Angie Cruz: Ever since the new report on climate change was released I’ve had numerous conversations with different black artists, writers, etc. The report paints a catastrophic future and urges for immediate action. Although it all seems so grim when I think about our everyday resilience within our communities and also of our collective imaginative capability, aren’t our communities the most capable to imagine how to survive, or resist when faced with not having resources? So why aren’t more artists engaging this topic when it’s the most pressing conversation as far as our survival is concerned? Are these conversations happening privately? Being that all of you are part of this beautiful anthology, Letters To The Future, as writers who have pioneered ways of seeing and making in your work, have any of you engaged this climate report, creatively, intellectually, spiritually?
Erica Hunt: It came up big time for me during Hurricane Katrina. Because the people in the Gulf were vulnerable because of climate change, and because of all the alterations that have been made to the natural barrier from the Mississippi River and the Gulf, they built and built and built. And they built this canal that really made people more vulnerable. And who lives in the most vulnerable areas?
Dawn Lundy Martin: Black people.
EH: Yes, and not only that, but who did not get the assistance that they really needed?
DLM: Black people.
EH: And when it came to the relief part, help the people, deliver the pampers, all of that, who did they forget how to get there?
DLM: Black people.
EH: And when it came to the recovery, which is like, let’s help you get your kids back in school, and take care of health needs and so forth, where did they have the most trouble finding responsible community leadership?
DLM: Negroland.
EH: Yeah, exactly. So that really underscored to me our vulnerability and how the same structural racism that operates when it isn’t an emergency is for sure going to operate when there really is an emergency, when there really is a catastrophic time.
giovanni singleton: California has an ongoing drought problem. And to address it, state water agencies set rates and started charging money according to how much water you use. So if you can’t afford to pay those rates, then you don’t get any water. That’s just the basics. Poor people can’t even get water when they’re living right next to the Pacific Ocean. It’s like water everywhere but not for poor people. Water for lawns but not for people. And the thing that really concerns me is what are black people doing? I look around and ask folks “Do you understand that there’s a drought?” And their response is like, “no.” There are so many other problems that are going on, like, “I’m living in a tent outside City Hall,” right? So you just can’t catch up with the sheer amount of problems that exist, and with the solutions which don’t seem to apply to you. So I think about that a lot. And how did it become so difficult to find something as basic as green grass, that hasn’t been poisoned, to stand on barefoot? Then there are folks who find themselves trying to live in neighborhoods located in the shadow of refineries and other toxic industries. And so I think about that and what can you do? It’s like, I have three jobs; I’m trying to keep my lights on. . .but then there’s this greater, human crisis. Having awareness maybe a first step toward figuring out how we deal with this.
Dawn Lundy Martin: I think the rhetoric around not believing in climate change, is about racism —like there is an insidious nature to racism that is almost imperceptible. Because in some ways they understand who the most affected people are. I think it’s one of the many genocidal strategies. That and all of the other little things that on a minute level pollute the environment. It goes back to all of that work we were doing in the 80’s and 90’s around environmental racism. Folks of color in Los Angeles, for example were organizing because there were all these pollutants, and all these horrible things were happening to their children. There’s a continuation between placing those plants or disposal areas or whatever in communities of color in the first place, and then this larger, insidious mode of annihilation. I think the really interesting question is also around where the creative work raises those questions, where it intersects with those questions, or negotiates them.
AC: What are some things that we’re just not even looking at that we should be paying attention to collectively? The climate report is so dire. When I try to bring it up there is a kind of helplessness or resignation. Maybe it’s because of what you’re saying, giovanni, there’s just too many problems and the climate is not the priority for a lot of people. So I’m thinking, we’re in a privileged position. We’re artists, we’re makers. Many of us have some kind of job security. We may have more time to think about the things the mainstream may be ignoring. Is climate change the thing that we should be working against, putting more of our creative resources toward?
Ruth Ellen Kocher: I think part of the problem is that when you’re writing from the perspective of a writer of color, we are in some ways seized and often taken hostage and absolute need by social activism to associate with subject position. For me, social activism for environment preceded any activism, or even attention to race and writing, because it was a complication of my life as a person. As a poor white person I grew up in a cancer cluster, which is why I had a follicular carcinoma in my neck when I was fifteen, and the Mayo Clinic hadn’t seen it in anyone under the age of fifty-five ever. And it’s why I had a recurrence when I was twenty one. And so I spent a year working for Pen Pick, knocking door to door, trying to raise money for lobbying, trying to get Superfund in 1985 reinstated, and I went to Wisconsin to help train them so they could do their clean water canvassing, and I will tell you that part of the work I did in Wisconsin was part of the almost ricochet effect that made me invest more of my energy into investigating identity and race, because here I am in Wisconsin, knocking on peoples’ doors, trying to work toward the environment. You know, I’m knocking on doors and people are showing me pictures of fish they had just gotten out of the Oshkosh, the weekend before with one eye, or this one woman was like, oh yeah is that why every time I waterski, I get this rash? Or we were standing by the Fox River waiting for the Greenpeace ship in ‘85 when there was a bombing, We happened to be there in that town—all these things were happening. But we could not do that work without being confronted with the issue of identity. We’re standing on that dock, and there are bikers there who are looking at us as a queer, a n***er and a hippie. That’s what they see, and they’re going to kill us and throw us in the river. We just want a clean river. But we’re still a n***er, a queer and a hippie. That’s the problem, I’m knocking on peoples’ doors to work for the environment, and as I’m talking to them about the act I’m trying to raise money for, they’re reaching up and they’re locking their screen door.
AC: So how does this show up in your art? (Heart)
REK: I understand but here’s the problem: that is in my heart. The sound of the click of the screen door is in my heart. And then I sit down to write, and I’m writing about my experiences as a black woman in the world. And that’s what I mean about how it gets pushed back. Because there’s this like salient thing that happens—
DLM: I think it’s not incidental.
REK: No.
DLM: That’s what I mean about the insidious, active genocidal—
REK: …they’re so paired.
EH: …that won’t even let them hear what she had to say, which was so vital to their lives. Because they saw these people on their doorstep, and they said, well what do these people have to tell me?
REK: Well the irony is, the experience I was telling you about in the parking lot, of being with my friends in the coal banks, in the coal waste, with carbon up to our ears, and nostrils, that’s what made me like them. I knew more about who they were than they did, and I could tell them why they were going to get sick and get cancer like I did, but they didn’t want to hear it, because they were looking at me, and they just saw difference. It becomes a difficult thing, even for other people who we were trying to talk to about the environment, we have speakers and listeners, and they have to get through the filter of us to hear what we have to say. It’s a strange way that we’re predicated on this other thing, even as environmentalists.
gs: Their whiteness is going to kill us, and them.
EH: That’s it. Thank you.
AC: Recently I went to a psychic, and she suggested I read poetry for answers because supposedly the poets are the ones who have access to the divine. So then of course it got me thinking, what if you poets have a key to how we can slow the destruction of the earth.
REK: I think you bring up a very good point. I’ve just started talking about this—I’ve felt as though it’s always been a salient thing, it’s right here and they’re happening together, even when people send like a solicitation for an eco-poetic poet, and I’m thinking I am, but there’s a way that the activism part of me may not be visible to somebody else. They don’t understand that’s my impetus, it’s not like it’s the voice that’s reaching out to my reader, and I’m thinking wow, that’s a responsibility that maybe I need to re-interrogate. Maybe I should think about the level of visibility that I’m affording it or not. As far as I’m concerned, I feel like it’s a salient aspect of everything I am, but does anybody else know that?
DLM: I think the way that it enters one’s consciousness is different from say, direct activism. I wonder about the usefulness of activism, really. I mean, you know, where does it get us? But resistance I think is different. This work seems to be more subliminal in its resistance, but maybe the subliminal is where things are hectic, as opposed to direct action. In this particular moment especially. When things are visible, legible, readable, recognizable, they also become mute, ineffective, nothing, you know?
EH: I would love for Ruth Ellen to put that story into print though. Because that’s like a witnessing. There are many things that can be drawn from it, but certainly one of the things that could be drawn from it is the fact that this has differential value of who speaks to you. And there’s a differential value even when that person has information that is going to save your life. You would rather die than hear it from somebody else. That’s like Trumpism, right?
gs: It’s been that way all along, that they would rather die than allow you the right to vote.
EH: That’s right.
REK: They’d rather die than have you as their president.
EH: They’d rather be fucking dead. That’s the definition of craziness, right?
AC: I’m also thinking about what you said about the kinds of work that is visible—how it almost placates people, works to make them comfortable. Versus a really uncomfortable artwork that makes you think, wait a minute, I have to shift the way I live or act? Or I have to find a new way to think or be.
EH: LaToya Ruby Frazier did these photos of Flint, Michigan. She’s from Braddock Pennsylvania, but she goes to Flint. And she makes us look at what it means to not have water.
DLM: Is there a strategic way—it’s like you can never get ahead of the machine. The machine is always at work. The regime’s machine is always at work. It’ll fucking crush you, and right before it’s gonna crush you you gotta figure out a way to get out of the way.
AC: But art has always been ahead of the machine. Think about how much of science has just proven or is trying to prove what artists have already expressed in their work. I feel that there are many artists doing the kind of work we need right now, but are not as visible because they are ahead of the moment. Or if and when we do this work, like Ruth says, where her works is talking about the environment, the way our works may be read is hostage to a subject position, often race.
EH: But let’s go back to the question of climate change. My son brings it up to me all the time. He says, I don’t give a shit because you guys fucked it up and I don’t even know what I’m doing in the art business because climate change is going to happen. We’re going to have to live in a planet that’s unlivable. So what does art have to do with that? How is that useful?
AC: I think that art could be the portal to the answer. If we just put our heads together. Like if we just had time to incubate ideas. Am I being too optimistic?
DLM: Like in a mystical way?
AC: Maybe? I mean if you think about the things that historically have been threatening. For example I am thinking about the Disappeared Quipo works, by Cecilia Vicuña. How could this fiber, these knots have been so threatening that they had to banished? I think there have been ways that art has been able to hack the system. For example the Guernica. When one thinks about the trouble that painting brought. People couldn’t even look at it without being incited. How is it that there are works that do end up shifting a lot of people’s consciousness around something?
DLM: I think the Guernica still works that way. People are called to it. It’s incredible, right?
REK: Guernica just tells you when you walk into that space, be quiet and, just be quiet. And everyone fills the outer edge, and your only job in that space is to receive it. And you’re right. It tells you that. The painting tells you that. I remember being in that room and people look around each other like you walked into a church, like someone had already given the people their instruction, and the new ones fall into line. It’s like, this is what we’re supposed to do. That experience of being in that room is riveting. It is a leveling experience. It seems so inevitable. Strangely simple and complicated.
DLM: It also is powerful that people from all over the world are there. There’s something about that too. This kind of gathering space. For me, imagining what every person is bringing to this experience, that is both different and somehow analogous.
EH: So I talked about Parable of the Sower today with somebody and I went, don’t you remember the part in the book where they’re planting seeds? And I thought that that of course points to some response to your question. That we don’t have an answer really, we don’t know what the artwork looks like, we just know that we need to plant some seeds that will have the answer. And be mindful that yes, time is also running out. The report this week said that by 2040, if we don’t do shit, it’s done. It’s done. Planet is cooked. Cooked. One and a half degrees versus I think they were saying four if we don’t do anything. And a four degree rise really covers a lot of ground. Worse storms, worse droughts, a lot more land in the water, a lot less ice in the poles,
REK: I can honestly remember being in graduate school in the 90s and teaching these essay classes, and we’re asking undergraduate students to write essays, and we’re always searching for topics. And many of the topics that I would migrate to were these topics. And I have to say it was the first time that I realized that there was other resistance to the ideas of climate change than the ones I had encountered earlier, when I was working in activism. So when I was working in activism, the resistance I encountered was from like those bikers, we used to call it when we were canvassing and going to new areas, we would say watch out for the J.O.B’s, and that was people who would exact violence on us because they saw us as a threat to their jobs. Blue collar people who were like, these activist people are coming into our town with their clipboards and that means they’re gonna take our jobs. So in my mind that was what the resistance was.
But then many years later, as a graduate student teaching undergraduates, in Arizona, I’m encountering young conservative twenty-year-old undergraduates who were writing these refutations of climate change because they listened to Rush Limbaugh, and their parents are goldwater conservatives, getting into the hype and furor of Rush Limbaugh in the 90s, and I’m shocked, and they’re making these arguments against climate change, and I’m looking at them like, you can’t honestly believe that! And it feels as if though there’s some kind of mass Jonesian hysteria that’s going on. Drinking the Kool Aid, and at that time it was so bizarre to me, I couldn’t believe that it could actually gain legs to travel into the future that is now, and that there would still be freaking people twenty years later—those students are now forty and forty-five year old adults who supported Kavanaugh and really believe that that’s a myth, still. And it’s hard for me to believe that it’s true. And it’s not only true, but they’ve multiplied. It was marginal then, and it’s become a bigger movement.
DLM: Why would anyone deny it? What’s the benefit in denying? The denial is just about how the people who are going to be gone first are all these people of color, and all these island countries that currently have no water.
REK: One of the most privileged towns in the world, and a lot of the workers who live in the trailer parks with walls and trees…they’re going to be gone too. Because as soon as we’re in a strained economy, there’s not going to be any free clinics, we’re not going to have any social programs, people who have maintenance medications won’t be able to have them. I remember thinking as a kid that when the apocalypse comes, I’m going to die because I can’t get my asthma medication. I thought that as a kid. We have people in America living like it’s the third world. And those people will go.
AC: When Puerto Rico was devastated by that hurricane and didn’t have electricity for months, I was interested in learning how we/they were pooling their resources, trying to survive. We inevitably will all have to mobilize around climate. So I was dreaming up a 20 year plan, keeping climate in mind. Being that Pittsburgh is predicted to be a good place to live, I’ve been leisurely looking how to grow a hydrophonic garden, get some solar panels, etc.
REK: There’s a certain privilege in just being able to imagine that you can plan for it. Like when the time comes, I can do this, or I can build this, or I can stockpile this—you can survive if you’re healthy and strong. But if you’re on insulin and—
AC: But somebody has to plan. No? I feel that too many people I love are just going about their day to day business and will be unprepared when they are hit personally with it all. I also wonder if I should even continue to make art or use my time in a more useful way? I think individualism –thinking about what is good for me and not the “we” will kill us all too. Actually it’s already slowly killing us.
gs: You bring up a very good point, which is exactly the art education that I’m interested in is work that pushes back on fatalism. Because that is a very American attitude. Oh well, what can you do about it?
AC: Earlier today at the panel, Ruth said how things could/should die, like white supremacy, that’s a death. So there’s other things that can live. I loved that.
DLM: What I’m going to be stockpiling as you’re growing your garden: guns.
gs: Why should they have them all?
REK: I’m kind of with you Dawn. I’m there with you.
AC: Well some of us will be armed to protect and others will feed. But for sure people with community do better in dire situations. So more community building?
EH: That’s right.
BIOS
Angie Cruz is the author of two novels, Soledad (2001) and Let It Rain Coffee (2005). She is the editor of Aster(ix), a literary/arts journal. She teaches creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh and her novel, Dominicana is forthcoming with Flatiron Book in 2019.
Erica Hunt is a poet, essayist, and author of Local History (Roof Books, 1993) and Arcade (Kelsey St. Press, 1996), Piece Logic (Carolina Wren Press, 2002), Time Slips Right Before Your Eyes (Belladonna*, 2015), & A Day and Its Approximates (Chax Press, 2013). Hunt has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Fund for Poetry, and the Djerassi Foundation and is a past fellow of Duke University/University of Capetown Program in Public Policy.
Ruth Ellen Kocher is the author of Third Voice (Tupelo Press, 2016), Ending in Planes (Noemi Press, 2014), Goodbye Lyric: The Gigans and Lovely Gun (Sheep Meadow Press, 2014), domina Un/blued (Tupelo Press, 2013), Dorset Prize winner and the 2014 PEN/Open Book Award, One Girl Babylon (New Issues Press, 2003) Green Rose Prize winner, When the Moon Knows You’re Wandering (New Issues Press, 2002), and Desdemona’s Fire (Lotus Press 1999) Naomi Long Madgett Prize winner. Her poems have been widely anthologized. She is Professor of English at the University of Colorado where she teaches Poetry, Poetics, and Literature. She is the Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at UC Boulder.
Dawn Lundy Martin is a poet, essayist, and conceptual video artist. She is the author of four books of poems and three chapbooks, including most recently, Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books, 2015) and Good Stock Strange Blood (Coffee House Press, 2017). Martin is also a co-founder of the Black Took Collective, an experimental performance art/poetry group of three, and a member of HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, a global arts collective. Martin is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She is currently at work on a memoir.
giovanni singleton is a native of Richmond, Virginia, a former debutant, and founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a journal dedicated to experimental work of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. Her debut poetry collection, Ascension (Counterpath Press), informed by the music and life of Alice Coltrane, received the 81st California Book Award Gold Medal. She has received fellowships from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Workshop, Napa Valley Writers Conference, and Cave Canem. She was the 2015-16 Visiting Assistant Professor in the creative writing programs at New Mexico State University.
Image Credits: Shipyard Planet
