Reimagining cultural memory of the arctic in the graphic narratives of Oqaluttuaq

Magdalena Zolkos
Jyväskylä University, Finland
Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany

The Greenlandic oral story-telling tradition, Oqaluttuaq, meaning “history,” “legend,” and 
“narrative,” is recognized as an important entry point into Arctic collective memory. The graphic 
artist Nuka K. Godtfredsen  and  his  literary  and  scientific  collaborators  have  used  the  
term  as  the  title  of  graphic narratives published from 2009 to 2018, and focused on four 
moments or ‘snippets’ from Greenland’s history  (from  the  periods  of  Saqqaq,  late  Dorset,  
Norse  settlement,  and  European  colonization). Adopting a fragmentary and episodic approach to 
historical narrativization, the texts frame the modern European presence in Greenland as one of 
multiple migrations to and settlements in the Artic, rather than its central axis. We argue that, 
in consequence, the Oqaluttuaq narratives not only “provincialize” the tradition of hyperborean 
colonial memories, but also provide a postcolonial mnemonic construction of  Greenland  as  a  
place  of  multiple  histories,  plural  peoples,  and  heterogenous  temporalities.  As such,  the 
 books  also  narrativize  loss  and  disappearance—of  people,  cultures,  and  environments—as a 
distinctive melancholic strand in Greenlandic history. Informed by approaches in the field of 
cultural memory and in the study memorial objects, Marks’ haptic visuality and Keenan and Weizman’s 
forensic aesthetics, we analyze the graphic narratives of Oqaluttuaq in regard to their aesthetic 
dimensions, as well as investigate the role of material objects and artifacts, which work as 
narrative “props” for multiple stories of encounter and survival in the Arctic.