Girls Against God

1990, I beam with it.
Hatred is my imaginary world, my pleasure dome. How would you even say pleasure dome in Norwegian? You don’t. Definitely not in a southern accent. Here my hatred exists only deep in my gloomy stare, in that look that seems about to implode, that seems to look into itself in pictures. Is that gaze the language they call hatred?
You don’t have to answer, of course. You might not understand a single word of Norwegian in any accent. But maybe hatred has made you happy, too. That’s why I’m writing this to you. To get away.
From the moment I learn to write, I hate God. I have to capitalise all these words, and I hate it. Jesus Christ, Our Father, God, and so on. Written submission. In school they give me extra tutoring sessions to teach me capital O. In class I just draw spirals, and they assume I can’t draw a circle. During these sessions I’m supposed to sit and spell out the Word in Norwegian, Ordet, with a capital O, the way it’s spelt in the Bible. I remember having to repeat it over and over, I remember burning inside, and I remember Ordet burning, and I remember finally breaking and writing a series of OOOOOOOOOOO’s on the sheet, more like doodles than words. I cross all the lines on the sheet until I’m writing outside the worksheet and on the desk and the teacher returns and gives me a written warning. Have you ever thought about how similar the words scrawl and scream sound? I hate capital letters and I hate the Word.
We’re not allowed to say hate unless it’s about Hitler. Someone’s dad said that. But I don’t say it like them anyway, hadår; it’s too soft and wet. I say hate, and I love to hate. It’s 1992 and I’m the Gloomiest Child Queen.
It’s 1992 on the screen as well now, on the bonus material DVD that came with the reissued early Darkthrone albums. Swirling trees shot in black and white. Tense atmosphere. I follow the shaky camera around the forest, delighted by its attempt at turning the plain, pleasant and ordinary pines into something ugly, threatening and mysterious. As if the band were attempting to really squeeze the lifeblood out of 1992, or as if they’re expelling the ordinary 1992 out of the year.
A boy, still Nocturno Culto I think, is smoking on a bench in the forest. ‘More primitive,’ Fenriz says. He’s speaking English. It’s an interview, done many years after the film, and the band is summarising and analysing. They’re able to look back and say, We went for something more primitive.
You can watch the interview for yourself. It’s online. Primitive. I’ve never heard anyone say that in a southern accent.
As I hate my way through school, to 1997 when I enter college, it becomes more and more obvious that language doesn’t quite cut it. Something’s wrong down here in the south. Maybe there’s something wrong with the Norwegian language altogether. Maybe Norwegian doesn’t have the right words or sounds to really express pleasure. It feels like a provincial language, a language only appropriate for small talk about the weather, church services, Baptist church congregations, boat manuals and sermons. It’s not as musical or archaic as the words in the Old English Dictionary and ancient English poems printed in Gothic font. The Norwegian language is full of words to describe my sins and mistakes; it’s my forced vernacular, a language fit for people who don’t really understand language, who don’t understand poetry or the need to communicate. In college I identify with Inger, a character from one of the novels on our curriculum, Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun. Inger has a harelip and a speech impediment. She can’t seem to get words out properly, so instead she just shuts up, or should shut up, according to Hamsun. Her muddled speech delights me. I should probably identify with her even more. She’s an expression of a genetic mutation that affects her mouth and her mind, and I probably am, too. But I don’t. Instead of sympathy I choose hatred. I hate Hamsun. Especially his Pan, another book we’re assigned. I refuse to finish it. I tell the teacher that it’s an insult to the brain, and the teacher gives me a written warning. I wish I’d told the teacher that the Bible is an insult to the soul.
My whole childhood and throughout my adolescence, I’m frothing at the mouth. When I talk, and when I don’t talk. When we’re forced to recite Ibsen’s Terje Vigen, the only part I identify with is the verse that describes the hard sea and frothy waves around the Homborsund reefs. That’s how the inside of my mouth froths when I read. There’s nothing smooth or soft in my mouth: everything that’s moist froths and foams endlessly, like a looped beat.
Nocturno Culto’s cigarette is out. The camera is in the forest again, black and white snow accompanied by music from Transylvanian Hunger. I note: ‘Norwegian nature looks and sounds like buzzing, angry insects.’
I’m watching these black metal clips because I want to write a film. I don’t know what the film is going to be about yet, but I like the early black metal aesthetic, so near to my own childhood. Strangely, it gives me hope, hope that it’s possible to make art primitively, in a way that isn’t steeped in professionalism and compromise. Art that still hates. I remember how much hope there is in hatred.
The next clip I watch is a black metal gig that looks as if it took place in an assembly hall in an early nineties secondary school. I note: ‘Wholesome Norwegian youths talk amongst themselves and walk in and out of the room while the band plays on, completely unaffected. Black metal crawls unnoticed through adolescence, mine too. It doesn’t burrow down completely, but for as long as it’s there it lives and crawls.’
One of those youths