Julia Martin

'This is where I am coming from': gangsters, thatched roofs and cheese boys in an undergraduate classroom

Without political, social, and value changes, no technology will make us sustainable. More to the point, do we equip students morally and intellectually to be a part of the existing pattern of corporate-dominated resource flows, or to take part in reshaping these patterns towards greater sustainability? Orr 1992: 146

SITUATING ‘PLACE’ FOR ENVIRONMENTAL LITERACY

Abstract This essay reflects on recent experiments in teaching English at a South African university in response to the local/global crisis of environment and development. It suggests that if our pedagogy in literary studies is to enable a discourse equipped to demonstrate the key insight that ecological sustainability and social justice are inextricable, and boldly assemble conceptual tools for materially changing the world, then the way that we view place and situatedness is crucial. In this regard, a worthwhile challenge is to find ways of valuing personal, present-tense apprehension of place and places and a sense of locatedness and bioregional specificity, without lapsing into a myopic parochialism or ahistoricism. This may be put more positively as a question: in working with students in literary studies, how may close attention to the particularities of (for example) home, neighbourhood, bioregion, and so on, offer not an alternative to but precisely a window or lens into discussion of broader historical, geographical, political and environmental networks? A related challenge concerns a change in the sort of words we use to read and write in the transmission of our discipline: to find within our pedagogy (alongside the discourse of critique and analysis which it has been our business to develop), the place for a ‘utopian’ language of appreciation and celebration; words to facilitate effective engagement and hopeful action. In exploring practical responses to these challenges, the essay discusses examples from an undergraduate course in ‘Reading the Environment’ at the University of the Western Cape.

On the Sea Shore

Abstract This piece uses story and metaphor to explore edges, dualisms, indeterminacies and the possibility of nondual apprehension. It takes the form of a narrative essay in which the intertidal zone, that shifting region between land and sea, is represented both as a metaphor of liminality, and as a “real”, biophysical ecosystem which is an embodiment of nondualism. The speakers perspective is informed by Buddhist theory and a sense of ecological urgency, and situated in the particularities of living in a coastal neighbourhood. In its concern with narratives of place, the essay foregrounds the inextricable relationships between environment or location and cultural practice. As an example of what some people are calling narrative scholarship, it suggests implicitly the need for extending our work in literary criticism and theory to include writing in “other” genres and for wider audiences.

The Path Which Goes Beyond: Danger on Peaks Responds to Suffering

Now well into his eighties, Gary Snyder continues to pursue lifetime habits of engagement and detachment in which the activities of literary work, spiritual practice, environmental activism, and fa...

Recipes, love, and forgetting: a sparse domestic archive from colonial Natal

This essay uses the genre of creative nonfiction to tell the story of two particular women, and to explore the inextricable relations between femininity, food and love as experienced in one family who lived in a neighbourhood of colonial Natal at the beginning of the twentieth century. Beginning as a conversation with the speaker’s ageing and forgetful mother, the narrative becomes an attempt to discover more about her mother, Madge Smallie. In the process, it unpacks a small domestic archive in which the only published books are a colonial recipe book and an early feminist novel, and the only words written in Madge’s hand are recipes for food and domestic preparations.

Mountains, Waters, Walking: Gary Snyder’s reticulate meshwork of trails

Gary Snyder loves mountains, and he has spent a lifetime writing about actual peaks and ranges. In this work, they embody a kind of spiritual and political refuge, and the experience of climbing and walking in wild places evokes a clear, attentive point of view that sees way beyond the narrow reach of the habitual mind and its recent accretion of so-called civilization. The collection Danger on Peaks (2004) begins with the formative experience of climbing Mt. St. Helens as a 15 year old. Recollecting that ascent in prose that recalls in its concentrated imagery the forms of the Japanese haibun, he writes, “If you want to get a view of the world you live in, climb a little rocky mountain with

At Goedgedacht: A Story of Olives

When Goedgedacht was given to a charitable trust in 1993, the disaster had already begun. Globally, temperatures were rising and the devastating impact of First World-style development was beginning to be publically acknowledged. In South Africa, the central heartland had been largely stripped of the people and wild animals that had always inhabited it, the diverse grasslands supplanted by sheep, fences, and a quiet desert that was moving eastward. And on this beautiful farm, one of the earliest frontier outposts, the old buildings were crumbling, the grape harvest was unsustainable, and the workers and their families were living in subhuman conditions. In responding to a local/global disaster by paying attention to the social and ecological relations in one particular place (as members of the Goedgedacht Trust came to do in the years that followed), this farm is perhaps not that unusual. All over the world there are projects inspired by the desire for social justice and environmental sustainability which focus on the small, beautiful particulars of a given street, neighborhood, watershed, bioregion, and so on. And for ecologically conscious writers, too, and for the theorists and critics who track them, to write about place and places, to write from the position of one’s situatedness in a particular location, has been seen to offer a way to position oneself with some integrity against the grain of a hegemonic social order. If the neo-liberal delusion of late modernity has rendered people like ourselves dislocated, placeless, ‘‘off-ground’’ entities, and

Springbok, Farmers, Places and Shards: Reading and Writing the Bleek-Lloyd Archive

Abstract This is a narrative essay which reflects on the experience of reading the nineteenth‐century Bleek‐Lloyd archive of /Xam testimonies (both in the original collection of exercise books in which they were transcribed and in the online collection which has recently been established) in the light of a preoccupation with the contemporary local‐global crisis of environment and development.

The Tiny Skin Boat: Visiting Gary Snyder in 'Amerika'

This is a narrative essay which reflects on a visit to the United States in 2005 to interview Gary Snyder and attend a conference on literature and ecology. The speaker describes teaching Snyders poetry in South Africa as part of an attempt to develop an approach to reading and writing that conveys a sense of the urgency of environmental issues, and of their implicatedness in social and political ones. Meeting him again serves to confirm and to some extent complicate the committment to these priorities.

The Speaking Garden in William Blake's The Book of Thel : metaphors of wisdom and compassion

Summary Responding to the reductionist and objectifying dualisms of scientific mechanism and authoritarian Christianity, Blakes work evokes a view of being in which “everything that lives is holy”. In The Book of Thel (1789) this is exemplified in the representation of an ecologically interdependent Garden of speaking subjects. In this environment, the insubstantiality and impermanence of all subjectivity (which for Thel is a source of distress) is shown to be the necessary condition for love and reciprocity. This article is an appreciative reading of Thel in relation to the late modern predicament of eco‐social crisis, and in conversation with (simultaneously deconstructive and affirmative) views of subjectivity and liberation in Mahayana Buddhism. My purpose is to represent it as what might be called a “teaching text” for contemporary readers with regard to both the dualisms of self versus nature which habitually carve up the nondual world, and the dualistic oppositions of absolutism versus relativism and essentialism versus nihilism. In the imaginative space of the Garden, the jewelled network of what in Buddhism are called emptiness (sunyata) and dependent arising (pratitya‐samutpada) is recognised as an interdependent network of care; for the speaking plants and animals, no‐self means selflessness; the radical insight into impermanence and interdependence is shown to be inseparable from love; wisdom and compassion are inextricable. Blakes metaphors for this are simple and instructive.