Black and Native American Nature Poetry PDF

 Black and Native American Nature Poetry: being under- or over-identified with Nature(“Wilderness”)  In white U.S. American culture, Native people are over-identified with Nature qua Wilderness  Stereotyped as “urban,” Black people are under-identified with Nature qua Wilderness What kinds of...

 Black and Native American Nature Poetry: being under- or over-identified with Nature(“Wilderness”)  In white U.S. American culture, Native people are over-identified with Nature qua Wilderness  Stereotyped as “urban,” Black people are under-identified with Nature qua Wilderness What kinds of ecological poetry are needful/possible from these subject positions?   Native writers invested in ecological themes are often in the position of needing to assert their existence as modern, urban people in a way that doesn’t … a) invalidate their nativeness or their right to, connection to land b) play into the stereotype of their connection to land in a way that idealizes or romanticizes them out of existence Nora Marks Dauenhauer (Tlingit), from “How to Make Good Baked Salmon from the River” TO SERVE After smelling smoke and fish and watching the In this case, dish out on paper plates from fry pan. cooking, smeling the skunk cabbage and the berries Serve to al relatives and friends you have invited mixed with seal oil, when the salmon is done, put to the barbecue and those who love it. salmon on stakes on the skunk cabbage and pour And think how good it is that we have good spirits some seal oil over it and watch the oil run into that still bring salmon and oil. the nice cooked flakey flesh which has now turned pink. … Shoo mosquitoes off the salmon, and shoo the ravens away, but don't insult them, because mosquitoes “Gunalchéesh for coming to my barbecue.” are known to be the ashes of the cannibal giant, and Raven is known to take of with just about anything.  Black writers who care about ecology can face the reverse problem: being over-identified with urban culture and places – to the point that “urban” even operates as a euphemism for Black – so that it is hard to get heard as a Black eco-poet: “At some point, the terms urban and black became interchangeable. Such terminology would have us believe that our history began in cities and that we are a people of concrete and bricks, far removed from the oaks, rivers, and low country.” -- Ravi Howard, “We Are Not Strangers Here, Black Nature anthology, ed. Camille Dungy, p. 37).  Gerald Barrax, Sr., from “To Waste at Trees” Black men building a Nation, My Brother said, have no leisure like them No right to waste at trees But it’s when you don’t care about Inventing names for wrens and the world weeds. That you begin owning and He forgot that we’ve built one [a Nation] already destroying it – Like them. In the cane, in the rice and cotton fields And unlike them, came out humanly whole Because our fathers, being African, Saw the sun and moon as God’s right and left eye, Named Him Rain Maker and welcomed the Forget this and let them make us deceive blessing of his spit, ourselves Found in the rocks his stoney footprints, That seasons have not meanings for us Heard him traveling the sky on the wind And like them And speaking in the thunder we are slaves again. That would trumpet in the soul of the slave. Camille Dungy, “Introduction” to Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (xxvii-xxviii) “Despite all [their] connections to America’s soil, we don’t see much African American poetry in nature-related anthologies because, regardless of their presence, blacks have not been recognized in their poetic attempts to affix themselves to the landscape. They haven’t been seen, or when they have it is not as people who are rightful stewards of the land.” “The majority of the works in this collection incorporate treatments of the natural world that are historicized or politicized and are expressed through the African American perspective, which inclines readers to consider these texts as political poems, historical poems, protest poems, socioeconomic commentary, anything but nature poems. This is particularly true when the definition of what constitutes literature about nature or the environment is limited to poems that address the pastoral or the wild, spaces and subjects removed or distanced from human contact. The alternative formulations and representations collected here are often not considered when anthologies, syllabi, and papers about nature or environmental literature are compiled.” Paul Laurence Dunbar, from “The Haunted Oak” (1900): Pray why are you so bare, so bare, Oh, bough of the old oak-tree; And why, when I go through the shade you throw Runs a shudder over me? My leaves were green as the best, I trow, And sap ran free in my veins, But I saw in the moonlight dim and weird A guiltless victim’s pains. … I feel the rope against my bark, And the weight of him in my grain, Feel in the throe of his final woe The touch of my own last pain. And never more shall leaves come forth On the bough that bears that ban; I am burned with dread, I am dried and dead, From the curse of a guiltless man. (BNA, 159-161) eard the terrible laughter of termites ep inside a spray-painted wall on Sharswood. first thought was that of Swiss cheese dening on a counter at the American Diner. second thought was that of the senator m Delaware on the senate floor. as on my way to a life of bagging tiny mountains, ling poetry on the corners of North Philly, est to mothers & Christians. Major aring it too the cop behind me shoved me Jackson, de for he was an entomologist “Pest” a former lifetime & knew the many ng structures of cicadas, bush crickets & t flies. He knew the complex courtship bark beetles, how the male excavates uptial chamber & buries himself, back end sticking out till a female sang yric of such intensity he squirmed like a Quaker gave himself over to the quiet history rees & ontology. All this he said while ting me down, slapping first my ribs, then ding his palms along the sad, dark shell my body. How lucky I was spread-eagled at 13, discovering the ruinous cry of insects as the night air flashed reds & blues, as a lone voice chirped & cracked over a radio; the city crumbling. We stood a second longer sharing the deafening hum Loose ends on racial/sexual politics in Ecotopia On racial separatism, self- segregation, self-determination:  Ecotopia is radical (and radically aligned) for going beyond the left liberal multiculturalist vision of American freedom and equality  For suggesting that this vision can operate as an alibi for the U.S.’s global will-to-power as an empire and a superpower  It falters where some minoritized people’s decision to separate seems to absolve the rest of Ecotopia from having a “race problem” (99) Ecotopian SEXUAL EXPERIENCES with MARISSA (TMI) “What we do sexually is different from “[Marissa] seemed to me a ravishing anything that has ever happened to presence in a way I have never before me.” encountered. Not exactly beautiful, at least by my usual standards. But sometimes, … and he’ll tell you more than you when she looks at me, my hair stands up as ever wanted to know (52-54) if I’m confronting a creature who’s wild and incomprehensible, animal and human at “Springing in after her, I found once” (52-53)” myself in some kind of shrine. She was lying there on a bed of needles, “Marissa’s got positively hypnotic powers: taking deep, gasping breaths. Dimly when she’s here I lose track of time, visible, suspended on the charred obligations, my American preconceptions. inside of the tree, were charms and She exists in a contagious state of pendants made of bone and teeth immediate consciousness. Somewhere far and feathers, gleaming polished back in her head must be the forest camp, stones. It was as if I was being her responsibilities there, her plans to return sucked into a tree, into some tomorrow. But she seems to be able to turn powerful spirit, and I fell on her as if them absolutely off and just be. She seems I were falling freely through the soft capable of anything—she’s the freest and air from a great height, through least-anxious person I’ve ever known. To the darkness, my reportorial self floating extent I can get in on this, I begin to feel