creative writing on environmental justice
Artist’s statement
“After Gaza” does not mean that the Gaza genocide is over—not only because the genocide is ongoing, but because Gaza, like the Shoah and the Nakba, will never be over. “Never again” feels like “the hope” that Benjamin said was for those who have none.
Theodor Adorno said that poetry “after Auschwitz” is barbaric, but you only live “after . . .
hear me out please my home has grown into gunfire
the bullet is going round again on the news my people dangle
between nightmares between mouthfuls of regrets in search
of quiet in another headline a child left home . . .
Akka left for the war. She didn’t come back, not right away.
For a while, we thought that our mother might go, since she was the marine biologist, but Akka was a pilot, an astronaut in training.
The monsters had come from the sea, and we had to take the fight to the deep dark waters, so alike and yet so different from the vast quiet and emptiness of space. Deep pressure . . .
The glass in my veins
still remembers white sand.
Gold-stopped, the head of Crassus
lolls beneath the raft of the filling station,
a reliquary of fossil greed.
The war had taken nearly everything from Dozan, but by leaving him his little daughter Ayula, he also found something he’d lacked most of his life: a sharp, crystalline sense of purpose. As they fled the Char-ravaged flats for the foothills, all of Dozan’s will bent toward keeping his daughter alive, and keeping the war from seeping into her as it had into him, . . .
the saddest part about survival is how often it is at the very end of things
that a rough road becomes a calm body of water
and there’s suddenly no need to look for knives. here’s another way of saying this:
there’s a special undocumented time the world becomes your mother.
a trail that ends wilderness. a stranger, bitter and concerned, saying
someone . . .
I’m Idi, and today’s my lucky day! The weather dome in Sector 99 isn’t leaking sludge for once, and the artificial sun isn’t stuck at max setting again—I mean, just last week, it was warm enough to melt the soles of my rubber slippers. The air filtration systems are still belching purple gas, but those never bother me anyway: I’ve breathed in DTE micro matter since . . .
Why don’t these people stop having babies
during a war, under the air strike?
—A comment under the video
In other words, why don’t they
stand at their windows,
watch the offerings of fire
falling from the sky,
This issue of Reckoning is devoted to works about war and conflict viewed through the lens of environmental justice. What is seen through that lens is, by turns, grim and hopeful.
It is through writing that we remember freedom, as Le Guin puts it. Writers are capable of probing into the heart of the crises of our time: extinction, genocide, climate catastrophe. . . .