Interviews
On life and living in Greenland
Hi, my name is Mads Peder Nordbo. I am the author of the Arctic/Greenlandic thrillers The Girl without Skin, Cold Fear and The Woman with the Death Mask (all publishing with Text in 2019 and 2020). The last four years I have been living in Greenland with my wife and our daughter Arendse (she’s 15 years at this moment).
Life in Greenland is in any way so different from anything I have ever experienced before. The first thing you have to learn are to let go of time as a controlling concept. We do naturally use time in Greenland, it’s just not the most important factor planning your days and weeks – the arctic weather is. In Greenland we have no roads between the towns/settlements; all traffic is by small planes, helicopters or boats, and it’s not unusual to be stranded for days or weeks because of bath weather. Often you can’t just sail or fly because it will be too dangerous. That’s one of the things you have to accept living here – you might be planning by the clock, but the weather decides if you succeed.
Another thing that’s very different is the vast distances and the loneliness. In mainland Europe we are used to being close to everything all the time. We are always online and can always come to each other in a short space of time. We are always available. In Greenland it’s the opposite; The Internet is often bad and in many places there is no Internet or mobile connection at all. And we cannot quickly drive from one city to another. You are where you are, and that’s it. You are always surrounded by an ice-cold Arctic sea, mountains and an almost infinite ice cap. If you get lost in the mountains you will freeze to death; if you fall into the sea you will freeze to death - in few minutes. That’s the beauty of it all. You have to respect nature and life in another way than you do it in Denmark, where I grew up. Nature almost never kills anyone in Denmark; up here it kills quite often. That makes you think about, that humans are not that supreme after all. The earth is so much stronger than us.
However; if you let go of time – and accepts the loneliness and isolation – you suddenly find yourself falling in love with life in the Arctic; and there is so much to love …
The air up here is so unbelievable clean and cold – we have winter at least 7 month with meters of snow and constant frozen air. Most people think that it must be dark in the winters here, but the snow and ice lights up everything. When it’s dark in Denmark, Germany or Spain it’s really dark, but up here everything lights up and glows from ice and snow. And sometime in the early hours of the evening northern lights flickers over the dark sky – like thin shimmering veils of green and pink breath. It’s like the breath of the suns dying light dancing with the soul of the earth.
And that’s not even the most mesmerizing thing about life up here; the best thing is the ice; the real ice; the inland ice; the huge and kilometers thick ice cap that covers most of Greenland. The colors of the ice are endless. Sometimes it’s white. Sometimes blue. Sometimes like crystal. Sometime you just stare at it thinking ‘that’s not possible’. Even more amazing are the age of the ice. It’s not just frozen water; it’s water that has been frozen and solid for more than 100,000 years. When huge lumps of icebergs drift ashore you can go and hug them and touch them and feel them breathing ice cold to your skin. I often put a bit of the old ice in my mouth and close my eyes as the ice melts. The water in my mouth has not been liquid since before modern man. It’s like being in a time machine; you are traveling through time in each single drop. It’s magic.
There’s so much I could tell. I guess that’s why I chose to write books about life up here - intertwined with a little fiction :) One last thing, that’s so different from life in Denmark, that it took me some time to adapt, is whaling – as in ‘the hunting and eating of whales’.
I grew up the Greenpeace-way knowing that all killing of whales was bad and evil. In Greenland, hunting and eating whales has always been an important part of life. There are tight rules and quotas, but some whales are caught, and in some way, it seems okay, as long as they are used in full. You eat the meat, the fat, the skin and everything. Personally I prefer the fat and skin - although it sounds quite crazy to say something like that. Whale fat is extremely oily and it gives a tingling heat in the body that makes sense up here in the Arctic.
So…is everything just good and amazing in Greenland? No, not at all. Sadly the beauty hides a heavy darkness. Greenland holds the world records in both suicide and rape (in percent); 34 percent of all girls are exposed to sexual assault before reaching the age of 15 years; the murder rate is 16 times higher in Greenland than in Denmark. 62 percent of all women have been exposed to domestic violence. Why this enormous contrast between beauty and darkness? It’s difficult to say; but it’s the reason for me to write The Girl without Skin. I know several Greenlandic girls and women like her. I felt like giving them a voice, and that voice is my female main character, Tupaarnaq.
Mads Peder Nordbo is Danish but has lived in Nuuk, Greenland for several years. Born in 1970, he holds degrees in Literature, Communications and Philosophy from The Universityof Southern Denmark and the Universityof Stockholm. Mads has lived in Denmark, Sweden, Germany and Greenland. He works in communications at the Town Hall in Nuuk, where he amongst other things, writes for the mayor of the municipality, Kommuneqarfik Semersooq, which stretches across the Greenland ice sheet. His crime debut, THE GIRL WITHOUT SKIN, has now been sold to 17 languages besides Danish.
