Iktsuarpok: the Inuit word for those who wait

You're waiting for someone tonight. You get up for the third time in ten minutes to check the window, you glance at your phone without quite knowing what you're looking for, you listen for footsteps in the hallway, you walk through the apartment again as if you'd forgotten something.

You don't really know what to call the thing running through you. (It isn't impatience, not quite anxiety, it would almost be sweet if it would just stop.) The Inuit have had a word for this for a long time. It says exactly what you're doing there, standing in your living room. The word is iktsuarpok.

The word and the gesture it carries

Iktsuarpok comes from Inuktitut, the language of the Canadian Arctic, from Nunavut to Nunavik (with close variants in Greenland). It is written in a syllabary, in signs that look like leaning arrows: ᐃᒃᑦᓱᐊᕐᐳᒃ.

To the ear, it sounds roughly like ik-tsoo-ar-pok, with the final q held a little longer than in our languages, at the back of the throat. Transcriptions vary (ikhsuarpuk, iktsoarpok) because no romanisation has won everyone over.

The meaning, though, is precise. Iktsuarpok names the act of stepping outside, again, to see whether someone is finally arriving. Not waiting in general, not impatience, not anxiety. The repeated gesture of going to check. The door you open again. The glance into the distance, the decision to come back inside because you've looked, and then stepping out again three minutes later because you have to look once more.

That's what makes it so accurate. Most of the words other languages put on waiting hold it still: patience, anticipation, hope, longing. Iktsuarpok moves. It has feet, a door, an outside, a horizon. It says that waiting for someone you love is almost never sitting down. It's standing up, sitting back, standing up again.

Why such a word was needed at the edge of the world

To understand iktsuarpok, picture a place where visitors are rare.

In the Thule region, in northwest Greenland, where Knud Rasmussen was born and where Jean Malaurie spent the winter of 1950-1951 (recounted in The Last Kings of Thule), the nearest neighbour sometimes lived days away by sled. The polar night lasted for months, and every journey cost hours of dogs, ice, and biting cold.

When a hunter had promised to return by a certain moon, you held him to his word, and you watched for his return the way you watch for the sea to come back.

Malaurie describes the quiet ceremony of a visitor's arrival: warmth without display, food shared right away, a place made in the igloo as if they had been expected forever. Rasmussen, for his part, wrote that meeting Inuit he had never crossed paths with felt like a reunion between old friends.

It's because, before each arrival, sometimes for weeks at a time, there had been this very motion: stepping outside to check whether a sled was coming in the distance, and starting over.

A whole language turned that gesture into a word. Not out of poetry, out of necessity. When your social life hangs on rare arrivals and your hospitality is sacred, waiting isn't a defect of patience, it's almost already the meeting.

Saudade watches, iktsuarpok walks

There's another word, better known, that orbits the same emotional territory. Portuguese saudade also tells of the absence that weighs, the missing that settles in, the someone who isn't there. You might think iktsuarpok and saudade are cousins. They aren't, really.

Saudade looks behind. Iktsuarpok walks toward what is coming back.

Saudade settles in with its lukewarm tea and its song in the speakers, it lets the absence take up all the room. It's a still word, turned toward what has been, toward the trace left behind. Iktsuarpok doesn't have time to sit down. It moves. It goes out, comes in, goes out again. One says the presence of absence, the other says the motion toward arrival. One carries the tender mourning of the one who is no longer there, the other carries the tender restlessness of the one who is about to come.

Roland Barthes, in his A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, laid the equation out in a single sentence.

“

Am I in love? Yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits.

— Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

The lover is the one who waits, Barthes wrote. The other shows up late, the other is busy elsewhere, the other doesn't think to count the minutes. But you, you wait, and that's how you recognise your love.

Iktsuarpok gives that equation a body. Barthes' sentence tells you what you are. The Inuit word tells you what you do with your feet and your hands, standing in a room the other one hasn't walked into yet.

“

Saudade sits by the window. Iktsuarpok gets up to open it again.

Other languages brush against the same zone without entering it. German Sehnsucht reaches toward an absolute elsewhere, Welsh hiraeth holds on to a place. None of them catches the precise gesture, half comical from afar, half tender up close, of someone stepping onto the porch for the fourth time to see if.

That's why iktsuarpok doesn't translate. It doesn't describe a feeling, it describes a motion.

Iktsuarpok without knowing it

You don't live in the Arctic, you're not waiting for a hunter coming back from far away. And yet you do iktsuarpok pretty much every day, without knowing it.

You do it when you're waiting for a message and you open the conversation seven times in twenty minutes. You do it when you track a package that holds a gift for someone you love, refreshing the page as if your click might push the truck. You do it when you open the little window of an advent calendar just for the gesture of opening it. You do it when you tick a box on a countdown that says twelve days left.

Technology hasn't killed iktsuarpok, it has multiplied it. We used to step onto the porch once or twice an evening. Now we step onto the screen thirty times an hour.

The phone you unlock for nothing is a doorstep you cross. The ping you're hoping for is a silhouette you watch for on the horizon.

Psychologists working on anticipation have shown since the 1980s that the pleasure of waiting for a loved experience can be as strong as the experience itself. Waiting isn't the cost of love. It's already love doing its work, in advance. Iktsuarpok is the name of that work.

Naming is enough

A curious thing happens when a feeling receives a name. It stops tugging at you. It doesn't disappear, it goes on holding its corner of the room, but it becomes a thing you hold rather than a thing that holds you.

Before you had the word, you took this inner motion for a flaw, a sign you couldn't stay still, something to fix with patience or meditation. The word, set down on that restlessness, does the opposite of a clinical label. It dignifies it. What you're living there is love doing its work in the absence of its object, and a whole people at the edge of the polar circle once decided this deserved its own word.

You take part, without knowing it, in an old choreography others have danced before you, on snowy porches, in front of windows that opened onto white horizons. What you took for a nervousness to correct is your body walking toward the other before the other arrives.

What the Inuit understood is that this restlessness doesn't need to be cured. It needs to be recognised, and let to do its round. It always wins in the end. The other arrives, the gesture stops, the word goes back to rest. Until next time.

You already knew the gesture, walking in here. You just didn't have its name. Now, when you get up for the fourth time tonight to walk to the window, you can tell yourself with a small smile that you're doing iktsuarpok. The word, for its part, can stay in Inuktitut. You'll use it anyway.