TY - JOUR
AU1 - Fairfield, Catherine
AB - The scope of “life” in life writing is expansive, much more so than I expected to encounter when I approached this genre. Life in these texts extends beyond the human and beyond the individual to encompass the many livelihoods that influence the writer’s life and that are affected by her life. My primary texts are Jody Aliesan’s True North: Nord Vrai (2007), Sharon Doubiago’s Hard Country (1982), and Jan Zita Grover’s North Enough (1997). All of these texts are life narratives that were written in the late twentieth century.1 The expansive representation and redefinition of life develops out of each of the texts’ focus on space. Space is a central theme present in all of the texts, a binding factor in women writing about their lives. These writers think spatially in order to recognize and engage with the environments on which their lives depend. I argue that by turning to space to tell their life stories, the writers address what the narrative of one life has to do with survival of life in the collective sense. When we read life writing as environmental writing, the texts illuminate not only how space shapes the human lives in these texts but also how space and the nonhuman reflect and depend on these women’s livelihoods. My readings attend to what becomes legible in the story of a human life under women’s autobiographical gazes and what is at stake in women taking up space in their writing. My research is indebted to Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s prolific contributions to the field of life writing criticism.2 In “The Spaces of Autobiographical Narrative,” Watson points out the surprising dearth of dialogue between life writing discourse and discussion of space (Smith & Watson). Life writing tends to be discussed in terms of temporality, identity, and authenticity, issues that matter deeply to understanding women’s authorship. What has not made it to the center of these discussions are the authors’ engagements with the environments in which they are immersed. Even Eveline Kilian and Hope Wolf’s collection, Life Writing and Space, which significantly furthers the literature surrounding this intersection, does not delve deeply into an ecological and material perspective that engages with space as a non-linguistic and multispecies site. Watson devotes one of her essays to the topic of space in life writing, in which she proposes spatiality as a reading practice that will illuminate “the networks of social relations negotiated across differences of location and position” (Smith and Watson). My readings will demonstrate that women’s life narratives do the work of making non-discursive space legible through their writing. They draw the material, nonhuman background into the foreground of their experience. I argue that doing the work of writing one’s witnessing of nonhuman life is an act of feminist sustainability. Bearing witness to the spatial, the environmental, and the material makes legible the experiences of both human and more-than-human life that are illegible in narratives dominated by oppressive, patriarchal epistemologies. Aliesan and Grover have been subject to very little scholarly engagement thus far. Aliesan is a part of the tapestry of discourse around late twentieth century feminist poets, and some extended discussion has taken place around her environmental work. For example, Jeffrey Craig Sander’s account of Aliesan’s sustainable urban home and farming methods provides insight into her impact on environmental activism in the Seattle area. Grover’s North Enough has been taken up rarely but by prominent scholars including Heather Houser and Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands. Houser and Mortimer-Sandilands have explored Grover’s work in the context of AIDS writing that explores nonurban queer presences in melancholic, sick, and wounded rural landscapes. Doubiago, while not being as widely studied, has received significantly more critical attention, particularly relating to Hard Country’s impact on twentieth century epic poems by women.3 I situate Hard Country as, first and foremost, a piece of life writing that then utilizes the genre of epic poetry. In each of the three texts, I deepen the conversation of how life and space interact when a woman documents her life. Space is taken up to define different aspects of environment across the texts. In Aliesan’s text, space is where the body is located, its living environment—a habitat, if you will. Aliesan makes little distinction between built and natural environments and instead focuses on space being a part of the body. Doubiago addresses space through the language of landmarks and ecology; it requires looking out of the self. Grover’s approach to environment is grounded in breaking apart the binary of city and country, which is a process necessary to reconcile her experience of the prevalence of AIDS in urban settings and the idea of wilderness as a site of retreat and solace even within the built environment of the city. In each of the texts, the women are drawn to sites of logging—specifically sites of clear-cuts. They write about forests that have long, deep histories, histories that are longer than the traumas that the trees endured at the hands of human industry. These forests are teaming with life, with layers and layers of multispecies survival that offer lessons into what it means to stay grounded and persistent when rooted in an ever-changing planet. The authors approach these spaces in differing ways, from openness of listening to predetermined opinions about what will be found there. But each writer finds themselves encountering something in those spaces of wooded history that communicates a liveliness that is illegible outside of that subject’s interaction with the space. Clear-cutting acts on several different levels in each text. The clear-cut moves between a material experience of the forest, an analogy to women’s oppression, a metaphor, and a source of language for witnessing change, redirection, and subversion—and also, simply, of trauma. I am not tracing a trope of clear-cuts across the texts, as my goal is not to identify a narrative pattern. Instead, I am pausing to linger on scenes of trees, forests, and the violence of logging which allow writers to express something otherwise inexpressible. While these moments in each text are unique in their unfolding, they always resonate with each other because of the significance of turning to the more-than-human to write about survival, longevity, and vitality. The deep histories of spaces like clear-cutting sites offer a great wealth of meaning for life narratives. Clear-cuts have an established history in feminist, disability, and queer studies discourse as a learning ground for activism. Eli Clare writes about the clear-cut as a challenge to relearn ecology in the wake of an education that supports the commodification of wilderness: “I knew big, old trees exists…But I didn’t know about thousands of acres of big old trees. Nor did I know about animals, like the northern spotted owl, that lived in old growth forests. No one told us, and the logging industry had quite a stake in the silence” (23). Clare grapples with “the chasm between my homesickness for a place thousands of miles away in the middle of logging country and my urban-created politics that have me raging at environment destruction” (20). That loneliness “reaches deep under my skin, infuses my muscles and tendons” (19). Intertwining the narratives of diverse more-than-human life is an act of survival, and sharing them as written text is activism. I am turning to Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology and her theorization of orientation to demonstrate that bearing witness to space makes legible the threats to survival of both human and nonhuman beings in that environment. It is a feminist act to be attentive to the impact of power structures on all beings. Ahmed’s orientation addresses how bodies relate to and rely on each other in space, which is at the core of why space and writing about one’s life are so intricately tied. These relationships make legible the ways that the human and nonhuman are mutually implicated in oppression and survival. Ahmed’s framework of orientation offers a language for thinking about the seemingly illegible presences that shape the lives that we turn into narratives. Ahmed conceptualizes life in terms of lines and directions and turns: where we go, how we go, and why we go – and what happens when we go off course. Orientation is as much spatial as it is embodied. A discourse of survival arises out of the relationship between space and orientation. Ahmed explains that “some spaces extend certain bodies and simply do not leave room for others” (11). Orientation is social and material. Ahmed writes that “[o]rientations…are about the intimacy of bodies and their dwelling places” (8). Bodies have perspectives, responses, and histories all shaped by and with their dwellings. The body knows as much about its dwelling as the dwelling knows of itself. Overlooking certain vitalities and sensations, certain spaces and “heres” (in the sense of being “here”) are all part of Ahmed’s claim that phenomenology is a matter of centers, margins, and backgrounds. With their attention to space, the life narratives of women writers make margins legible by making them part of the narrative and bringing them into focus. The background, the alongside-of, the life stirring at the edges of a clear-cut, is active. My engagement with life writing texts involves looking back and returning to former feminist moments and former women’s lives. Looking back is a necessity of sustainability, one that needs to balance looking forward. Each of the texts in this article delves into the authors’ experiences during the 1970s-80s. Some writing is written retrospectively, and some is taken from publications and journals written during those decades. From the perspective of feminist environmental humanities, it is increasingly valuable to look back to feminist history to make sense of the relationship between gender and environment. The archive of my first author, Jody Aliesan, will take us down the path of returning as a form of reorienting and recognizing. True North Jody Aliesan was a feminist, a poet, and an environmental activist, conducting her work within the Seattle area. Among the causes that she worked for were women’s rights, establishing sustainable farmland, and building socially conscious communities. Her book, True North, was brought alive to me when I visited Aliesan’s archive at the University of Washington, which include Aliesan’s personal journals from much of her adult life. True North is a point of contact and kinship for me. It is the beginning of a path through feminist history grounded in space and place. Aliesan demonstrates that reaching back can be a practice of feminist sustainability; in her own recursive reflection, she asks how self-examination through detailed record keeping can teach something about helping the feminist collective to survive. Reaching back initiates reaching forward. By visiting the archive, I was put in contact with Aliesan’s living legacy. Through my archival encounter, it became apparent how much of an influential force Aliesan was in the Seattle community. I call this an “encounter” because Aliesan came alive outside of the boxes. One of the special collections librarians with whom I conversed at the desk told me, “I knew Jody.” At this opportunity we shared how and what we knew of Jody – my impressions of her and the librarian’s memories. She confirmed and corrected what I had gleaned through research. This was a moment of community that Aliesan had given to me. Two women on their work shifts with intimate knowledge of another woman who did not outlast us in life but remains in legacy: I read her journals and tracked the minutiae of her life, and the librarian lived with her, touched her, and acted as caretaker for several of her published works that were not included in the archive. True North is a short memoir in experimental form. It is non-linear, fragmented, and collage-like, made up of journal entries, conference papers, poetry, notes, and more to tell the story of part of Aliesan’s life. True North’s opening poem, “You are Standing in a Dark Room,” is spatially framed and uses second person to embed the reader there, too. The title sets up the subject’s existence as defined by space; “you are” (my emphasis) establishes the state of the subject as defined by where they exist and how (“standing”) they exist there. The there of the poem is a meeting point of subjectivity, body, and environment: looking out bright windows the room is your skull the brightness your eyesockets you are safely hidden curtains and treeboughs protect you from anyone looking in By revealing that “the room is your skull” and its “bright windows” come from “the brightness of your eyesockets”, space is used to solidify the narrator. You are positioned in space and the space is in you; you exist. This poem underscores that the out is in and the in is also out. You exist in, and of, space – and interaction happens in, and out, there. The second person voice pulls the reader—and the potential of other life—into that bodymind space as well. There is an openness. The presence of other people and objects in the space of this bodymind shapes the subjectivity of “you.” The subject knows life, knows what exists under the cover of things in and around them. Through this poem, Aliesan demonstrates the perspective that I want to highlight in women’s life writing: that not only is the authorial voice recognized as being embodied, but it is also always located. Space is within the self. The body’s environment is foregrounded. It is put into focus as an active, animated, and symbiotic element of the author’s life. Aliesan’s journals are filled with records of her lifelong commitment to community activism. One of her approaches to environmental activism was experimenting with cooperative housing. As an environmental activist, she did not take a back-to-nature approach, but rather enacted change through promoting urban modes of living that supported local farmers by bringing locally sourced food to the Seattle area. Her experience of cooperative living illustrates Aliesan’s recognition of even a communal house as an environment on which her wellbeing and survival depended. In her journals she refers to the co-op in which she lives as “a closed ecological system” (Jody Aliesan Papers). Many of her moments of community restructuring are moments of self-care and restoration in reaction to being faced with the pervasive presence of the patriarchal dynamics at work in her community. One day’s entry observes, “Will be glad to leave the philosophical shallowness, arrogant ignorance of element in this house” (Jody Aliesan Papers). Describing the male-dominated conversation taking place during a dinner with several friends and friends-of-friends, she writes: Over-intellectualized psychoanalytic sexism. Dave spent three extra years of time and tuition learning that males are “expansive,” females “intensive,” Eriksonian sugarcoating to the usual active-passive pill. Jennifer and I left them to their nonsense and danced in the dark, simply, sensually. (Jody Aliesan Papers) Her retreat with Jennifer to dance in the dark is an act of searching and exploring, of rejecting and restructuring. Leaving the circle of men at the dinner, she and Jennifer reorient the space through nonverbal communication that resists and counters the truths put forward in their dinner conversation. By sharing in a performance of female intimacy visually obscured to voyeurs’ eyes by the darkness, Aliesan works to heal herself from the toll of regurgitated epistemological oppression that threatens her vision for growth and progress in her community. She shows that through reorienting a space, the subject brings it to life and makes it vital while enacting her survival. Dancing in the dark restructures the house through the activism of movement between bodies. The idea of reorientation as activism is repeated in a central section of True North, entitled “This is a Managed Forest.” The title refers to a site of deforestation and reforestation that Aliesan visits several times throughout her life. She learns the forest’s wild and undisturbed past, then revisits it on a bus journey accompanied with several men when the forest has been clear-cut, and finally returns with her partner – a woman – to see the replanted managed forest that now occupies the site. The treads of her memory draw out an environmental history that the development and industry make irrelevant. Her writing and rewriting from different orientations act as a kind of subversive choreography for reclaiming and revitalizing both the memory and the futurity of the ecological space. From her position, the forest carries a story, a web of impressions and lifelines. I am struck by the present tense of the section’s title. The site is a forest, the verb drawing out its ongoingness. Even when clear-cut to the point that it can be seen by the passing eye as a site for future development, this is a forest, and continues to be. She writes that “the plantings are not part of a natural succession” and “[w]e will not get back what we lost,” but she still recognizes that there is “a small misshapen hemlock,” “the first sign” of the persistence of the forest and “all the other life underfoot and beside and above” (91). The text as a whole portrays Aliesan’s orientation to spaces as taking up a perspective that sees life left behind in the wake of destruction and harm. Aliesan, herself, is part of the life positioned “beside” the forest. She writes, “It looks to me like everything is getting steadily worse, and there is no hope. I can live without hope” (91). She and the managed forest share certain imprints, such as those of being unseen in their truth. The men do not see the forest as anything other than a controllable commodity. They also cannot pin down Aliesan’s queer presence on the bus, in that space. One man on the bus asks, “You an environmentalist?” (90). Aliesan writes in response: I said I wasn’t calling myself anything, but I hoped there would be someplace left where the trees weren’t all the same kind and the same age and planted in rows. He didn’t speak for a while and then we talked quietly, the way people do when they don’t know for certain and aren’t trying to prove anything. (90) Aliesan characterizes the masculine social presence as follows: “Fears ambiguity, incompleteness, the unknown. Prefers what is black-and-white, thorough, clear-cut,” or in Ahmed’s words, that which follows a straight line (93). Through drawing this distinct analogy between the clear-cut forest and masculine dominance, she makes that shared experience of violence legible. Offering another interaction between herself and the forest, at which point two queer bodies are aligned with it in ways that the men on the bus could not be, Aliesan describes her return to the site: “This spring my sweetheart and I drove to the same place on the same road…But when we rounded the bend into familiar country, I couldn’t help the tears” (90). The inclusion of this memory draws out the question, how do you recognize the profoundly different space? It brings to mind Maggie Nelson’s use of the question of the Argo ship in her 2015 feminist philosophy book, The Argonauts: is something which has been altered to the point of containing none of its old parts still that same thing? The Argo is “willing to designate molten or shifting parts, a means of asserting while also giving the slip” (Nelson). Other than location, something maintains Aliesan’s sense of kinship toward the forest, which has gone through a clear-cut and burning, “vast gray killing grounds…everything dead” to uniform planting of new trees (91). Shared history, being able to see and recognize the life that persists “under foot and beside and above” the “uprooted” and “burned” space (91). Shared experience brings recognition, mutual imprints, and similar movement for the sake of persisting. True North is a project of recognizing—and making legible—Aliesan’s consistent self amidst traumas, growth, and changes—like Nelson’s portrayal of the self as Argo. Montage is not a crisis; it is careful and precise articulation of something that resists homogeny and containment. Aliesan is unafraid to linger and even immerse herself in the painful and the disappointing when it comes to her activism. Her work undertakes an epistemological exploration of environmental harm. Her attention to what exists at the edges and background of a space in which the goals of capitalism and patriarchy are foregrounded does not provide a solution to environmental justice or sustainability. But she draws into focus the insidious background about why we, as humans, act in harmful ways and which actions even defy their own internal logic. She writes, “What is it about us that wants to manage?…Maybe the manager inside us…Fears what is wild…Thinks of abundance as threatening, goes into a killing frenzy to assert superiority” (93). By her own not understanding, the dominant capitalist epistemology is not itself “clear-cut” and does not exist in an empirical state of “rightness.” Like the clear-cut forest, there are roots, scattered seeds, even ruins that remain and exist at the base of that which is rebuilt. Aliesan’s dancing in the dark is a choreography that is repeated across her work because it represents an improvisational form of feminist world-making in which bodies can reorient space—even queer bodies that exist in the margins and the dark corners of that space. Hard Country Recognizing the imprints left by other livelihoods in one’s environment is central to Sharon Doubiago’s life narrative, which asks the question of what alternative histories are legible within land. Doubiago approaches life writing by taking up the genre of epic poetry. Her intervention into the masculine epistemology upon which the epic genre is constructed pushes the questions: how do you write an epic poem when you do not have the foundation of empirical knowledge of your narrative? What does such an epic poetic voice sound like when you do not have a reliable set of memories upon which to base your writing? And in what voice do you witness in order to reach an audience? Doubiago understands that the material world holds the presences of women’s history. The histories of women in her family have been forced into impermanence by being rejected by patriarchal and colonial cultural discourse. Turning to the land is an opportunity to witness from a temporal distance. Recovering imprints when traditional history records fail to represent the lives of the past is the mission of Hard Country. Her life narrative is an act of both searching and record-keeping. Throughout Hard Country, Doubiago works to recover and reconcile her family’s history that has favored its male lineages and contained limited records on female ancestry. As a project of recovering and honoring lost histories, the poem is a story of women surviving with the earth at the hands of men’s violence. Writing that story is crucial to Doubiago’s family survival as she is at odds with the erasure of women’s history in the previous generations of her family. In the end notes of the text, she explains her connection to her indigenous heritage as being a matter of oral and memory-based preservation of an illegible truth that evades normative, empirical record-keeping: When I wrote Hard Country I didn’t know the specifics of my own Indian heritage. My mother had just pounded it in from the beginning, We are Cherokee, Choctaw Seminole, maybe Shoshone. What I think now is that the grandparents drilled this into her and her siblings—You must never forget!—before putting them in the local Virginia orphanage, an institution whose main admittance rule was all white. (272) There are a number of dead women in Doubiago’s life that direct the meanders of the poem, including her mother, the mother of Ramon (Doubiago’s lover), Doubiago’s grandmother, and Doubiago’s grandmother’s daughter for whom part one of the poem is dedicated. The narrative has the mission of centering such questions as “Who were the women / Who told their stories / to each other across the hills” and “Who is it that I look just like” (11, 15). The answers have been lost due to “the family disease, amnesia” (14). Doubiago writes back to her Grandmother, telling her that “You were a map, Grandma / to a place I couldn’t find/born in a land without roots” (14). She imagines how her grandmother interacted with space, making up memories of her movement: “Sometimes, Grandma, you walked to the Georgia border. / I make it up. You must have walked / to North Carolina looking for a tree. / How else did you bear / That poisoned corner of Tennessee?” (17). Her grandmother must have sought refuge in the land, as Doubiago, herself, has. Land is the compass by which Doubiago searches for a new way of knowing the world. She grounds the human in site and landmark, in natural phenomena and geographical signifiers. Places and stories are inseparable. There are no disembodied presences in the poem—everyone is located in space and in geography. Finding material landmarks in the self-grounds her identity, providing reason and steadiness. Somewhere between the tension of women’s tenuously legible subjectivity and their material motherhood and genealogical persistence, and the tension of the material, ancient environment that is also fragile and vulnerable, there lies a space for women to pass down their witnessed accounts and to trust the voices of those experiences. Both women and environment are made vulnerable by men, harmed by men, made illegible by men. But by intertwining stories and landscape, women in Doubiago’s family create a space in which their vulnerable truth cannot be erased or silenced. The language that both Aliesan and Doubiago use invokes a different relationship to gender and sexuality than is used in current feminist discourse. The portrayal of gender during that period is often essentialist and binary; there are men and there are women, and they are oriented along separate but parallel lines. Deviating from these lines is a divergence from the norm and so is being vocal about the effects of these lines. The language of sexuality is direct and visceral. The women’s voices locate sex and gender in no uncertain terms—mapping the way in which the world takes form around these axes. The body and the self are worldly and relational; they are deeply material. Hard Country exemplifies the clarity of the shared language of women and environment, as exemplified by the passage: “Flood me, deflower me, pollute me, blind me. / Make me as my city, the 200,000 dead. / You are a man. You know nothing. Therefore you can do/anything” (53).4 These lines articulate how Doubiago sees women and environment reflecting each other, and gestures toward an embodied knowledge that is at odds with the knowledge of men. Locating embodied knowledge as part of one’s identity is the seed of women’s counter-epistemology across the three texts discussed here. Moments of visibility and anger, of action and resilience, mark a time when women demonstrated the need to search deeper within their own bodies and further away from culture to understand themselves and their oppression. A trip through the landscape of the Redwoods becomes an opportunity to move further away from what Doubiago calls the “knotted male perspective” (96). The presence of trees draws out a resonance of legibility. Visiting the site of a clear-cut in the Redwoods opens up a clear narrative “to the simple unfolding / of the story” (96), “to the stories that call through dark manure / and red carnivorous soils” (94). She takes a train with her lover through trees that have not yet been logged to the point of the clear-cut. Being present amidst “the circle of new shoots / from the burnt heart of redwood” allows her to loosen “the knotted male perspective” (94, 96). Her own voice is bracketed by the voice of a male guide5 who tells her “This track laid…to get the trees” (96). The following italicized passage moves from the Whitmanesque “who” to repetitions of “why,” unlocking an articulation of experience that Doubiago sees reflected between herself and the wounded trees: Why when you found me bathing in the pool did you look at me and see the world and your land, sacred genital to holy mouth, why your need to haul my body into property, your land into pornography, why your fantasy to love things to death? (96) Where Aliesan saw capitalist exploitation in the male treatment of human and nonhuman bodies, Doubiago also recognizes colonization. Ramon’s fantasy love for her is a conscious desire to turn her body into property and pornography. Through pairing property and pornography, she equates colonization with male hedonism, underscoring how each disenfranchises women and profits on their bodies. The action of hauling her body mirrors the trees being taken away on the train. The form of the bridge disintegrates into incomplete sentences as Doubiago pieces together her knowledge of her body being broken apart into serviceable entities for Ramon. Like a clear-cut, the breakdown leaves more behind than “clear” suggests. Being amidst the logged forest with Ramon, she can recognize his orientation to her body. Her orientation to the forest detects and empathizes with the forest’s own exploitation. The “why” questions of the previous stanza evade her. She longs to “suck us back”—herself and Ramon—“before America was born/before the land was cleared / before our lives were broken // to wilderness/where marriage is possible” (94). The revelation of deforestation offers an intersection of environmental exploitation, violence toward women, and the mutually destructive silence and story-building of men: The Redwood Empire is now, at best, second growth, and I am a giant snag left from your clearcut of the virgin forest my famous awesome beauty gone my enormous roots still snarled everywhere beneath the ground. (98) Calling the Redwoods an empire signals that they are never simply a forest; they are always implicated in colonialism. “Second growth” indicates the generations of the empire. An empire is a composite that grows beyond its original form to encompass diverse and manifold parts. By balancing the image of the Redwoods with a description of herself, Doubiago articulates a form of survival that speaks to Nelson’s Argo. Her lover’s clear-cutting of her is a destruction of that which is profitable and has market value, like virginity. After that hauling of her body, of what he deems to be his property, her “enormous roots” survive beneath the ground, allowing her to persist. She sees herself change from a forest to a snag, but those deeply entrenched roots answer the question of Argo by insisting that she is still herself: a forest remains through its roots. North Enough Jan Zita Grover’s memoir, North Enough, takes up the conversation of what lives on in second growth and other sites of destruction. Grover writes about her experiences caring for HIV-positive men in San Francisco. She then turns to her migration to rural Minnesota with the intent of recovering from the burnout that she suffers after being so close to a community of dying AIDS victims for so long. She describes her motivation for moving as, “Reckless and burned out, I wanted nothing more than to find a place where I might be at peace” (3). The book moves between the two major settings of San Francisco and Minnesota, which structure the tone and focus of each chapter. The goal of the text is clearly expressed as Grover wanting “to record what I saw and experienced. I want to bear witness” (7). The narrative bears witness to her own life, those of her friends who died of AIDS, and the nonhuman world that she observes around her. Its patient and detailed passages that articulate the behavior of the land, as well as the land’s history, are necessary steps toward explaining the ways in which a dominant epistemology has shaped how forest life is valued and stewarded. The city/country binary is inscribed into the narrative simply through the process of moving from an urban area to a rural one to find peace and escape the harsh realities of modern existence. However, while Grover recognizes the binary, she does not reinforce it as being based on reality. The boundaries of city and country are broken down through her narrative of recognizing life and beauty existing in damaged places. There is a reciprocity between the seemingly disparate settings that Grover describes: “In learning to know and love the north woods not as they are fancied but as they are, I discovered the lessons that AIDS had taught me and became grateful for them” (6). She explains, “I travel with my dead” (12). What this means for her experience in bearing grief in both the city and the woods is learning that nature follows you into the city and the human follows you into the wilderness. The narrative of Grover’s experiences in both settings hinges around the death of her friend Perry who has AIDS. She meets Perry in Minnesota despite her intent of escaping from the impact of HIV by leaving San Francisco. Perry often reminded Grover that “Nothing lasts forever,” a knowledge that he “inhabited…his body rotted, sloughed its beauty, liquesced. He sunk deeper and deeper in his bed as if growing roots, extruding layers like a clam” (13). Death “most visibly entered” Perry through his lesion covered leg which becomes a focal point while Grover comes to terms with his death (24). As she changes his bandages, she thinks, “How much of the world could I find in something that was dying?” and “Could I learn to see his leg as a creation as well as destruction?” (23). Perry’s decaying body is a set of questions around what happens at the limits of living. Debriding his wounds with hydrogen peroxide, “The bubbles winked back at me, catch-lit; they might have been stars wheeling in an unfamiliar galaxy” (24). This thinking-back and thinking-with Perry offers her limited perspective of the landscape, which sees mostly damage, but also sees the potential to expand and change with the help of different orientation (13). Writing about Minnesota, Grover locates a circuit through the cycle of liveliness, survival, and decay that occurs in communities of every species that she witnesses. Through witnessing that circuit, she finds beauty in the bodies of her sick friends, and she finds a similar kind of beauty in precarious sites of wilderness. The trauma of witnessing her friends’ deaths is intricately tied to recognizing beauty in the ways that life appears in different spaces. Reflecting at the site of the Blackhoof River which is “a melancholy and pleasure-making place, for everywhere human influence of the direst sort is distressingly evident,” she comments that “a powerful beauty remains” (98). The discordance between the sadness and beauty of nature that bears no illusion of being untouched and is visibly under threat strikes a familiar chord for Grover. The sections devoted to Minnesota are built around sites of wildlife and wilderness, though not places that would likely be recognized as worth savoring. She chooses “to find the poorest, most obscure spots…from which to ask my questions alone,” calling these places “to think with” (94, 95). Her descriptions convey the beauty that she recognizes within them: beauty that is hidden, ignored, or unconventional, but always tied to diverse life forms. Grover offers another imperative that instructs readers to turn our attention to marginal sites at which life persists in spite of oppression: “Look to your borders, birders: there are birds who can live along edges and birds who cannot” (103). Observation is crucial for thinking with the more-than-human and working toward a radical diversity. Researchers of forest typology, Grover explains, have found that “There is no privileged forest form…The only surety is that one change entrains another” (109). The dominant cultural orientation toward nature spaces as possessing some valuable wildlife forms and some worthless beings is not reflected in the knowledge that can be found in the environment itself. This is “chaos theory [coming] to the north woods” (110). Grover’s discussion of recognizing unvalued life brings orientation to the foreground when she writes about trawling “the backwoods for clear-cuts” (103). Clear-cuts are thinking spots where “certainly there was plenty…to interest one” (111). Here, the logging road returns as a point of entry and a point of contrast. Grover arrives at areas of the forest that are not visible from tourist roads, but she emphasizes that only a limited view of the “visible violence of clear-cuts” is accessible from that vantage point (109). By changing one’s spatial relationship to the forest through diverging from the dominant perspective of the road, the forest’s own radical diversity comes into view. Orientation, movement, and recognition are inextricably linked. There is no condemnation of the logging road. It is not relegated to the status of industrial imposition but is accepted as a scar in the history of the landscape and an entry point into knowing the forest. There are many angles of perspective that Grover flags for the reader as she describes the forest space. The logging road itself offers a different view of clear-cut sites than the “paved country road[s]” that are buffered by “idiot strips” for “urban tourists’ tender sensibilities” (103).6 She draws attention to the “busyness” that exists underneath the “barrenness” of the clear-cut “that becomes visible only when you give yourself over to a scale of time slower than that of fax and voice mail” (104). The following passage employs a hegemonic lens to depict what a clear-cut looks like to the modern western individual who is embedded in a temporality dictated by technology. The perspective of this normative body is conditioned to reject the destruction that is left in the wake of profitable violence: The look of a clear-cut, especially one this fresh, is superficially distressing: the only things upright are dead snags riven by the vertical grooves bored by pileated woodpeckers; shrubs that escaped the loaders’ and skidders’ traders; an occasional trash tree too small or lowly even for pulping. There was plenty on the ground, though: logged trees are limbed and bucked before being hauled, so between the running red sores of tractor treads lay piles of sweet-smelling slash. (104) Grover’s “trash tree” pulls the clear-cut forest to the “lowly” level of landfill, emphasizing the proximity of landfills to actual nature sites and also the destructive treatment of wilderness by humans.7 A clear-cut, here, turns a forest to trash. The hierarchy of forest visibility looms large in this passage. The normative human perspective of the forest is oriented in such a way to favor that which is vertical, tall, and upward-reaching. The foremost distressing quality of the clear-cut is that its height is gone and the remaining upright snags are visibly dead. The woodpeckers, representatives of remaining animal life, are themselves a lofty species that draws the eye upward. However, “There is plenty going on the ground” and Grover wants to pull the readers’ perspective to that angle, which requires leaving the vantage point of the logging road to go deeper. Instead of foregrounding grief, she favors a focus on scrappy activity in the wake of a clear-cut. To only see death is “superficial” (104). The closing alliterative line “running red sores of tractor treads lay piles of sweet-smelling slash” calls forth images of the sick body, like descriptions of Perry’s leg as a complex site of liveliness in places where death is occurring. The “sweet” scent of the left behind tree branches draws the reader toward the ground. Grover’s language makes visible the depth of ignored life and “unexpected richness” of felled forests that she argues is left out of most narratives of logging (104). She wants to make clear that the forest at any state—sick, clear-cut, thriving, or protected—is active, not passive. The parallel between Grover’s portrayal of wild Minnesota and her experiences with sick bodies in California is already well-established by this point in the text. In this section, the stakes in instilling the parallel forest with images of wars being fought and survival being an active process are particularly political. Moving away from her previous narrative voice that describes the more-than-human through the language of “radiant diversity,” the descriptions of the forest take on a more normative and distanced voice of natural selection, battling organisms, and physical achievement. The shift ensures that the latter reflects back onto the disabled body of the AIDS survivor, just as progressive and flourishing traits of the radiant forest do (94). The “viruses that would destroy them while perpetuating their own kind,” that wrap up the earlier sampling of forest species may be indicative of both HIV and the viral manifestations of homophobia and stigma that greatly increased the risk toward sick individuals gaining the resources that they needed in order to survive (108). The images of organisms and cells fighting for survival and making great achievements while “their lives [are] all but suspended in the cold” echo the activity of both the sick body and the community of those living with AIDS and their care workers (107). The echo is particularly strong when Grover follows up her description of natural competition with the statement that “Mature forests are communities of survivors” (107). By viewing the AIDS community through the lens of the clear-cut forest, it acquires its own “entirely different look” (108). Grover writes in her introduction, “The north woods did not provide me with a geographic cure…they offered me an unanticipated challenge, a spiritual discipline: to appreciate them, I needed to learn how to see their scars, defacement, and artificiality and then beyond those to their strengths—their historicity” (6). Environmental observation—or consciousness, it might be called—is, for Grover, a process of desire, care, and faith. By going to the north woods, she is looking for “a place I can explore slowly, slowly, like a lover’s body, like a body I will tend” (13). Her exploration of “the clear-cut north of the Gunflint Trail” leaves her “[needing] to believe, as a simple act of faith, that this nearly treeless, shorn opening nonetheless swarmed with a universe of creatures all busily remaking it” (122). The triangulation of desire, care, and faith that Grover inherits from caring for sick friends and learning about her environment offers an invitation to action for those with the power to take it. She tells readers that “Our forests and river bottoms offer this infinitude, but only if we do not reject the possibilities that lie in Styrofoam and clear-cuts” (123). Grover identifies her faith as distinctly American, and distinctly colonial. Her faith is inherited, this time from “the tragic and ecstatic history of northern European immigrants’ quest for a new world, a new land” that she bears (123). Coming from that position of privilege endows her with power to act against the devaluing of threatened wild sites, to pull others down the divergent paths that invite the slow tending of wilderness. Conclusion By turning to clear-cuts to tell the stories of their lives, Aliesan, Doubiago, and Grover are taking a stance on vitality. They are recognizing life where it has otherwise been denied or devalued. When Aliesan questions the logic of cutting down trees to make a profit, she forces the question of which lives on the planet are socially legitimate and legible. The very inclusion in a life narrative of sites in which death and growth occur simultaneously centers the livelihood of those sites. Instead of whether this is a legitimate life, the feminist question becomes the puzzle of Argo: what is different about this life? The diffuseness of life and agency that we see in both the life writing texts and in feminist new materialist discourse demonstrates that survival is a matter that is both individual and cooperative. If life is diffuse across intra-active assemblages of multispecies community, then taking care of each other is vital. The persistent survival in these texts teaches—even decades later—how to locate the roots of life and livelihood where there appears to be a dearth of it. These texts refuse to refute the existence of wilderness. They hold on to such nostalgic perceptions as nature possessing a unique kind of beauty or holiness. These concepts are of course not unproblematic, and the authors do not leave them uncomplicated. But they remind us that sustainability can start with something as straightforward as saving the trees. The three texts demonstrate how gender and space overlap and how thinking with gender draws out covert livelihoods of a space. Thinking with space makes legible our affective experiences as embodied subjects. Those bodies that are, as Ahmed describes, “off line,” or diverging from normative lifelines, inhabit spaces differently and draw out otherwise unseen narratives from their environments. Orientation is not often a conscious relationship. It is a subtle and constant process of turning, pushing, pulling between and toward the objects and pathways that make up the map of our experience. Writing one’s life for an audience is an act of sustainability. Catherine Fairfield is a PhD candidate in English & Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. She earned her BA in English at the University of Exeter. Her research interests include twentieth century to contemporary Anglophone literature, environmental humanities, and feminist theory. Her dissertation explores the role of literature in how we learn to sustain, care for, and survive with our material environments. She is also invested in how environmental criticism intersects with disability studies and animal studies. Endnotes 1 While published in 2007, Jody Aliesan’s True North is made up of writings from several decades of her life, the majority of which are from the 1980s and 1990s. 2 I am using life writing as the term to refer to first person narratives about the authors’ lived experience. These kinds of narratives are sometimes referred to as memoir and autobiography. For the purposes of this article, life writing serves as a generically expansive term that encompasses the hybrid forms and diverse genres of my primary texts. 3 See, for example, Lynn Keller’s chapter on Doubiago in Forms of Expansion Recent Long Poems by Women (1997). 4 While not explored deeply in this paper, the environmental toxicity and pollution are engaged with frequently in Hard Country. They are a site for articulating slow violence that affects the human and nonhuman livelihoods in Doubiago’s family history. 5 It is unclear if this figure is an official guide or simply a male stranger who is offering unsolicited information about the forest. 6 “Idiot strips” refers to the buffer of trees left at high-visibility edges of a clear-cut to give the illusion of uninhibited tree growth and to hide the view of the clear-cut wreckage from sight. 7 There is also a tongue-in-cheek tone in the way that the trash tree reveals the thin line between a forest that has been impacted by human industry and the hated landfills that are rejected by most as sites of nature. Works Cited Ahmed Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others . Duke University Press , 2006 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Aliesan Jody. Jody Aliesan Papers, 1943-2012. Box 1-3. 1943. Special Collections, University of Washington, Suzallo and Allen Libraries. 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TI - The Roots of a Clear-Cut: Tracing Feminist Orientation and Environmental Legibility in Twentieth Century Women’s Life Writing
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isaa202
DA - 2020-12-31
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-roots-of-a-clear-cut-tracing-feminist-orientation-and-rBoePSDRgq
SP - 1190
EP - 1208
VL - 29
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -