TY - JOUR
AU - Zantingh, Matthew
AB - Should we agree the purple loosestrife along the river is beautiful and benign, intending only to shine? Choking out even the bulrushes, pharaoh of weeds. – Di Brandt, “Horizon on Fire” (11–14) Purple Loosestrife is a wetland plant, native to Europe and Asia, but in North America it is considered one of the most problematic invasive species. It grows quickly, forming a thick stand in disturbed areas, choking out native species with a dense mat of roots while providing little food value for native species. Furthermore, a single plant can produce over one million seeds each year, making it difficult to root out. Yet the plant also produces numerous purple flowers along its stems, so that Di Brandt proclaims the plant beautiful and benign even as it chokes out native bulrushes. The lines above epitomize the way Brandt sees a vitality in the natural world that consistently interrupts certain human activities while calling viewers to reflect on their beauty and ongoing resistance to human control. The poem is set in an apocalyptic urban future marked by smokestacks, concrete, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane or DDT, and dead fish, yet nature finds ways to re-assert itself in weeds, grasshoppers, and birds. The poem’s speaker wants to celebrate this resistance yet also mourns the inherent destruction of industrial capitalism which has created urban wastelands. This tension is more fully articulated in “Zone:<le Détroit>,” a poem from the same collection, but one that is rooted in the specific place of Windsor, Ontario. This poem offers an urban ecological narrative that moves past the problematic binaries of human/nature and city/wild. Brandt creates a multi-perspectival view of the city that articulates both Windsor’s unique history, especially its connection to the automobile industry, and the startling presence of the natural world in urban landscapes. The various stanzas’ speakers articulate visceral responses upon finding polluted pieces of land and moments of wildness in Windsor’s urban grid. These ambivalent reactions mobilize an elegy for the city’s unstable relationship to the natural world; the plants, animals, and soil of Windsor are toxic, yet they also contain arresting moments of vitality and beauty. The poem works to defamiliarize Windsor by moving away from humans and their cars towards a more comprehensive vision of the place. Most importantly, though, Brandt’s poem refuses to give up on Windsor as an inhabitable space; the long poem offers an instance of lived environmental praxis that might, in turn, inspire defenses of other urban spaces and their neglected or obscured ecosystems. In reading Brandt’s Windsor, I offer it as a synecdoche for thinking about global cities and the toxic and compromised lands they are rooted in. Peter Roberts, Joe Ravetz and Clive George write that “urban areas are now home to over half the world’s populations” and “they also represent the most significant concentration of global environmental challenges” (2). While this urbanization is happening in different ways in diverse places, it represents a significant challenge for ecocriticism, a field which has tended to hold urban spaces at arm’s length.1 Urban nature can be surprisingly and disturbingly breathtaking, as visitors to Chernobyl’s radioactive landscape can attest, yet it also reveals the high ecological cost of urban development. Most city development prioritizes human life and activity, removing or seriously compromising earlier forms of more-than-human life. Instead of a healthy and ecologically diverse forest, cities have imported flowers or shrubs in concrete planters. Yet this is not the whole picture as nature possesses an incessant vitality that refuses to be tamed, constantly adapting to human action. Brandt pairs the natural with the urban and allows readers to live in a palpable tension between hard concrete and wild plant. This kind of clear-sighted attention to the urban acts as corrective to what Chris Wilbert and Damian F. White call the romantic style of ecocritique (3). In short, the conceptualization of Windsor in “Zone:<le Détroit>” as a compromised yet vital environmental space opens up a productive space for thinking about how to interact with the material places readers inhabit. Ecological Art and the City Part of what makes the city seem like a deeply unnatural space is its complex make-up. Geographer Erik Swyngedouw argues that cities are produced as “palimpsests of densely layered bodily, local, national, and global—but geographically depressingly uneven—socio-ecological and technonatural processes” making urban areas into a “deeply heterogeneous, conflicting, and often disturbing whole” (61). Cities are diverse spaces, so much so that even when we see falcons, sparrows, squirrels, pigeons, or raccoons in cities, we do not recognize these creatures as natural, instead preferring to view them as aberrations to the urban landscape.2 Such creatures thriving in urban spaces do not fit our common conceptions of the natural world. Moreover, Swyngedouw writes that “under capitalism, the commodity relation and the flow of money veil the multiple socio-ecological processes of domination/subordination and exploitation/repression, which feed the urbanization process and turn the city into a metabolic socio-environmental process that reaches out from the immediate environment to the remotest corners of the globe” (62). Economic systems are set up such that it is difficult to see how the city itself depends upon and lives off of the natural world, both locally and globally. We can imagine the city as an un-natural or strictly human space precisely because consumer capitalism encourages us to view it as such. Furthermore, a consumer mindset encourages humans to view themselves as the only actors in the urban grid, yet each time a city is flooded or faces infestations of bed bugs or rats, this illusion is shattered. With this mindset, it is easier to continue thoughtlessly consuming and exploiting natural resources because we do not see the immediate consequences or costs of such actions. Furthermore, a focus on saving remote areas from development can paradoxically allow rampant exploitation in cities because such spaces, like small marshes or abandoned industrial lots, do not qualify as natural spaces “worth” saving. In an inadvertent way, the environmental movement and ecocriticism have passively allowed for this devaluing of the urban to happen, so that the city becomes a space that is discursively separate from the natural world even though it remains embedded in it. However, ecological art has a role to play in bringing the natural world back into our focus when we view the city. Dianne Chisholm argues that art “mobilizes our ecological sense by acting on it with ‘percepts’ and ‘affects,’ and ‘visions’ and ‘auditions’ that are more emotionally, mentally, and ethically moving than the functions and variables of science, even when science refers directly to landscapes of conspicuous environmental damage” (585). Brandt’s poem, then, offers readers alternative ways of seeing Windsor through the variety of affects that it mobilizes. Rather than embracing the city as wholly unnatural or strictly human, she sets up Windsor as a complex space where pollution and cancer, products of industrial modernity, can exist alongside human wonder at maple trees and wildflowers. As she puts it in the poem, Windsor is “the most polluted spit of land/in Canada, with its heart/attack and cancer rates,” yet “the trees can still knock/you out with their loveliness” (4.19-21, 23–24). If, as historian William Cronon suggests, “a city’s history must also be the history of its human countryside, and of the natural world within which city and country are both located,” then ecological literature offers a way of re-reading the natural world back into a city’s fabric (19). Brandt’s poem digs through the layers of Windsor’s cultural and physical construction to unearth the natural world, even if what is found provokes ambivalent responses. More often than not, urban nature productively questions conventional ideas about what nature is. Where Windsor has often been associated with the automotive industry, casinos, and the American border, Brandt presents a strange and unfamiliar city marked by historical injustices and industrial pollution while also celebrating what exists. Urban nature is compromised, polluted, and contained, always seeming less than ideal, and Brandt’s poem does not cover up the horror, shame, or shock of seeing a toxic and cancerous place. This acknowledgement of a toxic world in which our worst fears have already been realized is coupled with an overpowering sense of wonder at nature’s resilience. The speaker’s marked ambivalence calls readers towards action, so that we are left with a sense that we must now learn how to navigate our own compromised cities. Viewed in this way, Windsor becomes a synecdoche for global cities, offering a method of mourning the loss and degradation of urban space but also praising the life that continues to exist in the cracks, crevices, and parks of our cities. Place and Space Geographer Doreen Massey’s complex account of place offers a useful tool to navigate the way that a local place is nested within the larger scales of region, nation, and globe, each replete with diverse actors. Wary of the way that place can lead to “reactionary nationalisms[,] competitive localisms, [and] sanitized, introverted obsessions with ‘heritage,’” she proposes a progressive sense of place which embraces multiple identities, does not lead into itself but outward to the global, and is not defined by the borders drawn around it (“Power-geometry” 65). She argues that we need to “think through what might be an adequately progressive sense of place, one which would fit in with the current global-local times and the feelings and relations they give rise to, and one which would be useful in what are, after all, our often inevitably place-based political struggles” (65). Against the suggestion that places have innate characteristics that existed before human inhabitation, Massey writes “what gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of relations, articulated together at a particular locus” (67). It is the variety of actors, actants, and actions in a place that gives it its specificity, and Massey leaves the door wide open as to whether these actors are human or not. In For Space, she affirms this when she writes “[places] implicate us, perforce, in the lives of human others, and in our relations with nonhumans they ask how we shall respond to our temporary meeting-up with these particular rocks and stones and trees” (141). Windsor’s specific constellation of relations is defined by its geographical position at the headwaters of the Detroit River, a position which attracted the Ojibwe, Pottawatomi, and Odawa peoples before European contact; its location across from the American city of Detroit; its historical connection to French settlers; its importance as a city of refuge for escaped African-American slaves; and, most recently, its centrality to the Canadian automotive industry.3 These various relations all come together in the fabric of Windsor as a place; they are not so unique in and of themselves but their configuration is. This sense of place as a set of relations that lead outwards to the global level and back to the local sets up the Windsor of “Zone: <le Détroit>” as an interesting case study for how a local urban place might serve as a model for environmental praxis. Part of what makes Brandt’s poem a productive ecological text is that it is written from an estranged or distant perspective. Brandt is a self-professed prairie poet and not a native Windsorite, yet such distance affords her a critical perspective while illustrating that outsiders may attain a strong sense of place. In “The poet and the wild city,” Brandt writes that “despite my practiced urbanity, I’m still country in my imagination and my bones,” signaling a persistent sense of uneasiness with Windsor despite living there for ten years while she taught at the local university (74). Even though Brandt writes from the position of a rural prairie exile, “Zone: <le Détroit>” is an intensely local poem, enriched by its many references to local landmarks, history, and culture. The fact that Brandt could produce such work suggests that place is not as exclusive as some have made it out to be, and that a progressive sense of place does not put minimum residency requirements on those who would speak of or participate in a given place.4 Paralleling Massey’s emphasis on place, geographers Steve Hinchliffe and Sarah Whatmore argue that urban nature itself necessitates locally specific interactions with a city. In “Living Cities: Toward a Politics of Conviviality,” they note the emergence of “recombinant ecology” in conservation biology which takes up the city as a functioning ecosystem (123). They put forward a notion of living cities that works to challenge “the styles and practices of analysis institutionalized in scientific and policy procedures that characteristically presume and reinforce spatial divisions between civic and wild, town and country, human and non-human” (124). They want to open up the city as a space that is characterized by a multiplicity of actors rather than seeing humans as the sole agents in the landscape. Pointing to the unexpected presence of Peregrine Falcons, Badgers, Black Redstarts, and other animals in Birmingham, England and Whatmore assert that cities are spaces where many lives and beings are entangled. They argue that “in other words, we might see urban inhabitants as more-than-human; more than animal; more-than-plant; and so on. They are complex assemblages, mutually affecting and affected by their fields of becoming” (128). This notion resonates with Massey’s argument that place is not an autochthonous or pre-existing quality, but something that arises from a network of relations.5 For Whatmore and Hinchliffe, such assemblages can only be discovered through “invest[ing] more of our energies in intervening in the terms under which city residents and other urban constituencies are invited, and enabled, to engage in the policy-making process” (119). While their focus is on a non-prescriptive site-specific approach to policy-making, their call to engage with each place in its individual nuance and detail rings true for any urban environmental praxis. What follows is an attempt to pay careful attention to the literary, cultural, and natural contours of Windsor’s landscape. Windsor’s wildness So what does Windsor look like as a place? “Zone:<le Détroit>” presents a city that is polluted, urban nature that is deeply compromised, yet it hosts spaces of wildness in its confines. The poem can be read as a refusal to give up on the city in spite of how degraded or impoverished Windsor is as a lived space. In the first stanza, the speaker cries out against “the future clogged in the arteries/of the potholed city” (1.18-19). Even though this presents a negative image of Windsor, the city is still imagined as a beating heart that might, with careful work, continue to give life. The long poem, written in five stanzas that possess their own distinctive voices and present different perspectives on the city, details a complex engagement with Windsor’s physical and cultural spaces. The city’s consistent identification with automobility and the border are gestured to but not reiterated as the only markers of Windsor’s identity.6 Here, Brandt is already moving between the local, regional, and global by using automobility as a way to explore the city and its all too visible ecological loss. Yet the various voices of each stanza also suggest different stories that might undergird a sense of Windsor as a place. Brandt crafts a dynamic vision of Windsor as place that moves beyond the too-easy categorization of the city as either good/bad, non-human/human, or wild/colonized. The poem makes clear that nature is present in the city, though it is neither pristine nor an escape. The speaker chronicles the presence of burdocks, aster, and goldenrod growing along an abandoned railroad in downtown Windsor (3.1-6). The city has several abandoned railway lines that now form hybrid green spaces, filled with trees, weeds, and grass alongside creosote-soaked railroad ties whose tracks were salvaged long ago. These lines were phased out as the automobile replaced trains as the primary mode of transportation in North America in the mid-twentieth century. These liminal spaces in the urban grid have evolved into spaces where urban nature thrives, “reclaiming” portions of the city grid. Many cities in North America have such zones as changing preferences in transportation modes and the fluctuations of global economies transform once lively and industrious neighborhoods into economic dead zones left to decay until their value rises again. The nature of such spaces is itself compromised and certainly not healthy in an ecological sense as land around abandoned railroad lines regularly carries high levels of toxins in the soil. These are not pristine wildernesses, but compromised ecosystems signaling both more-than-human resurgence and lingering pollution. As Tanis MacDonald puts it, “Brandt positions the land as urgently alive and desperately threatened. She breaks down the Romantic conventions of landscape poetry to contrast the literary construction of a pastoral idyll against the harsh chemical reality of a poisoned environment” (xiii–xiv). And it is in these poisoned urban environments where most North Americans now live. Urban nature is most fully explored in the third stanza of “Zone:<le Détroit>” where the speaker discusses her “usual quest for a bit of wildness” (3.4). In this stanza, the speaker travels along the abandoned rail-lines, acutely missing her canine companion, yet taking on canine characteristics in her “sniffing around” (3.1). There are elements of autobiography in this poem as Brandt has written about how she regularly walked with her dog as a way of experiencing the city in her essay “The Poet and the Wild City” (73). She writes that exploring the city in this way is akin to “the way my children did when they were very young, as grey blurs interspersed with living patches of sweet-smelling, endlessly fascinating damp or wet or dry patches of earth, and grass and riverbanks and squirrels and cats and birds and earthworms and acorns and twigs and pebbles and snowflakes and puddles and mud and clouds and rain and sun” (73). Brandt’s sinuous sentence conjures up the hyper-sensory nature of any city. There are a multitude of sensory stimulations on offer, but only if you are looking and not indifferent to them. Here, though, Brandt as adult is acutely aware of the environmental degradation that has happened, and the concrete office towers, busy asphalt streets, and pollution-spewing factories which frame such moments of earth and animal. Yet I do not want to downplay the child-like delight at discovering plant and animal in the city as several poems in Now You Care also evoke this experience.7 Wildflowers and creosote exists side-by-side in this poem, producing a deeply complex portrait of Windsor. Moreover, rather than explicitly finding the wildflowers she longs for, she finds something far more startling. She stumbles upon a group of women’s breasts dancing “their breastly ghost dance” and acting “like dandelions in seed” (3.18, 21). These breasts were “cut off to keep our lawns green/and dandelion free” (3.15-16), laying out a disturbing conflation of female bodies with weeds as if neither had any recognized value for the (male) home-owner. Brandt makes this connection to highlight the injustice of both the body burden thrust upon women’s bodies through domestic interactions with toxic cleaning chemicals but also the ecologically problematic ideal of the monocrop grass lawn. Dandelions in this vision become rogue actors that resist landscaping homogeny, providing instances of the infiltration of the wild into the most tightly controlled spaces. The speaker herself is unsure of what to do with the presence of these breasts as, in one sense, they are free and dancing, living wild lives. At the same time, she is acutely aware of “our aching chests … and we just strap on fake ones/and the dandelions keep dying,/and the grass on our lawns/gets greener and greener” (3.29, 31–34). The dancing breasts are ambiguous symbols, alluding to sexual and gendered violence but also suggesting freedom. Can we read them as genuinely free even though they have been violently cut off from their body? Brandt’s poem creates just such a paradoxical image. Is Brandt mourning their loss or praising their vital feminine energy? It seems both are possible. This symbol illustrates well Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality where “the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world,” particularly when it comes to toxic substances (2). Alaimo argues that “traffic in toxins may render it nearly impossible for humans to imagine that our own well-being is disconnected from that of the rest of the planet or to imagine that it is possible to protect ‘nature’ by merely creating separate, distinct areas in which it is ‘preserved’” (18). In the poetic linking of creosote, mastectomies, pesticide, and dandelions, Brandt creates a wide network that marks the way toxic products of industrial development have infiltrated female bodies. However, by calling the breasts “treasure here/among the forgotten weeds,” the speaker also suggests a vitality that remains intact in both wildflowers and breasts. Both are resilient: though heavily damaged, neither can help but burst out in praise and vitality. Readers encounter a fundamental tension as Brandt wants to celebrate this resilience while also mourning the way that women and land have been and are forced to pay ecological costs. While these grotesque images are compelling, they offer no easy answers or immediate solution. Wildness not wilderness Brandt’s search for wildness is worth unpacking as it navigates the tangled waters of wilderness with considerable acumen. She is not seeking untouched wilderness, but wants to explore a different sense of wildness. In “This land that I love, this wide, wide prairie,” Brandt writes that “I always loved the weeds more than the cultivated plants, they were prettier, wilder, they smelled nicer, I admired the way they kept coming back, insisting on their right, their place on the prairie” (4). Wildness is more of a character trait than a condition of not being degraded by humans; in fact, these wild plants seem determined to assert their agency in spite of humans. Just as important is the fact that although Brandt prioritizes a certain view of Prairie landscape, she recognizes that such a landscape exists because of a prior colonization and exploitation, calling the Prairies “this stolen land, Métis land, Cree land, buffalo land” (1). Wildness is possible for the Manitoba landscape she grew up in because of colonial injustice and oppression. In this sense, wildness is not a haven away from humanity or an amoral space, but is deeply intertwined with humans and ethics. Indeed, “Zone: <le Détroit>” desperately calls out to Tecumseh, an early nineteenth century Shawnee chief killed in battle against Americans over his peoples’ former territory around Windsor in the War of 1812. She refines her usage of the term further in “The Poet and the Wild City” when she writes “wildness, in the stern eyes of our Mennonite father and grandfathers, denoted social disorderliness, lack of control, unsubmissiveness, willfulness, stubborn resistance to reason, disobedience” (74). Here, wildness is a cultural phenomenon, not something that exists independent of human life. This, in turn, makes it possible for wildness to exist in the heart of the city, and, for the Mennonite elders, even likely that it will appear there. Brandt writes that “wildness seems to be profoundly about otherness: a radical, irreducible difference at the heart of all living beings and organisms and communities … an energetic fiery free-spiritedness that also connects these differences in unexpected, erotic and magical ways, and that resides at the very heart of life on this planet” (84). The burdocks and aster are beautiful because of this wildness and remind Brandt of the vital life of nature in the city. Brandt places her hope in the rogue work of weeds and plants in the city, knowing they productively disrupt the rationality and order which built concrete and asphalt grids. Furthermore, wildness becomes a way to work against the prioritization of the human in a city, and “Zone: <le Détroit>” uncovers the problematic underpinnings of the city in both ecological and cultural terms. Automobility The poem also explores how automobility has shaped the city’s development and landscape. Windsor is Canada’s Detroit, home to major factories for all the American auto manufacturers of the postwar period, making it an ideal location to reflect on automobility. In the second stanza, the speaker takes on a paranoid tone as she moves along Highway 401 towards Windsor. She grills her audience with insistent questions about human disappearances, organ thieves who stage multi-car pile-ups, and apocalyptic skylines. The 401 corridor is one of the most heavily travelled transportation corridors in North America with a 2013 Ontario Ministry of Transportation report recording an average of 410 000 vehicles per day on its surface and peaks of over 500 000 vehicles in a single day (38). This highway is at the heart of Ontario’s automobility, connecting Québec City with Windsor and servicing more than half of Canada’s urban population. It connects industry and consumers alike while also driving a sizeable portion of Canada’s economy. The speaker’s questions suggest a darker, often obscured, side of automobility, one which interrogates the efficient progress highways are often seen as marking. The stanza ends with an apocalyptic suggestion that “maybe we’re already dead,/maybe the war is over,/maybe we’re the only ones alive” (2.29-31). These conspiracy theories cast a sinister hue on Windsor’s long historical association with the automotive industry. Returning to the first stanza, Brandt is openly critical of the industry. The speaker proclaims “all these our bodies/crushed to appease/the 400 & 1 gods/of the Superhighway,” mockingly setting up the road in mythological terms and viewing the deaths, workplace accidents, and cancers as sacrifices to bloodthirsty gods (1.9-12). The speaker decries the way the automobile has transformed a once-lush landscape into a chemically-saturated dead zone; she links the sprawling automotive factories’ smokestacks with the reality that Windsor is a broken, toxic landscape. She asks “Who shall be fisher king/over this poisoned country” (1.28-29), alluding both to T.S. Eliot’s apocalyptic images in “The Wasteland” with its absent fisher king and the much older archetypal figure of the fisher king. Like Eliot’s poem, the reader is left to wonder whether a hero will ever come to restore this broken kingdom. The poem’s final stanza completes the deep questioning of automobility by asking how much it has truly cost to construct the Detroit–Windsor Tunnel. Rather than seeing it as an efficient way to cross the border, the speaker reads it as a senseless expenditure of life and limb made so that women can easily go shopping in Detroit (5.15-18). She questions narratives of human progress and reframes roads and tunnels in terms of body counts. Most North American cities are particularly reliant on the automobile for their everyday functioning, and any look at urban nature must take such a fact into account. Rather than seeing cars and trucks as unnatural or natural entities, we need to see them as actors within the urban landscape. In an ironic way, the rise of affordable automobiles made large sections of the country accessible to tourists which, in turn, fueled the broader environmental movement, but they also contribute to pollution and global climate change while encouraging urban sprawl. An urban environmental praxis must be aware of what the true cost of automobility is, and Brandt’s poem goes some way towards uncovering it. She goes on to remind readers of the bones embedded in the tunnel’s walls and recalls Princess Di’s tragic death in a Paris tunnel (5.21-25). Because Windsor has been home to Canada’s auto industry, her assertion that the car be seen in terms of injury and death moves automobility away from terms like efficiency or convenience towards bodily and ecological costs. Furthermore, her engagements with the city’s history also show how its fortunes rose with the automobile, but have fallen as factories relocated to the global south. The city is now left with poisoned land and cancerous bodies as a result of a close relationship with the auto industry. In essence, she poses an open question: what has been gained and lost by the tunnel’s construction and, on a larger scale, by automobility? Finding Hope? Embracing urban nature also means recognizing that pollution is a key player in urban ecologies and Brandt’s poem views all bodies as polluted. Reflecting on the title Now You Care, the collection that contains “Zone: <le Détroit>,” Brandt writes that it is “an expression of the pollution panic running through this book, inspired most directly by the hyper-industrialized landscape of the Great Lakes region of North America, in particular, Windsor–Detroit, where I lived for nearly a decade, fearing daily for my health as I breathed in, along with everyone else, the thick toxic fumes of factory smoke and agricultural chemicals that have made this region infamous for decades” (“Je jelieda, je vechieda” 106). This pollution panic means that all the bodies in the poem are corrupted or contaminated in some key way just as the missing breasts are. The breastly ghost dance is an elegy for the lost innocence that bodies have: our bodies, particularly women’s, now bear the toxic burden(s) of the Industrial revolution. In the fourth stanza, the speaker proclaims Windsor’s primacy as the most polluted place in Canada, yet, as a drag queen comments, the natural world in the form of trees can still instill a sense of awe (4.19-24). Such startling declarations do not avoid the reality of a poisoned world, but posit its existence alongside fragments of natural beauty. Brandt decries the bodily cost of modernity by populating her poem with beings that have managed to survive in spite of the obstacles; they are characters situated in a broken, complex urban environment. The poem does not retreat to an untouched forest or lake, but confronts the messy, sticky situation we find ourselves in. Moreover, Brandt’s poem is notable for its refusal to give up on Windsor and its concomitant sense of hope. It will certainly seem odd to claim “Zone: <le Détroit>” as a hopeful text when the majority of its images are of degradation, oppression, and injustice. Yet there is beauty within the images and words of the poem itself. The poem’s subtitle, “After Stan Douglas,” alludes to the fact that the poem itself was commissioned by the Art Gallery of Windsor in conjunction with a photographic exhibition of Stan Douglas’ series of photographs entitled Zone: Le Détroit. Douglas’s photos of Detroit resemble Brandt’s poem in that they present beautiful aesthetic works of art whose content is the degradation and decay of urban space. Douglas’s photos feature dilapidated houses, abandoned churches, and broken factories while Brandt’s poem is populated by images of toxic poisoning, broken bodies, and gendered violence. They choose not to ignore ecological and social brokenness, as others might, but instead engage with it in the hopes that careful attention and deep care might be able to suggest alternative possibilities. These works cry out for a better life, for fulfilling and engaging cities where women’s breasts need not be cut off, where the water is not poisoned but populated with fish, and where indigenous peoples are embraced not displaced. Finding meaning in brokenness is certainly not condoning the conditions that bring about this brokenness; instead, it is a refusal to allow oneself to be beaten down by the relentless grind of injustice and environmental degradation. “Zone: <le Détroit>” is a lament for the destruction of the urbanization process, but it is also a celebration of the fragments of the natural world within it. Returning to the first section, the speaker cannot finish her question about who will be fisher king, ending instead with: “who will sing us back into -” (1.36). Her pleading question cannot even be fully formulated because of the brokenness of the city as it has been imagined in the previous lines. In fact, only one of the five sections actually ends with a period as if the poem refuses to end itself, refuses to allow injustice and degradation to have the final word, but at the same time shies away from any unbridled optimism. In a sense, Brandt and Douglas hold open the door to possibility, even if they cannot see what it might be. Brandt’s poem mourns the lost innocence and contemporary injustices in hopes of producing a better future. It is this almost inarticulate hope in the face of environmental collapse which provides a nuanced account of the urban worlds we inhabit. What does Brandt’s poem offer an urban environmental praxis then? It offers a sense of pragmatism in that it acknowledges urban ecologies as polluted, contaminated, less-than ideal, yet it also does not foreclose the possibility of such spaces being meaningful places. In spite of the fact that “Zone: <le Détroit>” chronicles the gendered, racial, and ecological injustices of Windsor, it does not give up on the city. The poem’s closing lines, “feeling like we accomplished/something, snatched from/our busy lives, just being there,” is a continuation of the ironic critique of cross-border consumerism and the dubious justification offered by automobility (5.29-31). However, it might also be read as a statement of being present amidst ecological degradation in Windsor, suggesting that just being there is all that may be possible right now. If we are to take urban nature and the city more seriously, we need to spend more time just being in it rather than indulging in imaginative or literal flight from it. We need to search out the wild spaces that exist while also recognizing the pollution and contamination that has occurred. Brandt’s critique of this pollution is a first step towards working against it; it is an epistemological move that sees the city not as an unnatural space where dumping chemicals into the river or burying toxic waste are normal practices, but as a lively space that contains animals, plants, watersheds, and other beings, all of whom are impacted by human actions. An urban environmental praxis informed by Brandt’s poem works towards a more equitable balance in the urban ecosystem, one that does not prioritize human action, profit, or pristine conditions. It is a process, a becoming that can only ever tenuously manage the agendas of the city’s multiple actors and their needs or desires. Taking up the city will mean experiencing some level of ambivalence about current conditions, but also being aware of the globalized economy where actions far away can have tangible local impacts and, much less frequently, vice versa. It will require that we both elegize environmental destruction but also refuse to let it have the last word. We may be surprised by wonder at weeds, raccoons, or maple trees in the city. This is a good reminder that we are not stuck forever in a world where humans can only destroy the world around them in a kind of twisted environmental Midas touch. It is possible to find beauty and hope in the world, even if such moments are qualified and compromised. Ecological art, like “Zone: <le Détroit>,” has a key role in bringing these instances, moments, and affects to our attention. Although Windsor is a place that some humans simply pass through, Brandt’s poem might serve as a model for how we can begin to inhabit the spaces we ourselves live in. The future is not so much out in the wilderness as in the broad spectrum of human inhabitations that have metropolises like New York or Tokyo on one end, cities like Windsor in the middle, and isolated rural settlements on the other end. Footnotes I would like to thank Catriona Sandilands, Amanda Di-Battista, and Ella Soper for their work in organizing not just this cluster of papers but also the Green Words/ Green Worlds conference in 2011 where the germ of this article first came to light. Gratitude is also due to the anonymous peer reviewers who have helped shape this piece in profound ways by pushing my thinking in different directions. Finally, many thanks to Di Brandt herself for graciously allowing me to reproduce her work in this paper and for talking with me about her writing at an early stage in my academic career. 1 Rod Giblett’s Cities and Wetlands is a promising work that begins to reverse this trend. 2 For a compelling discussion of the squirrel as a natural revolutionary figure for environmental discourse, see Nicholas Holm’s “Consider the Squirrel.” 3 Such a list inevitably falls short of capturing the many nuances of Windsor itself. As Massey notes in For Space, place is better viewed “as a simultaneity of stories-so-far” (12). There are many stories of Windsor, and I readily acknowledge that I have only painted some broad strokes. 4 I myself am not from Windsor, and can claim no high degree of expertise on the region. However, if we require such expertise, we foreclose opportunities for others to contribute to a shared responsibility to place. 5 There is also a parallel here with much indigenous place-thought that embed humans into relationships with the animals, plants, land, and other beings that exist in the land. See Vanessa Watts for a Haudenosaunee/Anishnaabe exploration of these complex relations. 6 James J. Flink defines automobility as “the combined import of the motor vehicle, the automobile industry and the highway, plus emotional connotations of this import for Americans” (451). For a reading of automobility as a key component of globalization, see John Urry’s “The ‘System’ of Automobility.” 7 See the poems “Wake Up: Four Quartets,” “Interspecies Communication,” “Dreamsongs for Eden,” “Horizon on Fire,” and “[We with wildflowers growing in us]” (44–47, 48–49, 65–73, 74–78 and 102). Works Cited Alaimo Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana UP , 2010 . Brandt Di. “Horizon on Fire.” Now You Care , Coach House , 2003 . 74 – 78 . Brandt Di. “Je jelieda, je vechieda: Canadian Mennonite (Alter)Identifications.” So this is the World & Here I am in It . NeWest Press , 2007 . 105 – 32 . Brandt Di. Now You Care. Coach House , 2003 . Brandt Di. So this is the World & here I am in it . NeWest Press , 2007 . Brandt Di. “The poet and the wild city.” So this is the World & Here I am in It . NeWest Press , 2007 . 73 – 88 . Brandt Di. “This land that I love, this wide, wide prairie.” So this is the World & Here I am in It . NeWest Press , 2007 . 1 – 10 . Brandt Di. “Zone: <le Détroit>.” Now You Care , Coach House , 2003 . 13 – 18 . Chisholm Dianne. “The Art of Ecological Thinking: Literary Ecology.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 18 ( 3) ( 2011) 569 – 93 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Cronon William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. W.W. Norton , 1991 . Flink James J. “The Three Stages of American Automobile Consciousness.” American Quarterly 24 ( 4) : ( 1972 ): 451 – 73 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Giblett Rod. Cities and Wetlands: The Return of the Repressed in Nature and Culture. Bloomsbury , 2017 . Hinchliffe Steve , Whatmore Sarah . “Living Cities: Toward a Politics of Conviviality.” Science as Culture 15 2 ( 2006 ): 123 – 38 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Holm Nicholas. “Consider the Squirrel: Freaks, Vermin, and Value in the Ruin(s) of Nature.” Cultural Critique 80 ( 2012 ): 56 – 95 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS MacDonald Tanis. “Introduction.” Speaking of Power: The Poetry of Di Brandt . Ed. MacDonald Tanis . Wilfried Laurier UP , 2006 . ix – xvi . Massey Doreen. For Space . SAGE , 2005 . Massey Doreen. “Power-geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place.” Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change . Ed. Bird Jon et al. . Routledge , 1993 . 59 – 69 . Ministry of Transportation . Provincial Highways: Traffic Volumes, 2013. Province of Ontario, Ministry of Transportation, Traffic Office , 2013 . Roberts Peter , Ravetz Joe , George Clive . Environment and the City. Routledge , 2009 . Swyngedouw Erik. “Circulations and Metabolisms: (Hybrid) Natures and (Cyborg) Cities.” Technonatures: Environments, Technologies, Spaces and Places in the Twenty-First Century . Ed. Wilbert Chris , White Damian F. . Wilfrid Laurier UP , 2009 . 61 – 84 . Urry John. “The ‘System’ of Automobility.” Theory, Culture & Society 21 ( 4) : 2004 . 25 – 39 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Watts Vanessa. “Indigenous place-thought & agency amongst humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!).” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2 ( 1) ( 2013) : 20 – 34 . Wilbert Chris , White Damian F. . “Inhabiting Technonatural Time/Spaces.” Technonatures: Environments, Technologies, Spaces, and Places in the Twenty-First Century . Wilfrid Laurier UP , 2009 . 1 – 30 . © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)
TI - Wildness and Windsor: Di Brandt’s “Zone: <le Détroit>,” Environmental Praxis, and Urban Nature
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isy048
DA - 2018-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/wildness-and-windsor-di-brandt-s-zone-le-d-troit-environmental-praxis-ARAymcPDsr
SP - 396
EP - 411
VL - 25
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -