With the publication of his first novel, Homo sapienne, published in 2017 in the fictions du Nord collection of Éditions La Peuplade, the author Niviaq Korneliussen immediately revealed herself as the new ambassador of queer youth in Greenland. That’s what with The valley of flowers, she continues to give a voice to those who have none.
Posted at 12:00 p.m.
It is in this raw and unique language that had pointed out to her that she explores again in this second novel, with depth and acuity, the question of identity, of what it means to be Greenlandic and to live under the yoke of a colonizing nation.
Solitary, the narrator is looking for a place where to flourish when she feels nowhere at home. She hates her home and mourns her grandmother who she misses terribly. Eager to leave her parents’ home, but torn about leaving her lover behind, she travels to Denmark to study anthropology and finds her “cave” there. Once there, the discrepancy is striking: she quickly comes up against the prejudices of the Danes towards the Greenlanders and fails to bond with her fellow students.
Meanwhile, a wave of suicides swept through his native country. They are 15 years old, 56 years old, 27 years old, 48 years old… Men, women. Everyone knows someone who committed suicide in Greenland. When her lover’s cousin kills herself at 17, she rushes home to be by her side. Powerless in the face of the family’s misfortune, she begins to dig to try to determine the extent of this social catastrophe and discovers that there are no more figures on the question than there are resources. Just a nation left to itself. “For young people in Greenland, suicide has become a culture,” writes a Danish newspaper in the only article on the issue that it manages to find on the internet.
Her own discomfort ends up pushing her to leave again. Back in Denmark, she is looking for a place where she can live in peace with herself. And there, like her family, she sinks into darkness. Niviaq Korneliussen constructs a contemporary and powerful novel that echoes the heartbreaks of all the indigenous peoples of the North and reaffirms the importance of literature in regaining control of one’s destiny and one’s territory.
The valley of flowers
Niviaq Korneliussen (Translated from Danish by Inès Jorgensen)
The People
384 pages