Living in the Necrocene, and being somewhat cognisant of environmental change as it happens around me, has its disadvantages. There’s a constant, low-level preoccupation with death: of species, of ecosystems, of potential futures. This tends to be reinforced by my choice of reading material. As a speculative writer myself, and one who often focuses on climate and environmental fiction, I read as widely as possible in this genre—mostly, if I’m honest, to see how other people are coping. Other writers, anyway. The way we collectively explore the age of death, and the ways in which we try to navigate it, to construct some sort of blueprint out of imagination and prose… I find it fascinating.
It helps that every so often I come across a book like Hatch. Written by Jenny Irish, Hatch is a collection of prose poems that interweave several different, but loosely interconnected strands of one speculative future. That future, like the book itself, is a product of the Necrocene: it engages with extinction and the means that scientists develop to record and mitigate species loss. It does this through a focus on birth and reproduction—an approach which might otherwise seem hopeful, but which in Hatch is shot through with the realisation of historical, contemporary, and (inevitably) future failure.
Nicholas Culpeper, who wrote the seventeenth century Directory for Midwives, is a repeated reference. He turns up in several poems, representative of the historical trend in midwifery that took the responsibility for safeguarding women in labour from female midwives and gave it instead to male doctors. This had, Irish points out in poems such as “Motivation and Intention” (p. 32), “Historically, the English Have Strong Opinions About the French” (p. 37), and “Progress” (p. 50), mixed results. Demography shapes outcome, as is illustrated again in “Shame” (p. 28), which records the significant disparity in infant mortality between Black and white newborns when treated by white doctors.
The horror of these historically compromised births prefigures, within the text, a new connection between birth and the Necrocene in the form of births gone terribly wrong. “The Sport of Kings” shows the eventual extinction of horses by describing one especially monstrous birth, with the expulsion, from the mother, of an “enormous foal, fully furred, but soft as water-saturated soap, giving way under the hands that tried to collect it” (p. 9). The imagery here is one of rot, of mould and ongoing decomposition, the newborn flesh both unreliable and incapable of keeping shape. The poem is honestly repulsive, albeit in the best and most affecting way. It’s an illustration of corruption, of slow and spreading extinction, and as the collection develops, readers discover (in “Potent” p. 45) that the probable cause of these dreadful births is “a mutating permafrost pandemic—ancient diseases released from the vanishing ice.”
This rebirth of old species of death has terrible consequences.
All sorts of species begin to fail. What’s common becomes unnoticeable, however—“The end of the bluebottle fly wasn’t recorded for years” (“Goodbye, Fly” p. 13)—and part of that unremarkable, ongoing loss is the realisation that it is unremarkable simply because we don’t want to look. Goodness knows I often don’t. Especially as there seems to be so much of it, and more to come. The poem in Hatch that I find most chilling is “Toodle-oo, Kangaroo,” which describes the death of the last crawfish while a university researcher is monitoring transplanted kangaroo embryos. The crawfish extinction is nothing more than mild distraction, even as the last member of that species dies in front of her. “With a powerful push from her toes, the intern glided her wheeled stool across the lab, adding an extinction report to the to-do list on the whiteboard near the door” (p. 20).
The bleakness of that image! An entire species gone, and it sparks nothing but bare acknowledgement because the loss has become so commonplace that it has ceased to matter. That’s the future I least want to be part of.
Engaging with loss is difficult. It’s work, and often that work is hard and unpleasant. It requires self-examination. Often that work, and the self-reflection it requires, is actively rejected. The poem “Relearning,” for instance, notes that the response from some to this new, necrotic world is “a ban on teaching children under the age of twelve about permafrost pandemics, water scarcity, and horses” (p. 66).
If we don’t look, it’s not happening. A childish response, yes, but one all too sadly familiar.
Admittedly, the work of engaging with loss can be entirely motivated by self-interest, as it is with the grief of the woman in “The Intern Trains the New Intern” who discovers that, in common with crawfish and bluebottles and horses and other newly extinct or declining species, reproduction is beyond her: “the world is dying, and it has been, and she knows that she will never be a mum, she will not, not ever, and she excuses herself to the loo to cry alone” (p. 33). Self-interest may be an imperfect sort of motivator, but on a narrative level, particularly within the science fiction genre, it can result in fascinating invention.
If what we think of as normal human reproduction becomes somehow unattainable, then technological innovation is one potential substitute. Among the most science-fictional of all the strands making up Hatch is the presence of a gargantuan metal womb—mobile, self-aware, and capable of housing “a hundred tiny and terrified heartbeats” (“The USS Narwhal” p. 1). This is industrialisation at scale, and the metal womb is essentially a factory farm for human beings. Individuals aren’t exactly being disgorged on conveyor belts, but there’s a certain robotic tinge there that’s inescapable, perhaps, for any genre reader. The idea of the human body as something which can be constructed, which can be replicated, has more than a whiff of programming about it. We don’t like to think of ourselves as products, but Hatch has taken care to illustrate the ways in which humans think of the world around them as just that: as an exploitable, consumable resource. Sooner or later, the collection implicitly argues, that perception will be turned back on us.
The most compelling thing about the metal womb, however, isn’t her productive capacity. Yes, that undertone of industrialised reproduction is disturbing, but it’s also not terribly unusual in dystopian narratives. What makes Hatch’s depiction of the trope so interesting, and so original, is the active awareness of the womb, which is, despite its technological origin, always gendered as female. She is sentient, even sapient—a factory that is aware of both responsibility and limitation, a factory with a sincere emotion of care towards its products. Lacking eyes, the metal womb is still capable of dreaming—in “The Question About Electric Sheep” (p. 2) it dreams of capturing fireflies above a meadow, and capturing them in jars. It may be, as “Squatters’ Rights” (p. 4) argues, a transient image somehow transferred from the minds of those that the metal womb is gestating. Given that the womb is also presented, through multiple images—of submarines, of ancient Egyptian vibrators—as containing multitudes, however, the firefly dream may also be a metaphor for the self, and the womb’s careful handling of the jar a means of exploring her own capacities.
Which can sound rather abstract, except the womb has gone rogue: her actions inexplicable to the human minds that exist outside her metal shell. She wanders through the pages of Hatch, hiding in different ecologies—in amongst a swamp with crocodiles, for instance—and in general not doing what is expected of her.
I had to rewrite that last sentence, replacing pronouns, and not for the first time in this review: it seems the association of womb with female, in my mind, limited as that association may be, gets subconsciously drowned out by the association of technology with neutrality. Perhaps it is the spectre of the factory, hanging over. I would always refer to a factory as “it.” Certainly, looking at some of the political rhetoric coming out of the far right lately, that choice is something to examine. The apparent determination of some to limit women’s reproductive healthcare in favour of enforcing their productive capacity has more than a whiff of exploitation about it. Who wants to be treated as more factory than human? Not me. Not anyone I know, either. It’s dehumanising… and yet here is the metal womb, nonhuman, a moving thinking machine for human reproduction, and the text gives her gender.
I’m not entirely sure why. I’m not sure, either, that there needs to be an answer. It’s one of those interesting narrative choices that ends up, perhaps, being more than usually dependent on the reader and their own cultural perceptions. Hatch is, admittedly, a collection that requires things of the reader. The connections between the different poems are often both loose and sympathetic; readers will find themselves required to approach the whole from a multitude of different perspectives.
I happen to like books that do this. They’re the books that most often make me think. And I admit: while the metal womb may be the most central of all the poetic strands here, it’s also the most interesting. That’s largely because it’s so flexible in its approach to genre. The womb can be read as a science fiction staple—the artificial intelligence gone rogue, the nonhuman creation looking to define her own existence when compared to her creators—but there’s no denying that she is also a carrier of some monstrous seeds. The humans inside the metal womb are “wailing in the dark,” having pulled themselves free of their placentas and existing, untethered, inside the metal dark (“In Quarters” p. 7). Trapped in the womb, unable to escape, the new humans turn to cannibalism, gorging themselves on biological mothers who have attempted reproduction within the metal womb and died in childbirth (“Adaptation” p. 61).
It’s a horrifying image, but lest we forget: birth is horrifying, or at least it is in Hatch. If there is one poem here that rivals “The Sport of Kings” and its dreadful foal for sheer wincing revulsion, it’s “Some Facts About Human Birth,” which reminds readers that the most natural option, when it comes to labour, can also be terrifying. I give you the poem’s least technological remedy to a placenta that ends up fused to the uterine wall and needing to be removed: the doctor or midwife inserts their arm into the mother’s body and “might change their hold on the tissue from gripping to ripping and then begin working fleshy fistfuls free, sweeping their hand back and forth like a knife in a jar of peanut butter, hunting for the last smear” (p. 26).
If I never wanted children before, I really don’t want them now. And if I had to have them, the factory is looking pretty bloody good, I can tell you. The other factory. The one that isn’t me. The technological surrogate. And what are the ethics of that, when the surrogate, that metal womb, has developed thoughts and feelings and desires of her own? Lest we forget, Hatch consistently argues that the choice to exploit living things, to treat land and womb as a production line, is a choice consistent with death. With the Necrocene, in fact. And that metal womb, harbouring death within itself as it explores new ways of being alive, is—and I use the phrase deliberately—a product of its time.
A fascinating product, to be sure. Horrific and illuminating in equal parts; the poems are fireflies in a jar. Perhaps we should look a little closer.
Another Life by Sarena Ulibarri, solarpunk writer and editor, depicts an ecotopian community thriving through the climate crisis after the collapse of the current global economy. In dialogue with current trends in politics and environmentalism—as well as timeless themes like the weight of history over individuals, the conflict for power between different generations, and the tension between the ideal and reality—Ulibarri explores morality and accountability in a world haunted by past actions and their environmental consequences. Can we really start over from scratch in a world so shaped by the past? Can decades of service and commitment to the greater good be condemned by a previous life?
The story follows Galacia, cofounder of Otra Vida and its current conflict mediator. The novel begins with a stunning conceptual breakthrough: Galacia’s nephew just figured out how to identify one’s past life via gene analysis. And of course everyone wants to know who they were.
Everyone but Galacia.
But here’s the deal: she’s running against Tanner to be reelected as mediator, her odds don’t look good, and she feels her opponent is too young, too inexperienced to lead the town she’s devoted her life to… And Otravidans demand both candidates reveal who they were in their past life before their public debate. Galacia has nowhere to hide when Diego, maverick scientist and her nephew, tells her she used to be “universally hated” Thomas Ramsey, “the man who had declared climate change wasn’t worth fixing because he had ships ready to take everyone who could afford a ticket to Planet B” (p. 4).
Her move? Hiding her past life from her constituents, as long as she can. Dealing with such a shocking revelation has been added to the list of the conflicts she has to mediate, only this one is about herself. As if she didn’t have enough on her plate already, Galacia also has to deal with an external threat: outside forces are trying to sabotage Otra Vida.
Another Life tackles morality, responsibility and heritage in a way only speculative fiction can. What began as a fun curiosity (having your past life figured out by science) soon turns people’s moral judgment about Galacia around. Despite the fact that she’s dedicated her whole life to Otra Vida, people suddenly hold her accountable for Ramsey’s dues, even if this character’s motives aren’t precisely those reported by historical records. Is a life of service to others and the environment enough to wash from one’s skin the faults of previous generations? Or the other way around: Can we really hold people accountable for past deeds they didn’t actually commit?
The questions raised by Ulibarri’s science fictional element (the novum) are some of the same questions asked in contemporary discussions of identity politics, privilege acknowledgement, and history revisionism. While Ulibarri resists the kind of oversimplifying that could reduce Galacia’s story to a moralistic fable, the narrative does seem to come down on one side of the debate. “I think there’s a reason we forget. We can’t get so hung up on who we used to be that we forget to be who we are” (p. 150), says one of the characters, stressing the overarching theme of Another Life: How do we deal with the past so we can move forward?
The other novum in the novel is the seed of its environmental dimension: the creation of an artificial lake in Death Valley, California, by pumping desalinated sea water into the desert through an unused oil pipeline. From the Oil to Water Project stems a social movement that will crystallize in Otra Vida, an autonomous town of about 2,000 people that by the time the novel unfolds has effectively abolished wage labor and poverty for its people by harnessing technology in sustainable ways. It has, in time and without intention, developed social classes and centralized the power in the figure of the Mediator—a power Galacia leverages in favor of the Founders (of Otra Vida) and the Inheritors (their offsprings) in detriment of the Petitioners (outsiders immigrated and accepted into the ecotopia after its foundation).
Otra Vida is not a perfect utopia after all, and Galacia is like Ramsey in a certain way. Even when they weren’t supposed to centralize power over a figure such as a president, Otravidans ended up doing so out of habit and comfort. Is it Galacia’s fault she handles power the way she does, or is it the people who endowed her with it in the first place? As a reader from outside the USA who has witnessed radically different ways of decentralized political organization, I initially thought this was a flaw in the novel. But what I thought was a lack of imagination turned into one of the central themes: even utopias have to reckon with former power and government practices and their present influence. Ulibarri thus challenges utopianism and points towards one of its big issues: it is always made by people with a political past and history.
Part of the reason I became interested in Another Life is that the novella is labeled as solarpunk. Indeed, Ulibarri has edited Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers (2018), Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Winters (2020), and Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures (2021), as well as authored several short stories in the same subgenre. Having both followed the development of solarpunk and read her work before, I couldn’t miss Another Life, especially since it’s one of the first solarpunk works that surpasses the length of the short story. And it has to be said: as a solarpunk novella, Another Life delivers. Reading about Otra Vida as an ecological utopia and how it functions despite the climate crisis is hopeful and reassuring. If you want to read about a community overcoming the climate crisis by building a sustainable, technologically advanced community, this novella is definitely a must.
Stylistically, Another Life employs straightforward, clear language that works well for depicting a radically different world. We can see that in the following excerpt from chapter two:
We wove through the sculpture park, where I noticed a couple of recent additions: a delightful stained glass windspinner, and a rusted gas-era pickup truck with a hundred baby dolls glued to it. Zacharia showed little interest in the collection of quirky art projects, so we didn’t linger. (p. 20)
While at first sight the particularization of the art pieces might seem excessive, it doesn’t get clunky and gives us the right amount of information so we can imagine them. This strategy of clear, particularized description and narration is used extensively. Even though I sometimes found it weird that Galacia spoke that way throughout the novel, it didn’t matter much because it’s a device which serves the purpose of depicting a utopian community to the reader in an accessible way.
And there are figures of speech after all, as seen in the following quote: “Anger started as a heat in my chest, spreading like a bushfire through my entire body. My fists curled so tightly my fingernails left red crescents in my palms” (p. 103). Beyond that, however, there aren’t many passages where Galacia’s speech takes a poetic bend. I get it: maybe it’s just not her thing, she’s not ‘poetsy’ and so doesn’t speak that way. In any case, I found the prose too literal and I don’t think the narrator’s choice justifies the reduction of such an important aspect of storytelling. There are other ways of achieving literary prose while having a protagonist narrator, such as developing her tone or her dialect. And I missed that in Another Life.
Another thing I would’ve liked to find in the story is the consequences of Diego’s discovery. Yes, finding out who they were in their past life takes over Otra Vida and has both personal consequences for Galacia and political ones by influencing the elections, and there are a couple scenes where characters speculate about the discovery’s future consequences, but I found the reaction to it quite mild. I felt the scientific breakthrough was irrelevant for the characters all along. After working as the inciting incident for Galacia’s character arc at the opening chapter, the discovery’s impact over Otra Vida’s society receives little attention. Aside from a couple of dialogue lines where characters debate its philosophical and legal implications, they treat the past life test as a curiosity to gossip about, as they do in the opening scene of the novel:
“You were an old white man?”
Cindy threw her head back and laughed. “I know, isn’t it hilarious?”
“Here, look at mine,” Alex said. Green lights flickered across the balcony as people showed off who they had been. Voices drifted from other buildings, nearly every balcony and patio in the small desert city of Otra Vida alive with discussion and laughter. (p. 3)
Not to say I don’t think people would have fun with their tests and gossip about them. The problem is it doesn’t get to be something else; we don’t really see the social consequences of a scientific breakthrough so radical in its spiritual consequences it’d surely spark a paradigm shift similar to those of the Copernican Revolution or the discussions around the Anthropocene.
Maybe that future society has seen too much, knows too much about the cosmos, so it takes scientifically proven reincarnation as a mere curiosity they could chit chat about over dinner with their pals, as if it were the result of a quirky personality test. But if that’s the case, if such a scientific breakthrough is not astounding for Otravidans because they’ve seen it all, it isn’t shown in the novella and so I kept finding their reaction unfounded and incredible. But then again, maybe it’s just me: I’d go crazy if such a thing as scientifically proving who anyone was in their past life was possible!
When I was reading Another Life, I thought: “I’d definitely be on Galacia’s side: I wouldn’t want to know.” Then I realized that’s the metaphor: past mistakes must be unearthed. Someone has to take responsibility for them, even if they’re not guilty. We forget that in order to be able to look back into the past, to take responsibility for what we see there and transform it, we need to be unchained from its biases. I guess it’s a thin line, the one between either acknowledging the past to move towards a better present, or pretending it never happened at all. Another Life tells a story about coming to terms with the past in order to build a better world, one where past deeds no longer haunt the present. Or, like philosophers Natalia Carrillo and Pau Luque put it:
Feeling guilty in a literal sense when one hasn’t taken part in an action can be an expression of narcissism and, at its extreme, can destroy the inner world and the external world. Feeling guilty in a metaphorical sense, on the other hand, can be an excuse to live an examined life in an Aristotelian sense and thus assume responsibility.[1] (p. 103)
Galacia nearly fell for literal guilt. By telling her story, Ulibarri creates a metaphor that brings the reader close to metaphorical guilt, the kind which reveals to us that injustice doesn’t always follow a straight cause-effect line, but that doesn’t mean no one’s responsible for it.
Another Life has a couple of soft spots, but plenty of well-rounded ones. So many it makes for a fine piece of narrative art. And like any of those, it’ll shake you if you allow yourself to read it. I highly recommend you do.
1. Natalia Carrillo & Pau Luque. Hipocondria moral. Editorial Anagrama. This quote is originally in Spanish; since the text is not available in English, the translation is my own.
If you’ve ever found yourself thirsting for a pond, maybe you can relate: since middle school, I have been taught to believe in certain prerequisites for being an artist. You need, first, solitude; second, peace of mind, usually defined as someone else doing your laundry; third, your own place, preferably by a pond. We were shown Landscape Art and given Nature Poetry, with nature defined as an external place you could go to extract inspiration and landscape defined as the world, how much it pleases you (srsly, those lily pads, perfect 10). While species after species were going extinct, entire sections of the biophonic choir folding up their hymnals and calling it a day, I was encouraged to look up the definitions of copse, crag, and thicket for the sake of there-will-be-a-test. Because I (maybe you too), was queer, an artist, inept at my assigned gender, neurofabulous, etc, and therefore a bundle of unnameable wants, what I thought I wanted at the time was the thing offered to me. I wanted a damn pond of my own.
Now that the world is fully on fire, the biophonic choir going alarmingly minimalist, and every kind of grief (personal, societal, human, ecological, planetary) dominating our feeds, I want something else. I want to know how you make art when you’re mortal, grieving, furious, and crisping at the edges. I need books about finding home, resistance, and belonging in our shifting climate. I want stories that are wild enough to match living in this moment. And I want something to rise out of the pond/forest/ocean and fight back.
Green Fuse Burning, a magnificent and chilling swampcore/eco-horror novella by Tiffany Morris out of Stelliform Press1, plays in these muddy waters and delivers. Morris, a L’nu’skw (Mi’kmaw) writer from Nova Scotia, opens Green Fuse with an art gallery announcement for a new show: the recovered paintings of Mi’kmaq painter Rita Francis, who mysteriously disappeared during her residency in a cabin on a pond. Each subsequent chapter begins with the gallery’s description of one of the paintings. The descriptions suggest clues about what happened to Rita: she used elements of the pond in her work; she painted tortured figures; what is this red sticky stuff on the canvas? The painting descriptions provide a frame for the chapters in which we get to experience Rita’s residency, the moments up to her disappearance, in real time.
The heart of the book is Rita’s grief, which Morris renders alongside Rita’s climate change sadness as a loss of psychic habitat. Rita is reeling from the recent loss of her father. Her grief is tied to a sense of alienation: the loss, not only of her father, but of connection with Mi’kmaw language and culture. Her father’s funeral is in “prayers her tongue couldn’t shape” without either the full grasp of the Mi’kmaw language, or the religious background of her cousins or brother who grew up on the rez (p. 12). Rather than hold space for her grief, Rita’s white and slightly toxic girlfriend, Molly—freshly back from an MLM retreat in Bali—submits Rita’s art to a fellowship in a frenzy of positive thinking, and wins her a residency out by a pond, in nature, air quotes. This next detail says it all: Molly remembers going “down to the shore” of that pond during childhood summers (p. 22). Rita knows “the Mi’kmaq people were forced off the land.” Still, she goes. Maybe she can paint. Maybe nature will do her good. Maybe she can be the sunny productive artist her girlfriend wants her to be. If this were a never have I ever, I’m betting some of us would be taking a sip.
Rita carries the awareness that her art retreat is on her ancestors’ stolen land, but she nevertheless “imagin[es] herself painting in swaths of golden light each day, reading by candlelight, heating her food on a woodstove” (p. 16). Of course, almost immediately, out by the swamp, something in the night’s like: “BUMP!” Stuck between despair and the desire to create, eventually Rita wanders into the mud and experiences an encounter. Not quite a haunting, not quite a monster. Let’s just say that looking for belonging and inspiration, she finds it in the arms of the swamp.
Green Fuse Burning asks who gets to have the idealized art retreat experience? I know this question. A few years ago, I too was lucky to win a fellowship to write in nature with a friend and collaborator. We drove to the place where they said there would be woods and found “No Trespassing” signs and a redundancy of U.S. flags. When we stopped for gas, several white men in flannel shirts wandered up from their trucks. They put their hands on the hood of our car and leaned in, surrounding us. “We just wanted to make sure you felt welcome,” they said, unsmiling.
As soon as Rita arrives in a place where the names have all been replaced, she encounters racism of the “We weren’t expecting you to come here . . . .” variety (emphasis mine, p. 24). When this happens to QT/BIPOC/disabled/femme artists on art retreats in nature, should we consider these men/settlers/racists part of our landscape, or do we photoshop them out?2
Maybe the real horror is that in capitalism, there is occupied land that is set aside for contemplation. Some people are allowed to access it by application.3Green Fuse Burning reminds me that an artist retreat is the restriction of a resource that should belong to everyone: land, time, art, space. Before there was a Thoreau Gift Shop where you can buy mugs that say “all good things are wild and free,” the pond (re)named Walden had history as a place where formerly enslaved people tried to build a life of freedom. Before that, ~12,000 years of Native American cohabitation, and before that, it simply existed, birthed by icebergs. Now, climate change and the impact of half a million visitors a year threaten its very existence as a pond.4
Green Fuse Burning also engages with the question of nature, art, landscape, and self as separate. The title conjures a coming riot of swamp-revenge, the explosion of the idea that we are separate from nature, the swamp, the cycles of life. But there is a secondary meaning: fuse, become. Midway through the residency, Rita looks in the mirror and finds a vision of the swamp: “the usually familiar shapes of her face not making sense, not cohering into a memory of herself . . . her hair a tangle of gnarled branches and her cheeks smudged pools of sludge” (p. 53). Morris is also a poet (Elegies of Rotting Stars, Nictitating Books, 2022), and it shows in her jaw-droppingly lush imagery. When she comes to these places, she throws down, with language soaked in life. You’ll want to read slowly, sink into it like so much mud, mouth open to salt and grit and lichen.
~ Spoilers below ~
The explosion of Green Fuse Burning is what you don’t see in the paintings: Rita’s encounter with Lichen Woman, a kind of hypernatural embodiment of the swamp. The scene with Lichen Woman is so muddy, sexy, swampy and alive, it could be one of my favorite descriptions in any book last year. Dripping, marshy, lichenous, earning the “core” in swampcore with glorious muddy vibes of grief and rebirth and resilience. This encounter leads to the triumph of the book and to the equation at the center of so much great horror: There is a monster. The monster is me. I will fight back.
Rita survives and is found. She gets to attend her art opening and give an artist talk. This is where I admit, as one reader, that the book and I diverted. I didn’t want Rita to return and give a speech, even a great one, to her community and her now-ex. I wanted to imagine her happily out there in the swamp, covered in mud, wild, hand-in-hand with Lichen Woman, helping settler homes sink into the bogs. And yes, I know this is quite Sapphic of me. If I disappear, you know where to look.
~ End of spoilers. ~
The good news is that the swamp endures. Because being human and being vulnerable to grief does not end. Because Death, Life, Mud—it’s part of us. And, more importantly, because there is something out there still, something that can’t be killed or sectioned off or painted. Something that will surely take us down with it or carry on gleefully without us, but if we’re very, very lucky, it will take us in.
I, for one, love a swamp that fights back. Give me eco-horror over any other climate change genre. I want the frogs to win. Spiritually, I know time to be circular and iterative, but I want land to be petty and vengeful. Give me the satisfying revenge of that final panel in a Tales from the Crypt comic, but it’s Earth laughing and Humanity crying no, mercy, we didn’t mean to, it wasn’t our fault. Eco-horror, as a genre, doesn’t care for the despair of Dennis Quaid just trying to rescue his son while the superstorm comes. Eco-horror doesn’t need you to reach some Overstory-esque sympathy for life forms that aren’t us, because nature wins—you don’t need pity from things you’ve pwned. Eco-horror is my favorite kind of queer aesthetic because it replaces extinction with extra. Take the heartbreak of climate change and give me a hundred frogs, a thousand moths, and mud that doesn’t care about your attachment issues. It’s the lichen curling around your ankle as you try to walk away. It’s the thing out there that’s worth fighting for because it can’t be killed.
As Eco-Horror and Swampcore both, Green Fuse has everything you could want: there is plenty mud, there is a hyperabundance of moths so well rendered I batted my hands around, there is a spitting-up-frogs scene so graphic I still can’t eat pickles. There are bioluminescent mushrooms. There is what she, Rita, wanted: “a language of her own on a secret part of the land. Her own suckerfish writing, her essence in the mud” (p. 90).
Green Fuse Burning contributes to making 2023 a great year, at least when it comes to eco-horror and indigenous eco-horror, alongside other titles like Bad Cree, Never Whistle at Night, and more. It’s also been a good publication year for swamps, marshes, and wetlands. Consider Annie Proulx’s Fen, Bog, and Swamp, B. Pladek’s excellent Dry Land 5, Grant Chemidlin’s What We Lost in the Swamp, and Nomeda Urbonas et al’s Swamps and the New Imagination (2024). Something is speaking to us from the pond. As Morris writes in the acknowledgments, “Wetlands are devalued for the same reason that death and trauma are ignored . . . we do not see the importance of holding space for pain or holding the literal space of the swamp, even though both are about life itself. Even though they help other areas of life thrive.”
Maybe in our grief, we’re craving what’s messy. Maybe we’re needing filtration systems to sift the information overload. Maybe we want mud because it marks us, like glitter off that queer on the dance floor, as part of this joyous, fractious messiness of the world we are part of. Maybe, covered in mud, we can crawl out and reclaim something that should belong to all of us. Green Fuse Burning is dedicated “to those in the swamps.” I for one have been in the swamps a lot this year, for better or worse. Maybe you have too. Maybe I’ll see you out there. We can mud wrestle.
Content Warnings for Green Fuse Burning: Suicidal ideation, anti-indigenous racism, grief, loss of a family member, loneliness.
1.Stelliform is a Canadian press promoting intersectional views of environmental justice, with a mission to “resha[pe] nature/culture relationships through the stories we tell ourselves and each other.” Their books come in eye-catching covers, like the cover of Green Fuse Burning by artist Chief Lady Bird: chartreuse, hot pink, and luminous, like moonlight on a mutating swamp.
2. If you’re not QT/BIPOC/Femme/Disabled and think you can just ignore this kind of thing and focus on your art, or if your eyeballs need a dose of WTF, allow me to direct you to Alex Garland’s 2022 film Men.
3. For a triumphant counter, read E.C. Barrett’s Swimming Whole.
4. This is not an inevitability. For a story of a lake’s resilience, restoration, and returning, read Vivian Underhill’s The Return of Pa’ashi, Colonial Unknowing and California’s Tulare Lake (2023).
5. Editor’s note: Find Bogi Takács’s review of Dry Land for Reckoninghere.
Sometimes I like to fantasize about how I’d cope with the end of the world—or, at least, the end of our relatively comfortable and stable society. I’m hardly a doomsday prepper, and I’m pretty sure that my gangly, over-friendly self would barely last a few days into the apocalypse, but it’s a fascinating hypothetical for two reasons: firstly, because the climate crisis brings the possibility that we may someday actually have to face this as a reality, and secondly, because it prompts a certain amount of self-reflection. What is your capacity for self-reliance, for cooperation with others, and ultimately, how is your mental and physical resilience? Even if you’re lucky enough to have your own fully-stocked bunker, would your values, connections, and integrity survive intact?
This is the scenario faced by Kit, protagonist and narrator of Natasha Calder’s first solo novel, Whether Violent or Natural. As I’d previously reviewed her excellent co-written work, The Offset, which deals with environmental catastrophe in the form of climate change, I was eager to explore her latest take on the apocalypse.
Written from a unique first-person perspective, it’s obvious from the outset that something is wrong. Dwelling in an abandoned bunker beneath a crumbling castle, Kit’s extensive study of encyclopaedias combine with her complete lack of socialisation to create a deeply unsettling voice:
Even the stars are still and silent, not singing to me like they sometimes do on a cloudless night, not twinkling out their astral boasts for all to read and weep. I don’t mind. Stars don’t stay quiet for long, not if they can help it, swanking vanities that they are. (p. 9)
Reminiscent of Jeanette Winterson’s poetic outcasts, Kit is eloquent yet disconnected, quick-witted yet naive, knowledgeable while at the same time deeply ignorant. And she isn’t alone.
We’re also introduced to Crevan, a seemingly grumpy and much less verbose individual whose quirks are no less odd. From the outset Kit introduces Crevan as ‘paranoid,’ ‘delusional,’ and ‘deranged,’ though his role seems to be that of Kit’s guardian. We’re left with a great many questions as to their relationship, and though Crevan appears to be a grown man, Kit’s wide-eyed sense of wonder and childish temper tantrums leave her age ambiguous. The two are platonic, and sleep in separate rooms, yet whether Crevan is father, mentor, or friend is left to the reader to decode:
But maybe he is as frightened as I am, as disturbed and as put out. Maybe it’s even worse for him than it is for me. Maybe when he says that I’m panicked, that I need to get a grip, I really should be the one saying it to him. Maybe taking care of me gives him a way to take care of himself too. (p. 50)
The bond between these two troubled individuals drives the story, and was the main draw that kept me turning page after page. There’s a constant, ever-present distance between the two, but their maladapted affection for one another is compelling, and our perceptions of each are played with throughout the entire story.
So why are these two alone in a bunker together? Like The Offset, Calder’s latest novel presents us with an environmental apocalypse and subsequent social collapse; yet while The Offset gave us a world ravaged by carbon, Whether Violent or Natural’s reality is formed via microbes. Like many, I’ve long been terrified of growing antibiotic resistance, lamenting the mass feeding of antibiotics to cattle and people taking them for the common cold. I’m not alone in this fear, and Calder exploits such a scenario to its fullest potential:
It is our fault, you know, entirely our fault—we have been tempting fate for years; we use our precious antibiotics recklessly, extravagantly, behaving as though they are an endless panacea, a bottomless well of clean water that may be dipped into as much and as often as we please. We are profligate like you wouldn’t believe. (p. 55)
Unable to cope with runaway infections of all kinds, urban life and medical institutions collapse. Yet I don’t believe this familiar vision of apocalypse—one of ruin, dysfunction, and violence—is truly the point of the novel. Calder’s work gets to something deeper, and more personal.
Whether Violent or Natural’s central theme is ultimately the breakdown of trust. Firstly, our reckless use of lifesaving medications and the resulting environmental upheaval causes a collapse in trust on a wider societal level: institutions require trust to operate. When medical science fails the population, the population stops trusting medical specialists. In this chaos, doctors are something to be hated and feared, and it seems absolutely no coincidence that Calder wrote this story during the global pandemic. Yet while our world saw fear spread via disinformation, the failures which bring about the world of Calder’s novel are very real—a result of wider societal hubris when it comes to our planet’s microbial ecosystems.
However, this breakdown in trust isn’t limited to medical establishments. The abuse of antibiotics and their resultant failure causes a collapse in wider societal cohesion. Kit’s grown up in a world that equates trust with danger. She lives in hiding because the outside world isn’t safe for her, so when an unconscious woman washes to the shore of Kit’s island, Kit is convinced that she represents a very real threat, giving us one of my favourite quotes from the novel: “‘We can’t keep her,’ I croak. ‘It’s strictly no pets’” (p. 23). Kit doesn’t even trust the grumpy Crevan, and despite their proximity she maintains a vast mental and emotional distance from him. Kit’s general lack of trust in turn devastates her own humanity.
So far, so apocalyptic. I mean, it’s common for post-collapse worlds to lack this sense of social trust. It would be easy to stop here, but Calder takes the concept further. Though Kit is an extremely knowledgeable and entertaining narrator, her poor mental health and lurid fantasy life also make her an unreliable one. Having lost her family and everyone she knew in her old life, her intense trauma and lack of healthy socialisation have led to a loose grasp of reality, and thereby impact her inner narrative. The breakdown in trust takes place on all levels, from the societal to the deeply personal. Not only has trust broken down between the people and their authorities, as well as with one another, but we can’t even trust the words we’re presented with on the page.
I feel like I’ve written the world ‘trust’ fifty times in the past few paragraphs, but growing up in a stable Western society, it’s easy to take trust for granted. We trust that the streets will be maintained. That our packages will be delivered. That we’re safe passing a stranger in the street. We trust new people, and invite them into our lives as potential friends, neighbours, lovers. Yet, as we’ve seen over the past few years, particularly in the wake of the pandemic, all this trust is eroded by instability. It doesn’t matter if that instability is brought about by disease or via the climate catastrophe. Destroying our environmental security destroys what is arguably our most important human asset.
Yet trust isn’t all that’s eroded here. We also get glimpses into the silver linings of social collapse – namely the lack of social expectation. One scene which stuck out for me as a big old nonbinary person was Kit’s lack of perceived gender:
…I had the island to myself for ever such a long time. There was no one to affront, no one to offend. No one to map me out and say: You are like this, you should be like that. No one to say: But you are a woman and I am a man, it is improper. To tell the truth, I’d forgotten there were such things as men and women before Crevan arrived, forgotten there were such divisions and categories to know and learn. I still struggle to remember it now—or rather, struggle to remember how they apply to me. I am just myself. I have always been just myself. (p. 40)
It’s a brief and relatively minor moment in the novel, but it’s one which really stuck with me, if for no other reason than the fact that it simply and elegantly lays out how I feel about my own gender identity. Though Whether Violent or Natural grapples with wider issues, it’s also filled with these small moments in which Calder thoughtfully speculates on the personal and psychological outcomes of collapse, going beyond pure negativity and horror.
Just as the reader settles into the setting, the plot undergoes a significant twist—and Kit’s status as an unreliable narrator is confirmed when we discover exactly how much she’s been keeping from us. As we aren’t told the whole story until this point, it makes it extremely difficult to cover in a review without spoiling the text, but I’ll do my best. It’s too integral to the overall story to be avoided.
Kit eventually reveals her own past. Her parents, medical researchers grappling with the advent of antibiotic resistance, discovered what is essentially the antidote. However, mass death had already ensued and the social damage had been done. The true infection was distrust, and though doctors were ready to administer the cure, by this point much of the public simply didn’t want it. Kit’s family became a target of those who were clinging to superstition, folk cures, and scapegoating—with Kit herself disfigured by mob violence. Her island refuge was no accident. Though she has every reason to distrust the mainland, we don’t know the full extent of the supposed apocalypse.
So how is this a book tackling the impact of apocalyptic environmental change if there’s potentially no apocalypse? This is the mystery which emphasizes the novel’s deeper theme. As with climate change and global pandemics, we absolutely have the ability to avoid catastrophe, but we’re held back by social obstacles—namely, disinformation and distrust. We can only implement solutions when we have mutual cooperation and a shared narrative. To what extent the world outside Kit’s island has collapsed depends on how far violence and superstition have spread, and it’s here that Whether Violent or Natural truly shines, showing us the intimate connection between social bonds and environmental challenges. In the end, trust is the scarcest resource, and the apocalypse becomes a certainty once we’ve exhausted it.
Upending the story in its later stages does muddy things, and we lose some of the terrifying wonder we’re presented with earlier on. Though some might find the redirected plot unsatisfying, I appreciate the ambiguity: to what extent the world has collapsed depends on the reader’s interpretation, and is ultimately rooted in our own optimism or cynicism. I particularly enjoyed the final pages, which end on an unsettling note befitting the mood we’ve been presented with from the very start.
As Calder’s first solo novel, I wasn’t sure what to expect from Whether Violent or Natural. Yet the strong narrative voice delighted me, immediately drawing me in to this dark vision of a post-antibiotic apocalypse, while continuing to claw at my attention via the twisted bond between Kit and Crevan. I was hooked to the last page. Not all readers will connect to the novel’s later stages, particularly those looking for a plot centered around unambiguous environmental collapse. But what we have instead is a thoughtful exploration of what is lost when we treat technology so carelessly—specifically the damage wrought to social bonds on all levels—and I found it an extremely worthwhile read.
The question, as a form, courts: wide-spanning and invitational, it provides the grounds for voicing provisional answers and desires, variously. The works that comprise this issue of Reckoning provoke essential questions for our current historical conjuncture, questions which defy the treacherous narrows of business-as-usual and open instead toward livable futures at once wily and strange—futures filled with the surprises that come of persistence, of life-thrum, prevailing in spite of everything.
How are we to “link fingers in the dark” (following Kelsey Day); what do we do at the checkpoints, when everything goes wrong (querying after Joanna Streetly)? How do we carry the ravages of the past into urgent articulation with our planetary present? What does that carriage—of word and idea; of nightmare-begotten dreams—look like and hold? Where do its lines break, and what wastelands can it be machined into navigating? How do we multiply the tongues of refutation and ignite material practices that collectivize, that make places built against destruction and for flourishing?
Alongside my fellow readers and editors, I have sought, in this issue, to bring together writing that provokes such lines of questioning. In turn, the writers included here have helped me to ask and re-ask the question of militancy, and what it might—or ought—look like on the page.
I tend to agree with the great documentarian, Muriel Rukeyser: we must “walk in the river of crisis toward the real.” Yet a profound recalibration of pace is in order. Amidst the ongoing genocide of Palestinian peoples, we must run, together, gathering the truth up in our hands and hurling it against the barricades to thought itself, which the state of Israel—backed by the death-fund of US empire—has thrown up to obscure the reality of this gruesome moment of flagrant, unblushing human sacrifice.
From Palestine to the abysmal failure of climate talks at COP28, the planet is ablaze with injustice. Even so, in the face of the anti-life operations of empire, menacing extractivism, and the killing racial logics of global capitalism, other stories are bursting forth; sites of resistance are erupting and lines of solidarity are being forged. I am grateful that Reckoning 8 houses some of these stories—counter-behemoths to the fire-spiting behemoths of the now, which would render land, lives, and languages alike moribund (per Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe’s conjurings).
This issue insists that we can, indeed, must, be fierce and uncompromising, on and off the page. That we must retain and seize the right to dissent from planetary collapse, enacting, instead, the inevitability of resistance, that dear and dearly fruiting tree, its luminous stones sweetly enfleshed with fuel for the hurling.
December 27, 2023
Occupied Lenape Territory of so-called Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Claire G. Coleman’s debut novel, Terra Nullius, is a difficult and powerful book set in an Australia under occupation. It starts in medias res with the flight from slavery of a young Native man named Jacky. This sequence may seem historically familiar, as may the word “Native.” But Terra Nullius contains a revision of perspective at about the 120 page-mark that shifts its genre solidly to science fiction and unmoors our understanding of what’s meant by both “Native” and the antithetical term “Settler.”
Before that sudden change, the novel follows Jacky’s escape toward what he hopes may be the family and home-territory he was taken from as a child. We witness his grueling evasion of recapture by Settler forces and are introduced to the colonialist systems that produce Native immiseration and unfreedom. These systems extend from malicious functionaries, like “The Head of the Department for the Protection of Natives,” to established religious orders. In search of his past, Jacky briefly and dramatically returns to the nunnery-run residential school where he spent his youth before being sold out to work as a slave. The “school” is presided over by the violently racist Sister Bagra, who lives with an uneasy awareness that she mustn’t allow HQ to find out about her institution’s growing graveyard for Native children.
In this initial phase of Terra Nullius we are also introduced to a Settler storm-trooper named Johnny Star, who revolts against the terms of his own service after he witnesses a massacre of unequally armed Native civilians. Glimmers of resistance to the colonial project begin to come into view, as Johnny joins up with a group of armed Native outlaws headed by a young man named Tucker, and the outlaws become aware of the existence of a precarious Native settlement that has so far evaded Settler notice. The settlement is a roughly democratic body, and one of the most effective people in it is a young woman named Esperance who will play a major role in the final action of the novel.
Soon, Jacky’s path will intersect with these other parties. Soon, they will all move toward self-defense, toward reluctant exemplarity, toward giving hope and rage to the oppressed.
So far, we could be reading an unsparing historical novel about colonial Australia. But this is where, if you don’t want spoilers about Terra Nullius, you should stop reading. Because next I have to talk about the big plot-reveal.
The big plot reveal is an interstellar invasion. It is by definition a surprise (there’s a grim joke to be made here about nobody expecting an invasion) but quickly makes all kinds of sense for the book’s accomplished conjuring of the apocalyptic Australian Indigenous experience of settler colonialism. Terra Nullius uses the genre-shock of its space-alien invasion to surprise white readers into seeing their own history as rapacious ‘alien’ history, while speaking with understanding and truth to readers personally impacted by the effects of colonialism about their own lived experience.
In pursuit of both of these goals, Coleman employs speculative metaphors that touch on the environmental toll of colonialism—its recklessly introduced new species, its indifferent disruption of existing ecosystems. Searching for water, Jacky must crawl on his belly beneath an invasive alien vine with poisonous thorns. The vine marks the presence of a stream, without which the plant could not survive, but also bars the water from use by any but the most desperate. “If [Jacky] was slow, meticulous and careful, if he dug down into the mud and muck when he needed to, if he was lucky, he might make it into the gully the vine was strangling” (p. 173). And back out again? It’s hard work for a Native to live, in every direction.
Terra Nullius came out in 2017. It’s still timely, in ways not particularly pleasant to think about, but which are—that dreaded word—useful. Some things about the way Terra Nullius has been received, though, suggest that not all of what it’s saying has been…accepted? Noted? Here’s what may be the problem: Terra Nullius is super clear about the fact that the alien invasion has wiped out all sense of racial distinction between humans. And yet, there seems to be a tendency for reviewers to identify the main human characters in this book as Indigenous. I assumed they were too, at first.
Here’s the book, on its own terms:
The arrival of [the aliens] had eliminated all racism and hate within the human species. It was not that with a common enemy the humans decided to work together…[i]nstead the colonization by the Settlers simply ended all discrimination within the human race by taking away all the imbalance…With no distinction between humans, no rights, no countries, the human race was in the process of homogenization. (p. 159)
It’s a strong universalizing statement and not every reader of the book is going to like it. Coleman is resolute, though: in the future world of her novel, no human really cares about race anymore. Terra Nullius argues that conditions under colonial occupation by an offworld power are simply too equally bad for race to matter as a distinguishing factor.1 But I think a lot of readers find it literally unbelievable, for varied and interesting reasons, that a science fiction novel written by an Aboriginal author about the ravages of colonialism would feature white people among its main sympathetic protagonists. And yet, that’s what Terra Nullius does.
Here’s a different reviewer’s description of the leadership of the novel’s Native (i.e. human) outlawry:
Juxtaposed against…the alien invasion as colonial project is a nomadic group of Aboriginal outlaws. . .These “lost souls” are led by the courageous Aboriginal woman Esperance and her grandfather.2
“[T]he courageous Aboriginal woman Esperance.” But Coleman specifically states that Esperance, who at the end of Terra Nullius eponymously holds what little remains of the novel’s hope, is white. Here she is, up early in the remote woods that have been her community’s fragile sanctuary:
She liked the peace, she liked to hunt before the sun hit the sky – it was cooler and more comfortable on her skin that humans had called ‘white’ before the [aliens] came, before skin colour became irrelevant. (p. 257)
In sum, Terra Nullius is an anti-colonial novel in which white people undergo, together with Indigenous, Black and Brown people, the full unthrottled murderous experience of being colonized. And at least one white person ends up taking on the fugitive heroic role of survivor and resister that I think we are more used to seeing Indigenous, Black and Brown characters take on (for good reason) in recent dystopian fiction. But the totally equalizing aspect of Coleman’s racial world-building contradicts some readers’ expectations to such an extent that it’s almost hard for us to see what she’s written, even though the words are right there on the page. Personally, I wonder if the idea of a “homogenized” humanity was hard for me to focus on while reading Terra Nullius because I—a white demigirl, for what it’s worth—find it too grim to imagine a world where we’re so beaten down, deracinated, overworked and information-poor that we can’t argue and worry, discuss and fight and care and learn about racial history anymore. “But for us to get there we’d have to be living in hell on earth,” I think. To which Coleman’s novel says, “Yes.”
Pladek’s debut novel, Dry Land, is a historical fantasy set in the First World War, focusing on an uncommon topic in fantasy literature: forestry. In addition to its environmental and war themes, and its careful engagement with queer realities, Dry Land also offers a refreshing take on magic. Yet perhaps most importantly, Dry Land is a story about personal and social limits, some of which can be breached, others which can’t.
Rand is a young German American forester working as a surveyor in the forests of Wisconsin, while the First World War rages in Europe. Rand has been involved in environmental activism since he was a teen, including working on a famous, failed project to revitalize a marsh. He feels strongly about nature, but it still comes as a shocking development to him when he discovers that his touch can make plants grow.
His teammate and lover, the Mexican American surveyor Gabriel, has secrets of his own: as his evening fiddle playing makes obvious, he should be playing in concert halls, yet there he is in the woods, braving the muck and the damp. When Rand starts sneaking out at night, Gabriel initially assumes Rand is sleeping around… but in fact he is experimenting with his power.
His days grew stumbling. He yawned into his elbow and shouted the wrong signals to Gabriel, who frowned, though he said nothing.
But his nights were transcendent. The dark woods blossomed beneath his fingers. With each test he pushed himself harder. Despite his growing collection of pine scales, maple keys, and basswood nuts, he had started small, with whatever bulbs lay already dormant in the earth. After two nights of flowers he advanced to shrubs, raspberry canes and stalks of red dogwood; finally, in another three, to trees. His first spindly sugar maple took such a concentration of energy that he fainted briefly against it. (p. 13)
Magic as a plot element can be used as a writing shortcut to avoid detail; Pladek does the opposite and brings every bulb and pine scale into close focus. His caring, thick description of nature shows a deep awareness that Dry Land owes just as much to the Wisconsin landscape as his protagonist Rand. The novel is thoroughly researched—as the author mentions in the acknowledgements, he read early forestry manuals and field guides. Yet Dry Land isn’t only a novel about nature as much as it is embedded in nature.
Once Rand’s power is revealed, he finds himself pressed into participating in the American war effort—even though, as someone ethnically German, he is often viewed with suspicion. But Dry Land isn’t entirely a war novel either, even as Rand is shipped into Europe.
He did not begin seeing evidence of the front until the fields had risen into hills patched with woodland. The shellfire was now regular to the northeast. At some point he began following the signs—scoops of earth from old barrages, a biplane’s timber skeleton half sunk in mud, and men, on foot or pumping handcarts or queued before a field hospital, men lapping sluggishly back and forth like a gray tide.
As if he were surveying, he triangulated their flows and followed. (p. 106)
In the built environment of a large city, or amid the utter destruction of warfare, Rand’s gaze remains the forester’s, the naturalist’s, the surveyor’s.
Dry Land is also a queer novel. In present-day terms, Rand would probably be considered bisexual, his lover Gabriel gay, and his best friend, the socialist activist Jonna, a lesbian woman alongside her partner Marie. The characters struggle against the queer-exclusionary nature of the setting; from raids on bars to gay bashing, from the terror of the military to internalized oppression. As Jonna tells Rand: “I thought I was like you, and could make myself take the easy way out. But then, you’re doing it the hard way anyway.” (p. 76-77)
Every character finds their way differently in this world, but all of the paths they take are presented with an intimate, yet not voyeuristic attention. Without describing the plot in detail, the book takes this approach in a more general sense too—never lingering on the violence, but not ignoring it either, and showing a rich internality of experiencing it. At one point, this includes a death wish as tangible as it is unfetishized.
In more than one sense, Dry Land is about limits. Rand rapidly comes up against the limitations of his magic and, throughout the novel, struggles with whether these limitations can be overcome through sheer effort, careful planning, or in some other way. Often they can’t. I found this both relatable on a personal level and refreshing. In fantasy, such limits are often laboriously spelled out with ‘laws’ of magic, but Pladek’s comes across as a more realistic approach, matching the general realism of the narrative.
Rand thinks of himself as a scientist, not a magician. He’s also a proponent of John Muir’s idea of preservation, advocating for preserving the natural “wilderness” as opposed to managing it for human ends, including industrial exploitation. But in the course of the novel, Rand finds out about the limits of science, too: “He’d thought he was being a good scientist. But nothing about his gift had ever been solved by this sort of science.” (p. 149)
His foil and antagonist Dr. Manning, the eugenicist doctor assigned to supervise him in the military, presents obvious, easy-to-reject views of science with his talk of “breeding” and “degeneracy.” Yet Rand himself has more subtle biases that go to the core of who he is and what he does: “He was a scientist; he should have known conservation was not accomplished deus ex machina.” (p. 217) He considers in detail what he sees, but he ignores what he doesn’t, what he is—in the most literal meaning of the word—segregated from seeing. Being a German American during WWI, he experiences sometimes physically violent ethnocentrism as one of “the enemy” and is at the same time able to take advantage of his own whiteness. All this is shown thoughtfully, unfolding step by step, drawing the reader in.
The ecological and the human all intertwine. What is “wilderness” and what is people’s role in interacting with it? Why is American environmentalism often tinged with the messianic, and what happens when magic enters the equation? Dry Land presents complication, difficulty, escape and not-escape; and the book leaves plenty of room for us to agree or disagree with Rand’s decisions. I have already read it twice while writing this review, and I’m confident it will reward even further rereads.
This is a thinky, reflective novel, with plenty of interiority and an avoidance of common fantasy plot beats. You won’t necessarily know where the plot will go, and it’s not the “hero’s journey” omnipresent in present-day Anglo-American storytelling. For all his magic, Rand isn’t a hero and the plot isn’t an extended training montage. It is something much, much closer to life, with all its pain and sense of wonder. It reflects on genre publishing—and not favorably—that this book came out from a university press, and for this reason it might be less noticed. I for one will continue telling people about it, and at the risk of employing the cliché: this is one of the not-to-miss speculative novels of 2023.
“This is my home,” my mother says to me one overcast day.
Picture this: mother and daughter are sitting on the couch together, our ponchos pooling and swallowing us whole. We are looking at a picture on the internet, a snapshot of the valley in Petorca. My mother was born in that Chilean city, a tiny bird nestled in the bosom of the Andes, gasping through thin air and an ever-evolving awe of the world. I expect, watching her then, a cloud of nostalgia to fog her eyes, for her to fly away from me and the couch here in Canada.
She does not fly away. I notice her speech warbles with hesitation, her throat holding that last word down, home, dragging it out long and narrow like the country. How I remember her staring, the rubbing of her eyes, the drugstore eyedrops, and the small circle of her mouth.
When she finally says it again—“This is my home”—no longer is it a statement, rather a climb, peaking in a question. She leaves me behind then to dash to the safe upstairs, rummaging through our family’s birth certificates and citizen papers and passports and who knows what, until she brings back to me an old picture.
My fingers retain still the feeling of that smooth, glossy paper; of how I turn it, checking the back to see ink splotches faded with time:
Lxxx, Petorca, 1975.
Wistfulness, I understand then, means there is some semblance of a home to yearn for. There is still something there to return to—yes, there could be little differences here and there—but you can walk the land and observe, with tinted sunglasses, a kaleidoscope of memories and endless futures gleaming in the sunset.
Nothing of that nature is found in the photograph in her hands—it is a reality which does not exist anymore. It was, as I consider the image, something beautiful, with swathes of green and yellow and blue. It was, she tells me, the place she was happiest in, even if she did not have hot water or had to use an outhouse or went hungry. It is, as I discover, somehow, the same place as the cracked, parched desert on the internet labelled Petorca. The jarring combination of speaking, of thinking, all at once present, past, and unknown, makes for an ominous blanket heavier than the warmest poncho.
This is my home? This cannot be my home. Did I ever have one? I had one, I know I did, once, but it is not this. How long can the world go on for? How long can I?
“What happened to the river?” I say, taking the role of the fool who asks obvious questions before a disaster foretold.
I remember the soft curve of her jaw as she cranes her head to our popcorn ceiling, going past it to enter something holy and safe.
“God help us all,” she responds.
What can one say about the environment that has not already been said? How could we reconcile with the fact that the place we were born will not be the same place we will die, even if the maps, even if our hearts, say otherwise?
My old university here in Canada floats on top of a marsh. I can feel the chill of the mornings I’ve spent walking along watery pathways, frogs croaking and salamanders whirling near my feet; occasionally, on these walks, my eyes wandered to the trail of smoke that wafts up from the clanging industrial parts of the city. Group projects in my academic career consisted of developing apps that would help the user report turtles crushed and splattered by cars, to hopefully have someone help take them to wildlife rescues. My lectures had many students yawning through the degradation of our Great Lakes, a source of life, with algae blooms and gifts of spewing sewage and oil spills.
At these institutions, one looks at the data; one maps and calculates and writes obligatory reflections that are more opinion pieces on the reality of things, and then one moves on. Moving on commonly means a hiring event where major oil and mining companies, among others in little cliques of giggling imperialistic friends, gather us ready and bright-eyed, one by one.
A funny thing: my tía abuela, Juana, a stout woman in her nineties, still works to run a family goat farm in Chile. My tía sends my mother a video of the old woman on the news, appearing on the screen with hands curling like tendrils in a garden.
“No way,” I say, looking at the old woman in amazement, seeing a continent of toughness etched on her pixelated face. “She’s still alive?”
My mother slaps me before she starts the clip again, leaning in, trying to listen to her tía’s words carefully.
Petorca province is a major provider of that emerald jewel of a fruit, the avocado—la palta—which can only grow in certain regions. A just right environment is mandatory for the fussy fruit. Raising them requires 320 litres of water per avocado. Agricultural companies and politicians and the like illegally divert the coursing river to these fields. Once grown, they are exported to a European or North American country, a destiny coded on stickers and red-flag sale signs, all to end up part of people’s self care smoothie or a sandwich in a bougie restaurant.
There, on television, my tía abuela Juana speaks of the town’s water crisis: people cannot wash their clothes, they cannot take showers, crops are wilting, livestock dying from dehydration. She could not afford to buy the avocados that her neighbours grow. She is still alive, yes, todo bien gracias a Dios, but who knows about the well-being of her children, many who work at the farm, if all her goats die from no water? What about her grandchildren; her great great-great-grandchildren; her great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren?
In the climate crisis, it is those at risk—ones statistically contributing the least to global pollution and energy consumption—who will encounter the worst effects of it. Though I believe that designating those at risk is to make the sacrificial lamb a matter of inheritance, instead of the truth of chronic disenfranchisement, of intentional displacement. Everything has a price to it, and some people are willing to be paid. Even the world burning has a price.
In Chile, Patagonian fluvial systems, running like veins to the end of the world, suffer as their ecosystems are upset by deforestation and pollution. Lithium exploitation in the name of green electromobility in turn consumes water in the north, with mining sites near primarily Indigenous communities. In my home here in Canada, water still has material needs we must provide, a necessary relationship that the media calls disruptive and violent and holding this country back. The water does not need oil spills and fertilizer pollution and waste; it does not need to water golf courses or suburban lawns or mall fountains; it does not need people to face police brutality for protesting these violations.
There are things to say about Indigenous sovereignty. There are things to say on how the fight against colonisation is the fight for water justice. There are things to say about our power as a group of people, that through each home we love, those which are fracturing like cracks in clay, we make our attempts at resilience. We survive. Fight.
I do not write about this for the love of writing about this. I do not write believing I have a voice that is good or matters above the rest. Those things to say on environmental justice perhaps are said better by others instead of me: an overwrought, disabled, neurotic Latina, with a persistent fear of misstepping hovering over me like a fly. However, now is the time where we must drive our purpose towards the collective needs of our people, and to the land.
I laugh when someone asks me if I consider myself an academic or a writer. It is unnatural for me in those ecosystems. What is there for people in that hierarchy of beings, with those intellectuals that love to create and fondle and debate among each other? However, I do consider myself an eternal student, and read anything that could explain the seedlings of questions that sprout from my chest: what is justice, what is the environment, who are we all in between?
Taking an Indigenous Knowledge class, I loved my time there, my professor almost lulling me with stories and exciting me in challenging the normative way of thinking, even when it was difficult at times. There I read and analysed, as part of our curriculum, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass.
“Wow,” I wrote to my professor late in the evening, happy to see the poetry in the world around us translated to words I could finally comprehend. “She’s just like me. For real!”
I believe the part of the book I just must write about goes like this, after introducing the reader to the Onondaga Thanksgiving Address: “Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. If an animal gives its life to feed me, I am in turn bound to support its life. If I receive a stream’s gift of pure water, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. An integral part of a human’s education is to know those duties and how to perform them.”
A great achievement of colonialism is that it convinces people that hyper-individualism is good. That there is not a right to anything unless you buy it. This is seen in Chile, with waters regulated by private property laws, which are a symptom of the infection of neoliberalism, implemented after the coup of 1973. For how could one own water? Why do government officials hand water out on a first-come first-served basis? The delusion of hyper-individualism creates the mantra this is just the way things are, that it is natural for an old woman to go on television and plead for water in the community and to stop desecrating the land she was born on.
It cannot be an individual’s responsibility to save watery ecosystems and the turtles by banning straws; we cannot turn up our nose at disabled people’s need for plastic straws and not do a thing to, say, fast fashion companies overflowing landfills and causing water pollution with last micro-season’s trends. It is abhorrent that the average person’s carbon footprint is always scrutinized, yet a celebrity can use private jets to fly mere minutes on a whim. There is a need for community. There is a duty we must fulfill to each other and the land.
Because for what, for whom, do we declare environmental justice?
There may not be a complete reversal of the climate crisis. That opportunity may very likely wave us by. Unprecedented times are precedent-setting times. Yet it is still within our power to continue forward. I do not mean that we all hold hands together and sing la-la-de-da, because there are those that oppose what needs to be done. There are those who will say that this injustice, these crises, are not real, even when we look at them in our own backyards. I also do not mean that progress, even technological progress, is bad, for there are things like ecological socialism to take into consideration as we move forward, ever forward. There is no one solution that may tie up neatly in a bow; we must think of the tangible, we must think of each other, and not fall into traps of ecofascism or relentless nihilism.
We live in a perfect green and blue spaceship. This is our home. We are born here, of course we will take care of it, one way or another.
After we watch the news and say our goodbyes to my tía, my mother and I prepare food together. She speaks of childhood memories while baking fresh bread; I simmer with the squash soup in all the ways I feel helpless—and all the ways I feel hopeful—about my power in this world.
When I sit with my family at the dinner table, that precious glass of water stays by my hand, waiting to give me a gift, and I accept it in each swallow. Tomorrow, I think to myself, tomorrow I’ll return the gift, in full.
While forks scrape plates and conversations lull, my mind drifts away: to snowy peaks and pine trees and endless sky. I remember the smell of the sea, the sun on my back, the green of the valley. I dream of mountain goats following at the heels of an old woman. I see the happiness that land gave my mother in her smile.
But what about the river? Its silence now is louder than the rush of water ever was. I hope our children hear its song again, one day. I hope our children have a glass of you, dear river.
Pero todos bien gracias a Dios, y mi gente.
References
Wall Kimmerer, R. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants. Milkweed Editions.
Magic! That is the word I could use to describe where I came from, my island. It was not owned by any individual but a collective of small dwellers surrounded by bodies of water, a small place where I knew our neighbors’ names, where I woke up to the serenity of the waves greeting me. I almost took this view for granted and lost my wonder of her.
I once lived close to the ocean, knew the smell of the ocean, I took care of the ocean in the ways of my people, and in turn she gave me life. Some days she would come bearing fruits of thanksgiving to my doorstep, foreign items I didn’t know I needed until she brought them to me. The children of Tarkwa Island benefited the most from these gifts. When I was a new baby, my mother got from her a dream catcher she placed over my crib. My hands would stretch out to touch it, and as an adult I could remember the dream catcher hanging over my head, slipping into my dreams and drawing me into the water.
As a child, items from the ocean were used as toys, or sometimes our parents graced our bodies with them, like that one time I got a rainbow shell.
I still wear it on my neck.
But there were other days too, days she kissed the toes of the threshold of my house that barely stood together. She threatened to swallow us, but she did not. On days like this she gifted the community with even stranger things. Like the one time she vomited in front of our neighbor’s house a lifeless human body. They said the body was round and swollen. I only heard about it; I was forbidden as a child to see those kinds of giftings from the ocean. But I grew up too and saw many gifts. I even saw the ocean give us the body of my childhood friend who had been missing for three days. I knew this loss, and it laced my tongue to remember that even when we were one with the water, the proverb remained: “Being a swimmer and spending time in the water does not make you a fish”. We were surrounded by the ocean, and to survive the ocean we had to become like rocks.
You would think that I should be afraid of water. That it would come one day and swallow me into its mouth and just like that I would stop existing. But a land that inhabits you shouldn’t be the one to kill you. I told this to outsiders who queried my bravery and rolled it on their tongue. Who came here to enjoy the water my island offered but ran back to the comfort of their homes when they grew tired of her beauty. Who would blame them? They had no idea how to pacify the water.
Children of the water returned back into the water. We were not like the outside world whose spirits roamed after death. When one of our own died, we would ship them into the middle of the sea and let them go back home. This was where they belonged, for the ocean held on to us, and if we didn’t do that, that person’s spirit would cry from beneath the grave, calling us to join them. We couldn’t afford to let our community die, we knew the city world frowned on us when we did such things, but they had no say over our domain.
This was home. Home was ours.
The ocean was on an island, separated from the outside world. I watched the city people come and go. They came to our island to have a swell time, but for us this place was home, and home was threatened. Home was threatened by the city people, people who parked their cars at the edge of the city and took boats to our island to have some fun. They would come dressed in their fancy city clothes, wearing bourgeois sunglasses, for the sun our bodies adored. They came with food items, too tired to clean up after they left, making the environment uninhabitable for us. But we were gracious enough to pick up after them. There was already a system in place that allowed the men of our island to tax them so we could clean up the place. It was giving back what belongs to us, and they did.
During summer the children of the island, now men and ladies, showed off their talents. I, for one, blended into the ocean to show off my skills with my skateboard, synched with the wind, and in turn I got the admiration of the city people. I got job offers to teach these people, and I made respectable money for it. I didn’t desire much—I was a wanderer, I needed only bread and fish for the soul.
Other times I saved people from our ocean. She was sometimes eager to eat those who didn’t know how to flow into her rhythm, but she knew me well enough to be merciful.
I defended my island until I could no longer defend it. It was the year before covid-19 that the government came for us. The year 2018, when I woke up to ships and guns surrounding our small houses, with a loudspeaker waking me up from my dream saying: “The government will be taking over this island, this island will now be used for military purposes”.
I imagined my ears to be filled with the sand from our island, that the seashells had covered them and that I was in a dream. The one where the sirens and the mermaids played tricks with my mind. Disbelief filled me til I thought I would drown in it.
Where would I go? Where was home if not here? I watched as the elders held countless meetings with government officials, days leading to months, til I began to shrug off the evacuation as nothing.
The island youths were angry. I was angry! Who would dare take our island from us? But I was powerless, and my tongue did the talking. Some of us, the youths who had access to social media, tweeted and trended for a week. I prayed that the city people would intervene. That they would save us. They did not.
It was decided that we would evacuate the premises, but we would be compensated. But how much could compensate for home, for her? For the smell of water? To wake up to the ocean and dive into her. To have your body know the waves. To become one with her. To have access to her. Our evacuation was due next year, but I was already swollen with sadness.
My eyes filled, and the tears dropped into the ocean.
In those days, the ocean was quiet. It was peaceful, it followed us in mourning, it could sense our loss, collective loss.
The island was slowly being cleared by the government with the installation of small camps. I watched as the elders of our island sold off our homes for five shillings, like Judas selling off Jesus to his cross. The betrayal burnt the bones of the youth in Tarkwa Bay. Where would we go and call home? Some heard this news with great joy, receiving a call to swap their consciences for a desire to leave.
Eventually, people started leaving, but my foot was rooted here. The bodies of my mother and siblings were buried deep in the ocean. How would I carry their presence into the busy city? Into a land where vehicles smothered the skin of humans in exhaust. Where their water rushed through pipes into their homes, while all I had to do was drink from the ocean.
I wasn’t ready. A few of us stayed back to defend our home, until the men with machine guns came at night and bullets dropped like rain onto our houses and we fled. Four years later, the world has moved forward and the city people have more access to our island, but this time the government is in control.
The city isn’t for people like me. I have watched my body shed skin to adapt to this new environment. It still doesn’t fit my webbed feet which are used to carrying the weight of sand. Not this concrete ground and cemented rooftops that threaten to take the air out of my lungs. This city where the clouds swallow the stars and hide them. It’s been years, and my body still can’t adapt to this environment. They say that man evolves, but all I wanted to evolve into was the sea.
As a child, I played mermaid with my island friends. Now my people are scattered all over this city, trying to blend in and become a part of it. But an ocean child is forever an ocean child, and when this city finally sleeps, I will return to her.
Marcia Mejia and her Indigenous community, the Eperara Nation, live along the banks of the Naya River in Colombia. Her settlement of Joaquincito sits right at the delta where the Naya reaches the Pacific Ocean. The Naya was a major site of conflict during the 50-year-long Colombian civil war. The Eperara, together with 64 Afro-descendant communities along the river, have defended their holy waterway and suffered terribly as narco-empires continue to fight for control of this strategic waterway.
1.
Marcia stamps her flip-flop on the dirty floor.
“I can’t leave you, not with a whole two hours to go until the bus,” she says in a low voice.
“Go, go,” I say. “Go. I’ll be fine. Be careful on the street.”
We drop my bags on the sagging, tipping plastic seats in the terminal. We hug again. I brush back her straight black hair.
“You haven’t had supper,” she says.
“Nah.”
I try not to cry. I’m old enough to be her mother, but I feel like her sister. She matters to me. I feel helpless, unable to do anything more to keep us close. She is so small, invisible to the rest of the world, so vulnerable. Steady, persistent, unstoppable, like a sturdy—but threatened—tree holding out her branches wide to protect her community: Joaquincito, of the Eperara Nation, on the mouth of the Naya River, on the Pacific Coast of Colombia.
The Eperara have lived on this river for time out of mind. But the enemies they face are monstrous, more dangerous perhaps than ever before: internal and foreign beasts crouching at the door. Waiting. Who will move in? Who has more power? Bigger guns? Who can twist things around, play the game—cocaine, mining companies, massive hydro-electric dams—make a pile, shit on the people and the earth, piss in the river, and move on?
“Go,” I urge gently. “I’ve got food. Plantain chips and lemonade made with panela. Besides, you guys have been feeding me too much for days. I already didn’t fit into the canoa!” We both laugh.
“Okay, Emi,” she says. She turns and walks away. Her orange wrap-skirt glows in the gloom. Somehow the bus station manages to be both fluorescent bright and deeply dingy at the same time. She’s gone.
I take a deep breath. Alone at last. Time to think about where my heart has been and gone these past five days. I look around for my salt-crusted chips. Eat a few. I’m not that hungry. These have been days of fish, glorious starchy vegetables of different hues and sizes, and fruit I never knew existed.
Then, wait! The flash of orange is coming back! Marcia. Her face is crumpled.
“I can’t leave you here alone. So long ‘til the bus.”
“It’s good, really. Go. Go,” I say.
“Okay, I’m leaving, Emi,” says Marcia again, resigned. The orange in her beaded necklace, her orange skirt, her determined eyes set in her round face are all so dear to me. One final, final hug, and she’s gone, becoming a carrot-colored dot, disappearing into the darkness. Just as she leaves, the evening rains call to the earth; the world outside is erased. Walls of water form, seeming to run both up and down.
I squeeze my eyes tight in prayer. Surround her with an impenetrable circle of protection. Make her invisible to the killers. Keep her safe. It’s August, 2018. These are hard days for Colombian community leaders, especially for women and men from the Indigenous and Afro-descendant—Black—communities. More than 342 people have been killed in the past year-and-a-half, since the 2016 signing of the peace accords between the government and the guerrillas of the Rebel Armed Forces.
I had met Marcia three years earlier, at an international gathering in Brazil, Fe y Territorios, Faith and Territories. It was a busy, frantic conference, with hundreds of participants, but somehow Marcia connected with me. She sought me out time and again. We sat and chatted.
“You have to come see me someday, in my community,” she said. I agreed, casually. I am the co-president of SICSAL, an international Christian human rights organization. Although we work in 28 countries, we are small and don’t have a lot of funds. I had no idea when I would ever make it to Colombia.
Marcia and I weren’t in touch regularly, but every once and a while, she would have access to the internet, and a note would pop up on my screen. Usually the same thing: How are you? When are you coming to see me?
Hi, I would answer. Nice to hear from you. Not sure.
But then, three years later, I did end up in Colombia, at another international conference, this time in Medellin. Marcia was supposed to come to the meeting but problems on the river took over: the boat couldn’t get out. The level of violence on the river was very high. I had to admit, I didn’t actually know where Marcia lived. Somewhere on a river delta, somewhere in Colombia. I didn’t know how, exactly, to get to her.
Fortunately, I have friends.
La Comisión (the Interchurch Commission for Justice and Peace) makes the connections for me and sends me off on the night bus to Buenaventura. My companions are Nidiria, a poet, and her friend Yamali, young leaders from the Women’s Committee of the Naya River Delta. They were both at the conference with me, showing up every day with one fabulous colorful outfit after another, purchased down in the city center during our breaks. At the conference they were clear: they had the right, as women, as young people, as the descendants of enslaved Africans, to live full lives, safely, in their homes, in their communities. Travelling with them, I feel like a young adventurer, invulnerable yet with a shake of danger.
The women shepherd me from the conference grounds, in the green sanctuary of the Mother Laura Convent on the outskirts of Medellin, through the long thin windy road down to the coast, through the sketchy, rough streets of Buenaventura to the safe house of the local Comisión leaders: Enrique and Maru—María Eugenia. The Comisión—on the frontline of energetic insistence on human rights for all—is a particular target for violence. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has ordered the Colombian government to provide for the safety of Comisión leaders. We arrive at an anonymous-looking house. An armoured car is parked in front. An unsmiling guard stands stiffly; presumably he has a legal gun to protect us.
We arrive to a household waking up. Maru is making eggs, tossing her mop of curls as she stirs vigorously. She looks around to laugh hello and—snap—turns back to flip the arepas, fried cornmeal triangles. Enrique pours coffee. And, surprise! There are three human rights leaders here from the Washington Office on Latin America: Adam, Gimena and Alex. They are going upriver this very morning, all the way to Las Conchas. We can all go together, they say. I have no idea where Las Conchas is, but it’s somewhere on Marcia’s river, so—let’s go!
The dock reeks. Things have died here and just been left to rot. An old wooden boat sits submerged up to its deck in water. Alongside it, men load two fiberglass hulls, which look sturdy enough. A group awaits, and then we’re on board. The two boats sag full, about 10 or 12 people per vessel: four of us gringos, and the Comisión folks, my friends Nidiria and Yamali, going home. Most travellers are community members returning up the river, including baby Kaila and her mom, from Las Conchas. Kaila had been sick, and they brought her out to see a doctor. Now she sleeps right snug beside me, in her mother’s arms, covered in a pink fuzzy sweater for the wind and the spray that will come. We slip on life jackets. Soon we putt-putt into the harbour. We slide past small shacks built up perilously over the river. Girls scrub clothes in the oily water, glancing up to see us just with the corner of an eye. We glide through the green and brown water and then into a mangrove swamp.
Now the boats move fast. They flit across the narrow waterways, choosing first the left branch, then the right from an impossible puzzle of choices. The boatsmen slip their caps over backwards and shout to each other with joy. It’s like they’re playing tag. The engine drones. The hum is so steady that I am almost asleep, head nodding down. Then—slap—we’re in open ocean. Blue, white and grey. The silver curve of an ancient coin, across which are days and days of sea, until there are at last some distant, wistful islands. The sunlight is deceptively thin, but strong enough to burn Alex to a crisp in half an hour. I had remembered before we left and slipped on a light, long-sleeved shirt underneath my life jacket, despite the coastal heat.
Nudging, roaring, surging and soothing, the boatsmen know how to ride through the swells. Then at last we turn into the mangroves again. Nidiria calls loud and happy from the front, “Emi, THIS is the Naya!”
The Naya is a short river, only 120 kilometres long. It begins its life in the foothills of the soaring Andes and snake-winds its way down and across the jungle lowlands, becoming a fat and brown river at its mouth, thick with spindly mangroves, where it finally meets the Pacific Ocean. Indigenous peoples have lived along the rich banks of the Naya since before memory can tell. But life changed drastically when, in 1526, Spaniards arrived in the area.
That year, Sebastián de Belalcázar, a Castilian donkey thief, set out to pillage the hot lowlands of the Pacific littoral, founding the city of Cali, all the while slaughtering Indigenous people and fighting internecine battles with his fellow invaders. In the mountains beyond, rumours ran wild about rivers of gold and fabled cities paved with the shiny stuff. The Pizarro brothers had actually found stacks of treasure and went promptly to work destroying the great Inca Empire. Belalcázar, though, would find no such treasure.
Reported to be a particularly vicious man, Belalcázar was even called to account by the Spanish authorities for slaughtering all the women and children of a particular village while the men were absent. He died in 1555, while awaiting extradition to Spain, where he was to be tried for the murder of a fellow Spaniard. (The statue of Belalcázar in Cali was torn down in 2021 by Indigenous community members, as was one in Popayan a year earlier.)
There were no pots of gold to be had in the lowlands among the fishers and the gatherers, so Europeans set about creating sugar plantations. As the Indigenous communities were all but extinguished, the Spaniards began trafficking boatloads of Africans to slave in the fields. The slave trade began in 1518. Over the next three hundred-plus years an estimated 1.1 million Africans were forced through its hideous capital: Cartagena de Indias, on the Colombian Caribbean coast. Slavery was abolished in Colombia in 1852.
Today, along the Naya river, there are sixty-four Afro-Columbian communities, while the upriver and downriver Eperara peoples each have a reserve.
We buzz along the lower reaches of the river and, after about half an hour, pull up to a collection of wooden houses built on stilts. We land at a shaky ladder leading up to the Casa Grande, bigger by far than the small, personal homes. The Casa Grande is the sacred gathering space of Joaquincito, the home of the downriver Eperara people.
There she is! Marcia is waving madly and coming down the ladder. Everyone from the village is in the Casa Grande, waiting to meet me. Enrique and Maru are talking with Marcia, explaining that we’re not staying, that I’m not staying, but that they’ll drop me off the next day. “Do you want to come?” they ask her. “We’re going to Las Conchas. You should come, but hurry, get your stuff.”
Marcia disappears, then returns with a little pink backpack and a girl, maybe about nine years old. They jump in the back. We beam with joy at one another. We did it! We’re together at last. There is no time to say anything, and we’re off. Up the river, buzz, buzz.
The green walls of the jungle close in around us, hiding who knows what. The trees seem endless, eternal. Looks like the jungle won here. But then we zip around a corner and there’s a big town: Puerto Merizalde, named after its founding bishop, who dreamed of building a bustling metropolis in the jungle. We move along the wooden houses stacked right over the river until—there He is! Standing high on top of a massive cathedral in the river town that had failed to become a city, right on the dome reaching out to his people: a grandiose white Jesus, hands extended in blessing. We float along under his outstretched arms.
On the other side of town, we dock and climb out onto a soggy wooden platform. We’re stopping for lunch. At last Marcia and I hug each other. I meet Yasmin, her daughter. We head up arm in arm to a table to my first fish of the Rio Naya. We eat with satisfaction, and we catch up. Things are not well at all on the river. Peace accords have meant nothing. I listen, shake my head. Four community leaders dead in the last few months. Everything a great unknown. Solemnly we board the boats again to travel to the next stop upstream. Yamali stays here, but Nadiria will travel with us up to Las Conchas.
2.
We’re heading further inland. After about an hour, we arrive at the Humanitarian Zone of San Francisco, where we will exchange our ocean-going boat for a river boat that will make it easier to journey farther up the shallow river through the ever-thickening, verdant jungle.
The region around the Naya River has a particularly troubled history, explains Enrique from the Comisión, with input from the WOLA experts, Adam and Gimena. In the past thirty years or so the Naya’s relatively short length, from the thick coca leaf sites up in the highlands, along the back and forth of the main branches of the river, to the lonely and unguarded Pacific coast, has become a key route for the moving of drugs and arms. There are big bucks to be made by the Colombian military (the largest in Latin America) and the shady paramilitary bands (which have direct links to the official military, but operate with impunity). These latter are responsible for the greatest number of human rights abuses. Last of all, but thick in the game, are Colombia’s two guerrilla organizations: the Rebel Armed Forces (FARC) and the much smaller yet still fierce National Liberation Army (ELN). Everyone wants a piece of this rich pie.
During Holy Week, 2001, one of the worst massacres of Colombia’s more than 50-year-long civil war occurred along the Naya River. Between April 11th and 12th, paramilitaries from the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia brutally murdered and mutilated an estimated 70 people up and down the Naya. Thousands more fled into hiding along tributary rivers, to Puerto Merizalde, and all the way down the river and along the ocean into the city of Buenaventura.
After a number of years of displacement, communities started to return and rebuild. An important tool for peacemaking was granted to them when the Inter-American Court on Human Rights ordered precautionary measures for the communities, and a number of “humanitarian zones” were declared. These were to be areas exclusively for civilians, entirely free from all weapons. No armed players from any side of the war would be allowed into the Zones. The communities would patrol themselves, and the Naya Community Council would oversee the civilian network.
By the time we arrive at the San Francisco Humanitarian Zone, I’m feeling a bit queasy. Maybe it’s the food, the sun, or the sway of the boat. I breathe deeply. We all pile out. Good thing Maru told us to wear our flip-flops. We disembark straight into the shallow water, and the riverbed is muddy and rocky. We are met by community leaders at the river’s edge. The village reaches right down to the water. Old cement block buildings, once painted but now crumbly and worn, stand close together. Neighbors look out and shout out to us. We stop at one place and another. Everyone knows Enrique and Maru, and there’s laughing and teasing. At one place we are given a shot glass to share. I take a wee sip. Holy Beasts! There is a coal of fire in my mouth, in my throat, in my esophagus, in my gut. Oh, I remember this. Isabelino, an Afro-Colombian leader who I met in Brazil, had some. It is a sacred drink, made with herbs, but also with a high alcohol content. My stomachache eases. That’s good news!
Then, out of nowhere, a helicopter thunders overhead. It lands on the other side of the village. The army. We go closer to observe. Soldier after soldier, each shouldering a bundle, marches down from behind a hill, turns left and disappears. We watch them warily from a distance, then go down to the next street. The leaders tell us what is going on. The soldiers have set up camp, smack at the edge of the village, on a jutting bit of land sticking into the curve of the river.
Adam, who carries himself with calm and confidence, consults with the villagers. Leaving them behind, we gringos move forward to check in with the military camp. An infantry specialist comes out to see us, a little surprised. Adam and Gimena converse with him, and Alex and I fall back. Soldiers should not be here, while we have every right. We are invited guests and, of course, we are unarmed. Quietly I take out my phone and snap a few shots. The soldiers have brought in heaps of provisions, what look like sacks of sugar or rice. Everyone is polite if tense.
I get the story in pieces. Officially, it seems, the military came to search for evidence concerning the four community leaders—three brothers and a cousin—who were kidnapped, disappeared and in the end murdered in April and May. Adam raises his eyebrows.
Later, I get a few more pieces of the puzzle. Valle de Cauca, a distant, forgotten corner of Colombia, became a central battleground and hiding place for the fighters in the civil war. It was mostly controlled by FARC guerrillas. After the 2016 peace accords went into effect, the FARC disbanded, moving into controlled de-escalation communities. But along the Naya, this left a vacuum of power, and of course the movement of drugs continues. There is a lot of money involved. Adam says that he has heard that ordinary soldiers request to be sent to this region. This is the place to make money. That may be the real reason the army is here. And behind the army, the paramilitary waits.
Finally, we are back at the boat, a new one able to go further up the river. I climb in beside Marcia’s daughter, Yasmin, in the front row, the bumpiest place. The green jungle walls climb higher and higher on either side of us, as the river gets both shallower and narrower. A couple of lime-green iguanas scuttle into the brush. There’s no more sun to burn us—it’s rumbling and cloudy up in the darkening heavens. Occasional single wooden houses jut up on stilts, and every once in a while, another Humanitarian Zone, with its big vinyl sign declaring it to be a weapons-free area, exclusively for civilian use. There are children running along the shore, people in impossibly skinny dugout canoes, standing or sitting, and others leaning on the window frames of the houses. Everyone waves, on the water and on the land.
The boat sways and swoops. On one riverbend intersection we come across, incredibly, my friend Isabelino, who had given me a sip of the sacred drink when we were in Brazil. We wave and laugh, and then our boats charge off like horses to gallop in opposite directions. The boat drones. I’m not sure we’ll ever get there. We haven’t seen houses for a while, when on one swoop we hear a sickening scrape and thud. Then the engine dies. Our boat turns lazily in the current and starts floating aimlessly downstream. Where will we stop? Sometimes it’s better not to ask anything and just encomendarse (hand yourself over) to God.
Our able boatman manages to get us into one quiet lull on the river’s edge and then another. Going backwards, we come to a house high on the riverbank. He calls up. A gruff answer comes down. Then a man appears with a rifle of some sort. Shouting, suspicion back and forth. It looks like he won’t help. Are we going to have to float down further? But then, it seems, peace has been made. The man on the shore disappears, comes back and down to our boat. He has a thin white wire. The motor is raised out of the water. I hold my breath and look around. Everyone seems relaxed. Then we all cheer as the engine putt putts. We’re off again.
The going is tenuous, with the driver occasionally killing the motor. We are too heavy, and the river too shallow. Once or twice, we get out of the boat and walk along a sandbar. At one point, Alex, who’s a big man, falls into the river while exiting the boat. But there’s not one complaint, just a smiling resignation at riding the rest of the way in his wet jeans.
Rain rushes down. Tarps appear from the boat’s storage, and we wrap them around ourselves. I tuck the end in around Yasmin. She’s shivering. I take off my sunscreen shirt and wrap it around her, and then the tarp, and then my arm holding it all in place. Then it happens: I love her. This little girl, who has the bravest mother: Marcia, who has traveled to Spain and to the States, who has seen and touched and laughed at snow, who has macheted her way through every rock planted on her path, a rural Colombian Indigenous woman with no recognized rights. Her sheer will is making things happen.
At every bend in the river Enrique drapes himself off the bow of the boat, holding tight to an oar, and measures for depth. For a long time, it is announced that Las Conchas is 15 minutes away, just around the next corner, until, at last, half of us are dumped onto a sandbar while the boat makes its final push to the community. Then comes back for the others. It is dark, and the rain is torrential. We were supposed to arrive at noon, and now it’s seven in the evening. In all the boat trip took almost nine hours.
We shake our feathers out in a dry little house on stilts. Baby Kaila, who didn’t cry once during the trip, and her mother are welcomed joyously, and Kaila disappears into the arms of one auntie and then another, and then through a series of cousins, or sisters and brothers. Her mother rests after the long ride. Nidiria sits and laughs with her old friends. The WOLA people talk softly with our hosts.
At last we make our way in the dark, in the rain, up a walkway that has become a stream, to a school. We sit at the small desks, and the room fills up. Someone jerry-rigs a lightbulb and a microphone to a cord which goes out the window to a generator somewhere. More neighbours come. The room is packed. People stand thick along the outside of the barred windows.
Before we talk, a smaller group of men and women gather in front of the classroom, to drum, to sing. How could I ever describe this sound, not even music, exactly? How could I, with my thin-white-Nordic blood, ever say anything at all about what this drumming and singing means? Something so ancient, so holy, so filled with sorrow and resistance, struggle and survival of 15-20 generations from the capture of their ancestors in Africa. If this isn’t Resurrection, I don’t know what is. The shaking, the lament, the song of determination fills the room, fills the hearts and souls of everyone present, pressing us all into a bonded commitment, a kind of vow that can never be broken. When they finish at long last, I don’t know what else needs to be said. The woman leading the singing says one thing: “This is a song of gratitude, and welcome. Thank you.” I lower my head. My eyes burn.
But of course, there is more to be said. One person after another speaks a part of the story. Adam types away on his computer, which came upriver sealed in a freezer-size Ziploc bag.
On April 17th, three men, brothers Hermes Angulo Zamora and Obdulio Angulo Zamora and their cousin, Simeón Olave Angulo, disappeared from somewhere along the river. After they failed to return, community members searched up and down the waterways. They reported the disappearance to government officials in Buenaventura. Tensions continued to climb. A third brother, Iber Angulo Zamora, was increasingly threatened. Support was again demanded from the departmental capital.
At last, on May 5th, a commission from the Human Rights Ombudsman office came to escort Iber out of the region. On the water they were confronted by armed men in a boat, who pulled Iber into their possession and sped away. Later, the four disappeared men were found executed.
Fears are high that the army is using these murders as an excuse to move in and take over the region. And right behind them, the paramilitaries. The river is, some community leaders say, already surrounded by the army, who have no regard for the communities’ ways of practicing vigilance. Nidiria points out that for more than 300 years Afro-descendant communities have defended and conserved the river and the earth. There is hope for increased unity between Afro and Indigenous people of the Naya.
There is some debate around small-time coca farmers, up and down the river. These farmers have never become wealthy but have served as a source for the raw coca leaves. Coca farmers are trapped. They have few other options. The government promised to help with new crops, and thousands of farmers signed contracts stating that they will no longer plant coca. But as usual, those getting shafted are the already poor. There has been no meaningful support for the transition, and in the meantime, the power struggle to control the coca trade ratchets up, with farmers trapped in the middle.
The discussion carries on for hours. Lollipops and chocolate cookies are distributed at some point. Finally the gathering comes to an end. I sit up quickly when Enrique asks if I might pray with the community.
“Of course,” I say. How to pray here in this place, with these people, what can I possibly say? Thank God for the Holy Spirit who always gives the words to speak. I think, well, why not start the prayer like I start every prayer. Not sure if it will work here.
“El Señor sea con ustedes,” I say.
“Y con tu espíritu,” comes thundering back, more people than I can count.
And so, in the dim flickering light, in the pouring rain, in a schoolhouse in Las Conchas I close my eyes and we pray.
3.
It rains all night in Las Conchas. There’s not a sound in the little dry house, except for a dog—there’s always a dog. Bark. Bark. Bark. But I sleep completely senseless, wiped out from so much travelling, listening, until the first roosters crack the morning chorus.
We are up with the first light. We eat soda crackers and drink hot, sweet coffee. Then we go back down the river, so much faster than the day before. The shallow areas from yesterday have filled in with last night’s rain. It’s still blustery and even cold, especially in the fast boat. Marcia and I make a Yasmin sandwich, and we wrap ourselves all up in tarps. There are children in school uniforms in the thin canoas, standing up and pushing along the river’s edge. Today’s the first day of school, after holidays, and they are heading to the nearest classroom. Yasmin whispers to me, “We have school today too.” I have no idea how far we still have to go downriver. Go, boat, go!
We arrive in San Francisco. No sign of the soldiers. We change boats and float down past the giant Jesus frozen in eternal blessing.
Before long we spy Joaquincito. It’s still morning, about 9 o’clock. Marcia, Yasmin and I disembark, climb the wooden stairs. The WOLA folks and the Comisión people wave and push off. About a month, Adam yells over the motor, until they’ll have their official WOLA report on the Naya River. We duck under the low roof and step in—suddenly we’re in the Casa Grande. It is dark, cool. I imagine it full of people for ceremonies and meetings.
So, here I am. Now what? Surrender, open, trust, love. Plutarco comes out to greet us. He’s the head of the community. Later I find out he’s Marcia’s older brother and the community health promoter.
Joaquincito is the Resguardo, the reserve of the Eperara community of the lower Naya River. There are about a hundred Indigenous nations all over Colombia, settled from the lowland rivers that head west to the Pacific, or north to the Caribbean, or east to join the great Amazon, to the highlands that meet the mountains and the edge of the Andes. In Joaquincito there are 42 households, mostly Indigenous, with just a few Afro or Mestizo families blended in. Along the river there are far more Afro-descendant settlements, 30 times as many as Indigenous communities.
Marcia leads me to the other side of the Casa Grande, through a wooden kitchen with a fire pit rigged up on cement blocks with a sand base. There’s the biggest cooking pot I’ve ever seen—upside down now. That must feed everybody.
“We just had a big feast,” says Marcia. “Five days ago.”
We shimmy down a treacherously (for me) damp wooden ladder, across some soft planks, then up onto a long, cement platform, about three feet above the wet ground.
“That’s the bridge,” says Marcia. “We fought years for that. Blood was spilt for it.” The bridge stretches out along the front of the houses. Each house reaches the bridge with a simple plank. Drainage canals carve into the land, which is often underwater depending on the level of the river, which floods with heavy rain and the sway of the ocean’s tide.
We go down two, three, four houses to Plutarco’s place.
“We’ll stay next door, with my mother,” says Marcia. “But it’s more comfortable here.” We slip inside. “I’ll get breakfast.”
I meet Plutarco’s wife, Paula. There are piles of kids, Plutarco and Paula’s children, Paula Andrea, Paulo Andres, Junior and little Ingrid. And Marcia’s son, Alejandro. Then comes Marcia’s mother up the plank, carrying two full, sloshing pails of water from the river. She nods a greeting to me and snaps a few words in Siapidara.
I sit in a chair at a small table. Marcia has disappeared through a door and left me with the kids. They are taking turns swinging in a hammock. Ingrid, who is one and a bit, stares at me with a look of suspicion as she moves from sister’s hip to cousin’s arms, then back again. Who’s this woman, say her fierce undisguised eyes.
Marcia comes back in a bit with a plate piled with food—just for me. Yikes. Four boiled green bananas, a hill of rice and a piece of rich pink pork. “That’s from the feast,” she says. “My brother smoked it. It takes a long time, but it lasts then for a good while, about a week.” Of course. There’s no refrigeration here, only electricity once in a while with an expensive generator.
Dear Lord, I’m in Rio Naya bacon heaven! Who knew that pork could be this delicious? Greasy and meaty and smoky. The green bananas are starchy and bland, perfect with a piece of bacon embedded.
While I’m finishing up a great fuss is going on in the house across from me—later I find out it’s the general store, which enjoys the only constant electricity, provided by a large solar panel. We head out to see. José de la Cruz has hunted an animal in the night, and now it’s coming to be weighed, and sold, I presume. I ask what it is, and get “rabbit” and “wild pig” as answers. The beast is now headless, so I can’t really tell. Not by looking at its little trotters. A sharp thin knife carves it into pieces.
After this, Marcia calls me to go back to the Casa Grande. There’s going to be a community meeting—a chance for me to get to know more people. We gather in the cool dark space. We sit on wide platform benches, men, many women, and many more children. Plutarco greets me officially. I say thank you, and then I listen.
Arturo, the school teacher, speaks first: “We are one of 102 different nations in what is now called Colombia. After the Spanish invasion we were called savages, then we were called, pejoratively, “minors” or infants. In 1991 there were reforms to the national law and we were recognized as nations, and the Afro-descendant communities were as well. We lived in peace. Then in 2001 we suffered the terrible internal displacement. We fled to Buenaventura, to other rivers, and no one helped us. We returned, and we know our rights, but so far that is just on paper. In 1989 the limits of our Reserve were defined, then in 2005 they were extended. There has been some disagreement with the Afro-community, but there has been a lot of work on building unity. The government owes us a lot, and we have received barely anything. Now, for example, they are saying something ridiculous: We own the land, as Indigenous people, but the government owns what’s under the land. That makes no sense to us.”
Oh dear, I think. The mining companies are already hovering here. Possibly Canadian. Beware.
Then Inez speaks: “I am the head of the Women’s Association. We have had a lot of troubles. The government promised us support, but nothing at all has arrived. Then there were the fumigations. We lost everything: even our seeds. We had yams and yucca, sugarcane and plantains. We lost most of it. The earth no longer yields much. We’ve had to go further and further into the forest, away from the village.”
Norberta speaks: “We don’t want mining or any such thing. We haven’t asked for much, but we haven’t received anything at all. We need a health centre, a school, decent housing. We’ve had no support since the displacement in 2001. We have insisted that there be dialogue. We are tired after 52 years of war. Our young people don’t want war. We live in paradise here. We have taken care of this place, we have looked after our own. They don’t want to admit that the military are here, and the paramilitaries, but we know that they are around. This is a Reserve, not a Humanitarian Zone like they have up the river. But this is a weapons-free zone too. Twice the army has arrived in the community, and twice the community has chased them off. All the Naya River has been in resistance. We have been fighting for 527 years, with our own culture, language and art. The last straw was the fumigations in 2012 and 2013.”
Cecilia agrees: “Everything was lost. The earth herself got sick. Our food supplies have diminished. Our pineapple, for example. And we live in fear. We built our Sacred Big House in 1991, and we have been saying forever: Mother Earth is not to be destroyed, not our forests. This is the very heart, soul, strength of the Earth. We are the only Indigenous community on the lower Naya, and we have been fighting militarization and big companies. And now they are threatening to fumigate again.”
The meeting goes on until many have spoken. I feel like I’m starting to get a sense of the story. Just a taste.
Marcia invites me to go back to the house. They are going to carry on in meeting. I am exhausted. I need a nap. I think fondly of the hammock as I negotiate my way up the slippery plank to Plutarco’s house. But what do I find? Ingrid is sleeping in the hammock, across its soft width, a perfect little bundle. I am embarrassed at how grouchy I feel: here I am uncomfortable and tired—and jealous of a baby!
Marcia is away in the Casa Grande for a long time. I’m glad she doesn’t feel like she has to entertain me constantly. I sit and read my book by the Andean theologian Victor Bascopé, the man who showed me how to make coca leaf tea and how to chew coca leaves when I was in Ecuador. He had told me about how hard it was to research the detailed story of the invasion of the Spaniards. The murder of so many leaders, both named and those now forgotten, and so many others. The treasures that were stolen, and much, much worse, the theft, destruction, attempted annihilation of Andean cosmology.
“When I look at the rocks making up the walls and churches and colonial buildings I just cry,” says Victor. “Each stone is an ancestor.”
I am reading about the nosebleed-high Andes, and I am here in the warm always-wet lowlands. The people and stories are linked, though not the same, of course. The invasion narratives of the Spanish, the Portuguese, the English and the French have common threads. For King, for Queen, for Church.
At last, Marcia’s back from the meeting. They aren’t going to Buenaventura tomorrow after all. Not until Wednesday. I can go with them. Marcia’s worried that I haven’t had lunch. I’m stuffed, I reassure her. She’s trying so hard to help me, to guess what I need. I am still figuring out how to be here. Mostly I try not to be a nuisance. Whatever may be uncomfortable or different or not the way I would do it. Forget it! Receive everything. I am filled with gratitude.
We go to the sacred river. Yasmin comes, and little Paula joins us. Everyone jumps into the river. Even though we’re in the warm equatorial waters, I have to ease myself in, down the worn ladder. The water is brown and slow and cool. Once I’m in, the river seems wide and endless. We splash and play. Marcia washes herself, and then a tub of clothes, while sitting on a low wooden step. The girls pretend to be sharks, and they do cartwheels from the soft bank into the water. They are like baby otters, twisting and splashing and smiling. They find a canoa, and they paddle around and around. They convince me to get in, and around we go, laughing without walls of any kind.
This river is holy. It is the artery of the whole body, the means by which people here live. It is where they bathe and wash and pull water for everyday things. It is their means of travel and their source of fish. The river changes, with the tides and the cycles of the moon and the rains.
“Naya Tooja.” Sacred River Naya, Marcia whispers. “Cho nara weda tooja beda.” No human hand could have ever made this river. No human hands dug the channels or made the turns. We float, and more than that: we are carried.
4.
It rains all night again, and I sleep in Marcia’s bed—without Marcia—with the mosquito netting all tucked in around in the absolute dark, in the absolute silence, but for the roosters that set one another off, then call down the row at three, four, five in the morning. By five or six o’clock, I know, everyone will be getting up. There was one single shattering of thunder last night—I didn’t see the schism of lightning. It was after we were in bed around nine and it seemed to crack the wooden houses with the power of its sound. Yasmin began to cry. Her mother’s soft words pulled her back into sleep, to comfort, to shelter.
Again, I wonder what I can do, what I can say? It takes so much energy to host me, to welcome me, to worry about me, to make space for me. Would it be better if I did something in a different way? Why am I here? Of course, I am not the Great White Saviour. But is there some part of me that wants to be? I have nothing to offer but my self. Marcia is clear, and she has shared with others: Emilie doesn’t come to bring projects or money.
Yet there is something about me being here—for me, and for the community. What does it mean that someone sees, someone notices, someone listens? For them and for me. I lie and think and toss a little. The rain comes down in steady soft waves along the roof. In a while, it is not quite as dark as it used to be.
At last it is five or so, and we get up. The day starts. Children are sleepy, still staying close to home, and to mothers. The women go into the wet side of the house. I am starting to figure it out. The front of the house is the ‘dry’ part. Here people sleep, sometimes in a separate room walled off, and in the back is where the cooking and washing happens, in a room still up on stilts. The back food-area is divided too, the preparing side and the washing part—where dishes and fish, root vegetables and even babies are rinsed and scrubbed—and then out on the very edge a fire on a bed of sand and stone. The back area opens to the sides and the bright green everywhere of growing things. This room is where the action is, at least in the daytime. Grandmas and mothers and aunties and kids gather here. Another hammock and a few small stools are occupied, so I sit on the floor. I like it better here than on my own on the other side of the wooden wall, where I spent the afternoon reading yesterday. Plutarco comes in with a mess of fish, and Marcia’s peeling green bananas. For now, we drink sweet hot coffee and eat soda crackers while the fish get cleaned.
I’m starting to understand food here now too. All meals seem to be a starch and a protein. Starches so far have been yucca, taro, purple yams, and green banana. The first three, and the last too sometimes, are prepared boiled. Twice we have the bananas fried, once whole, and once squashed into disks, patacones. The proteins we eat are best bacon ever, eggs, lots of fish, boiled or fried, beans, and once, chicken—but we’ll get to that part later. Everything is so good. Then there’s the fruit: sugarcane (peeled, sucked and chewed, spitting the hard, twiggy part out), green coconuts (drinking the fresh water first, then eating the thin, slippery bits inside after cracking open with a machete), guanabana, grenadilla, cherimoya, pitaya (weird yellow blobby thing with black spots, mushy white and melting inside), lulo (only for juice), papaya, maracuya (passion fruit? eat together with crunchy seeds), bacao which I thought was cacao, and is indeed a relative (very strong smell and taste, bitter crossed with sour, inedible for me—I give it to happy, receiving children), bananas and plantains, which I only see cooked and green, and my favourite: zapote—pumpkin orange, sweet and slimy, with two fat, long, slippery brown seeds. The zapote is given to me as I walk along the raised cement platform by a young man rushing by with two of them. He stops and turns when he sees me, and hands me one of his treasures.
The fruit is all gift. People come by the house to deliver or call me into their house across the wooden plank. I receive everything, try everything, like everything (except the bacao).
Doña Cecilia particularly likes to come by. She talks to me, and she asks me questions. She invites me to her house. “My house is really clean,” she says, and she shows me around the yard, back a bit from the cement platform and along another platform, this one made of wood. Her yard is a little bit drier—at least for now—as it is farther from the slow, mud-brown river that rises up every twenty days or so and floods under the closer houses. She shows me where she has a raised compost pile. She shows me her flowers, her fruit trees and her medicinal herbs—she and her husband, Bejerano, are healers. “This one is for stomach upset, this for headache, this for (mal de) ojo, this for sadness.” She takes me—and a whole handful of children—up a narrow path that leads even farther away from the river. We should have gumboots, she says, eyeing my flip-flops skeptically. We wander up the squashy path until it is apparent that it just won’t work. The earth is too soft. I am ankle deep in mud. Further up, she points, we have our plantings, the yams, and papas chinas (taro). She tells me more about how terrible it has been since the fumigations.
The Colombian government, with the full support of the USA and its ‘war on drugs,’ has engaged in extensive spraying for years. The chemical defoliant, glyphosate—the main toxic component in Monsanto’s Roundup—was repeatedly sprayed in aerial raids on coca plants and—according to residents of the Naya River basin—everything else: food crops, houses, animals and even people. In 2015 the government promised to stop fumigations by airplane after the World Health Organization declared that glyphosate was a proven carcinogen. However, the threat of resumed spraying remains, the latest possibility being drones to deliver the poison.
“So many things have just dried up,” says Doña Cecilia, sadly. “No pineapple at all. Nothing is growing in some areas.” People have told me of strange diseases not known in these regions before. Marcia’s mother had to endure the choppy boat ride to Buenaventura and have a large tumour removed from her neck.
Don Bejerano shows me his carvings: a sweet little turtle, a bird, and a gorgeous walking stick carved with a couple of birds, and just below the handle, a man, holding a staff of his own and a mochila, a woven bag.
Doña Cecilia worries at the fire and brings me my first fried fish of the day—crispy with salt sizzled right through. I pick at it and eat it delicately, saving on the side bones thinner than a needle. Her grandson comes by, and Doña Cecilia sends him up a palm tree to get us a couple of fresh coconuts. He sheds his shoes and shimmies up fast, but stops about two-thirds of the way up. He yells something down to his grandma, then scoots down quickly.
“There’s a new wasp’s nest up there!” they explain to me, laughing. We’ll have to wait for our drinks.
As we share stories—I tell them about my red-headed grandson and my black shaggy dog—I can feel the threads begin to connect us. Doña Cecilia tells me about her son, who died, about how heartbreaking and constant is her desolation. Once, she says, a long time ago, she tried to live somewhere else; her husband is from the Chocó region, but she could never get used to not being on the Naya. She tells me her story of the displacement in 2001.
It was further up the river, in the Afro communities where the worst violence took place. By various estimates, between 40 and 130 civilians were killed over a few days, many brutally. Bodies were dissected with a chainsaw. Quickly, the information flew down the river: leave, now, get out. Most everyone did. It was a massive exodus of boats, big and small. Some went into the town of Puerto Merizalde to stay with family, many went into hiding along quieter branches of the river. And others went all the way to Buenaventura. The whole river was drained of people. Doña Cecilia says that at first they refused to go. But at last Doña Cecilia, Don Bejerano, and their children climbed onto a boat. They made it downriver, to a branch along the mangroves where they hid for five days.
Then they decided to go back, no matter what. Five families returned to Joaquincito together. They stayed in one house, afraid of the paramilitaries, who were hunting up and down the river. They stayed and ate what they could.
“The worst thing was listening to the dogs and the chickens die. We had nothing to feed them, and almost everyone had gone. They didn’t have time to take their animals. The animals cried and cried from the pangs of hunger, and finally they died. The Sisters (from the order of Mother Laura) heard we were starving and brought us a little bit of food, dried rice and beans. We held out for a few weeks, but in the end, we had to travel down to the city, to Buenaventura, where for two years we lived as refugees.”
We sit quietly together. I am thinking about the recent murders on the river, the ongoing deaths, the attacks on leaders of all social organizations. Back at the conference in Medellin, we named and prayed for the over three hundred Colombian community leaders murdered since the signing of the Peace Accords, two years ago.
We sit and then I go back with the flock of children to Plutarco’s house. We eat more fried fish, soft and salty, which never seems to be too filling. Marcia’s sister-in-law drops by, with a young woman—her daughter-in-law—and her brand-new baby grandson. We chat, and I hold the baby, and then, when it seems polite, hand him back to his mother. The women consult for a while in Siapidara. I smile nicely. Marcia comes up to me and asks me quietly, “They want you to baptize the baby.”
My heart thuds. What to do? How can I be both pastoral and stay within the bounds of acceptable church practice? I know I can do the former and don’t always trust myself with the latter.
The only important question in this instant is: What would be of assistance to this family? What do they need? I don’t worry about correctness within the church, but do I care about being honest with this family. Baptism is a mark of belonging. Of course, all creation, and every creature, especially this perfect little one with dark hair and black eyes, lying in my arms, is loved, adored, treasured by his family—and by the One who made us all. Baptism is a way we humans turn and shout yes back to God.
There is no priest or pastor who ever visits this community. And me? I am, now, a friend. I say yes, let’s bless the baby! Let’s get some water. They bring me clean water, from the big jugs of filtered water left for me by the prepared WOLA people. We pour a bowlful. We gather around, the children and the women. I hold little Liam Mejia. We pray together. May the Creator of Heaven and Earth ever hold you close, little one. May you flourish in love, in this place. May you grow to the fullness of your life. May you play in this river for many, many years. May the fruit be abundant. May the pineapples return.
In my heart I pray that the wolves of greed and violence that surround this community may be held at bay. I pray that the Naya won’t be invisible to the world. That the Afro communities standing for their right to live, to flourish, may be allowed to exist as signs of the bursting through of justice. And that the Indigenous communities may be left to practice their knowledge, their time-out-of-mind knowing of things that matter. So many things that we have forgotten. And I pray that we—the rich, the north—can turn our hearts away from greed and towards love for all creation.
Liam is asleep. He moves and stretches a little as the water pours off of his head, onto the wooden floor, through the cracks, and back to the water below.
Earlier in the day, as I peered out of the wooden morning window and out along the cement walkway, I saw a woman carrying two unfortunate upside-down chickens. They seemed to have given up, no squawking was happening as their tails pointed to the sky. Uh no, I thought. Too much. Has Marcia asked for them to be brought to me here? I am being a nuisance. I nodded as the woman approached, then sighed in relief as she walked by our plank, down one, two, three doors, and up to another house.
But now, after our blessing, I’m told that there is a chicken soup coming back to Plutarco’s house. The chickens were killed to celebrate this impromptu baptism. I am served a big bowl. Liam sleeps and we eat.
Later I spy his mother with a whole group of young women and men out on a raised platform playing soccer with a squashed, wet ball. Every few minutes the ball flies off into the mud and the water on the ground. Then it starts raining. No one stops playing, laughing, shouting, and the game goes on until the sun hovers over the western bank of the river.
Just before it sinks into the jungle trees, Marcia and I go along the cement platform, then along the wooden walkway to the holy river, to her most holy river, her cho nara weda tooja beda, her ancestral river, made by no human hands. Here we sit and dangle our feet into the warm water. Tomorrow, before dawn, we will be going out to the open sea, through waves rolling bigger than our boat, to Buenaventura—one of the most dangerous cities in Colombia—she with Plutarco to settle things, to fight with the state, me to catch a bus back to the Convent of Mother Laura in Medellin, and a plane back to Canada. We feel sad already. I will go with my heart made bigger, my life somehow different. Marcia—who knows why she reached out to me, what she saw, what she sees?
It doesn’t matter. This is how two women become friends.
Afterword
This essay was written in 2019-2021. Since my visit I have had steady, if laconic, exchanges with Marcia. Sea changes have happened in her life, and in Colombia. In January 2020 Marcia welcomed a new baby, with her husband, Colombian Indigenous activist, Wilson Poirama. In June 2022, Marcia began advanced studies at the Pontifical University in Medellin.
Marcia writes, “Agradecer primero a mi dios por darme una oportunidad de vivir y también a mis amigo internacinale que me ayudaron para mí salud y esa es la razón de vivir en este planeta tierra, agradecer a mi esposo wilson poirama por apoyar mis metas, mis carrera profesional, en todas mis proyecion, tambien familiares como hermano, hermanas, mi madre querida, mis hijos gracias a todos asi puedo avanzar nueva mente encontrar en la universidad”
Translation: “First of all, I would like to thank my god for giving me an opportunity to live and also my international friends who helped me with my health (crisis), and that is the reason for living on this planet Earth; I would like to thank my husband Wilson Poirama for supporting my goals, my professional career, in all my plans, also relatives like my brother, sisters, my dear mother, my children; thanks to all so I can advance again in the university.”
There are hopeful changes at the national level as well. In August 2022, Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla and the ex-mayor of Bogotá and, thrillingly, Francia Márquez were inaugurated as President and Vice-President of Colombia. Márquez, an Afro-descendant woman from Cauca, a renowned and beloved community leader and anti-mining activist, has invited her countrypeople to join her in living a “vida sabrosa”, a life with flavor, a life with dignity, joy and power. Popular movements are gathering strength.
Adam and Gimena from the Washington Office on Latin America have kept their eyes on the Colombian story, especially watching and reporting on the risks and triumphs of local community leaders. Here is their fine article summarizing the current context.
I plan to visit Marcia in March 2023, as part of the gathering of the Óscar Romero International Christian Network in Solidarity with the Peoples of Latin America (SICSAL).
Living in the Necrocene, and being somewhat cognisant of environmental change as it happens around me, has its disadvantages. There’s a constant, low-level preoccupation with death: of species, of ecosystems, of potential futures. This tends to be reinforced by my choice of reading material. As a speculative writer myself, and one who often focuses on climate and environmental fiction, I read as widely as possible in this genre—mostly, if I’m honest, to see how other people are coping. Other writers, anyway. The way we collectively explore the age of death, and the ways in which we try to navigate it, to construct some sort of blueprint out of imagination and prose… I find it fascinating.
