An African in Greenland in Around the World

Apr 01, 2022 Nina ( picturetalk321 ) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: author-man, genre-travel, a-reviewed, 5-star, transl-french, europe-greenland, world-benin, world-togo, z-challenges-2022, absolute-favorites

This is a very moving book, first published in France in 1981. It is the memoir of Tété-Michel Kpomassie from Togo who, aged 16, comes across a book on Eskimos [sic] and develops a yearning for Greenland. He works various odd jobs, moves across various borders and countries (including Senegal, France, Germany [where he lived for several months in Bonn, with two ladies he met on a train], and Denmark) until, eight years later, he does actually arrive in Greenland.

The book has four parts. The firs This is a very moving book, first published in France in 1981. It is the memoir of Tété-Michel Kpomassie from Togo who, aged 16, comes across a book on Eskimos [sic] and develops a yearning for Greenland. He works various odd jobs, moves across various borders and countries (including Senegal, France, Germany [where he lived for several months in Bonn, with two ladies he met on a train], and Denmark) until, eight years later, he does actually arrive in Greenland.

The book has four parts. The first part relates the (to me, and maybe to all European readers) improbably and astounding story of how Kpomassie as a teenager disturbed a python, having climbed to the top of a palm tree where the snake had its nest. The python slithered across him; the boy thumped it on its head; the python started back up the tree to get to its babies; the boy, in a sheer panic, jumped off the tree, lay in a coma and smashed various bones. His father took him to a nearby village, part of a python's cult, where the boy was cured by, among other things, having a python rubbed against his body. The father then offered the boy to the snake cult. It is this, the prospect of becoming a member of this cult, that propels the young Kpomassie to run away from his home and wend his way towards Greenland.

Part two begins Kpomassie's account of his life in Greenland. Part three is about the winter months in the Arctic circle where the sun is never seen. Part four concludes with his time in Upernavik, with the eccentric Robert Mattaaq and his family, during the endlessly sunny summer months.

Kpomassie's voice is just wonderful. He comes across as a curious, friendly man who is also a very young man (24 when he arrives in Greenland). He likes to hang out with male friends. He also has affairs with various women along the way. I found this a bit alienating at first, but then I realised several things: one was my own prejudice along the lines of 'but one mustn't have sex with the natives!' Kpomassie is not a coloniser; he is not there, exploiting people. Nor is he an ethnographer, with an equally othering gaze but expected to remain 'objective' and not become personally involved. He does become personally involved, never more so when he gets into a fist fight with a jealous Inuit man. He is a young man, a tourist, a traveller, who sees and treats the people he meets on an equal footing, and that includes being attracted to some of the women. So the aspect that at first took me aback ended up making me reflect on my own biases and on the whole framework of 'travel to a foreign land'.

What drew me into buying this book in the first place was the surprising juxtaposition of African traveller and Greenland. I share this surprise with many others, judging from foreword, blurb and reviews -- and it is another bias check because why should not an African travel to the Arctic? Indeed, an African American was part of the party that reached the North Pole in 1907-09. Why should it be only white people who go travelling? Of course, in the majority, it often has been which is another important historical point to keep in mind when thinking about colonialism.

Because so much of the travel to 'native peoples' has been, and arguably continues to be, informed by colonialism. Kpomassie comes from a country, Togo, that was a French colony until 1960, i.e. his parents' generation all grew up under colonial rule. The author's book is written in French, the coloniser's language. So when he comes to Greenland, he comes as a formerly colonised person to stay with people who are currently colonial subjects. The coloniser in Greenland is Denmark.

Absolutely fascinating to me was the relay of meanings from coloniser to stranger to foreigner to white man. Tucked away in the glossary is this gem: 'Qashluna [Inuit] usually translated as "white man", but also applied to Kpomassie, so more correctly "foreigner" (300). The Greenlanders are initially completely fascinated by Kpomassie's otherness. But they have no term, racist or otherwise, for a Black man or an African. (Only once does Kpomassie hear a racial slur, part of the fistfight episode I mentioned above.). So they call this man who is different from them by the term they do have for a different person from elsewhere: qashluna, which they otherwise use to label Danes. So the Black, formerly colonised African is called by the same term as the white European coloniser. This disturbance of the force (the force of Black/White racialised thinking in the Euro-American sphere) was absolutely eye-opening to me.

Very interesting to me was also how the main point of fascination for the Inuit (at least as described by Kpomassie) was initially not so much the colour of his skin but his height. He is quite tall, anyway, but in the context of the mostly short Inuit, his height really stood out.

Kpomassie tells his story with a lovely, engaging voice. He describes marvellous things, and the passages of nature descriptions are particularly beautiful. He describes mores that are interesting to him, and now and again compares them to mores familiar to him from his home. Again, there is a welcome disjuncture to my Euro-centric outlook: what Kpomassie finds familiar and what he finds strange are only partially those things that I would find familiar or strange. He also describes mores that alienate him, particularly the constant drunkenness and the lack of initiative among some people. He does not overstate his but it does come through his text: these failings are ultimately due to the colonial administration, for example, Denmark's policy to consolidate bureaucracy by having everybody live in consolidated villages and moving people from other, especially non-coastal small dwellings, to towns built by the Danes.

Kpomassie himself is very educated and speaks and writes at least seven languages. Some of the people he encounters are also multi-lingual, and they just take this for granted. Fie, fie on the Anglosphere.

Format: creamy pages, nicely designed. Beautifully translated by James Kirkup. Pointless introduction by A. Alvarez. I pondered the photographs inserted half-way through often. ...more

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