High North

One journey into one place

On the Way to Sápmi by Reem Usfour

We are all, most of us at least, on the way to somewhere else. This book is a very direct attempt to give that journey shape. Reem Usfour does not write a long preface explaining things. But what needs to be said can be easily inferred. The author travelled into the homelands and hinterlands of the Sami people, in northern Europe, upon the Arctic fringe. And saw things there worth photographing.

We have a few cars. A few signs by the sides of the road. One or two of them toppled, or weathered. Or in some way less then whole and new and pure. And we have the inside of some people’s houses. Ordinary houses, seemingly, those ones on the way.

But this book was not made to show road signs and kitchens and ordinary houses quite far from the places in question. It was made to show us the places in question. And it does.

Here we are, then, in a different place. In a land nor ordinary. The scene is illuminated in ways that could be unearthly. So clear is the light, so bright the thing. And there are — more than the grasses, the thick grasses, that could be anywhere — other things to see and to admire. The high peaks. The tall mountaintops of the high north. A place of strategic importance, we’re told. Among those peaks are the ice seas. The seas that ice-breakers disrupt and travel, will travel in greater numbers. Will make the whole place navigable for cruise ships, for tankers, for cargo vessels each carrying a small nation’s GDP.

Again, so is said, so is written.

The icy seas. Places that many a canoe probably travelled long ago. It might be romantic to think of longships making the same journeys, hugging the coasts, spearing through the sheets of freezy water. But they may have come from other ports. So few of us in the West — in Europe’s west, in the western hemisphere, know much about the global north. It’s too far away. Too distant. It’s a different kind of world.

When ideas are occasionally had in other places about the frozen north, those bright ideas are often regarding these sorts of places. How to make them navigable. Did not our ancestors seek north-west passages for trade in even more daunting conditions? Is this not what mankind has always done?

Those ideas. Like where to put things like interceptors. Where to put things like satellite stations. Secret things. Missile defence. Intelligence gathering. It all has to happen somewhere. It may as well take place high up, far away, making use of the curvature of the earth. Why not? Have it up in the far, high north. In the places the missiles might one day traverse. A way station on the final few journeys made by man (and man-made things). A signal-point, a mile post, in the history of the end of the species and the world.

It’s what some people talk about, even openly.

While some of us look a photographs. We see the mountains. The great peaks, ever white — or almost always — because it is so cold they stay ever frozen. It is so cold out there. A friend of a friend once almost slipped into psychosis, I was told, because he wanted to survey every mountain that had never been climbed. Had never been climbed in the world. And then he wanted to make the long, long journey out to one, so that he would be the first to make it to the top. I asked my friend if getting to the top first would give his friend naming rights, like an entomologist naming a new ant variety. He told me he did not know. And I suppose he didn’t. Not many of us understand the behaviours, and least of all the ambitions, of the almost insane.

Back in the Arctic, the seas are like glass, on occasion. When they’re trapped in a photograph, they are like glass. They’re cold and profound and just like other seas. Like other seas, except for their presence on a particular part the earth’s great surface.

Away a little from the mountains are the trees. There are forests all over. The trees here are characteristic. They’re tall and strong and sometimes a little sparse. In photographs you might see a single tree on its own. A very tall tree. Isolated, unexpectedly strong. Braced, perhaps, against the forbidding climate, against the world. But we can’t talk to the trees, not normally, so we don’t know.

The people of this part of the world are their own kind. But they, too, are like other kinds of people. This is not to diminish them. They’re their own people, too. They are themselves. But they are like other people in some of their wants. They demonstrate for autonomy. They want other people, other interests, gone. And they make warm homes. Warm, pleasant homes with interesting colours. They make their clothes from fine, bright colours, too. Their ceremonial clothes are complex and bold. They wear ornamental garments on their heads in ceremony.