Arcadiana

A Blog about Literature, Culture and the Environment

Category: BLOG

  • “Where are you from?” Making Ecopoetic Homes

    “Where are you from?” Making Ecopoetic Homes

    Image by Corina Rainer on Unsplash

    From nowhere, I’m from nowhere, I fell down when the pinnacle of the TV tower pierced a grey cloud and unfolded on the bony grounds, unfolded over two snails and a plastic film

    From the street crossing the forest, I ran away, mouths full of wild bear leek, feet furry in moss green pools, margins so damp, so wound, I jumped over the crying sirens into rubber gloves

    From the volcanic earth, I ate truffle and mussels at the rim of champagne and lava bread, toes blackened in the richness how my liver bubbled in the heat

    From the tiny blood seed that travels through arteries that travels through vessels that travels through fat cells that clings on to water that enters the plumbing

    From the bar where I had three gins and whisky and vodka, everything, careful not to step into any stereotypes here, to drink myself into global anaesthesia

    From other places, which I left behind now to PET sculptured trees and pretend I speak / don’t speak / listen to everything, pretend we all love and laugh and laaf all the same, pretend we all don’t do it similarly / differently, holy fck, does it really

    Matter

    We’re moving. Blood streams through our bodies. Breath moves in and out, connecting us to the surroundings. Every day, the earth turns around its axis, around the sun, and is circled by the moon. The universe is in motion.  Why is there such a fixation on permanence, on static localities, on being based, rooted somewhere? Where are you from? Surely not from here?

    In and outside geographical Europe, borders are thickening, passport photos are scrutinised.
    Racist attitudes have always been spreading quicker than COVID-19. We stand together – until we run out of toilet paper. Near where I’m currently, partly at home, the chef of a renowned restaurant has recently proclaimed that customers of Chinese descent are no longer welcome. My home, my rules. Solidarity is a nice enough word, but scapegoating is much easier. You look/speak/smell differently… But where are you from originally?

    People have been on the move, physically, for centuries. With airplanes, high speed trains, Uber, and city scooters, it’s possible to move quicker than ever now. This is only true for some, though, and it happens at the cost of others; others including the more-than-human world that gets squashed by carbon footprints. Still, all of us are moving, not with the same speed, but we are; on foot, in wheelchairs, in strollers, in cars, in boats, in the arms of someone else.[i] From the world inside the womb to the world outside the womb, from the bathroom to the living room, from there to here. The anthropologist Tim Ingold suggests that human existence “unfolds not in places but along paths”, and that places are knots, where different paths meet and entwine: Places are meeting places.[ii] They weave together different experiences and perspectives, stories, and memories. They are not flat and unified but dense and multi-layered; not static but stretching in different directions, connecting them.
    Home, as an absolute singular, becomes a problem when it closes off place as an exclusive territory separating here from there and them from us. Collapsed with identity, place is pictured as a homogenous entity, when it is actually manifold and encompasses more variances than the word skin-coloured. People experience place differently, depending on age, gender, ethnicity; social, economic, and cultural context. Place is a multiplicity, it contains many different places. No matter how many borders and fences and walls, places are connected by global exchanges of air streams, weather, money flows, power lines, pipelines, toxins. Bodies are connected by oxygen, water, microplastics, bacteria, and viruses. In the past six or so months, depending where you currently are, the corona virus and its associated region-specific policies have once again unearthed and amplified the disparities that exist across continents, countries, cities, across schools and families. It’s easier to #stay at home if home is a sheltered location with a roof and functional heating/air con, Netflix, delivery service, and internet. Home is where the Wi-Fi connects automatically. If you can connect, Zoom in on the difference between a shared living room and living in a shared room. Home is imbued with new meanings; the place where five siblings sleep in one bed, where no one hears the bruises, where one is alone for 24/7, hell, or refuge. Beyond the European land frontiers, the paths of many people are cut before they can intertwine with others here. Their lost lives are less often featured in the daily news. Are you trying to take away something that’s mine, my home?


    I turn to ecopoetics as practice of making (poiesis) relationships across boundaries, with a shared home, the oikos, the planet earth. I want to think we not as an extension of I but as a chance for welcoming meeting places with the other, unknown paths. Far too often, the “where are you from?” question assumes fixed categories. Where do you belong? Which toilet door do you use? What religion do you practice? Which Hogwarts house are you in?
    As an interdisciplinary edge, a “passionate, a necessary interest”, as Evelyn Reilly and Marcella Durand phrase it, ecopoetics challenges boundaries and hierarchies. [iii] It can be poetry, it can be art, it can be something else entirely. A mode that acknowledges the masked ramifications of an “everything is interconnected” mantra. I want to think place in plural and home as a verb, as an active making of a here for all its participants. If paths are moving, if they are in process, they can be shaped and entwined differently. They can be changed. We all are from planet earth, “the only home our species currently knows”, one that has been moved to the brink of becoming uninhabitable for humans.[iv] Where do we want to go from there, from here?

    [i] Pointing out the persisting inequalities (“power-geometries”) along a global-local axis, the geographer Doreen Massey outlines how control over mobility both reflects and reinforces power: in-between all the movement of faxes, e-mails, financial flows, satellites, airplanes, ships and trains, lorries, cars, buses, “somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, there’s a woman on foot who still spends hours a day collecting water.” “A Global Sense of Place”, Marxism Today (1991), p. 25.  

    [ii] Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 148-149.

    [iii] See “Spatial Interpretations: Ways of Reading Ecological Poetry,” p. 201 and “Eco-Noise and the Flux of Lux,” p. 260 in Eco Language Reader, ed. Brenda Iijima (Brooklyn: Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs and Nightboat, 2010).

    [iv] Jonathan Skinner, “What is Ecopoetics?”Jacket 2 (2011).

    Author: Katharina Maria Kalinowski is a bilingual poet and EUmanities fellow at the Universities of Cologne and Kent. Her creative-critical PhD project focuses on ecopoetics, the Anthropocene, and expanded forms of translation. Her publications include Magma, Epizootics, and the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.

  • From Apartheid South Africa to Climate Apartheid: Mongane Wally Serote’s “City Johannesburg”

    From Apartheid South Africa to Climate Apartheid: Mongane Wally Serote’s “City Johannesburg”

    Image by Clodagh Da Paixao on Unsplash

    In one of the most recognisable South African poems of the twentieth century, Mongane Wally Serote’s“City Johannesburg” (written circa 1971), the black narrator of the poem searches through the pockets of his trousers and jacket for his passbook as he mockingly salutes the city of Johannesburg, the sprawling metropolis that developed out of the discovery of gold in the surrounding Witwatersrand gold reef in the 1880s. The history of modern racial segregation in South Africa is tied to the rise of industrialisation in the late 19th century which brought about the need to obtain a cheap labour force to fuel the region’s bourgeoning new industries whilst simultaneously preserving the racial composition of white cities. This process was intensified through the commencement of the policy of apartheid – meaning apartness, or separation of the races – in 1948.Serote’s poem is an explicit response to the dual universe fostered under these conditions in the early 1970s, where movement between the bustling white city and designated black townships and Bantustans was monitored by strict influx control policies that required black travellers to carry passbooks.

    The poem “City Johannesburg” offers us a glimpse of the sociality of South African apartheid. Yet while the poem alludes to the distant social worlds fostered under apartheid laws – what the Nobel Prize laureate Nadine Gordimer aptly referred to as “a world of strangers” in her 1958 novel of the same name – it arguably also gives form to the conditions of a kind of environmental apartheid that endured through and alongside the social and political dimensions of white segregationist rule. For although Serote salutes the modern city of Johannesburg with its “neon flowers” and “cement trees” (a reference to the city’s expansive urban forest), he also gazes back at the degraded environment of the formerly blackdesignated areas – places characterized by soil erosion, “dongas” (dry gullies) and whirling dust. 

    In “City Johannesburg”, Serote registers the extraordinary environmental destruction wrought by South African apartheid, not only through intensive industrial activities like mining, but also through the notorious Land Acts of 1913 and 1936, which increased pressure on the 13% of land reserved for black populations (some of the worst and most degraded in the country) and led to disastrous ecological consequences such as soil erosion and desertification. These consequences made living and producing food in these rural areas increasingly difficult, with women oftenbearing the greatest burden. The effects of soil erosion in the formerly black areas were powerfully illustrated by Alan Paton in his celebrated novel Cry, the Beloved Country (1948), which opens with a description of the degraded hills of the rural Ixopo Valley in the eastern province of Kwa-Zulu Natal. The conditions of this environmental apartheid were exacerbated by the way some of the country’s most prized landscapes, protected by nature parks like the iconic Kruger National Park, were reserved exclusively for white visitors. 

    In recent years, UN experts have deployed the term “climate apartheid” to describe a potential future in which the last fifty years of development, global health and poverty reduction threatens to be undone by the risks associated with global anthropogenic climate change. This would lead to a scenario whereby the rich would be able to pay their way out of intolerable conditions while the majority of the world would bear the brunt of ecological damage. In a world where unequal wealth distribution is entangled with lingering racial and gender divisions – as exemplified by South Africa, which remains one of the most, if not the most, unequal societies in the world – it is clear that climate apartheid will not be colour-blind. This draws attention to the importance of environmental justice to the struggle against climate change, understood as justice for those communities that are most vulnerable to environmental risks by virtue of their race, class, gender or location.

    There is a certain blindness, however, underpinningthe rush to adopt the dystopic metaphor of climate apartheid as signifier for a possible future defined by unequal exposure to a suddenly hostile environment. As the case of South Africa shows, certain populations have for centuries endured proximity to hostile, life-threatening environments under apartheid-like conditions. The geographer Kathryn Yusoff makes a similar argument in her book A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018), where she critiques the “White Geology” of the Anthropocene, referring to the narrative that the Anthropocene – the new geological epoch of human impact on the earth – introduces a new era in which humans suddenly find themselves exposed to the effects of a volatile planet. In fact, a sense of continuity between past and present underlies the way marginalised communities (especially black communities) have long endured exposure to environmental risks.

    Evidently, a proper scrutiny of climate apartheid cannot be achieved merely with recourse to a projected future, but requires interrogation of what could be called climate apartheid’s “deep history” over the last several centuries, in particular the history of racialized resource-based capitalism and colonial expansionism – where racial oppression and environmental degradation have tended to meet.  

    Might the climate apartheid metaphor that has seized hold of public discourse as a projection for the future be complicated by the overlapping histories of the past and present? Indeed, might it be possible to envisage more stringent ties between the seemingly unrelated moments of apartheid South Africa and climate apartheid? What implications would this have for the ways we organise our environmental politics and activism at a time of increasing uncertainty over the state of people and climate?

    The language of apartheid has been decoupled from its provenance in South African history in the service of an imagined future of uneven climate vulnerability.Language is indeed dynamic. It gathers new meanings and sheds older connotations. Yet it is possible that a broader case exists for bringing the two together: for recognising how climate apartheid necessarily draws us into a deep history of systemic racial oppression and environmental degradation across the formerly colonised world, and in turn how the particularities of apartheid South Africa might have always been fully planetary in scope – that is, part of a gradual process of rendering the earth uninhabitable for some and more liveable for others.

    It is against this backdrop that the poem “City Johannesburg” might be read from today’s viewpoint as a fleeting image of the uneven planetary transformations – the climate apartheid – that have been with us for some time, persistently for some, and imperceptibly for others.

    Author: Benjamin Klein holds an MPhil in Environmental Humanities from the University of Cape Town and an MA in English from the University of Leeds. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the English faculty at the University of Cambridge, where he is completing a dissertation on environmental justice in modern South African literature. His research interests lie in the intersections between environmental criticism and postcolonial thought, with a broad concern for literary engagements with the nonhuman world across varying historical, cultural and geographical contexts in the Global South. He has published ecocritical work in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry and Oxford Research in English.