Michel the Giant is as much an ebullient snapshot of a vanished age as a travel book. “Imagine that all the white birds in the sky are shedding their feathers…” It’s a measure of his increasing happiness in Greenland, though he leaves after 18 months to return home and try to explain things such as snow to his family. Once, Kpomassie is attacked by a ravenous dog and is saved from injury, aptly, by his thick dogskin trousers.ĭogs and men come together when seal blubber is on the menu: Kpomassie finds it “nauseating” – and seal intestines take “a lot of chewing” – but he soon comes to enjoy the food. A poverty-stricken man slaughters his dogs one by one to feed his family when permafrost is too hard for burial, huskies break coffins open and “gorge themselves on human flesh”. Even difficulties are described with relish: Kpomassie reports only one incident of racial abuse, which he (perhaps vaingloriously) attributes to the man’s envy of his success with local women.ĭarkness, figurative and literal, becomes more common: we learn of “polar hysteria”, where a man leaves his home to beat up strangers, and of the symbiotic relationship between humans and dogs, not just as companions but as food. “I wanted to live with seal hunters, ride in a sledge, sleep in an igloo!” So he travels to the far north, to experience the endless nights of winter and the nightless days of spring. And he is maddened by their nonchalance, where a direct question nearly always produces the answer “ Immaqa !” (“Perhaps!”) He is attacked by a ravenous dog and is saved, aptly, by his thick dogskin trousersīut like many tourists, he has exoticised the country and is disappointed by ordinary life. He goes fishing in the “international port” of Færingehavn, population 13. He, too, is like an alien to the Greenlanders: “As soon as they saw me, all talking stopped.” But they like this curious stranger and one girl names him “Michel the Giant”: at 5ft 11in, he is 8in taller than most locals.Īs Kpomassie throws himself into life in Greenland, he finds his height is not the only thing on a different scale. Two years later, he makes it to the “eternal ice” of his destination, a different planet 4,500 miles from home. In 1963, he makes it to Marseille he feels “freer in France than on African soil”, because residents of former colonies are made welcome, but also because he is at last alone in a new world. He feels “the call of the cold” in 1958, aged 17, and spends years working his way up the west coast of Africa, country by country, bouncing off obstacles like a pinball. Kpomassie is a young man of resourcefulness and energy.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |