True Stories

by Francis Spufford

  Hummingly whole as it is in comparison to the town’s tattered present, the past Lowenstein restores is no dream-time, no pristine origin. He returns health to an order of things which divided time, rather like Greek tragedy. Playing always against the chaotic, circumstantial happenings of the moment there stood the archaic example of Tikigaq’s first people. The whale-hunter now strove to reproduce, imperfectly, the way that Raven Man had harpooned the first whale, which became the Tikigaq peninsula. Memory would preserve the names of present people in uqaluktuaq (ancestor stories, ‘the things that were said of them’) for a customary five generations before oblivion intervened; but the primordial stories would remain, would still be going on. And, since those oldest ancestors had spoken and behaved exactly in the same tenor as current Tikigaqmiut – slipping turds into sleeping bags without a whit of divine reserve – communion with them was continuous. Tikigaq ritual utterance was extremely practical. It had a directness of function which puts to shame the rhetorical or stylistic directness of Western verse. When the umialiks, the skin-boat captains, wanted to ensure a catch next spring, they assembled in the qalgis on the ‘day of calling’:

  They called Suluk, and he answered:

  ‘I want to kill a whale! Right now!’

  They called

  Kunuyaq and he said:

  ‘I want to kill a whale! Right now!’

  The elaborateness of the hunt came of the universal symbolic relevance of the surroundings. Every material aspect of the hunt, and of quotidian Tikigaq life, required alignment. Lowenstein is metaphorically abstemious; his lines are poised, denotative, built on careful nouns. Even when the sense is densest, what may seem to be metaphors –

  Their words are soot.

  They tattoo the cosmos.

  – turn out to figure accepted connections between things. Metaphor is hardly necessary when the busy parts of Tikigaq’s world already have a far closer relation to each other than similarity. An identity is being revealed, not a comparison asserted. The soot that Raven Man’s argument with Peregrine scatters here is the same as the darkness in the bag of aboriginal night that he stole earlier in the story; it recalls the soot (burnt blubber soot of course) which the raped sun-sister smeared on the face of her rapist moon-brother; it is visible every day in historic Tikigaq in the form of face tattoos on Tikigaq women, made by rubbing soot into cuts. Given this non-metaphoric webwork of affiliations – into which, Lowenstein explains, every newborn Tikigaqmiut was inducted, even down to membership in one of two symbolic football teams – he can deploy the terse, imagistic conjunctions of his own poetics without cultural rupture or opportunism. The reader travels further into mystery, rather than back westwards, when a shaman’s body becomes a hollow vestment, and ‘sky pours through the sutures and eyeholes’. There are lesser disciplines for Lowenstein to observe as well. He must avoid altogether the note of distancing doubt struck in the famously anxious passage of The Golden Bough where Frazer pointed out that none of the magic he describes actually worked. Only once does he seem to falter, and then it proves he is referring to other Inuits’ practices, regarded with scorn by Tikigaq itself.

  From a Eucharist to a World Cup single, ritual depends on repeated action. Equally, it is a sign of living and rooted ritual that it can accommodate a degree of error and imperfect performance. Consensual ritual – unlike, say, a coronation service in Westminster Abbey – is implicitly fault-tolerant. It must be if it is to do its work as valuable praxis, reconciling ideal theory and inconvenient reality through a more or less set form. Lowenstein heard Asatchaq falter unworriedly when telling stories in 1975: forget a name, insert an irrelevant joke, suddenly demand his supper. None of this detracted from the authority of the telling. In Ancient Land he remembers to have his fictive speakers forget as often, patterning in small snatches of authenticating muddle. Moreover it is a principle that helps assure the dramatic success of the book’s climax, the long-prepared whale hunt. He gives us one sample year’s hunt; but sample in the sense that it incorporates an ordinary friction between plan and circumstances. The skin-boat’s crew his poem follows keep their cosmos coherent from moment to moment, as inexperience strands them in an ice-locked pond, as a youngster who may only be an idle phoney claims shamanic exemption from the work, as a murder in another boat complicates the proper division of the kill. Despite and because of this, the grandeur of the hunt is complete and unforced. Sweat and metaphysics go together. To the hunters, what they do touches the whole structure of the world: Moby Dick, annually. To the reader, the hunt confirms Lowenstein’s extraordinary achievement in focusing and recomposing the mysteries of his source material.

  The kill achieved, everyone rejoices. Even the whale is pleased once its severed head has been dropped ceremoniously into the deep:

  The whale’s soul escapes.

  It returns to its country . . .

  It will find a new parka.

  So ought we to be happy. Tom Lowenstein has harpooned Tikigaq from the edge of the feasible, using a composite weapon. Its sharp head is Inuit; the other braced pieces, which remain in his hand, he brought with him from afar. Two inflated floats named Ezra and Charles buoy up the catch on the water, turning slightly to show precepts etched in soot. He sends a runner to his publisher. She is happy. Soon the text will be distributed generously to bookshops. She is very happy. She has not stood on Bloomsbury’s rooftop in vain, holding up her qattaq garnished with typewriter ribbons and royalty statements, crying ‘Ui! Ui! I want to publish a good book! About the Inuit! Right now!’

  (1993)

  BOREALISM

  In the early 1980s, Dr Allen Counter, a neurophysiologist from Harvard, was on sabbatical in Sweden when he heard the rumour that the two American explorers who reached the North Pole in 1909 might have fathered Inuit children in Greenland. As an admirer of Matthew Henson, the African-American sledging veteran chosen by the expedition leader Robert Peary to accompany him on the final push to the Pole, only to be identified in polar history for decades as Peary’s ‘coloured valet’, Dr Counter was excited. Equipping himself with a research project into hearing loss among Inuit users of high-powered rifles, he won permission to visit the military zone around the US air base at Thule in the far north-west of the island. And there, in the settlement of Moriussaq, with a miraculous ease suggesting that the ‘secret’ was largely so only because no-one else had bothered to unravel it, he met an aged dark-skinned hunter in a parka, who shook his hand and said, ‘I am Anaukaq, son of Mahri-Pahluk’ – the latter being the attested Inuit name for the legendary, laughing figure of Henson, the only foreigner of the time, Counter was later told, ‘who could learn to talk our language without using his tongue like a baby’. The dates fitted, and, apart from a striking facial resemblance to Henson, Anaukaq had also inherited a mass of confirming detail about the expedition from the Eskimo point of view. Nor was this all. The miracle redoubled. Not far away there lived the surviving son of the slightly ­less celebrated ‘Peuree’: named Kali, equally elderly, he was equally happy to talk about his family history, and his link to the kahdonah (white) explorer. For Dr Counter there was the flattering plus that Anaukaq Henson, never having seen another black man before, except an American airman in the distance, assumed at first that he must be speaking to a fellow descendant of the great Matthew.

  It is a wonderful story.3 Why so wonderful, though? What is involved in the attractiveness of Dr Counter’s discovery of the two men? It seems magically appropriate, of course, that the great deep-freeze of the north should have preserved the traces and faces of Peary and Henson, bringing forth Kali and Anaukaq from the ice just as, in Siberia, it has disgorged mammoths, woolly as the day they died. But the same marvel happens in other places, without the suggestive apparatus of cold, simply as an accident of longevity. The daughter of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the man who began the revival of the Hebrew language in the 1890s, is still alive – and still using the obscure word for telephone (sachrachok) her father coined when h
is children were the only cradle speakers of the language in the world, instead of the telefon preferred by every other modern Israeli. It is, perhaps, the implied trick with time that appeals to us. Such accidents make the past seem, precariously, as present as the present is; retrieve from the grasp of history events that turn out to be still within the reach of memory; and open a private avenue into the past exactly as wide as one family. They seem to suspend the laws of time unexpectedly. Or rather they remind us that time has eddies and backwaters. It doesn’t flow on at a constant rate, but moves to a number of different measures, overlaid on each other, one of which – proceeding without any reference to historical periods – is the slow tempo of generations. There are (not for very much longer) Victorians among us.

  But in the case of Kali and Anaukaq, a polar expedition’s half-Inuit revenants, a connection exists to an idea in Victorian theories of human development which were influential in the exploration of the Arctic. This is the thought that, because different races achieved lesser or greater advances in the Darwinian struggle, there were effectively tracts of past time geographically disposed here and there about the globe, which whites could visit with their superior travelling technology. Hence New Guinea was, more than metaphorically, ‘in the Stone Age’. With its agriculture-preventing icecap, its treeless coastal margins and its total lack of metal, so was Greenland. According to theory, whalers and Danish churchmen and naval missions that went there were looking into their own tribal prehistory; a stage which the wretched inhabitants were stuck at, being heirs to the least desirable patrimony on earth. The idea was echoed in literature towards the end of the nineteenth century, though not with Arctic locations. Hardy’s aptly ­titled Return of the Native has a moor which sustains ancienter modes of life than the surrounding farmland: a kind of human archaeology is possible. And Conrad draws on the same perceptions to produce a different irony in Heart of Darkness, when Marlow tells his listeners that Thames was once a river as dark as the Congo, for the Romans watching the tribe-infested woods along the banks. It is echoed as well by Dr Counter, though quite unconsciously, for his book is an ingenuously faithful account of his Greenland journey and its sequels, along with a valuable reshuffling of the Matthew Henson file, rather than (in any sense) a net set for the flying ironies he looses. What can he be doing except recapitulating the old paradigm, in novel fashion, when he voyages to 80° North to examine a bubble of black American history, left unpopped there for eighty years?

  The corollary to this vision of the world divided into chronological reserves was the fascination with lost cities and lost civilisations; which was not confined to sensational fiction, for Southey had written an epic about Prince Madoc and Welsh America at the beginning of the nineteenth century, although it is the later, pulpier examples that tend to be remembered now: Shangri-La, the kingdom ruled by Rider Haggard’s She, the endless succession of displaced Romans that Tarzan would stumble upon, brushing back the jungle creepers to see a tropically transplanted Temple of Jupiter where, after all these centuries, the sentries still cried ‘Hail Caesar!’ Many regions of the expanding, imperialised Victorian world had one of these myths of early European settlement attached to it. For the Americas there were Madoc and St Brendan, for Africa there was Prester John, and for the whole world there was the nomination of this people or that as the lost tribes of Israel. Such beliefs offered a satisfaction more literal and more direct than the somewhat abstracted idea that Inuits were now what Europeans had once been. If they were true, it meant that a lucky traveller could find not just history alive in the present, but our history alive, the exact and veritable thing. And some evidence could be reckoned in support. Often there had been a historic settlement, or at least an early contact with Europe. One can then detect the mythic importance of the idea in the disproportionate attention paid by serious archaeologists to the meagre traces of such a settlement, while all around the indigenous culture of the region offered far fuller rewards. The fascination had a very definite racial subtext. But the purely fantastic component of the myth developed around the idea that the settlers might still be there, inaccessible, awaiting rescue and reunion.

  And Greenland, of course, had one of these fantasies associated with it. Vikings from Iceland had colonised the south-east and south-west coasts, built houses and churches, had a bishop sent them by the Vatican – and disappeared from European ken two centuries before ships again began to call there. As soon as they did, the search began. Stone rings marking the base of Inuit winter dwellings were constantly mistaken for recent Viking ruins, on the principle that only Europeans build with masonry. The savages were (axiomatically) architects in snow alone. By the time of Peary’s expeditions only the most hardened fantasists really expected that, breasting a difficult pass in the interior, an expedition might yet see smoke rising from a hotspring-heated crease of the icecap where, in a tiny enclave of skalds and sagas, a colony of brawny Olafs and plaited Gudruns still survived. On the other hand, there remained the chance that a pair of blue eyes in an ‘Eskimo’ face, or a head of blond hair, would announce a different kind of survival. If the colonies had gone under, the people at least might have assimilated, and in that sense still be there, disguised as natives. (Again Dr Counter, in a cloud of unknowing, recalls some very old obsessions.)

  Considering Europeans’ difficulty in confronting Inuit cultures, someone someday should write a modest northern counterpart to Said’s Orientalism, and perhaps call it Borealism. Said describes the range of ways in which commentary on the Orient patterned away – defused – the challenge of cultural difference, reducing the East to a historyless annexe of the European imagination. The Greenland/Viking fantasy was sometimes put to strikingly parallel use. It allowed European, and American, travellers to negotiate the contradictions thrown up in encounters with the Inuit. The particular difficulty was Inuit travelling technology: the low-friction sledges, the ergonomic tents, the heat-saving fur clothes and sleeping bags, the apparatus for handling dogs. It ought to have been that visiting whites, with their superior attainments and their supposed adaptability to all environments, could dispense with these savage solutions to the terrain. In fact, until the invention of reliable petrol motors, no expedition that did not adopt Inuit techniques succeeded. Franklin died, despite the steam-powered central heating on HMS Erebus. In Antarctica Captain Scott died, manhauling his sledges and wearing canvas clothing; while Amundsen, who had digested the lessons of the Arctic, rode to the Pole on a dog sleigh, dressed in furs. Peary and Henson reached the North Pole because they acted like Inuits, and drew on a fund of expert Inuit advice and labour. (The goal of the expedition, of course, was all their own, no Inuit being daft enough to think it was worth reaching an imaginary point hundreds of miles from land.) But this expedient adoption of Inuit methods did not necessarily imply any disruptive acknowledgement of the humans who’d perfected them. Just as the British in north India tended at first to attribute anything they admired to the distant influence of Alexander the Great and Hellenism, it was perfectly possible to credit Inuit material culture to the leavening influence of the vanished Vikings. Kayaks? Weeny longships. It was an identification that smoothed anxiety. And – a more general habit, familiar from Said – explorers separated people from objects imaginatively, put them in separate categories of consideration, so that Inuit stood in a more or less accidental relationship to their own creations. (The classic Saidian situation saw a European wondering over the draggled worshippers who inexplicably cluttered up the colonnades of a beautiful mosque. Here an Inuit substitutes for a Muslim, and a harpoon for a mosque. What cannot be admitted easily is that the one made the other.)

  All this may seem to set the scene for the usual tragedy of misunderstandings, with those on the European side enforced by guns and commerce, and the Inuit parties in the encounter sinking under those traditional consequences of European contact, alcoholism and disease. But the patterns of prejudiced perception were also accompanied, it should be remembered, by
varying degrees of practical co-operation, and individual recognition of features to be admired in Inuit life. The particular community of Polar Inuit that Peary and Henson were involved with seems to have survived rather well, on Dr Counter’s evidence, perhaps because their home is not on the way to anywhere that Europeans have an interest in, except the Pole. And it is clear, too, that the births of Kali and Anaukaq did not signal quite the predictable rupture in Inuit society and mores. Their Inuit mothers’ husbands were away on expedition errands when they were conceived, on board ship, by their American fathers; but the arrival of the babies appears to have been accommodated within the sanctioned Eskimo tradition of exogamy, which gives a newborn that many more relations to call on when times get hard. (On this point Dr Counter unfortunately limits himself to a protest against the sexual stereotype of Inuit. He therefore only establishes that neither mother was Eskimo Nell.) Both boys were well-treated by their stepfathers. Though other children teased Anaukaq for his ‘dirty face’, his blackness was accepted as a personal peculiarity, and rather prized than not for its reminder of Henson. Neither of the two suffered the exclusion reserved for half-castes elsewhere, or the cultural uncertainty. ‘I am Eskimo’, Kali Peary told Counter. ‘I was born and raised Eskimo. I think Eskimo. I was an Eskimo hunter . . . All my children were raised as Inuit.’