The Shape of Silence

Description

A Meditation on Iceland’s Hidden Emotional History

The Shape of Silence is a work of literary nonfiction that moves between memoir and history to trace something Iceland has rarely spoken of: the inner cost of centuries of hardship, and the way that cost was passed down through the generations.

Alda Sigmundsdóttir tells the story of three women in her maternal line. In 1906 her great-grandmother Þórdís lost her husband at sea, and her household was broken up, as routinely happened to poor families who lost their breadwinner. Her grandmother Elínborg was four years old when she was sent to be raised by strangers as a tökubarn, a fostered child. Her mother grew up in the shadow of that separation.

Around their lives, Sigmundsdóttir builds a portrait of the institutions that shaped ordinary Icelandic existence for hundreds of years. Under the vistarband, landless people were required by law to live and work on a farm as laborers, and paupers, children among them, could be auctioned off to whoever would keep them most cheaply. Around 1700, 96 percent of Icelandic farmers did not own the land they worked. Most people lived in dependence on others, with little legal recourse and no language for their inner lives.

Icelanders found ways to survive. They told stories of hidden people and read aloud to one another through the long winter evenings. Those habits kept a nation alive. They also taught people to endure without complaint and not to see what was being done to them, a response psychologists call betrayal blindness. Sigmundsdóttir follows that silence into modern Iceland, a country proud of its resilience, and finds it still at work in families and in public life, from the banking collapse of 2008 to the question of who owns the fish in its seas.

Throughout the book she returns to the image of a glass wall that forms between people who have been through too much and learned to show too little. You can see the person on the other side, but you cannot reach them, and they cannot reach you. The Shape of Silence is an attempt to see that wall clearly, and to understand how it came to stand there.

The particulars are Icelandic, but the pattern is familiar wherever ordinary people have lived for generations under hardship and under systems that demanded silence. Its questions belong to anyone whose family has carried something it could not put into words.