The Noonday Demon (39 page)

I went 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 head of public health. It is called Illiminaq, a place of hunters and fishermen with a total adult population of about eighty-five. There are no roads leading to Illiminaq, and there are no roads in Illiminaq. 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 at home. 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. We crossed the mouth of the fjord, navigating among the smooth, oblong shapes of older ice that had turned bottom up, and chunks of broken-off glacier, as big as apartment buildings, that were corrugated with age and curiously blue—our boat humble in the face of such natural majesty. As we progressed, we gently pushed aside the smaller icebergs, some of which were the size of refrigerators; others were like floating dinner plates, and they crowded the clear 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 tell 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 had split. From time to time, we’d see or hear a ringed seal plopping himself into the frigid water. Otherwise, we were alone with the light and the ice.

Illiminaq is built around a small natural harbor. There are some thirty houses, a school, a tiny church, and a store, which gets supplied about once a week. Each house has a team of dogs, who 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 Illiminaq. 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 houses have televisions. Every house has an inconceivably beautiful view; at midnight, when the sun was high 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 mood states with me. My translator—a lively, educated, activist Inuit woman who was trusted in Illiminaq—had agreed, despite her misgivings, that she would try to help me persuade the reserved local people to talk about feelings. 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. The Inuit are in my experience kind people, and they wanted to help, even when that help involved a loquaciousness somewhat alien to their usual way. Because of the recommendations that had been sent ahead for me, and because of the fisherman who had 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 Illiminaq. “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. 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 at the docks told me stories of their sleds going under (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 break) and of having to go miles in subzero temperatures in wet clothes; they talked about hunting when the ice was moving and the thunder of 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. Each of them had suffered terribly. Amalia Joelson, the midwife, was the closest there was to a doctor in town. She had had a stillborn child one year; the next year, she gave birth to a child that died the night after it was born. Her husband, mad with grief, accused her of killing the child. She herself could hardly bear at that time to know she could 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 Illiminaq. Shortly afterward, in rapid sequence her mother, her grandfather, and her older sister died, all independently. 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 over 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 has had to care for him and move his wheelchair around the house, bring up the children, and 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 Greenlanders are too 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 time out of mind. 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 in your boat and you will sink and drown, was the most common form of paranoia. Though these terms are now primarily used historically, they still evoke some of the conflicts of Inuit life. In Umanaaq, according to René Birger Christiansen, head of public health for Greenland, there was recently a spate of complaints 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 Illiminaq had each borne her pain in silence for a long time. Karen 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 describes 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 together about the depth of their anguish, about their loneliness, about all the feelings that were in them. Amalia Joelson had gone to the hospital in Ilulissat for training in midwifery, and there she had become aware of 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, Amelia Lange announced that they had formed a group and that they 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 Amalia Joelson’s place. Lange promised that such meetings would remain entirely confidential. She said, “None of us needs 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 offer, came to see them. Women who had never told their husbands or their children what was in their hearts came and wept in the midwife’s delivery room. And so this new tradition began, of openness. A few men came, though the men’s idea of toughness kept many of them 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 and 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 she had found the real cure for sadness, which 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 and in their intimacies, the people of Illiminaq do not talk about each other. But they go to their three elders and draw strength from them. “I know that I have prevented many suicides,” Karen Johansen said. “I’m glad I could talk to them in time.” The matter of confidentiality was of the utmost importance; there are many hierarchies in a small settlement, and these 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,” Amalia 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.”

The idea of talking therapies is frequently discussed in the West as though it had been made up by psychoanalysts. Depression is a disease of loneliness, and anyone who has suffered it acutely knows that it imposes a dread isolation, even for people surrounded by love—in this case, an isolation caused by crowding. The three women elders of Illiminaq 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 hot line 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 the state of depression. Inuit life is hard—not morally demeaning in the way of concentration camps, and not emotionally vacant in the mode of modern cities, but unrelentingly arduous and without the quotidian material luxuries that most Westerners take for granted. Until quite recently, the Inuit could not afford even the luxury of speaking their problems: they had to suppress all negative emotion lest it sweep away their entire society. The families I visited in Illiminaq made their way through tribulation by observing a pact of silence. It was an effective system for its purpose, and it saw many people through many cold, long winters. Our modern Western belief is that problems are best solved when they are pulled out of darkness, and the story of what has happened in Illiminaq 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 depression is a thing to which a leisured class falls prey in a developed society; in fact, it is a thing that a certain class has the luxury of articulating and addressing. 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. Context, race, gender, tradition, nation—all conspire to determine what is to be said and what is to be left unsaid—and to some extent they thereby determine what is to be alleviated, what exacerbated, what endured, what forsworn. The depression—its urgency, its symptoms, and the ways out of it—is all determined by forces quite outside of our individual biochemistry, by who we are, where we were born, what we believe, and how we live.