Names for the Sea, page 14
‘We barricaded it, front and back, and let no-one in and no-one out, and it went on until the police broke it up at 3 a.m.. The police kept pushing us back. That’s when I got pepper-sprayed the first time, a direct shot in my eye. It hurt. Quite horrible. That made me really angry. Before that, I was just protesting but after that – well, I was focussed. I had to get back at them. It was such a good feeling you had from being there, watching the politicians being carried out through secret tunnels. It was the first time in my life I really felt proud of being Icelandic when I saw all those people, thousands of people, gathered round the parliament, taking part. Some just watching and some up against the riot shields.’ He tails off, as if the images are fading. People talk much more about ‘being Icelandic’ than I’ve ever heard anyone talk about ‘being British’. Britishness seems to be largely an accident of birth, whereas being Icelandic, like being American, requires the observance of certain events and practices. The Pots and Pans Revolution may be one of them. ‘I don’t know. It got out of control. People went too far, police and protesters both.’
They went back the next day, 21st January, and again on the 22nd, determined not to stop until the protests were heard. Excitement crackles through Tómas Gabríel´s voice, remembering those days of bonfires and shouting, when to hope was to act. The exact chronology, through that sleepless week of darkness, blurs as he talks.
‘I don’t remember if they burnt a flag, but everyone was sweaty and tired and it was awesome. It was a really cool, cool day to be outside.’ Tómas Gabríel is talking as if protesting is a sport, an outdoor activity that makes you feel sweaty, tired and good. I don’t know if the coolness of that January day is literal or metaphorical, but I recognise the feeling of being young and taking control. Wordsworth’s account of the early days of the French Revolution murmurs in my mind:
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
‘Then I remember I went home and I got a phone call around midnight. My friend said, “Tómas, are you real about this? Are you willing to go to the end for the demonstrators? Are you really into this?” I said yes. And she said, “OK, come down to parliament. They are shooting tear gas.”’ He stops. Tear gas. In Iceland. The Icelandic police gassing the Icelandic people. In Austurvöllur.
‘I jumped into warm boots, got a good coat and a scarf to cover my face and ran down the whole way, the whole way across Reykjavík. It was freezing and I kept slipping but I ran. And when I got there it wasn’t Reykjavík, it wasn’t Iceland. It was dark, this disgusting smog in the air. There were people, teenagers and young people, walking away and cradling a friend of theirs and everyone choking and puking and crying and it was – I was – I kept going. And when I got there I saw this barricade of riot shields. On the other side of the square there were people gathered together, and I was standing there like an idiot in front of the riot shields, maybe ten, twenty metres away. And something landed at my feet and I look and I go, shit, that’s tear gas. They shot a canister at me because I was the only person standing there. I looked at it and thought, no. Walk away. I held my breath but it got in deep and I was coughing up and my throat and eyes were burning away. I have asthma and lung problems and I felt I was suffocating. That was when everything turned, everything went surreal. It didn’t feel as if it was happening.’
I notice the detail of Tómas Gabríel’s topography, the way his story moves around the few hundred metres of Reykjavík’s centre. His apartment, the university over the road, the parliament buildings across the park. His city is gathering new stories before my eyes, the meanings of space changing. These demonstrations were domestic in more than one way, an expression of alienation from home for which it’s hard to find international comparisons.
‘That night we went from parliament to another place, it’s by the sea. And there were people there who were way out of line, people who’d been clashing with the police before the riots, drug-dealers and felons. They’d gone off and found some rocks and come back to throw them at the police. At which point the police were running really low on pepper spray and they’d said, all right, that’s it, gas masks on, we’re going in.’
Things often run low in Iceland. Things are there and then not there again for a few weeks: limes and walnut oil, children’s ibuprofen, my preferred brand of tampon, nothing for which there is no substitute. Except pepper spray. Until then, someone had been making a decision about whether to use pepper spray or gas in each situation, but from now there was no choice. ‘And it was – I remember standing there and seeing this guy just pick up a bottle, a big glass bottle, and throw it at this police officer. There were seven police officers, and I’ll hand it to them, those were some brave police officers. Seven of them, and hundreds of us, and they were getting rocks and glass thrown at them. It was getting really unpleasant until one of the activists walked up to them and took a loudhailer and said, “Look, we can be angry, but let’s not take it out on these poor souls. They didn’t do this. We can paint the city red but we don’t go hurting people.” And then some of us ran up to him and stood with him and made a kind of blockade around the police. And after that the night turned into a sort of tug-of-war with the police and we were lighting benches and setting them on fire. There were some injuries, a friend of mine got shoved into a bench by a police officer and broke his sternum, there was bleeding, and they were hitting people on the head with batons which is illegal, they’re allowed to hit your arms and legs but not your head. The hospital was on standby because the police had told them, right, expect serious injuries, we’re not going to stand for any more of this. But the day after that was Wednesday, Wednesday the twenty-second, and that was the day the orange ribbon came out. If you wore an orange ribbon it meant you were protesting but you were peaceful, you didn’t want violence. I celebrated it this year; I called it “Gas Mask Day”. After that the police weren’t really needed at the demonstrations. Things quietened down. There was no more burning. There were a few others, smaller protests and demonstrations, but I didn’t partake in those, I just watched. And shortly after that the government fell.’
And after that, Tómas Gabríel says, he became disillusioned. He talks about the weaknesses of democracy, about people voting for the wrong reasons and about the compromises made by anyone who takes power, but I wonder if his disillusion has more to do with the way ‘things quietened down’. The quietening down was uniquely Icelandic; the police were overstretched and under-prepared, exhausted by back-to-back shifts and night working. The Reykjavík force had called in back-up from all over the country, putting administrators and new recruits on the streets with front-line officers, but the protests were unprecedented and no-one in Iceland had much experience of managing crowds and public order. According to the Reykjavík Grapevine, on 22nd January ‘protestors wearing orange armbands offered to relieve the police from their duties in guarding the parliament building. This was accepted, and the police in riot gear left the scene.’
Tómas Gabríel revives. ‘I feel really sorry for the people who missed it. I can always say that I went there, I did what I wanted to do, I shed tears, I bled blood, I now know what tear gas and pepper spray tastes like and I’ll tell my children and my grandchildren. That’s what 2009 was like and it was great. It was a brilliant, brilliant moment and next year on January the twenty-second I’m planning on getting a gas mask tattooed on my arm, with the date, just to remind me.’
Tómas Gabríel is watching his memories on the wall above my head again, as if there’s a re-run of the kind of sporting triumph that men seem to recall and discuss for decades afterwards. Tómas Gabríel wants something different from what there’s been for the last twenty years (almost exactly his own lifetime), something new and better. But he must – surely, at twenty-one – have a sense of the future as well as nostalgia for those three days fifteen months ago.
‘Do you still feel that sense of hope?’
He shrugs. ‘We’re in a situation where there’s not much we can do. Every account is heavily in debt, everything needs to be cut. But I feel happy that although this government will have to downgrade everything, it will be done with the people in mind. Not the private investors, not the big companies run by the Independence Party’s buddies. So even with this great cutting knife that has gone through our healthcare, when I arrived at hospital with my finger deformed, in a lot of pain, I was treated immediately and well. Within a couple of hours I was on a surgical table and I had capable staff around me and that tells me that we are doing something right.’
It takes time, I want to tell him; the state is an oil tanker that takes five miles to stop. The new government promises to defend the principle of not nationalising debt, promises to make the inevitable cuts in the most humane and accountable ways possible, promises to protect what Icelanders value about their country while accepting what the International Monetary Fund offers and considering EU membership.
‘So you’re optimistic about the future for Iceland?’ I ask. I shift in my chair. It’s beginning to get dark out there.
‘Well, the people who suffered most from the crisis are people who had good jobs, big loans, big cars, big TVs. We had so many people who were in a really tight situation, knowing that as long as they had their job, their overtime, they could keep up the repayments. Just. People who just trusted that things would go as they go.’
Þetta reddast, I think. It will sort itself out.
Tómas Gabríel reads my mind. ‘Yes, it’s very Icelandic. But I wasn’t raised like that. I don’t take loans. I drive a twenty-one-year-old car, I study, I play sport and I work a few hours a week to buy gas and food. That’s the way we should be, less extravagant, and I think this crisis will bring more people to that mindset. I hope so. I hope we don’t just find new loans, pay it all off, party it up for five more years and then find ourselves here again.’
It’s not the first time I’ve had a glimpse into the frustration of Icelanders who have been considered weird and even deviant for the last few years, people who throughout the boom eschewed debt of any kind, disdained shopping, reduced, reused, recycled, grew and made their own (potatoes, socks, garden sheds), not out of poverty but as acts of principle. They stand now as exemplars, Puritans, hoping a purged Iceland will see the light and join them in the City on a Hill. But people who have always seen themselves as mainstream consumers have also said to me that Iceland needed a lesson, that the kreppa is the overdue punishment for a decade of greed and arrogance. Matthew, who was raised in a broadly right-wing American tradition and owns the biggest television I have seen in a private house, says that we all have to take responsibility. He and his partner saved up to buy their television, but he is, he says, still partly to blame. He delighted in the new foods coming into Iceland, in the Israeli coriander and American cranberries. He loved to sit in glossy cafés with his new laptop and a cappuccino. When fresh spinach began to be imported five years into his time in Iceland, he went wild for it, and didn’t ask what economic current had carried it to his table. It’s time to go, and I walk back through the rain to the bus stop, hoping that the future holds something as good as the past for Tómas Gábriel.
*
I keep wondering about the other side of the argument, because at the moment I can’t imagine how anyone could begin to defend the bankers or the Independence Party. I’m sure my friends are right – or at least sure that I share their politics – but it seems a good idea at least to look over the fence at the other camp. English language sources of Icelandic news are rare and brief; the Iceland Review, mostly for tourists, has a rather Chinese policy on current affairs, carrying headlines about wildflowers and ski-resorts on days when the Icelandic papers are all writing about the IMF. Morgunblaðið, now owned by one of the corrupt bankers, offers a few sentences of English summary. Otherwise, it’s blogs – mostly left-wing – my students – mostly left-wing – and my friends – mostly left-wing. I should try talking to the other side. One of my students has a friend who knows Arni, the head of the youth division of the Independence Party. We agree to meet one Monday in March. I suggest my office, which is warm, quiet and central. No, he says, at the National Museum. We can talk in the café. The café has wooden floors, high ceilings, glass walls – a pleasant space where groups’ chat, small children’s play and the hysteria of coffee machines reverberates around the walls. It’s not a good place for a nuanced conversation. Another café, I suggest? His office? No, he says, we will meet at the museum.
It is ‘window weather’, bright but cold. I notice the shortness of my shadow as I cross the car parks between the university and the museum. It’s minus five and I pull my scarf up over my face, but my eyelids and forehead sting in a wind so sharp it finds its way between my gloves and my sleeves, around the tops of my socks under my trousers. I can see from the car park that there is no-one in the café. There are a couple of tourists trying the heavy copper doors. Of course. Monday. The museum is closed. I pull back my glove and check my watch. I am, as always, five minutes early. Icelanders are always late, at least five minutes, for everything, but I can’t adapt, because what if the time I’m late is the one time an Icelander is punctual? I back into the corner of the porch and the main building, where I’m well sheltered from that wind, and find that I can almost feel a breath of warmth in the sun on my face. I watch birds coming in to land on the marsh in front of the airport, because the birds are coming back now, and a jogger in a balaclava, head bowed into the wind, crossing the pedestrian bridge that arches cat-like over the eight-lane highway out of town. The painted houses downtown are bright in the sun, and after ten minutes Arni appears, a tall man with a red face darker than his blonde hair, hand outstretched in greeting. We apologise to each other for the museum’s day off. Arni suggests the campus canteen as an alternative. I conduct him to the coffee room at the top of the Foreign Languages building, and make coffee while he sits texting. He can’t put his phone away, sends and reads texts throughout our conversation. I can’t really get Arni to say anything. He’s wary, 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.’
