Arkhticós Dolorôs
2021, Poems

Publisher Arena
- Arkhticós Dolorôs was nominated for the 2022 Nordic Council Literature Prize

The poetry collection Arkhticós Dolorôs (2021) brings together in an excellent way the themes that have occupied Kleemann for the past quarter-century: The abuse of nature by modern humanity, the loss of indigenous culture, and the struggle for a descendant of the Greenlandic Inuit to find a new identity in a modern, globalised present. Symbols, figures and objects drawn from Greenlandic culture are combined with similar objects from far away – in the same way that different languages, especially Greenlandic, Danish and English, are intertwined to form completely new spaces of meaning. In this way, the cultural mix is experienced both as a loss and as a creative invention that takes us to new and unexpected places.

The text is saturated with emotion, not least pain and frustration – but out of the pain are born new meanings, images and words that challenge the reader to take part in the exploration of life’s conditions and existence that the poems set in motion. Central to Arkhticós Dolorôs is the suffering, melting Arctic. Jessie Kleemann was one of the first to reinterpret the myth of the Sea Mother as a modern symbol of pollution and environmental catastrophe. In Arkhticós Dolorôs, the figure is duplicated in the form of a “creature of the cold”, the inua of ice and glaciers – a soul or being whose pain is violently reflected back at human beings themselves. Kleemann thus shares with us the experience of an indigenous people of the fundamental dependence of mankind on the surrounding nature of which it is a part – interpreted in a late-modern, globalised present.

The fact that Jessie Kleemann is a performance artist is evident in the texts’ use of the white space of the page, and in their mobile progression. It is about Arctic pain, the experience of colonisation, Greenland’s special geopolitical situation and, of course, global warming. These are definitely tough themes, but an irrepressible, teasing humour also bubbles up between the melting ice blocks of the texts – as the publisher aptly describes them in its presentation of the book. (text from the Nordic Councils of Ministers)

Arkhticós doloros
min jord i arktis
issitumi nunanni issora…”