Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk was an Inuk writer who was initially asked by Catholic missionaries to help them improve their Inuktitut language skills. She began by writing down phrases and terms used in day to day life, but quickly grew bored with her task. Nappaaluk then essentially reinvented the novel, never having read one before, as she invented a whole cast of characters and narrated their daily lives to alleviate her boredom. She stopped her project for 20 years due to ill health, but was later approached by Bernard Saladin D’Anglure, a Canadian anthropologist, who encouraged her to finish her book. Shocking no one, away from the eyes of the Catholic missionaries, Nappaaluk felt emboldened to tackle topics she felt she couldn’t before, so the later chapters of Sanaaq deal with things like sexual relations, conjugal violence and possession by succubi.

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I wish the afterword of this book came before the text, because had I known this I would have felt less frustrated by the repetitive nature of the book. But once I learned that it was initially a language-learning exercise, the synonyms and repeated phrases all made much more sense. She was trying to get as much vocabulary and as many grammatical and syntactic structures in there as possible! Sanaaq was transcribed and translated first into French by D’Anglure, and then from French into English by Peter Frost to be published 2014.

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Content-wise, Sanaaq is straightforward, narrating the day-to-day lives of a fairly large cast of Inuit characters. They fish and hunt and grow old and fall ill and marry. The titular character is strong willed and fiercely protective of her daughter, refusing marriage to men she doesn’t care for. It also covers the group’s first contact with white settlers and missionaries, which was very interesting.

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Would highly recommend the audiobook as Tiffany Ayalik does an incredible job bringing it to life. Just such an interesting one both in content and production/historical value!