I had planned to talk about alcohol in this blog post for the fifth chapter of Seven Graves, One Winter, but I really don’t want to. Or, rather, I don’t want to spend a long time on why Maratse drinks vodka rather than drinks vodka in this chapter. Suffice it to say, there is a general stereotype of Greenlanders that is often portrayed in the media – although that is changing now, with far more emphasis on culture and tradition, and the whole person than what was often dredged up before.
So, I won’t throw more fuel onto an old fire.
I will say that while I rarely drank alcohol before moving to Greenland, I stopped the day I arrived. Many Greenlanders drink responsibly, just as many Danes drink excessively, but when living in a small, sometimes tiny, community, any problematic social issues hit one thousand times harder. I saw first hand on an almost daily basis what alcohol can do to small, remote communities, and I decided I didn’t need to contribute to those problematic issues one way or another. It’s also important to say that there were proportionately just as many Danes struggling with alcohol in those communities as there were Greenlanders, something the Danish media never touched on.
But for every problem there was a problem crusher – positive Greenlanders enjoying and living life to the full, enjoying alcohol, or not, as they so chose. My characters are inspired by them, as I wanted to mirror the Greenlanders I was privileged to know and work alongside, and thus do my bit to balance the scales and fight back against the stereotype.
So, Maratse doesn’t drink, he medicates. I used alcohol for a purpose in the story, as a plot device, and to help Maratse take one more step on his journey.
As for me? Apart from two occasions in Greenland, I never touched a drop of alcohol in seven years. Sorry, three occasions. When working in Nuuk, one of my Danish colleagues thought I must be an alcoholic as I wasn’t drinking alcohol at a party. Talk about peer pressure, I bought a beer to prove him wrong.
My last one.
Until walking the West Highland Way with cousin Stu, but that’s a few blogs away. 😉
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Very interesting, Chris, and sensitively written. I think basically the same thing could be said about Iceland . . or maybe ANYWHERE, as far as I know!
It’s a tough one. But it’s certainly not limited to any one country. Some countries just seem to get more negative coverage.