by Lynn Keller
Less concerned than Well Then There Now with the guilty burden of colonial history, Core Samples from the World investigates what one can understand of culturally distant places one visits, either in person or through the mediation of documentary art. A note in the front matter announces, “The book comes about as unprecedented human movement leads, here as elsewhere, to conflicts, suspicions, and opportunities to reconsider what is meant by ‘the foreign,’ by ‘the foreigner.’ It is also a very personal account of negotiations across borders (between languages and cultures, between one species and all the rest, between health and sickness, between poetic forms, and between self and others).” As in Massey’s thinking, borders here are not enclosures; they are potentially permeable sites of negotiation and exchange. The relational condition of foreignness is itself a kind of border, understood as a trafficked location of possible exchange: “The foreign, a crossing place of languages and codes.”30
Gander is trained in geology, a field in which core sampling illuminates multiple aspects of geological history; analyzable changes in sedimentation register variations of climate and species over time, as well as geological upheavals and transformation. The book’s title implies that each poem or each visit offers only a limited sample, a tiny specimen from one location on the globe, but it also suggests that such small snippets may nonetheless prove sources of useful understanding. Gander follows through on this core sampling metaphor by opening each of the book’s four sections with a one-page “Evaporation,” composed of juxtaposed bits from distinct layers of experience. Evaporation methods are used with soil cores to determine water retention and unsaturated hydraulic conductivity. In a book where many of the landscapes are desert or desertified, the emphasis on loss of moisture itself may be meaningful, but the figure is also a reminder of flows and changes of state that are ongoing processes, even if invisibly so, in any place.
In part, the book concerns what one learns of oneself through travel, and that aspect of the volume will remain in the background here as it’s less directly relevant to my focus. However, Core Samples also investigates ideas of place-in-motion, as Gander explores ways of representing and documenting the dynamic nonhomogenization of both physical places and the people or cultures that inhabit them—ways that avoid being merely exoticizing or appropriative. Not that the two central concerns of the book, knowledge of self and knowledge of “foreign” places, are really separable; as Gander writes, “Of course, every place is equally exotic and numbingly familiar, and our distance from others, as Edmond Jabès notes, is exactly that of our distance from ourselves” (CSW 48). The places depicted in this book seem removed from the kind of globalization associated with “time-space compression”; linguistic and cultural particularities appear intact. Yet local and global clearly intersect and interact, much as they do in Massey’s Kilburn. Take, for instance, the following description of a market visited by an international group of poets who, after gathering at Beijing, are given a tour into western China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region:
Abdul announces the next stop, the famous Kashgar Market, where everything but milk of chicken is sold. A labyrinth of stalls that display ancient Chinese and Roman coins, Pashmina wraps and scarves, dry toads wide as umbrellas, bins of walnuts and ripe cherries, cheap Pakistani suits, traditional Uyghur hats made in Italy, bolts of striped silk, jars of saffron, pelts common and exotic, and fragrant peaches. There are hanging carcasses harassed by flies at butcher stands one beside another and, at every corner, pomegranate vendors beside marvelous juice-presses ornamented in silver and wood.
Men at the edge of
their shops, spitting on fingertips
to seal the deal. (CSW 14)
Many of the social relations that compose this place are “constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself.”31 There is no romanticized fixing of this market as a display of ancient local traditions; rather, the specificity of the place derives from particular social relations that weave together at this moment. That includes the suits and “traditional” hats brought to Kashgar through world trade networks and international corporate development, along with the culturally distinctive juice presses, food items, and shop-owners’ gestures. The notably local materials are not presented nostalgically; Gander does not convey the error Massey critiques in For Space of imagining the geography of globalization in terms of Westerners going out and finding, not contemporary stories, but the past.32
Even so, how comfortable is the reader likely to be with the visitor’s stance? Is the word “marvelous” in the passage just quoted—potentially patronizing and exoticizing at once—a misstep on the part of the privileged visitor? Possibly, yet it would be an ethnocentric blindness not to acknowledge the marvelousness of this ornamentation of the ordinary, an example of the artfulness valued in cultures where craftsmen produce objects that in more thoroughly industrialized places would be produced by machines. That Gander’s language evokes some discomfort in the reader seems appropriate to the complex mobility of place-sense here, given that few of the people the foreigners visit can themselves afford voluntary world travel. Like the traveler, the reader is invited to open her or himself to other trajectories through a process that may yield unsettling perspectives. Approaching an unfamiliar place as a privileged, cosmopolitan outsider sets up a tricky dance, as is evident, for instance, from a conversation between “the foreigner” and a Tsotzil shepherdess in “The Tinajera Notebook”:
Have you been to France?
I have.
How do they live?
Like everywhere.
They have sheep?
Sure.
How many might one shepherd have?
I don’t know, thousands.
How could they be counted?
You’ve got me.
What did you say?
I said I’m not sure.
And what took you there?
I was looking for bonds. I wanted to break a mirror. I wanted to render myself accessible, available. I wanted to borrow eyes from another language. I was looking for words to come.
And now?
And now what?
And now that everything in your life has changed? (CSW 31)
The traveler who seeks a way beyond his own reflection, a breakthrough into others’ ways of seeing (think Massey, Dening, and Spahr), could indeed be profoundly changed by his contact with another place—though his experience of the place might be just a fantasized misunderstanding produced by impenetrable differences in languages and cultures. That Gander’s speaker apparently has little more comprehension of industrial agriculture than does his indigenous Mayan interrogator who has never before contemplated such scale of production signals a further complication and instability in the notion of “foreignness,” as does the surprising intimacy of the shepherdess’s final question. What one expects to be familiar is strange, and vice versa. The foreigner’s experience of unexpectedly encountering a collection of anamorphoses—“those distorted paintings that, viewed in a convex mirror or from a certain perspective, suddenly resolve into natural proportions” (CSW 47)—perhaps provides an image for this manner of witnessing otherwise withheld aspects of oneself and one’s usual place-sense through the surprising lens of what is spatially distant and culturally unfamiliar. Tellingly, the moment in the volume when the traveler feels that he is at last “in rhythm with the local, at home, that the foreign has rendered itself accessible and his life is taking place in real time in the place where he has arrived” occurs when his vision is distorted, in this case by alcohol. At that moment, “the space in the room is contracting, expanding,” and the next thing he knows, he finds himself kneeling alone on the cobblestones in the alley outside the “throbbing, roaring cantina” (CSW 93). Like this scene, the book’s narratives suggest that one’s understanding of “foreign” places one visits (and this may apply also to the “familiar” places one usually inhabits) necessarily remains shifting and partial; on
ly from particular, perhaps chancy perspectives experienced in ephemeral moments will a full and proportional view emerge.
As a counterpoint to the works in Core Samples highlighting a global sense of place grasped, however fleetingly or partially, via international travel, “Moving Around for the Light, a Madrigal” evokes the lives of Americans who deliberately try to live independently of the globalized economy and to create a relation to their place somewhat like that experienced in nonindustrialized societies. Photos taken by Lucas Foglia in outsider communities where people live off the grid and off of the land provide documentary grounding for text that arranges and rearranges snippets of speech from community members. (Foglia recorded hundreds of hours of interviews from which Gander “drew out phrases.”)33 The piece exposes how largely invisible places may be carved out within larger social or national spaces—in this case, places where independently minded people, even those “too independent to listen to each other,” seek to “move in a way that’s more connected” to what they regard as “the natural order of things.” Some of the speakers are preparing for postapocalyptic survival after the banks and modern systems of provision fail: “When / others won’t, we’ll make it” (CSW 59). Their remarks highlight the us-versus-them mentality of the saved and the damned that often accompanies apocalyptic thinking. Others quoted are simply wanting “to lose that feeling of being a foreigner and find / a sense of being at home” (CSW 57) by living with like-minded people and growing, foraging, or hunting their own food, consuming roadkill or wild game including owl, heron, rabbit, and squirrel. The photographs convey the cultural distance of such communities from the world of time-space compression; the people shown wear minimal or no clothing, and their dwellings are made of bark held in place by bent and lashed saplings (fig. 10).34 Presumably, those who drive through the mountains and produce the roadkill that these people salvage have no clue that they are passing near such communities drawn together by powerful shared beliefs and aversions: “Nobody comes in, / nobody leaves” (CSW 54). “Moving Around for the Light,” then, underscores the multiplicity of places and place-perspectives that may coexist in one region or nation. It also demonstrates that (as Massey teaches and Berry and Snyder know well) the way most of us Westerners inhabit the places we live and the high carbon footprint associated with it—a way that we perhaps tell ourselves is dictated by global corporations and established infrastructures—remains in fact a choice, one trajectory among many currently possible trajectories.
Figure 10. People living off the grid in the United States, in Forrest Gander, Core Samples from the World, 56. (Photographs by Lucas Foglia; courtesy of Lucas Foglia)
A final aspect of place in Core Samples from the World that has particular significance for the self-conscious Anthropocene is that many of the descriptions that seem least exotic and that tend least toward cultural distinctness depict sites of anthropogenic environmental degradation. Mining and its damage to landscape and communities recur again and again, as if they are becoming near universals. Repeatedly in Core Samples, landscapes are dry, forbidding, eroding, full of airborne dust. A little research into the haunting photographic series by Raymond Meeks that underlies Gander’s “A Clearing” reveals that the photos come not from one region but from several removed ones: they depict the Burmese mining industry and also American aggregate pits and desolate quarries.35 Yet the two come together seamlessly; a reader may not be able to distinguish between the unpeopled Burmese wastelands and the American ones in the photos, and the Burmese miners might be taken for people from several continents. The opening of “A Clearing” may be read as suggesting the difficulty of determining where one is or where one comes from precisely because of this kind of pervasive environmental damage that renders geographically distant places more and more alike:
Where are you going? Ghosted with dust. From where have you come?
Dull assertiveness of the rock heap, a barren monarchy.
Wolfspider, size of a hand, encrusted with dirt at the rubble’s edge.
What crosses here goes fanged or spiked and draws its color from the ground.
Xanthic shadow at the edges.
Where are we going? Ghosted with dust. From where have we come?
Stretcher loaded with clods by a spavined work shed.
What does it mean, a cauterized topography? (CSW 5)
The stretcher loaded with dirt clods turns out a few pages later to be a literal reality; a photo shows men carrying it (fig. 11). But the idea that the land itself is in a kind of health emergency is carried through in the verbal image of “a cauterized topography,” as if there has been an attempt to seal off a wound on the surface of the land, which in the photo appears parched, cratered, without plant life. The homogenization that seems most deadly here is that of environmental degradation due to resource extraction: the destruction and erosion of the soil, the poisoning of land, water, air, and of human and nonhuman health.
Figure 11. Burmese miners, in Forrest Gander, Core Samples from the World, 8. (Photograph by Raymond Meeks; courtesy of Raymond Meeks)
Related indirectly to the homogenization of built “nonspaces” like airports and malls that is commonly associated with time-space compression, this transformation of place that produces nonbuilt nonspaces is something Gander particularly attends to. Here’s a passage in which an activity that is memorably “foreign” is upstaged by the environmental consequences of China’s globalizing development:
Then they are whisked by van to the desert to witness the Kyrgyz version of a polo match, played with the decapitated carcass of a goat. Those who can ride are given mounts from which to survey the tumultuous competition, men grappling from the saddles of their galloping horses for a hold on the carcass. Behind the yipping riders, in the distance where a new mining facility squats in the Haoshi Bulak ore field and where the rocky plain, plowed and abandoned, lies denuded, a stupendous dirt cloud rises, mixing with the dark purple sky. One competition framing another. The riders have not given up, but the storm is barreling theatrically toward them, their clothes snapping in wind like a fire. (CSW 18)
That fast-moving cloud, carrying topsoil and perhaps mining tailings, is, unfortunately, one version of place-in-motion, and an increasingly common one around the globe.
If anything differentiates these desiccated and degraded nonplace landscapes from one another, it is the varied forms of pollution that in the final poem add colors to the scene. In a section of “Chile: Pigs of Gold” set in “Andacollo: haunted by the ghosts of miners and gritty with tailings that blow from buzz-cut and beveled mountains,” Gander observes, “The river is dry, a depository of bulging green plastic bags and noisome litter.” He also witnesses, “In cratered flats, tarry, / orange-fringed chemical / pools glisten” (CSW 85). Even the gold of the title becomes visible in association with toxic pollution. The traveler observes the owner of a failing wildcat mining operation that has struggled on after the mines have played out—a man whose appearance indicates mercury poisoning—using that highly toxic heavy metal to mine gold:
In the sear of afternoon sun, one miner is crushing stone, another scooping the pieces into a rudimentary wooden sieve. The owner steps under a tin roof where sieved gravel is swirled in large washtubs. From his pocket, he takes a vial and pours several beads of quicksilver, mercury, across the life-line of his palm. He smears this against a tin plate he attaches to the washtub. After swishing the muddy water with a paddle, he removes the metal plate, flecked now with gold precipitate. This he wipes into a cloth filter, again with his bare hand. (CSW 88)
By focusing on this man, Gander again makes evident something Massey insists upon: that place is differently perceived and differently experienced by people in differing social positions. Higher social and economic standing sometimes offers protection from environmental dangers; in this scene, however, the financial investment of the owner makes him, perhaps unknowingly, assume more environmental risk than his employees. Yet, viewed on a global scale, the lac
k of environmental protection for both owners and workers in this “developing” country is a manifestation of environmental injustice typical of global capitalism. The contrastingly privileged tourists from the industrialized world are not really threatened by the “apocalyptic pastoral” landscape the speaker observes and in their short stay are unlikely to inhale or otherwise absorb significant amounts of mercury. While Massey recognizes that the time-space compression involved in producing the lives of those comfortably well off in the global North “may entail environmental consequences . . . which will limit the lives of others before their own,”36 Gander’s work, like Spahr’s, adds to Massey’s analysis of the power geometry and social differentiations within space-time compression a more developed awareness of the ecological and environmental justice dimensions of global place.
PLANETARY AND INTERPLANETARY PLACES IN JENA OSMAN’S “MERCURY RISING”
In “Toxicity and the Consuming Subject,” historian Nan Enstad identifies a “broad-based new anxiety about globalization and its perils” emerging around the toxic debris that is deposited in human bodies from transnationally circulating commodities. Toxic chemicals, Enstad observes, “move silently with a giddy freedom from place to place” aiding their ready absorption by our permeable bodies. As toxicity manifests “the global ‘within us,’ ” it has ramifications for our spatial categories of global and local. It also, as Mel Y. Chen elaborates, alters our notions of selfhood—“toxicity becomes us, we become the toxin”—along with our understandings of what is and is not animate.37 The final work I will discuss in this chapter, Jena Osman’s “Mercury Rising (A Visualization),” imaginatively creates a vision of the global place that is formed through the mobility of toxins by rendering nearly indistinguishable varied interacting scales of place—the scales of the individual human body, the town, and the planet. In so doing, she highlights the damage to human and environmental health caused by anthropogenic uses of mercury and of nuclear weapons. In the context of this chapter, Osman can be seen as extending Gander’s use of art to expose the nonplaces that are resulting from human exploitation of “natural resources” around the globe and as bringing home the personal impact such environmental destruction may have.