“Marks and traces of Greenland can surely be found in my writing”
Interview with Danish writer Iben Mondrup
Born in Denmark, but moving to Greenland at an early age, the formative years spent in this remote landscape helped form Iben Mondrup as a writer and visual artist.
“Marks and traces of my growing up in the Greenlandic landscape can surely be found in my writing. My novels are known for their raw sensuality, passion and temper, all rooted in my childhood in Greenland, where life is tough and the gap between life and death can be very narrow, and where people are painfully dependent on one another in tiny communities isolated by ice and snow. My use of language was informed by running on the rocky ground, chasing the dog sleigh, far away from the settlement. As the Danish child, who felt she belonged in the Greenlandic landscape, but never truly could belong there because she was Danish,” said Iben Mondrup, speaking ahead of her appearance at the 6th EU-China International Literary Festival.
“My family arrived in Greenland in 1972, in the middle of the country’s modernization. A highly politically charged period in which the population was exposed to the so called Danization, the assimilation to Danish language and culture. My parents were Danish schoolteachers, dispatched to Greenland along with an army of Danish workers to develop the traditional trapper’s society into a modern society of the European type. Their societal position was superior. As Danes they were born into privilege, while the Greenlanders remained their subjects.
“Throughout the 1970s a fierce criticism of the unsustainable and unequal relationship between Danes and Greenlanders gained momentum. The criticism led to the Greenlandic Home Rule Referendum of 1979 and by that a radical change of course: The country now was to be made Greenlandic again. Growing up in an ideological climate of inequality sharpens and heightens the sense of identity and social rank in everyone’s core. I was not aware that I was a Danish child before I started school and was separated from my Greenlandic friends. The Danes were taught in a separate room. In reality this meant that we were alienated from one another, and the seed of exclusion, the inferiority and guilt that all children, no matter their ancestry, were made to feel, was planted and remains at the core of the current disunion between Greenlanders and Danes.
“I spent the greater part of my early youth feeling guilty about Danish arrogance and superiority. I was angry and interpreted the plans for modernization as a mere continuation of colonial repression of the Greenlandic people. I felt partly responsible for the incurable mental wounds of the people living in the country. As a grown up I’ve gradually become conciliatory. And grateful. My anger has turned into an urge to write about my past, reinforced by the Danes’ general ignorance of our shared history. Even though I write fiction and aim to provide my readers with a literary experience, my novels always contain an element of enlightenment. I consider my upbringing a precious gift. My experiences may shed a light on history in order to prevent it from repeating itself.”
Mondrup’s latest novel Tabita, which has been hailed as a “distinguished literary achievement”, stays with these themes and focuses on the plight of two Greenlandic children, Tabita and Vitus, who are adopted by a Danish couple and taken to Denmark.
“I feel very strongly about the plight of children. Children are powerless and must live with the decisions of grownups. Children are born loyal, cooperative and dependent of the nurture of their surroundings. In the 70s many Greenlandic children travelled alone to Denmark to live with foster families and attend Danish schools, without any contact to their families at home or to each other. They were meant to quickly become fluent in Danish and go on to take the roles of little ambassadors of the new culture when they returned home. We now know that the price they paid for being sent far away from home was a dear one. The children, now grown, relate stories of bereavement and loneliness, of feeling estranged, of never again really regaining the ability to feel at home with their families,” Mondrup said.
“When I set out to write Tabita, these were the children I was preoccupied with. During my research I stumbled upon stories of children who never returned to Greenland but were adopted by their Danish foster families. In some cases, the children themselves didn’t even realize why they had to stay in Denmark.
“The field of adoption contains many blind spots. A transportation of Greenlandic children took place more or less beyond the grasp of civil law, some refer to this as human trafficking. No one questioned this practice. By adoption, the children were given a shortcut to a much better life – the common attitude of the day. Naturally, I had to write about this. I felt obliged to write about it. Especially because many of the adoptees are now traumatized grownups whose lives are traumatized or even ruined.”
Another of Mondrup’s novels set in Greenland is Godhavn, where the narrative unfolds on the island of Disko, a hostile landscape where she examines a world of secrets and desires where three children are trying to find their way in the world.
“Godhavn is about being a Danish child in a family relocated to Greenland. About belonging but also constantly sticking out. About experiencing the project of modernization from the child’s point of view. We are often prone to black-and-white thinking when dealing with the price of colonization and modernization, but in Greenland all the children, both Greenlandic and Danish, paid the price: Being denied the sense of belonging together,” Mondrup said.
Mondrup attended The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts for eight years, but says she didn’t truly realize what her true artistic material was before she started writing.
“I wrote my first book during my time at the academy: A work consisting of conversations about the identity, language and culture of the solely Danish-speaking Greenlanders. In the work process I realized that writing was related to other artistic processes, and I came to understand that the artistic material I’d been searching for was words,” she said.
“I’ve never looked back since; I’ve used the words extensively and have written a bunch of novels.”