Elin Brimheim Heinesen’s talk for a panel meeting at the Faroese House of Culture, 7 April 2000, on the popular relations between Denmark and the Faroe Islands:
In my talk I will take my starting point in my own personal experience. The personal is probably the only thing one actually knows anything about, when it comes right down to it.
When I lived in the Faroe Islands, before I moved to Denmark, I never really thought much about the concept of being “Faroese” — or about what it is “to be Faroese”! Just as little as I thought about the fact, when I went for a walk down by the beach or up in the mountains, that I was now “out in nature”. I wasn’t on a sightseeing trip like some tourist. That’s why it wasn’t something I put into words — it was just something that was. Me, down by the beach. Me, up in the mountains.
Until the day I was confronted with a completely different kind of reality. Then the reality I came from suddenly became something else — something I was no longer in the middle of, but something at a distance, something that could only be viewed from the outside. It was still there inside me, but it couldn’t be seen on me. It was something that had to be explained — but not necessarily something that could be explained to others. And then it turned into words — into named concepts: to be “Faroese” — to be “out in nature”.
That other reality — the Danish one — which I now found myself in when I moved to Denmark, suddenly made me very aware that what I came from was something completely different from what I had arrived at. And my reality was very difficult to explain in words.
I remember that at one point I got talking to a young Danish girl who could hear that I wasn’t Danish. She asked where I was from. I said I was from the Faroe Islands. She looked at me for a moment, and then came the remark: “Is it nice there?”* she asked. “Nice? — Nice?” I thought to myself. I had no idea what to answer… and suddenly a chasm of dimensions opened up between her and me. A strangeness that is unspeakable. I suddenly became very conscious of the cultural divide between Faroese and Danes. It’s simply a matter of lacking a shared frame of reference.
I had been very much looking forward to coming to Denmark to study at the university in Aarhus — this bright country that seems so friendly, so green, so lush. To me Denmark felt like another, but a familiar, country, one I had come to know through ‘danskarin’, as my father called Danmarks Radio’s programme on the Kalundborg transmitter, and which was a fixed part of everyday life. I had my own close relationship with this country, through the considerable amount of Danish literature — both fiction and pulp fiction — I had read since childhood, and through Danish music — Gasolin, Shu-bi-dua, Jomfru Ane Band, Gnags — and whatever else we happened to like listening to, before I travelled to Denmark. The Danish was part of all our daily reality. I had also visited Denmark several times — even lived there about a year before school age and attended a folk high school when I was 18.
To me Denmark stood as a country of opportunity, a country of freedom, where people were tolerant, where a greater personal freedom was permitted than I thought one had in the Faroe Islands — a small country where everyone knows everyone, and where you therefore don’t dare stand out, for fear of being shut out of the community, which means everything in the Faroe Islands. True, the Danes didn’t have our mountains, but they had lush fields and woods and big cities full of life.
I really looked forward to making use of these opportunities — experiencing lots of new things and getting to know lots of new people. I thought I knew the culture and could speak the language. And people are people everywhere, after all, so I didn’t expect any great problems with becoming integrated, as the saying goes. It came as a bit of a surprise — not to say a shock — that, when it came down to it, I ended up feeling so wrong. So outside. Like a completely wrong key that simply didn’t fit the keyhole.
This time it was different. Something that had to do with the very awareness that I was going to live in Denmark for many years. It was suddenly much more committing. It dawned on me with full clarity that it was I who had to adjust and give of myself in order to fit in. I discovered the frustration of the fact that I could easily sing along with their songs, but they knew nothing — absolutely nothing — about where I came from. They could share a great deal of themselves with me; I couldn’t share much of myself with them. Our frames of reference were vastly different.
In this process I became very aware of how large a part of my identity actually lies in the interplay between myself and what is outside myself. That the way I am depends incredibly on the response I get from my surroundings. I had always believed that I was a reasonably outgoing, straightforward girl — that that was simply the core of my nature. That’s how I had always been — back home in the Faroe Islands. I just wasn’t aware that it wasn’t only my nature, but also my ‘culture’.
For suddenly the role I used to play no longer worked the way it had in the Faroe Islands. You become what others perceive you as. Here in Denmark people reacted to me and my behaviour in a completely different way than people in the Faroe Islands did. I thought I was playing one melody on the keys, but a completely different melody came out of the instrument than I expected. When I tried to say something funny, not a soul laughed. And when I wanted to be taken seriously, people thought I was being funny. If I told them something to do with the Faroe Islands, I could see in their eyes that no bells were ringing anywhere. It simply didn’t mean anything to them.
Nor did my keys play their melody when they played on me. The ever-present Danish irony — or sarcasm — all that is unspoken between the words, I often couldn’t grasp at all in the beginning. And the result was that I wasn’t the one people addressed their nuggets of wisdom to — nor did anyone expect nuggets of wisdom from me. It was strange, because I wasn’t used to that. I used to be the centre of attention — but here I suddenly had no idea how to conduct myself.
I was isolated — I was a stranger! I became so perplexed and confused that I closed up like an oyster. I changed personality completely in Danish contexts. I didn’t say a word. That’s how it was. For several years. People who studied with me knew me only as that quiet, shy girl from the Faroe Islands who never said anything. If only they knew. I know that there are very many Faroese who come to Denmark and have experienced it in exactly the same way. They fade out.
It didn’t help that I had come to a real talking culture. Danes talk; they talk a great deal. They’re rather good at it compared to Faroese, because they’ve grown up in a tradition where democracy is taken quite literally — where you’re brought up from childhood to voice your opinion. Where you have an opinion on almost anything, so to speak — and like to let others in on what you happen to think about one thing or another. Never mind what. As long as you have something to talk about. Something that many Faroese often perceive as unnecessary talk and pure complaining.
I wasn’t used to having to take a position on and have an opinion about all sorts of things. I couldn’t. And when you don’t know the rules of the game — well, then you’re outside. And once you’ve created a particular image of yourself, you get stuck with it. It’s very hard to come back after a long time and suddenly start playing the big shot, when you’ve been the sort who blends into the wallpaper for so long. I came to perceive Danes as people I didn’t particularly get along with. And from there it’s not far to falling into a romanticising of where you come from, which is, after all, what you know and feel safe with.
Many years have passed — 16 and a half, to be more precise. I’ve grown older and a good deal wiser. And much more at ease on the Danish stage. In time, the security came. In Denmark I am Danish today — also in my own consciousness. I only become Faroese to the Danes when, for example, I suddenly switch to speaking Faroese when I answer the phone. Then the Danes look at me in puzzlement. What was that strange language you just let out? I have come to reveal that the person they otherwise see before them is also a completely different one. I can feel how the strangeness spreads for a moment in their eyes.
Now I’ve been here so long that time has made the Danish reality my reality too. And now it’s like this: when I come to the Faroe Islands — and talk about my reality, as it shapes itself for me down here — then I can see the same strangeness towards me in the eyes of those Faroese who have never experienced it themselves — and that’s many of them. They are confronted with a part of me that they don’t really want to acknowledge, because it isn’t something we share a knowledge of.
So what am I now? I suppose I hang somewhere in between, I think. I’ve become a neither-nor — both-and — Faroese Dane. Perhaps my heart will always belong to the fatherland, the Faroe Islands, but I cannot deny that Danishness has slowly but surely crept into my blood as well. That’s how it is with the things you spend your time on.
Nationality has nothing to do with stereotypes and media-created clichés about people. It has to do with a shared feeling that arises in those who stay in the same place at the same time long enough.
Elin Brimheim Heinesen
7 April 2000
