Sanaaq by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk

Qalingu, now in the thick of the blizzard, was fast losing hope. His face was encrusted with snow and he could not make out the slightest thing. Nonetheless, he plodded on into the wind. His cheeks were freezing and his entire body was feeling the cold. With night falling, he decided to take shelter on the side of the hill away from the wind, while there was still some daylight. Without even a snow knife, he began digging a hole for himself in the snow, all the while afraid of being smothered by the blizzard.

Sanaaq is billed not only as "An Inuit Novel" but "The First Inuit Novel," or at least, the first novel written in the language Inuktitut. Author Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk, it seems, was tasked by missionaries with helping to prepare educational materials in Inuktitut. But the project soon took on a creative bent, and Nappaaluk, seeking at first to show the use of the words in context, I suppose, wrote this novel, about the widow Sanaaq and her life among the nomadic people of far northern Quebec.

Above all else, Sanaaq is a portrait of what life was, or perhaps is, among the Inuit. Much of the novel is taken up by the ordinary tasks of life: sewing bags and mittens, building and deconstructing igloos, fishing and hunting--both of which, it seems, often must take place at a moment's notice, when the fish begun to run or the polar bear appears (or the fox, or the ptarmigan, or the seal, etc., etc.). But it's a life, too, that's close to death, and in Nappaaluk's simple prose, moments of intense disaster and loss take on tremendous meaning. I was really struck by one scene in which a character, splashed by boiling water, loses his eye, which is so melted it falls literally on the ground. Another scene, in which a hunter slips beneath a floe of pack ice and is lost forever, underscores just how fragile life must be at the top of the world, and how present the possibility of death and disaster. Among these moments of quotidian and not-so-quotidian life, Nappaaluk sketches a number of compelling characters: the headstrong widow and her impetuous daughter Qumaq among them.

One of the most interesting things about Sanaaq is that Naapaaluk captures the arrival and slow integration of Europeans into the life of the Inuit: the arrival of the first boat, the first airplane, the missionaries, the doctors and nurses. These watersheds are compacted in time, so that Sanaaq's life, simple as it is, seems to span centuries. At the beginning of the novel, Sanaaq and her family are terrified by the plane that roars for the first time overhead; by the end, Sanaaq's husband himself boards  a plane to join a work program for the Inuit. Disruption and change are inextricable from the arrival of Europeans and European-Canadians: at one point Sanaaq runs away with her injured daughter because she is afraid she will be taken from her to bring her to medical care. Sanaaq's husband reacts violently, and it is Sanaaq herself that ends up being sent away to the southern hospital, and the outside authorities, the priests and the police, visit her husband to reassert their authority. At the same time, it's clear that Sanaaq is the work of a pious Catholic; Sanaaq's own conversion--from Anglicanism!--is meant to serve as the novel's resolution. Sanaaq is an interesting artifact in that its attitude toward colonial presence is not quite what we would expect in the 21st century. Beyond that, it's a hell of a story.

The Incomparable Atuk by Mordecai Richler

'Old One.' Atuk loathed addressing him like that, but ever since his father had figured in that prize-winning National Film Board short he had insisted on it. 'Old One,' Atuk continued, 'I have found the girl I want to marry.'

'Is she a nice Eskimo girl?'

Atuk scratched the back of his neck.

'Speak no more. Atuk, my son, I remember when your eyes were deep and true as the blue spring sea. I recall when your soul was pure and white as the noon iceberg. This is no more. Today--'

'For Christ's sake, will you cut out that crazy talk. You sound like you were auditioning for Disney again or something.'

Atuk, an Inuit from Baffin Bay, hits it big with a collection of poetry. He's brought down to Toronto for an award, and he decides to stay. A lot of people are invested in Atuk's success: the big businessmen who bankroll his publications, the professors who pontificate on his cultural significance, the journalists who write about his dalliance with Bette Dolan, a pin-up and Canadian icon who recently swam the length of Lake Ontario. To these people, Atuk plays the naive Native, speaking in simple language and writing about polar bears and icebergs, but deep down, he's a shrewd operator who knows how to manipulate those who think they're manipulating him.

Richler's Canadian satire is most famous today for its ill-fated movie adaptations, which supposedly killed several leading men who were attached to it: John Belushi, John Candy, Chris Farley. I don't think that movie's ever going to be made--it's hard to imagine the broad racial comedy of The Incomparable Atuk translating in our day and age. And there's plenty in the depiction of the Inuit--the book, of course, uses the outdated-to-offensive "Eskimo"--that seems cringeworthy today. But ultimately, it works, because the satire is pointed back at Canadian society. Atuk's "Nativeness" is all a sham, a kind of performance meant to satisfy white Canadian expectations. Atuk's exploitation of these expectations is intense and complete: he keeps his family, including several brothers and a father known only as "Old One," locked up in a Toronto apartment building mass-producing cheap Inuit sculptures. At first, Atuk's family seems like they might be as pure and uncorrupted as he pretends to be--he convinces them that the television is a charmed box, where Humphrey Bogart appears by way of incantation--but soon they wise up to his schemes and start agitating for their own share of the cash.

Richler has his sights set on Canadian identity. People believe in Atuk because he's a symbol of Canada, like the Maple Leafs. Much of this identity, Richler observes, is founded on being different from the United States, that foul country to the south that wants to punish Atuk for eating a wayward Army pilot (come on now), even while it has adopted American attitudes toward money and self-interest wholesale. Richler saves a special sharpness for Canadian Jews, who adopt Protestant affectations and attitudes to get ahead. One conversation between Atuk and his benefactor Rory Peel (ne Panofsky) even takes aim at Zionism, underlining the comparison toward the end with a thick black line:

'How amusing. You come back after thousands of years and would like me and my family to move out. Your people sound very aggressive to me.'

'With reason, but. Conditions--'

'One persecution does not excuse another. Just because your people have suffered--'

'It's more than that. The land was promised to us by our gods.'

'Pardon me while I laugh.'

'We have a book. It's all written out there.'

'Look, everybody has a book. This is our country. You can't drive us out like--like Arabs. We're Canadians.'

'To us, you're all Arabs.'

Imagine putting that in a movie in the year 2024.

Richler's best books, I think, manage to combine his particular brand of satire with a deep pathos. Atuk is an amoral schemer; there's nothing in him that resembles the striver resentment of Duddy Kravitz or the aging guilt of Barney Panofsky. He's a cartoon, and perhaps there's no room in this little book to make him real. The satire wheels from black to bright colors, often funny but always superficial, marked by silly gags, like the dalliance between an FBI agent and an undercover journalist who fall in love with each other while crossdressing--like a rejected plotline from Shakespeare. But the sheer brazenness of Atuk--and the novel--are well worth their brief span.

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!