "It was a tough decision," he recalls about his resignation.
"But at that very historical and dramatic moment
action was needed to overthrow the old order that had been protecting the abuse of power for so long
Until then, belonging to the select club that the Nobel winner decided was life-long. So you could say that Stridsberg gave up a comfortable life in the world's literary elite. "For a true intellectual it is difficult to keep secrets with that type of moral and illegal implications.
As a writer, your mission is to speak out.
My heart has always been with the abandoned, those who suffer abuse, those who have no power, "he says. After learning that the Swedish academy had silenced abuses and rapes for years (some committed in apartments owned by the institution in Paris), the The rules have changed. Today the members of the committee that decide the Nobel are for a period of three years. Do you think that will contribute to making them feel a little less all-powerful? "Hopefully.
Let's hope for the best and be prepared for the worst
", concludes the Swedish author quoting Maya Angelou.
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