Memory, Ecology, and Sustainability Conference: Keynote Lecture by Prof Pramod k Nayar

[00:00:00] all right good morning just got five minutes to move in with afternoon [00:00:16] and a very warm welcome to what is the final session of inms 2024 i have this [00:00:25] unenviable task of introducing promote naya right and some of you remember this from last time it is [00:00:34] uh very specific exercise because by the time you finish introducing him you may have written another [00:00:40] book published promo so it's just you know it's not going to happen it's probably going to come [00:00:45] to a point where if you go to google and write promote my google might snap back at you seriously [00:00:50] you know you hate me so much right but i'll just touch upon some of the basic things with a ton of [00:00:56] books on pretty much everything from hunting narratives to imperial masculinity to eco politics [00:01:03] human rights you can just go on forever he's been a teacher he's been a mentor he's won the president's [00:01:10] award for academic excellence in our country so everyone knows all that but i'll just [00:01:17] deliver a little bit of an effective introduction uh if i may i think for our generation when we were [00:01:24] sort of trying to get into academia in this country and looking for a role model uh someone to look up [00:01:31] to you uh someone that you try to emulate uh maybe get closer to you this was a man uh for not just me [00:01:40] for several people uh before after and i think it continues to inspire us uh he's been around he's [00:01:47] been the most talkative person in this um universe this conference i had to literally shut him down [00:01:52] right now and make him sit down he has the curiosity and the imagination of a 17 year old which you know [00:02:00] explains so much in terms of what he does and i think i said this uh last year as well i think for [00:02:08] everything you do whether you're a footballer or a musician or academic you need a benchmark uh something [00:02:14] that you can make a run for uh knowing fully well you're not going to make it uh but you still need [00:02:19] that mark you still need that golden standard uh as it were and for me ramon nye is a benchmark [00:02:27] i think knowing again fully well i'm never going to get even close to what he is but it's still worth a run [00:02:34] it's still worth getting close to and it is an extremely emotional moment for me to introduce him [00:02:40] so please join me in welcoming for the final plenary of animus 2024 [00:02:46] um thank you abhishek um it does seem that uh i'm perpetually here every time abhishek and meron think of a [00:02:58] conference uh i'm here uh it's like uh those who know their films i'm sure rajesh remembers [00:03:08] whenever hindi films i'm talking hindi films all the credits will end with and pran [00:03:15] it's a bit like that um that's the uh title of his autobiography as well it's called and pran [00:03:20] so you couldn't have um uh films without his presence i'm sure anjali also knows that [00:03:26] um so thank you it's always fun to be here and looking at the diverse papers that are presented [00:03:34] the panels the plenaries i particularly should uh thank uh catherine for um [00:03:42] very meticulously organized talk um it's very enviable that you can put together thoughts in that [00:03:49] particular fashion uh i am at best um a rather chaotic uh thinker and writer so um my prose goes all [00:03:58] all right most of the time um and i will not even mention punctuations uh marks so terrible [00:04:09] in the kind of work that this center is doing i've seen the shift [00:04:17] across the last few years and the focal areas have become more and more relevant more and more topical [00:04:29] it also does very interesting stuff in terms of the collaboration between theoretical empirical work [00:04:38] it brings in the cognitive um materialist philosophies epistemologies which i find particularly [00:04:46] interesting i was also impressed by the fact that the papers selected do at some point tie in with the [00:04:57] conference theme it's not like the thing with which several of us used to travel in our childhood [00:05:03] something called a trunk when you put everything in it it can be used to sit down children or the older [00:05:10] people you know it was a really unwieldy iron box kind of thing um its advantage was it was practically in [00:05:18] undefeatable and you can fling it you can sit on it you can push it and shove it and the trunk [00:05:23] remains the trunk it's a bit like batman invincible you know there's nothing you can do with it and most [00:05:29] conferences in india unfortunately are like that you know everything goes in there and sometimes you wonder [00:05:38] was that the same conference um because the paper sounds something else so the conference will be [00:05:46] xyz in film studies and then you still listen to three papers on aboriginal poetry [00:05:52] how on earth is this film studies you know except for the fact that there are people filming it [00:05:58] it has actually nothing earthly to do with um films but i find that um i wish i can do take a lot of time [00:06:07] to prune the lists but it's finally like an iffy setup right i mean whatever you do about selecting [00:06:15] abstracts people will do what they want and the abstract the title and the paper delivered are three [00:06:21] entirely different things and uh it's a great act of cognitive gymnastics by which the audience will say [00:06:31] oh that's how it connects because otherwise there isn't one um so i can understand the problem of [00:06:37] organizers i was told that they received upwards of what 700 600 plus uh yeah um so yeah and they're [00:06:45] very nice people uh so they don't want to say no but at some point they're also academics and part of [00:06:50] academia i mean if you have all graded papers you know is to say no and i know this is not going to [00:06:55] work this just does not work and this ought not to work um so i'm very uh grateful for the opportunities [00:07:01] that uh i wish i can merit insist on uh giving me um and my talk uh although it sounds extremely [00:07:10] jargonish i understand echnopoiesis and planetary memory geotrauma and postcolonial ecopoetics [00:07:15] i don't seem to have used any single syllable word in the whole title but i hope it'll get clearer as [00:07:20] we go um so okay here goes so janita maapatra in dawn writes about the footsteps of a few who walked on [00:07:27] them so that the grass with ancient feet heavy feet has remained in the frail shelter of that sound [00:07:34] the land remembers even shapes itself around the sounds of footsteps in mahapatra's lines in simon [00:07:41] ortiz's first one from the set forming child the child's tremble in the womb is described as quote [00:07:48] a beating of wings following ancient trails to help us return john kinsella arguably australia's most [00:07:54] significant poet in now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings opens with three verbs [00:08:01] with a full stop after each trench full stop excavate full stop layer widely separated in terms of [00:08:09] cultures and nations ortiz mahapatra and kinsella's writings embody an eco-poetics of planetary memory [00:08:15] i read a collection of poets from native american traditions aboriginal australian canadian [00:08:20] african and others to formulate this eco-poetics planetary memory i argue is cast in these [00:08:27] poets from the formerly colonized nations and peoples as iconopoiesis i employ the term as a spin on the [00:08:34] term iconology which is the study of fossil races the tracks in the ground by animals and plants from [00:08:43] ages ago iconopoiesis is the making of a world through traces and tracks traces exemplify continuity but [00:08:50] also what i'm calling biogeophilia which is my spin on jeffrey jerome cohan's geophilia the love of stone [00:08:57] but it's for me biogeophilia a love of current material lives embedded in matter that carry traces of local [00:09:04] lives and local histories however i suggest that when we discern an iconopoiesis that is voices being meaning [00:09:13] making and world making that occurs across poets and poems from very different cultures and history [00:09:18] it is possible to see the phenomenon as gesturing at a planetary condition at least in this kind of [00:09:24] reading where the poems are extracted beyond and outside the contexts in which they are usually read [00:09:30] in order to make them speak with an outside and beyond the immediate in other words this is a postcolonial [00:09:36] poetics for the planet so i'll start with poetic stratigraphies layers in simon ortiz's what my uncle [00:09:44] tony told my sister and me the speaker recalls the avancular advice to respect the land the poem which [00:09:50] has a clear didactic tone and set as a series of injunctions concludes with everything that is around you [00:09:57] is part of you this is the advice given everything that is around you is part of you unless russell's [00:10:03] australian aboriginal writer red the speaker declares that the color of his blood and that of the earth [00:10:08] is red and therefore he's a part of the earth the speaker then goes on to inventory items living and [00:10:14] non-living with whom he shares this red colored blood animals the pea flowers trees and the sun [00:10:23] and the poem concludes with for all things are a part of me and i am a part of them the emotions [00:10:29] themselves are the result of intersubjectivity they arise from contact with the ground it's it's very [00:10:35] important to recognize that thereby locating the world around as constitutive of the self this sense [00:10:43] of embeddedness in in and connection with to the world especially the ground reaches an apotheosis [00:10:49] in another aboriginal poet poet hylas maris in her spiritual song of the aborigine maris goes on to [00:10:55] list the many identities she has she says she's the river the snow the wind the red rocks and the elements [00:11:01] she's also she says the eagle crow snake and other creatures she concludes with i am this land and [00:11:08] this land is me i am australia which will recall for you both uh whitman and other australian authors [00:11:17] have a few years before this especially 80 hopes the death of a bird and australia the two canonical 80 [00:11:22] hope poems the post-human vision culminates in her becoming australia itself because whitman-esque she [00:11:28] encompasses multitudes embeddedness connections rootedness and linkages compounded by traces cast in [00:11:35] material forms such as rocks soil and even liquid topography constitute the human and the non-human there is [00:11:42] no distinction between human and non-human or even between living and the non-living in this vision [00:11:47] of the connectedness of all matter while autism speaker lists all the people the young ones are [00:11:52] connected to and ought to respect only one item is in that inventory is given the suffix the beginning [00:11:59] land land is the beginning nothing else is what is the speaker emphasizes that this land its matter is where [00:12:06] we begin but also other life forms and although we believe we come from parents and families and [00:12:12] genealogies only this matter can be termed the beginning see he very clearly states that human [00:12:20] origins of the human are less important this view of origins merges human genealogies with that of the [00:12:26] land refusing to disentangle one from the other deep in the earth lie buried buried the ores and mineral [00:12:33] loads that drew the human but as deborah miranda australian original poet observes in her poem indigenous [00:12:41] physics the element colonization the toxins and useful minerals plants and heavy metals are entangled in [00:12:49] unobtrusive ways in the earth her focus in the plant world which cleanses the soil and waterways after [00:12:57] the humans have caused their toxification she writes this maize mustard greens sunflowers blue sheep fescue [00:13:06] and canola transform heavy metals the same way water hyacinths suck up memory lead cadmium zinc cesium [00:13:15] strontium 90 uranium and pesticides the same way bladder campaign accumulates copper indian mustard greens [00:13:24] concentrates selenium sulfur chromium the same way willow absorbs uranium and petrochemicals and once [00:13:32] the willows biomass concentrates heavy metals here miranda is not offering an instrumental view of [00:13:38] the plant life that cleans the water or the soil rather she's speaking of a certain type of food chain [00:13:43] where the dangerous elements serve the plant's purpose the sheer variety of plants that assimilate and [00:13:49] therefore neutralize toxic metals and matter is an endorsement of the planet's attempt to regulate [00:13:54] dangerous substances and rewrite its own memory for samuel wagon watson in future primitive the human's [00:14:01] passage across the earth is marked by three powerful verbs and this is how he writes it hungry across the [00:14:06] land chewing tearing screaming those are the three descriptors for how humanity lives as a race the humans have been [00:14:16] producing matter from earth mother earth mother is his uh watson's term referring to mineralogical [00:14:22] explorations drilling and factories built on the land in roberta hills these river these rivers remember [00:14:30] she cautions us against seeing only the surface area that has been built up by human civilizations in this [00:14:36] particularly profound stratigraphic poem she writes beneath the tarmac and steel in saint paul roots of the great [00:14:43] wood are swelling with an energy no one dare betray from this point the poem attempts a quick history of [00:14:49] the region the savannahs and their fauna the rivers and their ancient names the harmony of the people and [00:14:54] the changes that then set in i must admit that there is a quite a bit of romanticization of the natural [00:15:01] world that happens in many of these texts but that's more or less a given when you're looking at ecological [00:15:06] poetry the phrase center of the earth occurs twice in the poem once at the opening and once as the last [00:15:11] line in hills consciously biogeophilic poetry the emphasis is the harmony that has been for millennia [00:15:18] sedimented in the terraqueous terrain in the land the rivers the trees and the people refraining from [00:15:24] sounding completely elegiac or even nostalgic hill refers to the region as the center of the earth but [00:15:31] leaves it open-ended whether she means a central location on the planet or the deeper geological center [00:15:37] of the earth we never can quite figure out harmony and mutual dependency i suggest is the center of the [00:15:42] earth which holds the planet together and is a stabilizing influence the connectedness of all layers [00:15:49] and the inhabitants of the layers constitute the very planet's existence and layers are planetary memory [00:15:56] everything radiates outward from the center laura navajo poet also focuses attention on the center of the earth [00:16:03] as she recounts the origins of her people in one of her poems her people come as she puts it from the [00:16:09] umbilical center of the sacred earth not only is this center lost the very land has been colonized by [00:16:15] europeans and tohe recalls the history of displacement violence suffering into endured by her people [00:16:23] for gabriela spears rico in eology for ramona in memory of the zapatista [00:16:28] and warrior ramona she says she's a unique woman warrior in a land where i quote women crafted from clay [00:16:36] emerge from the center of the earth so the center of the earth becomes a key theme in all these texts [00:16:42] samuel watson presents two histories of the land the bora of the aboriginal peoples and the european [00:16:48] histories in other lands european exhibitions of culture civilization and the arts do not account for [00:16:53] aboriginal developments and histories he argues in the exposition he's talking about an exhibition um and [00:17:00] the poem is titled cheap white goods at the dream time sale in the expo the critics as he puts it [00:17:06] neglect the rubenes crownness of a bora ring here watson is not merely foregrounding a history of colonial [00:17:11] thieving he calls them murderers turned trustees is how he describes the europeans doing art but also [00:17:19] pointing to an entirely different kind of the history of the lithic the neolithic additive that is missing [00:17:25] from the narrative of global civilizational progress is that of the aboriginals the aboriginal sites such [00:17:32] as the bora which have considerable significance for the community is no longer listed that is the new [00:17:38] stone age the neolithic is measured only in european terms when similar and parallel developments did occur [00:17:45] among the aboriginals as well so two different neolithic traditions in other words neolithic and [00:17:51] the associated connotations of newness is ascribed only to the europeans watson is gesturing at forms [00:17:57] of the historical narrative that forever positions the aboriginals at the at the primitive and pre-modern [00:18:03] end of the evolutionary scale even when the neolithic can be found among the aboriginals as well so when [00:18:08] you map the european history you have the paleolithic and the neolithic apparently that never happened in the [00:18:13] aboriginal community so the lithic and the neolithic which represent the layers of a community's life [00:18:18] therein do not matter except when these are of european provenance watson's poetics of prosopo [00:18:24] biostratigraphy which is prosopo being community bio being biological and stratigraphy which is layer so [00:18:29] the layers of the land are about biology people community and all forms of life offers a critique of the [00:18:36] exclusionary and discriminatory poetics of the colonial uh of the of the key uh colonial memory structure [00:18:43] the museum wherein some stories and layers are ignored even perhaps erased um ojaide's delta blues is [00:18:51] dedicated to kensaro eva and other environmental activists executed in 1995 and the poem is a dual [00:18:57] elegy for the land and for the people who fought for the land ojaide also opens with a layered image with a [00:19:03] stratigraphic image the inheritance i sat on for centuries the inheritance has had on for centuries [00:19:11] this inheritance of the speaker and his community will come to haunt them but for now the speaker is [00:19:17] nostalgic about the evergreen and the rivers in stanza three the tone changes my nativity gives immortal [00:19:24] pain masked in barrels of oil oil as we know fossil fuels are the product of about 250 million years of [00:19:32] evolution it's the sediment from pre-human times that we are connected to which means effectively our [00:19:40] memory is actually planetary memory because we thrive on fossil fuels which are 250 million years old [00:19:46] but as somebody pointed out it took 250 million years to produce oil it required us 400 years to finish [00:19:52] it off right the inheritance is this oil which produces much suffering in the people whose land it is [00:19:58] oh jade references the prospectors and what he calls barren robbers who have come prospecting for oil and [00:20:03] displays the natives and i find the term prospect particularly interesting because prospecting is digging [00:20:09] into the ground but prospect is also a particular view john barrel writes about the prospect view in the [00:20:15] 18th and early 19th century aesthetics where the landlord stands upon a promontory and looks at the land [00:20:20] and says this is what i own and arguably one of the more famous prospect views um would be in casper [00:20:26] frederick's wanderer looking over a sea of fog a famous 19th century painting the movement between surface [00:20:33] native lives lived on the land and the depth the oil is a movement in time because the time of sitting [00:20:39] calmly and enjoying the landscape which then becomes the time of prospecting and mining and that's planetary memory [00:20:45] for you so the life on the surface life under the ground or life which has become sedimented as oil [00:20:51] under the ground the life on the surface hinges on the layers below layers which carry oil um which is [00:20:57] why more and more people are talking about calciferous fiction or what's now called uh paleolithic fiction [00:21:04] fossil writing the images of depth and layers persists it persist from the very opening lines [00:21:09] inheritance i sat on and continues in his image of womb and mounts and things like that finally he [00:21:16] concludes he's referring to the graves of ken sarowio and others saying the inheritance i was blessed [00:21:22] with now crushes my body and soul what crushes him is the oil from under the ground and the entire [00:21:28] civilizational uh project of the natives being destroyed the womb of fortune is used ironically the [00:21:35] fortune that emerges from the earth is actually ruinous the womb metaphor also links to [00:21:39] the term he uses birth slash right or jade speaks of later in the poem a right that has now been [00:21:46] denied the birth right that is the land and its depths have been violated just as the land itself [00:21:52] has been other poets also point to the massacres and graves that constitute the legacies of the post [00:21:57] colony this is uh irish poet evan boland's witness a poem in the poem cycle colony in the lost land [00:22:04] collection which she concludes with a rhetorical question what is a colony [00:22:09] if not the brutal truth that when we speak the graves open and the dead walk what is a colony if [00:22:16] not the brutal truth that when we speak the graves open and the dead walk in his famous dhavali [00:22:23] giant mahapatra links the absence of the fecundity in fields with the massacres that occurred there [00:22:28] what he calls the fallow fields in which red smeared voiceless bodies lay buried the earth he writes [00:22:35] burrowed into these bodies the sense of place its history then is divided between the quality of the [00:22:41] earth fallow and the material symbolic red smeared voiceless layer surface and depth in other cases [00:22:48] it's water and not land that conceals and contains ancestral residue in mahapatra's famous one relationship [00:22:55] where he speaks about those maritime ancestors who have vanished in the black bay without a trace [00:23:02] a poem which is very resonant with derek walcott's uh powerful the sea is history mahapatra implies [00:23:09] that the water bodies continue to carry ancestral memories and the ancestors live as he puts it in [00:23:15] the sound of the waves mahapatra boland and other poets suggest that the buried predecessors family [00:23:21] members citizens define the colonial experience and its legacies so it's not just a blame game where you [00:23:27] blame the whites for everything that has gone wrong right how much of a nationalist and patriot you are [00:23:34] with this heightened awareness of science of predecessors and ancients of inheritances and birthrights [00:23:38] prosopo biostratigraphy embodies an entire poetics of traces and tracks [00:23:45] in simon ortiz's poem which i quoted when i began a child is being welcomed into the world and the [00:23:52] child's tremble in the womb is described thus a beating of wings following ancient trails to help us return [00:24:00] one observes that ortiz casts the child's movement or heartbeat in the womb in avian terms [00:24:07] butterfly bird you're not very clear imagery uh avian imagery leading us to ponder over the implications [00:24:13] i suggest that ortiz is aligning three things here the non-living tracks in the land the human life [00:24:20] form in the womb and the non-human life forms the beating of wings leaves for all practical purposes [00:24:26] no traces in the air the ancient traces in the land may be discernible or not the fetuses heartbeats and [00:24:35] movements are however tangible and traceable ortiz's iconopoiesis maps the tree traces onto each other so [00:24:42] you can no longer separate this verse sets the tone for the biogeophilia of the creation tales and he [00:24:48] writes in the next poem which is predictably titled the second one he says i will point out your place on [00:24:56] the earth among mountains on ground by old water courses in wind where your mother walked where her [00:25:07] mother walked ortiz projects here every individual as an iteration of a longer genealogy all of whose [00:25:14] members are connected to the earth just as the earth itself its very topography is an instantiation of [00:25:20] lives lived there the places his mother walked and her mother before her other newborn's place as well [00:25:26] for the place has been marked or traced for him the newborn is a footsteps traveler a particular tradition [00:25:33] of travel writing called footsteps travel and retracing reiterating and redrawing those who have gone ahead [00:25:39] or before cortiz also refuses to make flat terra firma the sole terrain for the people the mountains water courses [00:25:47] the wind and the level ground are all equally important so it's not just traces on the land [00:25:52] if in first one the earlier poem we have a child following ancient trails in the second one practically [00:25:59] all material forms water wind earth carry traces are all possible sites where the newborn could be [00:26:06] placed traces in ortiz's poems exemplify continuity but also biogeophilia where material lives are embedded in [00:26:14] matter that carry traces of previous lives of entire generations and genealogies much geophilic biogeophilic [00:26:23] poetry from the global south is concerned with traces of individuals families predecessors and ancestors [00:26:29] this poetry is deeply interested in materiality and matter whether of the human the non-human [00:26:35] or the non-living it thinks in terms of rootedness and traces of culture antiquity and therefore a certain [00:26:41] example iconopoiesis marks the poem marks the poems iconopoiesis is a sense of wonder that characterizes [00:26:47] poetry interested in traces and tracks mostly of predecessor civilizations and cultures a clear [00:26:54] instance of stratigraphic aesthetics where the present is read into and in terms of the past however vague and [00:27:00] ambiguous the traces of this past may be iconopoiesis serves the purpose of linking human and geological [00:27:07] stories slash histories in the poetry for linda hogan arguably one of native america's most significant [00:27:14] ecological poet in her poem the sand hills the wind is the language of the cranes and it has blown for [00:27:21] millions of years across the land with each season of the arrival she says the ancient story story is made new [00:27:31] the wind tells in the process the translated story of life across the sky that's her term the translated [00:27:37] story of life across the sky the wind is speaker translator and author it authors the story that it takes [00:27:43] from the cranes the writing of the story is across the sky and thus is a roof over the world the traces here [00:27:50] of what she calls ancestral longing presumably of lands and cultures now lost are literally sky high the wind is in [00:27:59] odin's evocative phrase the climate under which we lead our lives uh that's odin in praise of sigmund [00:28:06] freud whom he described as the climate under which we lead our lives ni osundere african writer in the [00:28:11] course of his longish poem waiting laughter speaks of the wound quote wound lodged in the spine of swindled [00:28:19] mountains i'll note the metaphor slipping across the human corporeal and the geological pointing to the [00:28:26] geotrauma and that's the second part of my talk because much of iconopoiesis emerges from what i'm [00:28:31] calling geotrauma uh pointing to the geotrauma inflicted by human actions swindle referring to of [00:28:37] course mining which causes cuts in the earth's crust in tanuro tanure ojaire's witnesses he writes that [00:28:45] the marks on the land are not beautifying tattoos they are scars of pain inflicted through human greed [00:28:52] everything in the land such as ojaire shrinks the mighty mountain and he says no mountain grows bigger [00:29:01] the more it's quarried mountains don't grow that's the whole point when these poets attempt to describe [00:29:07] and attribute causes principally colonialism to the traces which are mostly injuries and scars on the land [00:29:15] we understand that iconopoiesis is in fact geotrauma where i am using geo to include not just terra but [00:29:23] also aqueous terrain so it's not a literal geo as of the earth but it includes all forms of terrain [00:29:29] iconopoiesis is the poetics of geotrauma capturing the injuries the barrenness the loss of soil quality [00:29:35] the markers of destruction and erosion of the terrain and the consequent displacement of aboriginals the loss of the [00:29:41] habitat their ways of life and of course the effects on the disastrous effects on fauna and flora the dents [00:29:48] and scars are scar tissue the traces of a history of violence um john kinsella focuses on geotrauma as [00:29:56] iconopoiesis and his uh um long poem divan comedy um i wouldn't recommend that you read it it's 580 pages of [00:30:05] poetry it's a reworking of dante you know and since nobody reads dante i assume nobody will read kinsella [00:30:11] either unless you are you know on a deserted island and the only thing left for you as reading material [00:30:17] is dante you know um um john kinsella also focused on geotrauma's iconopoiesis in now only a dent in the [00:30:25] earth marks the site of these dwellings which is the segment of his poem he opens with three verbs like i [00:30:30] cited before trench excavate layer the later verbs are about disturbing the grounds and the resulting [00:30:37] geotrauma unearth and disinter those are the other two verbs he uses unearth and disinter what also [00:30:43] emerges as we excavate and disinter is a history it's a history that people do not wish to know or recall [00:30:52] this is a history as he puts it of coolies and navvies that's when you begin to make the connection [00:30:58] a sign remains and the sign says convict hiring depot that's the only sign that's left in shimasheni's [00:31:07] the graubel man based of course on the fossil discovery of the graubel man about the fossilized [00:31:12] remains of a third century bc human found in denmark and shimasen is important for uh um [00:31:20] where is kandan interested in yeah on mud uh shimasheni is interested in bog and we have something [00:31:32] called bog poetics in heaney heaney's argument is that bog and the mud from the bog is what gives him [00:31:38] his irish identity arguably the most significant poet of the bog is shimasheni in shima heaney is the [00:31:45] graubel man about the fossilized remains of a third century bc found in denmark he compares the [00:31:50] wrists of the fossil to a bog oak which is the bog oak is the subject of an entire poem in his 1972 [00:31:58] volume wintering out and he notes the signs of a violent death this so graubel man is a fossil which [00:32:04] shows signs that he died because his throat was slashed and he refers to the signs of violence death [00:32:10] but he's also struck by the paradox that this sounds like a nightmarish scenario out of a netflix series [00:32:16] that the dead appear so animated you know and he asks heaney who will say corpse to his vivid cast [00:32:24] he's so vivid and how do you refer to him as dead or corpse heaney implies that the fossil being [00:32:32] unearthed from the bog is akin to a new birth the fossil's hair is like that of a fetus and this is [00:32:37] description from the poem and the head and the shoulders are bruised like in the case of a forceps [00:32:42] baby as he calls it fossil's baby within codes while implicitly referencing the cycle of birth and death [00:32:47] embedded in the land in the layers of the land heaney reflects on the violence that is human history [00:32:52] a violence whose evidence periodically surfaces literally like the graubel man for ak ramanujan [00:32:59] in traces the earth has what he calls layers of temporality with quote shelves of fossils these fossils he writes [00:33:07] quote traces carry traces of anything that will leave a trace which includes in ramanujan's lovely inventory [00:33:14] leaves seeds shells among others ramanujan then points out that these material artifacts from a [00:33:21] completely different temporality serve as an import serve an important function for humans who will [00:33:26] decipher these fossils in order to give themselves a history a past and eventually a family tree [00:33:34] and decipher and family tree are his terms that is materiality generates discursive narrative and [00:33:41] symbolic connections the earth literally provides a history here he needs anthropocene poesis [00:33:49] revolves around remaking the contemporary around the traces of the ancient and the primordial [00:33:55] everything leaves a trace so that the present world so that the present world remains indebted to the [00:34:02] continuing materiality of and from the past kinsella's iconopoiesis may not be solely about fossil [00:34:09] traces and the paleontological discoveries as kinsella puts it it's paleo up to a point it's paleo up to a [00:34:16] point kinsella's iconopoietic mode focuses on subsurface histories and their tangible visible signs [00:34:24] the earth offers signs of human history buried inside its layers but also made visible when human actions [00:34:31] such as excavations take place bronislav zarzinski has argued that planetary memory has three forms [00:34:37] the energy buried in the earth residual heat from uh formation times matter fluids that carry memories of [00:34:45] dissolved structure and space the shape or arrangement of something he proposes that i quote lithospheric [00:34:51] memory becomes both an archive of different deformation events which can be read by an outside observer but [00:34:57] also consequential in that it affects the behavior of that geological formation in the future which [00:35:03] is why people like katherine use of are now speaking of geological subjectivity and geological life [00:35:08] when samuel watson writes of quote the hopeless arguments of history and this is quote the hopeless arguments of [00:35:17] history palpitating gently into the cracks of stoneware earth in his poem cold storage wagon is presenting human [00:35:25] and planetary memory in that one phrase let me repeat that the hopeless arguments of history palpitating gently [00:35:32] in that one phrase the hopelessly the hopeless way into the hopelessness of stoneware earth the [00:35:36] arguments of history as he puts it are obviously about human history on the planet [00:35:41] and or in that particular place but the earth's texture stone is cracked and thus enables the history to be buried in it [00:35:50] or um [00:35:58] the walcott poem also the ruins of a great house which also do the same thing but the earth's texture [00:36:05] stoneware is cracked and thus enables history to be buried in it compounding the geotrauma [00:36:10] wagon's uh iconopoiesis suggests that the same crack in the earth can provide a glimpse of the human history [00:36:17] within it history has deformed the lithic left traces in the rock but he implies this history of [00:36:24] colonization slavery corporate greed does not quite go away it affects the geological and the historical [00:36:32] formation in the future wagon is pointing to the persistence of history and historical memory [00:36:38] sedimented into the very layers of the land history is inscribed deep into geological matter [00:36:43] other poets are careful in their iconopoiesis and they distribute their attention across human and [00:36:48] non-human traces simon ortiz another absolutely lovely um native american writer in his poem the bend in [00:36:55] the river begins with a human observer watching the arkansas river rippling over pebbles and he notes that [00:37:03] glacial stone moves slowly and um those of us uh and you are interested in this uh the glacial movement is a [00:37:12] specific time we call it glacial time it's a time different from human time right um and he notes glacial [00:37:20] stone moves slowly as the poem proceeds we see the same observer discovering many tracks at the river's edge [00:37:27] tracks of the raccoon the coyote the deer and the crow the river bank then is inscribed within the reminders [00:37:34] of the non-human and ortiz after listing all these non-human presences at least in the form of the [00:37:39] tracks writes and now my own his tracks that is the human's tracks merge with the tracks by several other [00:37:46] non-human creatures planetary memory etched on the terrain in this case land is a mix of multiple life [00:37:54] prints human and non-human the river traditionally the source of life with human civilizations being [00:38:00] established along rivers in all parts of the world carries on its banks the signs of different life [00:38:05] forms the humans is only one among many although the human may have had a more powerful definitely more [00:38:11] destructive impact on the planet as those who endorse the anthropocene epoch argue ortiz implies that the [00:38:17] inscriptions of the surface messily merge the human and the non-human when ortiz's old hills ends [00:38:24] old hills is the poem we have a prominent topographical feature the hills denuded and he says it's worn down [00:38:31] to a flatness so there's a whole hill that has been denuded to the level of the ground the stones of [00:38:36] these hills writes ortiz quote remember being underwater and the cool fresh green winds and those of you who [00:38:45] read uh novels like stephen baxter's evolution which begins with pangia the earliest supercontinent to [00:38:52] the present um you will see uh him talking about fossil records and and things like that the landscape [00:38:57] which has changed over the years over millennia and it's pre-human history uh ortiz bestows the land [00:39:03] with memory the stones that make up the hills carry memory the traces of the wind and the [00:39:08] water of the bygone era have reshaped the material structure if you can think of it that way the [00:39:13] physiognomy of the stones and if as wittgenstein said meaning is a physiognomy then what is the [00:39:19] meaning of the stone some poems like ojade's recession view even benign human interventions as [00:39:25] dangerous for the planets in this poem ojade opens with a statement quote a wilderness recedes into a [00:39:31] garden of eggplants in my palm in the course of the poem ojade refers to an injunction from a sick sage [00:39:39] and the injunction is no amendment to natural laws end quote but the natural laws include unfortunately [00:39:47] a locust infestation and these what he calls fragile destroyers do destroy the crops these and other what [00:39:55] you call surprises mark the season presumably the agricultural season the poem concludes with a [00:40:01] slightly modified version of the opening line um if you remember the opening line went a wilderness [00:40:08] recedes into a garden of eggplants in my palm but the poem ends with the wilderness recedes into a garden [00:40:14] of eggplants in my bruised palm there's a shift the bruised palm is that of the farmer the indefinite article [00:40:21] has been replaced by the definite one and and a wilderness has become the wilderness the wilderness [00:40:30] gestures at a particular space of wilderness that has now been claimed and tendered or rendered into [00:40:35] a garden the garden a good example of man's intervention um standing in direct contrast to [00:40:42] the wilderness in terms of the control over nature is also devoid of variety it's just an eggplant garden [00:40:47] nature it would seem has shrunk to one species of plant life alone the bruised palm refers to the [00:40:53] calloused palms that result from working in the garden the prize of transforming wilderness into a [00:40:58] manageable plot and that's the difference and even boland has a poem about a plot which becomes a site [00:41:04] the land which becomes a site is immediately transformed from something natural to something [00:41:08] built up by humans that said the verb recedes that ojide employs suggests withdrawal or going back [00:41:16] thus supposedly nature goes back from not just a state of wilderness but perhaps from humanity itself [00:41:22] when the latter starts to bound it cultivate it and therefore transform it it's a rearrangement of [00:41:28] nature itself the bruised palm is a legacy of acting against nature and can be linked to the hapticity [00:41:34] that marks human nature interactions in the poems of john kinsella and others john kinsella speaks about [00:41:39] people who work and their palms are bruised and there's he's got a nettle sting sting here and the [00:41:44] of a break in the skin from working on the land when the const while the construction of the land may [00:41:51] indicate as critics have noted again about the garden in simon ortiz's poems such as returning it back [00:41:56] a fight against the injustices of colonization ojide is more ambivalent as to the end effects of such a [00:42:02] project of gardening if it means that the wilderness is no longer available to the human in laura tohi's poem [00:42:10] even the predictions of the arrival of the white man are cast in the language of hapticity touch [00:42:16] quote they would arrive wearing metal coats riding strange beautiful animals would arrive in clothes [00:42:22] that brushed the earth would arrive in clothes that brushed the earth carrying crossed sticks to plunge into [00:42:30] the land here tohi shades the brush of the cloth a superficially tactile event into the more violent one of the sticks [00:42:37] plunging into the nahawa's homeland the light touch of the coats and cloth is a preliminary to a deeper and [00:42:45] more violent haptic connection that the conquistadors would forge with the native americans sacred land [00:42:51] in nunacle's community rain song the rains have been delayed and the aboriginal community hopes their song [00:42:57] will bring the rains however nunacle is careful not to romanticize the power of the community or its [00:43:02] cultural practices she observes that quote the strange words of the rain making song handed down [00:43:08] through countless generations are not understood now but faithfully repeated nobody understands those [00:43:15] things any longer and she's quite matter of fact about it cultural memories are no longer preserved from [00:43:22] one generation to the other nunacle says although she does not sound quite elegiac in her account [00:43:29] much of eco poetry is elegiac in tone it seems to be the most dominant form in which you can write about [00:43:35] this she then goes on to describe the singing itself some of the words themselves are described in terms of [00:43:41] rain from the ranked one community rose the toneless monotone of showers the purpose she says is quote [00:43:48] to reproduce the universal sound of steady rain so the human voices and the sound of the rain [00:43:54] various animals also echo the chants and the sounds and therefore the non-human and the non-living also [00:43:59] crash and clash with each other the wind she says whoops thunder arrives with quote a double shattering crash [00:44:07] and the rain rolled the community disperses laughing and screaming into the caves as the rain comes down [00:44:13] nunacle's poem moves from human sounds to the sounds of the elements once the elemental sound [00:44:19] of the rain appears in the poem the human words disappear and then there is only laughing and screaming [00:44:24] nunacle provides an entire vocabulary of elemental sounds as noted above but suggests that human sounds [00:44:29] produce the materiality of the rain and its sound but she achieves something more the power of the words of the chant [00:44:36] remains even when their meanings are forgotten that is the mystical power of the words are present even [00:44:43] in the absence of the import for the new generations a kind of dedicated trace in other words the power [00:44:48] and quote unquote true meaning of the words appear as traces as the quote mark of the absence of presence [00:44:56] the meaning is not visible to the new generation it is absent and yet this absence invokes a hidden presence [00:45:02] forgotten forgotten and invisible but not erased because it's in the elements [00:45:06] nunacle suggests that the traces of power of meaning in aboriginal cultures remain even when the next [00:45:12] generation does not quite comprehend this power well eventually the road words produce the rain so to [00:45:18] speak there's a clear link she draws between the words and the elements just as geological strata carry [00:45:24] memories of evolution and human and non-human activity the elements appear to have carried traces of the song's power [00:45:30] or the words or songs embody the elements that have appeared whenever enunciated all the songs and [00:45:37] their instantiations reign reappear reiterate in the present too nunacle invokes this change in [00:45:43] aboriginal cultures where traditional meanings are lost but not without traces in a poem called return to nature [00:45:51] here she speaks of hands and feet crossing the landscape both now and what she says a thousand years things [00:45:58] have changed over time the speaker moans that and writes now my civilized self stamps its imprints on [00:46:07] reluctant sands we're back to the earth image now my civilized self stamps its imprints on reluctant sands [00:46:16] nature carries traces of human contact then and now nunacle sorrow is that old imprints are lost and new [00:46:23] civilized ones supposedly make their mark on the sands of time or the sands of nature so much so that [00:46:29] nature turns from human contact because nature remembers human brutality or what she calls brutalness [00:46:37] i don't think the word exists outside but yeah that is human traces upon nature are remembered planetary [00:46:43] memory and nature no longer can stand human touch precisely because of this memory and nature doesn't [00:46:48] want any more of that new memory what previous generations of humans have done brutalness when [00:46:54] they imprinted the land is recalled and nature now literally recoils from the present touch as humanity loses [00:47:01] as humanity civilized it loses literally its touch craig santos peres arguably one of the most significant [00:47:08] eco-poetry uh poetry uh practitioners today in his poem halloween in the anthropocene [00:47:15] offers another form of the trace here the eyes of youth are what he calls open pit uranium mines so [00:47:21] he's speaking about guam and he says the eyes are pits of uranium mines and he says their veins [00:47:29] poison rivers hearts tar sands tailings ponds tailings is left over of after uranium mining the human body [00:47:36] carries traces of the place's corruption as the toxins enter the veins the human is the embodiment of [00:47:42] the place's evil materiality so that geophagy the destruction of the earth phagy being destruction geophagy [00:47:50] becomes biophagy so when you destroy the earth what is also destroyed is life perez does not see the two [00:47:57] forms of destruction of the earth and of the human form as distinct because the mining operations [00:48:02] into the earth brings out the uranium that then enters the human it's not a life cycle you want [00:48:09] the inside human outside the human inside the earth outside the earth binaries are no longer clear [00:48:14] because the extrusions and extracts intrude into the human body the open eyes of the boys are open mining [00:48:22] pits the veins are poison rivers peres avoids the simile roots here nor does he anthropomorphize the [00:48:30] earth that is to say the ruined earth is traced within the human form he's not interested in the earth [00:48:35] any longer geotrauma therefore becomes biotrauma when for example gabriela spears rico another poet whom i [00:48:42] have cited before says that genocide and ethnicides quote would wipe out the people of copper her specific tribe [00:48:50] so why this is a history of the native americans for oakwick in soprano man soprano man soprano man is [00:48:56] also a famous fossil and also a phantom um optic ponders over the soprano man and his traces rocks are [00:49:05] words rocks carry what he calls chalk marks which are quote both art and image oakwick as noted before offers [00:49:14] multiple scales of time the pleistocene the era to which the fossil has been dated the ice age and its [00:49:21] thawing the age of the sabatooth tiger and the petrification of forests which is the source of our [00:49:26] fossil fuels but oakwick also refer references traces of this past whether this is in the form of drawings [00:49:32] and came out or petrified forests the changes in the earth its geotrauma leaves some evidence in some [00:49:40] fashion today's earth retains the fossil and not just as fossil as he puts it those bones old bones of [00:49:50] soprano clacking at the center of earth echoing the hills remember it began with the center of the earth [00:49:57] image across poetry those bones old bones of soprano clacking at the center of earth echoing the hills [00:50:06] the clacking of fossil bones and the echo are like the residual radiation of the formation of the universe [00:50:13] continuing presences of a bygone geological era the primordial sounds echo this even today so [00:50:20] persistent is this absent presence traces that even a baby's coat brain capacity as he puts it is held [00:50:28] like a fossil in the hand you can only think of today's bodies as fossils in the making and traces of [00:50:37] the fossil are back with you it's not enough to think in terms of fossil traces okpik brings together [00:50:44] continents when he writes of wolves and hyenas with raised haunches in mukluks in africa our old home [00:50:51] or with bare feet fleeing to alaska our new boreal forest so because life originated in ethiopia and [00:50:59] now the movement is to alaska these traces are correlations and embody his emphasis as an [00:51:04] optics emphasis on globalization continental drift shared ice ages and force okpik i suggest brings [00:51:11] together deep time traces of past worlds and time the progress of progress within quotes of resource [00:51:17] extraction and geological paleontological exp explorations here okpik calls attention to layers [00:51:24] of rock shaped by ice water and time as relics of distant human culture [00:51:30] i'll conclude with a couple of more points stratigraphic poetry as i've argued with its keen interest in the [00:51:36] haptic and other sensory relationships with the land the immersion so to speak of the individual [00:51:41] and collective of the lands and the traces and tracks in it constitute an eco-poetics where human [00:51:47] and non-human biotic and abiotic are entangled in most cases the history and fate of the land is mingled [00:51:53] with those of the life forms inhabiting it the poets make sure we sense and understand that the land [00:51:59] and please note that i'm not using land as just land but land which includes water i mean it's odd isn't it [00:52:05] that we uh the planet is made of 70 percent water and we call it earth i mean we should we call oceania [00:52:13] or something i mean how can a planet which is made of so much water be called earth earth this is [00:52:18] really insignificant component right and humans should also be called hydro creatures 80 of our bodies [00:52:23] water um right the poets make sure we sense and understand that the land is cast within a political [00:52:28] ecology in latorian terms so that the questions of nature planetary memory and stratigraphy are also [00:52:33] questions of human agency and history from the agricultural practices of tribes and communities [00:52:38] to colonialism and more recently post colonies and neocolonialism forms this sense of the past [00:52:46] present and future cast in biogeophilia in the form of biogeophilia is seen in ben okri's a broken [00:52:52] song a poem again dedicated to ken saroviva having described an africa that has been pillaged [00:52:59] okri suggests that we must quote wait for the unnatural times he writes only the unnatural ones [00:53:06] can live at ease while they poison the lands rape her for gain bleed her for oil and not even attempt to [00:53:14] heal her wounds only the unnatural ones can live at ease while they poison the lands rape her for gain [00:53:21] bleeder for oil and not even attempt to heal her wounds where there were once quote proud trees of africa [00:53:28] we now see deserts as the land bleeds numerous images of what okri terms defilement run through this [00:53:37] a powerful poem of political ecology where he paints a post colony marked by greed corruption extractivist [00:53:43] processes and commercialization of natural resources biogeophilic poetry is in the final instance an [00:53:50] instantiation of a political ecology because it refuses to see ecological injustice or deforestation [00:53:56] or desertification in merely environmental terms because they see these actions as linked to social [00:54:02] inequalities and unjust practices visited upon the people and the planet alike a world undone across [00:54:10] colonial rule and post-colonial ruination invites a poesis that captures the process [00:54:15] practices and politics of despoilation despoilation which are natural quote and cultural at the same time [00:54:23] this is anthropocene poesis thank you