Danish post-colonial conscience examination in the form of narrative fiction
By Lars Ole Sauerberg
The legacy of the Danish colonization of Greenland reached an international reading – and later cinema – audience with Peter Høeg’s ‘Miss Smilla’s Feelings for Snow’ in 1992. Hans Jakob Helms, educated in Denmark, but born, growing up, and working in and for Greenland, has put a lifetime of arctic experience into Hvis du fløjter efter nordlyset (’When You Whistle at the Northern Light’), a rare specimen of Danish post-colonial conscience examination in the form of narrative fiction.
The story is shaped round the personal history of Bjørn, a Danish journalist of radical bent, but who has now been working quietly for almost twenty years in Alaska as a radio news reporter. Why he ended up there dawns on the reader as Bjørn discloses an account of his life, only missing the final chapter, to his 18-year-old daughter. Framing the account of the chronological progression are current events that simultaneously threaten to put the Bjørn out of his job, come to terms with an unpleasant diagnosis, making up with the family left more than twenty years ago in Denmark, and, not least, tell his daughter about the circumstances of a repressed trauma recently re-emerging.
The story puts its focus on the events at the time of the early 1980s, when Greenland voted to overrule Danish-European relations and leave the European community. Through Bjørn’s eyes the reader witnesses the darker sides of local arctic entrepreneurial and commercial initiatives in Greenland, Canada and the USA, in more or less healthy cooperation with political forces.
Helms’s novel is based on solid knowledge of the arctic region. Though expressing a strong affection for Greenland especially, the narrative showcases critically and mercilessly both doubtful political maneuvers and general human shortcomings and vices.
