Neomedievalism and a Microstate
3.2 The “Clash of Civilizations”
As I have said, characters from the Islamic world pop up curi-ously often in Crash-writing. As so often, it is Eiríkur Örn Norð-dahl who best expresses this trend, through a characteristically trenchant satire of the post-Crash literary scene: his 2015 novel Heimska is about two Icelandic writers who each,
simultane-ously and independently, write a novel in which a man called Akmeð migrates from a majority-Muslim country to Iceland as a youth. He becomes an Islamic-fundamentalist terrorist, joins ISIS, and fights in the Syrian Civil War, before being found dead in a house on Laugavegur. (Chapter XLVI, apparently a review of the books, partly reproduced on the cover of the novel, pro-vides explicit commentary on the pomposity of two white au-thors largely ignorant of Islam writing this story.) While each author accuses the other of plagiarism, it is clear that both are in fact reflecting the Zeitgeist: stories like Akmeð’s are just in the air.
Sure enough, the Icelandic literary scene around the time of the Crash was evidently pervaded by a widespread need to write Iceland in relation to the Islamic and/or developing world.
The identical choice of names by the authors in Heimska has a real-world correlate: almost every female Muslim character in my corpus is named after the Prophet’s most revered daughter, Fatima. In Óttar M. Norðfjörð’s Hnífur Abrahams she is Egyp-tian-American; in Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl’s Gæska and Auður Jónsdóttir’s Vetrarsól she is Moroccan; in Böðvar Guðmunds-son’s Töfrahöllin she is Turkish. Both Hnífur Abrahams and Tö
frahöllin deliver their submissive, Orientalized beauties conve-niently into the arms of their white, male protagonists, which is also true of Fatíma’s counterpart in Óttar’s Örvitinn, who, while not called Fatíma, is named (admittedly self-consciously) after the other medieval Muslim woman famous in the West, Scheherazade, the narrator of One Thousand and One Nights.
Individually, these authors are well informed and thoughtful:
indeed, Auður and Óttar co-edited an article collection work-ing to improve Icelandic understandwork-ing of Islam in the wake of the controversy over the Danish Jyllands posten cartoons of the Prophet in 2006, Íslam með afslætti (2008), and I discuss (and largely praise) Eiríkur Örn’s exploration of feminism within the Islamic world below (Chapter 5). Fatima is undeniably an enor-mously popular name in the Muslim world — but there are oth-ers. Taken together, the homogeneity of these novels’ naming of
Muslim women suggests an ongoing reliance on stereotypes in Icelandic discourses of the Islamic world.
At times the eruption of the East into Crash-writing is merely fleeting and implicit, primarily indicating how the Middle East hovers, peripherally but perpetually, in Icelanders’ conscious-nesses. When one of the debt-wracked characters in Ævar Örn Jósepsson’s Önnur líf complains about having to move out of central Reykjavík, his colleague comments that “þú hljómar einsog hún hafi verið að biðja þig að flytja til Afganistan […]
Ekkert að Rimahverfinu” (“you sound like she’s asked you to move to Afghanistan […] not to the Rima-district”).8 In Bank
ster, Markús listens to the New Year’s fireworks exploding in 2009 and imagines himself as “ísraelskur ‘major’ eftir velhepp-naða hervelhepp-naðaraðgerð” (“an Israeli major after a successful mili-tary operation”), momentarily asking the audience to compare the Icelandic crisis, and Markús’s involvement in it, with the Israeli siege of Gaza.9 But at times the comparisons are more pointed, as I discuss variously in this chapter and the next.
I am reminded of Antia Loomba’s statement that “early mod-ern English plays about the East […] obsessively stage cross-cultural contact, conversion, and exchange, while articulating a parochial fantasy of global relations”: Loomba’s words fit my interpretation of Icelandic Crash-writing well. Moreover, Loomba has suggested that scholarship on the early modern period “often tends to read Muslim elites as emblematic of all non-Europeans.”10 In a similar way, post-Crash Icelandic novels, even though they are usually sympathetic to the difficult posi-tion Muslims find themselves in Iceland, often seem not only to draw rather heavily on stereotypes of Muslims, but also to be de-ploying Muslims as emblematic of the developing-world Other.
8 Ævar Örn Jósepsson, Önnur líf [Other lives] (Reykjavík: Uppheimar, 2010), 112–13.
9 Guðmundur Óskarsson, Bankster: Skáldsaga [Bankster: a novel]
(Reykjavík: Ormstunga, 2009), 86.
10 Ania Loomba, “Periodization, Race, and Global Contact,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37, no. 3 (2007): 595–620, at 595–96, 603.
excerpt 3
Óttar M. Norðfjörð, Örvitinn eða;
hugsjónamaðurinn, 27
Eldhúsið var í sama stíl og stofan, 19. öldin sveif þar yfi r vötnum. Alfróði ákvað að steikja hamborgara. Hann sót-ti kokteilsósu og hamborgarabrauð en baðst afsökunar á því að eiga einungis svínakjöt. Afsakanir voru óþarfi að mati Kristínar; ekki voru þau svínahatandi múslimar. Í kjölfarið lét hún nokkur misvitur orð falla um “múha-meðstrúaða.”
Innsæi stráksins sagði honum aftur á móti að tal henn-ar væri særandi. Hann spurði þess vegna hvort múslimhenn-ar væri ekki bara eins og venjulegt fólk. Ekki stóð á svari frá Alfróða. Múslimar voru ekki eins og venjulegt fólk, heldur mörgum öldum eftir á, svipað og Pólverjar í fatatísku. Þau þrjú máttu ekki haga sér eins og kommarnir eða menn-ingar legu afstæðissinnarnir sem sögðu ekki múkk við ills-kunni. Fjölmenning átti sín mörk. Ekki var nasistum sýnt umburðarlyndi. Nei. Hvers vegna þá múslimum? Þetta öfgafólk hafði nú haldið Evrópu í gíslingu nógu lengi og það var kominn tími á aðgerðir. Múslimar vildu augljósle-ga ekki aðlaaugljósle-gast Vesturheimi og því var best fyrir þá að hypja sig.
Strákurinn stóð agndofa; hann hafði ekki vitað að múslimar væru svona vondir. Það bjó nefnilega enginn múslimi í Fögrusveit. Kristín viðurkenndi að hún hefði heldur aldrei hitt múslima, en það var nóg að sjá myndir af þeim í sjónvarpinu; þeir voru alltaf í grautfúlu skapi.
Strákurinn vildi gjarnan vita hvers vegna múslimar væru svona vondir og Kristín svaraði að bragði að það væri út af því að þeir væru fastir á miðöldum — þegar fólk var vont.
The kitchen was in the same style as the living room: the nineteenth century was hanging in the air. Alfróði
decid-Excerpt 3 presents Óttar M. Norðfjörð’s condensing of Is-lamophobic attitudes, as familiar in Iceland as in the wider Western media discourses from which they arise, into the din-nertime conversation of the Panglossian figure Alfróði and his guests in Örvitinn.11 The diatribe concludes with the firm, fa-miliar assertion that Muslims “væru fastir á miðöldum — þegar fólk var vont” (“were stuck in the Middle Ages — when people were evil”). This discursive construction of the Islamic world as
“still medieval” is a characterization which has achieved geopo-litical importance in the wake of the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, with a key public example being the rhetoric of George Bush Jr and Paul Wolfowitz.12 As Holsinger has argued, one of the most important functions of the post-9/11 American medi-evalization of Islam has been to justify America itself dispensing with the legal and diplomatic conventions through which it has traditionally construed itself as “modern”:
post-9/11 medievalism functions […] as a means of reducing a host of very complex geopolitical forces to a simple histori-cal equation, freeing its users from the demands of subtlety, nuance, and a rigorous historical understanding of the na-ture of inter- and supra-national conflict in an era of global-ization. In this temporal bisecting of the world, America’s enemies inhabit an unchanging medieval space equivalent in many ways to the monolithic East imagined in Orientalist discourses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of the more obvious effects of 9/11, in fact, has been to reen-ergize the enduring interplay of medievalism and Oriental-ism.13
Decrying the medieval as barbaric is presumably a relatively straightforward rhetorical manoeuvre in the New World, where
11 Cf. the comparable passage in Norðdahl, Illska [Evil] (Reykjavík: Mál og menning, 2012), 54.
12 Bruce Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007).
13 Holsinger, Neomedievalism, 9–10.
ed to grills some hamburgers. He fetched the coctail sauce and burger-buns but apologised for only having pork. As far as Kristín was concerned, the apologies were unnec-essary: they weren’t pig-hating Muslims. She continued by dropping into conversation some loopy words about
“Mohametans.”
The boy’s intuition told him, however, that her speech was insensitive. So he asked whether Muslims might not just be like normal people. He didn’t have long to wait for an answer from Alfróði: Muslims were not like normal people — rather many centuries out of date, rather like Poles in relation to fashion. The three of them couldn’t behave like commies or cultural relativists who wouldn’t utter a peep at evil. Multiculturalism had its limitations.
No tolerance was shown to Nazis. No. So why to Mus-lims? These extremists had held Europe hostage long enough, and now it was time to do something. Muslims obviously didn’t want to adapt to the Western world, and so it was best for them to sling their hooks.
The boy stood perplexed; he hadn’t known that Mus-lims were so bad. In fact, there weren’t any MusMus-lims living in Fögrusveit. Kristín confessed that she had also never met any Muslims, but it was enough to see pictures of them on the tv; they were always in a terrible mood.
The boy was keen to know why Muslims were so bad, and Kristín replied that it was because were stuck in the Middle Ages — when people were bad.
medievalism, while important, is less central to mainstream na-tionalist narratives than in the Old World. It is also relatively easy in European countries, like Britain or Sweden, whose na-tional identities center more on post-medieval industrialism and imperialism. For a country like Iceland, however, whose independence movement and national narrative has been squarely predicated on medieval glory-days, it potentially poses a serious ideological problem, exacerbating a existing cognitive
dissonance regarding the place of the medieval in Icelandic con-structions of itself as modern.
The tension between nationalist and Orientalist medieval-isms is, as Bergljót Soffía Kristjánsdóttir has argued, neatly rep-resented by one of the poems from Anton Helgi Jónsson’s Ljóð af ættarmóti.14 It is worth mentioning, for the uninitiated, that Icelandic phonebooks list people’s professions as well as their names:
Nafn mitt á eftir að lifa.
Símaskráin frá 1994 þykir nú þegar safngripur.
Í henni stendur nafn mitt.
Ég finn fyrir stolti
þótt konan hafi neitað að skrá titilinn hryðjuverkamaður.
Það skiptir ekki alltaf máli hvað maður gerir eða hvort maður gerir yfirleitt eitthvað.
Nafnið lifir.15
My name must live on.
Today, the phonebook from 1994 already seems a museum-piece.
It contains my name.
It gives me a sense of pride,
even though the woman refused to list my profession as ter-rorist.
it doesn’t always matter what you do, or whether you do anything in particular.
14 Bergljót Soffía Kristjánsdóttir, “‘Ég get ekkert sagt.’ Skáldskapur og hrun.”
Ritið 11, no. 2 (2011): 53–66, at 61–63.
15 Anton Helgi Jónsson, Ljóð af ættarmóti [Poems from a family reunion]
(Reykjavík: Mál og menning, 2010), 60.
The name lives.
Here terrorism — which Bergljót argues to connote Islamist terrorism — is brought into a wry allusion to the most famous stanzas (76–77) of the famous medieval poem Hávamál, a key text of the medieval Icelandic canon and prominently cited by, among many others, the financier Björgólfur Thor Björgólfs-son.16 The former of the two runs:
Deyr fé, deyja frændr, deyr sjalfr it sama;
en orðstírr deyr aldregi,
hveim er sér góðan getr.17 Cattle die,
kinsmen die, you yourself will die;
but reputation never dies
for him who gets a good one.
As with many poems written shortly before the Crash, Anton Helgi’s could retrospectively be interpreted as a comment on the Crash itself: Björgólfur Thor’s overweening desire to promote his good name has led to him wreak the kind of destruction which might be associated with terrorism, pressing us to rethink the categorical othering of the terrorist. But either way, it asks us awkwardly to read traditional, nationalist medievalism and the new, orientalist medievalism in the same breath, disturbing the chronologies into which Iceland is normally fitted.
16 Cf. Chapter 4.
17 David A.H. Evans, ed., Hávamál [The speech of the High One] (London:
Viking Society for Northern Research, 1986), 54.
Another neat illustration of the tensions that arise at the in-tersections of nationalist and Orientalist medievalism is the chil-dren’s book Hetjur, by Kristín Steinsdóttir. Here the protagonist, a sensitive Icelandic boy of about 13 called Þórhallur, moves with his family to Norway. The Crash makes no appearance: the fam-ily moves because Þórhallur’s father Þórður has a year-long uni-versity position in Trondheim. But, coincidentally or otherwise, the novel resonates with the experience of extensive Icelandic emigration to Norway (in particular) in the wake of the crisis, and the disruption of family lives it caused. Unlike his outgo-ing younger sister Katla, Þórhallur struggles to settle in, feeloutgo-ing alienated in the new society. At first, he draws solace from the respect which Norwegians have for Snorri Sturluson (d. 1241), to the point of taking Snorre as his Norwegian name: this is a straightforward recapitulation of Iceland’s nationalist medieval-ism and the ways in which Iceland has tended to rely, continu-ously since Snorri’s own time, on its heritage of saga-production for cultural status. Eventually, Þórhallur makes friends with another lonely child, Erlend, a half-Greek orphan, who is even keener on King Ólafur Tryggvason of Norway (d. 1000) than Þórhallur is on Snorri. Meanwhile, Katla’s first friends in Trond-heim are two Iraqi refugees, Shirouk and Shamshad. By hearing about their experiences of war-torn Iraq (along with watching TV coverage of Palestine), Þórhallur comes to recognize the hor-rific nature of the violence which characterized the careers of both Snorri and Ólafur, and both Þórhallur and Erlend reject their societies’ veneration of these figures.18
Þórhallur’s insight, then, is in some ways a critique of Iceland and Norway’s nationalist medievalism. But Hetjur figures the temporality of the present-day Middle East as overlapping with that of medieval Scandinavia, implying that, unlike the West, the Middle East is “still medieval.” Norway’s acceptance of refu-gees is portrayed in terms of Norwegians’ hospitality rather than refugees’ rights: “ég er bara glöð að mega vera hérna í Nóregi”
18 Kristín Steinsdóttir, Hetjur [Heroes] (Reykjavík: Vaka-Helgafell, 2009), esp.
80–82, 121–24.
(“I’m just glad to be able to be here in Norway”), says Shirouk dutifully.19 The book does hint at the quasi-colonial relation-ships whereby the promotion of nationalist medievalism within the Nordic countries compromizes the region’s commitment to the wellbeing of people beyond it: “þið takið þátt í öllum friðar-hreyfingum en samt flytur þú með þér bækur um morðingja og glæpamenn” (“you both take part in all the peace-movements but you still bring books here about murderers and criminals”), Þórhallur tells his father, referring to Snorri’s history of the king of Norway, Heimskringla.20 Þórhallur’s critical stance at least sketches how Nordic culture can be hypocritical, and less sup-portive of human rights than it likes to imagine. Meanwhile, while recognizing the privileged status Icelandic immigrants have in Norway over people from further south or east,21 Hetjur indicates how it is hard for ethnic outsiders — whether Iceland-ers, Iraqis, or half-Greeks — to become included in Norwegian society, showing that it is easier for outsiders instead to develop solidarity with one another. And, through Þórhallur’s reflections on how foreigners in Iceland might have as hard a time as he is having in Norway, the book implies that Iceland’s society is also rather closed. Thus Hetjur indicates the main lines of both positive, nationalist medievalism and abjected, Orientalist me-dievalism, in Icelandic culture, and the tension between the two.
What is perhaps most striking about the number of refer-ences to the Islamic world in Crash-fiction is that the explosion of highly public Islamophobia, racism and xenophobia that has convulsed Western politics in the last few years had not yet oc-curred when most of it was written. The racism that came to the fore in the Reykjavík municipal elections of 2014, the UK’s referendum on membership of the European Union and the US presidential election of 2016, and so forth caught political commentators by surprise: Icelandic fiction, then, provides
in-19 Ibid., 43.
20 Ibid., 121.
21 Cf. Guðbjört Guðjónsdóttir, “‘We Blend in with the Crowd but They Don’t’: (In)visibility and Icelandic Migrants in Norway,” Nordic Journal of Migration Research 4 (2014): 176–83.
teresting evidence for how these forces were already stirring and manifesting themselves in fiction around 2008. Thus an exami-nation of how Crash-writing navigates temporality to negotiate Iceland’s situation in a globalizing world is worthwhile, and pro-vides useful possibilities for understanding post-Crash politics not just in Iceland, but more widely in the West.