One of the more memorable reads from my 2011 list was The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle. The author, Sara Wheeler, visited native communities across the north - Alaska, Siberia, Greenland, Canada, and Scandinavia - to take a pulse on life in the furthest reaches of the planet. She also did a lot of research, thereby introducing her reader to any number of works on life in the north.
One of those books is Tété-Michel Kpomassie's personal account of the time he spent living in Greenland in the 1960s, An African in Greenland. This was not an easy book to come by, but I eventually found a copy on Amazon and, after letting it sit on my bookshelf for a few months, finally cracked it open and really, really enjoyed it.
Tété-Michel is a teen in Togo when he is bitten by a snake, cured by a priestess of the snake cult, and then promised to said cult by his father, as payment and in gratitude for their services. You couldn't make this stuff up. Only days before he is enter the cult once and forever, he finds a book about Greenland in an evangelical bookshop and determines to runoff to the Great White North rather than face the fate of a life among pythons deep in the West African forest.
By turns, and over the course of six years, he works his way from Togo to Greenland by way of Ghana, Senegal, France, Germany, and Denmark, learning the customs and languages of the locals, working whatever jobs he can find, and, evidently, charming the socks off of everyone he meets. Time after time he is housed gratis and he even manages to find a sort of fairy grandfather who finances the trek to, and months in, Greenland.
Once he reaches his promised land the fun continues: dinners of seal, whale blubber and boiled reindeer; sledging across mile after frozen mile of land, building an igloo and sleeping with sled dogs when the way is lost; hunting for seals and fishing with the natives, you name it. All while obviously keeping meticulous notes on his thoughts and experiences and even comparing and contrasting the West African cultures of his childhood to the European and Inuit cultures of his travels. It's a marvelous little book, honestly, and while I don't expect too many others will bother to find and read it, those who do will be richly rewarded.
Wow! Where did you hear about this one? This sounds amazing. My local library network actually has 5 copies of this, too.
ReplyDeleteSomewhat unrelated, but I caught the end of an interview with the founder of the Lonely Planet guidebooks on NPR today. He and the host were swapping elephant stories. (I wish I had an elephant story.) Here's the article: http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2012/10/24/lonely-planet-wheeler. And here's what I think is the link to the full broadcast: http://hereandnow.wbur.org/section/radio/2012/10/24
The author of Magnetic North mentioned it in that book and it sounded interesting. I'm impressed your library has so many copies - I tried to convince CADL to add it to their collection, and ended up buying a copy myself when they didn't!
ReplyDeleteAs for Lonely Planet, I think working for them would have to be my dream job. And he also put my own (troubling) motto succinctly when he said, "One of the things about travel is you find the more places you go to, the more places you haven't been to." The world is just too damn big most days!