{"id":13752,"date":"2019-08-08T11:37:23","date_gmt":"2019-08-08T15:37:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/?page_id=13752"},"modified":"2019-08-30T14:09:36","modified_gmt":"2019-08-30T18:09:36","slug":"pandey","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/journal\/past-issues\/issue-11\/pandey\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the Inuit Territory a “Black Eye”? The Loneliness of Justin Nobel’s “Magical Place”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Romil Pandey<\/strong><\/h2>\n

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In his article \u201cThe Last Inuit of Quebec,\u201d Justin Nobel gives an account of his experience with the Inuit community in northern Quebec, where he discovers manifestations of a fading culture instead of finding his \u201cmagical\u201d place. Nobel\u2019s fantasies of such a place are reflective of Pico Iyer\u2019s \u201cLonely Places,\u201d an essay which explores the nature of the world\u2019s \u201cmisfit\u201d places that are self-sufficient in their loneliness. Did Nobel actually find such eccentricity in the arctic region of Ivujivik? Or did he witness globalization leading to a loss of minority culture? Through Iyer\u2019s concept of \u201cLonely Places,\u201d the Inuit community in Ivujivik can be viewed as a Lonely Place whose loneliness and cultural resilience are interdependent in the globalizing world.<\/p>\n

Iyer defines Lonely Places as \u201cthe places that don\u2019t fit in; the places that have no seat at our international dinner tables\u201d (Iyer 32). They are excluded from matters of global participation and intercommunity communication. The historical, cultural or geographical factors differentiate these places from the common world. Iyer elaborates on the emergence of Lonely Places: \u201cSome are born to isolation, some have isolation thrust upon them\u201d (Iyer 33). Applying this to Nobel\u2019s article, Ivujivik can be classified in the first category as its geographical isolation has influenced the very foundation of the Inuit culture, the survivalist lifestyle, and hence the nature of its loneliness.<\/p>\n

The cultural difference between the minority Inuit community and Nobel demonstrates how Lonely Places are perceived to be strange. In his yearning to find a \u201cland where people still lived in skins, gathered around fire, and believed in magic\u201d (Nobel 38), Nobel was actually in search of a Lonely Place whose traditions were still intact in our globally interconnected community. It almost seems like the humanity in this Lonely Place is unaware of its own peculiarity. Nobel illustrates the strangeness of this place through the characterization of its people; he describes his encounter with the absurd \u201cdrunk woman named Saira\u201d and the children who \u201cpummeled a man with a hockey and golf clubs\u201d (Nobel 39). From angsty teenagers who vandalize and maul for leisure and those who are monotonized by technology to bizarre adults, the Inuit village is inhabited by strangely contrasting behaviors. Iyer writes that \u201cLoneliness makes them stranger and their strangeness makes them lonelier\u201d (Iyer 33). The seclusion of the Inuits have made them evolve differently as a community. Nobel\u2019s description of the people makes readers see such strange behavior as part of the Inuit culture, which it is not. Outsiders like Nobel misinterpret the dysfunction of the lonely Inuit community in response to the modernizing world as the strangeness of their culture. This shows how the Inuits are getting alienated from their own traditions over time. The cultural resilience of Ivujivik is threatened as the cultural difference is considered strange, and therefore \u201ca black eye\u201d (Nobel 42) by the modern world.<\/p>\n

Despite its loneliness, the Inuit community has not been left unaffected by globalization. Nobel\u2019s attempt to find a magical place in Ivujivik was not quite successful; what he found instead was the \u201cannihilation of their culture\u201d (Nobel 42). Not only did the locals not remember how to steer a kayak, they \u201chad to order kayaks from southern Quebec and hire an outside guide to train locals\u201d (Nobel 43). Nobel did not find adventure where one would expect to. Globalization has increased the dependency of Lonely Places, destroying their self-sufficiency, harming their ability to continue on their own. Reliance on external factors harms them both economically and culturally. Nobel presents tourism as a possible solution to this: \u201crather than destroying tradition, it could bring it back\u201d (Nobel 43). Nobel hints at an idea to counter the vulnerability of Lonely Places: promoting traditional practices through tourism with specific needs of each Lonely Place instead of a laissez-faire globalization that threatens cultural resilience.<\/p>\n

Nobel\u2019s recount shows that since Lonely Places are unfamiliar with external communication, they are unaware of their own susceptibility to foreign intervention. Iyer encompasses this by stating that \u201cLonely places are so far from the music of the world that they do not realize how distant they are\u201d (Iyer 33). Therefore, there are ramifications to the inability of Lonely Places to comprehend their own loneliness. It makes them vulnerable to intervention by the majority:<\/p>\n