Tuesday, February 8, 2022

HW for Feb 10: Ecopoetics and other kinds of making nature writing


 Diane Arbus, "A Family on their lawn" (1968)

Answer to either or both of the questions below:

1. How are elements of the pastoral (imagination of tranquility and wholeness associated with the adapted landscape of rural life) related with the suffering of animals in Gabriel Gudding's  poems (anthology, pp. 69-77)

2. Comment on the connection Jetnil - Kijiner's "Fishbone Hair" makes between the nineteenth-centur doctrine of Manifest Destiny that justified the expansion of America into Mexico and First Nation's territories, and nuclear colonialism in the Marshall Islands (anthology, pp. 78-85)

FOR DISCUSSION IN CLASS: think about whose voices and bodies are silenced and killed by colonial relations with nature. Please consider Gary Snyder's proposal "Some points for 'New Nature Poetics' in "Unnatural Writing" - how to write form the perspective of ohter languages and beings? Is this poetry?

4 comments:

  1. Question 1:
    In his poems, Gudding explicitly exposes how the idyllic fantasy of the american pastoral is only made possible through the suffering and killing of the animals who inhabited the land before Man settled there.
    In his poem "Rivers for Animals" Gudding writes: "The killing of its animals is blown back into the narrow gene. Their bones and sorrows shoved back into the arrow and the embryon. An earthlet not for them."- Gudding emphasizes how this sense of entitlement towards the land and its creatures is passed down from generation to generation like a "killing gene".
    In his poem "Jeremiad" he states that " There can be no pastoral as long as there is a slaughterhouse". He goes on to say that the slaughterhouse is "in the basement of all oppressions" and that it is "at the ignored forefront of every assertion and definition as to what 'nature' is.".
    So, according to Gudding, not only is there no pastoral, but the very definition of nature is lacking or even misconstrued altogether.

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  2. Question 2:
    The concept of Manifest Destiny held that there was a divinely permission for the United States to expand its borders. This notion becomes clear in the passage where Jetnil-Kijiner says “they conquered the territory of her tiny body / they saw it as their destiny / they said it was manifested” (Jetnil-Kijiner, lines 16-18). Here, she compares her niece, Bianca, to the Marshall Islands, showing how the Americans took over their territory as intended/allowed by the deities, exactly how the illnesses (consequence of nuclear testing) takes over someone’s body.
    As the author insists “This poem seeks (…) to understand the complex nature between the legacy of the United States nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, and its long lasting effects of illnesses amongst Marshallese that stem from radiation” (Jetnil-Kijiner).
    Unfortunately, these experiments with nuclear weapons had to take place somewhere and that’s when the colonization takes place. The kind of colonization involved in this selection - of where to test the nuclear weapons-, is not that of resources nor material, but being envisioned as a non-place to the colonizers - the marginality, the powerlessness is the resource that they are drawn upon. Consequently, the Marshall Islands, distant from the EUA, in the Pacific Ocean, were an ideal area for this experiment to take place.

    Natália Silva

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  3. Gudding chooses words so unusually employed, even in prepared speech, that i found myself spending more time searching their meaning than actually reading the "poems", who by the way, fail to rhyme and are more like prose.
    From what i understood, Gudding has a non-human perspective on our world. He sees "pastoral" as a blind and discriminatory ideological construct, that places human beings on a higher level of importance and worth, above and over every single life form who also inhabits the planet. He points the finger at Christianity, in the context of religion, as the source of these behaviour, blaming it for creating a narrative of the soul and afterlife, where the physical reality is transitory, making nature and other creatures disposable means on the path to achieve the higher goal of eternal life. As a result, we disrespect nature. For example, he makes reference of Illinois and Wisconsin, were wetlands have been drained and turned into agricultural fields for corn production, and forest's cut down for lumber and furniture making.
    It is thought provoking, i give him that much... He believes the law should entitle other earthlings to the same basic rights as human beings, such as life.

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  4. Question 2 - Letícia Leite
    American colonialism needed an explanation/justification for its actions. The nuclear expansion in the Marshall Islands were no exception. The concept of Manifest Destiny is interlinked with the consequences of the nuclear experiences. Therefore, the author procedes to explain how the colonials saw the remains of her niece's human body as "conquered (...) territory". Along these lines, not only rolls of hair were left behind, but also her bones, where the author compares them to "tiny neat bones". In the end, this community was devastated by these abruptal, villainy activities that only provoked pain.

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Final HW: Walt Whitman and Derek Walcott (pp. 279-283)

1. Do some research on D. Walcott and try to account for the different perspectives of the ocean (and sea-crossings) in Walcott's "...