Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  Before I went to Greenland, I had assumed that the primary issue there was seasonal affective disorder (SAD), which is depression resulting from a lack of sunlight—a particularly acute vulnerability in a place where the sun barely makes its presence felt for a full three months. I had anticipated that everyone would dip in late autumn and begin to improve in February. That is not the case. The prime suicide month in Greenland is May, and though foreigners who move to the northern part of Greenland get depressed during the long periods of darkness, the Inuit have adapted over the years to seasonal shifts in light. Springtime is an instigator of suicide in many societies. “The richer, softer and more delectable nature becomes,” the essayist A. Alvarez has written, “the deeper that internal winter seems, and the wider and more intolerable the abyss which separates the inner world from the outer.” In Greenland, where the springtime shift is twice as dramatic as in a more temperate zone, these are the cruelest months.

  Life is hard in Greenland. The Danish government has instituted universal free health care, education, even unemployment benefits. The hospitals are spotless, and the prison in the capital city looks more like a bed-and-breakfast than an institution of punishment. But the forces of nature in Greenland are unfathomably harsh. One Inuit man who had traveled across Europe said to me, “We never made great art or built great buildings, the way other civilizations did. But for thousands of years, in this climate, we survived.” It struck me that this was quite possibly the greater achievement.

  Greenlandic hunters and fishermen struggle to catch enough to feed themselves, their families, and their dogs, and sell the skins of the seals they eat to pay for the repair of sleds and boats. They have a high rate of freezing, starving, injury, and loss. During the three-month period of relative darkness, hunters dressed in trousers of polar-bear fur and coats of sealskin must run beside their dogsleds to forestall frostbite. Many survive the winter on kiviak, which is made from fermented auks buried for eighteen months in a fatty sealskin, then consumed raw. My Greenlandic friends assured me it was no more repellent than blue cheese. Forty years ago, these people lived in igloos. If you’ve never been inside an igloo, you cannot fathom how small they usually are. The only sources of warmth are a seal-fat lamp and the body heat of the occupants. Sewn into clothes for the winter, the denizens of an igloo would lie partly on top of one another. Now they live in Danish-style prefabricated houses with just two or three rooms because the cost of heating in a land with no readily available source of fuel—Greenland has no trees—is prohibitive.

  Inuit families are large. For months on end, a family of twelve people may stay unremittingly inside their own house, usually gathered in one room. It is simply too cold and too dark for anyone to go out except the father, who goes hunting or ice-fishing once or twice a month to supplement the stock of dried fish from the summer. This forced intimacy offers no place for complaining, talking about problems, anger, or accusations. In igloo days, having a fight with someone with whom you would have to be in immediate physical contact for weeks on end was impossible. Even now you must share rooms and meals for months. If you storm out, you go into a climate in which you will surely die. As one said, referring to the old days, “When you got angry or upset, you would just turn your head and watch the walls melt.” The extreme physical intimacy of this society necessitates emotional reserve. Some people who live close to the old ways are storytellers, especially about hunting escapades and near escapes from death. Most are tolerant. Many laugh readily. Others are silent and brooding. But no matter their personality, almost none speaks of his or her feelings. The distinctive features of Greenlandic depression are not direct results of the temperature and light; they are the consequence of this taboo against talking about yourself.

  Poul Bisgaard, a gentle, large man with an air of bemused patience, was the first native Greenlander to become a psychiatrist. “Of course if someone is depressed within a family, we can see the symptoms,” he said. “But we do not, traditionally, meddle with them. It would be an affront to someone’s pride to say that you thought he looked depressed. The depressed man believes himself to be worthless and thinks that if he is worthless, there is no reason to bother anyone else. Those around him do not presume to interfere.” Kirsten Peilman, a Danish psychologist who has lived in Greenland for more than a decade, said, “No one tells anyone else to behave. You simply tolerate whatever people present and let them tolerate themselves.”

  I went in June, in the season of light. Nothing could have prepared me for the beauty of Greenland in June, when the sun stays high overhead right through the night. We took a fisherman’s small motorboat from the five-thousand-person town of Ilulissat, where I had landed in a small plane, southward toward one of the settlements I had selected in consultation with Greenland’s minister of public health. Called Ilimanaq, it is a place of hunters and fishermen with a total adult population of about eighty-five. No roads lead to Ilimanaq, and no roads traverse it. In the winter, the villagers travel across the frozen terrain by dogsled; in the summer, access can be gained only by boat. In the spring and autumn, people stay in the settlement. At the time of year when I went, fantastical icebergs, some as large as office buildings, flow down the coast, grouping near the Kangerlussuaq ice fjord. My guide and I crossed the mouth of the fjord in a small motorboat, navigating among the smooth, oblong shapes of older ice that had turned bottom-up, and chunks of broken-off glacier that were corrugated with age and curiously blue—our boat humble in the face of such natural majesty. Some ice refracted the light from the sun, which was permanently perched on the horizon. As we progressed, we gently pushed aside the smaller icebergs, some the size of refrigerators, others like floating dinner plates. They crowded the water so that if you let your sight line follow the remote horizon, you would have thought we were sailing through unbroken sheets of ice. The light was so clear that there seemed to be no depth of field, and I could not tell what was near and what was far away. We stayed near the shore, but I could not distinguish the land from the sea, and most of the time we were canyoned between mountains of ice. The water was so cold that when a piece of ice broke off the lip of an iceberg and fell in, the water dented as though it were custard, reclosing itself into smoothness only a measurable few seconds after it was split. From time to time, we’d see or hear a ringed seal plopping itself into the frigid water. Otherwise, we were alone with the light and the ice.

  Ilimanaq, built around a small natural harbor, has about thirty houses, a school, a tiny church, and a store, which gets supplied about once a week. Each house has a team of dogs; dogs far outnumber the human residents of the place. The houses are painted in the bright, clear colors that the locals adore—Turkish blue, buttercup yellow, pale pink—but they hardly make an impression on the vast rocks that rise behind them, or on the white sea that stretches in front of them. It is hard to imagine a place more isolated than Ilimanaq. The village does have a phone line, however, and the Danish government will pay for helicopters to airlift local people in a medical crisis if weather permits a landing. No one has running water or water-flow toilets, but there is a generator and so some houses, and the school, have electricity, and several have televisions. Every house has an inconceivably beautiful view. At midnight, when the sun was up and the locals were asleep, I would walk among the silent houses and the sleeping dogs as if I were in a dream.

  A notice had been posted outside the store a week before I came, asking for volunteers to discuss their moods with me. My translator—a lively, educated, activist Inuit woman who was trusted in Ilimanaq—had agreed, despite misgivings, to help me persuade the reserved local people to talk. We were accosted, somewhat shyly, the day after we arrived. Yes, they had some stories to tell. Yes, they had decided to tell them to me. Yes, it was easier to talk about these things with a foreigner. Yes, I must talk to the three sage women—the ones who had started this whole business of talking about emotions. Everyone wanted to help, even when that help involved an alien loquaciousness. B
ecause of the recommendations that had been sent ahead for me, and because of the fisherman who brought me in his boat, and because of my translator, they made me part of their intimate community while granting me the courtesies due a guest.

  “Ask no open questions” was the advice of the Danish doctor in charge of the district that included Ilimanaq. “If you ask them how they feel, they won’t be able to tell you anything.” Nevertheless, the villagers knew what I wanted to know. They did not usually give answers of more than a few words, and the questions had to be as concrete as possible, but even if the emotions were not available to them linguistically, they were clearly present conceptually. Because trauma is a regular part of the lives of Greenlandic people, anxiety after trauma was not uncommon; neither was a descent into dark feelings and self-doubt. Old fishermen told me stories of their sleds going underwater (a well-trained dog team will pull you out—if the ice doesn’t break further, if you don’t drown first, if the reins don’t sunder), and of going miles in subzero temperatures in wet clothes; they talked about hunting when the ice was moving and the thunder of its sound made it impossible for one man to hear another, and you felt yourself rising up as a chunk of glacier shifted position, not knowing whether it would soon turn over and plunge you into the sea. And they talked about how, after such experiences, it had been difficult to keep going, to wrest the next day’s food from the ice and the darkness.

  We went to see the three woman elders. Amalia Joelson, the midwife in the village, was the closest approximation of a doctor in town. She had had a stillborn child one year; the next year, she gave birth to a child who died the night after it was born. Her husband, mad with grief, accused her of killing the child. At that time she could hardly bear to know that she would deliver the children of her neighbors, but could have none herself. Karen Johansen, the wife of a fisherman, had left her native town to come to Ilimanaq. Shortly afterward, in rapid sequence, her mother, her grandfather, and her older sister died, all of different causes. Then her brother’s wife became pregnant with twins. The first twin was stillborn at five months. The second was born healthy but died of sudden infant death syndrome at three months. Her brother had one child left, a six-year-old daughter, and when she drowned, he hanged himself. Amelia Lange was the minister in the church. She had married young, a tall hunter, and she had borne him eight children in rapid succession. Then he had a hunting accident: a bullet ricocheted off a rock and his right arm was split halfway between the elbow and the wrist. The bone never healed, and the break line would bend like an extra joint if you took his hand. He lost the use of his right arm. A few years later, he was just outside the house during a storm and was blown by a strong wind. Without his arm to break his fall, he broke his neck and has since been largely paralyzed from the head down. His wife had to care for him and move his wheelchair around the house, to bring up the children, and to hunt for food. “I would do my work outdoors and cry the whole time while I did it,” she recalled. When I asked whether others had not come to her when they saw her weeping at her work, she said, “They did not interfere so long as I could do the work.” Her husband felt he was such a burden to her that he stopped eating, hoping to starve himself to death, but she saw what he was doing, and seeing it broke down her silence, and she pleaded with him to live.

  “Yes, it is true,” Karen Johansen said. “We are too physically close to be intimate. And we all have so many burdens here, and none of us wants to add our burdens to the burdens of others.” Danish explorers of the early and middle twentieth century found three primary mental illnesses among the Inuit, described by the Inuit themselves. These have now largely died out except in very remote locations. “Polar hysteria” was described by one man who had suffered it as “a rising of the sap, of young blood nourished by the blood of walruses, seals, and whales—sadness takes hold of you. At first you are agitated. It is to be sick of life.” A modified form of it exists to this day as what we might call activated depression or a mixed state; it is closely related to the Malaysian idea of “running amok.” “Mountain wanderer syndrome” affected those who turned their back on the community and left—in earlier times, they were never allowed to return and had to fend for themselves in absolute solitude until they died. “Kayak anxiety,” the belief contra reality that water is filling your boat and that you will sink and drown, was the most common form of paranoia.

  Although these terms are now used primarily historically, they still evoke some of the conflicts of Inuit life. In Uummannaq, according to René Birger Christiansen, head of public health for Greenland, a spate of complaints recently came from people who believed they had water under their skin. The French explorer Jean Malaurie wrote in the 1950s, “There is an often dramatic contradiction between the Eskimo’s basically individualistic temperament and his conscious belief that solitude is synonymous with unhappiness. Abandoned by his fellowmen, he is overcome by the depression that always lies in wait for him. Is the communal life too much to bear? A network of obligations link one person to another and make a voluntary prisoner of the Eskimo.”

  The women elders of Ilimanaq had each borne her pain in silence for a long time. Johansen said, “At first, I tried to tell other women how I felt, but they just ignored me. They did not want to talk about bad things. And they did not know how to have such a conversation; they had never heard anyone talk about her problems. Until my brother died, I was proud also not to be a cloud in the sky for other people. But after this shock of his suicide, I had to talk. People did not like it. In our way, it is rude to say to someone, even a friend, ‘I am sorry for your troubles.’ ” She described her husband as a “man of silence” with whom she negotiated a way to weep while he listened, without either of them having to use the words that were so alien to him.

  These three women were drawn to one another’s difficulties, and after many years they spoke to one another about shared feelings of anguish. Joelson had gone to the hospital in Ilulissat for training in midwifery and had learned there about talking therapies. She found comfort in her conversation with these other two women, and she proposed an idea to them. It was a new idea for that society. In church one Sunday, Lange announced that they had formed a group and wanted to invite anyone who wished to talk about problems to come and see them, individually or together. She proposed that they use the consulting room at Joelson’s place and promised that such meetings would remain confidential. She said, “None of us needs to be alone.”

  In the following year, all the women of the village, one at a time, each unaware of how many others had taken up the proposition, came to see them. Women who had never told their husbands or their children what was in their hearts wept in the midwife’s delivery room. And so this new tradition began, of openness. A few men came, though their ideal of toughness kept many away, at least at the beginning. I spent long hours in the houses of each of these three women. Amelia Lange said it had been a great insight for her to see how people were “released” after talking to her. Karen Johansen invited me in with her family, gave me a bowl of fresh whale soup, which she had said was often the best answer to one’s problems, and told me that for her, the real cure for sadness was to hear of the sadness of others. “I am not doing this only for the people who speak to me,” she said, “but also for myself.” In their homes, the people of Ilimanaq do not talk about one another. But they go to their three elders and draw strength from them. “I know that I have prevented many suicides,” Johansen said.

  Confidentiality was of the utmost importance; a small settlement has too many hierarchies that cannot be disrupted without making problems far greater than the problem of silence. “I see the people outside who have told me their problems, and I never bring up those problems or ask in a different way about someone’s health,” Joelson said. “Only if, when I say politely, ‘How are you?’ they begin to cry, then I will bring them back with me to the house.”

  Depression is a disease of loneliness, and anyone who has suffered it acutely knows that i
t imposes a dread isolation, even for people surrounded by love—in Greenland, to some degree, an isolation imposed by the impossibility of being alone. The three women elders of Ilimanaq had discovered the wonder of unburdening themselves and of helping others to do the same. Different cultures express pain in different ways, and members of different cultures experience different kinds of pain, but the quality of loneliness is infinitely plastic. Those three women elders asked me about my depression, too, and sitting in their houses and eating dried cod wrapped in seal blubber, I felt them reaching from their experience to mine. When we left the town, my translator said this had been the most exhausting experience of her life, but she said it with incandescent pride. “We are strong people, the Inuit,” she said. “If we did not solve all our problems, we would die here. So we have found our way to solve this problem, this depression, too.” Sara Lynge, a Greenlandic woman who has set up a suicide hotline in a large town, said, “First, people must see how easy it is to talk to someone, then how good it is. They don’t know that. We who have discovered that must do our best to spread the news.”

  Confronted with worlds in which adversity is the norm, one sees shifting boundaries between the accurate reckoning of life’s difficulty and depression. The families I visited in Ilimanaq had in general made their way through tribulation by observing a pact of silence. An effective system for its purpose, it saw many people through numerous cold, long winters. Modern Western belief holds that problems are best solved when they are pulled out of darkness, and the story of what has happened in Ilimanaq bears out that theory, but the articulation is limited in scope and location. Let us remember that none of the depressed people in the village talked about their problems with the objects of those problems, and that they did not discuss their difficulties regularly even with the three women elders. It is often said that only a leisured class in a developed society falls prey to depression; in fact, that certain class is distinguished merely in having the luxury of articulating and addressing depression. For the Inuit, depression is so minor in the scale of things and so evident a part of everyone’s life that, except in severe cases of vegetative illness, they simply ignore it. Between their silence and our intensely verbalized self-awareness lie a multitude of ways of speaking of psychic pain, of knowing that pain.