creative writing on environmental justice
Rivers lament over why they were born, they
Question their existence, ask their maker if any
The rivers weep copious tears no one can see
For the loss irreparable. Clinically dead, they
Seem to wait for a time when news echoes in
The air: the wasteland returns. Cuckoos will
No more sing to declare the advent of spring
Deadly and ear-piercing cries of humans and
Animals . . .
Michael: Kate Schapira’s Climate Anxiety Project is a fascinating creative experiment in which she sets up a counseling booth (in the style of Lucy from Peanuts) in a city square, invites people worried about the future of humanity to come and talk to her about it, records the results, and finds creative ways to respond. Her “Three Alternate . . .
from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth
Ownership
CLIMATE ANXIETY: 5/12/16
Heat, dryness, really sick people, kind of barren landscapes. A lot of—as I’m listing things off it looks a little bit like what’s happening right now, in terms of economic and cultural devastation. A lot more complete separation of folks with resources and folks without resources, . . .
Read Mohammad Shafiqul Islam’s poem “Rivers Lament” from Reckoning 1.
Michael: We hear a little here in the US about Bangladesh’s low-lying areas being one of the most heavily populated places in the world under threat from rising sea levels, but not much comes through to us about it in the way of media reporting. What has been your experience . . .
Read Mohammad Shafiqul Islam’s poem “Rivers Lament” from Reckoning 1.
Michael: We hear a little here in the US about Bangladesh’s low-lying areas being one of the most heavily populated places in the world under threat from rising sea levels, but not much comes through to us about it in the way of media reporting. What has been your experience of climate change so far? Do you see it affecting the people around you, your co-workers, and your students?
Shafiq: Bangladesh is proud of Bay of Bengal, the Sundarbans and hundreds of rivers flowing around the country. Bay of Bengal, the largest bay in the world, is situated on the southern part of Bangladesh bordering India and Sri Lanka. The Sundarbans, the largest mangrove forest in the world and a world heritage site declared by UNESCO, covers the northern part of the country. Bangladesh government has planned to set up the Rampal Power Station that is going to be a coal-fired power plant in Bagerhat, Khulna. Environmentalists, along with left-wing politicians and activists, are protesting against the power station, but the government reiterates that the station will not affect the Sundarbans.
With an area of 1,47,570 square kilometers, Bangladesh is well-known as a riverine country. There were once about seven hundred rivers in the country, but unfortunately, the number has declined. We are losing rivers because of the unrestrained greed of the land grabbers—small rivers in various districts of the country have disappeared. Besides, industry wastes land in rivers, which is why river water is becoming poisonous. The capital city, Dhaka, stands by the Buriganga, one of the important rivers in the country, but its clean water is now only a memory. It is true that low-lying areas of the country are submerged by flood every year and this affects human life severely. Climate change, a global phenomenon, also impacts the environment and life—comfortable weather conditions no longer resonate with the seasons here.
Michael: Could you tell me something about literature in Bangladesh? Who are your favorite authors, your influences as a poet? You’re a professor of English—what kinds of writing do you assign to your students? What do they like?
Shafiq: Bengali literature in general is rich in comparison with many other literatures of the world, whereas Bangladeshi Bengali literature in particular has also drawn attention of readers throughout the world. Translation of Bengali major works into English is taking them across borders and cultures. I should make it clear that the language of West Bengal, India, is also Bengali, and their literature is called Bengali literature. So Bengali literature by Bangladeshi writers and the same by West Bengal writers need to be addressed separately. Bengali literature made its mark across languages and cultures for Rabindranath Tagore who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1913 for his seminal work Gitanjali (Song Offerings). Kazi Nazrul Islam, famously known as a ‘Rebel’ poet, is the national poet of Bangladesh. Famous poets and writers of Bengali literature include Jibanananda Das, Buddhadev Bose, Selina Hossain, Syed Shamsul Haq, Rudra Muhammad Shahidullah, Humayun Azad, Helal Hafiz, Hasan Azizul Haq, Shahid Qadri, Nirmalendu Goon, Mahadeb Saha, Humayun Ahmed, Taslima Nasrin, Imdadul Haq Milon, Mohammad Nurul Huda, Shaheen Akhtar, Syed Manzoorul Islam, Harishankar Jaladas, Nasreen Jahan, Mohit Ul Alam, Moinul Ahsan Saber, Audity Falguni and Pias Majid among others. Some of them are also being translated into English.
Bangladeshi English writing is an emerging field though very few writers including Razia Khan Amin started writing in English in 1970s. Bangladeshi English literature has drawn more global attention recently because of Dhaka Literary Festival (DLF) that takes place during November every year. Writers, poets, artists and performers from around the world gather at Bangla Academy premises to share and exchange culture and literature. Among the fiction writers, Thmima Anam, Zia Haider Rahman, Adib Khan, Monica Ali, Niaz Zaman, Mahmud Rahman, Rashid Askari, Kazi Anis Ahmed, Razia Sultana Khan, Jackie Kabir, Sharbari Z Ahmed, Abeer Hoque, Farah Ghuznavi and Shazia Omar are well-known—some of them are diaspora writers as well.
Kaiser Haq, the most prominent English language poet from Bangladesh, is known and studied across borders—he is the leading poetic voice of the country. Besides, a handful of poets including Azfar Hussain, Rubana Haq, Shamsad Mortuza, Ahsan Akbar, Sadaf Saaz, Mohammad Shafiqul Islam, Sabahat Jahan, Sayeeda T Ahmed, Nahid Kaiser and Shehzar M Doja, among others, write poetry in English.
Many works of Bengali literature, translated into English, are becoming part of world literature. Well-known translators including Fakrul Alam, Kaiser Haq, Niaz Zaman and Shabnam Nadiya, among others, have already translated a good number of books into English, and they have enjoyed warm reception. The notable works of translation include The Triumph of the Snake Goddess (Kaiser Haq, Harvard University Press, 2015), The Essential Tagore (Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty, 2011) and Bandhon Hara: Unfettered (Niaz Zaman, Nymphea Publication, 2012). Dhaka Translation Center promotes translation, and it has already published some wonderful books of Bengali literature in English translation—The Book of Dhaka: A City in Short Fiction (Comma Press, UK, and Bengal Lights Books, Dhaka, 2016) is one of its remarkable publications.
As an enthusiast of poetry, I try to read all kinds of poemst—classical, romantic, modern as well as contemporary. At present, I am doing a PhD on Nissim Ezekiel who is one of my favorite poets. To name my favorite authors is not easy at all—many poets and writers from various countries and languages have influenced me. Keats among the romantics and Eliot among the modernists are my favorites. I also like reading Baudelaire, Neruda, Derek Walcott, William Carlos Williams and many other contemporary poets. I like Kaiser Haq’s poems very much. Sudeep Sen is also a wonderful poet in the contemporary literary scene. Recently, I have read Vahni Capildeo’s Measures of Expatriation and liked it very much.
I usually teach poetry—romantic, modern and contemporary. South Asian poetry in translation interests me as well.
Michael: “Rivers Lament” makes reference to some Anglophone literature—I love your use of Grendel as a representative of environmental destruction—but clearly also draws on your own sense of place. Do you write in English? Bengali? I’d love to hear how you think about combining those influences.
Shafiq: I have been inspired by many influential texts and great writers of English literature. When I find a relevant context, I try to bring some characters or subject matters as allusions into my writing. In the poem “Rivers Lament,” I used Grendel as a representative of environmental devastation—you are right. Those who grab riverbanks, grab land, destroy rivers, devastate nature and torture human beings illogically are modern Grendels. I feel disturbed when I see that our rivers are disappearing day by day, river water is turning poisonous and we are losing green to the greed of modern Grendels.
I write poetry in English and translate from Bengali into English. My debut book, Wings of Winds, is a collection of poems. An anthology of short stories in my translation, titled Humayun Ahmed: Selected Short Stories, appeared in 2016. My latest book is also a translation titled Aphorisms of Humayun Azad that is out in February 2017. I am now at work on my second collection of poetry and a translation project.
I have influences among both Bengali and English writers and poets. I use elements from my culture, literature, environment, and everyday incidents as raw material for my writing. I write in English, but the subject matter of my writing mostly comes from my culture. I learn craft by reading different texts from around the world meticulously.
Michael: Are there other writers in your community addressing environmental justice? Anyone you’d recommend I solicit for Reckoning?
Shafiq: Many poets and writers of Bengali literature address environmental justice, but it is difficult to name even a few who exclusively write on environmental justice. But I can refer to a poem by Kaiser Haq titled “Buriganga Blues,” which is from his latest poetry collection called Pariah and Other Poems. This poem reveals how the river Buriganga has lost its glory and how its water has turned poisonous—indiscriminate urbanization and people’s mindless activities are responsible for this kind of damage to environment and nature.
Michael: Thank you! There’s a lot here for me to dig into, I really appreciate it.
Shafiq: Thank you for this amazing publication! In this world of climate change and global warming, Reckoning, no doubt, plays an important part for environmental justice.
Michael: I asked Johannes Punkt (whose story “The Bumblebee-Maker’s Kiss” is in Reckoning 1 and goes live on the site next month) to interview Marissa Lingen about “How Far Are We From Minneapolis?” because he’s from Sweden and I thought he might have interesting things to ask her, and because I’m trying to do . . .
Michael: I asked Johannes Punkt (whose story “The Bumblebee-Maker’s Kiss” is in Reckoning 1 and goes live on the site next month) to interview Marissa Lingen about “How Far Are We From Minneapolis?” because he’s from Sweden and I thought he might have interesting things to ask her, and because I’m trying to do everything I can to foster cross-pollination between Reckoning authors, artists, readers and yes, editors.
Johannes: I love how you write nature as something incredibly personal. Who do you write like, do you think, on your best days? Who would you like to write like?
Marissa: I want to write like my best self. I am inspired by so many other writers, but I have a hard time saying, “I want to write like Jane Yolen” or “I want to write like John M. Ford” or “I want to write like Octavia Butler.” I want to talk about relationship and society the way Octavia did, I want to have the interplay of ideas Mike had in his work, I want Jane’s range in talking to all sorts of audiences. I try to learn from everything I like, to see what makes it go. But at the end of the day, I can only write like me. If I’m lucky and work very hard, I can write like the best me.
Marissa: I’ve been reading more personal essayists lately as well as writing this piece–usually I write fiction. So I can say more particularly that I am inspired by Elizabeth Dodd and by Karen Babine, in this form, and I’m always looking for more inspiration.
Johannes: Since you wrote about wilderness—what is your favourite wilderness in writing?
Marissa: Since you’re Swedish there’s some chance you’ll actually know what I mean when I answer this! My first wilderness in writing was the robber’s woods in Astrid Lindgren’s Ronia the Robber’s Daugher, and I think that that writing about being a little girl in the forest, sometimes with her little boy friend, imprinted itself and the forest on my heart when that was me too. All the others since then have been paler echoes—some of them wonderful, but none as vivid as that first literary wilderness.
Johannes: Reading your piece, I couldn’t help but think about it and about how notions of private/public property shape the landscape and, in turn, those who grow up there. Have you and your Swedish cousins talked about Allemansrätten [A Swedish law that means that even if you own land, you can’t stop people from going there/temporarily sleeping there, &c. That’s the gist of it. In English it’s called “freedom to roam.”]?
Marissa: Yes! They had us out to their country house when we were visiting last year, and it came up then, because we walked out on the road but came back through a field and some woods that were adjacent. I had read about what a large percentage of Swedes go berry-picking or mushroom-picking—an even larger percentage of Finns, I think, under the same type of law—and it totally makes sense compared to here, where people mostly don’t do that. My best friend does urban foraging, but she always asks very carefully. She goes to the door and knocks and says something like, hi, I see your mulberry bushes are full of fruit going to the birds, would you mind if I picked some. And then she makes jam. And of course I don’t want random strangers wandering in and eating my tomatoes, but having a common understanding sounds appealing indeed.
Johannes: Related to the previous question: You write about wildness and wilderness, like a stewardship of nature almost. How do you feel about ownership of land, tamed, half-tamed, or not? (Is it something that elicits emotion?) obviously you wrote that the waterfall was “[y]ours” but the two feel like very different kinds of ownership, no?
Marissa: They’re very different indeed. My feelings about land ownership get complicated. We own a house on a third of an acre here, with woods in the back. When we moved in, the woods were part of a long strip of forested land that crossed ten or twelve people’s private property in going down to the city park. It wasn’t a large woods, but it was nice. Now several of our neighbors have chosen to cut and landscape that, which changes the feel of the whole. And of course that’s their prerogative, but it makes me gloomy.
The kind of possessiveness that I feel about Minnehaha Falls is an entirely non-exclusive possessiveness. It’s mine, it’s ours—and I want that “ours” to be as large as possible. I want all the people who live around here and even visitors to feel that they have some relationship with the Falls, some responsibility to see that it’s cared for. I think under our current system having it be a public park is the best way to do that, but if it can be a public park that makes people feel that they are part of the public, even better. I fear that too often “the government owns it” ends up feeling like “no one owns it, no one takes any responsibility,” when it should be a collective feeling of *everyone’s* responsibility. Ownership should feel more like “I need to take care of this [possibly with some other people]” than like “I can do whatever I like with this and no one can stop me.”
Johannes: Your piece discusses adjusting to disability. I got mine relatively early; I can hardly remember what it’s like to be “normal.” You seem to ground yourself with those memories and patterns; what do you do when the world is too xenoformed, too alien to adjust to? If it ever is.
Marissa: Oh, it is sometimes. Yes. There is a level of vertigo that results in dreams of being on a malfunctioning space station with the gravity going haywire, because that’s how completely disoriented my body is about up and down, and that’s the metaphor set my science fiction writer brain has to process those sensations when I’m unconscious. So my brain is literally saying: this is beyond our planetary reference frame, this is an alien environment.
What do I do practically: well, there is a practice my best friend refers to as “Marissa is brachiating again”: that is, going from branch to branch like a monkey. Only I am doing it in the house: getting around without falling over by reaching for the next thing to steady myself on, going from touching a wall to a chair to a countertop. That’s one of my best coping mechanisms in my small, immediate world. In the larger one–my assistance needs and coping vary a lot depending on how bad a day it is. Sometimes my cane is enough. Sometimes I need to take a friend’s arm. Sometimes the only thing that will work is patience, waiting for a day when the world and I are better lined up.
Johannes: And, lastly, it’s a new year and stuff. What are you looking forward to reading this year?
Marissa: I have Maria Dahvana Headley’s Aerie at the top of my stack of Christmas books. I loved Magonia, and I’m looking forward to Aerie very much. Last year I read Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built In Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, and I’m now going through the rest of Solnit’s work a little at a time. I also read my first Gerald Vizenor novel, Treaty Shirts, which I loved, so I’m reading the rest of his stuff a little at a time too. And of course there are new things coming out that I’m eager for—Thoraiya Dyer’s debut looks pretty great, and our mutual editor has been talking up Christopher Brown’s Tropic of Kansas, so I’m excited for that.
My Swedish cousins were very confused by the walk through the woods down to the Mississippi River. “How far are we from Minneapolis?” they kept asking. And we would repeat: we’re in Minneapolis. This is part of Minneapolis. We’re in Minneapolis right now. They gazed at us in frustration, unsure what part of their excellent English was not getting through. “But . . .
My Swedish cousins were very confused by the walk through the woods down to the Mississippi River. “How far are we from Minneapolis?” they kept asking. And we would repeat: we’re in Minneapolis. This is part of Minneapolis. We’re in Minneapolis right now. They gazed at us in frustration, unsure what part of their excellent English was not getting through. “But how far? How far to get to Minneapolis?”
The urban park land that stretches from just upstream of Minnehaha Falls down to the Mississippi is mitigated, human-focused land. It’s not wilderness by any reasonable definition. And yet the small wilds, the contained wilds, have their place—not to substitute for larger conservation efforts, but to preserve specific landforms. And more, to set aside green space not as a thing that city dwellers visit, but as a thing that we live with intimately.
The park navigates the space between human and wild expertly. At the top of the Falls, there are lawns, even small cultivated gardens. There are statues and plaques. Picnic tables and a bandshell and even a little restaurant that’s open in the warm months. And there is the destination on the official tourist checklist: the Falls themselves. The statue just upstream ties them in explicitly with Longfellow’s poem (though it would otherwise have nothing to do with the area—Longfellow’s Gitchee-Gumee—Kitchi Gammi, Lake Superior—is three hours north). All of that is the farthest thing from wild. But if you take the stairs to the bottom of the falls, a trail leads along Minnehaha Creek, to a wide, grassy meadow with no amenities, except that it’s fun to run around in. Follow it a little more, into the trees, and before you know it you’re alone, you and the bunnies and the squirrels, heading down to the Mississippi.
Close to the Falls, the WPA stabilized the streambeds against erosion back in the 1930s. Those walls have been rebuilt and expanded into a pool area slightly downstream. When I was eight, we took my great-grandmother there on a picnic, and she told us about how she would take the streetcar and walk to get down from Nordeast Minneapolis, where she grew up, for Sunday School picnics beside Minnehaha Creek. Our family was so poor then that Great-Grandma couldn’t afford the white dress she needed to participate in her high school graduation. But they could still enjoy the park, even before its WPA improvements. When we brought her back, she was so shaky she needed my dad’s arm, but she could get there. She couldn’t go up to the Boundary Waters into the wild woods. But this, with shaky steps, with help, she could do.
I didn’t know how soon that lesson would apply to my own life.
Further along, the main signs of human habitation are a stretch of boardwalk where the trail tends to get mucky in the spring, and a bridge and bench at the confluence with the Mississippi. And, of course, the trail itself. The other people you meet here are quieter than the people at the top of the Falls. There are conversational hikers, friendly hikers, but the kids’ birthday parties, the raucous laughter, are left back in the entirely human environment of picnic tables. Between that and the half-wild environment of hiking trails, there is space and the sound of water. It is a very short walk.
Sometimes you need the walk to be short.
“But we have seen her in the woods,” One of my Swedish cousins said, when I was diagnosed with a major balance disorder. More than anything else, that spoke to the frustrations I was feeling. They thought of me as sure-footed, swift and eager to show them my favorite natural surroundings. I thought of myself that way.
I spent a lot of the first year inside. I did the things I absolutely had to do, but when even the most level paved ground pitches and yaws under your feet, it’s hard to add unnecessary tasks to your day. One of the hardest things about disability—especially as you make the transition from hoping it will be temporary to realizing it won’t—is figuring out how to keep the parts that are most important from who you were before.
I couldn’t make a trip to real wilderness. I couldn’t reach the sorts of sprawling forests needed to make life possible for countless species including our own. But even on a bad day, like my great-grandmother, I could take someone’s arm and get to the bridge over the falls. I could inhale the smell of iron-rich Minnesota soil in the water, almost like blood in my nose and mouth. On a better day I could make it down the stairs into the woods. I could take deep lungfuls of the quiet green smell. I wasn’t very far away from people. But I could be away from people, in one of the places I have always belonged.
The Falls park let me be the person my cousins had seen in the woods and find the limits of how I could be that person based on how I was feeling that day, not defaulting to the worst-case scenario like I’d have to on a long trip. And that gave me strength to keep going while we were figuring out an imperfect solution that would allow me “real” hiking trips later—on good days, in good months. The Falls park didn’t demand my best days. It was there for me every day.
Once I was back on my feet, I took a friend’s kids to the park around the Falls, and the thirteen-year-old wanted to know what we were doing there. “Is it the tallest waterfall?” she asked dubiously. “The most volume of water?”
“It’s beautiful,” I said, “and it’s ours.”
Certainly there are things that make the Falls unique—geological, historical. I love The Laughing, Leaping Water, a blog about the history of Minnehaha Falls and Minnehaha Park. But what I love about the Falls are the things that make it beautiful, the things that make it ours. If we let our experiences of the natural world be reduced to a tourist checklist, we miss what’s important about them. We miss the details.
You can experience the Falls, the walk down to the Mississippi or the nearby Minneapolis lake parks on a single visit. Coming back over and over, you learn to understand them. How high is the water? Is that typical for the season? What does it mean for the months to come? What does the water smell like? Did it smell like that the last time the leaves and the grass smelled like this? What does the combination tell me? Is there a lot of garlic mustard around the path down to the river, a little, buckthorn instead? How are we doing with removing those invasives? How far does the ice extend this year down the path into the sunny section? When do the Falls freeze? When do they melt?
You can smell the air, look for invasive plants, admire the swirling currents in the water as it passes, on your first visit. You should! They’re great! But they’re even better in context. This place has so much to teach us.
When you stand at the confluence of Minnehaha Creek with the Mississippi River, having walked the length down from the Falls, you’re watching the lifeblood of the center of North America. It’s all part of the same gigantic system.
Maybe the Indigo Girls told you that “the Mississippi’s mighty, but it starts in Minnesota at a place that you could walk across with five steps down.” Amy and Emily wouldn’t lie to you about something like that. It’s true, and Minnesotans are supposed to make a pilgrimage to that unassuming spot. But a pilgrimage takes time. The headwaters of the Mississippi at Itasca are four hours north of Minneapolis. Great for a weekend trip, no good at all for every day. You can’t make a pilgrimage like that for just a minute on your way home from work. When you’re having a bad day, you can’t flee to the smell of freshwater and trees if it takes four hours to get there. When I heard that my beloved aunt’s surgery had not been effective, that she would have to live with a debilitating condition for the rest of her life, I did all the things I needed to do, updating other relatives, running errands, holding her hand while she cried. And on the way home, I went back to the Falls.
My Swedish cousins love to hike, and to walk in parks and gardens near them in Stockholm. But for them, the two never meet. Parks and gardens are planted, cared-for, manicured. Beautiful. But not a bit wild. There’s no gradient of setting from the managed to the natural. There are grand monuments, mighty rivers and beautiful natural forests, but nothing like this semi-wild park in the middle of Minneapolis.
The grand and the mighty are worth experiencing. But bucket list tourism doesn’t give a sense of rhythm and scale, and it can’t work its way into a city dweller’s daily life. The things that make Minnehaha Falls Park less wild make it accessible. People who don’t have a car for a four-hour drive or the money to rent one can get off the lightrail very near the Falls. People who can’t hike to the confluence—like my great-grandmother, like me some days—can still walk or wheel to the top of the Falls and take the water in, take notice, take stock of what’s the same and what’s different. Someone’s bicycle abandoned in the rocks at the head of the Falls, a mitten frozen in the ice dams. Leaves upon leaves upon leaves. And they can come back tomorrow, next week, the end of the season: has the bicycle gotten pulled out? Is the ice thawing around the mitten? Are we done with leaf season? On a day you’ve gotten bad news, if you live in a city, you may want to go hide in the woods. You know it doesn’t actually work like that. Your life is still there. But this mitigated, urban wilderness gives me a piece of those woods to flee to, to breathe in, to make myself part of.
Pristine, no. But beautiful, and ours.
Michael: My brilliant friend Erin Hoffman has ideas spilling out her ears and plates spinning from here to the next century. To celebrate the occasion of publishing her poem, “Transition”, in Reckoning 1, I managed to corner her to ask how she might envision a community forming around Reckoning not just to foster new ideas and beautiful art on the . . .
Michael: My brilliant friend Erin Hoffman has ideas spilling out her ears and plates spinning from here to the next century. To celebrate the occasion of publishing her poem, “Transition”, in Reckoning 1, I managed to corner her to ask how she might envision a community forming around Reckoning not just to foster new ideas and beautiful art on the subject of environmental justice, but to be some actual change in the world. Here’s just a bit of what she sent me.
Erin: I love the magazine itself and the fact that it exists. We pan-seared some mushrooms in honor of the Reckoning launch, local chanterelles and oysters. Maybe that should be your launch event—have people cook local flora dinners and message you pics.
Michael: I love this idea!
Erin: What I think would be really cool is if the readers and writers for the magazine could become some kind of genuine community that could share information on what can actually be done, re the activism side of the magazine. I feel like it’s beneficial to me to even just keep hearing about your work in permaculture . . . keeps me thinking about these things.
Michael: (Makes note to ramble about permaculture here at some point. We’ll get to that. We’ll get to all of it.)
Erin: I have this idea about trying to promote backyard farming here in Palo Alto. We have a vegetable garden and because of the idiosyncrasies of where the sun is it happens to be in our front yard. Results in a lot of commentary from neighbors, which is surprising to me because these gardens are not uncommon—we have the most active garden in our cul de sac, and probably only 1 in 15 houses has one that we can see. Anyway . . . their interest was interesting to me, and I thought it would be interesting to try to make growing food more accessible. I was inspired by this segment of the TED radio hour on giving (there was also a whole “the food we eat” show that was great). What I’m messing with is this idea of just telling people to grow one thing . . . and then keeping a community map of gardens where people can share vegetables. So I might decide I’m just going to specialize in asparagus, so I’ll build a planter and just fill it with asparagus and people can come and take it. I might put out recipes in a box alongside the planter. The funny thing about this is that I don’t even think it’s easier to grow one thing than twelve things, but I think people don’t know that. They think growing food is hard. If they had a community purpose around it I wonder if a lot more of them might do it, and then it might also result in actually talking to your neighbors, which would be a nice thing around here.
Anyway, that’s a wild digression. But I do wish I had a community to talk about these ideas with, and it seems like Reckoning might be that place, if it were a place. OH MAN I COULD SET UP A MUD. ReckoningMUD? 😉
Michael: (Laughing.) I am not promising a MUD . . . but a community? I really want something like that. The magazine showcases only one facet of the brilliance and unique thinking of all these authors and artists. That one facet makes me want to see more. It makes me wonder what they could do and make and change if they came together.
Like coronary occlusion, it began small, spiral shell and Sierpinski gasket, a vibration amongst the strings rippling outward into rising sea levels, Pacific hurricane, the exhalation of universes, sublime and terrifying– and then we were gone. Love and strings; they go together.
I poured into him my rivers with their poisons, my plains and valleys . . .
Like coronary occlusion, it began small,
spiral shell and Sierpinski gasket, a vibration
amongst the strings rippling outward into
rising sea levels, Pacific
hurricane, the exhalation of universes, sublime
and terrifying–
and then we were gone.
Love and strings; they go together.
I poured into him my rivers
with their poisons, my plains and valleys
parched; his acrid exhaust burned the air
between us. Fertilizer we fed into tributaries
bloomed algae where it should not have been;
the glaciers of our filial strength
dissolved from below, slipped
beneath 34 degree indifference;
birds lost their way.
Now we return to the beginning.
We go below, realign Fibonacci
series, retune strings, pray
for rain.
When the first green appears,
luminous leaves, one then one
then two, we will cherish it, clarity
arrived at last with oceanfront property in Sacramento:
in the end there is only life;
in the end there is only life.
Michael: What inspired “Wolphinia”?
Giselle: I’d written a few stories about the environment, when somebody showed me a video about a dolphin asking divers for help to remove a fishing hook. I started reading about dolphins and found out that they can have vestigial hind limbs and probably used to live on land. There is some evidence that . . .
Michael: What inspired “Wolphinia”?
Giselle: I’d written a few stories about the environment, when somebody showed me a video about a dolphin asking divers for help to remove a fishing hook. I started reading about dolphins and found out that they can have vestigial hind limbs and probably used to live on land. There is some evidence that they are self-healing and can completely recover from wounds like shark bites, keeping their original body shape. Then I discovered that there is a rare hybrid called a ‘wolphin’ or ‘wholphin’, a cross between a female common bottlenose dolphin and a male false killer whale. I’ve always been interested in the question of what makes some people take political action and others not, and also in the fact that intelligent species like dolphins can’t protect themselves from humans simply due to their lack of hands and mobility on land. I imagined a future where humans are coming to an end, but dolphins (eventually) make it back onto land, with a little help from a courageous girl.
Michael: Your writing has a unique and I think delightfully black sense of humor. How do you approach humor in your fiction?
Giselle: Thank you! I have to say that I don’t ever set out to be funny. I’ve always thought there isn’t much distinction between light and dark – all part of life, I mean, and always weirdly related. Sometimes, the darker things are, the funnier they can be: experiencing the worst can make you appreciate the best. This is not to minimalize the seriousness of certain things, but humour helps to alleviate them and highlight the absurdity of awful actions—also to point the finger at the perpetrator in a way. I suppose once the character’s voice comes through, then the humour just follows. I often laugh a lot while writing and occasionally I cry, sometimes both at once! I think black humour can make the emotions more affecting, rather than less.
Michael: What would you say are your satirical influences? What writers most inspire you?
Giselle: I’ve got no idea if it’s affected my writing, but Kurt Vonnegut made a massive impression on me when quite young, as did J.D. Salinger and Joseph Heller. I read a lot of Anthony Trollope when I ran out of Jane Austen. Satirical writers I’m inspired by now include Lorrie Moore (who else can begin a story with somebody killing their friend’s baby by accident), the inimitable George Saunders, ZZ Packer, and Ray Bradbury. I haven’t read much Martin Amis, but loved London Fields (which seems to be a real Marmite book). Tom Lehrer’s songs are unbeatable for dark humour. There’s lots of others I love who are less satirical, but I won’t list them all here.
Michael: Does writing fiction have a cathartic effect for you? Does it make you feel better about the world? Worse?
Giselle: A killer question! Definitely cathartic: I love the process of writing and I enjoy life more because of it. I’m not so sure if it gives me hope for the world, but it helps me connect with it and I’ve learnt a lot of interesting things doing research for stories. It makes me think about the seeds of human peculiarities, both light and dark, which is hopefully useful information for the coming environmental battles!
Michael: Could you tell me a little about something you’ve done in the past year that has made you feel better about the world?
Giselle: A cycling trip from The Hook of Holland to Copenhagen, mostly along the coast. Lots of wind and even more wind turbines—people protest about them ruining landscapes, but I think they look amazing, like some sort of better vision of the future. People’s houses were often covered with solar panels. Also, the brilliant cycle lanes and number of people cycling in these countries—Copenhagen recently became the first city to have more bikes than cars. It made me feel that these things are within reach and that there is some hope.
It used to be that I didn’t dare stop driving around—people would notice; I’d make them feel guilty and they might attack. Now, on my walks through the harbour, all I have to do is duck the cars that smash through the barrier high above my head. And flinch when they hit the heap of metal that lines the sea wall.
Ride not riot. That’s the tiny government’s latest slogan. . . .
It used to be that I didn’t dare stop driving around—people would notice; I’d make them feel guilty and they might attack. Now, on my walks through the harbour, all I have to do is duck the cars that smash through the barrier high above my head. And flinch when they hit the heap of metal that lines the sea wall.
Ride not riot. That’s the tiny government’s latest slogan. Not that anyone’s listening since the election turnout dropped to 2.3%. But the people keep queueing up for their petrol. Fucking lemmings!
I follow the harbour wall that ends at the old customs house, tucked underneath the flyover, now the seat of the tiny government. I’m wondering what they actually do, besides doling out petrol, when out of the mucky water pops this wolphin and I jump a fucking mile.
I put my hands up. Wolphins aren’t stupid. It’s very likely to be pissed off: every time another car ‘forgets’ to take the curve and flies off into the sea, a wolphin floats belly-up afterwards.
Still, what on earth do I expect it to do? Gun me down? Wolphins don’t have hands.
I look closer. It’s way too big to be an English wolphin. Maybe the rumours were true, maybe it’s ex-Russian. Not that anybody cares. Even the Nationalists have given up—more important fish to fry and all that.
The wolphin half-rises from the waves and opens its mouth, as if it’s struggling to say something. I’m interested. Conversation is pretty scarce these days. I edge closer, keeping my hands up, but the wolphin moves back. You can’t blame it for being suspicious—I am a human, after all.
Though hardly anyone’s fishing anymore. Even the police just drive around. To be fair, there’s not a lot else left to do.
Whistle, whistle goes the wolphin and it flips over and wiggles its tail.
I wasn’t too hot at Wolphinese when everyone was into it—before the wolph-fishing started. Anyhow, I don’t even know if it speaks Wolphinese, let alone English.
I sneak a look at its undercarriage, but I can’t tell if it’s F or M. Oh well, nobody gives a shit since the babies stopped coming. It probably can’t tell about me either: I’ve shaved my hair off now Mom’s not around to tell me to act like a proper girl.
I’m trying to remember ‘hello’ when another wolphin swims up, a big grin on its face. Well, it’s hard to tell really when a wolphin is smiling.
Maybe it’s for the best I don’t speak Wolphinese: the fanatically fluent were the first to start eating their new friends.
I put on a lame grin and lower my hands.
Whistle, whistle goes the first wolphin again, and the second hesitates, then rolls over.
Fuck me! It’s got little hind legs.
I’d read about this during the wolphin craze. Super-rare. And these ones look like proper legs—like they might actually be going somewhere—not like the tiny buds in the pictures.
I’m literally at a loss for words, but I want the wolphins to know that I would never eat them—unlike some, I recognize their official person status. I’m not a fucking cannibal! I look towards the concrete bunker of the tiny government and I flip the finger and spit afterwards for good measure. The wolphins do a little jump and I know they understand. They start to swim away, but then they turn and look back at me and I wish I could go with them.
But I can’t. Sure, I’m a little mercury-toxic already, but it’ll be swiftly over if I so much as touch that water.
I can’t even say ‘tomorrow’ in Wolphinese, so I point to the sun, then roll my hands, and they do another jump.
I watch them swim out to the harbour mouth. I wonder if they’ve managed to get anywhere beyond this crappy island.
I meander in the direction of the customs house. The tiny government blew the remains of the budget on bulletproof window glass and fenced off the last working petrol pumps—conveniently located next to the customs house, underneath the flyover. Rumours are they even recruited a few ex-Russian wolphins to protect them on the ocean approach. Hush hush, of course: the soldier wolphins were officially all home-bred British. Fucking Nationalists.
There’s a ripe breeze coming off the cars that didn’t make it into the water and I pull my scarf up over my mouth as I stare out to sea. It looks almost beautiful, a grey gleam catching the sunshine through a break in the clouds. But I know what’s in that water.
Still, plenty of fish in the sea, if you don’t mind eating just a little mercury.
The wolphins frolic in the dim sunlight, a bit creaky, but basically survivors—the new roaches of the sea, as their ex-friends, the wolphinistas, took to calling them, just before they started eating them. After they conveniently forgot they had person status.
No one would dare eat them now: they are packed to the gills with mercury. But somehow thriving—like the tiny government is rumoured to be. Everybody used to want to know their secret, when they still cared about living forever.
I pull out a cigarette. Mom and Pops went on and on about it, before they started the big drive, but really, my lungs can’t tell the difference. I lift up my scarf and take a drag and pretend to blow the smoke out through the top of my head, like a wolphin.
The tiny government hasn’t been sighted outside their bunker for some time, except for their petrol people, doling out the rations.
I cough in surprise as a school of wolphins swims right past me—at least forty. They roll over and wiggle their legs. They all have the legs! Except for the leader, who I take to be the first wolphin I met. They clear their blowholes and swim in formation in the direction of the tiny government.
Once, I would have run to tell someone the news . . . now, I just stare. Who is there to tell?
But it’s a bit like old times. I haven’t seen a wolphin parade since before the wolph-fishing. As far as I was concerned, conscripting them was cruel, more soldiers for the useless cause. God knows what they were actually making them do.
The wolphins surface way past the customs house and swim back out to the harbour mouth.
I can’t help wondering what they’re up to. Do they have a plan? Or are they just stupid great fake-fish in the pay of the tiny government?
Still, what would they pay them with? Wolphins don’t need petrol, and even if they could drive, they’re already in the sea.
Whatever. I may as well try and find out. I don’t exactly have anything else to do.
It’d be less suspicious to get close to the customs house in a car and I’m sort of regretting my resolution to give up driving. But there are a few people who approach on foot if they’re dumb enough to run out of petrol . . . usually women, according to the government.
I never thought I’d count myself lucky to be a girl. How could I when the tiny government are all men? It’s kind of a sicko joke now that women are crashing through the barriers into the sea in equal numbers.
But I’m not stupid enough to just walk right up to the bunker empty-handed. I’ll have to go home for some props.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen the house. The dead telly reflects slices of yellow grass between the window slats. Mom and Pops used to spend a lot of time watching the news; later, they just watched the crashes.
I run upstairs to their room, grab one of Mom’s wigs and Pop’s binos and run back down to the kitchen. I’m ravenous.
I open the cupboard and stare at the tins and tins of fucking fish.
“Eat your little fish, Monkey,” I hear Mom saying, and I force myself to move on to the garage.
I fling a rusty petrol can into the back seat of the saloon.
The keys are in the ignition. I haven’t driven my car since Mom and Pops sailed into the harbour, in a manner of speaking. I start the engine and collapse against the wheel, laughing. When I remember that mood incongruence is one of the early mercury symptoms, I laugh even more, until I’m weeping. Eat your little fish—what’s a little poison on the side? Mom and Pops couldn’t help it. What else was there to feed me? Ha ha ha!
I hoot and wave at my one remaining neighbour as I cruise past. Once she would have been so proud I’d started driving again. Now, she doesn’t even look up. She just carries on checking the petrol in her tank.
It’s dusk by the time I get back to the harbour. I drive right past the bunker. Hopefully they’ll pass me off as just another petrol junky, desperate for my next ration. I scan the sea as I take the entrance to the flyover.
I’m not supposed to stop up here, but it’s almost dark and I pull over to one side, where I can get a good view of the customs house. Just in time, it turns out. A small van accelerates through the hole in the barrier and lands way out. Talk about making a big splash!
I aim Pop’s binos at the bunker to avoid looking at the red stain spreading across the water. I can tell it’s blood, not petrol. They must have hit a wolphin. And that’s when I see the dinghy heading out from the customs house.
I didn’t know there were any boats left. It’s even got an engine and there are three MPs crouched in it. They have a long pole with a hook on the end. They putter out and snag the wounded wolphin as soon as it surfaces.
What the fuck? Its best chance is to be left alone. People know about the self-healing power of wolphins—that’s what got them started on eating them. And it’s the tiny government that banned wolph-fishing in the first place, once they realized about the mercury. Maybe they are trying to save it?
The wolphins surround the dinghy and start jumping out of the water. They almost knock the pole away, but the MPs speed away, back to the bunker, and haul the wolphin out onto the fenced-off slipway. It makes a strange, strangled scream and tries to thrash free. They deliver a swift booting, and I know for sure that they are not going to save it. They drag it hurriedly through the big metal doors, to the answering screams of its fellow wolphins.
Fuckers.
I can’t stop thinking about Mom and Pops on their final trip into the harbour. Did they even remember me before the big crash?
Whatever.
I sit until it’s almost dark, watching Mom and Pop’s mascot wolphin swinging from the car mirror. They used to worship the wolphins for being mercury-tolerant, but in the end they were jealous.
I’m badly tempted to just keep on driving.
I roll the car forward until it blocks the gap in the barrier, pull on Mom’s wig, get out and throw the keys over the edge.
I feel my way down the flyover, one hand on the barrier, petrol can in the other.
A weak moon lights up the dirty mist floating over the harbour. I imagine the wolphin ghosts, torn and twisted, rising healed from the water—like Jehovah’s Witnesses on resurrection day—and marching back onto the land, while the humans drop into the gloom, trailing red, clutching their precious steering wheels.
I put down the petrol can and creep towards the bunker. I make it to the wall that runs at right-angles to the sea. I inch along it, before I notice the MP sluicing the wolphin blood from the dinghy. It’s tied to the inside of the fence that juts out from the wall into the water. I press myself against the wall until he goes back in.
I slowly lift my head. There’s a small circle of light showing through a hole in the blackout cloth over the only window. I have to stand on tiptoe to peer through.
Luckily, the MPs have their backs to me. They’re sitting at a long table, watching a tall man. He stands facing them, eyes closed, hands uplifted, doing some sort of prayer, it looks like. There’s an enormous white plate in front of each of them. I strain closer, until I see that telltale black wolphin meat with the red edges like hot and angry coals.
I turn and shuffle away as fast as possible, my hand over my mouth.
Fucking cannibals!
I wish those wolphins would reappear. I need somebody to talk to. Nothing makes sense. Not because the MPs are eating wolphin—you never know what to expect from humans. It’s because I realize that there is not one sane person left.
Why am I so surprised?
I crouch by the wall until the night smudges into another grey day, half-hoping the wolphins won’t come. I’ve never touched a sliver of wolphin meat, but how will they know that?
The wolphin surfaces alone. I don’t expect sympathy after its companion has just been offed by its supposed fellows. But I remove Mom’s wig. I want it to recognize me. I want it to know that not all humans are the same.
“Sorry,” I say, and it does its little jump.
And it makes everything worse. I stand looking away from it, pressing my sleeve against my stupid mouth, trying not to laugh. Fucking mercury! I’m losing it!
“Sorry, sorry,” I say, and I look it straight in the eye and almost reach out to stroke its shiny poisonous flank, the red tip of its sore fin. I almost do. But I can’t. Even a few drops of water on my skin will . . . but what difference . . . .
The wolphin whistles at me, then turns its nose to point at its fin, then whistles again. My eyes have gone all blurry. All I can think of is Mom and Pop’s last drive and I realize I’m crying . . . . Better than laughing, I suppose.
It whistles again and I wipe my eyes. I finally understand what it’s trying to tell me when I see what it’s got wedged between its fin and body.
I look up, trying to clear my head. The school of wolphins have gathered at the harbour mouth and are swimming patterns in the water; it feels like they are showing me the way when they roll over in unison and wave their stubby legs.
I understand what it’s like to be them, I understand what it’s like to be ignored. What did the tiny government ever do for us?
I take off my scarf and wrap it round my hand. I lean down and gently lift up the grenade.
Pops was ex-military, like almost everyone since we became disconnected from the other continents and there was no longer any cause. He used to tell me tales about kamikaze Russian wolphins. “They couldn’t get the English ones to detonate the grenades,” he’d whisper.
I’m pretty sure he never dreamt I’d be dumb enough to try it one day. Even if I was a girl.
But now I’m finally a young woman. I breathe out. What next?
But I know already. I point towards the bunker, towards the remains of that feeble atrocity, the tiny government. “Now?” I ask, and the wolphin jumps up high.
My fingers are so numb that I let the scarf fall and hold the grenade with my bare hands. I can’t help flinching as the drops of water touch them, but I’ve got a feeling I won’t be needing them soon.
I’m shivering as I clasp the grenade and sneak over to the bunker wall. No sign of any MPs. I unbutton my shirt and tuck the grenade inside, then clamber along the outside of the fence and swing myself round to the inside where the dinghy is tied up.
The hardest part is getting into the boat. I still can’t stop trembling at the thought of all that water. Maybe Pops was right: those Russian wolphins must have been nuts to blow themselves up.
But then they didn’t have a good reason.
The dinghy rocks from side to side as I untie it and use the pole to push it close enough to the open metal doors.
The MPs stare at me as I bob into their line of sight.
The wolphins know that I’ll die in that water. And I know now for sure I will never join them when they march back out onto the land.
I may as well make myself useful.
“For Mom and Pops,” I yell, as I pull the pin and lob the grenade straight through the doors.
There’s a bright flash and I feel strangely illuminated from the inside out as I’m blown through the air into the poisonous sea.
The wolphins push me up to the surface to breathe, and the feeling of being carried aloft on their little hind legs almost makes up for the fact that it’s nearly all over for me.
But my rage has gone now that the tiny government is wolphin food. The grey water actually appears blue and fresh. An obvious delusion, but I have to admit, I’m enjoying it.
At least it’s better than just driving around.
Read Michael’s interview with Giselle about “Wolphinia” here.