Contrasting Cultures

~ Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland. By Sarah Moss ~

I have so enjoyed all of Moss’ fiction that I bought her non-fiction book without hesitation. And I have not been disappointed. Her careful, thoughtful, skilful writing in her distinctive writing voice comes through in non-fiction too with its usual penetrating, dry, intelligent unsentimentality, which manages, simultaneously, to be luminous. 

Moss, a British academic, decides to take a job for a year in Iceland, teaching 19^th century British literature. Her husband, Anthony, from Kent, where they are living, had just lost his job and so they move with their 6 year old Max and 2 year old Tobias, to Reykjavik, in late July 2009. Moss is immensely sensitive about being a foreigner, often feels inadequate or wanting particularly because of her lack of facility with Icelandic, and the unfamiliarity with the culture.

After a year living in Iceland, “when we come to the checkout I find that I still can’t say the Icelandic words I have in my head, and still can’t bear the arrogance of asking people to speak English for me, and sill, therefore, mutter and smile as if I had no language at all

p324

She represents that this is not so much caused by Icelanders reception of her, than her own shyness and British habit of self-disparagement. Her writing beautifully encapsulates how both language and culture are alien to her:

Einar comes with me, to translate Icelandic and to translate Icelanders

p268

Moss finds Icelanders not very easy to read, largely unflustered and unpanicked even in the face of apparent disasters. Talking to an elderly couple who evacuated their island because a volcano was exploding, she finds the husband the epitome of Islandic masculinity, unflappable and unafraid in the face of imminent danger. As always, she puts it beautifully:

Theodor [whom Moss writes “looks as if he’d smell of Imperial Leather” p183] replies soothingly, reminding me again of my grandfather who grew calm in direct relation to my grandmother’s fluster, as if there were a limited amount of anxiety in the house and she had hoarded it all.

p186

In this book, Moss provides a thoughtful, searching, candid comparison of Icelandic and British-middle-class cultures: for example, how there are no second hand shops in Iceland, because everyone sources what they need, through personal networking, since everyone knows everyone else, in Iceland. Or how there are not many fresh fruits and veg on sale, or indeed, in the cuisine, which tends to be heavy on carbs and protein, and yet Icelanders seem healthy. Or how despite the poverty which is theoretically a reality in Iceland and the collapse of the Icelandic economy (the kreppa), everyone drives a 4×4 and no one walks or even cycles.

Icelandic children start school aged six, and stay in the same school until they are sixteen, when they move to a college which takes four years to prepare them for university, or into vocational education. Children and adolescence have a different shape here. Fifteen-year-olds are in the same category as seven-year-olds, both children, both part of that tribe old enough to go around without adults but not old enough to drive, the only people who walk and take the bus, while nineteen-year-olds, although able to drive, vote and drink alcohol, share their daily space with sixteen-year-olds. We hear no-one demonising older children here, nothing akin to the English fear and loathing of teenagers.

p57-58

British academics are a mobile bunch, tending to move hundreds of miles with every promotion, and most departments include several people who commute from the other end of the country, or even from another country because their families have refused to move again, or because their partner specialises in a kind of medieval history or neuroscience that happens at only one institution. […] There is no sense of this provisional conditional way of living at Haskoli Islands, no flicker of sideways glances at other institutions offering other jobs that might be nearer home or have a better library or saner colleagues.

p71

Moss unpacks the identity construction of Icelanders. In the national museum when she brings her students for a visit she encourages them to share their reactions, “I notice again that the first reaction is shame or pride, fear of losing face in the eyes of the world and then price in independence and simplicity” p242. She stresses how despite their self-sufficiency, Icelanders seem to suffer a continuous worry about how they will be perceived by the rest of the world.

That said, she juxtaposes this observation with trying to delve into the reason for their calm stoicism and habit of acceptance:

I wonder if I am beginning to understand why Icelanders seem unperturbed by economic collapse [Icesave], the swine flu epidemic which has swept Europe over the winter and the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull. […] Fishing means that all plans and livelihoods are always dependent on the whims of North Atlantic wind and weather, and the alternative is farming on land that explodes from time to time. A limited sense of both responsibility and agency could be the only way of remaining sane in such a place; you can’t live in Iceland without discovering the limits of human power, and it’s not intelligent to try to take responsibility for what you can’t control.

p187

Moss is perceptive and sceptical enough to understand that Icelanders’ projection of identity may actually be partly delusional or poorly informed. She asks her student, Einar, to visit a foodbank with her.  It is not a comfortable visit for either of them or anyone there; the staff find the people using the foodbank ungrateful and unwilling to follow their regulations; the people receiving help feel ashamed to be seen in such need and do not want to communicate; and Moss finds herself too thin-skinned to show unseemly curiosity in the face of the shame of others. Einar, a local, is shocked.

I am shocked by his shock, struggling to understand why Iceland should imagine itself exempt from the economic inequality that characterises every other capitalist society. […] Young Icelanders keep telling me that there is no class system in Iceland, that inequality is a foreign phenomenon, but the fact of many of my students’ alienation from poverty seems to prove Icelandic social inequality. I remember a colleague in Sociology telling me that not only is there a difference between the middle class and the poor, but the difference is so great that the existence of the poor is news to some of the middle class. Einar starts his car. ‘I did not know,’ he says. ‘That’s the worst thing. I did not know.’

Maybe, I think. Or maybe the worst thing is that I’ve known about poverty all my life and I’m not shocked.

p279

Moss finds Icelanders’ attitudes towards poverty conflicting and conflicted. They spend huge amounts of money they do not have to drive many miles to a foodbank, for example.

Taking the bus here seems to be the last word in shame and deprivation, an equivalent to burning the furniture to keep warm, and yet the buses are cleaner, more frequent and more punctual than in European cities where catching a bus is perfectly normal behaviour for salaried adults.

p272

There is much in their attitude to class and poverty which puzzles Moss – she finds a partial explanation by one Icelander academic:

“I think we have not realised that when the rich in our society gets richer, everyone spends more money because we cannot acknowledge a divide between the rich and the ordinary. When we put children of rich people in the same state-run schools as everyone else, we exert pressure on poorer families to spend beyond their means to keep up. Because they will not tell their children, “We are poor and they are rich.”

I wonder if his idea explains the apparently disproportionate outrage at Mark’s and my interest in used clothes and furniture. We are poor and they are rich. Coming from Canada and the UK we find nothing unusual or disruptive in this idea, nothing that affects our self-esteem, but in Iceland such a statement threatens national identity.

p287

Moss is sensitive to the fact that widely held identity constructions are framed, a narrative created for particular purposes, and that this includes some level of self-delusions held by Icelanders. She is also increasingly aware that what may generally be accepted as social truths, may actually not rest on firm foundations, or may arise out of ignorance, or selected blindness to certain sections of community.

At first, as is normal for immigrants, Moss observes all the differences between Iceland and British culture, including how safe it is, how people can leave homes unlocked and babies in prams untended outside shops, and how dangerous the Icelandic driving appears to be, etc. Later on, she checks the official statistics and realises that some of them draw quite a different picture of the stereotypical imaginings of Iceland – that there is quite a lot of crime in Iceland, including sexual assaults and crimes against children and violence Icelandic women are subjected to, that poverty and deprivation levels are quite similar to those in UK; though it is true there is almost double the amount of road deaths in Iceland compared to UK.

I feel safer in Iceland than I do in England (except on the roads), and I feel that my children and my possessions are safer in Iceland than in England (except on the roads). All the Icelanders I know feel safer in Iceland than they do anywhere else, and most will say Iceland is a safer country than any other. The differences are real, but not, for most part, quantitative.

p296

Moss depicts her year of living in Iceland with warming candidness and self-awareness. She is aware she is trying too hard to be respectful of other cultures, she is uncomfortable at being uncomfortable. There are of course wonderful descriptions of Iceland’s amazing landscapes and climate. Moss includes delightful anecdotes of her children’s behaviour and responses. (She includes very little about her husband, Anthony, perhaps trying to protect his privacy.) Moss mentions the prohibitive costs of things, is introduced by friends and colleagues to many new friends, digs into local politics, investigates widespread belief in elves, and represents many endearing Icelandic features she encounters, such as the devotion to dairy (particularly the ubiquitous skyr), the cosy houses, the egalitarianism which is practically a religion for Icelanders, and their habit of knitting, men and women alike:

Icelanders knit everywhere. On buses, in restaurants, during meetings, in class. In the first week of term, several students came into the classroom, put down their cups of coffee, took off their coats, hats and scarves and pulled out laptops, power cables, poetry anthologies, knitting needles and wool.

p281

She goes on to mention the sewing circles, which her women students keep mentioning and which are also background events in some Icelandic films.

Sewing circles seem to be established in adolescence and continue until death, although some are intergenerational and therefore, presumably, infinite. Many women are members of more than one, which is probably part of the answer to my question about what Icelanders do in winter.

p298

It is a lovely read in all, particularly for British readers, because so many will very likely hold much the same attitudes and opinions about Iceland and Icelanders that Moss herself held prior to living there. Her journey of discovery is one readers can live vicariously without having to actually undergo all the tribulations and upheaval of relocation and dislocation. And of course, there is always Moss’  wonderful way of putting things, her consciousness and her distinctive writing voice:

I don’t know if the new happiness is mine or Reykjavik’s.

p326