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Since the late 1960s, Jan Myrdal has become a central figure on the radical left in Sweden in the context of his prominent role in the protests against the US war in Vietnam. And he became a presence as a representative of the left-wing Maoist intellectuals. Although this trend abated in the early 1980s and most of Myrdal’s colleagues changed their minds, he remained the same. Despite this, it was difficult for him to organize himself in any political organization, and even when he was an inspiration to found the “Swedish Communist Party” (a far left), he did not accept any official role for himself in the party. In his youth, he joined the Democratic Youth Organization for a time, but he soon left and continued to the end as an unorganized Maoist Marxist!
Myrdal saw Swedish democracy as false. He may be the only Swedish writer who has worked systematically, for decades, to “penetrate the fabric of lies called public opinion sometimes and sometimes with prevailing opinions”, as he described it. His detection of official lies and his anti-imperialism explain the many attempts to silence him, freeze him, politically condemn him or ignore him. He is also almost the only Swedish writer who provided a global perspective in the arena of political and cultural debate, a third world perspective, and a clear position on liberation from colonialism, imperialism, and all forms of great power domination. With his extensive culture, encyclopedic knowledge, tremendous memory, scant production abundance, his pluralistic view of things, and his rigorous formulation of his texts, articles, reports, and books, Jean Myrdal inspired and influenced (and certainly will for a long time after of his departure) in many people of different political opinions. It was the fiercest argument in the squares and in the media. Until the age of 90, he remained active by participating in panel discussions on controversial issues in society. He stunned audiences, blunted by ready-made stereotypes and targeted media, with shocking statements and stances. In the 1989 events in Beijing, for example, he claimed that military intervention by the authorities to end the demonstrations was necessary to preserve political stability in China and East Asia, and many voices were raised against him, including his colleagues from the Swedish PEN club, who demanded his exclusion from the club. He was also asked to be removed from the club when he defended the right of expression of French thinker Robert Faurisson, stigmatized as Holocaust denial. It was, indeed, a comical fact, since the club that is based on defending freedom of expression wants to deprive a thinker of freedom of expression, and he himself wants to expel one of its members because he defended freedom of expression! ! It was clear that Myrdal joined the PEN club in good faith as it is, by the prevailing claim, a club that supports freedom of expression around the world, while the club’s positions revealed clear international biases. Perhaps it was his knowledge of this game that saved him the effort of those who called for his exclusion from the club by excluding himself!
This old rebel has had revolt in his blood since his teens when he refused to follow the map his parents drew for the future, and left school to start working as a journalist when he was only seventeen years old. His rebellion against the family was the beginning of the path of rebellion against the institution as a whole. In 1954, a major publisher refused to publish his first work of fiction, Return to Home. The novel revolves around the editor-in-chief of a newspaper in his intellectual transformations during his career, from an intellectual devoted to supreme values to a moral nihilist. The content is scathing and can be embarrassing to her famous parents, who hold important positions locally and internationally, as the publisher saw in his justification for the refusal, which led Jan to print the novel in a left-wing publishing house outside of the capital. But his fame locally and internationally came in 1963 with the publication of his book “A Report from a Chinese Village”, which was translated into several languages and its content was discussed around the world, and was praised by famous cultural figures, including Claude Levi Strauss, who described it as the first anthropological work to explain modern history.
1982 Jan Myrdal will cause a sensation with the premiere of “Infancia”, with which he opens the biographical trilogy. This book, in a nutshell, destroys two of Sweden’s cultural constellations: Gunnar and Alpha Myrdal, Jan’s parents! They are both famous locally and internationally, and both are Nobel Prize winners, and both are major names in the human rights and social renaissance that Sweden witnessed in the years after World War II, and are widely appreciated by the society, then the people closest to them, their fighter son, come to destroy their glamorous official image. The book describes Jan’s upbringing and struggle with his parents, and his feeling that he was not visible to them, as the father Gunnar, a bully, calls his son fat in front of the son’s friends, while the mother Alpha, the child psychologist, is a hypocrite and all her son cares about is making him into a subject for her. All of this is written in an influential style that was another factor in the popularity of the novel. The family tried to stop the publication of the book and objected to its content, but he adhered to his right to tell the truth as he saw it, saying that they could remember the past in their own way, but “he remembers this past in a more liberal”. It may be, indeed, and it may be that the trauma of his childhood was so cruel that he could not overcome it despite the years. But the objections also came from some critics, not because the novel lacked artistic force, but precisely because of its artistic force that made it captivating and widely popular, which gives it a credibility that afflicts painful damage to the image and reputation of the Gunnar and Alpha Myrdal’s parents, especially since when the book was published they were old and unable to defend. For themselves. Despite this, the book is still widely read today and is considered one of the eyes of modern Swedish literature.
For him life was a fight for the truth, and his weapon in it was the word, although he left more than eighty books, he stayed until his last days, fearing that he would not finish writing what he wanted. He said the worst thing about death was that it would deprive him of his precious writing time. In his articles, he repeatedly recalled the importance of accomplishing our tasks and completing our work because our time in life is limited, or as he described, “It is the short time available for a person between darkness and darkness.” This explains the abundance and diversity of his production, which is why he wasted no more time than the work he loves. In the field of documentary books, whose objective was to convey the true image to the Swedish reader and break the biased and stereotyped image presented by the mainstream media, the list of his books continues: On the United Nations, Afghanistan (A trip to Afghanistan – 1960) and India (Libro India Waiting – 1980), Mexico (Libro de México 1995) and around Cambodia, Pakistan and Turkmenistan. In addition to political essay books, he has published literary studies on Strindberg, Balzac, Dickens, Seminon, Sartre, and others. To this is added a large number of television sets and productions, including documentary series, as well as a satirical television film. The rare thing circulating in the Swedish book world is that Jan Myrdal’s books are loved even by his opponents, due to his superior skill in the art of writing. You can feel these days how writers and intellectuals from various directions have mourned and glorified him, including his intellectual opponents, while Swedish television dedicated the entire daytime period after the announcement of his death to broadcast everything related to him despite the fact that this television, and all the mainstream Swedish media, was a regular target of their attack. atheism. Journalist Betty Hammargreen wrote on her blog on the day of Myrdal’s death that “it is impossible to avoid being influenced by their language and the breadth of their culture. His language was sharp as a knife, powerful, self-taught but also juicy and popular. Even his texts, which are collected in books, are written with the same force that I could not resist them, but I dedicate them to my bourgeois-minded father ”
A friend of Jean Myrdal described its importance by saying that it is not overstated however important it is to speak of Myrdal in the formation of a radical, democratic and anti-imperialist public opinion. It’s hard to imagine the extent of poverty, isolation, and backwardness that Swedish culture would have survived without Jan Myrdal.
Jean was married four times but lived the last period of his life alone, his only company being his library of 50,000 volumes. In 2019, his latest novel, Another Time Out, was published and he considered it the last book in the autobiographical series. It is then the book in which he returns to himself and then rests forever.
