Recomposing Ecopoetics
Page 28
“A HIGHWAY THROUGH TO SOMEONE ELSE’S POSSIBILITY”: ED ROBERSON’S CITY ECLOGUE
The title of Ed Roberson’s volume City Eclogue, a ringing challenge to those who would see the two words in oxymoronic relation, indicates his desire for an encompassing understanding of nature that incorporates the spaces of human culture and habitation and expands rather than rejects poetic traditions of the pastoral in which the eclogue is prominent. The title poem, “City Eclogue: Words for It,” prepares for the volume’s exposure of the racialization of space and the inequities that have accompanied it by linking dominant understandings of nature and its beauty with issues of social stratification and, implicitly, of racial segregation. Roberson suggests, then, that while received understandings of nature—often associated with pastoralism and its opposition of city to country—need not be discarded, they need to be substantially recast.
The poem begins by contrasting the “actual” way in which trees are planted in the city with common ideas of their reproduction in nature, ideas that are filtered through romanticized visions of the pastoral’s locus amoenus:
Beautifully flowering trees you’d expect
should rise from seeds whose fluttering to the ground
is the bird’s delicate alight
or the soft petal stepping its image
into the soil
but here come the city’s trucks
bumping up over the curb dropping
the tight balls of roots in a blueprint out
on the actual site in the street
someone come behind with a shovel will bury.13
In Roberson’s view, “man can’t be outside of Nature; our life exists as an act of Nature.”14 Thus, cities that humans have produced as their habitat are part of nature, which makes the planned planting of saplings along city streets a natural phenomenon. Succeeding passages of this poem argue (though with characteristically complicated syntax that can often be read several ways) that the contemporary city exists in a context of censorship and deceit that includes misrepresentation of what is “natural”; it’s a place where people “lie” in saying
that this shit is not the flowering,
that shit off the truck and not the gut
bless of bird and animal dropping isn’t somehow
just as natural a distribution
as the wild bloom. (CE 16)
Aestheticized and idealized visions of nature that imagine seeds being dispersed by graceful fall to the earth, rather than via either bird and animal droppings or deliberate human cultivation, foster perspectives that distort the real, messy processes of nature and deny the nature of cities. Roberson links these attitudes with attempts to regulate proper speech and control language change (which would deny the order and logic behind “dirt mouth curse and graffiti”) and, further, with efforts to separate different social classes. He suggests that attempts at segregation generally—whether dividing off the natural from the supposed unnatural or separating the upper classes conscious of their social propriety from the supposedly indecorous and sinful lower classes—are proving increasingly irrelevant as they are being overpowered by larger hybridizing forces of nature and history. “The idea of the place” (I take him to refer to the city)
tramples up its rich regenerate head
of crazy mud into the mutant’s changling potion.
Committee cleanliness and its neat
districts for making nice nice and for making sin
may separate its pick of celebrant monsters:
but which it is now is
irrelevant as the numbered street sequence
to archival orders of drifting sand. (CE 17)
The emerging future Roberson looks to involves an urban nature that diverges from the tidy districting imposed by city planners as well as from the anti-urban visions of a nature unsullied by human intervention. He offers in closing a fragmented vision of something already in motion that is less beautiful and less easy than either: “the stinking flower / the difficult fruit bitter complex.” Its composting action integrates processes of nonhuman nature with historically determined social realities and complicates the neat divisions previous approaches to nature and to cities have imposed:15
—all
on the clock
on the tree rings’ clock
history’s
section cross cut
portrait
landscape
it already
knows
composts into ours the
grounds for city. (CE 17)
The environmental injustices that have followed from imposed orders of separation or segregation come into focus particularly in the section of the volume titled “The Open.” Within a U.S. context, environmental injustice often emerges as an extension of environmental racism; in other parts of the world, where race and class are not so significantly aligned, this is less true. Roberson, who is African American and has lived most of his life in cities—especially Pittsburgh, Newark, and Chicago—has a keen sense of what American environmental justice scholars talk about as the spatialization of race. He’s well aware that those “districts for making nice nice” tend to be white neighborhoods that the powers that be would keep separate from the black neighborhoods they disparage as full of sin. His poem “The Open” develops from an all too familiar narrative of the racialization of space in which the white power structure routes a highway through a poor black neighborhood for the convenience of commuters, driving out the inhabitants and making the land available for developers who get rich by gentrifying the area and opening it to prosperous whites. Roberson conveys the devastating effects on the residents of a black neighborhood of razing its buildings in order to make way for such a highway.
In this grieving and angry poem, a human community has been destroyed with the destruction of the buildings in which its members lived: “People [had] lived where it weren’t open,” and the opening of space resulting from the bulldozing of their homes has left them “drowned in exposure.” The poem’s first lines depict the residents choking as much on their losses as on the dust produced by turning their homes into rubble:
Their buildings razed. they ghosts
their color that haze of plaster dust
their blocks of bulldozed air opened to light
take your breath as much
by this kind of blinding choke as by the loss felt
in the openness
suddenly able to see
as if across a drained lake from below
a missing surface: (CE 63)
Roberson, who has extensive outdoor experience as a climber and an explorer of remote areas of the globe, introduces here a figure of speech that likens this community’s experience of loss to the kind of loss that would upset conservationists: the draining of a lake. He then extends the conceit of the drained lake with language that puns on schools of fish or, in the following lines, on the catch of a fisherman: “the way the neighborhood // a village packing up and leaving raises you with / the catch // out in the open.” Such a catch, of course, would not be harvestable—it would quickly rot. Roberson makes clear that habitat destruction is as much of a threat for certain human populations as it is for nonhuman species. Prompted by thinking of schools of fish to consider human schooling, Roberson plays on the purportedly African proverb, “it takes a village to raise a child,” a popular phrase among educators after Hillary Clinton used it as a book title. What’s been lost is precisely the kind of community a village provides: “some common // immersion schooling you” that contrasts with the awful empty space of exposure. Roberson’s use of natural figures in this poem is not simply a rhetorical strategy that will work on the environmentalist sympathies cultivated by our pastoral traditions. Nor does the likening of humans to stranded fish animalize those humans in a degrading way. Instead, here as elsewhere in Roberson’s writing, depicting humans and built nature in terms of the nonhuman is a way of positioning the human within nature and insisting that
nothing human is outside nature.
As we move further into “The Open,” it’s worth noting how much Roberson’s depictions of the racial dynamics of urban redevelopment correspond with those of urban sociologists. Many of the ideas Michael Bennett draws from such scholars in his essay “Manufacturing the Ghetto: Anti-Urbanism and the Spatialization of Race” could be drawn equally well from Roberson’s poem. Bennett has called for an urban ecocriticism that will help put an end to racist public policy by confronting “the ecological devastation being wreaked upon inner cities and the ideologies that underlie this assault.” His essay, which presents the American ghetto as an “internal colony” or the “Third World within,” explains the social barriers constructed by the “coded racism” of public policies that concentrate urban poverty in poor black neighborhoods and result in the spatialization of race. Bennett comments on how anti-urban sentiment “provides an alibi for the cyclical process of disinvestment and gentrification by building ‘a symbolic construction of “white places” as civilized, rational, and orderly and “black places” as uncivilized, irrational, and disorderly’ ”16—Roberson’s “districts for making nice nice and for making sin” in “City Eclogue: Words for It.” The alignment of Roberson’s social analysis with that of Bennett and the social scientists he cites is particularly clear in this passage from “The Open”:
a people whose any beginning is disbursed
by a vagrant progress,
whose any settlement
is overturned for the better
of a highway through to someone else’s
possibility.
A people within a people yet whose link
we lived in a distant separation as if
across the low valley we never knew
our ward flowed through
or knew the downtown was as close to
as the gold dome on the new municipal
horizon. (CE 64)
Close to wealth only in geography, this colonized “people within a people” can now see the full extent and depth of the segregation that has been there all along—what Bennett speaks of as “urban apartheid”—but is only now dramatically exposed. Lines in a later section of the poem emphasize that the destruction of the community is not just collateral damage incurred in urban development; it’s a deliberate economic strategy: “Destruction is a hidden real investment: / nurture loss in value, mine what’s left” (CE 72). Identifying the same dynamics, Bennett explains that “the problem with gentrification . . . is that it actually begins with the process of disinvestment that clears the land and makes it available to up-scale developers,” and, as part of his description of government “assault on urban areas,” lists “building highways that destroyed housing and sealed off most people of color from the suburbanizing white middle class.” Such projects, Bennett notes, transform “many black communities into pockets of unremitting poverty. . . . [T]he combined effects of anti-urbanism and the spatialization of race have been built into current public policy, which leaves a majority of African Americans in communities deprived of adequate education, employment, health care, housing, and overall social capital.”17 Roberson’s poetry, we observe, can compress into a few lines or even single words the insights of pages of scholarly analysis: the verb “mine” in the italicized lines just quoted equates what are considered disposable human communities with “natural resources,” both ripe for exploitation by the powerful.
This reference to mining clarifies how Roberson’s figurative depiction of urban space as part of nature serves the anti-humanist dimensions of his environmentalism. When Roberson attacks developers who dehumanize disenfranchised populations by comparing those oppressed people to exploited natural resources, he does not then defend those people by defending their humanity. The profundity of the developers’ wrong is instead evident in the figure that indicates their greedy violation of the earth. Given that humans and all of human civilization are simply part of nature, for Roberson no one is human in the anthropocentric humanist sense that positions humans at the pinnacle of creation. His natural figures equalize the human and the nonhuman, just as they thwart a privileging of the nonbuilt over the built. When he speaks in “The Open” of “poor pride-kept and neat / stands of // old houses mown down” as if they were carefully tended orchards or forest preserves felled by a heavy mower and of “vacant lots of garbage lawn” now “fallowing,” his metaphor reminds his readers that city spaces are as loved and precious as their rural counterparts and that human communities are ecologies that themselves warrant protection. By presenting violations of human rights in environmental terms, Roberson represents the situation he depicts as specifically one of environmental injustice. Elsewhere in the volume the geography of the city is also naturalized in what we might generalize as pastoral terms, its streets a “hive grid,” or a “high plateau,” the skyscrapers “peaks downtown,” the bulldozer a “bulldozer-beetle” with its ball of dung, and the crowds rhythmically flowing through the crosswalks as “oceans” (CE 26, 132, 131, 44); such language works to counter in readers anti-urban attitudes that, as Bennett persuasively argues, enable such injustice.
Those in power, however, have no such sensitivity. When it comes to razed neighborhoods, they are waiting only for “the dead to clear and the air / to smell of the scrub of money” before they take over this space for their own uses (CE 65). In a later section of “The Open,” where the severance of these people from what had been their home and their place of connection to others is dramatized through the image of a cut-off phone line, Roberson conveys the scale of the power the developers wield when he compares what has happened to this neighborhood to the transformation wrought by a glacier tearing up the land and bringing cold: “as plowed earth up as // by a glacier as by erasure changed to this / house of dead connection of no warm answering // on the lines / held frozen in our hands” (CE 66). The members of this (former) community march in protest, but effectively it’s too late: a vital and meaningful place has been turned into a meaningless open space: “not even a place anymore // can’t even walk it as / a street!” (CE 67). Again, he uses figures from nonhuman nature to convey what has gone wrong in the human world and thereby points to their essential unity. That unified realm is not idealized, however; nonhuman nature can be brutal and predatory, and human society can be brutally unjust. Thus, another poem describes the neighborhood’s garbage collection after the city subcontracts with the mob using imagery of predatory animals:
Brakes howling wild as a thing possessed
loose in the alleys, the city’s garbage truck
lopes house to house, street to street, the wolf—
in that hour before light—to the sleepless.
It has our scent. It has our fucking jobs.
______________________________________
when the city tore down like shooting
all the houses living on our street
we couldn’t even get the job
of hauling
away
our dead (CE 56–57)
It’s widely acknowledged that aspects of nature figuring in literature are differently inflected according to a people’s history as well as their culture; for instance, large trees in works by African Americans are more likely to suggest lynching than a shady bower. Notions of “the open” have generally positive meanings for white America, particularly in connection with nature, where the open is associated with individual freedom and the possibilities of the unfenced, unbounded frontier. For black Americans, however, in Roberson’s representation, the open is a threatening space of isolation and dangerous exposure, where the protection of community is lacking, where those with dark skins experience potentially deadly vulnerability. This sense of vulnerability derives partly from America’s racialized past. Invoking the image of core sampling in “The Open,” Roberson examines “the fine segregations / taken as a core from our society” (CE 68). The civil rights struggles (“fire / hoses // run people off down the pavement”
) and the urban riots of the late 1960s are figured as another kind of opening, envisioned possibly as the “phoenix re-invention / of the nation” but resting on terrible African American sacrifice, the most horrifying of atmospheric pollutions: “God’s strange rope spinning things open out of sky, / up in smoke // our tornado our lynched / black pillar of light” (CE 69).
A less horrific but still grief-filled vision of the open—this time as a space of aimless drifting—emerges in the later sections “12” and “13,” which return to the scene of “a flattened sea of housing brick rubble,” “vacant block after block,” to focus on an isolated, nearly naked man, a “just wakened” squatter, seen at the window of “the last building standing” as if both together are the lone survivors of a deadly battle (CE 70). No champion, however, the man seems closer to an embodiment of Agamben’s “bare life”—a vulnerable figure stripped of political significance.18 Though positioned as if on the prow of a “ghost ship,” the lone figure “hanging out / of his shorts” where previously so many people were “hanging out / of windows” talking from floor to floor, is “keeping it open” only in an uninhabited ghost world where what’s left of people’s home furnishings—“the twisted / chrome-less tubing of cheap kitchenettes”—assumes forms reminiscent of rusted chains that once bound African slaves (CE 73–4).
In a poem later in the volume titled “Open / Back Up! (breadth of field)” Roberson makes clear that even the notion of “open field poetics”—one formulation for the projectivist poetics with which his highly visual arrangements of text might seem aligned—can’t have the positive resonance for him as an African American male as it can for a white writer. The poem’s opening announces that the “most recent open field [he’s] crossed” is a long block on campus where “Black people get stopped regularly” by police in cars “to show they have university / I.D.”—a far cry from the meadow (“so near to the heart, / an eternal pasture folded in all thought”) to which Robert Duncan’s mind gratefully returns.19 The first few stanzas of Roberson’s poem use regular left-hand margins, but lines broken and spaced to allude with grim irony to open field poetics end the poem as follows: