Category: Nonfiction

Dheepa R. Maturi

In my childhood, I remember whispering the names under my breath, determined to ward off my family’s amusement by pronouncing them precisely: Tiruchirappalli and Thanjavur, Dindigul and Erode, Coimbatore and Chidambaram. These were the cities of my summer vacations, where I visited relatives, temples, and sights throughout the southeastern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

Occasionally in view as we traveled by car and train was Cauvery, South India’s third-largest river, bisecting Tamil Nadu roughly west to east. My father would point out her drying riverbeds and then explain water cycles and drought and the timing of monsoons. After sweltering hours on the road, I wasn’t particularly receptive to his facts and figures. Nevertheless, I listened groggily as he reminisced about the Cauvery of his own childhood, her waters ample and clear, and as he worried for her future.

Now, decades later, Cauvery’s crisis conditions have accelerated from pressing to dire. With so many Indian cities losing groundwater at an alarming rate—and indeed, predicted to lose it entirely at any moment—their governments increasingly turn to Cauvery’s river water, extracting it with pumps, collecting it in tanks, and then transporting it to clamoring crowds.

As groundwater drains, the water table falls below river levels—which means Cauvery now feeds the groundwater, too, like a mother pouring her attention wherever she’s called. But as climate change alters monsoon patterns, Cauvery herself is barely fed and never replenished.

As I hear of the worsening droughts, of the increasing desperation and displacement, it’s particularly harrowing to learn which cities in the Cauvery basin are approaching Day Zero, when all the taps run dry. Some are those I visited throughout my childhood, the cities where family members live at the front lines.

A wide rectangular room anchored my grandparents’ home in the city of Karur and accommodated most household activities, even eating and sleeping. As a child, a major source of my amusement was cartwheeling from one end of this room to the other, where the narrow passage to the kitchen and bathroom commenced.

At that entryway stood a tiny sink with an equally miniscule faucet—everyone’s first stop for morning ablutions, specifically, toothbrushing. I still remember my mother’s scolding when I accidentally let the water run while brushing, as well my relatives’ look of shock at my wanton disregard. I learned that two or three quick fistfuls of water from the tap were considered sufficient for a rinse and eventually mastered those motions. But my irritation—and shame—lingered.

At the time, I didn’t consider the possible reasons for the tight management and careful husbanding of household water—I only felt the inconvenience. I struggled to get my long hair fully washed with the allotted two buckets of bath water. Sitting on a short stool, I used a small chombu to pour the water over my head; it took me a week or so to get the knack of maximizing its coverage.

During summers of drought, I sometimes had to draw my bathwater from a storage well at the side of the bathroom. During those droughts, the thick wall of this storage well was lined with larger chombus, used to catch extra water whenever the taps were running. That captured water would be used later for washing clothes or cleaning the household.

Even in a clean and well-maintained home like my grandparents’, the stored water containers attracted the dengue-spreading Aedes mosquito species, which hospitalized me at age seven. The stored water itself also presented challenges, often tasting a bit strange and even altering the flavor of the food cooked in it.

My grandparents’ home was comfortably outfitted by community standards, with an attached groundwater well, some pipes, and a few sinks. Unlike other families, we did not have to fetch water from elsewhere. With attentive management, there was enough with which to cook, wash, and to transport in stainless steel thermoses when we traveled—after, of course, it had been thoroughly boiled, filtered, and cooled.

At a certain point during my summer vacations, one vision sustained me: returning home to America, filling a tall glass with ice, then adding water straight from the tap. I dreamed of that brimming liquid and my first frosty gulp and the sweet taste.

Just a few more weeks, I’d tell myself.

As a child learning Bharath Natyam, a classical dance form native to South India, I was discouraged at times by the notoriously rigorous physical training. I knew, though, if I bided my time, I’d eventually cross the bridge from nritta (physical steps) to nrithya (facial expressions), and finally, to what I longed for: natya (drama). At its heart, Bharath Natyam is a storytelling tradition, and I longed to be the one dancing those stories.

The stories were those I’d learned from my parents and grandparents, from books and Sunday School lessons—compelling tales of sages, warriors, kings. Later, in high school and college, I enjoyed researching these stories further, digging into their philosophical and spiritual dimensions, and then watching as expert dancers communicated those more esoteric aspects.

For example, a physically skilled dancer might accurately execute Shiva’s signature tandava dance—but could she demonstrate how it symbolized the ever-pulsing circle of creation and destruction? An expressive dancer might easily portray a woman’s assiduous search for her beloved—but could she evoke the soul’s longing to merge with Oneness?

When I could see and understand what a dancer truly meant to convey, it felt exciting and revelatory, like a flash of light.

At a 2019 Isha Foundation fundraiser for Cauvery Calling, a massive river revitalization effort, I watched a set of dances relating well-known tales of the woman named Cauvery, the wife of a renowned sage, who accepted the task of irrigating South India. At one point during the evening, the featured dancer told the story of another river, the Ganga, whose connection to India’s history and mythology is as deeply rooted as Cauvery’s. Though I’d heard many versions of Ganga’s story, my skin prickled at this particular interpretation of the old tale:

Humanity needed Ganga’s sacred waters on the Earth, and she was ordered to descend there from heaven. Angered by the order, Ganga planned to sweep the Earth away in a furious torrent. Appealed to for assistance, Shiva, the divine ascetic and yogi, caught Ganga as she descended in the thickly matted locks of his hair, where she remains now, eternally entangled. She is released only gradually, reliably, and sustainably for humanity’s survival.

Locks. Entanglement. Sustainable release. In the context of the event and the information being shared there, I understood what the dancer wanted to tell me.

I saw that flash of light.

In the last few generations, forests flanking Indian rivers have been cleared for a variety of reasons, for example to follow non-traditional agricultural methods. For millennia, those forests produced thick, interlocking networks of roots and topsoil, which trapped water in the earth. That water was released gradually, feeding the river continuously and sustainably. The dense tree cover resulted in transpiration, drawing rainfall, and acting as another source of water for the river. The river never dried, and, due to the tightly-woven root networks, the monsoons couldn’t wash away all of the nutrient-rich topsoil.

Encoded in the dance was this age-old wisdom. Shiva’s locks represent the underground root-soil networks. Ganga’s capture represents the sustainable release of water and preservation of topsoil. This is a story of the structures and cycles holding the water in our rivers. It’s a story of the natural world in balance.

It is estimated that Indian land has supported agriculture for at least 10,000 years. However, over only the last few generations, the availability and nutritional value of its soil has plummeted due to climate change factors and the recent “Green Revolution” that encouraged farmers to abandon traditional crops, deploy chemical fertilizers, and plant high-yield seeds.

Lacking adequate water and nutrient-rich soil to produce crops, and now trapped in debt and despair, Indian farmers are committing suicide at a shocking rate—some sources estimate 60,000 suicides over the last three decades. This desperation has prompted responsive measures such as the Cauvery Calling campaign, an alliance of scientists, universities, associations, and government bodies.

Soil health is deeply connected to river health, and as such, soil depletion results in river depletion. Cauvery Calling is implementing a large-scale intervention, planting a kilometer-width of trees on both sides of the Cauvery, over her full length, in order to build up organic material in the soil, increase water percolation into the river, and promote water retention within the river. Farmers enrolled in the program are gradually diversifying to fruit tree-based agriculture and are receiving educational and moral support during the entire period of transition.

There is an old saying in the Tamil language: even if the rains fail, Cauvery will never fail. Sayings like these are now subject to question. Within a few generations, 10,000 years of traditional agriculture have come undone. Within a few generations, rivers that flowed for millennia have drained, and the forests that sustained nutrient-rich topsoil have been depleted.

It is now predicted that 25 percent of India will turn to desert. I find it unimaginable that this land I visited regularly, bursting with plants and insects, exploding with color and fragrance, overflowing with fruits and flowers, could lose its ability to support life—unimaginable that its teeming soil could turn to sand.

As this desertification advances, I wonder whether the erstwhile profession of water divination—the detection of drinkable water by examining local vegetation—might revive. The ancient sage Sarasvata composed a geo-botanical guide to prospect for groundwater based upon micro-environmental ecology, noting how, for example, the presence of a date palm near jujube and piu trees pointed to water, as did certain ficus varietals in proximity to one another. Later, in the 6th century C.E., Varahamihira built upon this work, listing 120 plants serving as groundwater indicators. Though such guides may possess less relevance due to irreparably damaged and altered landscapes, I suspect that the people drawn to this profession, being instinctively tuned to the natural world, will adapt.

I met such a figure recently, not in India, but in Santa Cruz, California. She was not a water diviner, but rather a forager who searched for edible foods among the grasses, weeds, and trees in the area.

When my husband and I began our hike with her, I found it difficult to concentrate, thinking of the wildfires that had raged in the area during the previous week, imagining another spark reigniting the landscape. But I slowly tuned in as the forager shared how to identify edible plants and explained which leaves and nuts and berries we could touch and eat. Each time, before placing an item in her mouth, she closed her eyes for a moment in gratitude to the land around her, the source of the food she consumed.

Though we hiked in a parched and dusty area, at one point we crossed into a clearing, its air fresh and cool. A pond rippled at our feet, inviting us to bend and touch the ground, to place our hands in the water.

I wished I could send myself backward in time to stop the car in India that held my child-self. I wished I could place her hands in the water, too. I’d ask her to feel Cauvery nourish the land, to look deeply into her waters.

I’d beg that child to ignore her various inconveniences. I’d ask her to stop worrying about pronunciations, to stop reciting city names, and instead to list all that the flowing water fed: Soil and Clouds, Leaves and Roots, Bodies and Cells.

Though I wouldn’t want to spoil her moment of communion, I’d feel obligated to warn her of the times to come, and to urge her to fight for the water, for her life, for the earth.

Sources

1. Das, Krishna N. and Shyamantha Asoken. “A Quarter of India’s Land Is Turning into Desert”. ScientificAmerican.org. Nature Publishing Group. 18 June 2014. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-quarter-of-india-s-land-is-turning-into-desert/

2. Isha Foundation. “Cauvery Calling”. https://www.ishaoutreach.org/en/cauvery-calling

3. Kumar-Rao, Arati. “India’s water crisis could be helped by better building, planning”. NationalGeographic.com. National Geographic Society. 15 July 2019. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/07/india-water-crisis-drought-could-be-helped-better-building-planning/#close

4. Safi, Michael. “Suicides of nearly 60,000 Indian farmers linked to climate change, study claims”. TheGuardian.com. Guardian Media Group. 31 July 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/31/suicides-of-nearly-60000-indian-farmers-linked-to-climate-change-study-claims

5. Salopek, Paul. “India is in a historic water crisis. Will diverting 30 rivers solve it?” NationalGeographic.com. National Geographic Society. 6 March 2019. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/03/india-diverting-30-rivers-to-solve-historic-water-crisis/

6. Zwerdling, Daniel. “‘Green Revolution’ trapping its farmers in debt.” Npr.org. Corporation for Public Broadcasting. 14 April 2009. https://www.npr.org/2009/04/14/102944731/green-revolution-trapping-indias-farmers-in-debt

Priya Chand

Water: what is it good for? Absolutely everything.

(I’m sorry. But also not. I hope that’s stuck in your head now.)

In privileged areas worldwide, access to clean water is never far away. Water is so ubiquitous—and, depending where you live, so seemingly renewable—that, if you are in this population, it’s easy to forget how easily disrupted these systems are, how quickly that convenient tap can go from potable to unsafe, how your recreational or work sites can be shut down or disrupted practically overnight.

I’m excited for all of you to read four perspectives that are as diverse as the challenges facing our water systems today. Each piece brings an environmental issue into stark personal focus. Whether it’s government or paramilitary action, the exploitation of resources far past what can be sustained, or the ever-lurking shadow of global warming, ecosystems are being transformed at unprecedented rates—and the people who inhabit these ecosystems alongside them.

But these are not stories of hopelessness. Part of focusing on the personal—my favorite part—is that it highlights points where individual action does make a difference. It’s easy to look at the challenges today and walk away thinking there is nothing to be done, but that elides the important work that people are doing every single day to protect and restore their communities.

Building resilience matters. If we want to restore natural continuity, we must start by ensuring our spaces—the full ecosystems, including the human elements—are healthy.

Tim Fab-Eme

We are so used to statistics that many of us rarely bother about the numbers and what they really mean until alarms trigger us to act. We rarely drink the right amounts of water even when we dread heat injuries, cerebral edema, urinary and kidney problems, seizures, and hypovolemic shocks. The poems in this issue are like a sensor for diagnosing water levels and the impact not only on our personal body but also on our real body—the Earth.

Human activities are increasingly unsettling water bodies everywhere—the Colorado River recedes revealing remains of the Vegas mob families—the Danube empties unveiling carcasses of World War II German warships—the Tiber falls low, showing the stone supports for Nero’s Bridge—the Po dries up leaving behind World War II tanks—the Elbe ebbs exhibiting an ancient hunger stone with the inscription: “if you see me, then weep.” And we have seen it and we cannot hide the tears falling as broken pieces of the graveyards, dinosaur footprints, settlements, gardens, and the other artifacts vomited by the waters turning toward other places. Because the amount of water in, on, and above the Earth is constant, changes in climate also mean that other rivers are experiencing more rainfall and flood, like the Amazon, the Nile, the Mississippi, the Yangtze, and the Murray.

These poems portray the precarious state of our waterways—from chemical to oil spills, from radioactive to nuclear waste, from invasive to endangered species—and it is not getting any better. Yet we cannot despair. Let us listen to these songs and reconsider our connectedness with the oceans, aquifers and springs, rivers and streams, wetlands, bays, and estuaries that are a part of us. Our body is fragile, our planet is fragile, and both of them are about two-thirds water. These poets, like physicians, have diagnosed our ailments and are calling us to reconsider our activities and care for our body, earth.

Octavia Cade

I grew up on the coast. That’s not unusual, coming from an island country as I do. Water is part of the daily life of islands, beyond the ways of drinking and planting that are common to all of us. Nearly every week my parents would take my sister and me down to the beach to play in the rock pools. The intertidal zone is something I never grew out of, and the sense memory of salt water and salted rock, the way they felt on my fingertips, is something I can easily call up.

There is something particularly relevant about those rock pools. They’re so easy to influence. All the little crabs and starfish, all the sea lettuce and Neptune’s necklace. My sister and I could have scoured it all out if we wanted to. We could have smashed the sharp-slicing baby mussels that lined the rocks. The pools could be so small that even as children we were large enough to outmatch them. What we didn’t realise, as children, was how tolerant rock pools are. The organisms that live there are adapted to such extremes. Their environment changes in salinity, in temperature, in exposure to sunlight, and in turbulence. There’s so much that they can survive . . . and then there was us, with our buckets and our ice-creams, ready to explore. Ready to shape.

That’s what the stories of this issue do. I think of them as rock pools, as little worlds with their authors standing over them, sunburned and observant. Maybe they don’t have ice-cream or those bright little buckets with them, but they’re still watching, because rock pools are places of wonder and of living with change. If we watch them closely enough, through that clear bright lens of water, we can learn to be adaptive too.

Brianna Cunliffe

Last September, they told us not to drink the water.

Our water, from our river, the same water that’s cooled every summer thirst, washed every dish at every birthday party, rinsed the sap off every Christmas since the day I was born.

The advisory was only a precaution, the news broadcast reassured us, but the Food Lion and Harris Teeter shelves were empty in hours flat. Even the Smartwater, the Fiji, the fancy-pants expensive stuff no North Carolinian in their right mind would ever buy in bulk—every case was gone.

Up the river in Fayetteville, the DuPont team responsible for the release of the chemical driving the drinking ban was gathered in some PR war room, but downstream, we turned to sweet tea, lemonade, coffee, orange juice, every other thing in the fridge, always starting for the tap and remembering just as we began to turn it.

But of course, some people went right on drinking the water, just like some people have parties on the beach during Category 4 storms, because this is the Carolina coast and we are nothing if not accustomed to disaster.

This was before Florence, when we had enough distance from a truly bad storm to cheer on the fledgling squalls spiraling off the Gulf Coast, craving the respite from life and school they would bring. And if they ever threatened with any seriousness to arrive, it was a crude, manic, festive vacation, as we boarded up windows, spray-painting challenges or prayers on plywood, surfers racing for storm swell as the ocean churned and they howled the joy of getting waves as close to California big as our east coast shore could ever muster.

In Wilmington, North Carolina, our history is made up of pirates, hiding behind piny shoals from the law, of stubborn generals in the last bastion of the civil war, flowering azalea, cobblestones, steeples on every corner, college basketball and hurricane parties, and so some people flapped their hands, scoffed at science, and went right on drinking the water.

In the coming months, clumsy local-news reporting fed us the piece-meal story: Once upon a time, DuPont, nee Chemours, manufactured shiny new Teflon upstream in Fayetteville, and to make it extra-shiny, they used a chemical (and I swear this is the name, though I know it sounds like a comic book kryptonite) called GenX. It flowed with the rest of the sludge deemed safe into the Cape Fear River. And one day, in a series of routine tests, they found it in the drinking water. Someone saw the results and rang the alarm bells, even if they didn’t know what they were ringing them for.

The impacts of GenX on human health are unclear. It’s a new chemical, one of many PFAs beginning to be called “forever chemicals”, developed as a replacement for the blacklisted PBDEs of the 1980s. They exist in a kind of grey regulatory limbo, not yet classified as toxic or completely cleared. They’ve caused cancer in some lab rats—news that makes your stomach turn when you turn on your tap—but it hasn’t been enough for companies to forgo their profitable use.

What was clear, though, was that the bottled Fiji water my more nervous neighbors were using to brush their teeth with wasn’t going to do any good. GenX had been in our water for almost a decade already, at 130,000 parts per trillion. If it was going to hurt us, the damage was done.

So there was a great Southern shrug, and we all turned on our taps. Just like turning up the music at a hurricane party as the winds howl. What’s done is done, what’ll come will come.

Meanwhile, every agency with an acronym east of Raleigh was floundering. The bogeyman of this long-term mystery molecule was proving impossible to wrangle, harder even than the coal ash spill from a few years back in the same long-suffering river. Suddenly its presence in the water and its questionable past were splayed out on scrolling cable news bulletins night after night. There were town halls packed full of scared angry people who wanted to know what was in their water, and the harried municipal inspector fresh out of school, the underpaid chemists from the treatment plant—they all had to tell their neighbors: we don’t know.

Let me be very clear: Wilmington is not Flint, Michigan. Environmental disasters always disproportionately affect already marginalized communities, hitting hardest the people who can’t afford a case of Fiji water or people in food deserts who walk to the corner store for groceries and couldn’t carry five cases even if they could afford it. And parallels of negligence are certainly present. But GenX isn’t lead. Our children aren’t dying. And our elected officials were blindsided by its presence in our water, just like us, even if the Chemours executives were not.

This is the place I am from: where a river only this year after tireless fighting has stopped carrying a wild-card chemical downstream into the taps of everyone I know and love, where coal ash was spilled in the same waters a few years back and there was never just restitution, Where surrounding farmland is plagued by algae-choked lakes, animal refuse is dumped with abandon as factory farms go unregulated, where building codes allow brand sparkling new oceanfront construction for the revenue they will generate despite the constant sea level rise and erosion, where people stare stubbornly into the eyes of storms like Florence, which took seventeen lives and left my hometown an island, which worsen with every passing year.

This is the place I live now: where I sit in a classroom in Maine and listen as a professor talks about the sublime American wilderness, where I major in a field of study centered around the ‘environment’, in a town where farmer’s markets dot the village green and grocery stores have started charging per plastic bag.

I write these words on a scientific station off the coast of Canada on a summer arts fellowship, with hundreds of miles of ocean between me and a factory, where we count with care the eggs of even the common gull and are careful not to let even hand soap contaminate the nesting sites of sparrows, where at night the only visible sign of human industry under the stars with the milky way caressing their swirling center is the lighthouses to the south and north. I am paid two dollars an hour more than the minimum wage in my state to write poetry about storm petrels and honeybees and the fog rolling in from the sea.

And at first glance, this makes sense to me. After all, there are places like Kent Island, and places like Wilmington. There and Here.

When most people talk about the environment, they mean Kent Island and the jungles of Belize, beautiful wondrous pristine places, distant places, There.

But beer cans in estuaries and a state park with trails layered over tore-up old motorbike paths, and the muddy river under fourth of July fireworks flowing, and the creek behind the subdivision, and the GenX flowing downstream—the environment is hiding Here, too.

There is an incredible contempt in America for the middle landscape—a term environmental scholars use to describe places like Here. Not catastrophe and ruin, oil spills or garbage dumps or black-lung from coal or the radium-girl shocking headlines from old factories, but the Here—the backyard grass that needs mowing.

But the problems in our thinking are the hardest to shift, especially when the pull of the There is so deeply ingrained, and we are all forced to deal with the drudgery and carnage of the Here.

Like the officials in my home town with their alarmist call to turn off the taps or like the DuPont inspectors who said nothing all those years, it is either feast or famine with the American imagination. We invoke a love of Nature to save the redwoods, while it isn’t even a word we connect with planted petunias on overpasses or roots scrabbling up in vacant lots.

No one is paying me to write poems about the flooded cobblestones on 3rd Street after the hurricane, greasy with sunscreen and gasoline, about the retention pond my dad and I fished in, always catching turtles on accident; no one is paying me to write poems about the bare shelves of Food Lion, even the Fiji water gone.

But maybe the answer is that I will anyway. Because I am sitting in this pristine paradise with all the privilege that comes along with it, and I’m telling you: they’re the same gulls circling overhead, the same goldenrod that grows along the highway in the place I am from. At home and far afield I have the same right to clean air and water and a livable planet, regardless of how well it translates into our romantic ideals of wilderness.

The “environment” is of no use to us if it ceases to exist where it cannot fit easily into poems like “Leaves of Grass” or even “The Wasteland”. Feast or famine are not the ways to live in the world. The power of activism spurred by imagination is futile if our contempt for the middle landscape blinds us to the necessity of change.

We all live in landscapes that shapeshift, passing through blurring borders of Here and There. It can seem impossibly incongruent: the carelessness of a tossed-aside beer can on a commercial shore and the gentle fastening of a thousand-dollar tracker to the wing of a burrowing grey bird.

But I am learning to blur these lines, to unhitch my sense of beauty from an obligation to perfection. Like anyone with the privilege to experience such beauty, I must grapple with my longing to always live on Kent Island, to set these places on their pedestals. I know that my hometown’s muddy river water is not truly separate from the waters crashing on this untouched shore. It is all flowing from the same headwaters; we all live downstream.

paulo da costa

By the hand of your great-uncle Zé and great-aunt Fernanda, you and your sister Amari enter the enormous bird enclosure. The cackle begins. The geese do what they do best, warn those inside and those one hundred metres around the farm that intruders have arrived. The sound is deafening. The peacocks join the chorus. You inspect the clay roost lined with straw, where the chickens lay their eggs.

“How many, Koah?”

You shrug, disappointed. There are none to collect.

The daily visits to the farm and to the animals offer you a type of informal schooling that no longer exists in this neighbourhood. You are the last student of this farmland, entering the pens, cages, coops to play with the animals, or running across the fields to inspect the bugs that hide under scattered implements. No other child is seen holding a ladybug on the palm of a hand, or sticking twigs into the mole’s underground tunnels, hoping to stir one out of its hide-and-seek game.

In these five months in Portugal you are becoming fluent in more than another human language to aid you in relating with different cultures. You are also learning to converse with the animals, the trees and the stones. You are listening to those who will soon be killed and eaten, and learning about the violence of the world. This is a place where the pigs hang by their hind legs, splayed at the spine like crimson books in butcher windows. At the end of our road, the suckling ones are a delicacy on a spit. The price of one euro per kilo is offensively low for a life, if there ever was a fair price for death.

Great-uncle Zé walks you around the little cement pond. Ducks race in laps, motored by their orange paddles, pretending it is not another typical day of mayhem. The blend of mud and fowl droppings, its squish, squish, arrests your steps. You stare at your once flashy green runners. Sighing, you carry on. The raft of ducks makes no waves until you arrive at the rectangular wooden bird house on stilts, home to the Pekin bantams. Then the ducks also quack up their own storm. You crawl and disappear inside the deep and narrow hens’ house too short even for your four years. Moments later you hold a tiny bantam egg. Your palm opens and closes, feeling the small frail shell.

The striking white feathers of the pheasant distract us from the ruthless beak that last week killed a Helmeted guinea fowl, and a peacock several times his size. The strong farm arms of your great-uncle Zé lift you to where, balanced and woven against a grapevine, baby pigeons chirp in their nest.

“We leave those babies be, Koah,” Uncle Zé tells you, as your hand stretches out to touch the nest.

Iridescent in the light, the nest shines from the blue-green peacock feathers collected to decorate it. The mother pigeon flies frenetically about the enclosure. Other pigeons fly in and out through the small gaps in the wire ceiling. These are racing pigeon refugees from the neighbour; birds no longer capable of earning their keep in medals or pride. They now seek shelter, easy food and company amid the larger family of winged ones.

This is the same uncle who decades ago invited me and the neighbourhood children for an afternoon of killings in the orchard. Hosts of sparrows had been pecking at the cherries, irritating him and other neighbours also at war with the hungry birds competing for their favourite fruits.

I remember wounded sparrows, wings broken by shots of the pellet gun, flapping sideways on the grass. I remember sparrows missing an eye, frozen in shock, blood trickling down the neck, the soft grey feathers in my hand staining red. I have never stopped remembering.

I stayed at a distance as the other houndlike boys raced after the fired shot and fetched the wounded creatures, who remained very still in the grass, stunned by fright, pain or by the smell of death. The boys collected the quasi-dead sparrows and strung them by the feet, twenty to a twine, a cascade of death that hung from a post as a warning to other winged creatures. Including their ineffective guardian angels.

The neighbourhood boys and your great-uncle Zé proceeded to pluck the feathers from the tiny sparrows after they had been immersed in the stockpots of boiled water. This was the boys’ initiation into a mass killing that apparently had been a pastime in your great-uncle’s childhood. He sang the praises of the delicacy to come as a reward for the hard work of the afternoon soldiers: a well-earned tomato-rice bird stew. I remained a little behind the eager boys, chopping onions. My lips were clenched.

During the extended dinner preparation, great-uncle Zé entertained the boys with tales of ambushes, exotic snake attacks and night guerrilla battles during his time in a West African war, one of the bloodiest Portuguese colonial battles. Within fourteen years, in Guinea-Bissau, ten thousand conscripted soldiers lost their lives, and one hundred thousand Africans lost theirs. Many young Portuguese men fled the country to avoid the draft. Your underage great-uncle Zé was an eager early volunteer, later returning with a ‘love’ tattoo for his regiment on his forearm.

When the dinner call arrived, I did not sit at the long table of twelve. Hearing the tiny bird-bones crunching inside the joyful mouths of the other children served as the conclusion to that story. That was the afternoon I became a non-meat eater in my mind, although it took two more decades before it became daily practice.

The goats bleat; they recognize your voice in the distance. We climb the knoll to the upper fields where they await. In heat, the buck reeks. My eyebrows rise. You do not seem to mind the gallant’s choice of perfume. The goats press their bodies to the double wire fence that cannot prevent their heads from squeezing through. They stretch their tongues to reach for the deep green collard in your hand. After an hour of back and forth snapping collard leaves from the field, you lie down on the grassy ditch next to the fence and converse with the four-legged. I cannot hear what you say. Goats stare and listen, despite the lack of collard in your hands. Once in a while, the large male or the baby bleats.

You are learning about the imprisonments that condition the free movement of beings, and how a prison also conditions the guards, who can never live far from the fences themselves. One day, you will learn that this profession is still called husbandry, a practice rooted in domesticating and controlling the lands and its non-human creatures. And one day, a little or a lot later, you may choose to have a woman companion that convention will call a ‘wife’. Then you may want to question the links, the meanings encooped in these words, in these practices, and also choose not to be husband to a wife. Or a husband to a husband.

While you feed the goats collard leaves, your great-aunt Fernanda arrives with a glimmer in her eye. “Come.” You giggle and follow her; you appreciate surprises. It takes all your might to control the pace of your steps and remain behind your great-aunt. In the kitchen, by the fireplace, sits a shoebox. Ti Fernanda opens it. Piu . . . piu . . . . Your eyes widen to the fluffy chick inside, born just hours ago. The bird cowers and attempts to hide in the corner of the shoebox.

“You can pick her up, Koah,” great-aunt Fernanda encourages.

You are not so sure.

“Where’s the mamma?”

“It doesn’t have a mamma.”

You do not believe her.

A dish, the size of a jar lid, has overturned inside the shoebox, scattering gritty cornmeal feed. The bird burrows under the thin layer of wood shavings cushioning the shoebox.

Your great-aunt cups her hands, lifts the chick up. The bird attempts to jump. A fall on the hard tile could break her toothpick-thin legs. Ti Fernanda passes the bird to your cupped hand. Your index finger runs over the bald and bony head no larger than your thumb, then caresses the yellow fuzz on her wing. A combination of tenderness and awkwardness, since the bird wants to walk out of your hand, and you are unsure how to handle this fragility asserting her own will.

After a time, the fast-pulsing chest suggests a stressed bird. I propose walking outside to see the goats. You stay a moment longer, kneeling by the box, watching, talking to her with the tenderness of a father loving his own offspring.

Another day has passed. I steer you to the goats’ fenced field and avoid walking near the kitchen. Your great-uncle Zé tells me the chick dehydrated, forgotten in front of the heater.

When you ask about the newborn chick, I mumble about it not being in the kitchen any longer. You know it is an excuse, yet you ask nothing more. There is another side to your great-aunt and -uncle that you do not yet see or understand. It is a paradoxical equation of affections. For all the incommensurable love Ti Fernanda and Ti Zé show you, there is also their unconscious side, in neglecting their farm animals. I don’t know why I believe I must wait for another time to explain best the unintended or intended cruelty of those who are close to us. The most difficult affections, you will learn, will be when love and harm intersect. Some of your deepest hurts in memory will likely come from me, since I have already provided you with your first disappointments, anger, and conflicts.

Sometimes those who love us are willing to listen, and even willing to change because of our emotional gravitational pull in their lives. You grandfather Agosto stopped caging birds after a few years of listening to my unhappiness at seeing the birds in captivity. I suggested he could also enjoy them flying about in the sky and yard. He would fall silent and stare at the caged birds. One day I arrived from Canada to find the bird enclosures not only empty, but also dismantled.

“They are never far, anyway,” he told me, pointing out a nest in the tall ornamental cedar beside us. In the ensuing quiet, the chirping of baby melros trickled down. Soon, a mother darted in with a wriggling worm on her beak.

Your grandfather smiled.

On arriving in Portugal, you cringed upon seeing chained dogs barking frantically from their tiny cement doghouses. “Why does Ti Zé tie them up? Why is that second dog barking so madly at me?” After a few weeks you have begun to accept their neurotic condition, and to imitate your great-uncle, who taught you to use an osier twig to strike Bolinhas, eliciting compliance for sitting and rolling on the lawn.

There is a tale of two chained dogs on your great-uncle Zé’s farm. Bolinhas, a recently acquired puppy, lives in a cement doghouse next to the raven’s now empty cage. This Labrador belongs to Ti Zé’s granddaughter, who lives in Brussels. She requested a puppy to play with twice a year on her Christmas and summer visits. Willing to please his granddaughter, Ti Zé unchains Bolinhas to run off-leash in the yard most days and feeds him store-bought dog food and treats, while the twelve-year-old mutt Caima, two chain lengths away on the other side of the link fence, looks on, and sniffs the drifting air. His bones mimic the ribcage of a disintegrating caravel. Never off his chain, Caima watches from the adjacent muddy field. Any time we bring the veggie scraps from grandmother Micas’ house to feed Ti Fernanda’s sheep, we also carry a bowl of left-over soup, chicken bones and day-old cornbread for Caima. He yaps and wags his tail. It is not every day we have leftovers.

You are learning about human incoherence, witnessing that some affections are narrow, selective, leaving the heart blind to others. It is a roulette of fortune. The ball seldom lands twice on the same lucky number. That is why, when the sun shines on us, it is essential to be grateful for privilege and not be blinded by self-absorption. In those moments, it is kind to look around, seeking those who need the warmth and have been confined to the shadows.

Ti Zé and Ti Fernanda are not conscious of the harm they inflict on animals, having been born into farming practices carried out for centuries. The absence of day-to-day moral dissent also permits unchallenged behaviour to flourish. You and I are also at the mercy of our cultural blindness, and it is our obligation to peel away such blinds to make our choices free from obvious social and cultural conditioning. You hold significant emotional influence over those around you, as they are willing to hear and please you. They want your happiness, and will expand that circle of care to others, if you so insist.

I encourage you to speak your worries about the chained dogs to Ti Zé.

You do.

He laughs.

You don’t.

Ti Zé does not know what to tell you. It is the way he has lived his life with farm animals. By domination. Punishment. Their servitude. He once shot his dog in anger for biting him when he struck the dog with a hose for having disobeyed a command. It will take another trillion raindrops to change the shape of a stone that believes its present form is all it can be. Patience is the most difficult practice for those who do not have a thousand years to live, those witnessing animals already dying every day from neglect and abuse. Patience is difficult for those of us recognizing another’s pain.

Day after day, following the slowness of the seasons, you have already grown to understand the necessary courage to make this world a better place. Yet, the one who names the injustice while standing among those benefiting from that injustice becomes vulnerable, often triggering redirected wrath.

I look forward to you growing older, even more articulate and assertive, and bringing to light the numerous, varied enclosures in my mind. I hope to be grateful, while dismantling such mental cages, to free the possible dreams still invisible to me. That day will mark the beginning of another journey, one more reciprocal, in the learning exchange between us.

It is our last week in the valley, and you are turning stones on a field, looking for worms, finding snails instead, which you roll on your hand to inspect.

When you attempt to separate a snail from its shell, I explain that the snail will die without it, and since it is attached, it would likely be as painful as tearing your arm from your body. You move your attention on to the glistening black slugs in collard paradise. I harvest sweet-smelling tangerines from a wooden ladder propped against the roof tiles on the herb-drying building.

I have only collected a dozen tangerines in the bag when you arrive.

“Paulo, Paulo.”

In your hand you hold a tiny snail. Its broken shell reveals a hole the size of your thumb. Your face tells me that you are upset.

“Will it die?”

“It might. A shell doesn’t grow back. Small and fragile creatures depend on our gentleness.”

You become silent, staring at the snail you have returned to the ground. It is not moving.

I have seen or heard the perishing stories of the animals in this farm. From territorial fowl that should not be sharing crowded enclosures to sheep without their water replenished on scorching days, from infirm ostrich, rabbits, or chickens to an ailing, gaunt mare meeting her last moment, the plethora of agonies are endless.

The animals are ornamental objects Ti Fernanda and Ti Zé dream up for their vision of a farm. The creatures become living toys to entertain grandchildren and other visitors. Your great-aunt and uncle fail to see farm animals as feeling beings who suffer and require the love, attention and care dispensed to you and your sister. Fernanda and Zé’s perennial struggle to remain within the limits of accomplishable farm tasks in a day costs these incarcerated creatures their lives. The animals cannot help themselves and will live or die at the mercy of an unreliable hand.

You do not yet know that it breaks your mother’s heart to walk into this farm, yet she does not let her sadness diminish with your joy in your interaction with the animals. This farm is a playpen for you, but an animal concentration camp for us.

Since childhood Ti Fernanda and Ti Zé have been my favourite aunt and uncle for their generosity, playfulness, spontaneity and good disposition. Despite contradictions and my ethical and moral divergence, they continue to be dear to me as they already are dear to you. It is a tense cliff edge at times. They understand where my values clash with theirs. In our complex web of human and family affections, we hold this reality: a great-aunt and -uncle who can be ignorant of the suffering they cause.

We teach you that this or any other farm’s existence is not a validation, much less an endorsement, of an animal’s natural fate. Month by month, year by year, we will teach you to see beyond the veneer of appearances, and to read between the lines, seeking the missing narratives. Ignorance can carry on for eternities, like sadness and its acceptance. How we treat those vulnerable is an elemental matter to our higher consciousness and will reflect our core being. We will be defined not only by what we choose to create, but also by what we refuse to destroy.

Today is April 25th, Revolution Day. The Portuguese celebrate deposing a fascist government that ruled the country for forty years, until 1974, the year Aunt Marina was born. I was nine years old. The image I retain most vividly replays an old woman in black scurrying along the cobblestone road shouting, “The revolution has arrived, the revolution has arrived. Olive oil is going down to cinco tostões a bottle now, five cents. Viva a Revolução!” Olive oil’s price increased every year thereafter. It is two hundred times more expensive today and no longer the cooking staple of the working people. It has been substituted in their kitchens by imported sunflower oil. Not only had the people become free that day, the market had also. The median wage has risen a mere fourteen times since that April day. More importantly, a myriad other essential gains, from education to health, have been achieved, and every citizen is free to complain now, meaning that political imprisonment or torture is no longer permitted.

This holiday afternoon we prepare to visit the cousins from your grandfather’s side of the family in the neighbouring county of Oliveira. Their semi-rural, three-house cluster holds nine people. Their extended clan across three generations of committed hobby-farmers grows most of their vegetables and fruit, animal flesh and herbs.

Every year, our cousins effusively receive you and Amari. In fine Portuguese-hospitality style, a banquet of home-baked sweet cakes and breads awaits us, including vegetarian dips and healthy options for the odd Canadians we are. They believe the non-meat inclination is a generalized Canadian trait, not our fringe family preference.

The cousins immediately take you and Amari to visit the two dozen rabbits they raise in cages. You pet them and their babies. No one tells you the rabbits are food. A dinner plate destiny for these long-eared, fuzzy creatures does not cross your mind. When I look at those rabbits, a deep stomach knot reaches back to my childhood. Every Saturday, I accompanied my father, often with my mother, to your great-grandfather Manuel da Costa’s farm in the village of Vermoim, over the Cambra hills. That is where I met these second cousins weekly, and we played in terraced fields and back woods. Several times a year I watched your grandfather Agosto kill and prepare a rabbit for the Sunday roast the following day, a special lunch to reward the long work week.

On one of those Saturday afternoons, your grandfather selected the plumpest rabbit from the wooden cage and brought the buck dangling from hind legs to the cement washing tank. The water gurgled in a continuous stream, overflowing to a channel that irrigated the cornfields down below. In the past some rabbits had squirmed and sprung, resisting what they must have smelled was their approaching end. Others dangled, resigned, or perhaps frozen in fear. Beneath the hanging pigeon house and the cooing birds, vovô Agosto would hold the rabbit upside-down. A swift hack of his hand to the rabbit’s neck was as good as an axe. The strike aimed to fracture the rabbit’s spine, to instantly kill. Two or three strikes sufficed.

The smack, smack, smack, echoed against the tender splash of water flowing from the black plastic pipe that brought cool water from the spring on the hill, several hundred metres above. The two pigeons stopped their cooing at the first strike of bone on bone.

With unease, I watched the fear in the rabbit’s eyes intensifying after the first strike, its springing legs attempting to hop away from the nightmare, yet finding no ground beneath. Your grandfather struggled to aim the next strike at the neck, now made more difficult by the wildly swinging rabbit in his grasp. He clenched his lips, not enjoying the task.

At the third strike, the rabbit became motionless. Your grandfather tied its hind legs with a cord and dangled the rabbit from the two knobs on the double door. The white, soft belly faced us. A couple of quick slices along the heel revealed muscle, allowing a hold for your grandfather’s fingers to pull off the rabbit’s fur coat in a steady, loud rip. The first tear echoed in the still air of the hot afternoon as the rabbit began to violently swing from the wall. The carpal bone strikes of the hand had only stunned the rabbit to unconsciousness. I screamed. Your grandfather turned pale.

“Stop. He is alive.”

“They’re only muscle spasms,” your grandfather tried to assuage me.

Blanch-faced, he continued ripping the fur to end everyone’s agony sooner. The rabbit stopped jerking after a few seconds, succumbing to the pain of being skinned alive, having woken up from one horror to experience another far worse.

You cradle your cousin’s rabbit against your chest. It kicks, wanting to hop away. The jostle frightens you. You move on to visiting the chickens and stomp in their fenced yard, attempting to catch one, cautioned not to step on their droppings. A car zooms past on the nearby road and the song that symbolizes the revolution, played today on every radio and TV, drifts away with it. “Grândola Vila Morena” always makes me think of your other great-aunt Fernanda, imprisoned and tortured while in the resistance movement, and whose mental health, after release, was never the same. I had planned for you to finally meet her on this trip, while showing you Coimbra, the city of my university years; however, she died days before we landed, having choked on her breakfast, alone in the bedroom of her old age home.

We leave the chicken coop and stroll in the vegetable garden. Your Bustelo cousins tenderly lift you off the ground to reveal the three wild nests of melros and serin finches concealed among the dense foliage of their pear and apple trees. They leave them be.

After indulging in the afternoon feast disguised as a humble snack, we all stroll along a fallow field. A ladybug lands on your chest, a butterfly on your shoulder. You hold the ladybug on your open palm until it flies away. We soon say goodbye to our relatives, carrying home armfuls of arugula, lettuce, watercress, collards, cabbage, fresh lemon balm for tea, dill and oregano herbs. This green bounty will feed us for days.

On our return home from Bustelo, you want to squeeze in a visit to the goats and the sheep. Hoping to drop leftovers to Caima, you are disappointed when grandmother Micas says there are none today. The sun slides down the horizon, assailed by the cutting wind from the north. We are at the end of another Revolution Day. My mention of returning to the apartment, a three-hundred-metre walk from Ti Fernanda’s farm, prompts a sudden wave of tiredness, and you cannot drag one foot in front of the other.

I attempt to motivate you.

“Tomorrow is the start of your last week in school, Koah.”

“Paulo, school is boring. We sit most of the day.”

I understand. For the first time in your life you are experiencing entrapment. It is apartment life, in winter, at the busiest intersection of this small city; it is the lack of lushly treed parks; but mostly it is the confinement to four walls in school, for five weekdays. All of this is a new way of living after playing in the spacious green spaces, forests and shores of Victoria. You want to escape walls as a bird wants to escape a cage.

You have not been conditioned to stillness, hypnotized by screens, or inured to confined living spaces. You want your day to continue in your grandparents’ yard or your great-aunt’s farm across the lane. Domestication is a word you have yet to learn, although you smell its approach. That is also why you do not sleep under a blanket. Even in your sleep, the lightest bed sheet covering you is kicked away. You want no pressure, no weight upon your dreams.

We stroll down to where the lane joins the larger road leading to our apartment. At the corner, in the house with many pets, the effusive parrot greets you, “Olá”. You match his high-pitched screech with a returning “Olá”. You stop, lean over the spiked railing to talk, and admire the bird scratching his grey, feathery torso with his unchained leg. He walks sideways in frenetic steps along the stick-perch, excited to see you, pleased with your attention.

We finally begin moving again and are within sight of the apartment when we hear the cry of a bird in the sky. The insistent and long song accompanies the last droplets of light.

“Spring must be near, Koah.”

That is when you begin singing:

A seagull flew, flew

wings of wind,

heart of the sea.

Like her, we are free,

we are free to fly

My heart stops. You sing it freely and lightly. Acquainting you with the sounds of Portuguese while in the womb every night, I sang you this verse. I am surprised and unsure how you have memorized the words. You do not know the political context of this song, yet. I sang you revolutionary freedom songs from ’74 to welcome you into the world. What you do not yet know is that the people of Portugal borrowed the images of free animals, such as the gull in our ocean-kissed country, to inspire them to attain their own freedom. Now that the Portuguese people are freer than they were in my childhood, it is time to extend the favour to others who are not free: the animals still incarcerated in our midst.

Nearing the apartment, on our last week in the valley, you slow down our progress by first walking backwards, then testing your balancing skills and walking on the long, thin wall of another apartment complex. You pretend to be an acrobat probing your limits. Then without warning, you jump down from the wall like the kid you are.

“We have to free the goats, papá. Once we are gone to Canada, they need to be able to get the collards on their own.”

“You are right, Koah. I’ll let Ti Zé know.”

“Please don’t forget.” You say it with your most serious face.

“I will certainly not.”

You carry on along the wall, hopping up and down, until you stop and turn to me, full of conviction.

“And the chickens too need to be freed,” you conclude, adding a determined nod.

It is another April, four decades after carnations plugged the barrels of machine guns, and the revolution is yet to arrive at the enclosures of those animals we have used as inspiration for action in art and song. We are the jail keepers and dictators we believed we had freed ourselves from. Perhaps the April revolution will mature alongside you and your sister, as you run through the sandy Furadouro beach and dive into the Atlantic, seeking the perfect surf. The wave will curl up, almost shy, just before unravelling its power. It will propel you far and wide. Then the seagulls, flying freely above the sailing boats, will join you, singing their song.

Gabriela Santiago

In a way, hope is a failure of imagination. In a way, it is a flourishing.

It is a failure because I cannot imagine the end. The world goes on, and on and on, even when we wish it would stop.

I know how bad it is. The emission levels, the microplastics, the pipelines, the species gone, the rogue genes introduced, the coral dying, the water rising. The infrastructure still damaged in Puerto Rico when I visit my great-uncle, the droughts and floods within the same week that destroy the soil of my mother’s farm in Illinois, a tornado in a Minnesotan December as I leave another message on my senator’s voicemail. I know.

But the end? That I cannot comprehend. There is a well of despair so deep I could fall forever, there is a grief so all-consuming it warps the edges of dimensions, melts reality like plastic trash on a campfire. Who could wrap their mind around that loss?

I am only human. I can only hold one emotion for so long.

In a way, hope is a flourishing of imagination. Because when we reject the surrender of the end, we must imagine going on in new ways. And there is no limit to the paths the authors have chosen in answering this submission call for complexity, complicity, and hope.

Always hope.

We become trees, exhaling oxygen and digging our roots into eroding shores; we become islands, and rise up. We endow the soil itself with artificial intelligence and willingly place our fate in its hands. We speak with fungi, and we speak with our family, and all of the conversations are hard and necessary. We grapple with a monstrous, enduring capitalism, and reach out for each other as it tries to trap us within ourselves. Even when we are no longer on the planet, there are echoes of us and our actions in the relationships of the lives, natural and mechanical, we leave behind. We become ghosts but it never stops mattering that we were here, that we did what we could.

We go on and on and on. Together.

It is not utopia. But it is what we can have, these careful negotiations, communications, challenges, and sharing. We have relationships. New, complicated, frustrating, rewarding. Alive.

Relationships are what we have at the end of the world. The world is ending right now.

Hello. Nice to meet you. Please sit down. Are you warm? I have made my mother’s herbal tea. I have made soup from a local butcher and a CSA. I have made cookies from lard and wheat flour and sugar whose history is drenched in blood; they sparkle in the light. Please eat. It’s cold outside, for now. Tell me what you imagine.

The world is also beginning.