SCOTLAND

From Chapter 9:    Atiq

    Madeleine Allakariallak kneels quietly at the top of a windy ridge, picking tender qungulit leaves that force themselves up through the hard Arctic tundra between patches of summer snow.  "Eat these," she smiles, holding out a handful of velvety leaves and stems, red and green confetti against her soft brown skin. "They’re sweet like candy," she beams "but you can only find them for a few weeks each year, when the weather’s warm like this."

    I glance at my pocket thermometer reading 22F, and smile beneath my woolly scarf. For Madeleine it’s a balmy summer day, but my wimpy internal California thermostat won’t register this as anything like July. There are icebergs in the bay below us, and snow on the ridges all around. The Canadian wind puffs and howls past our parkas, and I haven’t been able to feel my nose since we left her house to explore the stone covered hills of Baffin Island. Yet in a way I do feel oddly warm standing on this rocky ridge, blasted by a crooked sun and floating in the cobalt blue of an Arctic sky.

    From the hooded pouch in Madeleine’s sealskin parka, 13 month old Jack stretches his hand out to me and coos softly. I pretend to bite his chubby fingers, and he giggles and holds onto my hair as Madeleine and I climb the ridgeline above Iqaluit on a clear summer afternoon. Jack is Madeleine’s third child, her first boy.

    He is also her grandmother.

    In the Inuit way, Jack carries more than just the name of Madeleine’s late grandmother Minnie–-he also carries her identity, the spiritual element that is in her name. Her atiq. He has nine names, each of which connects him to a web of relationships with people in the community. For Madeleine, it is her grandmother Minnie, for a woman in another village, it is the name he bears of her late husband, and on and on with each of this little boy’s names.

    I am fascinated by this, although I do not fully understand. So I ask Madeleine, her mother, other elders I meet, to teach me about atiq. The answers come slowly, as Inuit answers always do–-freely, but without urgency for me to understand. I will or I won’t. Either is good, in the Inuit view, and there is time.

From Chapter 11:  The Lessons

    To witness throat-singing is to stand between two halves of a heartbeat. To sing it is to release your voice into the pulse.

    I had listened to recordings, watched videos, seen live demonstrations, and even observed mother and child practicing together. But until I let go of reason and fear and stepped into the rhythmic stream of sound, I did not understand the value of hearing Inuit voices speak.

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GEORGIA SEA ISLANDS

From Chapter 16:  Barrier Islands

    Georgia does not fling itself dramatically into the sea, with cliffs and coves and rocky shores, as some coastal landscapes do. Instead, her loamy soil slips modestly through hardwood swamp and marsh and grassy bog, easing itself down into the warm Atlantic behind a series of graceful barrier islands.

    Georgia’s intercourse with the sea is a private affair. If you want to see it you have to stay with her a while, make your way through her heartland and onto the islands which protect her, and beyond–-to the edge of her corporal body. You have to get to know her a little before she shows you her snow-white dunes, her pounding ocean surf, open stretches of pristine sand and screaming seabirds.

     Once found, Georgia’s beaches are as wild and beautiful as any in the world, but they are not easily won. She requires that you get to know her first, to pass through herself to touch her shore. Georgia is not easy. I like that about her.

From Chapter 18:   Are You Ibo?

    She lived on Sapelo. She turned its earth, and breathed its marshy air, and fed her blood each evening to its greedy bugs. She pulled okra from its gardens and cotton from its thorny fields, and in the tidal moon pulled silver fishes from its shallow bays.

    She bore twenty-two children on her bed in the thick, steamy darkness of its longest nights, and in the end, after freedom came, she died beneath its mossy oaks, in a wooden cabin beside her husband–-both of them too old and weak to escape the burning building alive.

    She lived on Sapelo. But first, she lived in Africa.

    Before the sack, before the chains, before the terrifying ship, she lived in Africa. Where young men danced and yams grew wild and rice was pounded in the odu, she lived in Africa on a grassy plain. And all night long, before the catchers came, all night long beside her mother in the village, while Onwa the moon drew water through the Niger delta, she listened to the stories by the fire.

     She was old enough by then to understand the trickster tortoise wasn’t real, though in her dreams sometimes he frightened her a little–-but it was just a story now, she knew.  It was a good one though, and when the nwoke told it–-his eyes and hands and words dancing up behind the sparks–-she still let herself believe a little sometimes, before she fell asleep.

    The night she fell asleep in Africa for the last time, she slept beside her mother. In the morning, she helped her auntie tie the baby on her back, and they both set off together for the field where groundnuts grew. By end of day the catchers came, and she was in a sack, tied up with other screaming, frightened children. And in the chains, and on the ship, and during all those weeks across the water, she cried and wailed, and then fell silent like the rest.

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