| and Alternatives to the Hegemony of "Nature Writing" and Environmentalism (an essay based on this talk will be available in the eco-language reader from Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs) A small male fish during breeding season regards the circle of territory around its own physical limits as part of itself. It responds to invasions of that territory with as much ferocity as it regards attacks to its skin at other times. The lesson is about territory, boundaries. The self is and is not the self you see and feel and can outline--edge of skin meeting air--the little fish turned fierce is evidence of the self as a field of experience. Why do I, a poet and artist, write about territories, space, "nature," and ecology? Why a discussion of eco-anything from a culture worker? And why now? Values of purity, disembodiment, the separation of self and other, self and land, head and heart are persistent white, North American, middle class civilizing notions--notions that allow its citizens to entertain ideas of freedom alongside traditions of enslavement, genocide, war, and torture. Conversely, ecology, as a concept, is radical in that it addresses relationship and that language is itself as problematic, as an exercise in mapping, plastic, partial, and rendered. I want to push against the tradition of civility and purity. I use poetry and art to chart the project. An ecopoetical practice potentially operates in an oppositional mode, pushing, creating performances of language that point out literature's hegemony, its relationship to power and its role in erasure. An ecopoetical practice may result in works that resist comodification, defy traditional measures of "effective" communication, and point out the constructedness of those mechanisms (such as the media and the body politic). Therefore, an ecopoetics as a continued critique of nature writing and a critique of environmentalism's hegemony. A Ecopoetical Critique of Nature Writing Nature writers are "the children of Linnaeus," according to the editors of the 1990 Norton Book of Nature Writing. Establishing the genre in a very specific middle class and taxonomic orientation, the editors state that "Throughout the second half of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, parsons, poets, ladies and gentlemen of leisure in England, explorers and collectors in the wilds of America, all carried their copies of Linnaeus." They describe nature writing in North America an act of "exploration," not conquest. They describe this writing as "escapist" in a positive sense and they praise the voice of "prophetic anger" from early environmentalists. As editors they fail to articulate the link between the abuse of peoples and the abuse of land and literature's role in that relationship. Their editorial demarcations are, I believe, indicative of the mainstream ideology of nature writing as a genre: that this writing is about contemplating beauty, a superior morality, and healthy adventure. And so, even from writers who call themselves "environmentalists," nature writing side-lights history, creating a seemingly beautiful glow but long shadows and severe blind spots. On how to read what is sometimes tagged "environmental literature," David Mazel, from his essay "Literary Environmentalism as Domestic Orientalism" instructs: Our reading of environmental literature should help us realize that the concerns are not exclusively of the order of "shall these trees be cut? or "shall this river be dammed?"--important as such questions are--but also of the order of "what has counted as the environment, and what may count? Who marks off the conceptual boundaries, and under what authority, and for what reasons? I am interested in "environment" not as noun or subject, but constructed, perspective-dependent, inhabited and in fact created by language itself, and therefore a potential instrument of ideology. After September 11, 2001, I found myself writing often about the sky, birds, trees, small houses with porches and shutters. I looked for property in Vermont on-line. From the Psalms of the Bible, from a religion I had left a long time ago, these words came echoing: "I will lift mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help." And from Rogers and Hammerstein: "I go to the hills when my heart is lonely." Rather than moving away, I decided I needed to re-think my own tendency toward equating nature with escape. Inspired by an event that, through fiery spectacle, signaled the connectedness of all of corporeal, intellectual, emotional, material territories, I needed to research and re-think the (my) American pastoral. As I thought about land and language, I remembered the place where I spent my childhood. The name of my town was Allamuchy. The rivers near were the Pequest and the Musconetcong. There was Lake Hopatcong. There were towns called Independence and Liberty. All evidence of the uprooting/routing of peoples. (An arrowhead pops up out of a freshly plowed field after a soaking rain. It rests against the spines of my childhood books.) Familiar with the concept of a subway from my mother, as a child I envisioned the underground railway rumbling beneath fields. Above ground, the crumbling foundations of slave-quarters, the unspoken New Jersey. My father told me that before the war he and grandmother went into the Estonian forest to pick mushrooms. There, according to his story, they happened upon a naked woman, dancing. The same Estonian forests that harbored the heroic nationalist fighters, The Forest Brethren, harbored extermination camps where thousands of Jews died. When I asked my father once if he knew about the camps he said he had no idea. Trees of the same forest hold different stories for different folks. The land is left to cover something or we dig, looking for a full history. The land is peaceful or an extension of human cruelty. From Zora Neale Hurston: "In de black dark Ah wrapped mah baby de best Ah knowed how and made it to the swamp by de river. Ah knowed de place was full uh moccasins and other bitin' snakes, but Ah was more skeered uh what was behind me." Leslie Marmon Silko says, "You are never the first to suffer a grave loss or profound humiliation. You are never the first, and you understand that you will probably not be the last to commit or be victimized by a repugnant act." I want my writing to acknowledge that the legacy of North American whiteness is a separation response--to intellectually, physically, emotionally separate from that which is new. The self as separate from what is seen, always the outward pointing face, the body as front only, ocular above all else. The psychosis of power, of possession, of ownership. Utterly restless, always in search of the new. Alternative ways of being and conceptualizing, of course, exist and have existed forever. Following are three images and thoughts are just three examples. Leslie Marmon Silko, from her essay "Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination": . . . the term landscape, as it has entered the English language, is misleading. 'A portion of territory the eye can comprehend in a single view' does not correctly describe the relationship between the human being and his or her surroundings. This assumes the viewer is somehow outside or separate from the territory he or she surveys. And again, Zora Neale Hurston, from Their Eyes Were Watching God: "She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see." Brenda Hillman, from "12 Writings toward a Poetics of Alchemy, Dread, Inconsistency, Betweenness, and California Geological Syntax": "A single body is not big enough to hold an experience." Juliana Spahr, in This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, answers this problem of boundaries, "There is space in the room that surrounds the shapes of everyone's hands and body and feet and cells and the beating contained within." Lyn Hejinian, in Happily, says, "One is stung by a bee and it is noticeable that the whole body is involved/Why isolate part of the field." I think of these as statements of an ecopoetics, in opposition to a tradition of poetry and nature writing that rewards self-containment, digestable epiphanies, rehearsed forms, consumption, and the seperation of inner and outer worlds. And this oppositional stance is gendered and raced--the oppositional being inclined to disperse or providing an alternative to the white male gaze. This gendered and raced opposition writes while conscious of the structures that train the eye, conscious that literature is never nuetral. An Ecopoetical Critique of Environmentalism But what to do with the problems of pollution, water shortages, natural resource depletion? An ecopoetics would begin by exposing the hegemony of the environmentalism. Neil Evernden, from "Beyond Ecology," says that biology is articulating "a mutualism in which the fate of two organisms has become so intertwined as to make them appear inseparable." This biology, making it harder to "draw the line between one creature and another." A radical ecology denies "the subject-object relationship upon which science rests." Again, David Mazel: Any politically actionable environmentalist discourse . . . requires two creations of difference, both of which can be construed as thoroughly political. First is the discrimination of an outside from an inside. Such discourse also requires a secondary discrimination, a marking off of some graspable portion of the remaining totality. But what part? Such a selection requires a prior determination of what shall count as environment. This is the source of the second layer of politics, for not everyone will agree on what matters. Shellenburger and Nordhaus, from their stirring article "The Death of Environmentalism" say, " . . . we can no longer afford to address the world's problems separately." Michel Gelobter, et al, from "The Soul of Environmentalism": A discussion of land use is about "exposing sprawl as a symptom of race and class segregation, not its cause." Ecopoets are in a position to enact this non-separation. Appealing to the legislative body on single issues has been environmentalism's persistent strategy since the 70's. This strategy's effectiveness relies on the act of separating issues, providing a focused, singular presentation on an aspect of "environment," meaning "nature." Then, individuals are organized remotely to comment through letters, emails, faxes, and donations of money toward the singular issue. In this model, the citizen stands opposed to the legislative body, connected by an invisible cord called "communication." The untested idea of the effectiveness of this cord perpetuates certain assurances that our voices are heard, and we have the possibility of making change simply by speaking. Form letters might come back in reply, our emails might get a standard response. And because the loop seemingly gets closed, we are satisfied that we have agency for the moment. Yet these responses are not evidence of dialogical communication, with its matrix of negotiations, reiterations, and perspectives. Rather, these communication events are a form of ritual. The meaning behind the ritual is this: we are doing something so join in, there's power in numbers, it's possible to be heard. Rituals are important for the identity and uplifted mood of those who participate. But have there been resulting policy victories as a result of these rituals? The fact is, victories within the last two decades on major environmental issues like global warming and emissions standards have not been large. Ecopoetry as an Oppositional Mode: Thoughts on Art and Activism The practice of poetry resists ritualized emptiness in its insistence on individual utterance--even if composite in composition, and its insistence on a non-standardized performance of language--even while enacting traditions. It is language communication on the small scale, with no measurable effect. As a poet, this is my lullaby: "no measurable effect." I believe that whatever difference is or isn't made from a poem can not be measured. This state of not knowing creates an inherently oppositional mode within a post-capitalist "information age" and it is why I write poetry. Edouard Glissant, in his Poetics of Relation further articulates this aspect of poetry in the realm of the non-white, non continental, essentially local and relational context of Caribbean literature: In addition, the Poetics of Relation remains forever conjectural and presupposes no ideological stability. It is against the comfortable assurances linked to the supposed excellence of a language. A poetics that is latent, open, multilingual in intention, directly in contact with everything possible. Theoretician thought, focused on the basic and fundamental, and allying these with what is true, shies away from these uncertain paths. Attending to silence: this is art-making's requirement. In our political climate, with the record of losses on the left, and the successful public relations work of the right, are artists nervous now about exercising quietude, nervous about being considered bourgeois and out of touch? I am thinking of Paulo Freire who says there is no action without reflection. Perhaps the very health of our society depends, to some degree, on our role in the symbiotic relationship between those citizens who are not artists and those who are; I think our acts of reflection and small-scale communications as poets are utterly necessary in themselves. To advocate for the union of art and politics assumes that the two realities are separate. Yet for many artists in this country and all over the world, there has been no separation between art and politics, between experiences of daily life and larger social structures. What are some examples of this inherently political nature of art-making? One of the most powerful libratory possibilities humans possess is to accept distinction and inclusivity at once, to exercise inventiveness in the face of oppression. This seemingly contradictory property of an art practice is essentially imaginative, relational and is, therefore, political. Further, the arts of language need not decide to be either conceptual or narrative. They can be both and therefore break down hierarchies within institutions of taste that posit the hermetic as superior to the demotic, the poetic as more advanced than the narrative. And to reduce the importance of the pure pleasure of poetry-making, whatever its content, is to deny the transformational quality of what Audre Lorde calls "the erotic" in her seminal essay, "The Uses of the Erotic, the Erotic as Power." Finally, and related to what individual artists might offer as "solutions," we can remind ourselves that social change has always been communal. Further, consternation over the use of "I" in our writings might signal that we are making too much out of the idea of our own individualism. For me, the intensely personal and unabashed first person perspective does not mean it carries with it a suspect worth. Stories are at once personal and communal, performative and changeable. Verse inspires other versions. Utterances result in more utterances. To maintain and create an environment for the exchange of the arts of language is the work. As Silko points out, "The ancient Pueblo people sought a communal truth, not an absolute." "For them, this truth lived somewhere within the web of different versions . . . " Back to our small fish. If an ecopoetics serves to articulate experience as both fiercely personal and fiercely relational, it has done lots to assuage any idea that we are isolated, ineffectual, and lame as artists. Joy Harjo says that some people are born with nerve endings "out to there" or beyond their physical bodies. So poets and artists may be. And we may quietly write that experience, that version of the world. And if others read, will the networks of nerves grow, might the deadening subside? That's my hope and practice. |
The Problem of Edges: Ecopoetics . . . |
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