I’m cribbing this from my very own book journal, because I was so impressed with this recent read:
An African In Greenland, by Tete-Michel Kpomassie. Oh my gosh, this book rocked! See, it’s a memoir by this guy who is a West African person, living in Togo, in the 1950s. A teenager, he and his family live somewhat traditionally. So one day he’s out gathering coconuts and gets attacked by a snake, after which he’s taken to the tribal elders, who are priests in a python cult, to be healed. The elder, who is very pleased with the healing process, decided that this is an omen that this guy should become a member of the python cult, which is like a lifetime gig. Michel, our narrator, is all “Snake handling? Um, thanks for thinking of me, but that’s terrifying and creepy.” Instead, after reading a book about Eskimo culture, he decides that he wants to go to Greenland and live with the Eskimos, and so he does. It takes him YEARS to work his way out of Africa and through Europe, yet he finally arrives in Greenland and lives there for about a year in the far north, living with native families and learning all about eating raw fish and seal hunting and dog sleds.
The best thing about this book is that it isn’t trying to be all ethnographic or scientific or anything. It’s really just a guy who wrote down his story about “This one time, when I decided to up and leave Togo and move to Greenland …” He doesn’t attempt to make a lot of profound conclusions about the culture of the eskimos or his role as Outsider or anything like that. It’s fairly straightforward observations of stuff that went on during his trip, and he’s not shy about pointing out things that he doesn’t like, or confuse him, and also about clarifying things that he initially was surprised by but later make sense as he learns more about surviving in the Greenland environment. His experiences with the arctic winter are especially interesting:
“On clear days the moon gave us light from five in the afternoon, hanging very low in the sky and looking so extraordinarily large that it really frightened me the first time I saw it. It rose over Disko Island, but if you were coming from the other end of Jakobshavn, it seemed to be squatting on the rooftops in front of you, its crumpled silver-paper face splotched with gray. The play of moonlight on the icebergs was indescribably strange, and its magnificent refracted shimmers were brighter than day. One night, fooled by its brilliance, I got up at three in the morning. I soon realized my mistake, but the “day” was so beautiful that I went walking for half an hour in the sleeping village. As it’s seven thirty in the morning in Paris when it’s three thirty in the morning in Greenland, I thought, in my calm and silent world, of all those Parisians with their steaming breath, now pouring into the Metro. I thought too, about what a fine sunny day it must be back home in Africa.”
I’m also looking forward to Song of Susanna, can’t wait to read and discuss it with my fellow DT obsessed Dopers!