Disciplining the disobedient Black maternal subject: the assimilatory pedagogies of public suffering and punishment

Abstract

Drawing feminist analyses of the affective work of shame, compassion and pain into dialogue with Black political theory's critique of the ‘ordinary’ spectacle of Black suffering and death, this article theoretically examines the disciplining of Black maternal subjects who behave badly in Nordic public space. Considering media coverage of two separate instances from 2019 where Black mothers are either threatened by the risk of death or succumb to death, this article analyses how the racial logics of national assimilation locate these women as deviantly unassimilable subjects who are swiftly made culpable for the conditions of their own suffering.

In the winter months of 2019, two Black mothers became the subjects of closely followed, and yet conspicuously short-lived, media frenzies in Sweden and Norway. The public attention that these women briefly garnered centres on forms of physical violence they either directly endured or allegedly performed in the presence of their children: in Stockholm, Sweden, a heavily pregnant woman of Congolese descent is brutally apprehended by transport security guards as her five-year-old daughter looks on in tears; in Tromsø, Norway, the lifeless body of a woman recently arrived from Sudan is pulled from sub-zero waters along with the three dead or near-dead daughters she assumedly led into the ocean. The violence is intimately woven with the prospect of death or the event of death itself. In the former case, the assault on the expectant mother threatens the life of the unborn fetus, while in the latter a mother's apparent resolve to bring about her own death is understood to also include the decision to end the lives of her children. In the immediate wake of the cell phone video footage depicting the pregnant woman's perilous restraint in Stockholm having gone viral, the forcefulness of the guards’ actions is decried. Likewise, the recovery of the bodies of the mother and her children from a freezing sea, as recounted by Norwegian media, is swiftly claimed as a ‘tragedy’ astonishingly and inexplicably visited upon the city of Tromsø. Amid such displays of alarm and dismay, however, I contend that furtive aspects of anti-Black racism, anti-immigrant resentment and racist nationalism become visible through the official condemnation and culpability that are ultimately levied against both Black mothers following the public spectacle of their distress.

Commitments to humanitarianism and ideals of non-racism continue to linger nominally within the national imaginaries of Sweden and Norway, as remnants of the 1960s self-conscious push towards social democracy (Dancus, 2014; Nordin, 2005). As such, ongoing and widely celebrated schemes of international aid, peace building, refugee settlement and expansive human rights policies have worked to rehabilitate the national image of these two Nordic countries away from the past mortification of Nazi sympathising and genocidal practices of racial biology ¹ (Olwig, 2011; Dancus, 2014; Hübinette and Lundström, 2014; McIntosh, 2014; Mendes, 2019). Even so, current times also witness rapidly securitised states and reinforced borders (Mbembe, 2016); the prominence of far-right political parties within the Swedish and Norwegian parliaments (Mulinari and Neergaard, 2012; McIntosh, 2014; Rydgren and van der Meiden, 2018; Erlanger and Anderson, 2022); the surge of extremist, anti-immigrant and white supremacist ideologies among the general populace (see: Gardell, 2014; Norwegian Ministry of Culture, 2021); the persistence of Islamophobia (Razack, 2007; Hoffmann and Moe, 2017); and the commonplaceness of African displacement and Black death in the streets of the global city, at the periphery of European states and in the waters of the Mediterranean (Rankine, 2015; Sharpe, 2016; Danewid, 2017). In the midst of such social and political shifts, these once boastfully non-discriminatory Nordic countries are openly restoring formerly clandestine white supremacist principles (Norocel, 2013; McIntosh, 2014). In the stead of a seemingly inexhaustible national philanthropy is a reluctant goodwill that is suspicious of Black and Muslim migrants and refugees in particular, who are perceived to threaten cultural demise and fiscal plunder (see: Mulinari and Neergaard, 2012; Bygnes, 2013; Gardell, 2014; Mulinari and Neergaard, 2014; Hoffmann and Moe, 2017; Mendes, 2019). If such is the ideological terrain upon which the presence of migrants, minorities and non-white subjects is begrudged, I contend that the two African migrant mothers and families in question in this article would have regularly encountered this complex registry of bad feeling well ahead of their publicised anguish.

As I reflect on the difficult, often agonising, publicised and mediated details of these separate cases of Black migrant mothers, I am also contemplating the limits of grievability (Butler, 2009) when it comes to the apprehension of the value and humanity of Black life within an affective public landscape. These women come into public purview through a pageantry of Black pain in a manner that perpetuates the familiar racial logic of discerning Blackness through the exhibition and constancy of Black suffering (see: Hartman, 1997). The incidents from Stockholm and Tromsø also convey that even when Black suffering is indeed evident, caring sentiments can still be closely guarded and stingily dispensed as the Black mothers’ culpability for their own pain is first assumed, formally evaluated and swiftly penalised – as seen in both cases. The criminal investigations and accusations that are levied against these Black mothers in the wake of their very public traumas indicate that to simply suffer is not enough to become a full recipient of public compassion or to be awarded provisional exemption from racist scorn. For this, the sufferer must remain irreproachable and ever pliable to the demands of integration even at the height of distress – which is what these ‘transgressive’ Black migrant mothers fail to be. It is then the putative bad behaviour of the Black mother that is conceived to incite the conditions of her pain, wreak havoc on public decorum and render her deserving of the suffering and penalties that ensue. By attending to some of the public affects surrounding both Nordic happenings, I argue that ideologies of assimilation – and the punishing of non-assimilating subjects – are embedded in the forms of corporeal and symbolic disciplining visited upon Black maternal subjects who are understood to be misbehaving in white-majority public space. I contend that what are initially taken to be extraordinary events of inexplicable violence are, in actuality, familiar scenarios for the racist imagination, which at once anticipates violence and cultural insubordination from unassimilated Black and Black maternal subjects and readily wields violence in order to regulate their perceived waywardness.

Recounting the pained event: Stockholm, Sweden

On the evening of 31 January 2019, Jeanine, ² a beauty salon employee and migrant from the Democratic Republic of Congo, was travelling with her young daughter on the Stockholm subway. Experiencing contractions weeks ahead of her 20 February due date, the expectant mother was journeying to the hospital when confronted by the transportation system's fare control personnel. In Jeanine's retelling of the events that followed, she was issued a fine for fare evasion in the delay between being asked to produce proof of payment and being able to locate her mislaid travel card in a pocket (Anderson, 2019; Henley, 2019). Upset with herself for misplacing the card, Jeanine tosses the hastily administered travel fine onto the floor, only to then be ordered off the train. ‘I wanted to go to the hospital because I was in pain’, Jeanine recalls (Anderson, 2019). Verbally protesting and questioning her expulsion, as her contractions continue, she is ultimately pulled from the subway car by transit security officers who meet the train when it arrives at a stop in the city centre. What takes place throughout Jeanine's removal and arrest is captured in astounding video footage recorded by witnesses and shared across social media. Watching the scene unfold, part of what renders it so thoroughly chilling are the ways that the chaos of pain and fear are made to marry with methodical violence, as the guards manoeuvre to apprehend the recalcitrant Black female body. In the brute work of ejecting and restraining she who has been forewarned to be defiant of transit bylaws and non-compliant with orders to exit the train, the episode is awash with indifference to both her condition and her cries of agony, which penetrate the air of the underground. To put it simply, because Jeanine is perceived to be indefensible in her refusal, she becomes indefensible from the pain of the assault.

The details of the violent encounter are as follows. ³ Two white male guards are stationed behind a seated Jeanine who is barely visible as they vigorously and persistently tug on her arms. By continually reinforcing their footing and using the power of their body weight, they haul her to standing. The wailing of an unseen child bursts forth as Jeanine is braced on either side of her body by the guards. As she is led out of the train and onto the platform, Jeanine looks over her shoulder and calls out to her sobbing child, ‘Come! Come!’. In the tumult of the scene, fellow passengers stop to observe or walk past, the ticket control personnel look on from a distance and an unidentified woman hurriedly guides Jeanine's child off the train. Momentarily soothed as she clings to her mother's waist, the child's screams reignite as the guards use their weight once more to propel Jeanine, stomach forward, onto a pedestrian bench in the pursuit of handcuffing her hands behind her back. Amidst the din and havoc, we hear the distinct thud of Jeanine's head hitting the tiled wall and her own screams begin to meet those of her daughter. In a choreographed tactic of arrest, one guard takes a wide legged seat onto the bench with his back pressed firmly against Jeanine's rear as the other hovers over her body, repeatedly wrenching her arms until he has placed her hands in restraints. Jeanine's desperate shrieks punctuate this process of bodily contortion. Strikingly suggestive of labour contractions, she cries out in steady intervals as the weight of the guard presses her pregnant stomach ever more stoutly into the unremitting hardness of the bench.

From the moment that Jeanine is lifted from her seat on the subway car and comes into the full view of the camera, the fact of her pregnancy is irrefutable. In the tussle of apprehension her blouse has ridden up, exposing the supple roundness of a belly that is heavy with child and that bounces with each jerk and manipulation of the mother's captured body. In her own words, Jeanine describes the physical and visceral anxiety of being pinioned: ‘They took me by the arm very hard … They forced me out. They put me on the bench, with my stomach down. One of them put their knee on my back and I lost my breath … I was afraid that my baby was going to die in my belly’ (Anderson, 2019; emphasis mine). Alongside the agony of restraint and the terror of the five-year-old child who bears witness looms the nightmarish prospect of death to the unborn as a repercussion of the struggle to remain on the train and to get out from under the vice of a ruthlessly apprehending authority. The cruel irony of the situation is that concern for the pregnancy is what motivates the journey that ends with injury and the possibility of miscarriage. The episode eventually concludes off-camera, with Jeanine being rushed by ambulance to the hospital (Anderson, 2019; Henley, 2019) and with the police and transit authority opening investigations into the actions of the arresting guards (BBC, 2019; Cuddy, 2019). What remains uncertain, however, is if the guards are investigated because the arrest is understood as an inhumane happening that is in principle insufferable, or if the investigation is a pacifying response to the public condemnation by activists and the embarrassment of international media attention that quickly follows the dissemination of the video across social media (Henley, 2019; Local, 2019a). In other words, it is unclear whether the investigation is in the interests of justice for and recognition of the violated body, or if the judicial measures are meant to secure Sweden's image of humanitarian goodness in the viral glare of international scrutiny. It is the motivations and implications of a public and institutional response that I put to question in what follows.

The ordinariness of suffering: Black women and Black maternity

To simply note the fact of Black suffering is not in itself akin to seeking this suffering’s end or opposing its protraction. In this same vein, to express indignation in the moment of observing scenes of Black affliction – such as that experienced by Jeanine – does not mean one is participating in the ‘material transformation’ of the systemic conditions that perpetuate the degradation of Black life (Patel, 2016: 83). As scholars of Afro-pessimism make clear, for the white imagination there is much that is familiar and thus dismissible about Black pain (Rankine, 2015; Sharpe, 2016) within an ‘antiblack world’ that routinely denies Black sentience (Sexton, 2011: 25–28). Black suffering is treated as a pointedly unremarkable occurrence visited upon the ordinarily damaged, disposable, violable and ‘unsurviving’ dark Other (McKittrick, 2006; Philip, 2008). Furthermore, as Hartman (1997) convincingly explains, even in the event that the traumatic moment is acknowledged, the anguish of the Black subject often becomes spectacularised and theatricalised through voyeurism. In the act of looking upon or revisiting scenes of torment in the way of the voyeur, pain remains cohesive with the qualities ascribed to Black existence (Blue, 2018). In Jeanine's case, Black agony is indeed on exhibition and there are people there to look as the spectacle of public violence unfolds through the theatre of Black pain. And, of course, a recording is made and circulated to a wider public audience who respond viscerally across social media. Diverging here from Afro-pessimist anticipations of indifference to the violated Black body, it is notable that the painful event becomes part of broader public knowledge and upset because of its virtual audience and their reactions to what they see. Even so, the scene of violence itself is one that unfolds without explicit public intervention or interruption in the moment of its happening. Nobody comes to stand between the body of the Black mother and the guards in the interests of suspending her pain; the guards have their way with her as the other passengers look on – even if what they are feeling is outrage. In short, it becomes difficult to disentangle the inert looking from the intrigued gaze of the voyeur (see: Morson, 2013). Are the other passengers on the train and later on the subway platform incapacitated by shock in the face of an unconscionable and traumatic event? Or are they enthralled by the theatre of violence, by the familiarity of Blackness behaving badly and/or by their agreement with the institutional apparatuses used to regulate public deviance? While ascertaining a decisive answer to these particular questions is beyond the purview of this article, I would note two salient occurrences at the time of the arrest that interfere with the inert looking: 1) an Afro-Swedish activist, Lovette Jallow, records and circulates the video and goes on to speak out publicly against the racism inherent to the arrest, in a manner that illustrates the consequentiality of Black suffering for another Black woman, who would herself be subject to anti-Black racism; and 2) an unidentified woman acts by leading the crying daughter off the train in the midst of a scene dominated by paralyses and quiet looking.

Within the context of Sweden, the exploitability and familiarity of Black suffering dates back to: 1) the mercantile enterprise Afrikakompaniet (the Africa Company), established in the 1600s with the explicit objective of profiteering from African enslavement; 2) plantation slavery exercised on the Caribbean island of St. Barthélemy from 1874 to 1878 (Ghose, 2008); and 3) the spectacle of Africans in human zoos common into the early 1900s (Nordin, 2005; Mendes, 2019). Such cruel preoccupations continue into the Swedish present through performances of blackface. Hereby colonial reveries of African capture and torture are indulged within some of the largest institutions of the public domain (Hübinette and Räterlinck, 2014). ⁴ The racial logics that at once decide that Black pain is habitual and Black life is expendable also inform the manner in which Black womanhood and Black women's fertility come to be assessed. The ordinariness of the suffering or dying Black woman becomes particularly evident through rates of Black maternal mortality.

For over a decade, scholars have noted the prevalence of unfavourable reproductive outcomes – including death – for women from sub-Saharan Africa who give birth in Sweden (Högberg, 2004; Esscher et al., 2014). By global standards, Sweden's low maternal mortality rates seem to indicate that the country is particularly hospitable to gestating life. However, Black women in Sweden disproportionally meet untimely deaths during pregnancy or in the critical period directly thereafter (Elebro et al., 2007).

While it has been suggested that racial discrimination potentially impacts the standard of care that Black pregnant women receive (Högberg, 2004), the supposed failure of these migrants to assimilate into normative Swedish values is also presented by some as a tenable explanation for the reproductive complications they may experience (Högberg, 2004; Elebro et al., 2007). Following this logic, the atypicality of maternal mortality in Sweden becomes explicable when it is the unassimilated Black woman (and the foetus that comes from this body) that numbers among the dead and dying. If Black suffering is commonplace and Black maternal death is ordinary, Jeanine's experiences on the Stockholm subway are consistent with the violences to which Black migrant womanhood is banally subject.

To approach assimilation as a matter of life or death reflects a type of deductive reasoning that marries well with both the ideologies of Sweden's normative national imaginary and the grievances belaboured by right-leaning political parties. Notably, the increasingly prominent far-right, anti-immigrant, once-Nazi affiliate parliamentary party Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden Democrats) warns that incautious humanitarianism, mass migration, multiculturalism and cultural dissimilitude are the variables corroding the integrity of the Swedish welfare system (Norocel, 2013; Norocel et al., 2022). Within this racist nationalist ideology is encompassed the conviction that non-white migrants are inherently culturally incompatible with and divorced from the genuine character, values and history of the Swedish nation (see: Mulinari and Neergaard, 2014). As such, the heightened risk of fatality for pregnant Black women in Sweden can be framed as an unsurprising result that mortally illustrates the incompatibility of Blackness and Black migration with Sweden. Unsurviving Black life can be used to crudely evidence the impossibilities and inevitable failings of multiculturalism; the intractability of Black women's alien wombs; as well as the intrinsic cultural and physical incompatibility of African migrants with white-majority Swedish space (Mendes, 2020). Building on Black feminist analyses of anti-Black racism (particularly the work of Sharpe, 2016), I have often considered the racist fear and dread that pummels the Black womb which is begrudged for unleashing – with rapid succession – the unvaluable excess that is more Black life (see: Mendes, 2019, 2020). Enduring readings of Black cis-women's bodies as ‘hyperreproductive and hyperfertile’ (Nash, 2021: 170) linger across a global white supremacy in what Christina Sharpe (2016) call's ‘slavery's wake’ (2016: 15). Expanding on the analyses of Sharpe and her Black feminist contemporaries who interrogate the racial paradox whereby both Black death and the reproduction of Black life are treated as imminent (see: Roberts, 1997; Nash, 2021), I interpret the actions of the guards in Stockholm through the same devastating rationale, which would posit that even if one Black fetus is lost, there will surely be others. The risk of injury rests not with the gestating Black maternal subject who can simply spawn more Black life but with the welfare state which will have to contend with the inevitable proliferation and chaos of defiant migrants. The case study from Sweden thus presents one example of how these racist logics are operationalised in a Nordic context.

The culpability of the sufferer and the unacceptability of refusal

Similar to the ways that the unassimilated Black woman is held culpable for her perinatal death, Jeanine is regarded as reproachable for her pain. In response to inquiries made by national and international news organisations, the Stockholm Public Transport (SL) admits that the cell phone video reveals that the guards were ‘too forceful’ (Henley, 2019; Local, 2019a) and did not handle things ‘appropriately’ (BBC, 2019), and that Jeanine's removal had ‘the very disturbing consequence of her being pushed down on a bench’ (Anderson, 2019). Despite these concessions, what repeats throughout the dialogue that surrounds the incident is the degree to which Jeanine too is at fault and is to be held accountable for her seizure, including through legal indictment (Anderson, 2019; Henley, 2019). The SL authorities and Stockholm police cite acts of resistance and refusal on Jeanine's part to apportion her guilt. Accused of not paying her subway fare (i.e. the first refusal) and then officially investigated for charges of ‘violent resistance’ against a public servant (Anderson, 2019; Henley, 2019), Jeanine doubles as the victim and the aggressor through the intolerability of her insubordination.

Engaging with the politics of compassion in the event of being confronted with another's suffering, Lauren Berlant allows that pain may ‘normatively’ register as a ‘pre-ideological’ (2004: 10) experience that universally signals human membership and compels the responsibility of the witness. The ‘moral elevation’ of such fellow feelings nevertheless can be swiftly ‘reversed’ (Berlant, 2004: 10). Spectators to suffering, according to Berlant, estimate that ‘some pain is more compelling than some other pain’ (2004: 10). By way of assessing which painful occurrences ‘deserve attention’, the spectator begins to interrogate ‘the scale of suffering, the measures of justice, or the fault of the sufferers’ (Berlant, 2004: 10). The exhibition of mortal vulnerability may accordingly be met with an ‘aversion’ to the suffering Other as the spectator discounts the gravity of pain's effects or else, in Berlant's words, ‘drown[s] it out with pedantically shaped phrases or carefully designed apartheids’ (2004: 9). The extent to which Jeanine's suffering is deserving of recognition and justice is indeed tested and depreciated through the pedantics used to regulate public space. It is not accepted that because she is human, Jeanine should be protected from inhumane treatment regardless of the alleged infraction. It is instead through the pain that follows her acts of public refusal that she is made acutely aware of the refusal of her humanity as grasped in her assertion ‘I don't think a white woman would have to go through this. I was treated like an animal’ (Anderson, 2019). Jeanine's blameworthiness is pivotal to the interpretation of the event, the distribution or withholding of caring feelings and the acknowledgement or denial of the Black mother's membership to humanity.

Given that the official narrative insists that Jeanine is ‘caught without a valid ticket’ (BBC, 2019; Cuddy, 2019; Henley, 2019; emphasis mine), it is clear that in this refusal to follow transit bylaws she is already a misbehaving subject who, in being ‘caught’, is exposed to the seizure ahead of her physical apprehension by the guards. The intensity of her misconduct increases through: 1) her impertinence to ‘grow angry’ (Anderson, 2019); 2) her ‘refus[al] [of] a penalty fare’ (Cuddy, 2019); 3) her ‘refus[al]’ to exit the train ‘according to our rules’ (BBC, 2019); 4) her audacity to ‘scream and make resistance’ when detained by the guards; and 5) the indefensibility of ‘disturbing the [public] order’ (Henley, 2019). The violence experienced is less compelling when the sufferer can be accused of both inciting the conditions of her torment and perpetuating violence through the very act of resisting harm. Even if obliged to acknowledge that excessive force was used, the pain of this Black woman and the lethal danger posed to the foetus do not take precedence over the affront suffered by the apprehending authority who had to wrangle with the disobedient Black female body. By daring to withhold her body, Jeanine becomes indefensible from the violence that is wielded against it (Dolin, 2019). The dangers posed to Swedish values by the unassimilated incompatible migrant can once more be confirmed as Jeanine is perceived to inflict injury on the rules and decorum of Sweden's most public of spaces.

Within two months of the incident, the state prosecutor assigned to the case against the guards, Lucas Eriksson, decided that excessive force was not used, released the arresting guards of all charges and reiterated to the Swedish news media that the onus for the incident lies with Jeanine, since ‘[i]t's the woman's behaviour that escalates the situation’ (Ibbetson, 2019; Local, 2019b). Going on, Eriksson further declared in his comments to the media that the guards had ‘kindly ask[ed] her to leave the train’ (Ibbetson, 2019; Local, 2019b). Kindness then becomes a part of the official narrative of a scandalising apprehension in a manner that encourages an interpretation of the pregnant Black mother through antithesis. That is, her unruly behaviour exhibits an unkindness as it rebuffs the kindness of the guards. In this affective formulation, it is not Jeanine who suffers injury but the goodwill of the guards.

Criminalising the Black mother: Tromsø, Norway

An empty baby carriage is spotted by a passer-by on a coastal path in the northern Norwegian city of Tromsø on the evening of 2 December 2019 (Bøhler, 2020; Buggeland, 2020). Footprints in the snow lead towards the icy shores of the Norwegian sea. An investigating police officer later pulls the unconscious bodies of one woman and three children from the freezing waters, found ‘eight to ten meters’ from the shoreline (Eggen et al., 2019). A twenty-seven-year-old woman and her seven-year-old daughter are pronounced dead shortly thereafter at Tromsø's university hospital (Eriksen et al., 2019). Two surviving children are flown to the Oslo university hospital Rikshospitalet (The National Hospital), of which one, four years old, passes away within three days of treatment in the critical care unit. An eighteen-month-old infant, then on life support, remains as the sole survivor of those retrieved from the sea. Exposure to extreme cold and drowning are identified as the cause of death for the woman and two children (Eggen et al., 2019). What led this family to be in those inhospitable waters quickly becomes the stuff of local speculation, media preoccupation and police inquiry. Unlike the case from Stockholm, this case did not make international news, although it caused a stir in Norwegian news media.

The details released by the local police reveal that the deceased woman (still yet unnamed) moved to Norway from Sudan with the two eldest children in 2017 as part of the family reunification programme available to refugees (Eggen et al., 2019; Bøhler, 2020). The father of the children had arrived in Norway in 2015 and was at his place of employment at the time that his young family entered the fjord (Bøhler, 2020). A general sense of incomprehensibility permeates the narrating of the incident by Tromsø political representatives and neighbours (Eriksen et al., 2019). Yet the criminality of the deceased mother is expeditiously proposed and the charge of homicide is promptly brought against her. Tromsø's chief of police emphatically asserts that ‘all possibilities’ are under consideration but that murder-suicide is the ‘most conceivable scenario’ (Eggen et al., 2019), ⁵ a conviction punctuated by plans to bring the criminal case before the Attorney General (Schjetne, 2020). The woman's corpse is then indicted for second-degree murder and attempted murder. Not only is the presumptive guilt of the Black mother invoked to explain her death and that of her children but the legal reprimand seeks to punish her symbolically in the hereafter. The provocation for death is elusive, yet her criminality is almost immediately intelligible.

The guilty and the guiltless: the incomprehensibility of Black pain

At the same time that the dead mother is indicted for homicide, a public recites its own blamelessness so that shock overlays with absolution. The incident is explicitly claimed by officials as a ‘tragic event for everyone involved’ (Eriksen et al., 2019), even as accountability for the tragedy is ascribed solely to the deceased. The guilt of the mother is thus plausible while the guiltlessness of a surrounding community is indisputable. Explaining that the family had not come to the attention of local authorities prior to this incident, Tromsø's mayor, Gunnar Wilhelsen, emphasises that ‘[t]hey were an ordinary reunion family’, and goes on to assert that ‘[s]ince we are not aware that there has been anything special about this family, we do not see that we in the municipality could have done anything differently; (Eriksen et al., 2019). ⁶ Similarly, a neighbour is quoted as stating ‘We’ve tried to think if there is something we should have seen, but I cannot think of anything. It is absolutely unbelievable what has happened’ (Eriksen et al., 2019). ⁷ The statements indicate that because the family was not suspected of provoking danger or being subject to it the members of the municipality are not answerable for the violence that occurred in their midst, even as they can insist on feelings of devastation. Borrowing the words of Candace Vogler, it can be said that the city is touched by a suffering it ‘did not cause and that would not otherwise touch [its] li[ves]’ (2004: 30). The city is astounded but innocent, mystified but not responsible.

Writing on the ambivalences of ‘bad feeling’, Sara Ahmed contends that shame – particularly that felt by the members of a nation – has the twinned potential to recognise injustice ‘committed against others’ and to lay an affective grounds for ‘nation building’ (2005: 72). In other words, feeling shameful establishes a sense of national collectivity as members bind together through this affective acknowledgment of what went wrong in the past and the shared sense of ‘meaning well’ (Ahmed, 2005: 77) now and into the future. As Ahmed argues, ‘feeling bad’ can work to restore a national identity as members of the nation are able to ‘feel better’ (2005: 77) as they move away from a collectively binding shame towards a similarly unifying reaffirmation of the national ideals (e.g. goodness, equality, multiculturalism). One of the implications of a national identity reconstituting through the apprehension of injustice, however, is that the emotionality of the national subject is centred since the suffering of the injured party simply serves to reaffirm the nation. The citizenry can be imagined as reciting in chorus: it is not your injury that matters so much as how our feelings about your injury allow us to see ourselves and see each other. Attending to these affective dimensions of self-condemnation, I must emphasise that my critique of Tromsø's apparent refusal of public accountability is not meant to demand that shame should be present where it currently is not. At the same time, I do note that the exiling of the drowning from collective culpability enacts a similar reaffirmation of Norway's national ideals of goodness, decency and unequalled capacity for humanitarianism (McIntosh, 2015). That is, members of Tromsø's community can be confirmed as ideal national subjects and ‘well-meaning individuals’ (Ahmed, 2005: 77) as they unify through the bad feeling of shock and tragedy even as the deceased woman's lethal acts remain isolated from the municipality's range of moral liability (see: Wynter, 1994). Nevertheless, my intentions here are neither to advocate for the innocence of this Black mother nor to make speculations on whether or not she did indeed lead her children to death in the sea. Rather, what I see in the denial of local accountability directly coincides with what makes the incident at once affectively incomprehensible and yet also criminally intelligible. To put it succinctly, the issue at hand is not the refusal to feel responsible for another's suffering but rather the refusal to understand their suffering.

In her much-cited work The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry expounds on the sensory solitariness of pain whereby ‘one's sense of one's own reality and the reality of other persons’ (1985: 1) endures a radical break. As part of this somatic isolation, Scarry contends that ‘for the person in pain’, the sensation is ‘“effortlessly” grasped’ as an ‘incontestabl[e] and unnegotiabl[e]’ truth of their present (1985: 2). The certain feeling of ‘having pain’ can then communicate what it means to ‘have certainty’. For the person who is not immediately subject to pain and is ‘outside the sufferer's body’, it is ‘effortless’ to not comprehend the ache of their fellow human and to be completely ignorant of its presence (Scarry, 1985: 2). While the pained body comes to know ‘certainty’, the person met with the account of another's pain experiences ‘what it is “to have doubt”’ – that is, doubt of the ‘existence’ of the other person's pain or even ‘den[ial of] its existence’ altogether (Scarry, 1985: 2). Returning to the mayor of Tromsø's conviction that the Sudanese family in question is merely ‘an ordinary reunion family’, I ask if there is in fact anything ordinary about being refugees given that one has been compelled by hostile conditions to abandon all that is familiar and, in this case, restart life on the inhospitable fringes of a white-dominated foreign environment. I instead propose that what occurs through the municipality's reaction is another illustration of the ordinariness of Black pain and vulnerability to violence. As a nation, Norway has longstanding humanitarian involvement and financial interests on the continent of Africa, from which it has received refugees and asylum seekers for decades – most recently from East and Central Africa (McIntosh, 2015). In her ethnographic analyses of the Afro-Norwegian presence and experiences, Laurie McIntosh (2015: 319) notes through the reflections of an interlocutor that ‘Africa in need’ is part of what makes the continent and its peoples comprehensible to a normative white Norwegian imaginary. When it comes to Sudan and the Sudanese in particular, Norway has a prized relationship as a major mediator in the extensive negotiations for peace in Sudan from the mid-1980s up until the eventual signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005 (Kelleher, 2006). The prevalence of chaos and conflict and the need for its careful humanitarian management thus informs Norway's political understanding and relationship to Sudan and its people. In this way, the commonplaceness of Sudanese displacement and Norway's role in managing this population becomes one of the ‘certainties’ of Sudanese or African existence for Norwegians, so that nothing appears abnormal about a Sudanese family having to navigate the conditions of refugeeness.

The murderous mother

Norway's historical legacy includes significant periods of subjection to imperial dominion, as a territory long seized by Denmark and then brought under Swedish rule in 1814 through a forced union at the near end of the Napoleonic Wars (Lantto, 2010; McIntosh, 2015; Mendes, 2019). In response to a past of prolonged foreign control, Norwegian nationalism is encoded with emancipatory sentiment that romantically pays homage to the country's ‘unshackl[ing]’ from Danish and Swedish influence and power (Dancus, 2014: 124). At the same time, a historical record of prolonged imperial subjugation and later Nazi occupation – and the national sense of wounded innocence that this sustains – is used disingenuously to obscure Norwegians’ past participation in colonial exploits and popular support for Nazism (Gullestad, 2005; McIntosh, 2015). Interwoven with this history is a provincial self-image, which McIntosh succinctly describes as follows: ‘Norway's historic self-perception is that of a small country: a land of poor peasants, isolated from each other by fjords and forests; a land without an internal elite or an imperial or oppressive history … a country therefore innocent of the crimes and legacies of colonialism’ (2015: 312). Similar to the racist inheritances of Sweden, however, Norway's magnanimity for international aid and ‘conflict mediation’ (Olwig, 2011; Thun, 2012; McIntosh, 2015) directly follows less-flattering records of complicity in colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade as profiteers, explorers and missionaries actively capitalising on Danish colonial enterprise (Gullestad, 2005: 43), genocidal assimilation policies targeting the Sámi and Kven Indigenous peoples along with Roma and Jewish populations, official endorsement of racist biology and eugenics, as well as the establishment of the Norwegian Nazi Party (Dancus, 2014: 125). Despite the electoral and parliamentary successes of the right-wing populist Framstegspartiet (The Progress Party) and the staggering examples of lethal white supremacist violence and mass murder stretching from the last decade into the COVID-19 pandemic (see: Holroyd, 2021; McIntosh, 2014; Norwegian Ministry of Culture, 2021), Norwegian political debate remains evasive on the issues of race and racism (Bygnes, 2013). Within Norwegian public discourse, any structural or systemic forms of racial violence and discrimination are instead isolated to the extreme, unprecedented and thus extraordinary ‘malicious’ acts of ‘specific individuals’ and thus are nullified by the general conviction that ‘[ra]cism is not considered to be a relevant issue in the Norwegian context’ (Thun, 2012: 49). Even so, part of what the contemporary examples of white supremacy and colonialism in Norway gesture towards is the deeply held conviction that Norwegianness is fundamentally signified through whiteness so that members of the nation are very much orientated by race and by what Marianne Gullestad calls ‘the myt[h] [of] Norwegian homogeneity’ (2005: 43; see also: McIntosh, 2015). A sense of racial and cultural ‘sameness (likhet)’ is part of what orientates and unifies Norwegians as a people whereby whiteness and Norwegianness become self-referential categories (Thun, 2012: 47). Even as egalitarian and humanitarian values are officially cultivated, so too is this sense of sameness which is guarded doggedly through the regulation of the border and the demand that immigrants integrate.

As Gullestad explains, ‘minorities who complain about racialisation and racism are often seen as aggressive: “too sensitive”, “too thin skinned” or “obsessed by skin colour”’ (2005: 29). Going on, Gullestad notes that experiences of racism are commonly ‘trivialised by some form of denial’ and are rarely recognised publicly in Norwegian media; even so, ‘the word racism’ itself is frequently present in public debate, including in instances where Norway's anti-racist imaginary is passionately defended – making for a difficult paradox (2005: 30, 43). Amid the sustained national conviction that Norway is at once tolerant and uniquely humanitarian, examples persist of the resentment felt by white Norwegians towards the intrusion of foreigners into a long-prized (though, mythical) racial and cultural homogeny. One such illustration extends this racial anxiety even beyond the boundaries of the nation, namely Norway's cabinet ministers enjoining the ruling bodies of other European nations to ‘simply let migrants and refugees drown in the Mediterranean’ (Bangstad, 2019). Significant in itself, this also raises the question as to whether the death by drowning of refugees in Tromsø fulfils racist wet dreams – thus being reflective of ‘the national unease’ that surrounds ‘the presence of non-Europeans and [the] visibility of “black” bodies’ (McIntosh, 2015: 320). It is nearly redundant to then specify that anti-Black racism and the race-based experiences of people of African descent in Norway largely do not hold public attention or enter public consciousness (McIntosh, 2015: 310). During Norway's report to the United Nations Human Rights Office on ‘the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination’, the country's provisions emphatically decline to engage in the UN's International Decade of People of African Descent. The rationale given by Norway for this omission is the concern that such attention to anti-Black discrimination will unduly ‘disregar[d] other forms of discrimination and intolerance’ (OHCHR, 2015). By the terms of this flawed logic, attending to bias threatens to generate bias. If the particularities of Black peoples’ experiences of racism merit neither political attention nor social redress, it is not difficult to grasp why a fatal event – conceivably provoked by the very conditions of anti-Black racism – is baffling to a popular Norwegian imaginary. In denying the singularity and urgency of anti-Black racism in Norway, what can be discerned is not only the passive effortlessness of being ignorant to another's pain but also the active cultivation of ignorance that predicts that events that result from such trauma are always inexplicable. Placing Tromsø within the larger racial context of Norway, what I argue here is that the reluctance to acknowledge the prevalence of racism in general and the impact of anti-Black racism in particular within Norwegian policy, politics and public debate (OHCHR, 2015) is what allows for any racial pain that the drowned mother felt to be effortlessly incomprehensible. The prospect that the psychic pain of racism in a white supremacist Norway can feel as intolerable as living in a conflict zone conveys, for the dominant Norwegian imaginary, what it is to have doubt.

Child welfare, victim compensation and the corruptions of the bad Black mother

The criminal charges are ultimately dropped on 11 September 2020 after the defence lawyer appointed to the deceased woman petitions that her death makes the homicide case inadmissible (Buggeland, 2020; iTromsø, 2020; NRK, 2023). What is curious about the initial incrimination of the dead, however, is that one of the leading incentives propelling the criminal proceedings is to secure compensation and benefits for the surviving child(ren). In 1976, Norway instituted a compensation programme for victims of violent crimes, following a scheme initiated by Britain in 1964 and later emulated by other European nations (Buck, 2005). As Katharina Buck explains, the general intention of these victim compensation programmes is to ‘award money to crime victims where no other means of redress is available’ (2005: 149). Within the context of the Norwegian criminal court system, the awarded compensation is to be paid directly by the offender, or can otherwise be collected by the victim from the Norwegian state through the ‘Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority’ (Kontoret for Voldsoffererstatning) if the case is acquitted (Todd-Kvam, 2019: 1483). In instances where the victim is a minor harmed by their parent or guardian, the compensation authority's official procedure is to ‘pay the compensation amount to the State Trustee in the minor's county’ (Kontoret for Voldsoffererstatning, 2023). As such, both the state and the Tromsø municipality would be involved in the management of compensation for the surviving daughter. Moreover, because victims have the right to claim compensation from the state regardless of the outcome of criminal proceedings, this indicates that a basic goal in this case is to establish the near-drowning as a violent crime so that the child is recognised as a victim who is eligible to collect compensation. The apparatus of the legal system can then go to work to claim monetary retribution on the child's behalf. In other words, privileges and protections are sought for the child through the official indictment of the mother for murder. In this warped legal formulation, it becomes in the best interests of the remaining daughter to have had and to have survived a homicidal parent.

Up until this point, my analysis has sought to demonstrate the refusal to attend to Black women's suffering. It is then striking that the official recognition of Black injury and victimhood in relation to the child reinforces the culpability and badness of the Black mother. Accounting for the impact of ‘post-racial’ rhetoric on the trope of the bad Black mother, Nicole Rousseau (2013: 461) notes that the familiar irresponsibility and criminality of the welfare-dependent mother has undergone a cultural shift. As a phenomenon of post-racial liberalism and meritocracy, representations of the Black mother have recast her as a ‘psychopath’ (Rousseau, 2013: 461). Herein the mother is ‘no longer ignorant’ of the harm done to her children by others but is the ‘perpetrator’ of this violence and an instructor on ‘antisocial norms’ (Rousseau, 2013: 461–462). The remarkably difficult task left for the child is to ‘surviv[e] a “bad” Black mother’ (Rousseau, 2013: 462). Although these crude characterisations of Black motherhood emerge from the political contexts of North America, a similar capacity for debasement accredited to the Black mother is palpable in the Tromsø case study, and in documented approaches to child welfare in Norway. The child welfare system and child welfare laws in Norway are bound up with the services of the welfare state at large and modelled on the ‘color-blind and culture-blind’ edict of Norwegian law (Križ and Skivenes, 2010: 2637). Investigations of child welfare workers’ discernment of the structural inequities faced by ‘black and minority ethnic parents’ in Norway observe that: 1) racism is not acknowledged as a concern; 2) parents are made ‘responsible for their children's integration’; 3) black and ethnic minority parents are ‘blame[d]’ for their ‘lack of culture and system competencies’; and 4) it is expected that these parents ‘proactively handl[e] the challenges they encounter’ (e.g. linguistic, cultural) to safeguard their children's future prospects of being equal members of Norwegian society (Križ and Skivenes, 2010: 2643–2646). If the misguided principle of colour-blindness pairs with the admonishing insistence that migrant Black and other people of colour integrate for the benefit of their children, the elements that comprise the ‘badness’ of the Black mother in Tromsø can begin to be deduced. For one, the older configuration of the bad Black mother already appears through her habitual reliance on the bounty of the welfare state as a refugee, while her routine ingratitude is exhibited through the thanklessness of suicide. Notwithstanding the fact that the Sudanese mother was attending local programmes made available by refugee services (Eggen et al., 2019), this gesture of integration dissolves in the psychopathic act of murder, which either eliminates or jeopardises her children's prospects of leading integrated lives in Norway. It is through this act that the Black migrant mother fails in the designated task of handling the challenges she encounters. In refusing such a duty, she chooses instead to succumb to the deathly grip of the sea and guides her children not in cultural competency but in antisocial norms. In light of these factors, I argue that the charges of homicide brought against the dead align with the conventional derision of the corrupt and corrupting bad Black mother.

In the midst of official efforts to fiscally secure the welfare of the surviving child through the indictment of the unsurviving mother, the near-absence of her father becomes conspicuous. As a grieving spouse and parent faced with immense loss, this Sudanese man is made marginally present through the media coverage, which merely notes his gratitude towards both a compassionate public (Buggeland, 2020) and the police for ‘do[ing] such a thorough job in the case’ (iTromsø, 2020). ⁸ As of July 2020, the investigation into the case by the Tromsø police is complete and the Attorney General, Lars Fause, announces his decision to close the case at a press conference in September 2020 (iTromsø, 2020). It is in these remarks that Lause also declares that the father is fully cleared of suspicion as an accomplice in his late wife's still-inexplicable act of treachery (iTromsø, 2020; see also: Bøhler, 2020). The father's freedom from homicidal suspicion is, in part, bound up with his being at work at the time of the drownings (Bøhler, 2020), which becomes tied to his emergence as a likely assimilating subject. According to Norway's official immigrant integration goals and statistics, integrating migrants are committed to the industriousness, ‘self-sufficiency’ and social contribution normatively signified through employment (Ministry of Children, Equality and Social Inclusion, 2015; Søholt and Lynnebakke, 2015; Statistics Norway, 2020; Johannesen and Appoh, 2021). Being at work therefore keeps this man out of trouble and he is also not trouble because he works. To further elucidate this point, I return to Gullestad, who explains that ‘when “immigrants” are mentioned in the Norwegian mass media, the dominant perspective assumes that they are a burden to Norwegian society; the everyday, non-sensational discrimination many immigrants suffer is barely mentioned’ (2005: 29). If, as Gullestad conveys, immigrants are popularly suspected of over-burdening the welfare state, and ‘public debate’ scrutinises ‘immigrants and refugees’ with the presumption that they are ‘ruthlessly exploiting the welfare system’ (Olwig, 2011: 184), and at the same time Africans ⁹ have the highest numbers of unemployment among all immigrant populations (Johannesen and Appoh, 2021), I contend that the father is revealed as not being this kind of immigrant through his verified industriousness. And yet, his relief from these particular forms of anti-immigrant resentment, along with his innocence from criminal acts, arrives after such great devastation.

Witnessing Black maternal love

Amidst the racist readings that condemn the Black mother for her badness and insubordination, I conclude this article by turning to the untold affects that can be witnessed in the anguished events, particularly that of love. What I propose is that expressions of love and care on the part of either of the Black maternal subjects discussed in this article can be discerned within the very same moments that a public perceives deviance. To be able to infer that Black maternal love is present in the instance of violence, it is imperative to reflect upon slavery's cruel inheritances. Black feminist scholarship has long interrogated the affective and ontological conditions of capture for the enslaved Black female subject as well as the siege of Black reproduction through the dehumanising mechanisms of the plantation, whereby the productions of the Black womb were capitalised on (Hartman, 2016; Sharpe, 2016). At the same time, slavery's archives also reveal how reproduction is imbued with Black women's oppositions, including through the illicit instrument of death. Abortions, infanticide and homemade contraceptives were all in the repertoire of resistance deployed by women in revolt against the extortion of their fertile bodies and in refusal of the life of bondage preordained for their offspring (Millward, 2015; Sharpe, 2016). The enslaved mother's resolve to extinguish burgeoning life thus reveals when physical death is preferable to the ‘unliveability’ of social death. Part of what becomes discernible here is how the willing of perinatal death performs an act of care by saving the child from the promised tyranny of the plantation. The case studies from Norway and Sweden take place in slavery's afterlife. Although the precise forces that seek to control the reproducing Black female body have altered and are shaped by national nuance, the subjugation of Black life under white supremacy continues, as do women's tactics of resistance across the African Diaspora.

‘Rescued’ from the perils of civil unrest as Sudanese refugees to Norway, mortal legacies of resistive Black maternal love lend themselves to the interpretation that the distressed Black mother performs her own form of rescue through the relief of death. Supposing that the contempt held for refugees and immigrants, alongside the normatively dismissible degradations of anti-Black racism, are intimately grasped during those early years after arrival, I entertain the possibility that, for the young Black mother in Tromsø, death by drowning is pursued in the interests of saving her children from a future of untold racial indignities. Rather than willing death in the face of racial subjugation, Jeanine's loving resistance in Sweden can be located, conversely, in the struggle to preserve the future life of her foetus; as her own body is subjected to the arresting forces that threaten to cause premature death, Jeanine's rebellion is performed through the insistence that Black life will survive. To interpret an oppositional Black maternal love through the details of either case study is a type of speculative work that not all readers will be able to affectively tolerate. It should be noted, however, that the objectives of this article are not to give certainty to the uncertain circumstances of tragedy and violence. Instead, the examination of the Nordic media case studies that I have offered, alongside my proposed final analysis of Black maternal subjects’ instigation of death or struggle to secure life, aims to create a form of witnessing that goes beyond the swift dismissals of deviance to which the women in question were subject. By witnessing the love and care of these Black mothers in unexpected places, this article attempts to recognise their anguish and to acknowledge their sentience in a way that the narratives of criminality, culpability and incomprehensibility violently deny. If these women are normatively read as transgressive, refusing, unassimilating bodies, this article introduces a space to consider how their antagonisms are directed against the social-psychic forces that imperil Black life, while also frustrating the enthusiasms of the voyeur. In discerning the Black mother's attempt to repel pain, there can then be a witnessing of the humanity of her suffering.