Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss (the unexpected everything .txt) 📕

a politician on the record. I ask him what it means to be Icelandic, hoping for something which will reveal the crazed patriotism I’ve been told is typical of the Independence Party. (It’s like a cult, two of the students told me, wide-eyed, people grow up in it and they have these stages for each age and they marry in it and never leave.) He tells me that Icelanders are creative and productive. ‘We are a small nation, we come from small villages where everyone has to get up very early and work very hard, and that’s a big part of being Icelandic.’ Icelanders are ‘homogenetic’ and this spares them the dramas and crises over race, culture and national identity that rack other countries. Over the big issues, he says, such as independence and the rejection of the Icesave deal, ‘we are unanimous, and this shared purpose is our great strength.’ I wish I were the kind of person who can ask a confident man, at home in his own country, how it came about that a unanimous society had to throw his party out of government with bricks and burning benches. Instead, I suggest that immigration might have some effect on this cultural homogeneity. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘we had this debate in 2006; some people who were influenced by some of the far-right parties in Norway and Denmark opened the discussion, but they didn’t succeed, no-one took any notice and now it’s a non-issue. When the issue came up, there were tens of thousands of people coming here from the Baltic area, Poland and the Eastern Bloc countries, in numbers that were a significant proportion of our population here. The general feeling was that these people are coming to work, which is why we came from Norway, back at the beginning. We’re all immigrants, you know. They’re welcome here, as long as they come to participate.’

‘Really?’ I ask.

He’s texting again. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Really. We have a strong sense of national identity but we have never had any National Socialist movement here.’ This is only approximately true; some Icelanders, even during the war, saw Germany as Iceland’s natural and traditional ally.

‘The national movement is the cornerstone of our history. We all learn the history of the struggle for independence, because it is such a magnificent thing to see. We were living in the dark ages from 1300 to 1800, just a Danish colony, with such low standards of living, so much worse than elsewhere in Europe. And then we began to go abroad more and it brought about this great change, there was contact with the Romantic movement and young men and women were becoming poets and writers and artists, and writing about the nation and really going back to the heritage of the sagas and the first centuries here when we were free and happy. That was our enlightenment, the rediscovery of the saga heritage. We have such a strong correlation between gaining our independence and seeing a lot of progress, because these came – telephones, electricity, roads – after we became independent. Our national movement isn’t about being superior, but it is the thing that raised us, brought us into the light.’

Hence, of course, the fear of the European Union. I know, and he, I guess, doesn’t, how hard it is for an immigrant to assimilate in Iceland.

‘What about people who don’t have the saga heritage and don’t have feelings about Icelandic independence? How do they fit in?’

He smiles, someone who knows all the answers. ‘It’s going pretty well. We hear about these other cases, in Scandinavia and Europe, where there are a lot of problems but we don’t have them here. People come on their own, or with a small family, but we are not seeing little villages of Muslim people with radical Islamic views. Iceland is in very tight control of who gets into the country, who qualifies for citizenship, and we’re not a society that has very many foreigners, it’s not as if there are areas of the country where they run the towns, and so for the moment this is not an issue here.’

That binary again, us and the foreigners. They don’t run the towns. He’s not going to say anything newsworthy about Icelandic racism.

‘How does the financial crisis affect this?’ I ask. There’s a little plane coming in to land outside the window. ‘People are talking about selling off natural resources to foreigners.’ I mean, partly, what about ‘foreigners’ who aren’t itinerant migrant labour, what about ‘foreigners’ who might occupy positions of power, might, for example, buy up your high street chains and take over your banks?

Arni shakes his head. ‘That would be a very, very bad idea. But the lessons of this crisis are not yet learnt.’

There is, I think, general agreement that regulating the financial sector would be a good idea, and that allowing people in government to privatise national services and sell them to themselves causes certain difficulties a few years down the line; some consensus that loans against depreciating assets in currencies irrelevant to the transaction get people into trouble. Among other things. ‘What are those lessons?’ I ask.

‘Well, I hope that Icelanders will take more notice of second opinions, get less carried away by the mood. On a political level, we’re in a vacuum, fighting about whose mistake it was. And we may have to rethink our position in the world, for example in relation to NATO and the EU. EU membership was such a non-issue here before the crisis, because we were really the masters of the universe at that time. All the statistics looked good and we received a lot of international recognition for that and not everyone recognises that now. But of course these changes make you think about such things: can such a very tiny nation get by on its own?’

But those statistics, I don’t say, were lies, because most of the money turns out to have been imaginary, a fiction of dishonest