Reykjavík Grapevine - 19.05.2006, Síða 12

The book is called Draumlandið: Sjálfshjál-
parbók handa hræddri þjóð, or The Dream-
land: A Self Help Book For A Frightened
Nation. In the three months since its release,
it has been re-printed three times, and
reached record sales for a book published out
of Christmas season, moving in the excess of
8000 copies.
In the book, Andri Snær Magnason,
33-year old novelist, playwright and poet,
explores issues surrounding the conflict
between environmental preservation and the
build up of heavy industry in Iceland, and
examines the government’s hope to sell cheap
energy from hydroelectric power plants in or-
der to place Iceland among the world’s biggest
aluminium manufacturers. He met with me
in a suburban café in Reykjavík, interrupted
and congratulated repeatedly on his work.
People Would Have Turned the Page
For starters, the question, when a key piece of
Icelandic identity hasn’t been covered in the
newspapers, magazines or other media, why
present it suddenly as a book?
“I think it is really the only way. As soon
as a newspaper article reaches one page in
length, it is too long. A book can be over 300
pages and not be too long. It is really difficult
to go through a whole thought process, if you
need to be guided step by step in order to un-
derstand the whole process and see the things
in a different light. All education, whether
it is history or something else, is contained
in big units. Where as the media, the news,
everyone is trying to grab one headline, to fit
in one press release. It becomes chaotic.
“Even if it is a big news announcement, it
is still too short to convey this reality. If I had
written an article in a paper, people would
just have turned the page, and I would never
have had the time or the space to confront
these matters.”
Magnason is extremely critical of the
media’s role and the form in which the media
fulfils that role. In his opinion, news is not a
good way to learn about the world.
“I think people should just stop following
the news. They should just stop accepting this
form and denounce news. You watch a whole
news episode, ‘6000 chickens slaughtered
in Patong in China.’ People who live two
kilometres away most likely didn’t even know
about the event. Maybe nobody knew. ‘A bus
rolls over into a ravine in India,’ what is the
point? This tells us nothing. A bus falls into a
ravine… It tells us nothing.
“If you were to do a little test on people
concerning Iraq, what they now know about
the country, and what they knew before, there
is no new knowledge. People might be able to
name Fallujah. That is it. People know noth-
ing more about the culture, the literature, and
the history. They know nothing more than
there have been bombings here and bombings
there. They know nothing more about the
forces behind the war, the thought behind
it… I just think it is time people accept that
this is not a good way to acquire knowledge.
You are better off not knowing anything from
the news about how the Iraq War is going,
and read a book on the whole thing.”
In his opinion, Icelandic media has failed
to critically assess the discussion of heavy-
industrialization, and facilitate an educated
discussion.
“It is the media’s role to shake things up
and give people the whole picture. The media
has failed in that respect. Maybe it is just Ice-
landic media that is so shallow, but it has been
more occupied with manufacturing groups
of people. We see headlines like ‘the people
of Húsavík are happy,’ or ‘ the inhabitants
of East Iceland rejoice’ accompanied with a
picture of people from East Iceland raising a
f lag. This is just a product of fascism. They
are manufacturing masses, and PR companies
are build around this, to maintain this sort
of fascism-istic discourse that everyone as a
whole is ecstatic over some project, before the
project has even been started.
“The media just seems to be a stopover
for the discourse. The companies write the
press releases, the media picks it up and runs
it without assessing it, and then I read it in
the papers the next day. The media does not
seem to realize how the discourse is shaped,
how, and what words are used to portray the
discourse… Or they know, and they are just
in on it too.”
I press him for a more concrete example.
“Just the other day there was some news
regarding the possibility of mining gold up
in Þormóðsdalur. That was all that was said,
and that people were ‘optimistic.’ There was
no mention of how gold is processed. Look…
to make one gold ring like my wedding band,
you need to grind 30 tons of rock, bath the
ore in cyanide to extract the gold and the
result is 30 tons of crap and a wedding band.
So the area would look like the Kárahnjúkar
dam area, with cyanide. And if the price of
gold goes up, than maybe grinding 35 tons
becomes an acceptable cost.
“We are talking about the worst pos-
sible industry. Gold mines in the US produce
waste that is next to nuclear waste in terms
of pollution because the process extracts all
sorts of heavy metals from the ore, plus the
cyanide, and there is a constant risk that the
cyanide solution will seep into the ground
water. There was no mention of this in the
news. Everyone who saw the segment prob-
ably imagined cowboys with filters kneeling
on a riverbank. A few weeks earlier, there had
been a very critical 5-page spread world in the
New York Times about the environmental
and social costs of gold mining, but here there
was no mention of this. Here we were just
told that people were optimistic.”
Icelandic Environment as Sacrificial Lamb
Magnason has plenty on his plate if he sticks
with aluminium. Recently, Alcan Aluminium
revealed plans for enlarging its Straumsvík
aluminium smelter, and that negotiations had
begun with Icelandic power companies over
how increased demand for energy will be met.
The plan is to bring production capabilities
up from 180,000 tons to 460,000 tons.
Before Alcan entered negotiations with
the government, the power companies and
the municipality of Hafnafjörður - where the
smelter is located, word had already leaked
out that if Alcan were not successful in the
negotiation, the plant would close. This cre-
ated an immense pressure for officials to treat
Welcome To My Nightmare
Discussing the Dreamland With Writer Andri Snær
by sveinn birkir björnsson photos by gúndi
“The hardest thing was to be so angry, and yet to be
able to write a constructive book, and not get lost in
name calling, to keep my integrity, although I was not
really impartial. The book is created from a lot of an-
ger and the main reason behind me writing it was that
I was angry.”
>>> continues on next page
“The companies write the
press releases, the media
picks it up and runs it with-
out assessing it, and then
I read it in the papers the
next day.”
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