Recomposing Ecopoetics by Lynn Keller

Author:Lynn Keller [Keller, Lynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813940618
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Sharing Plumwood’s sense of potential agency and intentionality in earth others, a.rawlings, Gladding, and Skinner work to generate just such communicative models. Their interest in the specifics of particular species’ life cycles, sensory capabilities, and ecological needs perhaps suggests a degree of sympathy with those who think in terms of difference, while their attempt to render animal communication in English might be seen as participating in the logocentrism of the identity camp. But most fundamentally they are aligned with the indistinction thinkers like Plumwood, who “aim to have us notice and attend to the fact that what our culture takes to be ‘mere’ animals are capable of entering into modes of relation and ways of life that can never be fully anticipated.”24

Calarco’s phrase “our culture” is a reminder that not all cultures have the reductive perspective on animals evident in the modern West. To complete my framing of the poets’ thinking about their linguistic representations of animal others, I turn to observations the ethnobotanist Robin Wall Kimmerer offers about the cultural perspective of her Potawatomi ancestors. I do so because her insights highlight the key role that language plays in people’s ways of thinking about earth others. Her meditations on one Native American “grammar of animacy” underscore the potential importance of experimental poetics for transforming the relations that English speakers perceive and enact with earth others.

In her essay “Learning the Grammar of Animacy,” Kimmerer, a member of the Potawatomi tribe (one of the Ojibwe or Anishinaabe peoples of North America), recounts her experiences trying to learn the Potawatomi language—a tremendously difficult challenge because Potawatomi differs so profoundly from English, both in its grammatical structures and in the worldview they convey. Where English is noun-based, Potawatomi is 70 percent verbs. Moreover, in Potawatomi, both nouns and verbs are classified as either “animate” or “inanimate”: “Pronouns, articles, plurals, demonstratives, verbs . . . are all aligned in Potawatomi to provide different ways to speak of the living world and the lifeless one. Different verb forms, different plurals, different everything apply depending on whether what you are speaking of is alive.” Kimmerer recounts being stunned when she learned of the word Puhpowee, meaning “ ‘the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight,’ ” for “the makers of this word understood a world of being, full of unseen energies that animate everything.”25

The difficulties of learning Potawatomi were so great that Kimmerer was on the verge of giving up the struggle, until a revelatory moment when she encountered the verb wiikwegamaa, which means “to be a bay.” She recalls:

In that moment I could smell the water of the bay, watch it rock against the shore and hear it sift onto the sand. A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds

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