Nuummioq

A shard of black rock hangs impossibly in the air, detached from its steep mountain slopes below by heavy grey cloud. I feel some of the same heaviness inside, wrapped in a cloud of expectation, uncertainty. The child waits silently for his time, like a stone in my belly.

Years ago, I sat in a bustling pub in Edinburgh, enveloped in a cacophony of voices,  almost too loud to hear those of the young men hunched in close around the table where we sat with our dark beers. To these new friends, I was relating some story about a treasured book, given to me by a dear friend – a bound copy of an Australian newspaper for the entire month of the year of my birth. It was filled with noteworthy snippets of the age in which I was born – the abolition of the death penality, political turmoil related to one or another policy of a reformist prime minister, pages of job advertisements split into mens’ and womens’ sections, advertisements for such new-fangled gadgets as electric kettles. One of the young men, a bespectacled man from Aberdeen with an accent I found almost impenetrable, asked with dry wit, “And what was the headline on the day you were born? Population of Australia increases by one?” We all laughed.

But funny as it many seem, and though unlikely, it is a real possibility that on the day of my baby’s birth, he could indeed increase the population of Greenland by just one. There are only about 56,000 people who live in Greenland and the birth rate has remained fairly steady at about 850 per year for the past 15 years or so. That’s about 2.3 babies per day. So on a slow day, there could easily be only one child born. Last year, for example, there were three months of the year where there must have been fewer than two babies born on at least one day.

But when he is born, as welcome as he will be, no country will claim him – not Greenland (or Denmark) despite our living in Greenland for the last 5.5 years, not Australia despite his parents’ citizenship, not the United Kingdom despite his father’s dual citizenship. In fact, like the rest of his family, and despite his place of birth, he will never be eligible for citizenship in Greenland. As far as I have been able to determine from the Danish authorities, who still govern and administer immigration and citizenship in Greenland, there is simply no legislative framework for a non-EU citizen becoming a citizen of Greenland, regardless of whether one is born here or how long one lives here. Instead, we’ll embark on what is likely to be a lengthy application process in Australia and the United Kingdom to prove citizenship by descent.

A child of the world, born in strange days and with no citizenship may represent an increase of one to a nation that will never claim him. But despite the beaurocracy, I know that his surrogate Greenlandic friends and family will welcome him now, as always, as one their own – a Nuummioq.