The Landscapes of Silence: From Childhood to the Arctic

 

The story one tells oneself, and projects toward others, at a particular time, might be wholly necessary for your well-being, even your survival but, as time passes, if not relinquished or refashioned, it may become destructive of your, and others' lives. It was one of the most helpful lessons of my own analysis - the story was necessary then, but now? How might it be surrendered and reshaped?

Hugh Brody's mother was a Jewish refugee from Vienna, fleeing to Sheffield in 1938, falling in love, marrying, and hiding into the safety of English 'normality' by silencing her past, sheltering her children from the knowledge of where she had come from, why, and how many of her extended family were perishing in the Holocaust. But silences like this, though very real, are rarely watertight. Her mother, Brody's grandmother, whispers, and intimates other narratives; and, his mother is distorted by a passionate anger that rips through his family life, unexplained.

Brody was initiated young into the dangers of silenced narratives, silenced people. It is an ambiguity that he rediscovers on a youthful trip to a kibbutz in the early 60s. Here the life of high idealism and socialist equality is in evidence but is it a life lived in denial? The land was purchased from Palestinians at a 'fair price' but there is evidence of their dispossession. The land was empty before our energy and commitment transformed it but the landscape gives a lie to this. And so on ... but, it is also where Brody meets previously unknown relatives - all dispossessed by mass murder - Israel is founded in hope yet is already slipping into the silences that disguise its colonialism. 

Is there a place that lies beyond the reach of these complex strands of displacement, silence? Is there a place where people seek to inhabit their place, weave themselves into its contours, live with it and from it, without thought of conquest either of people or place? It draws Brody to the Arctic and the Inuit - and yes, there is evidence of a people so entwined with place, so intimately connected, that meaning is drawn so naturally from the unfolding patterns of daily life that everything speaks and where silence is a natural feature, a balance, not a place of hiddenness, of unbearable secrets. People appear to be widely comfortable with the close proximity of lives, and the endless weaving of narratives of togetherness.

But this intimacy (undoubtedly imperfect) is already being unwound by the forces of colonialism - of the white man's demands for 'civilization', 'order', and exploitation - with all its accompanying abuses. Brody writes movingly of the things he did not see, of which no one spoke, of the teacher he knew later convicted of widespread sexual abuse; and, of the community's widespread sense of powerlessness in the face of the white man's bureaucracy (and how his goods had created new dependencies that needed the Inuit to re-negotiate the manner of their lives).

Brody weaves profound connections between these dual narratives - his own and that of an indigenous community that he knows and loves (and which embraced him as family). 

I remember meeting a potential chair of Oxfam when I worked there, and they asked a wonderful question, that I have pondered (and used) ever since: "What is the story the organization tells about itself that is not true?" (For organization, you can substitute yourself, your family, indeed a unit of any organization up to and including countries). Brody's beautifully written meditation, 'The Landscapes of Silence: From Childhood to the Artic' explores the inverse question: "What is the story that lays untold, hidden, silenced?" The story that if told might deepen and widen your grasp of the truth of things and might help bring a deeper sense of liberatory meaning (even at the cost of exposing grief and pain).

The stories we tell matter - and there is a haunting section of the book on the high rate of suicide amongst the Inuit, particularly the young where a repeating story of idealized romantic relationships simply cannot sustain the work of healing and redemption they are required to do, and when they inevitably break up, lead to catastrophic breakdowns of meaning, and of life.  We need always to be in search of better, wider, deeper stories and the ability to interrogate our silences in search of them - and create safe spaces in which those dialogues, with ourselves and others, can emerge and be shared, and embodied.

And it is never too late, if not for one generation, for the next. With the fall of the Berlin Wall comes the opportunity for Brody's mother to receive restitution for property seized in Berlin by the Nazis. She remains mostly disengaged, unwilling, unable to pick up the threads of a story untold but Brody feels he can and must - even in such an imperfect process as this - threads of justice and acknowledgment can emerge if one can lean into the silence and restore some form of voice.

The book is not, nor should be a comfortable read, it takes you to some of the darkest places hidden in the silence of our histories - personal and collective - but is never devoid of hope. A return to the Arctic in 2018, twenty years after his extensive fieldwork - shows that the bonds of friendship live and that much of the knowledge of the Inuit in relation to their land (itself being dramatically affected by climate change) remains intact and flourishing in spite of ongoing assault. 

Nor is it devoid of inspiration to ask what sits in the silences and who is being silenced - and how can we recognize that it is often at the margins of what we imagine as the (our) world that we can better understand what is happening at its heart - and that these are the voices we need to pay most attention to. 

P.S. I cannot finish without noticing one infelicity (and it is the only one). There is a moment in Berlin with his mother, an uncomfortable trip when he is pursuing the property restitution, when (for reasons that need not be explained) Brody dismissively writes referring to his mother (and as a good Jewish atheist), "She had no more time for fantasies about reincarnation than I ..." An infelicity because it is a belief that his wider Inuit family would indeed entertain as meaningful and might expect a more careful disavowal if their story is to be honored (if disagreed with).