An African in Greenland by Tete-Michel Kpomassie

As soon as they saw me, all talking stopped. So intense was the silence, you could have heard a gnat in flight. Then they started to smile again, the women with slightly lowered eyes. When I was standing before them on the wharf, they all raised their heads to look me full in the face. Some children clung to their mothers' coats, and others began to scream with fright or to weep. Others spoke the names of Toornaarsuk and Qvivttoq, spirits who live in the mountains... That's what I was for those children, and not an Inuk like themselves. Like children the world over, they spontaneously spoke their minds about me. Unfortunately, I can't say the same for the adults. Proud and secretive, they masked their feelings behind an unchanging smile, mild but enigmatic. Not one of them corrected the children, yet the mothers' calm gave some of the children confidence, and, as they saw me approaching, they too tried to smile--a hesitant, not very assuring smile.

When he was a child, Tete-Michel Kpomassie found a book about the Inuit of Greenland in his village in Togo. He was captivated by the vision of a cold world, one where children are respected and treasured, and no trees to hide in, indeed, no snakes. Having fallen out of a tree after an encounter with a deadly snake, Kpomassie's father promised him to the service of the mysterious python cult, in return for saving his life. As Kpomassie describes it in his memoir of his adventures getting to and traveling in Greenland, the Arctic was a way out of the strict Togolese hierarchies which left him out of control of his own life. Perhaps these rationales exist partly in hindsight--"Do people ever know their true reason for embarking on a long journey?" he asks--but for whatever reason, young Michel is determined: it takes him years, traveling up through West Africa to Europe, taking small jobs, through France and Denmark, until finally he makes the sailing to Greenland with nearly empty pockets.

The indigenous Greenlanders Kpomassie describes are taken aback by his height and appearance--there is some suggestion that he is the first African ever to revisit the remote and lightly populated island--but also welcoming. In every village, Kpomassie is put up by locals, who welcome him into their home, as seems to be the custom. In some cases, they welcome him into their beds, too: Kpomassie is repeatedly floored by the sexual openness of girls and women in Greenland, who seem to treat intimacy in startlingly casual ways. He makes the mistake early on, in southern Greenland, of assuming a relationship he has struck up with a Greenlandic girl is exclusive, and makes a fool of himself by showing jealousy. Even other men's wives offer themselves to him: later, in the even more remote north of Greenland, he watches a strange ceremony where men trade wives ceremonially, and comes to understand this is a method by which inter-family relationships cement themselves. If one man were to die out on the ice, there would be a family for his widow to join ready-made.

Over the course of two years, Kpomassie pushes northward, searching for a more and more remote version of the Greenland he dreamed about in Togo, one with fewer cinemas and blue jeans, more kayaks, anoraks, and seal hunts. As he travels, he sees the darker sides of Greenlandic life: the collapse of traditional life, accelerated by the Danish authorities' termination of small villages and pushing people into the capital at Nuuk (here called Godthab), the poverty and heavy drinking. Autumn, as he describes it, is the worst time to be a Greenlander, when a malaise sets in as the sun begins to vanish--far worse than the winter, when it actually never appears--and the listless state of the sea, which is too icy to be navigated by boat but which hasn't frozen over for dogsled travel. It's in the North that Kpomassie meets the first Greenlander, a powerful and petty village head, who calls him the n-word.

But Kpomassie keeps pushing on, and much of the memoir's charm emerges from his good humor and insatiable desire to make the country his own. He learns Greenlandic; he learns to drive a dogsled; he learns even to love the taste of frozen seal meat. He wants to push onto Thule, the northernmost town on the island, but sea ice keeps him stranded in Upernavik, many miles to the south (though still really, really far up). There he finds a makeshift home with an old man named Robert Mattaaq, who lives with his family in a traditional turf house whose walls are lined with magazine articles, which the well-read Mattaaq calls his "library." It's here, at the end of Kpomassie's journey, that he finds the closest thing to what he has been searching for: a family in a remote place, living according to traditions as old as--but very different from--those of the Togolese, and whose kindness and openness are as fundamental to their survival in this harsh place as their know-how. When at last he returns to Togo, he says that it is to become a "storyteller," who can share the story of people like Robert Mattaaq and the Greenlanders with those in Africa.

Considering this a book from Togo--not Greenland--An African in Greenland represents the 55th country I've read a book from. Cool!