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- and the story is fascinating on many levels. The man is amazing and beautiful - there are photos. A man so obsessed with an idea that it drives him, for over a decade, across two continents as surely as the sun rose and set on each of those many, many days; not for wealth, not for love or for art, just for itself, just to see, just because.
Oh my goodness, this is the book that drove everyone around me nuts. It is a grand, ripping tale and it is all true. seal blubbering, that is.
Quests like Kpomassie's restore my hope in mankind. If you like eclectic travel literature, this is your cup of homemade grog. I could not stop talking about the Greenland diet after reading it.
Kpomassi is completely mad, of course, to have left the comforts of home and tribe - even if he was going to be inducted into a scary python cult against his will - for a place like Greenland.- sorry Greenland.
He was interested especially in how children were indulged, how the adults got along with each other, treatment of the elderly, beliefs and rituals concerning death, prohibitions on killing certain animals, and so on. He left home shortly afterward in 1958 and, having little money, spent eight years working his way through Ghana, Senegal, France, Germany and Denmark before finally boarding a ship for his ultimate destination. There were many scenes of poverty, squalor, boredom and heavy drinking among the locals. Judging from this book, his perceptions of what it's like to live in France between cultures would surely be of interest. We have everything a man needs--seals and fish in the sea beyond counting.
Descriptions of some of the people he met were memorable, as were those of things like riding a dogsled, the local diet, the packs of half-starved dogs running around the villages, the absence of trees, the extreme cold and the polar night. And for the most part, the local Inuit people embraced him. The writer was a good observer and often compared local practices with those of his own culture to find differences and similarities. Most admirable to me were the author's good sense, quiet humor and ability to adapt to each new experience.
Here life was hard, and the pursuit of food more urgent than in the tropics." If there was anything I missed in this book, it was more description by the author of his travels' effect on his own emotions and thinking. On the other hand, nearly everyone was very open and sharing with him. "'But we'd be glad to have you with us always.' old Mattaaq kept telling me. Though he never reached his final destination or got to live in an igloo like he'd planned, he enjoyed many other experiences such as driving a dogsled, seeing icebergs up close and fishing on the ice. This book was published in 1981 and centers on the author's adventures around 1966-67 in Greenland, the ice-covered island the size of Europe with a tiny population scattered along the coast.
A lesson reinforced by this book was that despite all the cultural and language differences, people are people, and they can find ways to relate so long as they keep an open mind. Do people ever know their true reason for embarking on a long journey. He'd hoped to reach the town of Thule in the northwest, but made it only two-thirds of the way before deciding to return home to share his experiences with his countrymen. A sample of his writing from late in the book, after he planned to leave: "Now that I had been sharing these people's lives for sixteen months, their food no longer disgusted me, and I thought nothing of eating a breakfast of seal fat and dried intestines every morning. So many causes, motives and impulses intertwine to form the semblance of a reason." As a parting gift, the author's given a handmade necklace made from the tooth and claw of a polar bear.
Born in French Togoland in West Africa, Kpomassie developed a passionate interest in Greenland after reading about it as a teenager. It appears he was the first black African to visit Greenland, and his descriptions of his reception on arrival there are among the book's highlights. But I understand you very well. Do you want for anything here. 'We know you. After so many years away from them, you don't know what's become of your own folk, and you want to go back and see them, don't you.' "He may have been right.
He described actions, beliefs and other people well, but wasn't really that introspective.Though the author returned initially to Togo, eventually he went back to France, took French citizenship and lives there. But here, in the land of the great cold, the daily ritual was stripped of that display. Unfortunately for those who read only English, it appears that nothing else he's written has been translated from the French.
He writes, "My own grandfather would have made the same gesture with the same intention, using the trophies of a leopard; but he would have chosen a remote spot and a twilight hour, spoken arcane words, and enlisted all those minute preliminaries and accessories which, by swathing this simple act in mystery, would have given it increased significance. Landing near the island's southwestern tip, he traveled slowly up the western coast, staying for long periods of time with friendly families who kindly took him in. You know that, because you hunt and fish with my sons.
How can you not admire someone who traveled to such a different place and embraced it. His descriptions of people and landscapes were impressive, bleak though they were at times. One night, he was astonished to see the aurora borealis for the first time, though the locals were so used to it they didn't bother to look outside.
When I first heard about this book, I thought it impossible for a black west-African to even conceive of such a voyage, let alone have interest in an ice-bound place. For one thing, the impact of human activity on the ecosystem is not yet understood. Kpomassie gives us only the surface of his break with his family and Togoland culture. For anyone interested in unique travels and traveler's perceptions, this book is a must read. What we know, in retrospect, is that Togo was having its own cultural upheaval: The young Tete-Michel Kpomassie questioned his family's belief in the snake rituals and the jungle priestesses. In contrast, it seems to me that in the 1960s--when cultures were still quite different--people took their cultural differences less seriously than we do today, despite the spread of said monoculture and the increase of photographs and documentaries that makes the world somewhat familiar to everyone.What's really unexpected about this book is that Kpomassie finds a Greenland and an Inuit or Eskimo people, who are--it seems to me--in a cultural upheaval. His growing fear of family tradition conjoined with his discovery of a book on Greenland, planted a seed in his mind that propelled him out into the cold north, the land of very long, dark winters.
He is not at all disgruntled with the French (or Germans) the former colonizers of his homeland; rather, his ability to speak French enables him to find good jobs as well as the friends who believe in him. Also, another subtext to this book is that for the author to leave Togo, he had to have an upheaval in his own life. If it could be told, it would be by an Eskimo about Kpomassie's effects on the Greenlanders. "I landed merely by showing my identity card," Kpmoassie writes, "and found that France is a hospitable nation: despite the storm of ill feeling at the time of our countries' [sic] independence, no restriction was imposed upon our entry into the former mother country". The children and the women pay the highest price for this cultural change.Somewhere inside this book is a great untold story, a book within a book.
Thankfully, the author, Kpomassie, devotes several chapters to his life in Togo; it's essential that the reader see what his life was like in 1940's and '50's sub-Saharan Africa in order to judge the contrast between his edge-of-jungle childhood and the world of freezing waters and rocky crags of Greenland. Most alarmingly, the impact of Denmark and Danish people on the Natives of Greenland is not yet calculated; there is a crisis of morality, religion, and of old and new ways that--for me--was at times dismaying. For example, today the contrasts between Togo, France, and Greenland are less obvious because of "modernization" and creeping monoculture. But the author--as he narrates--shows that all voyages and voyagers are similar: the idea is born in the young person's mind, he envisions himself there, he makes a break with his homeland and family, he finds key supporters in people inspired by his vision, and his French "adoptive father" becomes the sponsor of his voyage.Kpomassie takes eight years to get from Togo to Greenland, working in Europe along the way. I felt freer in France than on African soil" (58-9).I feel certain that much has changed in the relationship between black Africans and Europe in the forty years since the author made his travels.
I lost interest before the halfway point, and struggled to finish it. I loved the premise of this book, and couldn't wait to read it with my book group. However, the book itself wasn't as good as I had hoped.
Kpomassie is an excellent observer. He travels up north through the coast of west Greenland, stopping in several villages, where he was invariably taken into someone's home as a guest. But Tete has another ideas. The first chapters are wonderful, as he let us see an animist society from the inside. By a sustained effort of will, Kpomassie worked his way through Africa and Europe before arriving in Greenland after several years. One of the most unusual travel books ever written, covering two exotic societies in the eyes of the west: animist West Africa and the eskimos of Greenland.
In gratitude, the father decides Tete is destined to become a priest in the cult. He candidly writes about his shock about what he saw as a lack of personal hygiene on the part of the greenlanders as well as their sexual promiscuity. Written originally in french about 25 years ago, and covering events happening in the 50s and 60s, the book starts as Tete-Michel Kpomassie, a teenager in his native Togo, nearly dies in a fall from a tree. Being possibly the first African to visit Greenland, and the first black person most of the Greenlanders had ever seen, he becomes a minor celebrity. And his travels in Greenland are fascinating too. After that, his father sends him to a local python cult in the jungle to cure him.
While recovering from his injuries, he finds by chance a book about Greenland and became obsessed with the idea of going there.
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