Iceland review - 2007, Qupperneq 45

ICELAND REVIEW 51
Tune into the state broadcast station Rás 1 at 12:50 p.m. every
day of the year except Easter, Christmas and New Year’s and
you’ll hear a calm, even voice announce the names and funeral
arrange ments of those who died the previous day, a tradition that’s been in
place since the station was founded in 1930. When you come from a small
town in Iceland, you know when your neighbor’s tractor breaks down.
You know when they’re renovating their summer house, chang ing their
wall paper or buying beer at the liquor store. Gossip is insid ious, like
sawdust that finds its way onto and into every virgin surface.
The black box of the nation’s identity is its National Registry, where
every single Icelander and all foreigners with a kennitala, a national
identity number, are registered. Until 2004, the registry was accessible to
anyone in the world who knew how to use a computer (and read Icelandic).
The follow ing year the registry was limited for public access within the
country except to the official entities that needed it. Usually getting
someone’s full name, address and phone number only requires looking
them up in the online phone direct ory, also public domain. And then
there’s Íslendingabók, the online genealogical database cre at ed by genetics
company deCode, which can be accessed by any Ice lander who applies for
a username and password. The data base traces line ages back to before the
time of Settlement.
What this all means is that keeping secrets in a small society is nearly
impossible. But when secrets are kept, they’re kept, the sacrosanct code
of loyalty that no one deigns to break. For the 207 people who have
been diagnosed with HIV in Iceland, many have chosen to live beneath
this veil of privacy, choosing to share their status with only those in
their innermost circle, and sometimes fewer. But Anna doesn’t fall into
this category – her family has known since 1993, her extended family
and all of her friends – but she’s not ready to come forward publicly.
For reasons equal parts privacy and fear, she simply doesn’t feel the
need, or at least not now. “I don’t feel like being,” she pauses, “because
it’s so public in Iceland, it’s so small. I don’t want to become the stereo­
type of an AIDS woman. If I choose some day to come out openly, I
should be able to do that without feeling prejudice or any thing. Every
now and then I feel the whole fear of being judged because I’m just
human,” she says. For confidentiality, her name has been changed.
Anna looks at ease on the couch in a pair of Diesel jeans and a chunky
wool sweater. She’s finishing her master’s degree, speaks four languages
and meditates daily. She also happens to be a new mother to a healthy
baby boy. If her femininity, accomplishments and breeding read like
medical statistics, she’s about the last person you might expect to be
living in Iceland with HIV. Which is just the thing – no one is immune
from this virus. Gay, straight, black, white or Asian, in France,
America, Ghana or Iceland, HIV does not discriminate, but stereotypes
often do.
Anna was diagnosed with HIV in 1992. At the time she was living
with her then­husband in southern Europe, from whom she probably
contracted the virus sexually. She believes the virus probably went
undetected for a year or two before testing positive during blood tests
before trying to get pregnant. For a full year the couple lived in secrecy,
not because Anna was afraid to tell her family but because her husband’s
family was devoutly Catholic and she wanted to respect his wishes to