Terje Vigen pleading for his release and the life of his family. By Christian Krogh.
Being Norwegian is knowing Henrik Ibsen’s poem Terje Vigen. The MFA is now funding a project which weds Terje Wigen to a poem by Mahmoud Darwish. Being Norwegian then, is about supporting Palestine.
Lindesnes Watchtower, an art venue, is now offering Identity of the soul, a video-performance where Ibsen’s epic poem Terje Vigen is merged with Mahmoud Darwish’s A soldier dreams of white lillies. The logic behind it goes like this: Ibsen and Darwish’s poems are both about being human, and humanity transcends nationality. Ibsen’s Terje Vigen therefore helps us understand the Palestinians, just as Darwish’s A soldier dreams of white lillies presumably helps the Palestinians understand Norway. By merging the two poems, this logic goes, we are all the wiser as the sum of a whole tells us more than its constituent parts. This logic is flawed on several levels.
The historical setting is different. There is nothing generic about Terje Vigen, it is specifically rooted in Norwegian history, even though Norway did not become independent before 1905. The poem takes place during the Napoleonic wars in 1809, when Denmark (of which Norway was part) was allied to France and the British navy subsequently blockaded Denmark, thereby imposing much deprivation upon the population of what was to become Norway. In the poem Terje Vigen sets out to break the blockade in hope of gaining much needed supplies for his family. He fails, is arrested and imprisoned by the British, and upon his release and returns to Norway finds his family dead. To attempt to see some sort of parallel to this in Israel’s blockade of Gaza is not only unhistorical and illegitimate, it is outrightly scandalous.
The cultural context is different. Ibsen’s Terje Vigen finds redemption in saving the lives of the family of the very same British lieutenant who took Vigen prisoner, thereby in effect sentencing his family to starvation and death. In Darwish’s poem, the Israeli soldier’s attachment to the land “…is no more than a story or a fiery speech… I love it with a gun” It is difficult to see the message of the two poems as being pronounced in its similarity.
The political context is different. Terje Vigen is a poem designed and maintained as the nation-building epic of Norway. Even if A soldier dreams of white lillies is accepted as an equivalent, Norway and Palestine are incomparable in every sense of the world.
Poetry is not potatoes. If you have one potato and add another potato to it, then you have two potatoes which clearly is better than having only one. It is highly questionable whether one can safely assume that the same “more is better-approach” holds true for poetry and the arts. Does it add anything of value, for instance, if we superimpose an image of Micheangelo’s David on Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa? How about mixing the national anthem of Russia with the national anthem of China, does that get us anywhere?
What we see in Identity of the soul is just another example of how the Norwegian arts scene has let itself be hijacked into winning hearts and minds for government policy. We see it in the analysis of Henrik Placht and we see it in the vehement anti-Israeli art of Haakon Gullvåg and a while back there was even a work of art which meant that Mads Gilbert got to float over Oslo in a balloon saying “Palestine embassy”. This is no scarcely more artistic than other forms of political opportunism.
Yet it’s a win-win situation, it appears: The Palestinians get their narrative disseminated throughout Norway, the government wins hearts and minds for their populist policies, and the artists get enough money to scrape by. It is in order to accommodate the pro-Palestinian lobby that the identity of Norway’s soul is being twisted into what it is not.
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