Crisis and Coloniality at Europe's Margins by Kristín Loftsdóttir

Author:Kristín Loftsdóttir [Loftsdóttir, Kristín]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9781351018241
Google: 9IyADwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 39227507
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-12-19T03:13:36+00:00

The disappointment

Natalía has long, dark hair, and smiles kindly when she meets me at the restaurant where we’ve agreed to meet. She is in her mid-thirties and started working in the bank in 2006, only two years prior to the crash. Natalía had suggested that we go to a restaurant in downtown Reykjavík where the Business Vikings used “to hang out,” as she phrases it. The restaurant was also a popular place for many bank employees to have lunch and informal meetings. Natalía explains humorously that the setting is very fitting for the subject of my interview with her. The selection becomes somehow even more appropriate when I realize the restaurant is almost completely empty; it is almost as though we are entering ruins of something that once buzzed with life.

The interview takes longer than I’d anticipated because, as so often before in my interviews with bank employees, I have difficulties pulling away from the conversation. The pain of this period is readily evident in Natalía’s experiences and vividly shows how the crash was a seminal event in her life. It’s also clear that her experiences are not so different from those experienced by me and by others without a work-related connection to the bank industry.

We begin by talking about things relating to the bank and the crash, but slip again and again back to the pain associated with the crash. At one point, Natalía leans back and tells me,

There was probably a week where I was just looking at, you know, the bottom of the shame. I was worried that the pension funds would go, and the state, and you know that I would just watch this go down the drain. I mean there were moments where one was really, really pessimistic.

Her words reflect the intense and widespread concern among Icelanders at the time of the crash that the whole society would simply collapse, with unpredictable consequences. “There were probably one or two weeks where I was really deep down,” she continues. “I remember this sense of feeling like, shit, everything is going to hell.” Natalía explains that at that time people feared there would be shortages of common goods; and that during this time, when things were at their worst, people just “visualized total wreckage” (skipbrot). She is silent for a moment and then repeats distantly, “Total.” Natalía’s choice of word “skipbrot” is not coincidental. The word literally means a ship that crashes on the coast, and has an added layer of complexity due to the fact that Icelandic society is often referred to in popular speech as a boat.

I nod and tell Natalía that I remember this time well myself. “It was really painful,” she says, “but it did perhaps not last for such a long time. But this was such a terrible winter, right?” Again, I nod and cannot agree with her more. That period, especially between Geir Haarde’s speech and the loan of the IMF, had in fact not been such a long time, but

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