Dateline: Nairobi, Kenya
In February 2006, when travelling with my colleague Jacqueline in South Africa, we stumbled on the Guardian’s top 100 works of fiction of all time. Being competitive sorts, we immediately ticked off the books that we had read, or could have claimed to have read, and I was shocked. I am a well-educated guy who likes to read, so going in I thought I had a chance… I was skunked! I had only read 18 of these classics of literature while Jacqueline had read 45 or so.
Since then, on my travels around the world, I have enjoyed discovering a treasure trove of ideas, insights, and compelling stories from the list of books (current count, 38). Many of the novels resonate with the work that I do, inform the complexity of the current political and economic crisis, or remind us of our common humanity. And some are just plain old good stories.
None, perhaps, more so than Independent People, the great Icelandic novel, by Haldor Laxness, the great Icelandic author and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1955. I added it to the list largely because of the wonderful 3 weeks I spent in Iceland in 1990 writing for Let’s Go Europe. Picked up for a song last fall in Portland at Powell’s (the world’s greatest bookstore), I hadn’t made much progress on the book until the long flight from London to Nairobi.
Set in early 20th century rural Iceland, it chronicles the life of a proud and stubborn freeholder Bjartur who is desperate to remain independent–of the banks, of family, of God–despite desperately harsh conditions and extreme poverty. At times hilarious, but poignant throughout, I was struck by how the economic boom and bust today is just an echo of the credit crunch that Iceland lived through following the prosperity of the Great War. (And how ironic is Iceland’s own particular financial collapse today).
Towards the end of the book, we revisit some of Bjartur’s contemporaries to see how they have fared over their lives. One, Olafur, who had lost his wife and children early in his life, continued to live in poverty in the same turf hut despite the arrival of a host of social programs and modern conveniences to his fjord. “Human life isn’t long enough for a peasent to become a man of means” Laxness reflects.
Further, in discussing the government’s attempts to improve the conditions of the poorest of the poor, through subsidies to buy tractors or ploughs, cheap credit, “access to water on tap, linoluem and eletric light”, Laxness concludes:
“The fact is that it is utterly pointless to make anyone a generous offer unless he is a rich man; rich men are the only people who can accept a generous offer. To be poor is simply the peculiar human condition of not being able to take advantage of a generous offer. The essence of being a poor peasant is the inability to avail oneself of the gifts that politicians offer or promise and to be left at the mercy of ideals that only make the rich richer and the poor poorer.”
I am not sure that I fully agree, as there are millions of the poor around the world whose lives have been transformed within their lifetimes, but Laxness has a point. There are no quick fixes, this work can take generations, and it may not be through our generosity alone that they get out of poverty. We should pay heed to these fairly strong words of caution from nearly a century ago about how the best intentions may not, in the end, lead to real change for the poor.
Editor’s note: This post first appeared on Brian Trelstad’s personal blog, GreenHouseVentures