A Stranger in a Strange Land

by

Nicki Leone

Tété-Michel Kpomassie must be the only arctic explorer whose journey begins with a description of how he used to sleep naked in a loin cloth. His journey ends in a turf hut in Upernavik on the northwest coast of Greenland (well into the Arctic Circle), in a room too small for the author to stand upright in, with walls covered in carefully preserved magazine articles. Just how Kpomassie went from sleeping on the earthen floor of a palm-frond hut in Togo to a wooden palette in a turf one at the edge of the habitable word is one of the most astonishing and entrancing stories ever to have been overlooked by an adventure-hungry reading public: An African in Greenland is a story every bit as unlikely as its title implies.

Kpomassie was only a teenager in 1959 when, having climbed high into a coconut palm to harvest the fruit and dead fronds, he encountered an angry python and in his attempt to get away, fell out of the tree. It was a long way down.

He was seriously injured, and although his father was a man of importance of the village (with eight wives) and a skilled healer, he was unable to cure his son. There was no snake bite to treat, no broken bones to set, no apparent internal injuries, but Tété-Michel hovered in between life and death in a kind of dream-state. It was decided that since the accident involved an encounter with a python, he could only be cured by a priestess of the python cult which existed in great mystery in a compound in a distant sacred forest:

It took us a good quarter of an hour to notice that in an unlighted corner of the hut, over to our right, there was someone who had been examining us intently for a long time. It was a big woman with huge dark eyes, squatting in the shadow, motionless as a statue. Father was the first to become aware of this strange presence: he suddenly stopped speaking. We all looked in the direction of his fixed state, and there was a long silence. The woman did not say a word. However, everyone soon realized that it was upon me that she was focusing her attention. Indeed, I could feel the weight of a terrible, unblinking gaze, like that of a person in a trance. When this woman leaned forward to examine me more closely, her head emerged from the shadows surrounding her—shadows that further darkened our long silhouettes against the wall—and I was able to examine her face at leisure: it was incised with ten ritual scars—two in the center of the forehead, two on each temple, and two on each cheek—exactly the same number of signs that the initiates of the snake cult distinguish in the five creases on either side of the upper lip of the royal python they worship . . . The face of this corpulent figure would have looked rough and commonplace, had her eyes not glittered with a weird brilliance. On all of us she exercised a powerful fascination.

The treatment, which involved snakes, chants and scenes that make the Indiana Jones movies seem pallid and unimaginative, was frightening but successful, and had several immediate results. The first was that Tété-Michel’s father promised to bring his son back to the cult to be initiated as an acolyte priest when he a fully recovered, and since a father’s word was absolute law, Tété-Michel’s future now seemed inevitable and inescapable.

The second result was that the young man spent some weeks in convalescence, excused from the daily labor of harvesting at the edges of coconut plantations rarely visited by their absentee owners. Instead, he spent his time on the beach, reading—and here is where one first gets a hint that there is something unusual about Tété-Michel beyond his close encounter with the snake-priestess. Apparently, he spends the few coins he earns from selling coconut-frond mats at the only bookshop in the area. It was run by evangelical missionaries and contained a large number of Bibles and books designed to educate the heathen on the error of his ways.  But, as the writer puts it, “from time to time, as if in error, the occasional travel book or a novel would find its way onto the shelves.”  These the young man always ferreted out, which is how he came one day to be sitting on the hot sands of the beach, reading a children’s book called The Eskimos from Greenland to Alaska.

Kpomassie was immediately taken with the descriptions of Greenland, where there were no trees and (more importantly) no snakes. Where it was always cold and where “. . . the child is king, free from all traditional and family restraint.” Compared the future that had been decreed by his father, soon to be swallowed up by the snake cult of the dark forest the way a python swallows its prey, the life of the Eskimos seemed idyllic. And this is how a young man from Togo decided to run away to Greenland.

It takes him something like eight years to get there, working his way by ship from port to port and stopping in between to earn the money for the next stage of his journey. Oh, there were planes. But the cost of an airplane ticket was utterly beyond the abilities of a young man whose only income was from the sale of handmade coconut-mats. Kpomassie preferred boat travel whenever possible, because it gave him a chance to immerse himself in the lands he was traveling through. “What’s the point of flying over a landscape?” he asks rhetorically while standing in the frozen harbor at Christianshab hoping for a cargo ship to take him to Thule, “Wasn’t it a hundred times more worthwhile to sail through this natural grandeur, to feel its overwhelming power? Such feeling was far superior to the superficial admiration experienced from the air.” Kpomassie never retracts this sentiment, despite the fact that he is very prone to seasickness and has never once set foot on a boat without suffering for it. He seems to find this “inner psychological war” he wages with nausea each trip somehow interesting, even therapeutic.

It takes the first six years of that eight-year journey for the author to get out of West Africa and to the shipping ports of Copenhagen, but this lengthy stage of his travels is glossed over quickly in his account. One gathers that he is persistent and generally optimistic (or he’d be in that forest surrounded by snakes and shaking with fright) and it is clear that he is intelligent. There are casual mentions of an education by correspondence course which he had to eventually give up since he moved so frequently. He is also something of a natural linguist, and has no trouble picking up the languages of the countries he passes through—it is a kind of survival skill for him. By the time he actually steps off the freighter onto the shores of Greenland in Julianihab (where everyone one on the dock, every single person, falls utterly silent at his appearance) Kpomassie speaks at least five different languages—French, German, Danish, English, and his own native language of the Mina tribe. He also has the happy habit of making instant friends, and it is the casual kindness of strangers that sees him through much of his journey. One elderly Frenchman, finding in Kpomassie the kind of spirit that deserves nurturing, even becomes an adoptive father to the young man—helping him with money when he needed it (which wasn’t often), and advice when necessary (which was quite often).

But what makes An African in Greenland so astonishing is what happens when Kpomassie gets on the boat in Copenhagen, and is at last within sight of the dream he conceived so long ago on such a different shore. The author is an instinctual ethnographer and anthropologist, vested with a genial nature but an indefatigable sense of curiosity. He is constantly aware of the contrasts of his own culture and that of the country he has landed in, but unlike a European or American traveler, there is never any sense of superiority, of a “civilized” person visiting “uncivilized” lands. He is fascinated by difference, and also conscious of—even appreciative of—similarity.  When he discovers, for example, that to the Inuit everything has a soul—even rocks and streams, animals and important organs in the body, and even concepts such as a person’s name—it is a belief that he understands viscerally. Has he not left his own land because the souls of the pythons were ready to claim him? And don’t African hunters take as much time appeasing the souls of the lions they plan to kill as they do in the actual hunt? So it is with the Inuit on the hunt, going after whale or seals.  And Kpomassie understands also that because everything in the universe that is important has a soul, the white, barren landscape of Greenland is not, in an Inuit’s eyes barren at all, but teeming with life, with souls.

Kpomassie’s arrival in Greenland is national news. Literally—it is announced on the state-run news program. “I had started on a voyage of discovery,” he writes, “only to find that it was I who was being discovered.” This consciousness, this ever-present awareness, of both his own culture and that of the Greenlanders makes An African in Greenland unique.  But what raises it to extraordinary is the author’s expressive and beautiful language:

Towards one o’clock in the afternoon, we spotted the first ice floes. These were ice blocks of varying shapes and sizes, drifting here and there as the waves took them. The smallest looked like swimming swans, and some were like crouching camels rocking gently from side to side. Some were white, others green or blue. A brilliant sun, cold as steel, glittered on them and transformed the sea into a fairy-tale world: a vast ice-blue expanse strewn with great chunks of crystal. A dazzling glitter seethed and multiplied.

He makes his way up the western coast of the island from the southern towns steeped in poverty where the Inuit way of life has been all but abandoned by government design and the people live on government assistance, (the men drink, the women have sex, but children are universally adored) further and further north. He goes fishing for “sea wolf” with young men on a rusty trawler. He goes out with older men who still know the art of hunting with sled dogs. He sees an aurora borealis and thinks it is something supernatural (his hosts don’t even bother to put down their beers to go look). He ends up at last in the village of Upernavik, where he meets Robert Mattaaq, a cantankerous old man who refuses to be moved out of his turf hut and into one of the newer (but flimsier and colder) clapboard houses in the town. Kpomassie moves in.

Mattaaq is the antithesis of that snake priestess with the glittering eyes. He holds a wealth of tradition in his old head, but rarely leaves his hut to share it. Instead, he brings the outside world to in to him. The Inuit and the African spend days in front of the greasy oil stove, eating the marrow from cracked bones (which is all there is to eat) and trading stories. And Mattaaq has a “library”:

In his own way, old Robert was a “bookworm” whose favorite reading matter was restricted entirely to periodicals. Every week for many years now he had been getting hold of magazines dealing with “world affairs.” And even now when he avoided going out as much as possible because of the curiosity his appearance aroused in the village—his wife, his daughter, his youngest son Niels, aged fifteen, and his two married sons who also lived in Upernavik, continued to buy them for him. But therein lay the rub: these magazines, reviews and newspapers began to make such a clutter on the floor that one day old Rebekka suggested throwing them out the window. Alarmed, the old man began sorting out this junkheap and pinning on the wall the articles he wanted to reread. And so—casually, almost unintentionally—a first layer of printed pages spread over the four walls, followed in time by a second layer, a third, and even a fourth layer…The first pages dated from five years back and, as new pages had kept being added to the old ones, my host had great difficulty locating old articles or documents he needed.”

Bookworms the world over, it turns out, are all alike.

An African in Greenland was first published in 1981 in France, where it caused, not surprisingly, a national sensation. It won the Prix Littéraire Francophone that year but then fell into an obscurity that the book hardly deserves. Twenty years later it was republished by NYRB Classics, but even the recent interest in Arctic and Antarctic stories and exploration seems to have failed to bring the book into the public eye. This is a shame, because the nowhere else is the magic and bleak beauty of those frozen landscapes made more compelling that in the eyes of an African man, making his way along the cold bright shores of Greenland shining in the slanted light of the midnight sun.

Books mentioned in this column:
An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie (NYRB, 2001)

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.