Ukiortaami pilluarit!

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The Raven and The Gull: A Cautionary Tale

Listen. Do you know why the raven is so black, so black, so dull and black in colour? It is all on account of its obstinacy.

It happened in the days when all the birds were arranging their colours and the pattern in their coats. And the raven and the gull happened to meet midway between land and sea, and they agreed to paint each other.

The raven began, and painted the other white, with nice black blotches showing between. The gull thought that very fine indeed, and began to do the same by the raven, painting it a coat exactly like its own.

But then the raven fell into a rage, and declared that the pattern was frightfully ugly, and the gull, offended at all the fuss, simply splashed it black all over.

And now you see why the raven is black.


Postscript

While reading Lucretius De rerum natura to research my writing on Emma Stibbon, I came across an uncanny echo of this tale in his discourse on colour.

'Since there is no natural connection between particular colours and particular shapes, atoms (if they were not colourless) might equally well be of any colour irrespective of their form. Why then are not their compounds tinted with every shade of colour irrespective of their kind? We should expect on this hypothesis that ravens in flight would often emit a snowy sheen from snowy wings; and that some swans would be black, being composed of black atoms, or would display some other uniform or variegated colour.'

How to say ‘I love you’ in Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet

puttaarpoq - to leap from one ice floe to another, to dance

Upernavik Museum is the most northern museum in the world, a lonely building on a rocky island in Arctic Greenland. Last winter I was appointed writer-in-residence there, and - as it seemed incongrouous to be writing in English, a language not spoken by my Inuit neighbours - I began to take lessons in Kalaallisut. I wanted to understand the whispers of the hunters as they waited every morning for seals by breathing holes in the fast-ice, and to be able to respond to the shrieks of the children who tumbled past my door in bright snowsuits and mittens trimmed with polar bear fur.

Kalaallisut is infamous for its many words for different kinds of snow. It expresses the intricate Arctic ecosystem more thoroughly than the writings of any climate scientist. I discovered that the Arctic landscape is always present in the vocabulary. The word puttaarpoq, for example, can mean both ‘to dance’, and ‘to leap from one ice floe to another when trying to cross the sea’. Kalaallisut possesses a smaller alphabet than English, only twelve letters which are densely woven into compound words. Rarely shorter than three syllables, the words express concepts which English tiptoes around with a phrase. I was delighted to find signifiers for 'I am leaning on one elbow' (ikusimmiarpoq) and 'I reel with the delirious joy of being alive' (nuannarpoq). English seems finicky and prim in contrast: little words swimming indecisively this way and that way like minnows trapped in a shallow stream. Each Kalaallisut word is sturdy as a whale: a contradictory water-bound mammal that relies on the ocean depths for sustenance but comes to the surface to breathe. When I read that UNESCO had placed Kalaallisut on its list of endangered world languages, I decided to produce a tribute to its beauty.

How to say ‘I love you’ in Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet is an introduction the evocative vocabulary of the far north. From the romantic ‘I love you’ to the pragmatic ‘Make me a hot drink from the old coffee grounds’, a word has been chosen to represent each of the twelve letters of the Kalaallisut language. The thirteenth print in the portfolio, ‘The Last Letter’, is a eulogy for the language.

How to say ‘I love you’ in Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet will be hand-printed next spring in an edition of 42 copies. The print portfolio will be housed in a designer binding created by Natasha Herman, of the Red Bone Bindery, Ottawa. To be added to the mailing list for further information on the project and an invitation to the book launch, please email arcticalphabet@gmail.com.

The Bow Wow Shop

You can read my essay on poetry and the Arctic environment - 'No More Words for Snow'- in the latest issue of the online poetry journal, The Bow Wow Shop.

In Greenland the dogs say "Vaa Vaa Vaa" not "Bow Wow", but the journal is determined not to alienate its British canine readership by changing its name. Next up, I'll be writing a short feature for Huskies Today.

Spring is Everywhere

As I walked on Hampstead Heath this evening, listening to church bells pealing across London, I tried to understand the character of this temperate zone. Here joy comes, not from surviving a struggle, but from delight in subtler aspects of experience. The weather is patient. You can walk on the land. You can't walk on the water. The rivers aren't covered with icy skins. But the people are. Even so, every conversation can be understood, and this obligatory eavesdropping is a form of torture.

Although England has had a harsh winter, spring has arrived. The earth is bursting with baroque decoration. Haphazard living things distract the eye: people; trees; birdsong. Branches scribble confusing syllabics over the skyline. Blackthorn blossom and glistening horse chestnut buds blackmail the viewer into admiration. It is disgustingly beautiful, impossibly transient. Having seen the desperate state of the environment in the Arctic, it's clear to me that we have little time left to enjoy this balmy and benevolent climate.


I'm haunted by my experiences after leaving Upernavik Museum. I travelled down the coast to Ilulissat, where I'd arranged to stay with a hunter, Ole, and his family, in order to gain a better understanding of their way of life. Ole has built a turf hut where the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier calves into the sea (above). Here I heard stories of the effects of climate change that were more gruesome than any Inuit legend. Sermeq Kujalleq has been appointed a UNESCO world heritage site, but it seems futile to draw boundaries around beauty spots, which no pollutant respects.

Climate change is causing great economic hardship among the people in Greenland. As the ice diminishes, small communities are trapped without food or clothing. Hunters must shoot and eat their dogs as they cannot afford to feed either the dogs or themselves. The dogs that survive grow dangerous with cabin fever. Women are advised not to breast-feed their children, as the toxins in the sea pass from any fish or seal that they consume into their milk.

In the evenings I sat by the fire and drank tea brewed from heathery twigs collected from the hillsides in the summer, tea that smelt of mint and thyme. We talked about what the ice might do tomorrow, and joked at each other's expense, and exchanged new words in our different languages. Yet beneath the redoubtable Greenlandic sense of humour there was no evading the tragedy of this situation, the slow implosion of a culture. Ole told deprecating stories, which emphasised how his life differed from that of his ancestors. One of his most persistent complaints was the loss of freedom: the freedom to follow a traditional way of life, to earn a decent livelihood. This freedom, or 'liberty' as it is called in Article 3 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, has been insidiously eaten into as a consequence of European lifestyles. Our culpability, and our responsibility for change, has not gone unnoticed. One night, Ole threw his hands up and said to me: 'You must tell the people they must plant trees, and then the ice will not melt, and then there will be fish and seals and polar bears as before and we can live as we only know how to do.' I felt impossibly overwhelmed. As if I could reverse all the deeply engrained habits of humanity ... or even overcome my own giddy greed for the subtle delights of spring.

Left behind

A clause in my contract reads 'Visual artists must leave a work behind in the Museum but writers are not required to do so.'

It's liberating to be excused from producing any work during this residency. However, it seems strange that I should be exempted on account of working with language, when Greenlandic has proved such a rich resource to me. (As well as poems suggested by its rich vocabulary, an 'ABD' artist's book is now in the works and a word-a-day short story is being aired on Facebook.)

So I decided that I would break my contract. Following those who believe that we should leave nothing behind but our footsteps, I'm leaving a linguistic trace. I have excised a word from my own language, which I will never be able to use again. I aired it for the last time to an iceberg this morning, and the iceberg shone impassively on, with the glorious contempt for all languages common to its kind.

Fearing the iceberg was not the best custodian, I slipped a small manifestation of my loss between the pages of the old Greenlandic Dictionary in the Museum. I suspect it will remain unread for years. Many Greenlandic words (particularly those associated with Christianity and modern life) are loan words from Danish, and so it is a language that is used to welcoming newcomers.

And what word did I chose? Well, of course, I can't say. It's a small word upon which the future depends. As it's already been done to death by one poet, I don't think I'll suffer by its absence - although I may have to learn to bite my tongue.

Where in the world

At the museum, Beathe is processing applications for the 2012 residency. She's received bewildered enquiries. How do I travel to Upernavik? Should I fly to Iceland or Norway first? This bemusement is understandable. On Google Earth the museum appears to be floating in the middle of Baffin Bay, and the truth is not far off. Very few travel websites make allowance for Greenland in their search engines, let alone this small northern community.

To appease Beathe's frustration we concoct some fantastical replies, describing air routes from Europe via Sydney and Moscow, or journeys which entail taking a flight to Toronto but parachuting from the plane over Greenland. The truth of the matter - a three-day, five-flight ordeal in increasingly perilous craft - might appear equally implausible to most sensible travellers.

One person's north is someone else's south, and to Beathe, who has no desire to travel beyond Upernavik, Thule is still 'Ultime Thule' but also Qannaq, the nearest town up the coast. We may be sitting in the most northern museum in the world, but we are at the centre of our own universe, with a horizon of 360 degrees. I find it as hard to justify to Beathe the cultural and practical reasons for Europeans' confusion, as to pinpoint my own emotions at being so far beyond everything I know, yet still behaving in a relatively rational manner, drinking coffee and doodling. The exotic seems strangest in proximity to normality.


The Arctic carries an exaggerated sense of the exotic, since it has been represented in explorers' narratives from antiquity until the present as the ends of the earth. I try not to fall into this trap, but on my journey here, my amazement completely outweighed my terror as 'twin otter' planes flew low over vast tracts of uninhabited whiteness. I arrived in smaller and smaller airports, the names of the town cut with a jigsaw out of plywood and painted in bright colours. The times, and sometimes the days, of the flights were uncertain, and often I felt as powerless as a toy traveller in the bedroom of a child who had abandoned his games and gone to tea.

I found myself writing sonnets about the foibles of geography. For this uncertainty is expressed not only in the emotions of travellers, but also in the choices earth scientists have to make. There are ongoing debates about where to draw the southern boundary to the Arctic Circle (and whether it should be a real 'circle' of latitude or a wiggly line). Inevitably these have become even more complex as the climate changes. Also, there are several Poles in the Arctic, including the Geomagnetic North Pole and the Pole of Inaccessiblity (now obsolete). The North Pole was decided on as the 'proper' Pole, but even so it is not fixed. It wafts about the Arctic region through a variable known as the Chandler Circle. I'm quite that relieved finding it was not in my itinerary.

Mutability

A friend asked if I was enjoying wide horizons here. I can only echo Thoreau: 'my horizon is never quite at my elbows'. The mutability of the light and the weather in the Arctic tease gullible disciples of space and time mercilessly.

Yesterday evening I was at a party (the hunters had just caught a whale) where a boy was playing with an extending tape measure as if it was a yo-yo. The dizzying swiftness with which the centimetres drew back into their roll reminded me of how the horizon comes and goes. Yesterday morning it was unsafe to leave the house because of a blinding blizzard, but by sunset I could see to the farthest reaches of the sea - and further, to an illusory space where fata morgana and rainbows were dancing.

Sunset over the children's playground

Last week, work turned into a perverse game played with the weather. I was writing about ice. One night a storm blew away all the pack ice that I'd been observing the day before. When I woke to the sound of lapping water I began to write about the ice's poignant absence. The next morning I found that a blistering frost had covered the sea again ...

And then there's the icebergs, which each day drift slightly further south and crumble a little more into the water. Usually these changes are scarcely perceptible, just enough to suggest, disquietingly, that icebergs might be living things with minds of their own. This magic lantern show of mountains continually delights and distracts me. I developed a affection for one majestic specimen, which looked like the Taj Mahal, but one night it drifted right away and never came back.

Amongst such unpredictability there are moments of sudden intoxication, when I realise that the ice I'm standing on could very easily plummet into the sea. Snow is equally specious: an apparently even drift may cover a chasm, and for me, not having seen the land beneath in summer, one footstep can lead a long way – as I found to my cost when exploring the cemetery.

Recent arrivals in the cemetery

The one dependable quality of the snow in Upernavik is its continuous presence. I've always regarded snow with advance nostalgia for its imminent departure. But here it remains, crusted and stubborn. Snowdrifts realign the roads. Old men pay their dues by shovelling the wooden steps that run up and down the steep hillside, which incongrously remind me of sunny Pennsylvanian boardwalks. Of course, summer will come even to Upernavik eventually.

The empty museum

If you were sailing north, the first you would see of this island is the museum, its wooden walls painted blood red, on a promontory overlooking Baffin Bay. It can be difficult to spot, and some days it's completely under snow or obscured in mist.

The interior of the museum is also elusive. From England I found it hard to tell - from the website and a vague briefing - what the museum stood for. I arrived full of questions. How long has it been here? Who uses it? When I asked about the museum's function, people smiled at me as though I was slightly foolish, and began to tell me about Upernavik itself. I felt like a dog barking up the wrong tree, or perhaps a husky howling at the wrong hunter.

The building appeared strangely empty at first. It comprises several galleries, displaying a modest number of artefacts used by the island's earliest settlers: an old barometer and a ship's log book in one gallery, and in another, a tiny cabinet containing infinitesimal archaeological finds – a broken clay pipe stem, a rusted harpoon head. To my disappointment, and probably discredit, I couldn't get excited about these ancient remains. Rather than the numinous and powerful grave goods I had expected, they seemed to be just small, lost, broken things. Was I looking at a significant exhibition, or just a gathering of objects that hadn’t anywhere else to go? Never mind, I thought. There's always the icebergs.

As the days went by, I gave up my feverish questioning, and immediately - of course - everything began to fall into place.

Imagine walking round Joan Soane's Museum with a blindfold on. How could someone adequately describe those convex mirrored ceilings to you? The labyrinths of plundered plaster ruins? Approaching Upernavik Museum with a European mindset is equally unproductive. What might be experienced is completely obscured by an ingrained expectation of visual stimulus, a hunger for intellectual explanation or for a poetic conceit. The Inuit survived through waiting, watching, and listening, and to some degree these skills must be used to interpret the artefacts that survived along with them.

In acclimatising to Greenland, I have learnt never to expect a straight answer, or to demand a definite appointment. I have trained my eyes to see many colours in the snow, and to focus when watching the shifting dance of the Aurora Borealis. I have allowed myself time to be entertained, not by the flight of one raven across the bay, but by the story that unfurls in the moments elapsing between the flight of one raven and the next. With this oblique form of looking I began to notice presences in the empty building.

Upernavik does not need a grand institution with invigilators in branded t-shirts, Corinthian columns and a mission statement. There is a very thin and permeable wall between past and present everywhere on the island. Although the community has adapted to modernity, the objects that are desiccated and displayed in European collections are still proudly worn and used here. The legends are still cached in the memories of the islanders. It is not surprising that when you ask about the museum, people talk of Upernavik. Trying to define the purpose of a museum in such an environment is as complicated as trying to place the soul in human physiognomy.

At midday the museum's white walls reflect the first sunlight of spring, as does the ice outside. The ice is melting, that's for sure. But I hope that the museum walls will stay empty and reflective for as long as possible, and that the traditional life of the Upernavik islanders will not be condemned to the past.

Understanding Umwelt

There's a word to describe the way each species perceives the environment around it, a potent mix of sensory perception and personal history that makes an island look very different to a human and a raven. Umwelt. There are as many Umwelten as there are lifeforms. The concept, developed by the scientist Jakob von Uexküll in the early twentieth century, suggests we cannot write objectively about ‘the environment’.

Umwelt explains my presence as a temporary observer on this island, and my subjective response to its people and the landscape. As well as distinctions between species, there are also differences in environmental perception between different peoples. My sense of scale and climate was developed in a temperate region. This means I fall over a lot on the slippery ground, causing much hilarity in the village. On another level, my sensitivity to ice will never be as ingrained as that of the fisherman who steps across the floes every day to catch halibut, a job that must rank among the most dangerous in the world. His understanding of the ice is a means of self-preservation. For me, the benefits (poetic composition) are less vital.

So the working title for the poems I’m writing in Upernavik has become ‘Umwelt’. It reminds me that I am a single observer, poorly qualified to make sweeping judgements about the beautiful landscape, the history of colonialism, and the battles between global industry and indigenous life.

Before coming to Upernavik I read a good deal of poetry inspired by enthnography (I mean by ethnographic science – there’s a case for arguing that all poets are enthnographers, with their deep investigation of object and ritual). Particularly memorable was Tom Lowenstein’s Ancestors and Species. I’ve also long admired Robert Bringhurst’s translations from Haida. Both writers are experts in their subject, which is woven into their life as well as into their work. My knowledge, on the other hand, is cobbled together in a magpie manner, with an eye for sparkle and synchronicity.

A danger of writing about a very different culture is that one gets so lost in the novelty of another’s Umwelt. The poetry – like holiday photographs – relies on the exotic flavour of the subject matter, rather than anything inherently interesting or well-expressed. This literary tourism focuses on facts and names and anecdote – and the numinous quality which characterises a good poem is not caught on the negative.

To avoid complacency, I’m writing in a form that I would not have been able to use had it not been for another colonial history. The pantoum is a derived from the pantun, a Malay verse form that was introduced to Europe by the French (via Victor Hugo) in the nineteenth century. A strongly repetitive and circituitous series of interwoven quatrains, the pantoum has since been employed sparingly by other poets: perhaps the greatest tour de force I’ve read is Ashbery’s Hotel Lautréamont. The fact that I can bring a Malaysian form to bear on this cold climate surprises me almost as much as the fact that I am here myself.

How to say 'I Love You' in Greenlandic

The oldest book in the library at Upernavik Museum is from the series Meddelelser om Grønland, a Greenlandic-English dictionary printed in Copenhagen in 1927. During the 1920s the orthography of the language was still being debated and the idea of anchoring words on paper had been practiced for less than 100 years. (While Kallilusit has retained the Roman alphabet, some related Inuit languages have opted for the Inuktituk syllabary (titirausiq nutaaq) adapted from Cree). The dictionary is not infallible; there are contemporary corrections in a beautiful italic hand. So, for example, akiatsianga, which is officially defined (rather awkwardly) as ‘take hold (of it) together with me’ becomes ‘carry me, please’.

Most of the words in the opening pages – those beginning with ‘a’ – concern writing. Agdlak means ‘stripe, spot or pattern’ and the words that grow from this root refer to an act of mark-marking, such as adlagpoq (‘writes’) and adlapalaarpa (‘draws a design’). Since I have been intrigued by the links between poetry and shamanism (there are fewer Greenlandic poets than might be expected, as the angakok’s role covers all acts of inspiration and interpretation), I wondered whether it might be more than co-incidence that the word listed directly before that for writing, describes the shamanic act of rubbing stones together (agiut). But perhaps I should be careful of making these tenuous connections, since the word before that, aggaitsoq, is (i) one who sleeps in his clothes (ii) a stockfish. And surely one wouldn’t want to imply that either poets or shamans might be prone to a slight pong.

The dictionary is a testament to Greenlandic culture, with its highly specific words for harpoon shafts and specific cuts of meat, on which Upernavik Museum holds much material. However, the dictionary is not so useful on daily communication in the twenty-first century. I’ve just downloaded a dictionary in spreadsheet form from Oqaasileriffik, the Greenlandic Language Secretariat, but this is likewise distinguished by never having in it the word in which Beathe, the Museum Director, and I need.

So today Beathe has been teaching me ‘important words’, i.e. those I will need during my time in Upernavik. ‘I love you’, she said. ‘Asavakkit. This is the most important!’ she added, and smiled. Although the chances of me needing to say ‘I love you’ are slim, I agreed, love is important. Over coffee, we spent some time trying to establish whether love only exists as a verb in Greenlandic or whether there is a noun too. ‘As in “God is love”’, I say, wishing these fine distinctions were easier to explain. After a while, we give up, and look at the icebergs. I realise I don’t know the word for ‘iceberg’ yet, but some objects are so far beyond language that the words don’t matter.

Sugar Snow - Tire sur la Neige

'Explore your own higher latitudes with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary;

and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign.'

Thoreau, Walden

I’ve been asked to provide some children’s workshops during my residency at Upernavik Museum. As I’m exploring the traces humans leave on the environment, I thought it would be fun to draw on the snow, and what better way to do this than with maple syrup? (Fans of Helen Chadwick, look away now, for fear of bathos). I was inspired by Laura Ingalls Wilder, a Wisconsin author whose Little House in the Big Woods contains evocative descriptions of living off the land, including making maple syrup and sugar snow.

Boiling maple syrup poured on snow hardens instantly. It can be eaten spooned straight up from the fresh snow, or lifted free in fragile toffee shapes. Gastronomes suggest a chewing a gherkin to offset the sweetness.

Since there are no trees in Greenland, and certainly no sugar maple (Acer saccharum), I was ruminating on how to get my hands on the sweet goods to entertain Upernavik’s children. Happily, the Quebec Business Development Attaché came to my aid, and thanks to the enormous good will of the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, gallons of golden syrup arrived post haste at the museum. The tins with their cheery images of Canadian homesteads were somewhat battered after a journey with Greenland Air, and had suffered further by being pulled down the icy hill in a sack behind the postman’s sledge. However, not a drop of syrup was lost.

Initial experiments suggest the art of drawing with maple syrup cannot be mastered overnight, but the results are delicious. Never has language been so enticing or transient as these words written in the snow. In this climate, sugar dissolves faster than snow melts. The workshop is planned to co-incide with the celebration of the coming of spring on February 6th, which marks the first sighting of the sun above the horizon this year. Watch this space for a gallery of the results!

The Right Tools

I’ve come north equipped with pencils and pens, an assortment of notebooks from many kind friends, and - at the other extreme - a laptop. Between scribbling and typing, I have almost everything I need to work. I could pretend petulance about the frugal internet access, but in truth the isolation is welcome.

So I was amused to read Frederica de Laguna’s account of her sea voyage to Upernavik in 1929 as a young anthropology student accompanying Therkel Mathiassen on the first archaeological survey of Greenland. The excursion has more than a slight flavour of Swallows and Amazons about it, as when ‘Freddy’ describes trying to translate Mathiassen’s article ‘The Question of the Origin of Eskimo Culture’ for American Anthropologist during a heavy swell:

Mathiassen dictates to me, and holds down the typewriter with one hand. The rolling of the ship has made the machine seasick. If it is set crosswise to the roll, every time the boat heaves over, the carriage flies up and shifts into capitals. If the machine is set parallel to the rolling, the carriage sometimes has to go up so steep a hill that it balks. So I have to wait until the ship is leaning over to starboard and then type furiously to make up for lost time, before she begins to swing over onto her other side. And with one hand I grab the typewriter and the edge of the table. It has been interesting work.

Exclusive: “I’m abandoning Art for Ice,” says Arctic entrepreneur

Nancy Campbell has announced her plans to abandon an apparently lucrative career as an artist in a selfless bid to bring “hydro-fabulousness” and environmental ethics to the cocktail bars of Europe. Campbell’s coup de foudre came during a trip to the Arctic to observe the impact of climate change.

“After seeing the glistening icebergs”, Campbell says, “I realised there was only one way to prevent rising sea levels, and that’s if the whole world clubs together to use up all this naughty ice before it melts into the world’s oceans.”

Campbell was drinking tea by a halibut hole with a friendly fisherman when inspiration struck. The Inuit traditionally make tea by chipping small chunks of ice from the glacier to melt in their tin kettles over a fire. “At that moment,” Campbell says, “all I really wanted was a Whisky Mac, and it struck me that the pure glacial ice would top my cocktail off nicely.”

Campbell’s scheme will use ice from the giant glacier Sermeq Kujalleq in Ilulissat, the fastest calving glacier in the world. The area was recently designated a UNESCO heritage site in order to prevent the vulnerable environment from further destruction.

After rigorous tests on selected samples, to dismiss any suspicion that glacial ice has been polluted by industrial waste dumped in Arctic waters, the enormous blocks of ice will be flown to Europe’s capital cities in temperature-controlled conditions, to be broken down into cubes for discerning drinkers. The venture is tipped to bring work to hundreds of Inuit who are currently facing destitution as their traditional means of sustenance through fishing becomes impossible in the changing landscape.

Nancy Campbell has applied to the Enterprise Council for funding for 'Project Arctic Just-Ice' and welcomes enquiries from potential investors.