Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

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 Greenland, to some degree, an isolation imposed by the impossibility of being alone. The three women elders of Ilimanaq 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 hotline 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 depression. The families I visited in Ilimanaq had in general made their way through tribulation by observing a pact of silence. An effective system for its purpose, it saw many people through numerous cold, long winters. Modern Western belief holds that problems are best solved when they are pulled out of darkness, and the story of what has happened in Ilimanaq 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 only a leisured class in a developed society falls prey to depression; in fact, that certain class is distinguished merely in having the luxury of articulating and addressing depression. 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.

The problem of depression in Greenland remains acute; suicide is the leading cause of mortality there, accounting for a full tenth of all deaths. The overall rate has held steady since 1980 despite programs designed to reduce it; the rate among younger people is escalating, often tied to alcoholism and domestic abuse. The suicide rate for 2014 was 78 per 100,000 inhabitants. In 2015, Astrid Olsen, who works to reduce suicide in Ilulissat, explained that she and her colleagues had ceased to use the word imminorneq, which loosely translates to “taking one’s own life,” and had started to use imminut toqunneq, which means “to kill oneself.” The new term more vividly evokes the reality of suicide as a form of murder, and evokes the emotional trauma that suicide can inflict upon a community. “It was as if a huge, heavy blanket lay over the whole town,” she said. “We had to lift that blanket off.”

In 2009, Greenland voted for and received self-rule. It is no longer a colony of Denmark’s as it was when I was there. Huge strides have been made with the establishment of hydroelectric power, which allows more of the population in settlements to live comfortably. Despite this cheering progress, the primary news from Greenland is that it is melting: in 2015, the Jakobshavn Glacier lost a piece of ice the size of Manhattan, an event so dramatic that it could be seen from space. Areas that were solid ice when I was in Greenland are now farms. Comparing photos I took in 1999 to photos sent to me since, my heart breaks. The loss of that landscape of ice is not merely an environmental catastrophe, but also a cultural one.

SENEGAL

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