Culture

Willa Holt Managing Editor “Everything is temporary for us” Interview with Comic Artist Daria Bogdanska

This week, the Daily’s Managing Editor Willa Holt sat down with comic artist, union representative, and former punk musician Daria Bogdanska to discuss her autobiographical graphic novel Wage Slaves, which was reviewed in Vol. 109 Issue 12 of the Daily: the joint Labour, Body, and Care Issue with Le Delit.

Willa Holt, The McGill Daily (MD): What made you choose a graphic novel as your format for Wage Slaves? Daria Bogdanska (DB): Let’s start in general. I used to read a lot; I always read a lot of comics, especially a lot of independent graphic novels and DIY. I’m not a really patient person, but I like telling stories. So I guess I started first making comics because they’re so much faster than just writing. Those kind of comics, especially the DIY ones, were written by mostly young people from big cities. Stories about regular life shitty jobs. It was something I could identify with. So I really like this kind of medium, you know?

It’s like it represented a kind of lifestyle and the kind of problems that I maybe could identify with that I didn’t find in other mediums or literature or TV. And that was the inspiration, and I like drawing. Then I went to comic school in Sweden, and I realized also that, especially when making this book, I would never be able to write a book in Swedish, you know?

Those kind of comics, especially the DIY ones, were written by mostly young people from big cities. Stories about regular life shitty jobs. It was something I could identify with.

When I started drawing the book, I couldn’t speak Swedish. I just arrived in Sweden, and I couldn’t communicate really well. So the first part of the book is in English, and then at some point during the time I was working on the book, which was three years, I realized that my Swedish got much better and it’s actually better than my English, so I switched to Swedish. So the 50 first pages of the book [as published] in Sweden are in English, and then it turns to Swedish, which also illustrates my journey of learning the language. Something that strikes me is not only I like the medium, but it also enabled me to tell my story in Sweden, in Swedish, because I don’t know if I will ever master Swedish on that level that I could write litera[ry] texts. And where I lack words, I can use pictures and drawings, and that makes it easier for me. MD: One of the things I appreciate about the book is that you talk about how all immigration experiences aren’t the same, and that some people deal with different levels of discrimination based on their backgrounds and their languages. Why was that so important for you to get across? DB: Everything is temporary for us [Millennials]. We don’t experience any security like on economic level, and there are many, many different levels. And then there’s [discrimination], I think many people can identify with, no matter if you’re [a] migrant or not. And then it comes this other level that you mentioned, which is specifically the experience of being a migrant. And, you know, I wanted to tell the story of being a migrant. But I realized that I cannot represent all the people, all the migrants, since, like you said, the stories, the backgrounds – the privileges are so different. I can not just, like, self-proclaim myself being some kind of voice of the migrants. So it was very important for me to say that. And I would say in interviews, “This is a story of a migrant.” I’m telling the story of some other people’s reality also. But I am not the most typical example, also, I’m pretty special. Like, you know, I arrived in Malmö and for example, I got support from a community like this punk community, with some

Swedish people, [who I could] practic[e] the language with, that I could crash at when I lost my job. I got so many different privileges that put me in a different situation than colleagues of mine. And then again, that I’m European, that puts me on another level. So there are different levels of privilege of migration; what we can do sometimes, how can we react, what rights we have. It was also important for me to both be able to say, “This is the story for you, Swedish people, to hear a story of our migrants, us migrants,” but also say, “But it’s not the same story for everybody,” you know. MD: How did you approach writing about your co-workers and other people in these different situations? Was that difficult for you? I know with autobiographies, it’s kind of hard to decide how much of other people’s stories you can tell. Did that come up for you while you were writing? DB: Yes. And you know, that is the hardest part, and I’m glad you’re asking this question. This question comes up all the time, it’s like, “Isn’t it hard to write about your personal life, you know? You’re kind of talking about your love relationships; you’re showing sex; you’re showing yourself, your own flaws.” And I’m like, what? I mean, I’m not ashamed of showing my personal life, so it’s not hard to write about myself. I’m pretty sure that everybody knows that everybody fucks up and everybody has the same experiences, or similar experiences in a way. So, it was not a problem for me to share my personal life. What was a problem is, like you said, it’s a very, very hard thing to decide where I have a right to tell my story that includes other people and where their right to not being depicted in a story starts.

I tried to ask people. Some of my friends were like, “Absolutely, no problem with that,” and they’re just like, “Do your thing. Don’t worry about it. You can use our names.” Some people wanted their names changed. Some people wanted their looks changed. But the hardest one I guess is my partner. The start of our relationship is depicted in Daisy Sprenger | Illustrations Editor

the book, and with him, I had to negotiate a lot of back and forth. I mean, it’s created some few complex situations between us. So it was hard, since he agreed to many things, but then the book came out. Maybe he regretted a little bit and was a bit upset, and it was really hard for me because I couldn’t take it back, you know? Now, he’s fine, and it’s not a big, big thing. I tried to be respectful; in autobiography, you also want to tell your story, and I kind of think the more realistic it is, the better is the story. And I try. Like, you know, of course I have selective memory, like everybody. But I tried to really make this book exactly like everything happened. I don’t alternate facts too much, or even the timeline. Everything’s how it happened. And yeah, it’s hard. You’re not deciding only about like, showing your private life. You are also deciding their life. It can be hard compromising on that. MD: What do you think was the most rewarding aspect of getting the book out? DB: There’s many levels. One thing on a personal level, you know, I come from a working class background. My mom is a cleaner and my father, before he died, he was an electrician. And we were like, kind of poor, and there were never books at home. And I liked kind of hanging out in, you know, music and cultural circles. I was always surrounded by many creative people who do a lot of amazing stuff which I admired, and they inspired me. But sometimes their attitude is like this kind of self confidence where they just think about doing stuff and then do stuff, and a big problem during like, all my life, was that I always had ideas about doing stuff, but I lacked self confidence to do them. I just don’t know how to get stuff done sometimes, because like, I didn’t go to university, I don’t know how to start and end a project. Oh my god. It’s just chaos, I never learned that. So a big achievement for me was to actually sit down and work hard and do a book and be like, oh my god, I’m holding it. It’s like I never thought it would be possible in my life. And it’s, you know, it’s only a comic book, but for me it means a lot that I could [make it]. I could also produce some culture which makes me very happy. And it’s been like a lifelong dream that I didn’t really think would come true. And I made it. So I’m just proud of myself in a way.

And the other aspect of why I’m happy that it happened is that, I think, together with the media attention the book got, with all these talks I’m giving and being invited to different things, different forums to talk about these issues. I wouldn’t say that it’s thanks to my book that these questions started being lifted, but I’m sure that it’s been a part of it. And now the unions have more open discussion about how to work with migrants and so on. So in that way, I hope it helps to move this forward.

And all those articles in this journal that I was cooperating with who was helping me in the book. When my book got published, she wrote like a big, big article. Like it’s at the end of the book that I’m standing in front of, like a newspaper with my face. And she wrote another article like a month ago. And now we started cooperating again and doing some research. And we kind of got a lot of like institutions in Malmö [and] the city [itself ] to control those restaurants. My ex-boss and his brother who owned a lot of restaurants actually got sued in a court for exploitation, you know, like enslaving people. You know, I’m not the person that laughs [...] for somebody being sued in court, or going to jail. But here, it’s like a little personal revenge. This thing’s been going on for so long and nobody could do anything. [There] were no consequences. And, you know, in the process of uplifting the story, putting attention to these places, this kind of situation, these people, by openly telling who they are and what these places are like, now they get to experience some consequences. For me, that’s big. MD: Yeah, for sure. That’s really, really satisfying to hear, just because of how much of a theme it is in the book, and I’m sure in your actual life, to feel disempowered, and to feel like it’s not going to make any difference. Seeing how much of a struggle it was to work with the unions, and everything... It’s nice just personally as a reader to hear that something successful happened. DB: Yeah. Yeah. And it took so long. And, another thing, I’m gonna derail a little bit, but another consequence of me writing this book is that [before,] I was never really interested in union organizing, or like it just seemed so far away from my reality, something maybe from another epoch. I didn’t know anything about that stuff until after my book; I started talking about it. And then I started researching for when I was organizing after reading about it. And then I got involved in this union that was helping me while I was working. So for the past three and a half years, I’ve been an active member of this union. It’s why I do what I did, because I wanted to help people who were in the same situation that I was, and a lot of migrants write to me or write to the union that I’m active in and need help. And they experience a lot of problems of a similar nature that I did. What I’m doing now is I’m helping them to organize and helping them to find out all the laws that their companies broke, or if they didn’t get their wages paid, because in Sweden, as a union representative, you can negotiate with bosses if they break the law before you go to court. So for the last three years, I’ve been negotiating for maybe 12 different people, all migrants, and getting back a lot of their wages. So it’s a kind of activism that I don’t think I would have ended up in if I didn’t experience it myself. But it’s the most rewarding type of activism.

It’s like freedom’s been stolen from them [the workers], and you can do something and help them. And then you’re negotiating with the boss and you make them pay back the money. It’s very, very rewarding to be able to change something for the better and make a big difference for these people. So this is one of the best things that came out of this whole story with me writing this book.

You know, I wanted to tell the story of being a migrant. But I realized that I cannot represent all the people, all the migrants, since [...] the stories, the backgrounds, the privileges are so different. I can not just, like, selfproclaim myself being some kind of voice of the migrants.

MD: That’s amazing. Just to shift a bit, do you have any upcoming projects you’d like to talk about? DB: Yeah! I am working on my new book, it’s something I said, like maybe two years [ago] by now, but I actually started writing. [It’s] more of a continuation to the first book, which is also autobiographical. And I was thinking that I want to go a little bit deeper in this whole temporarity and precarity of the life of millennials. It’s going to be more focused on housing and about moving around. I don’t know how many times you moved, but I moved at least 30 or 40 times in my life. And like, comparing to your parents who maybe moved like twice or three times or five, I don’t know. I’m generalizing, but there is a big, big, generational difference on that. And we’re moving, partly because we want to, but partly because you have to change a job or the rent went up or we don’t have a safe contract or blah, blah, blah. So I want to go deeper into these myths of our generation being spoiled and wanting all this freedom and flexibility, and investigate how many different levels of life are temporary. And this is jobs, it’s housing, it’s a way of looking at relationships with friends and with romantic partners. Like everything, it’s temporary for us. And we’re expected to adapt very quickly to everything. And a lot of young people are not feeling well mentally today. After the Second World War, every generation was better off economically. We are the first one that is just going down economically.

I want to go deeper into what it does to us as humans, to our wellbeing, to our way of thinking, to our mental health. How does it affect us? Here I maybe want to use personal, everyday life situations. But I want the story to be universal in a way also. One of the more rewarding things and unexpected things is that everywhere I go in Europe or in the world and talk about the book, there’s people my age, or even older people come to me and say, “I identify so much with this story because I experienced exactly the same.” And in every city I go to to talk about the book, it’s like everybody tells the same story, “Oh, this neighborhood. We have a cultural center or a café or this bookshop here. But it’s getting gentrified. So, you know, it used to be a migrant neighborhood, but now, everybody is getting pushed out. And we are losing our money for doing cultural projects.” And, you know, it’s like everywhere I go. Everybody has a story, which is very sad. But in a sense that I didn’t expect [was] that the book would be well received outside of Sweden. It makes me happy in the way that people can find comfort in reading it not only where I live, but everywhere. And I hope to do a second project that continues that. I don’t think that what I’m doing is something specifically new because there are a lot of people talking as a voice of the generation. The things I was reading about, people living in shitty apartments and their shitty jobs and shitty relationships. It’s nothing new. But what I was missing in all those stories was always that this kind of description of this kind of life that I used to read in comics or literature was like, okay, we complain, we know it’s shitty, we realize that, but we kind of accept it, or we just know how it is. And I wanted to make something else. I wanted to show that there is solutions to change it, like with union organizing. So that’s the difference. Let’s not only make a story about, “Oh, we’re pretty fucked up,” but also that it’s possible to change things, that they don’t have to be like that. So yeah, I hope to finish that other book and I hope I get that message through, but we’ll see. Hold your thumbs.

I wanted to show that there is solutions to change it, like with union organizing. [...] Let’s not only make a story about, “Oh, we’re pretty fucked up,” but also that it’s possible to change things, that they don’t have to be like that.

MD: I know that definitely came through to me when I was reading it. This past summer I had a close call with a really precarious restaurant experience that was extremely similar. I was reading like, whoa, first of all, this sucks, and secondly, I totally understand this feeling. And then you were like, “Here’s all the stuff that we did and we can do.” So, I mean, you’re already doing that, and I think that’s really amazing. DB: Well, thank you, and it’s so hard, so it makes me happy that you got thinking about that. But also, I’d kind of think it’s annoying to read this kind of political liturgy that tells you exactly what you should do, like, “It’s easy.” I understand things are not easy and not black and white always. So I hope I manage not to be too much like, “Oh, I know all the answers.” I don’t know, you know? But I wanted to show that it’s okay to try.