THE ROAD TO HELL
by Tore Renberg
written for Tou Works and reproduced with permission from the author
When I was young, and I was for a long time, the road to hell went through Pedersgata. It's easy to forget the duration of a childhood. It's colossal and voluminous, something that becomes particularly strange if you see it in relation to who owns it; the child, right? That something so little, something so poor of experience should be the owner of something so mighty, seems almost irresponsible. Childhood has a seemingly borderless time line and whilst you're in it, it seems never to stop, contradictory to the experience you normally have later in life, when everything seizes almost in the moment you experience it, often because experiences have become so predictable that resignation sets in.
The time when the road to hell went through Pedersgata, I was in childhood and it's easy to forget how new and intense and present childhood is for the one who owns it everyday. For it is not just mighty, it is everywhere; the one who owns it, the child, never escapes it, on the contrary; the child is in the centre, it can never put childhood behind - but what does childhood do? It shines with first time experiences, day out, day in, and all through the night. Each day it comes with new things for its owner, carrying shiny metal and strange emotions showing this to the child and saying: This is yours! This you need to understand, now! And at the time the Pedersgata was the road to hell, I was the owner of my own childhood, the one I lost and speculate over - and it was scary that hell had manifested in my city. The same city I went to on Saturdays to go to Bolla and eat sweet bakery with mom, perhaps to go to Kirkegaten and buy music sheet at Ruud, perhaps to go to Idsøe to proper meat? I belong to the bourgeois majority in Stavanger in the 70s and 80s, even though we came from row house building outside the city centre.
Stavanger has for many decades and at least in my 35year old life, over all been a blue bourgeois city that doesn't mean that there hasn't been alternative or radical environments, poverty or social need, it only means that the balance in our city has been uneven between the classes. We cannot compare with Liverpool or for that matter Oslo. That has led to a majority of the city's youth growing up have several experiences with wealth and prosperity than for example working class and radical environment. In the 70/80s this was even stronger than today, and the borders were sharper between the city's different geographical sites. I remember very well that there were areas we should rather not visit. I cannot remember who gave me these prohibitions, and how strong these possibly were but I can remember the fear and the excitement that was attached to this hell on earth, Pedersgata. What was hiding in this street of apocalypse, alcoholism, AIDS and violence, I don't think I new, but it was hell, something that was confirmed by the nickname the area was given: the Heat. I remember that I was imagining this suffering heat - because it is also easy to forget, that childhood is a few percent of realism and the rest is imaginations - yes, I was imagining this boiling heat down in the east side; workers sweating and kicking the shit out of their wives, drinking themselves half to death every night, the terrible heat that only exists in hell.
The reason that I, a kid from the bourgeois and Madla, achieved contact with this area was my great grandmother, who lived in the block at Blåsenborg, and the second hand shop at Løkkeveien. The second hand shop was a kind of half cultural centre relatively at the beginning of Pedersgata, that my parents could accept me for frequenting, because I was buying something that could be read; comic books. And my great grandmother, poor thing, she was living there, and it was terribly sad that she could not find a finer place to live. But further into the Pedersgata I never went. I made visits to my great grandmother at Blåsenborg and the second hand shop. And from there I stood looking into this mythological street. As I grew older, these restricted ideas and mythologies were changing and the abstract notions of hell were challenged as you got to know new things about your city. It is always boring, and sometimes sad, but often necessary, when myths are revealed; it wasn't really hell hiding at the end of Pedersgata. It was at large, financial poverty, yes, but it was a cultural, historical and human diversity.
A lot has changed but some things stay the same. I have now an office at Tou Scene, one of Pedersgata's end stations. Tou Scene likes to regard itself as open and generous, but for a large majority of Stavanger, which still is a bourgeois population, Tou still is synonym with a cultural hell of experimental noise rock and far fetched performance art. For some colleagues, and me it is a paradox that we now find ourselves here and that this part of the city is experience a cultural growth and that it is embraced by us, because when we were young, we feared this place. We were asked not to go there. But as time went by, we got curious, then fascinated by it. Then we made friends with people living there, and we saw that heir way of life was different to us; their homes were not so tidy, the parents weren't at home for dinner at four, and we created new ideas about a free and healthy life, new mythologies of companionship, creativity and kindness. And so the bourgeois youth were wishing themselves out of the bourgeois restrictions. And finally, we wanted to have our studios, our office and our workspace in what used to be hell.
But we do not live there. That point has to be clear. We live at Gausel, we live at Madla, and we live at Våland.
