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Graeme Armstrong: “I have changed details. It was my friend who murdered a child with a knife and not the other way around."

2022-12-21T11:14:38.902Z


He has written 'The Young Team', an award-winning novel as raw as it is lyrical that narrates in the first person the life of a teenage member of a youth gang in violent Glasgow 20 years ago.


During the first decade of this century, Glasgow was considered the European capital of crime.

Its metropolitan area was the scene of a daily battle, fueled by drugs,

raves

and

trance music,

between multitudes of youth gangs for control of territory.

To the Scottish author Graeme Armstrong, born in 1992 right there, in the town of Airdrie, to the east of the Scottish city, this silent war caught him in his teens.

It was hard to grow up there and not fall under the influence of those gangs.

There was practically no other option.

The gangs brought a meaning to existence, a sense of protection that was hard to find outside of them.

Obviously, they also had their drawbacks.

They could get you kicked out of school, like Armstrong was as a kid, and witness horrors no one, least of all a teenager, should ever see.

You could also end up dead.

Luckily for him, he was able to escape all of that.

Literature had a lot to do with it.

In 2020 he published his first novel,

The Young Team

, which has just been (heroically) translated by Automática Editorial.

The book tells a story very similar to Graeme's own, although the protagonist is called Azzy Williams and lives in a working-class neighborhood.

A deprived area where there are no more shops or jobs and the kids have nothing else to do but hang out in an abandoned house and drink Buckfast, a kind of caffeinated, high-strength restorative wine sold in pharmacies.

Yes, he remembers

trainspotting

by Irvine Welsh, but it has its own entity: In 2021, the year of its publication in English, it received several Scottish literary awards (Scots Book o the Year, Betty Trask Award) and is already being adapted to the cinema.

“In my head,

The Young Team

It was always fiction, but if someone described it as autofiction, it wouldn't bother me either”, explains the author.

“The story is very similar to my own life.

I was in a gang in the same geographical space in which the novel takes place.

There was also an abandoned building as described in it and of course there was a lot of violence.

Azzy's fights and his gang are mine.

I have changed some details, yes.

For example, it was my friend who murdered a child with a knife and not the other way around.

The reality is usually much more shocking than the fictional versions.

The author today.

According to the author, in real history there were many more deaths than are reported in the book.

"In life there are many more blind alleys than avenues," he says.

“Reality sometimes has to be softened to be credible and serve the purpose of the book, which in my case was to explore masculine fragility and decadence.

I also wanted to reflect the yearning for a calmer childhood.

The terrible experiences with mental health and addiction are all based on true events.

Fiction offered me a blank canvas to delve into the past, but it also had its limitations

.

The Young Team

is also a story of overcoming.

Throughout its pages we accompany Azzy for almost ten years.

We live (and feel thanks to a literary rhythm that adapts to the story) his first drunkenness, the euphoria of his first partying and the effects of drugs, but we also accompany him in his moments of darkness, when he loses one of his friends, when trying to escape addiction.

Armstrong left the world of gangs at the age of 16 after an incident in which a friend died of a heroin overdose.

“The funeral was traumatic,” he recalls.

“Today I still perfectly remember his mother's face and his inside the coffin.

It was a very hard moment.

I realized that he was in a very dark place, surrounded by death and destruction.

It was around the same time that I read

Trainspotting.

.

The book had a huge impact on me and was decisive in my decision to stay in school and try to go to university.

That path would take me five years.

It wasn't until Christmas 2012 that I finally managed to beat my own drug addiction and take the first steps away from the world of gangs.

This Christmas marks ten years since I've been clean.

I feel lucky to be here because stories like mine don't usually have happy endings."

From then on, writing became an antidote to emptiness and the withdrawal syndrome left by drugs.

“The first few days I was going crazy.

Trapped in my own apartment, with no money, no friends and a lot of free time,” recalls Armstrong.

“I was very young, I was only 21 years old.

I began to reflect on the beginning of it all, on how it had ended like this.

I was consumed with frustration and loneliness and telling our story was therapeutic.

Three months later, he had written

The Young Team.

It has been a transformative experience.

The energy of suffering and addiction poured into every page.

After that I went back to the University of Stirling to study for a Masters in Creative Writing and continued to work on the project.

There I had the Scottish author Janice Galloway as a mentor who helped me a lot to take the step to become a professional.

It took another seven years and three hundred rejections before I finally got the book published in 2020."

Graeme Armstrong, troubled schoolboy.

As we can see, the writing process was very long and laborious.

In its original version, the book was written in the jargon of the area where the action takes place, a gibberish that is difficult for foreigners to understand.

To make the book easier to understand, Armstrong had to simplify it.

“The language of the protagonists took me a long time.

Using social media as teenagers, we were probably the first young Scots to translate our spoken street dialect into written words,” he explains.

“We started writing phonetically in SMS and MSN Messenger.

We had no idea that we were transforming a rich oral tradition into text, performing a very complex task linguistically.

When it came time to write the novel, I had to make many decisions regarding the lexicon.

This is how Carolina Santano, the translator in charge of translating the text into Spanish, explains it.

“To adapt the dialect that the author uses, I chose to use very specific local references that place the reader back and forth in Airdrie and that I spent hours searching for.

I also used capital letters to imply that we are yelling because we are IN A BAD HOST or we have ANXIETY, words without spaces like when one speaks of pulling without

stopping to breathe

and, above all, I prioritized and took great care of the tone of the original, which is quite brutal jargon, with insults everywhere, a raw and steely prose, a fast pace and surprising lyrical outbursts.

Probably the most difficult thing has been not to be self-conscious about the translation.

Sometimes it seems that there is a certain shyness or modesty that leads to wanting to soften the tone of the translations and reduce their intensity.

After all, 'Go fuck yourself, you bastard' is much more impressive when you put it in writing than when you hear it on the street.

But that is precisely the task of the translator: respect its author and be brave, leave shyness behind and write down that 'son of a bitch' that the author of the original text has chosen to write.

Because, after all, this book is so impressive as well as important, because of the courage of the story,

Armstrong acknowledges that his influences were very varied.

From the most expected, such as the films of Ken Loach, or the books of David Keenan, an author from his own city who "writes about the punk band scene of the seventies and eighties with strange, narcotic and beautiful prose";

to more surprising ones such as the

neonoir

style of the 2001 PlayStation 2

video game

Max Payne .

Obviously, the writer also admits the profound influence of

Trainspotting,

the novel, and the film, albeit with some caveats.

“The

Trainspotting

effect is still inspiring Scottish artists like myself.

It has been fundamental not only in my work, but also in my own personal survival.

The book mapped Scotland's creative landscape and allowed us to believe that it was possible to tell working class stories in Scotland.

I have paid homage and paid my respects to the book and always will, but I also think we have fallen into a trap.

It is constantly cited by middle-class English journalists as a current reflection of Scottish lower-class life, since it is really the only reality of Scotland they know or care about.

But

Trainspotting

was published in 1993 and is set in the 1980s. Its style fits with that era, it's over the top, crazy and actually more surrealism than realism in some places.

But a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, and many tribes with their own problems and strengths have been hidden under

Trainspotting's shadow.

It's a great legacy, to be sure, but it's long out of date.

Current Scottish histories are missing, especially from the working class.

There were also women in the gangs in Scotland.

Where is your story?

They haven't told us yet because we're too busy thinking about old-fashioned

Trainspotting puns.

Repeatedly debating, discussing, and dissecting that novel is a way of appearing open and inclusive, when the exact opposite is the case.

Nostalgia is fine, but there has been a generation of Scots younger than me for some time now and their stories matter, and they must be given their time and space in the cultural landscape of Scotland and the UK

. "

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-12-21

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