Situating Racialized Ecopoetics: Memory, Geography & Community // Sanna Wani
Sanna Wani writes on recognizing and claiming ecopoetics in this guest-edited month.
I am in the forest when it begins to snow.
On my government-mandated walk, as Chim calls them, I leave my phone and wallet behind. I am trying to follow Maya’s method of long walks: no route, no music, no phone calls. I have been learning the paths behind my house: a bridge I love, a bench with yellow flowers. It is late spring, but it hails beneath the sun.
I was born in an early April snowstorm, so the seesawing weather is a comfort. I am one of those weirdos who just stands by the water. The woods are a place I can ask: what would it be like to remember my birth? A woman and two dogs speed by. I still make it a point to stop.
*
In my second year of university, I took a course on rivers—it included a camping trip and lessons in white-water canoeing. I was nervous. I had a recurring and existential fear of drowning. I was worried about falling into the rapids (which I did, later, and survived)—but I was also excited. We would learn about eddies, see loons, touch the river. Sit quietly by the fire, sleep in the grass, count the stars in the curving belly of the sky.
It was maybe a week before the trip when—at the end of our weekly class—my professor took off his glasses, pulled away from his PowerPoint, and said, “Maybe this isn’t my place to speak, but I just don’t understand it.”
I remember how the whole room shifted. Every eye turned toward me and my friend Kyle, the only two visibly racialized students in a class of twelve. My professor continued, “It’s just something I’ve noticed … so often, I’ll go camping and everyone on the grounds will be white … so few people of colour tend to participate … every time, I ask—why?” He made direct eye contact with me at this point. “Why is that?”
Why is that.
*
The other day, I climbed a fence to sit on some rocks. I watched the trees. When I was no longer preoccupied with my own motion, I could see them swaying. Breathing is so much easier in the woods. Snow began to fall. How I could feel us watching, together.
*
There is a poem I’ve been thinking about a lot, lately: Sandra Beasley’s “Unit of Measure.” “All can be measured by the standard of the capybara.” I listen to it over and over.
“Everything is lesser than or greater than the capybara.” It is from The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street. “Everyone is more or less alarmed/than the capybara.” Both white cis women. “[W]ho—because his back legs/are longer than his front legs—feels like/he is going downhill at all times.” William Carlos Williams cited in the first line of the first page.
“Everyone is more or less a master of grasses/than the capybara.” I look up the Table of Contents. My eyes linger over the section titled HISTORICAL, the name Langston Hughes. “Or going by the scientific name,” Lucille Clifton, Patricia Smith, Jennifer Chang, “more or less Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris—” Joy Harjo, Yusef Komunyakaa, Audre Lorde— “or, going by the Greek translation, more or less/water hog.” I feel guilty for the names I don’t know, the names I am skimming past.
“Everyone is more or less of a fish than the capybara.” I am, in so many ways, a hand groping in the dark. “[E]verything tastes more or less like pork/than the capybara.” I have never tasted pork. “Before you decide that you are/greater than or lesser than the capybara, consider … ” In the wake of a decision, a list begins.
“Consider the last time you mated continuously.” In the construct of the word consider, there is anaphora and a metaphor for navigation. “Consider the year of your childhood when you had/exactly as many teeth as the capybara.” Dwell upon the stars, old language says. Regard in particular light.
“Accept that you will never be able/to sleep underwater.” My fear returns as heartbreak. “Accept that the fish/will never gather to your capybara body offering/their soft, finned love.” I am beginning to tear up. I look over the list one last time. “One of us, they say, one of us,” I close my computer, sigh, get up, “but they will not say it to you.”
But they will not say it to you.
*
Nana1 was a gardener.
Before that, he was a forester—Chief Conservator of Forests for two terms, planting trees all over Srinagar. He traveled across Kashmir and Asia to learn from different landscapes and the people inhabiting those landscapes. This made him a very good gardener.
In my most precious memories, he is greeting us by the gate, holding a trowel, his pants cuffed and dirty. He’s been in the garden all morning. Until zuhr2, he’ll check on the tomatoes, the eggplants, the magnolia tree. He’ll show me a rose he’s trying to cultivate to grow blue. He’ll pull a pear from the tree and take a bite, making a face because it’s still not ripe—he’ll apologize to the pear tree.
Every day after retiring, he’d wake up at dawn. He’d pray fajr3, then walk into the front lawn barefoot. He said the dew kept his eyesight strong. I believed him. I wanted to try, too.
*
I love Mary Oliver’s work. I love reading her books on my walks. I cherish her poetic voice.
But I have always felt deep unease about her veneration as the nature poet: as if years of systematic cultural and historical context were not part of this veneration, and the proposed universality of her experience. This isn’t to say her experience is not worthy—but I resist how we obscure its situation, how easily we fall into patterns of universalizing excellence. How infrequently we ask, especially when it comes to ecopoetics, how worthiness is constructed and layered by years of colonial-historical trauma. How that worthiness is tinged.
I am still unpacking this twinge—but I refuse to make it invisible anymore. What is at stake is too precious: the vast and multiple relations possible with the natural world that do not fit inside the canon. It is a wound parallel to how exhausted I feel when I enter a class on poetry and the only poets who are not white cis men are Maggie Nelson or Anne Carson. As if that is enough. This wound pulses against the irregular conditions of the world, of how we choose to see any kind of quintessential poetry. It pulses against our systems of standardization, against their classification as fair or unbiased, as if the conditions of our cultural imaginary were not borne from a devastating whiteness. As if they are not still stratifying, categorizing, and establishing hierarchies of who makes poetry—or what kind—or who is worthy at all.
*
Nana is at the beating heart of my poetry. The first poem I ever wrote was for a school assignment, and I showed Nana—with his encouragement, anything felt possible. I had written about a mossy rock, a hidden place, some kind of ruins. I think I’d been looking at a Windows desktop background. I was also thinking about a story Nana had told me a few days earlier about a trip to a forest up north; an encounter with a witch, her feet turned backward.
I didn’t notice then, but as far as my Nana was concerned, nature—a forest, a mountain, a river, or a grove—was always just a few steps away. A sentence or story could never live outside our geographies. A poem always went back to the world, to its woods.
This is a gift he passed onto me. A gift embedded in my poetics. My poetics embedded in how I live.
*
When my professor—yes, a white cis man—asked that question in the classroom, that twinge grew legs, stood up, trembled inside me. I was put in a position many students of colour will recognize. When a question is not just for you, it’s for your entire race. It’s for all people of colour. It’s because of the way you stand out against whiteness—you are doubly punished, forced to feel the chasm between you and him, between you and the explanation he wants from you.
I don’t recall what theories of his own followed that question: probably something about survival—socioeconomic mobility—repression. If this had happened more recently, I could recommend he listen to the Spot on the Couch episode on the accessibility of wilderness, created by my friends Savroop Shergill and Yasmine Hassen, instead of concocting his own theories.
But I hadn’t met Sav or Yas then. I was alone in front of him. What he was thinking, written on his face: that because people of colour weren’t in his ecological communities, that because they weren’t participating in nature in a way he could see or understand, they were not participating at all.
*
Growing up, my mother and Phupho4 would pack up me and my siblings, a cooler of drinks, some warm rice tins and salan5 and we would head to the nearest park. I think we must have been to every public park within a four-hour driving distance of Mississauga. Erindale Park, near the heart of the Missinnihe6 river, was our home base—where we would go if the grownups didn’t feel like driving. Every weekend featured new water and old trees, eating the same food with our family. My younger cousin and I would sprint around the grass, down the trails. I was obsessed with climbing trees. I fell into the pond. He always got more splinters.
We would walk and walk and walk and walk. It felt like those days would never end. We would fall asleep on the car rides home. Our parents would carry us to bed, smelling of grass and mud and sun.
*
It took me a long time to recognize and claim ecopoetics. In the exegesis of ecology in Western curriculum, a central white figure always emerges. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Al Gore. It takes time and energy to undo the internalized damage, to recognize how naturalized white histories and white modalities contribute to an affective whiteness7 that creeps into words like romanticism and transcendentalism.
But now I say it openly: I am an ecopoet. I love being an ecopoet. It brings me such beautiful excitement and joy. It opens up so many further possibilities of poetry. It helps me live, as most poetry does. It means what is still growing, inside and around me.
*
Let me situate my ecopoetics for you now. My ecopoetics is quiet conversation with my brother at his dinner table, about Imran Khan’s speech and the question of climate change in South Asia. The sea levels rising, the glaciers melting. It is reading and rereading this Franny Choi poem, how it teaches me to let go of the world. How it holds space for me to mourn in the reckoning of climate change.
My ecopoetics is in awe of poet scientists and engineers Madhur Anand, Grace Ma, and Qurat Dar, who pull together poetry and environmental and ecological sciences. How they revitalize both domains. It is laughing with my friend Terry, whose poetry is as lush and green as an open field, who knows more about deer than anyone else I know. Who also writes toward how we might grow a queer and trans ecopoetics.
My ecopoetics is remembering this poem by Oubah Osman and Adrian De Leon, how it touches water and home, how it inspired me to try collaborative poetry. How it led to this long-form poem my friend Manahil Bandukwala and I wrote together. It is getting to know my friend Natasha, our mutual passion for lychee, their heavy sweetness. Our silly and wonderful dream of coediting a lychee poetry anthology.
My ecopoetics is grounded in words that change my life. In Oliver Baez Bendorf’s The Spectral Wilderness and Yanyi’s The Year of Blue Water. In the tenderness with which these books move, the ways in which they reach for the world. It is etched by the entire essay I wrote about Billy-Ray Belcourt’s poem “THE CREE WORD FOR A BODY LIKE MINE IS WEESAGEECHAK.” By the last paragraph of “binesiwag” from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s book, Islands of Decolonial Love.
My ecopoetics is smiling at my friend Cleo, who stops to hug tree trunks too wide for their arms. Who loves bears more than anyone else I know. It is made of all the poets I am lucky enough to be in community with, to write among. Who expand my world and the world around them. Natalie Wee, Faith Arkorful, jaye simpson, Lily Wang, Hadiyyah Kuma. Countless, countless more.
*
I am grateful to all these relations. To be wrenching open the conditions of imaginary that might erase us. To know they would never dismiss my Nana and his garden, my matriarchs and their parks, my walks by the river. To experience our exponential resilience, together.
*
In my third year of university, I returned to Erindale Park.
When I moved back to Canada in 2016—after nine years—I moved back alone. Almost a decade had passed. Nothing was the same. How could it be? Nana had died in 2013. Phupho in 2015. I came back—physically, materially—a new person. A new body.
I took a course with professor Jill Carter. It changed my life. For our final assignment, we had to research and meditate on a place familiar to us, to rebuild our connection to where we had grown and settled. This was to be an act—an intimate act—of decolonization.
So I chose that park. I wanted to write a poem and Jill encouraged me whole-heartedly. I returned to that place on a cloudy day and sat on the cold bench for almost three hours. In a lot of ways, I see that moment—typing the poem onto my phone with numb, ruddy hands, the water, the snowfall—as a pivotal reawakening. Another origin.
I sat there, conversing with those trees again, being near the river again. That was enough. I sat still long enough to see the trees waving. Years and years swelled in the air around me.
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1 maternal grandfather
2 midday prayer
3 dawn prayer
4 paternal aunt
5 curry
6 “trusting creek” in Eastern Ojibwe
7“Affective whiteness [as the] spaces/places structured by white feelings/tastes/norms/affects” (from the field of affect theory)
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Sanna Wani lives on land stewarded most recently by the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. Her work is available or forthcoming in Briarpatch, Asian American Writers' Workshop's The Margins, and Best Canadian Poetry 2020. She loves daisies.
