Association for the Study of Literature and Environment
“Giving Voice to the Voiceless in Environmental Writing”

Session Coordinator: Thomas K. Dean
Office of the President, 101 Jessup Hall
The University of Iowa, Iowa City IA 52242
thomas-k-dean@uiowa.edu

 

Giving Voice to the Nonhuman in the Novels of Toni Morrison

Within Toni Morrison's novels we find humans using nonhuman animals in a multitude of ways:  as sacrifices in their schemes to hurt and oppress other humans; as resources to satisfy hunger and other human needs and desires; and perhaps most memorably as  the foundation of the system of symbols and images used to classify blacks as less human that whites.  Through these representations, Morrison makes clear how tragically vulnerable animals are to becoming caught up in the ways humans damage and oppress each other.  However, Morrison's animals also have a certain autonomy, which she communicates by periodically providing a window into their perspectives (for example, the beginning of the first chapter of Tar Baby is narrated by a chorus of butterflies, bees, clouds, trees, and other natural entities).  By emphasizing that animals have an existence and perspective that exceeds human concerns and constructions, Morrison provides an important counterpoint to the troubled human communities which she represents in all her novels.  As Milkman Dead learns in Song of Solomon, there was a time before language when humans and animals understood each other; remembering humanity's ancient ties to the animal kingdom, Morrison suggests, is a way of accessing the ancestral wisdom which is so often a source of solace for her characters and a way for them to affirm and enlarge their humanity.

Karla Armbruster
Webster University
armbruka@webster.edu

 

Encountering the Desert: Wilderness Advocacy and Sensual Experience in Terry Tempest Williams’ Writing

Through her bodily encounters in the redrock desert of the American Southwest, Terry Tempest Williams insists on the importance of physical interaction with wilderness areas in order to build a connection with the land. She determines that “humans must forge a more reverent, respectful relation to the land” (Adamson, 2001), and recognizes that a new relationship between humans and land requires the preservation and extension of wilderness areas. Williams’ intensely corporeal relationship with the desert inspires writing that offers a voice to the very ecosystems she visits. John Tallmadge explains, “In Refuge . . . the protagonist engages bodily with nature: she’s chafed by the wind, burnt by the sun, stung by the brine of the Great Salt Lake” (1998). The natural world and its effects on Williams push her to advocate protecting the places that foster the sensuous experiences that she shares with her readers. Williams claims that emotionally and physically connecting with a landscape helps one form “a poetics of place” that gives rise to “a politics of place” (Siporin, 1996), which in turn fosters a responsibility to care for the natural world.

Emily Odegaard
University of Minnesota
odeg0035@umn.edu

 

News of the Universe

Robert Bly’s Sierra Club anthology News of the Universe occurs in the middle of a long career as a nature poet.  The title comes from Georg Groddeck. For Groddeck and for Bly, poets ("den Dichter als K ü nder des Weltalls") bring news of Gott-natur which is shared with all natural things, animate and inanimate. This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood offers a formal example: when you hold the book up to riffle the pages from front to back, you see a snail (drawn by Gendron Jensen on facing pages) turn the mouth of its shell from left to right, page by page, as if addressing the audience. Yet it is important to consider as well Bly's rethinking of these possibilities in What Have I Ever Lost By Dying, where he renounces his earlier feeling that a writer "could describe an object or a creature without claiming it." To take the place of giving voice to the lacrima rerum (as he describes it in This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years ) we may try as an 'environmental' alternative for 'giving voice', the model of the natural order which Michel Serres sees in Lucretius, the foedera natura.

William A. Johnsen
Michigan State University
johnsen@msu.edu

 

Voicing Culture and Land in Ray Young Bear’s Prose

Ray Young Bear’s fictionalized memoirs Black Eagle Child: TheFacepaint Narratives and Remnants of the First Earth depict the contemporary struggles of the people of central Iowa’s Mesquakie settlement through the persona of Edgar Bearchild and the pseudonymous Black Eagle Child Settlement. Beneath all the struggles for cultural identity and preservation, for economic prosperity, and for social justice lies the relationship with the land, as well as the need to honor and preserve it. These struggles for survival are dependent on giving voice to many cultural elements that, in the modern world, are often silenced: the voices of children, of ancient stories and culture, of an oppressed people, of a people seeking their own cultural integrity, and of the land itself. Young Bear’s prose presents multifaceted ways in which the author works to manifest his people, his community, his cultural traditions, and the land of his home by giving voice to entities that are often made voiceless in the contemporary world.

Thomas K. Dean
The University of Iowa
thomas-k-dean@uiowa.edu