Glow

Don’t write too much about us. White people are always walking about with a pencil and a notebook as if they can’t remember a thing, jotting down a load of trivial details. And when they return to their own countries, they tell nothing but lies about us whilst portraying themselves as great heroes’: these are the words of the hunter Kutsikisoq that open the narrative reportage by the writer and photographer Ilona Wisniewska, "Bagliore", published by Iperborea and translated by Barbara Delfino. This epigraph foreshadows one of the central themes of the entire book: the right to tell the story of a community that has always been portrayed by others. Wiśniewska is an attentive and curious connoisseur of the North and its many facets, and she returns to Avanersuaq to chronicle life in the northernmost part of Greenland. The author immerses herself in the Inughuit world – a world of hunters and fishermen, packs of sled dogs and seal hunting – with a deep sense of responsibility and respect for the inhabitants, their customs, their history and their way of life: she observes, participates and takes notes. Through testimonies, her own photographs, stories and legends, Wisniewska paints an extremely human picture of the community that goes beyond cold statistics or geopolitical analysis. There are faces and voices such as Juaanna, a former Protestant pastor who lost her faith in God after her daughter Athina was mauled by dogs; Erik, who teaches at the small school in Siorapaluk, feels acutely lonely and makes no plans for the future; Aputsiaq and Michael, with whom the author goes seal hunting, who tell her about the ‘qivittoq’, an eerie and legendary figure halfway between man and beast; and little Karline on her first fox hunt, celebrated at home. Nature also plays a central role – hostile due to the temperatures, the hours of darkness, the polar nights to be endured, the ice to be survived – as does the story of a society marked by an alarmingly high rate of youth suicides, hospitals that only accept patients until four in the afternoon, helicopters grounded for weeks due to adverse weather conditions, community shops with exorbitant prices, and, from afar, the shadow of politics, which sets hunting quotas and issues licences without knowing what life is really like there. A lucid and fascinating report that chronicles an extreme corner of the world, casting its gaze towards its uncertain future – one that is hard to discern, like a glimmer sought on the horizon of a frozen sea, leaving one to wonder whether it was merely imagined or not.

 

Ilona Wisniewska
, "Bagliore
Iperborea", 288 pp., 20 euros