Ecology and Literatures in English: Writing to Save the Planet 1527518043, 9781527518049

Table of contents :
Dedication
Table of Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Part 1
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Part 2
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Part 3
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Part 4
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Part 5
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Conclusion
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index

Citation preview

Ecology and Literatures in English

Ecology and Literatures in English: Writing to Save the Planet By

Françoise Besson

Ecology and Literatures in English: Writing to Save the Planet By Françoise Besson This book first published 2019 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2019 by Françoise Besson All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-1804-3 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-1804-9

To my parents and grandparents who showed me the beauty of nature and the sense of connections between the human and nonhuman worlds; who showed me the fragile strength of a flower and the loving eyes of a dog or a cat; who made me listen to the voices of the world; who guide me on the way to wonder, to awareness and to fight. To my teachers, pupils and students, to my colleagues and friends, who guided me on the paths of the literary world; to my mountain and ecocritical friends throughout the world, from France to Kent and from the United States of America to Brazil, who illuminated my path; and to all the authors — poets, botanists or shepherds —, from Southern France to Canada and to Nigeria, from New Mexico to Montana, who showed me the weight of words, the strength of imagination and the power of dreams. To all our animal companions who, since the first day of my life, have taught me the meaning of love and trust—healing presences even in their physical absence. To all those trustful friends who are always sure that we can save them and show us the way.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword ..................................................................................................... x The Butterfly, the Rhododendron and the Star Introduction .............................................................................................. xiv Can Literature Save the Earth? Part 1: Literary Genres as Environmental Action Chapter One ................................................................................................. 3 The Theatre Serving Botany: Shakespeare's Gardens Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 14 Romanticism as a Prelude to Ecology? Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 24 Ecological Poetry and Ecopoetics Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 81 Songs as Modern Time Popular Poems to Defend the Earth Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 88 Detective Novels as an Ecological Warning Part 2: Landscape Paintings Revealing Man's Relationship with the World Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 114 Maps of Biodiversity: Travel Writers' Perception of the Wilderness Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 156 Writing the Colours of the World to Show the Beauty of Nature Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 169 Comics as Ecological Allegory: Visual Imagination

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Part 3: Imagination to Denounce Devastation Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 188 From Beech to Book and Vice Versa: Deforestation and Reforestation or the Weight of Texts Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 216 Streams of Consciousness: The World’s Water and Literary Warnings Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 232 The Fantastic to Denounce the Devastation of Lands by the Exploitation of Resources Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 239 Aboriginal Literature and the Way to Ecological Awareness Part 4: Animals to Show Man the Way: Nature, Science and Imagination Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 256 Real and Imaginary Animals to Speak about Connections and Responsibility Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 314 Children's Books to Educate Human Children through Animal and Nature Discovery Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 365 Animals to Show Man the Way: The Animal Bond Part 5: Literature as Resistance Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 406 Modern Theatre to Give Nature a Voice Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 421 Native Languages as a Means of Resistance

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Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 430 Literature to Answer the Violence to Lands and Men Conclusion ............................................................................................... 462 Literary Human Voices as the Translators of Nonhuman Voices Select Bibliography ................................................................................. 467 Acknowledgements ................................................................................. 506 Index ........................................................................................................ 513

FOREWORD THE BUTTERFLY, THE RHODODENDRON AND THE STAR

"That thou canst not stir a flower Without troubling a star." Francis Thompson 1

In two lines, the English poet Francis Thompson shows the relationship existing between the smallest gesture made on the earth and the cosmos. Everything is connected as asserted in another way through the now famous phrase "the butterfly effect" first pronounced by the meteorologist Edward Lorenz. 2 A butterfly's flutter in one place can provoke an earthquake at the other end of the planet. 3 The smallest gesture can have terrible consequences. Merrill Gilfillan's "Rhododendrons trail[ing] their fingers / in the river" 4 draw a natural link uniting the earth and water, the colours of the flowers and the transparency of the river and, last but not least, the world of nature and the human body since the branches of rhododendrons become fingers. Those vegetable fingers point to human lives and nature, from the flower to the star, from the butterfly to the rhododendron and from the rhododendron to the river. Poets and writers, in connection with scientists, show us ways to follow, like the rhododendrons pointing their fingers to the river as if to show the direction to take, a direction having the fluidity and transparency of water, showing

1

Francis Thompson, "The Mistress of Vision," in New Poems, London: Burns and Oates, 1907, Gutenberg.org. 2 Lorenz spoke about it in a conference in 1972. See Edward N. Lorenz, (March 1963). "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow." Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. 20 (2): 130–141. 3 We can also think about Ray Bradbury's short story "A Sound of Thunder" (1952), in which the gesture of a time traveller inadvertently crushing a butterfly during the Jurassic period provokes a series of disasters 60 million years later. 4 "Beech Gap" in Red Mavis, 2014.

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us the sense of life, the sense of the link uniting the human being and the nonhuman world. Man and Gaia, or the last couple to be saved on the symbolical Ark that is our universe. Through this double reference to Noah and the biblical Ark and to a science fiction novel by Mary Shelley, 5 the present book would like to add a small stone to the cairn built day after day by writers, activists and ecocritics. One more book … neither claiming to be exhaustive nor new, it would just like to give an idea of the role of literature in the preservation of the planet at a time when both the planet and literature are attacked and threatened. It is the point of view of a woman who is lucky enough to be at the same time a nature-lover, a mountaineer, a poet, an environmentalist and an academic and who, through that multiple relationship to nature and its inhabitants and to literature, would like to go on with the dialogue started years ago by writers and ecocritics all over the world. Nothing original in it; but as long as Gaia is raped and its inhabitants killed, as long as literature is regarded by some statesmen as a danger to be erased, this lack of originality will be necessary. The green colour must not become an original element on this Earth to justify original writing. Its defence through writing is fundamental; sometimes imagination becomes reality as shown by Jean Giono's shepherd planting imaginary trees in Provence and whose work took life in the person of Wangari Maathai and hundreds of women planting trees in Kenya. The aim of this book is to lead people to realize that literature reveals a fundamental idea that everything is connected and that it is only when most people are aware of that connection that the world can change. Exactly as a tree is connected with all the animal life in and around it, as it prevents erosion and floods, as it offers food and shade, as it allows a community to live in peace, texts show that nothing should be separated. There are negative connections that have changed the world: wars and terrorism are linked with the exploitation of resources, and the exploitation 5 The Last Man, published in 1823. This title was taken up by Wallace G. West for a short story published in 1929. It is also the title of several films (by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau in 1924, Charles L. Bitsch in 1970). And an early title of George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four, if the publisher had not been opposed to it, should have been The Last Man in Europe. "The last man" is also the phrase used by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathoustra to evoke the antithesis of the imagined "Übermensch," the last man seeking only comfort and security and being what the Western society has produced for itself. Margaret Atwood's dystopia, Oryx and Crake, has been translated into French as Le dernier homme. This notion of the end of mankind has preoccupied writers, artists and philosophers for a long time.

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of natural resources by industrialized countries is linked with poverty in the rest of the world. The excess of gases polluting the atmosphere, because of more and more polluting factories and more and more cars, increases global warming and brings about the melting of Arctic ice, which generates the disappearance of some species as it threatens the life of the emblematic white bear among others. To transform things and stop those devastating connections, we should just be aware of all the connections shown by nature, as Wangari Maathai's fig tree shows us (see xxiv). We should be aware of the fact that animal preservation does not only preserve animal life but can transform men's lives. A beautiful true story like James Bowen's Street Cat Named Bob not only tells an individual life story. It is not a story meant solely for animal lovers, even if it is also that. It reveals the reciprocal relationship between a formerly homeless man and a wounded street cat, a relationship based on love and responsibility, a relationship changing people's way of looking at the street musician. Bob the cat gave James Bowen his love and the opportunity to feel responsible and useful; James Bowen offered the wounded animal the love he needed. Whereas both were invisible to the eyes of society when they were apart, they became the centre of people's attention when they were together, because people love to see that kind of connection. Deep within each individual, there is the awareness that he/she is connected to the rest of the world, human and nonhuman as well. A cat on a street musician's shoulder may reveal to every man or woman their own belonging to the same world. As a street cat in London can show us our own way of looking at homeless people and what a little animal can do to change things, a dog living with nature preservers in the African bush is the opportunity to make us realize the damage done to African wildlife and what some people of goodwill do, what everybody in the world can do, or rather not do, by refusing to buy objects carved from death. Animal preservers do not hate humans as some people say: they try to save them, with the help of animals: this is what lots of literary or documentary texts show. The variety of literary genres dealing with the painting or defence of the planet, with ecology as a science, as a feeling or as a fight, made it necessary to choose examples to show that any text, any form of writing, any literary genre can become a way of fighting for the planet. This book mingles literary texts, academic references and personal experiences without any separation, as in a meadow there is no separation between the soil where the grass grows, the various species of flowers, trees, insects and other animals and the water allowing everything to live. At a period when quantity and numbers are keywords, when the virtual shows us

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reality separated from us by a screen, I have chosen to write about a relatively small number of texts evoking man's connections with the nonhuman world, actions through texts and texts as actions. It's up to readers to choose more texts, to think about their own experiences with animals, plants, mountains, rivers, seas and deserts; it's up to them to prolong this book, which is not a book but rather a walking forest, a forest in disguise, which tries to attack, in a peaceful way, the castle of growing, growing at any price, which seems to be gradually murdering Gaia. Like cairns placed on this paper path, some people, often women, who fought to show us the way, will come back from time to time, Rachel Carson, Dian Fossey, Peter Matthiessen, Linda Hogan, Wangari Maathai, N. Scott Momaday… and a line by John Keats, another one by Rainer Maria Rilke will recur like a warning burden. It's up to us to listen to them and prevent the silencing of birds from replacing the music of nature. When I started teaching in France, the pupils' handbook was entitled It's Up to You… It's up to you, it's up to all of us to listen to the world as all writers in the world invite us to, it's up to you, it's up to us to be aware of the connections shown in the weaving of texts. Only then can the world change. In all latitudes, writers hold out a mirror to us, they lead us to awareness by telling real or imaginary stories about all the people of goodwill who just try to save what can be saved, they speak about animals showing us the way to follow; they say that in spite of all destructions and tragedies, if we are just aware and connected, not to our smartphones only, not to the virtual worlds invading us only, but to the real world around us, to the blade of grass at our feet and the star above our heads, to the homeless man's eyes at our door and the peasant's gesture at the other end of the world, to the insect on the flower and the bird in the tree, there is hope. Around Chernobyl, poets remind us that plants are growing again and birds sing in a renewed nature. Toulouse, April 2017; March 2018

INTRODUCTION CAN LITERATURE SAVE THE EARTH?

"Can Poetry Save the Earth?" This is the question asked by John Felstiner in his beautiful book, where the preface starts with a line by John Keats, the introduction opens on a prayer by a Yokuts shaman in the Yokuts tongue and offers a survey of the "poetry of earth," 1 from the Bible to John Clare and William Carlos Williams, from Emily Dickinson to N. Scott Momaday. If ecocritical studies have taken on such great importance in only two decades, it is probably because, when seeing the deterioration of the planet, the natural world and the human population depending on it, more and more people listen more deeply both to the voice of nature and to all the poetic voices who, by singing its beauty, show us the way to the awareness of our connection with the natural world. This is what the Yokuts shaman's prayer says: My words are tied in one With the great mountains With the great rocks With the great trees In one with my body And my heart. 2

Mingling the Yokuts tongue of the shaman and the Hebrew of the Bible from the first page, Felstiner leads us to the conscience of this sharing of the earth through the poetic word being in those two cases associated with spirituality and stories of Creation. The word "poetry" itself comes from a Greek word meaning "to create" and thus it may be significant to see poetry as the best genre to evoke nature and all its creatures as it is perhaps the genre that uses most the sense of connections either in its themes or in its form. 1

"The poetry of earth is never dead," John Keats in Felstiner xiii. "Around 1900 a tribal shaman chanted that prayer, in the Yokuts tongue: nim yèt.au t.ikexo texal maiayiu lomto…" in Felstiner 1. 2

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We could prolong Felstiner's question and see whether this "environmental imagination" evoked in Laurence Buell's seminal book exists in all literary genres. The other word for literature is "letters." Letters are all the letters sent by citizens all over the world, following the initiatives of a non-governmental organization 3 to prevent an oil company from destroying a part of the Amazonian forest and the Native Americans living there; they are also the letters of a gigantic poem written by a Chilean poet 4 on the desert of Atacama; they are the letters of a Canadian alphabet book teaching children to read and also to be aware of the danger threatening the white bear; they are the literature through which writers all over the world tell the story of the Earth and of man on the Earth, of beauty and devastation, to reverse the movement and try to make people aware of the fact that each of them can participate in the rescuing of the planet and its human and nonhuman inhabitants. To paraphrase Felstiner, we might say: can literature save the world? This seems to be a naive question, not all that naive in fact. If in totalitarian systems poets and writers are the first people to be executed, it is probably because dictators know that they are more powerful than all their violence, which has always been the weapon of the weak, weak because they can only express their ideas by destroying people instead of convincing them. Poets are probably the most powerful people in the world and years after Garcia Lorca and Ken Saro-Wiwa were executed, their texts go on expressing their ideas, their voices will be heard until the end of the world, when all dictators have passed. All over the world, writers have felt and feel more and more the necessity to remind the whole world of the wonders of the Earth and of the dangers threatening them in an era when man's impact is such that scientists consider the influence of human beings on the biosphere to be so great that it has become a major "geological force" that can mark the lithosphere. That period, our period, has been called the Anthropocene, a word popularized at the end of the 20th century by the meteorologist and atmospheric chemist Paul Josef Crutzen, 5 who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995 with Mario J. Molina and F. Sherwood 3

Survival International. Raul Zurita. 5 About the Anthropocene, see https://www.futura-sciences.com/planete/definitions /climatologie-anthropocene-16008/, accessed May 18, 2018; Erle Ellis, Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Also see Stéphane Lojkine’s web-magazine, http://cielam.univ-amu.fr/la-paroleaux-humanites, accessed May 19, 2018. La Parole aux humanités n° 13, "Anthropocène," March 27, 2018. 4

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Rowland. According to him, the Anthropocene is a new geological period starting at the end of the 18th century with the industrial revolution and it would follow the Holocene. In this era dominated by man's will of growing at any price, writers show that this new human power of destruction over the whole nonhuman world can be changed into a power of life through the awareness of a sense of connections so present in tales and stories told by storytellers in the countries where storytellers have not disappeared yet. Writers are the modern storytellers and the palaver trees under which storytellers told stories to make their listeners aware of their link with their soil, with nature, with the others, are now trees changed into books; they can also be electronic waves, if they are used as a modern artificial tree meant to save the real ones and not as weapons with an unlimited range. Everybody, every creature always has a choice to make. That choice not only influences the course of their lives but also the lives of all those they are going to meet. Mikal Gilmore, in his introduction to Neil Gaiman's Black Orchid, writes: "That choice gives you the chance to remake not just yourself, but sometimes the world around you as well." 6 Anybody's change of behaviour indeed can change the world and whenever an author or an artist creates imaginary and fictitious worlds to speak about the world’s reality, he/she guides readers towards a better awareness of the beauty of the world and of the necessary reciprocal relationship between all the elements composing it. In their introduction to the collective book Literature and the Environment, George Hart and Scott Slovic write: For the most part, Thoreau tended to look toward wild nature as an antidote to the ills and excesses of human civilization. In his famous essay "Walking," he stated, "In Wilderness is the preservation of the World" (112). He did not say much about the potential diminishment of nature. However, between the 1870s and the second decade of the twentieth century, the writer and activist John Muir helped to launch the tradition of American environmental activism and showed that writers could be artists and social activists at the same time. (Hart and Slovic, 3-4)

Literature is an important part of people's education to awareness and this education to our relationships with the nonhuman world should start from an early age. Those who create ecological puppet shows have understood that role. Many educative projects linked with ecological awareness or 6

Mikal Gilmore, Introduction to Neil Gaiman’s Black Orchid (illustrated by Dave McKean, Lettred by Todd Klein), New York: DC Comics, 2012, 3rd page of the introduction.

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sustainability are led all around the world. In India, plays on ecological themes are staged in high schools. In France, at the beginning of the 1990s, a long-term project of ecology at school helped by a not-for-profit organization opened onto the publishing of a little book on animal protection 7 in which information about the damage to animal life was associated with famous writers' texts and quotations, as if literature gave more reality to the presentation of the real world. In a secondary school situated in Northern France, in the 1980s, a project of publication of a small journal devoted to the relationship between North and South countries allowed the pupils to publish five issues of this journal, significantly entitled Terre de tous, between 1986 and 1990. 8 Of course the first way of making children aware of their relationship with nature and other creatures including human creatures, is to take them into nature. As botanist Linnaeus did as early as the eighteenth century around Uppsala in Sweden, taking his students to natural places to show them plants in their ecosystems, like botanist and researcher Marcel Delpoux in France, nowadays, in the United States of America, the ecocritic researcher and writer Scott Slovic also takes students to the mountains and makes them discover ecocritical texts in a natural context. This is what hundreds of primary school teachers do as well. In Senegal, an experimental agroecological farm was created to train young farmers. Its name, Kaydara, is originally the title of a didactic narrative, which is part of Fulani's African traditional teaching; it was reported by the African historian and storyteller Aladou Hampaté Bâ. 9 The fact that such a project should have been given the name of a tale shows to what extent some populations can see the close link between literature and ecological agriculture. This farm, which proposes an alternative teaching to children who have dropped out of the school system, also proposes to fight against GMO by keeping the farm's own 7

Jacqueline Kelen. Protégeons les animaux, Paris: L’Ecole de Noé, 1991. Helped by the organization "L'école de Noé." 8 Terre de tous was published at the Collège Paul Langevin, in Rouvroy, thanks to the head of the school, Michel Debruyne, who trusted the project and devoted his life to help others, humans and nonhumans as well. It could be made thanks to the help of several people from the organization Frères des Hommes, particularly to a member of the organization and agronomist, Jean Besson, to Karyl Serrurier, to pupils and colleagues and also thanks to the participation of some artists, like Müss, specialized in caricatures linked with the relationship between Northern countries' wealth and Southern countries' poverty. A drawing by Plantu was used and this is the opportunity to thank all of them and to say that even when violence physically kills artists, their works live on. 9 http://repta.net/odpi/telechargements/fichiers/fiche_senegal_1_ferme_agro_ecolo. pdf, accessed March 28, 2017.

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seeds. As Gora N'Diaye, its co-founder and teacher of agro-ecology at the farm says: "we are going to keep our own seeds, we are going to multiply and share them between us, not to be invaded by GMO. If you let yourself be invaded by GMO, you lose your life." 10 This is also a way of preventing those young people from becoming landless peasants. That kind of project, uniting agricultural competences, ecological awareness, a will of making things progress by fighting against an international system and a traditional tale, reveals the importance of reuniting everything to make things progress instead of opposing them. Those educational projects or teaching methods appear in many other places and their aim is to show children or young adults what Native populations have always said: that everything is linked. Poets, like Victor Hugo and Francis Thompson, summed up the idea of the relationship between the cutting of a flower and stars. 11 Literature is not only an entertainment; it is a lens allowing us to see things more clearly and to become more easily aware. It is from the angle of the preservation of the planet that I would like to demonstrate how writers, through poetry, fiction, theatre, essays or any form of writing—even the simplest book teaching children how to read and write, an alphabet book—give us the key to the preservation of the natural world, hence the preservation of man in the world. Thousands of texts could be quoted to show the intimate relationship between writers' creation and a clear vision of our world. Thousands of texts could be quoted to show the close connection existing between all the threads constituting the huge web that is the cosmos and the small web that is the Earth. Some people think that ecology is not the major problem in the world. Yet it is. Everything stems from the environment, including wars and terrorism. The preservation of the planet and of peace is intimately linked. As Michel Serres put it: "Nous devons décider la paix entre nous pour sauvegarder le monde et la paix avec le monde pour nous sauvegarder." 12 Whenever armed conflicts appear on the surface of the Earth, it is because land or natural resources are at stake. It is because Ken Saro-Wiwa and his companions defended Nigerian lands against an oil

10 http://www.diawara.org/2013/07/04/prenons-en-main-notre-propre-santealimentaire-nos-villes-et-villages-sont-envahis-de-semences-ogm-made-inmosanto/, accessed 28 March 2017. 11 See further on p. 17. 12 "We must decide to make peace between one another to safeguard the world and to make peace with the world to safeguard ourselves." (Michel Serres, Le contrat naturel, 47, translation mine).

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company that they were executed by the dictatorial government of their country. This is one tragic example among many others. All ecological problems are linked with man's cohabitation with the rest of the world and, in the end, with his own survival. Even luminous pollution, which might seem secondary, takes another dimension when it is alluded to by poets, perhaps because poets know how to show its link with our relationship to the cosmos. In a 1986 interview with Louis Owens, the American Indian writer and intellectual N. Scott Momaday argued that "increasing light pollution in the U.S. desert southwest is not only a scientific problem for ecologists or astronomers but also a moral dilemma for all citizens. Will future generations be able to see the stars glittering above them? And, through the vehicle of those bright and distant stars—and through the stories that anchor their provocative arrangements in the night sky to the ongoing histories of human communities—will future generations be able to imagine their kinship with each other and with the larger cosmos?" 13 Louis Owens, in another interview with Momaday conducted that same year, saw the relationship between that pollution and the loss of myths: "Given your own sense of relationship that you bring out so well when you discuss the Kiowa myth of the sisters who ascended to the sky to become the stars of the dipper, there would seem to be a kind of dangerous ‘mythic’ loss in being cut off from the stars;" and Momaday answered: "Oh yes. I see it that way, too. It's something that threatens me at my centre. The stars are very important to me mythically. To think of losing the stars represents to me a very deep wound." 14 This echoes Rainer Maria Rilke's line, quoted as an epigraph both by Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard and by David Abram in his chapter "Coda: Turning Inside Out" of The Spell of the Sensuous: "Ah, not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition, shut out from the law of the stars. The inner—what is it? If not intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming" (in Abram 1997, 261). And David Abram thus comments upon the poet's words: 13

N. Scott Momaday, quoted in Chadwick Allen. "Siting Earthworks, Navigating Waka: Patterns of Indigenous Settlement in Allison Hedge Coke’s Blood Run and Robert Sullivan’s Star Waka." Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies, University of Minnesota Press, 2012, 193–248, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt2jcckc.9. 14 Louis Owens, "N. Scott Momaday", from This is About Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers, eds. William Balassi, John F. Crawford, and Annie O. Eysturoy, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990. In Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, ed. Matthias Schubnell, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997, 182.

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Introduction Not to be cut off, as Rilke says. And yet we seem today so estranged from the stars, so utterly cut off from the world of hawk and otter and stone. This book has traced some of the ways whereby the human mind came to renounce its sensuous bearings, isolating itself from the other animals and the animate earth. By writing these pages I have hoped, as well, to renew some of those bearings, to begin to recall and reestablish the rootedness of human awareness in the larger ecology. (Abram 1997, 261) 15

The dialogue between great writers, Native American poets and novelists, a German poet and an American philosopher, lays emphasis on our rootedness in the element of nature, of the relationship between that natural origin and our remote mythical memory. Their conversations or dialogue through books remind us of the link existing between the economic and scientific element of light pollution and myths, that is to say collective memory carried by imagination figured by elements from nature, a rock on the Earth—Devil's Tower 16—and a constellation in the sky—The Big Dipper. It emphasizes the necessity for human people to be aware of the "rootedness" of their awareness "in the larger ecology," as Abram put it. Owens and Momaday's conversation throws light on the interconnection between everything. Momaday refutes the idea that his writing is political but his messages about the beauty of nature and the connection between the elements of the landscape and man's history, his multiple warnings about ecological problems, tell his readers about the necessity of preserving the planet and the cosmos. If some writers like Ken Saro-Wiwa make a clearly political use of literature, others may deny their political intention but their words are political in the etymological sense of the word, insofar as they lead readers towards a better understanding of the "life of the city," the city having in this case the dimensions of the cosmos.

15

I am indebted to Céline Rolland Nabuco who ended her beautiful article "Le récit de voyage sur la piste d'un animal prédateur : The Snow Leopard de Peter Matthiessen (1978), Grizzly Years : In Search of the American Wilderness de Doug Peacock (1990) et On the Wing : to the Edge of the Earth with the Peregrine Falcon d’Alan Tennant (2004)" on this quotation, in Caliban n° 59, Les Rencontres de l’humain et du non-humain dans la littérature de voyage et d'exploration anglophone / Anglophone Travel and Exploration Writing: Meetings Between the Human and Non-Human, 2018. 16 According to the Kiowa Myth, Devil's Tower is the stump of the mythical tree that called the seven sisters chased by their brother who was becoming a bear. The tree took them to the sky where they became the stars of the Big Dipper while on the earth there remained the stump of the tree with striations appearing as the marks of the bear-boy's claws.

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Literature might give the nonhuman world an opportunity to hold out a mirror to us since we are unable to see the mirror animals and plants hold out in reality. Shall we understand Jules Supervielle's bear sadly playing with a little ball that is "the more and more reduced sphere of a midnight sun?" While the poet asks if we can make the bear understand, shall we realize that we do not understand what real bears say to us? Le pôle est sans soupirs. Un ours tourne et retourne Une boule plus blanche Que la neige et que lui. Comment lui faire entendre Du fond de ce Paris Que c'est l'ancienne sphère De plus en plus réduite D'un soleil de minuit Quand cet ours est si loin De cette chambre close Qu'il est si différent Des bêtes familières Qui passent à ma porte, Ours penché sans comprendre Sur son petit soleil Qu'il voudrait peu à peu Réchauffer de son souffle Et de sa langue obscure Comme s'il le prenait pour Un ourson frileux Qui fait le mort en boule Et ferme fort les yeux. 17 17

"A bear turns and turns again / A ball, whiter/ Than the snow / And than him. / How can we make him understand / From the far end of this Paris/ That it is the old sphere, / More and more reduced, / Of a midnight sun / When that bear is so far / From that closed room / That he is so different / From the familiar beasts / Passing at my door, / Bear who does not understand, leaning / On his small sun / That he would like, little by little, / To warm up with his breath / And with his obscure tongue / As if he took it / For a shivery bear cub / Pretending to be dead, curled up in a ball / And strongly closes his eyes." "The pole is sightless." Jules Supervielle, "L'ours", ["The Bear"] from Les amis inconnus [1934], translation mine. http://www.acnice.fr/ienvalsiagne/admin/projetsclasse/cabrieres_animaux%20en% 20peril/04-ours/ours%20poesie.htm, accessed 29 March 2017. The poem can be read on an internet site, which is a class project; pupils wrote poems, acrostics, on the white bear, in the wake of Jules Supervielle.

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Three balls warn us about what happens to the Earth: the ball with which the bear plays, a toy, which is the Earth, which is "the small sun," compared to a small bear, curled in a ball to pretend to be dead. The poet makes the animal try to make this "little sun" live again, reversing things and making the sun the child of the bear, aware of the necessity of instilling life again into the shrinking Sun and Earth. Italo Calvino quoted by Alison Hawthorne Deming thus defines the political use of literature: Literature is necessary to politics above all when it gives a voice to what is without a voice, when it gives a name to what as yet has no name, especially to what the language of politics excludes or attempts to exclude. […] Literature is like an ear that can hear things beyond the understanding of the language of politics; it is like an eye that can see beyond the colour spectrum perceived by politics. Simply because of the solitary business of his work, the writer may happen to explore areas that no one explored before, within himself or outside, and to make discoveries that sooner or later turn out to be vital areas of collective awareness (Calvino, 98).

Calvino's words raise a fundamental problem but also pose a question. When he says that literature "gives a voice to what is without a voice," we can wonder whether it only "gives a voice to what is without a voice" or if it also makes the human world aware that everything has a voice. Literature has always had the double function of entertaining and educating readers. And sometimes the most entertaining literary genres are those that make us aware of the deepest troubles concerning man's life and man's relationship with the world. Adventure novels like Jules Verne's Voyage au centre de la terre (1864) in France, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912) in England or James de Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888) in Canada situate the action in forests suggesting mystery on a first level but they also suggest man's deep relationship with the forests thus described. Jacques Brosse explains it: La peur de ces immenses territoires que l'imagination et l'inconscient peuplent encore de monstres n'a point cessé d'être actuelle, elle s'est cristallisée autour de quelques tribus d'Indiens qui y survivent à grandpeine, voués à une malédiction dont l'homme blanc est seul responsable. La terreur que peut provoquer l'apparition soudaine des Indiens de l'Amazonie, les derniers véritables "hommes sauvages" puisqu'ils vivent de la forêt, dans laquelle ils demeurent presque invisibles, se confondant avec les arbres et les lianes d'où ils émergent soudain à l'effroi du voyageur, n'a pas cessé de hanter les esprits, ce que montre encore le film récent, La Forêt d'émeraude (1985). Plus que des motifs cyniques, c'est au fond la

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peur qui engendre la destruction systématique des Indiens au Brésil, une des hontes de notre temps. (Brosse, 258-259) 18

Jacques Brosse shows to what extent the fear of an unknown world concealed in the mysteries of the forest is far from being a mere imaginary device. On the contrary it reveals a form of fright dating back to times immemorial and prolonging itself down to the 21st century. The destruction of the Amazonian forest reveals that economic motivations meet the desire of rejecting the other, of chasing the stranger frightening a society only reassured by the norm. If the three novels mentioned above and written at the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century, all stage characters lost in a world where the number of tree ferns is impressive, it is because the novelists see in those trees coming from the prehistoric past and still found nowadays in some countries, a link between our past, our present and the past of the world. Those gigantic tree ferns protecting an unknown world and apparently being the shelter of monstrosity may be a mirror held out to those who enter them or read about them. In that late nineteenth century, do they not reveal a monstrosity to come, a kind of monstrosity ruthlessly eradicating those who do not look like us? Those tree ferns living in novelists' adventure books tell about the end of all the trees, woods and forests that have disappeared, cut by men who wanted to make a profit on them, thus also destroying the peoples living around them. In those adventure novels, tree ferns are the sign of a meeting with the stranger, with the Other, that being that differs from what we know. Their great size is the visible image of otherness, a kind of otherness leading us back to our origins and awakening some ancestral fears conveyed by novelists. Trees speak about our relationship to the past and hold out a mirror in which we could see our link with all the nonhuman elements of the world exactly as the tree reveals its connection with the earth and the sky, with 18

"The fear of those huge territories, which imagination and the unconscious still people with monsters, has not stopped being topical, it has crystallized around a few tribes of Native Americans who survive there with great difficulty, condemned to a curse for which the white man is the only responsible person. The terror that can be provoked by the sudden apparition of Amazonian Indians, the last genuine "wild men" since they live on the forest in which they remain nearly unseen, melting with trees and creepers from which they suddenly emerge, frightening the traveller, did not stop haunting people's minds, which is still shown by the film, The Emerald Forest (1985). More than cynical motives, all things considered, it is fear that generates the systematical destruction of Indians in Brazil, one of the shames of our age" (translation mine).

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the water and animals, while giving man its shadow. The old English tree from Kent, which opens this book, shows ramifications in every direction. Its green leaves speak about life, the holes in its trunk are the dwelling places of birds and insects, and its roots, while allowing it to live, fix the water in the soil. Wangari Maathai, speaking about the fig tree, shows the ecological role of a tree: I later learned that there was a connection between the fig tree's root system and the underground water reservoirs. The roots burrowed deep into the ground, breaking through the rocks beneath the surface soil and diving into the underground water table. The water travelled up along the root until it hit a depression or weak place in the ground, and gushed out as a spring. Indeed wherever these trees stood, there were likely to be streams. The reverence the community had for the fig tree helped preserve the stream and the tadpoles that so captivated me. The trees also held the soil together, reducing erosion and land slides. In such ways, without conscious or deliberate effort, these cultural or spiritual practices contributed to the conservation of biodiversity. (Maathai, 46)

Can books save beeches? Can the book that etymologically comes from the beech, protect the threatened living beech? Literature, whatever its genre, can help us to become aware. But among all works, some have been defined as belonging to ecological writing, a formula that, like ecocriticism, is quite recent. Gabriel Egan considers that "the term ecocriticism was first used in the essay 'Literature and Ecology: an Experiment in Ecocriticism'" published by Williams Rueckert in the Iowa Review in 1978. Ecological writing is defined by Lawrence Buell according to four criteria that "distinguish the tradition of nature writing from that of literature inspired by environmental and ecological concerns:" 19 "environmental writing, in contrast to nature writing, assumes the presence of natural history in human history. [Environmental texts] "open spaces for the nonhuman 20 and its ‘interests', sometimes privileging a non-androcentred world and its distinct evolution and history." 19 The term "ecology" was invented in 1874 by a German zoologist, Ernst Haeckel, who applied the term "œkologie" to the "relation of the animal both to its organic and non organic environment." The word comes from the Greek oikos meaning: "house," "habitat" (Encyclopaedia Britannica, electronic version, http://www.britannica.com/). 20 Throughout this book, I will use the term "nonhuman" rather than more-thanhuman, used by David Abram and others, because of the negative prefix of

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"Environmental writing imports into the text an ethical orientation that makes human beings responsible for the environment and accountable for its health and continuation." "The environmental text assumes the processual order of nature and critiques or avoids a static model of natural change and ecological transformations." (Buell, 7-8) This means that all literary works speaking about nature are not environmental texts. The distinction can also be made between a writer as an ecologist and an ecological writer. Yves-Charles Grandjeat writes about that: L’écrivain écologiste proclame son adhésion à un ensemble de principes et d’idées–à une idéologie, au sens non péjoratif du terme, au service de laquelle se met son l’écriture. L’écrivain écologique, lui, ne se contente pas d’énoncer le bien-fondé de ces principes. Il va plus loin et cherche à mettre en pratique, dans son écriture même, les principes de l’écologiste. […] [|L]a question de la représentation de la nature, par exemple, se pose en même temps que celle de son exploitation. 21

All the texts evoking nature are not ecological texts or ecologists' texts but whenever nature is used in literary genres, it questions readers. Metaphysical poems or the Elizabethan theatre widely use nature in a metaphorical, symbolical and allegorical way and we cannot say that they belong to environmental literature. Yet some academics link classical poetry with ecology, like Diane Kelsey McColley who published Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell. This raises the question of whether we could give any mention of nature in a literary text some ecological dimension. Can we consider the metaphorical allusion to a plant or the ornamental description of a natural landscape only as a metaphor or an ornament? In the mere mention of nature can't we read the awareness of man's close link to the natural world and this ethical sense of responsibility that is obvious in what is asserted as environmental literature? Of course, a "nonhuman" making the human the centre of all things. Yet the ambiguity of the phrase "more-than-human," also used in fantasy literature, makes me choose the non-ambiguous word "nonhuman." I also chose it rather than Hallowell's phrase "other-than-human person," which also includes supernatural and mythical beings. 21 Yves-Charles Grandjeat, "Quelques propositions sur la littérature écologique américaine," Ecrire la nature, RFEA 106 (décembre 2005): 20. "The writer as an ecologist claims his support to a group of principles and ideas—to a kind of ideology, in a non-pejorative sense, served by his writing. As for the ecological writer, he does not content himself with saying the soundness of those principles. He goes further and tries to put into practice, in his very writing, the ecologist's principles. […] the question of the representation of nature, for example, is raised together with the question of its exploitation" (translation mine).

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metaphor remains a metaphor, that is a stylistic device meant to evoke something in the reader and to guide him / her on the way to the knowledge of mankind. Yet there is the mention, the name of the plant or of the animal. For example, Shakespeare's wide use of the semantic field of nature, his numerous allusions to various plants, is also a way for the spectator to be aware of the diversity of the vegetable world. Besides if mere metaphors have led some men, several centuries later, to create botanical gardens exclusively designed from Shakespeare's botanical metaphors, it is because those people have read in Shakespeare's text the necessity to preserve that diversity that is a way of discovering the text. Things are not that simple and nature in texts, whatever the text, may lead readers or spectators to become aware of the role of nature and of their responsibility to nature. A sample of texts taken from Anglophone literature will be tackled here to show to what extent Anglophone writers, from Shakespeare to Ken SaroWiwa and from Romantic poets to First Nations writers, show that literature guides us on the way to awareness and can even save the planet. It is up to readers to prolong this literary journey and to see this path to awareness in the texts they will read (or hear). Literature can appear as a way of speaking about environmental problems as some theoreticians as well as poets say it. To see Shakespeare's plays and sonnets as a guide to an ecological reading of the world is not obvious at first sight. And yet, through his keen perception of the human soul and mind depicted through natural metaphors, Shakespeare gave us signs of the close relationship existing between man and nature and of the necessity to read nature to know one's own place in the world. Darwin and all naturalists read nature to interpret it. Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle is filled with references to his readings, to the library that was onboard The Beagle and to the reader's active role in the scientist's interpretation of the world. But together with this bookish reading, there is the reading of natural life. Even if the term "ecology" only appeared recently, at the end of the 19th century, poets, from the Metaphysical to the Romantic poets, gave signs of some awareness of our relationship to nature; and Romantic poets can be seen as the precursors of an ecological vision of the world. Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is first and foremost a philosophical poem about man's relationship with nature, and the break of the harmony of the world from the moment when the central bird was killed shows how the destruction of the most fragile creature somewhere in the world can break the harmony of the whole universe and condemn men. Poetry, including songs, and particularly ecological poetry, guides us towards awareness. Each literary genre, from the most complex theatrical form of Shakespeare's

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theatre to songs or detective novels, can be read as environmental action when the authors give their readers or listeners some cues leading them to understand that a word can convey a fight. Even the beauty of textual landscape paintings and the colours of the world as travellers or naturalists depict them can appear as a fight: a fight to make readers acknowledge the beauty of the world, to show them why it is worth defending. Travel books, even if they present readers with factual descriptions of the countries visited, reveal the travellers' sense of observation and their awareness of the transformations of the world and the destruction of some species. The colonizing vision appearing in some of those texts disappears behind the awareness of destruction and they show readers a real map of biodiversity, which may also be seen in the painting of the beauty of nature and particularly its colours. Visual imagination with graphic novelists like Neil Gaiman or Alan Moore can also give birth to ecological allegories meant for any audience and the visual dimension added to the written text increases the visibility of the message. Literature leads people to awareness because it depicts all the damage to all parts of the planet and its inhabitants, both being totally linked. Those who do not understand that ecology is the first problem in the world and that everything depends on man's conception of the land and of all its inhabitants, might be guided by a haiku, a naturalist's autobiography, fantastic literature or children's books. The extinction of species, deforestation, water pollution, any kind of poisoning of the earth are tackled in literature. Deforestation is dealt with in plays as well as novels in African literature but some positive experiences like the Green Belt reconstituted by Wangari Maathai who, with hundreds of Kenyan women, replanted trees in Kenya whose forests had been destroyed by colonization, give us hope. The 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner told her story in A Memoir, Unbowed. She gave reality to Jean Giono's text (for the English translation of which she wrote a preface), The Man who Planted Trees. Even the fantastic may be a tool used by some writers to denounce the wild exploitation of resources. The First Nations perhaps have a deeper perception of the preservation of the earth than those who have colonized them. From the Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday, to some Aboriginal writings from Canada and Australia, we shall see how those writers lead us on the way to awareness. And perhaps the key is given by animals' voices as animals so often show us the way to awareness. Real animals studied by scientists like Dian Fossey or Jane Goodall depict the threat against some species and the huge amount of work done by those women and men and even children to preserve those creatures by first teaching the world to make their acquaintance. Fiction also speaks about animals as threatened species. The

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nonhuman world may give us the solution to preserve the planet, a solution that dwells perhaps simply in the fact of listening to the other, either the human one or the nonhuman one, the Earth and the universe at large. Children's books are also a way of educating human children through animal discovery. From Kipling's Jungle Book to Tomson Highway's illustrated children's books, writers open children's eyes and hearts to their relationship with animals. Literature is a means of resistance and this resistance may be expressed either through the theatre, which gives nature a voice, or through Native languages included in texts to resist the dominating language. Literature is an answer to the violence done to lands and men, as appears in texts taken from Nigerian, Tuareg or Native American literatures among others. To write about ecological literature, two options were possible: either choosing a precise corpus with a reasonable number of works; or refusing the idea of a corpus and preferring to travel all over the Anglophone—and even taking some non-Anglophone by-ways—world's literature. This totally unreasonable option led me to be non-exhaustive, but readers may feel like completing this journey and find many more examples. I chose this approach which is somewhat like a walk in a mountain forest where you do not know, when you start, which trees, flowers and animals you are going to meet and, as you progress, you deepen your knowledge of this forest. I would like to go on with the dialogue launched by poets and ecocritics throughout the world and suggest that literature, whatever its genre, may bring about deep changes in the world as far as ecology is concerned and, if there are deep ecological changes, this will necessarily bring about deep changes in human pacified relationships. Is it utopia? Maybe, but in the sense that utopia, "the place that does not exist," is our world, our universe. That place that does not exist yet is still to be invented. Our reality is made of too many illusions not to deduce from them that we should give more credit to the reality of illusion: colours are an illusion, or at least they are the result of a connection between our perception and wave lengths; the blue colour of the sky is an illusion and the result of the density of the air; star lights are an illusion since when we see a star light, it is a light that shone several centuries ago. So, what is real? Our present time in which we can see the star shining in front of our eyes or the past when this star was shining in reality? Our perception of the beauty of a starry sky puts us in the presence of a face to face between two times in the tiny spots of shining stars representing the hugeness of the cosmos. The appearance of things is not their reality. The French philosopher Jean-Christophe Bailly says that "every animal lives in the network of appearances in his own way, that is to say, he hides in it" (Bailly La question animale, 27, translation

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mine). This face to face between illusion and reality, appearance and reality, past and present, the instant of our perception here and now and the eternity of the universe, might be an immaterial cairn placed on our paths to let us understand on the one hand the relativity of perception and on the other hand, the depth of our relationship with the nonhuman. It is towards that conscience that writers, artists and ecocritics try to lead us. Is it enough to save the world? Can this increasing sense of awareness save the planet and its inhabitants? Scott Slovic quotes Rebecca Solnit's perception of the notion of saving and prolongs it in Going Away to Think: As activist and author Rebecca Solnit states, "A game of checkers ends. The weather never does. That's why you can't save anything. Saving is the wrong word, one invoked over and over again, for almost every cause […]. Saving suggests a laying up where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt; it imagines an extraction from the dangerous, unstable, ever-changing process called life on earth" (Hope 59) […]. Solnit's criticism of the word "save" has a lot to do with her sense of what it takes to motivate activists to take to the streets—and the woods and courtrooms—day after day. If you think you're supposed to achieve permanent victories and yet you recognize that you've only managed a series of modest, tenuous, short-lived successes, you could easily be demoralized. Species can be protected from year to year, but not removed entirely from the possibility of extinction. Air and water can be made cleaner through legislation and lifestyle changes, but never removed entirely from the thread of future degradation—never "saved" once and for all. Nonetheless, with the understanding that all "saves" are contingent and temporary, the urge to help and protect is a forceful one. (Going Away, 2)

There is something else in "the urge to help and protect" the nonhuman and thus the human world—for the latter depends on the former and for the moment the latter destroys the former, sawing the branch on which both are sitting, to use a familiar metaphor leading us to trees again. All short-lived successes are steps to make people aware of the necessity of insisting. Something that may not lead to an immediate saving but to the feeling of a connection, as Kev Reynolds put it in a lecture given in Toulouse. 22 A mountaineer and author of guidebooks, who proposes connections between places of social life and places of nature, he has a deep sense of connection and can thus guide his readers and listeners to awareness. Scott Slovic travelling around the world to give lectures on ecocriticism, and giving 22

Kev Reynolds, "Making the Connection," a lecture given at the conference "Anglophone Mountain and Exploration Writing: Meetings Between the Human and Nonhuman," 14 October 2016. https://www.canal-u.tv/video/universite_ toulouse_ii_le_mirail/making_the_connection_kev_reynolds.25041. Published in Caliban n° 59 (Irina Kantarbaeva-Bill ed.), Toulouse: PUM, 2018.

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classes on the mountain, and Kev Reynolds, who gives lectures all over the British Isles to speak about the mountains of the world he has climbed for decades, and who writes guidebooks on the Himalayas as well as the Pyrenees or Kent, both place cairns on our paths. Kev Reynolds shows his audiences and readers the beauty of nature and particularly of mountains and quotes writers who painted that beauty of nature. Scott Slovic shows his students, audiences and readers the weight of literature by analysing literary texts in the light of nature protection. Both of them and so many others lead us to see the connection between the human and nonhuman worlds either by celebrating the beauty of the world or by listening to its songs relayed by writers. Only the capacity of wonder may lead to respect. Rivers join, sometimes they allow nature and mythology to meet— Coppermine River in Canada, or in France, the Garonne river, whose name comes from the Celtic god Gar, who is also present in English quarries and Celtic ker and cairns. Like rivers, literature and nature may be united by a confluence of thoughts and ethics leading us simply to perceive and enjoy the living world.

PART 1 LITERARY GENRES AS ENVIRONMENTAL ACTION

Literary genres allow a literary classification. The major forms are prose and poetry and within those two major forms, there are genres: the novel, drama, poetry, and autobiography might appear as a general classification of literary genres. Within those genres, there is still another classification since there are social novels, adventure novels, detective novels, among others. The theatre encompasses comedy, tragedy, tragicomedy, and musicals, whereas poetry includes many poetic genres, like ballads, sonnets, odes, limericks, calligrams, haikus, epics, fables, elegies, songs and many more. The aim of this chapter is not to give an exhaustive review of all literary genres, but to try to wonder whether a literary genre as such can help an ecological message to be transmitted. In other words, can the genre of a literary work play an active role as a genre in the ecological message? To try to answer the question, we will choose a few examples borrowed from each major genre: the theatre and particularly Shakespeare's theatre, poetry, with Romanticism, ecological poetry and songs; and finally, detective novels. The choice is not arbitrary. Shakespeare's theatre will allow us to realize that what is now called an ecological message, that is a message speaking about man's responsibility towards nature and the damage against it, is not new and that the great dramatist used that popular medium to evoke the problem. Poetry is probably the oldest literary form: hunters' songs existed during Prehistory and still influence some poets as those rhythms are transmitted orally from generation to generation.1 To see how poetry as a 1 N. Scott Momaday speaks about the influence of prehistorical hunters' songs on some of his poems: "This song from the Sioux Buffalo Dance, or something very close to it, might well have been sung by hunters coming from across the Bering Bridge in pursuit of those great beasts which roamed the Palaeolithic north, the corridor from Beringia to the Great Plains of the North American continent. I wrote a poem entitled "At Risk," which bears some relation to this ancient song, I believe" (Momaday 1998, 85-86).

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Part 1

genre may help to transmit an ecological message, we will choose three elements: first, Romanticism—even if it is not a genre but a "literary system,"2 "a literary, artistic and philosophical movement"3—, because Romantic poetry appears as a precursor of the environmental message suggesting the union of the human and nonhuman together with the awareness of the importance of the smallest creature in the general harmony of the world. Poetry, perhaps because it is a genre using systems of connections more than other genres, is perhaps the most adapted genre to evoke connections between man and the world. A chapter will deal with ecopoetics and ecological poetry, which takes on more and more importance particularly in Anglophone countries. Poetry also encompasses songs and if a chapter is devoted to that popular genre, it is because more and more songs give ecological messages and appear as the literary genre that can reach the greatest number of people because of its oral and musical form. Finally, as far as prose and particularly novels are concerned, we will take the example of the detective novel as it is one of the most popular forms of novels and thus, like songs in the poetic field, it is probably one of the novelistic genres reaching most people. The examples chosen will show that the detective novel is a privileged literary space to show readers the close connection existing between damage against the land and against its human population. It is not by chance if novelists such as Tony Hillerman or James Lee Burke build their detective stories around the exploitation of Native American lands' resources and the destruction of Native Americans defending their territories. The detective novel genre is a way of touching a wide readership through an inquiry founded on mental plays, thanks to which readers discover Native Americans' conditions of life and the attacks of white companies against their territories and their people. It might be compared with the popular fashion of the gothic novel at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, which allowed gothic writers to inform readers about women's conditions of life in a patriarchal society. The popularity of a novelistic genre helps authors to lead readers more easily to some awareness concerning the problems of the time.

2

https://www.littre.org/definition/romantisme, accessed January 3rd, 2018. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/romanticism, accessed January 3rd, 2018.

3

CHAPTER ONE THE THEATRE SERVING BOTANY: SHAKESPEARE'S GARDENS

"That Nature, being sick of man's unkindness." William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, iv, 3, 176

Gardens created in America to follow a vegetable route found in Shakespeare's plays might be the sign of the link existing between literature and ecology. Shakespeare is not considered at first sight as an environmental writer and yet some academics published books about the dramatist and ecology.1 Some authors and researchers studied the world of flowers in his plays. In the 19th century, a minister, Rev. Henry N. Ellacombe, published a book entitled The Plant-Lore and Garden-Craft of Shakespeare.2 Shakespeare has his place in the active role played by writers to lead people to awareness. The botanical gardens that were created to pay homage to his theatrical work through the numerous plants he mentioned in his plays are guides in many ways. First, they draw visitors' attention to the fact that Shakespeare was a precursor through his responsible vision of nature. Secondly, the choice of flowers in his plays and therefore in the botanical gardens devoted to him, reveals at the same time the vegetable movements throughout the world, particularly through the voyages of discovery, which both represent imperialism and reveal the role of biodiversity to the public. Those gardens appear as the living translation of the weight of Shakespeare's theatre in our discovery of nature and of our responsibility to nature. Shakespeare's sense of responsibility concerning men's damage to nature appears in Timon of Athens when the eponymous character speaks about "Nature being sicke of mans unkindnesse" (IV, iii, 195).3 In some of his plays indeed, there are allusions to environmental problems like the shrinking of 1

For example, Lynne Bruckner and Dann Brayton, Ecocritical Shakespeare (2010) or Randal Martin, Shakespeare and Ecology (2015). See bibliography. 2 Rev. Henry N. Ellacombe. The Plant-Lore and Garden-Craft of Shakespeare [1877]. London: W. Sarchell and Co., 1884. 3 See further on.

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Chapter One

forests, which was already appearing in Elizabethan England as forests had been over-exploited since the Middle Ages. By Henry VIII's time the pace was accelerating. Wood was widely used as timber supplies for shipbuilding, so the government, fearing for the wood resources, took the first steps to manage depletions. Over-exploitation, added to climatic and demographic pressures, aggravated the loss of forests, and by the 1590s there was a fuel crisis in southeastern England which led to the country's first major environmental controversy. We can find similarities between what happened then and the threat of global warming nowadays. As J. U. Nef says, the stresses on southern English woodland—at that time the country's most essential but finite natural resource—reached an ecological turning point.4 Shakespeare echoed the problem in some of his plays, which shows his own awareness in front of that ecological crisis, which had not the name of an ecological crisis yet. In a few plays he alluded to "sea-coal fire" as in The Merry Wives of Windsor (1.4. 7-8) or in Henry IV Part 2 (2.1. 85-87). This might appear as a detail concerning the scenery but in fact it is much more significant. The allusion to sea-coal fire is a reference to the wood shortage since the solution that had been found to replace wood was to use sea-coal.5 To remedy the decreasing of resources in France, Colbert initiated the first state policy about forest protection in 1669. In those days, there was a wood shortage in all Europe. Colbert made the "grande reformation," from 1663 to 1688, which ended with the 1669 edict on forests. This was progress but, as Catherine and Raphael Larrère put it, "[t]he two orders (anthropologic and natural) do not overlap, but this has been all the

4

J.U. Nef, "The Timber Crisis," The Rise of British Industry, 2 vols. London: Routledge, 1932, i, 156-64; in Randall Martin, Shakespeare and Ecology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford Shakespeare Topics, 2015, 2 and 173. 5 Sea-coal helped people to have heat even if there were poor and it became such a popular resource that a song, somewhat in the fashion of shanty songs, was written by the songwriter Graeme Miles: "A great song by Graeme Miles in the style of a salesman's cry. There are exposed coal deposits off the coast of England and Scotland–the coal soaks up the salt water, breaks off, and washes ashore where it’s collected and sold. Because of the salt water, seacoal burns more easily." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HVlmm_YKYw, accessed July 18, 2017. Other groups or individuals sing that song on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqwjhnH9SN4; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-kyQK3FDd8; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QP4fJMrXG4c From Shakespeare's plays to a popular song, sea-coal appears as a natural element present in collective memory as a rescuing thing.

The Theatre Serving Botany: Shakespeare's Gardens

5

difficulty and all the grandeur of foresters' work, from Colbert to our times: to try to articulate them, to combine men's point of view and nature's."6 Trees are very present in Shakespeare's plays and Gabriel Egan speaks about the "recurrent arboreal imagery" in The Tempest (Egan 155). The play refers several times to the axing of trees and this is so important that some stagings retained that as a symbol of the First Nations' dispossession. In Robert Lepage's staging of The Tempest in Wendake (Canada, 2001), Caliban once freed from his fetters, seizes the axe of Ferdinand, who had felled the tree of his island. His gesture symbolises the settlers' exploitation and the deforestation of Native lands. So, deforestation was already a problem in Shakespeare's day and his use of tree imagery, together with his allusions to sea-coal, was a way of speaking about the threat against England's wild garden. His being aware of the importance of nature is relayed in our day by garden lovers, who created public gardens in the United States of America, to echo Shakespeare's theatrical garden. In New York, in Central Park, Edmond Bronk Southwick created the Shakespeare Garden in 1913, at the request of Parks commissioner Charles Stover. 7 Edmond Bronk Southwick was the Parks Department entomologist and a great reader of Shakespeare's plays: In cooperation with the Board of Education, Southwick carefully plotted the bulbs and seeds that would bring the garden to life. In 1916, the garden was officially renamed Shakespeare Garden and dedicated to the memory of William Shakespeare on the tricentennial of his death. In its early years, the Garden was maintained by Dr. Southwick and the Shakespeare Society. 8

It is the association of a scientist and the greatest playwright in the world that was at the origin of a garden, both leading walkers to know and love nature

6

"Les deux ordres (anthropologique et naturel) ne se recouvrent pas, mais cela a été toute la difficulté et toute la grandeur du travail des forestiers, de Colbert à nos jours, de tâcher de les articuler, de conjuguer le point de vue des hommes et celui de la nature." Catherine and Raphael Larrère, Du bon usage de la nature, 91, translation mine. Catherine and Raphael Larrère remind the reader in a note that "Aldo Leopold, one of the fathers of American environmentalism, should have been a forester, trained, through Gifford Pinchot, to European forest methods" (Larrère 325). 7 I would like to thank Flora Khermouch, who made me discover that garden virtually. 8 http://www.centralparknyc.org/things-to-see-and-do/attractions/shakespearegarden.html,

6

Chapter One

better and to deepen their knowledge of William Shakespeare in an original way. In San Francisco, at Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and Middle Drive East, close to the Japanese Tea Garden and the San Francisco Botanical Garden at Strybing Arboretum, there is another special botanical garden, called "Shakespeare's Garden," constituted of more than two hundred species of flowers all present in Shakespeare's texts. In Golden Gate Park—which is the setting of Charles Chaplin's film In the Park—, some botany lovers, who knew Shakespeare's theatre and poetry quite well, had the idea of reconstituting his imaginary garden and of giving life to his metaphorical vegetable world. Hence thanks to the Bard, those flowers are protected in a precise American space, a garden born from Shakespeare's text in the middle of an American city. Gardens paying tribute to William Shakespeare are often called, "Shakespeare Garden[s]" (among other names), but there are sometimes different names like the California Spring Blossom and Wildflower Association that originally established a garden as the Garden of Shakespeare's Flowers. "With a history dating back to 1928, the garden was the brainchild of Alice Eastwood, who served as the long-running director of botany for the Academy of Sciences."9 In Evanston, Illinois, Evanston's Shakespeare garden, situated on the campus of Northwestern University was designed by a famous landscape architect, Jens Jensen, who organized the garden by using the flowers picked from Shakespeare's texts. The garden was planned in 1915 and built from 1916 to 1929.10 Those garden creations reveal an important sense of connection between nature and literature. Shakespeare's deep knowledge of the human soul goes together with a deep knowledge of the natural world and particularly of botany. "Shakespeare's plant and flower imagery shows such a great understanding of horticulture that many believe Shakespeare himself must have been a gardener."11 Shakespeare did not content himself with situating important scenes in gardens as in Richard II (III, iv); he also quoted many flowers including some that were not among the most widely known. In his 9

https://goldengatepark.com/garden-of-shakespeares-flowers.html, accessed July 12, 2017. 10 http://www.thegardenclubofevanston.org/html/gardens.php, accessed May 19, 2018. 11 "Garden of Shakespeare’s Flowers," http://www.golden-gatepark.com/index.php/gardens/garden_of_shakespeares_flowers, accessed July17, 2015.

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plays, we can find daisies, violets, lady-smocks and cuckoo-buds in Love's Labour's Lost (V, ii), carnations (IV, iii) and daffodils (IV, ii) in A Winter's Tale, rosemary, pansies, fennel and columbines in Hamlet (IV, v), cowslips in The Tempest (V, i), thyme, oxlips, violets, woodbine, musk-roses and eglantine in A Midsummer Night's Dream (II, i), the lily in Henry VIII (III, i), roses in the sonnets, and poppy and mandrake ("mandragora") in Othello (III, iii). Other plants are mentioned in his plays like marygold, peony, wormwood, aconite, crown imperial, rue, pinks, lavender, sweet peas, sea holly and daisies. All the plants and flowers named by Shakespeare appear in those American botanical gardens. Apart from the pleasant experience of walking in a garden in the middle of a city, the travellers who walk in these "literary gardens" find another way of discovering canonical texts, which they are perhaps going to read or read again after the botanical walk. The walking discovery establishes a relationship between texts and nature in a living web. At the same time, as each garden is a botanical garden, it has the function of any botanical garden: to educate people through the discovery of plants, to make them discover ecosystems and to preserve nature and endangered species. Thanks to Shakespeare's awareness of the role of nature in human life, visitors can see the necessity to preserve plants that they knew mechanically so far and in which they now see a link between all ages—those plants existed in Shakespeare's time in England and they can see them now in 21st-century America—, and between themselves and nature. We can even say that some of Shakespeare’s cues reveal his will of guiding people to their responsibility towards nature, as is the case in Timon of Athens, where the eponymous character clearly makes the link between Nature's destruction and Man's actions: That Nature being sicke of mans unkindnesse Should yet be hungry: Common Mother, thou Whose wombe vnmeasureable, and infinite brest Teemes and feeds all: whose selfesame Mettle Whereof thy proud Childe (arrogant man) is puft, Engenders the blacke Toad, and Adder blew, The gilded Newt, and eyelesse venom'd Worme, With all th' abhorred Births below Crispe Heauen, Whereon Hyperions quickning fire doth shine: Yeald him, who all the humane Sonnes do hate, From foorth thy plenteous bosome, one poore roote: Enseare thy Fertile and Conceptious wombe, Let it no more bring out ingratefull man. Goe great with Tygers, Dragons, Wolues, and Beares, Teeme with new Monsters, whom thy vpward face

8

Chapter One Hath to the Marbled Mansion all aboue Neuer presented. O, a Root, deare thankes: Dry vp thy Marrowes, Vines, and Plough-torne Leas, Whereof ingratefull man with Licourish draughts And Morsels Vnctious, greases his pure minde, That from it all Consideration slippesEnter Apemantus. More man? Plague, plague (Timon of Athens, IV, iii, 195-217, emphasis mine)

Shakespeare's words, when he says that nature is "sick of man's unkindness" might be a definition of the modern man's frantic use of nature and the repetition of the adjective "ingratefull" reveals what modern ecologists say. To nature's fertility and plenteous supply of food ("plenteous bosome", "fertile and conceptuous womb"), he opposes plague brought by men. On the one hand there is nature that gives everything and on the other hand there is man who is synonymous with plague, a word also repeated twice. Shakespeare's words foreshadow the ecological discourse heard in our contemporary days. Botanical gardens telling about Shakespeare's theatre through a vegetable itinerary are also a way of speaking about travelling vegetation and the seed transfers that have occurred naturally but also through voyages of discovery over the centuries. Thoreau evoked natural plant transfers in his text "The Dispersion of Seeds:" Squirrels also help to disperse the pitch-pine seed. I notice every fall, especially about the middle of October, a great many pitch-pine twigs or plums, which have evidently just been gnawed off and left under the trees. They are from one-half to three-fourths of an inch in thickness, and often have three or four branches. I counted this year twenty under one tree, and they were to be seen in all pitch-pine woods. It is plainly the work of squirrels. As I had not chance to detect their object, I resolved last fall to look into the matter. […] For many years the daily traveller along these roads—nay, the proprietor himself—does not notice that there are any pines coming up there, and still less does he consider whence they came; but at last his heir knows himself to be the possessor of a handsome white-pine lot, long after the wood from which the seed came has disappeared.12

The activity of the squirrels and birds transforms the vegetation of the place and Thoreau shows how landscapes are fashioned and transformed by animal activity. His simple narrative of the story of a pigeon eating seeds before travelling and being killed very far from the place where it had found 12 ͒ Henry David Thoreau, "The Dispersion of Seeds," Faith in a Seed, Bailey P. Dean, ed. Washington, D. C.: Island Press, 1993, 23-24.

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the seed even takes a metaphysical dimension as, by showing that the bird perpetuates the life of a vegetable species hundreds of miles farther than its original place, he speaks about life in death: Pigeons, nuthatches, and other birds devour the seed of the white pine in great quantities, and if the wind alone is not enough, it is easy to see how pigeons may fill their crops with pine seed and then move off much faster than a locomotive to be killed by hundreds in another part of the county, and so plant the white pine where it did grow before. (ibid.)

Thoreau tells the story of life in death told by a seed and a pigeon and in so doing, he guides readers towards a sense of observation allowing them to see the link between all things. This is what botanical gardens try to do by getting species growing all over the world and telling visitors about the ecosystems linked to those species. Botanical gardens particularly contribute to preserve plants in general and particularly medicinal plants and some people think that "steps should be taken to involve them as closely and as fully as possible in the traditional medicine movement" (Bramwell, 221). They may also open onto the propagation of plants. With the botanical gardens devoted to Shakespeare, visitors are doubly educated, in the knowledge of plants and of classical literature. Botanical gardens are linked with the history of the world; Michel Baridon notes that, "according to the Old Testament, Adam appears as the founder of the first botanical garden as he gave each plant in the Garden of Eden a name" (Baridon, 40, translation mine). They are also linked with the history of colonization and voyages of discovery. Conquerors and travellers wanted to bring back seeds and plants from the territories they had discovered. This was part of their domination of the world. Alan Frost considers "the habit of plant transfer to be an important aspect of British imperialism in the second half of the eighteenth century" (Frost, Visions of Empire, 74). The transfer of seeds generated a sort of vegetal globalization and some plants became the emblems of some landscapes whereas they grew originally at the other end of the world. Voyages of discovery played a great role in the transfer of seeds meant to feed British botanical gardens. Joseph Banks collected thousands of seeds and plants that arrived at his home in London or at Kew Gardens (Miller et al., 39). He asked all collectors in the world and particularly the explorers who had been to Northern America to bring back seeds and plants. In 1792 Archibald Menzies and George Vancouver who had voyaged along the North American West Coast, brought back an exceptional collection of plants and seeds from that area. In the 1820s James Douglas also sent plants to Britain. Alfred Wallace brought hundreds of specimens from South America and from the Malay Archipelago, which he speaks of in his letters:

10

Chapter One You will see what I say to him about my collections here. Java is the richest of all the islands in Birds but they are as well known as those of Europe & it is almost impossible to get a new one—However I am adding fine specimens to my collection which will be altogether the fairest known of the birds of the Archipelago, except perhaps that of the Leyden Museum who have had naturalists collecting for them in all the chief islands for many years with unlimited means. (Letters, 264-265)

His admiration for the biodiversity of the place goes together with the desire of collecting specimens to send them to England. Scientific curiosity also represented a materialization of imperialism as plants from the whole world became enclosed in botanical gardens in England and they were not only transferred through natural means, by animal activity, but through voyages of discovery. In Shakespeare's plays—this is reflected in the botanical gardens devoted to his theatrical flora—, the abundance of Mediterranean plants13 is the expression of those vegetable travels. The "cypress" mentioned by Olivia in Twelfth Night (II, I, 118) and by Autolycius in his song in A Winter's Tale (IV, iv, 221), was growing originally in the Himalayas. In those two cases, it designates a mourning fabric14 but if we consider the natural imagery surrounding the text, we might infer that Shakespeare perhaps had also in mind the tree itself that can be found around graveyards and is thus linked with death, a tree that became the heart of Mediterranean landscapes. The "orange-wife" mentioned in Coriolanus (II, I, 66) reminds us of the multiple journeys of orange trees over history. Before oranges reached England and Shakespeare's imagination, orange trees, had first grown in China, were carried by Arabian caravans to Palestine and imported to Europe during the Crusades before being transported to Brazil by Conquistadores and colonizers and from Brazil to Australia during voyages of discovery. A simple word, an image in a play reminds the spectators of the movements of trees and plants 13 A study of Mediterranean plants in Shakespeare’s plays was made in a presentation I gave in Athens at the 9th Annual International Conference on Mediterranean Studies, March 22nd, 2016, which took place at the Athens Institute for Education and Research. Also see the article, "Mediterranean Vegetation in Anglophone Literature as a Sign of Man’s Relationship with the World", Athens: Athens Journal of Mediterranean Studies, vol. 3 n° 1, 7-20. I am grateful to Dr T. Gregory Papanikos, the organizers of the conference, the editors of the journal, and also to Helen Goethals and Isabelle Keller-Privat, the organizers of a conference in Toulouse about "Mediterranean Hinterlands" for giving me the opportunity to think about the connection between Mediterranean plants and English literature. 14 For a glossary of plants, flowers, trees and shrubs found in Shakespeare's plays, see http://www.shakespeareswords.com, accessed July 19, 2017.

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that tell the history of human movements, wars and crusades, colonization or scientific voyages. The sycamore (Ficus sycomorus), mentioned by Desdemona in Othello (IV, iii, 38), is a tree first growing in East Africa and it is frequent in Egypt. Its mention is frequent in Arabian texts and it also appears in the Bible. The other sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) is rather a mountain tree growing in Europe and around the Mediterranean Basin. It is probable that Shakespeare referred to the former as an element of exoticism but what is important to note is the fact that his imagery is full of references to plants and trees evoking plant transfers and travels. In Shakespeare's first work, Venus and Adonis, situated in a Mediterranean context, Mediterranean vegetation appears only at the end with a real "myrtle grove" (l. 865) that is part of the setting and a metaphorical "ebon dart" designating death (l. 948). The metaphorical choice of the word "ebon"— ebony—is due to the black colour of the wood but also to the fact that this rare wood was imported from Africa at the end of the 16th century and rich people had ebony furniture made in Europe. A mere word evokes both life and death, and also a part of the history of the trade of vegetable materials between Europe and the other continents. Moreover, the nonhuman world speaks about man's relationships with the Earth through mythological characters, and roots a mythological story in the reality of the Earth. In The Winter's Tale, partly situated in Sicily, Perdita mentions Mediterranean flowers that evoked various symbols in the spectators of the time: Sir, the year growing ancient, not yet on summer's death, nor on the birth Of trembling winter, the fairest flowers of the season Are our carnations, and streaked gillyvors, Which some call nature's bastards. Of that kind Our rustic garden is barren, and I care not to get slips of them (IV, iv, 79-82)

The organic rhythm of the seasons is seen through the evocation of two flowers. The carnation and the gillyflower are rejected by Perdita as nonseasonal flowers associated with "bastardy." It is as if she regarded that recreated nature as the image of her life as a foundling. The character's fate and the history of nature's evolution both appear in the mention of the two flowers. Like the gillyflower and the carnation associated with bastardy in Perdita's mind, Shakespeare's garden sends spectators to man's life, love and death, and even to war as a notion or to precise armed conflicts. Thus, through the "flower-de-luce"—the yellow iris—mentioned in The Winter's Tale and Henry V—love and war—particularly medieval Mediterranean religious battlefields and the Crusades—are linked since that flower was chosen by King Louis VII

12

Chapter One

as "the emblem on his shield and banner when he went to his first Crusade" (Kerr, 31). It is also in The Winter's Tale, that violets are mentioned by Perdita who links them with Antiquity, through Roman mythology and Greek customs since in ancient Greece, "the custom among women [was to paint] […] their eyelids with a purple, sweet-scented ointment."15 Shakespeare's text reveals a double metaphor: "Violets dim, but sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes" (IV, iv, 120-121). Through the double image uniting nature and mythology, the double cultural reference to Rome—with Juno—and to Greece, through the make-up custom, Shakespeare suggests a link between nature and myths in the Mediterranean world reconstituted in a flower. And the reference also evokes the plants travelling since violets have grown in the Mediterranean Basin since High Antiquity before reaching England. Athenians made creams or teas with violets, and Romans made crowns with them to make headaches disappear. They were linked with some medical power. Rosemary, another Mediterranean plant, recurs in Shakespeare's plays, particularly in Hamlet (IV, v, 176), to convey remembrance. The Winter's Tale contains references to "lavender, mints, savory, marjoram" (IV, iv, 104). Hot lavender and savory are also typically Mediterranean, perhaps "brought to England by the Roman invaders" (Kerr, 59), and they transform the memory of war into a painting of profusion in nature. Shakespeare's theatre uses flowers to introduce soft nature into the world of men's violence that is present in the Mediterranean origins of some flowers (Crusades or Roman invasion…). This suggests a world where everything is interrelated. Michel Baridon, in his anthology of texts about gardens, considers that in a garden, "nature makes its self-portrait" while "man conceives the picture." Shakespeare’s theatrical garden draws the picture of human violence that is present in filigree within the soft vegetable world. [Le jardin] Lui seul, en effet, nous peint le réel par ses éléments mêmes. Il crée son propre espace. Ses couleurs sont les vraies couleurs, ses formes sont les vraies formes, sa vie la vraie vie des arbres, des eaux, des fleurs et des feuilles. Le vent, quand il y passe, ne se change pas en courant d’air. Ni la lumière en éclairage. Il ne procède ni par assemblage de formes préalablement géométrisées comme l’architecture, ni par imitation, comme la peinture, mais par disposition directe des volumes et des teintes. Le grand, l’inépuisable paradoxe, c’est que cette simplicité, ce rapport direct au monde reel est l’effet d’une image double: dans un jardin, la nature fait son autoportrait, mais c’est l’homme qui conçoit le tableau. 16 15

See www.france-pittoresque, accessed February 7, 2016. Michel Baridon, Les Jardins, Paris: Robert Laffont, 1998, 5-6. "[Garden] is the only form of art painting reality through its very elements. It creates its own space. Its colours are the true colours, its shapes are the true shapes, its life is the true life

16

The Theatre Serving Botany: Shakespeare's Gardens

13

This is also what Stanley Kunitz, the American poet and garden-lover (1905-2006), thought: I think of gardening as an extension of one's own being, something as deeply personal and intimate as writing a poem. The difference is that the garden is alive and it is created to endure just the way a human being comes into the world and lives, suffers, enjoys, and is mortal. The lifespan of a flowering plant can be so short, so abbreviated by the changing of the seasons, it seems to be a compressed parable of the human experience. The garden is, in a sense, the cosmos in miniature, a condensation of the world that is open to your senses. (Kunitz, 14)

All gardeners see the garden, consciously or not, as a metaphor of life and of the cosmos. This may be why so many gardens live in Shakespeare's plays, the theatre being a popular genre allowing a great number of people to hear the message. Shakespeare's gardens are a living image of the relationship between nature and writing; this is what Stanley Kunitz expresses when he writes in his ultimate book, published when he was 100 years old and had nearly died two years earlier before experimenting a real "renewal:" "You might say, as well, that the garden is a metaphor for the poems you write in a lifetime and give to the world in the hope that these poems you have lived through will be equivalent to the flower that takes root in the soil and becomes part of the landscape" (Kunitz, 14). Shakespeare felt that connection between nature—and particularly gardens as they directly link man and nature—, and writing. This is also what the creators of Shakespeare's real gardens felt. But whereas Shakespeare's allegorized nature depicts human behaviours, the men and women who created Shakespeare's gardens made Shakespeare's text inhabit nature to guide visitors both to the awareness of the beauty of nature and to the necessity of its protection, and to the living role of literature. He paved the way for the poets of the following centuries who made the praise of nature a priority.

of trees, waters, flowers and leaves. The wind, when it blows, does not become a draught. Nor does light become lighting. It does not put together shapes that would be made geometrical beforehand as in architecture, It does not imitate things as in painting, but directly places volumes and colours. The great, inexhaustible paradox is that that simplicity, that direct relationship to the real world is the effect of a double picture: in a garden nature makes its self-portrait but it is man who conceives the picture." (Translation mine).

CHAPTER TWO ROMANTICISM AS A PRELUDE TO ECOLOGY?

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour." William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence"

Laurence Buell sees British Romanticism as one of the two epicentres of ecocriticism. Pamela Banting writes about it: "After noting at the outset the problematics of naming and defining the field, Buell describes what he sees as its evolution, beginning with its origins in two ‘epicentres,’ British Romanticism and American nature writing in the 1990s."1 Before Romanticism, we saw that some of Shakespeare's poetic words foreshadow ecological preoccupations and the same could be said of seventeenth-century poets like Andrew Marvell, George Herbert and others. Dian Kelsey McColley's book about Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell,2 shows that seventeenth-century English poets created a new language of nature and showed some awareness of the environment. John D. Staines writes that the author "sees writers like Milton, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, Margaret Cavendish, Thomas Traherne, George Herbert, and Anne Finch responding to revolutions in science and religion in ways that create a new language of nature."3 He adds that "[t]hey voice an awareness of environmental problems centuries before environmentalism becomes a recognized political term" and goes on:

1

Pamela Banting, "Ecocriticism in Canada", in Cynthia Sugars, The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature, Oxford: OUP, 2016, 729. 2 Dian Kelsey McColley, Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell, Oxford: Routledge, 2016. 3 John D. Staines, Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell (review), in Renaissance Quaterly, volume 61, Number 3, Fall 2008, 1053-1058.

Romanticism as a Prelude to Ecology?

15

McColley draws repeated parallels between early-modern vitalist poets and more modern and contemporary poets and nature writers like John Muir, Wendell Berry, Leslie Marmon Silko, June Sturrock, and others. […] (Ibid.)

Dian Kelsey McColley's book invites readers to realize that poets' awareness concerning environmental problems is not recent. In her analysis of Milton's poetry, she says that "[w]hile the poems Milton wrote during and shortly after his college days often retained suggestive allegory, they tilt toward natural knowledge and a sense of responsibility for the natural world." 4 And to demonstrate the ecological dimension of those poets, she refers to the etymology of the word ecology: The modern word ecology describes the work of these poets better than the classical and early modern economy. Both come from the Greek oikos, or household, but economy's other root is nomos, law, while ecology's is logos, word, knowledge, reason, or the expression of thought. Xenophon's Oeconomicus concerns rules for the efficient management of an estate; "ecology" suggests that our use of knowledge needs to be good for the whole household of living things. John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, Margaret Cavendish, Thomas Traherne, Ann Finch and other early modern poets shared an impulse to give responsible attention to the Earth and to nonhuman creatures. 5

Kelsey McColley's study shows that the notion of ecology precedes the word thanks to poets who, long before scientific and political ecology, showed the necessity of being aware, revealed human responsibility towards the Earth and the nonhuman, showed, before the creation of the word, that all creatures were part of a same household, which echoed the immemorial Navajo chant taken up by N. Scott Momaday in the title of his novel House Made of Dawn, and foreshadowed Michel Serres's words when he speaks about "our house of the world" and writes a whole book entitled Habiter ("To Live in"). Kelsey McColley opens interesting perspectives concerning the birth of the idea of ecology, which seems to have been initiated first by poets. Before Romanticism, poets opened the way to the conscience of nature, but it was still more often used as an allegorical instrument. With Romanticism, Nature became the core of the poetic discourse and the poet's communion with the natural world led to awareness, appearing as the first stone of a construction 4 Kelsey McColley, Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell, chapter 7, "Milton's Prophetic Epics", https://books.google.fr/ accessed May 12, 2017. 5 Kelsey McColley, Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell, Introduction, "The State of Nature and the Problem of Language," https://books.google.fr/

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starting with Shakespeare, Milton and the Metaphysic poets and developed in a passionate way by the Romantics. Nature is one of the most important themes of Romanticism, but the contemplation of nature is no simple passive admiration; it leads the poet towards his "inward eye,"6 the eye of the soul, the eye of imagination, the inner eye that is going to engender a fusion of the poet and nature. Romantic poets see a spiritual correspondence between man and Nature, a correspondence conveyed by a communion between the poet and the natural world. More philosophical and metaphysical than ecological at that period (the word "ecology" only appeared at the end of the 19th century7), yet there is a fundamental respect for nature, a real understanding of the nonhuman other, suggesting a consciousness of the preservation of a natural world making us live. Thus in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," a ballad by Coleridge told by a sailor narrating how he and the crew of his ship found themselves facing death because he had killed the albatross accompanying them, the link between the bird and man's survival is clearly indicated: I had killed the bird That made the breeze to blow. Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay, That made the breeze to blow!8

Romantic poets see perfect harmony in Nature and they also see in it the aesthetic principle of the organic form, as is shown by Wordsworth in his "Prelude" or by Turner in paintings showing the energy at work in Nature.

Microcosm and macrocosm The English Romantics see a connection between the microcosm and the macrocosm, the natural world of the Earth reflecting the energy at work in the cosmos. That relation is an echo to the Renaissance vision, widely relayed by Shakespeare. For example, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Titania says that the storm and meteorological disorders are provoked by her quarrel with Oberon:

6

William Wordsworth, "I wandered lonely as a cloud" (1804). See note above. 8 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Part II in Lyrical Ballads, 1798. 7

Romanticism as a Prelude to Ecology?

17

And this same progeny of evils comes From our debate, from our dissension We are their parents and original. 9

The characters' quarrels disturb the order of the universe. The Romantics showed that connection between all the elements (in Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," the killing of the albatross brings about the absence of wind) and particularly between the infinitely small and the infinitely large. William Blake's lines chosen as the epigraph of this chapter convey that link: To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.10

The tiniest part of the Earth, a grain of sand, represents a universe and the smallest flower is assimilated to the whole sky, which will be taken up later by Victor Hugo: L'algèbre s'applique aux nuages ; l'irradiation de l'astre profite à la rose ; aucun penseur n'oserait dire que le parfum de l'aubépine est inutile aux constellations. Qui donc peut calculer le trajet d'une molécule ? Que savons-nous si des créations de mondes ne sont point déterminées par des chutes de grains de sable? Qui donc connaît les flux et les reflux réciproques de l'infiniment grand et de l'infiniment petit […]? 11

Victor Hugo poetically shows the relationship between the infinitely small and the infinitely wide, between the tiniest thing on the Earth and the cosmos, like Francis Thompson later in his famous line "That thou canst not stir a flower / Without troubling a star."12 Poets sometimes have intuitions about the Earth and the cosmos before scientists. As Edgar Alan Poe, in his poem "Eureka," 9

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, II, i, 81-117. William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence," 1803, first published in 1863, by Alexander Gilchrist in his biography of William Blake. 11 "Algebra applies to clouds; the irradiation of the day star is profitable to the rose; no thinker would dare to say that the scent of the hawthorne is useless to constellations. Who can calculate the course of a molecule? Do we know if creations of worlds are not determined by the fall of sand grains? Who knows the reciprocal ebbs and flows of the infinitely big and the infinitely small?", Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, https://www.ibibliotheque.fr/les-miserables-victor-hugohug_miserables/lecture-integrale/page647, iBibliothèque, collection headed by Jean D'Ormesson; accessed July 18, 2017. Translation mine. 12 Francis Thompson, "The Mistress of Vision", 1913. 10

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Chapter Two

had guessed, before Arago, about the finitude of the universe, Thompson had the intuition of the link uniting everything. Loren Eiseley, both a naturalist and a poet, writes: Flowers changed the face of the planet. Without them, the world we know— even man himself—would never have existed. Francis Thompson, the English poet, once wrote that one could not pluck a flower without troubling a star. Intuitively he had sensed like a naturalist the enormous interlinked complexity of life. Today we know that the appearance of the flowers contained also the equally mystifying emergence of man. 13

In this little text that blends scientific, philosophical and poetic visions, Eiseley asserts man's debt to flowers: Without the gift of flowers and the infinite diversity of their fruits, man and bird, if they had continued to exist at all, would be today unrecognizable. Archaeopteryx, the lizard-bird, might still be snapping at beetles on a sequoia limb; man might still be a nocturnal insectivore gnawing a roach in the dark. The weight of a petal has changed the face of the world and made it ours. (ibid.)

Eiseley's conclusion about the weight of a petal is fundamental but his last word, "ours," may be a warning. The final notion of possession is perhaps used by the naturalist to convince man of his debt to the nonhuman world and particularly to flowers. And perhaps he thinks that the only notion that man can understand in order to accept this conclusion, is the notion of possession. In that beautiful hymn to flowers, the final possessive pronoun may appear as a strategic way of convincing humans of their relationship with the Earth. Native Americans say that we are only in charge of the world and it does not belong to us. Eiseley strangely concludes his essay by saying that "the weight of a petal […] made [the world] ours." Is it really the notion of possession that is present in the possessive pronoun or rather the notion of communion? Making the world ours is being aware of the fact that it is our house, it means that we are aware of our responsibility to it. The world is ours as it is the flowers' and animals' world. This vision of things prolongs the Romantics' perception of nature. William Blake, who was a visionary poet, read the manifesto of an absolute liberty in the natural world:

13

Loren Eiseley, How Flowers Changed the World, n.p., in The Immense Journey, 1957. Published separately by the Sierra Club in 1996 with photographs by Gerald Ackerman.

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A robin redbreast in a cage Puts all heaven in a rage. A dove-house fill'd with doves and pigeons Shudders hell thro' all its regions. A dog starv'd at his master's gate Predicts the ruin of the state. 14

In this poem, a list of ill-treated animals allows the poet to speak about human beings; starting from a robin imprisoned in a cage associated to the anger of heavens, he paves the way for a song of liberty in which all the animals imprisoned give the key of man's liberation. More than a century later, Mahmoud Darwich's canary answered Blake's robin to denounce the violence killing Palestine: Tomorrow, we will remember that we left the canary in a cage, alone not singing to us but to passing snipers.15

Animals are the witnesses of human violence and poets use their fragile voices to denounce wars and imprisonment as we shall see later. The poem starts with possible happiness for the imprisoned creature: Close to what will be we listened to the canary's words to me and you: “Singing in a cage is possible and so is happiness” ("The Canary," ibid.)

The canary leads the listeners on to the way of freedom within imprisonment, through a language—"words"—showing pure happiness. But when the bird is abandoned, the poem ends on a negative form—"not singing to us"—and the last word of the poem, "snipers," makes violence come back. In Blake's poem, pigeons, a dog, a horse, a lark, a wolf, a lion, a deer, a lamb, a bat, an owl, a wren, a cat, a serpent, a bee, a newt, and an eagle follow one another; night animals and day animals are connected, as are connected the king of the jungle and a simple gnat, creeping and flying creatures; all creatures are there to speak about man and the "poison" that is power. The Romantics need Nature 14

William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence." Mahmoud Darwich, "Boulevard St Germain", in A River Dies of Thirst, translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham, New York: Archipelago Books, 2009, 128. 15

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to speak about man and to reach God, who closes Blake's poem, to see the world through a metaphysical and spiritual way read in man's connection with the natural world. In Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," the mariner's act of killing the bird transforms the whole universe as is shown in part 2 of the poem. The Sun, presented as God's head—"God's own head"—is soiled by the blood of the bird. The murder of the albatross appears as a murder of light (since the fog replaces the sunlight) and a murder of life, real as well as spiritual. The same kind of symbolism can be found in N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn: in that novel the murder of a goose in a hunting scene is presented as a break of the harmony of the universe in the Indian conception of the world: The gray geese, twenty-four of them, broke from the river, lowly, steadily on the rise of sound, straining to take hold on the air. Their effort was so great that they seemed for a time to hang beating in the willows, helplessly huge and frantic. But, one after another, they lose southward on their great thrashing wings, trailing bright beads of water in their wake. Then they were away, and he had seen how they craned their long slender necks to the moon, ascending slowly into the far reaches of the winter night. They made a dark angle in the sky, acute, perfect; and for one moment they lay out like an omen on the bright fringe of a cloud. Did you see? Oh, they were beautiful! Oh Vidal, oh my brother, did you see? An awful stillness returned on the water, and without looking away Vidal pointed. Abel could barely see it then, the dark shape floating away in the blackness. (Momaday, House Made of Dawn, 119)

Momaday's celebration of beauty through the memory of the angle of geese appears as both an intertextual reference to Coleridge's ballad and to the break of the harmony of the world after the killing of the albatross whose life is shown as being linked with the mariners' fate. The geese that "craned their long slender necks to the moon, ascending slowly into the far reaches of the winter night" appear as the living sign of the connection between the Earth and the cosmos, and through man's gaze and awareness of their beauty, a sign of the connection between man and nature. The connection is natural and spiritual—the twenty-four geese remind the reader of the spiritual symbolism of number twelve in Native American cultures. They reveal the inclusion of natural life in the cosmos, which will be still emphasized when Abel, the main character, "carried [the dead bird] out into the moonlight, and its bright black eyes in which no terror was, were wide of him, wide of the river and the land, level and hard upon the ring of the moon in the southern sky" (ibid., 120). The ultimate picture of the bird

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is not one of death but an image of cosmic life shining in the bird's eye. Momaday's painting of the beauty of the angle of geese and of the break of their harmony through the killing of one bird is both a celebration of beauty, a Native American chant and an intertextual reference to one of the most famous romantic ballads, an intertextual reference emphasizing the powerful significance of Coleridge's poem. In Coleridge's ballad, no rebirth seems to be possible. Hence the idea of a painting appearing as a negative image of motionlessness, as if life was fixed forever, as if nothing could move any longer: "a painted ship on a painted ocean." The presence of evil appears in such words as "death-fires," "witch's oils" and "soot"; all of them reveal natural phenomena but their function is distorted and only reveals blackness and evil, a progression from the Sun to evil. This progression is visible through the notion of silence, a recurring word whenever the destruction of nature is at stake. From Keats's "And no bird sings" in "La Belle dame sans merci" to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the silence of birds speaks about death and tells the story of nature's destruction. 16 In part 2 of Coleridge's poem, the complement "into that silent sea" appearing in stanza 5 gives way in stanza 6 to the words: "to break / The silence of the sea." A gradation in negative elements is perceptible through a grammatical change: in the phrase "silent sea," the main element is the sea. It is still the active element, whereas in "the silence of the sea," the main element is "the silence," which can be associated with nothingness; the sea is only a complement of the noun "silence." This shows the double role of the sea: it is the sea of creation but also the sea of destruction, the symbol of death linked with the moon, another symbol of death as opposed to the sun. That opposition is reinforced by the contrast between horizontality and verticality. The horizontality of the sea is opposed to the verticality of the movement of the sun and of the mast, the same movement as the sun originally. But there is a change because of the mariner's guilt; "rise" is opposed to "stand," movement is transformed into motionlessness. Those lexical and grammatical contrasts are a way of showing the opposition between man's dissociation from nature and nature's initial harmony.

Man's gesture transforming the order of the universe The rhythm of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is the first element suggesting a transformation. Harmony is conveyed at the beginning by the iambic rhythm—an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable: line 1, "The Sun now rose upon the right". But the iambic rhythm is broken by a 16

See further on in part IV.

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trochaic inversion on line 2: "out of the sea came he"—generating a choriambic variation. That brings tension and enhances the semantic value of the line. Moreover, it foreshadows the rupture of harmony and introduces violence into the serenity of the seascape painting. The overstressing brings heaviness, enhanced by the alliteration in [d] but also by the chiasmatic structure: "Down dropped" / "dropped down" (l. 107). Throughout that part of the poem showing the link between the killing of the albatross and the mariners' fate, the iambic rhythm is broken by rhythmic variations showing the weight of the mariner's guilt and the tension of the crew. The real voyage is changed into a symbolical journey in which the murder of a bird brings the revelation of an inner light and of a supernatural light in the universe, conveying a sense of connection. The change is conveyed by the sounds; on line 103, the regular rhythm, the inner rhyme, the alliteration in [f]—"The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, / The furrow followed free"—echo the breath of the wind conveying harmony. This is different from the following stanzas where hard sounds, alliterations in [d], an active sea changed into a passive nothingness, and a chiasmatic structure as if to express the fight between the breeze and the sails instead of their complicity suggest a clash. The power of the elements (the sunlight, the wind, the sea) is replaced by the powerlessness of the ship and the crew figured by a negative form: st. 13: "We could not speak, no more than if / We had been choked with soot." The mariner's awareness of his guilt appears in the last stanza. The last two lines sound like a revelation with the assimilation of the cross and the Albatross, an assimilation conveyed by two devices: through the structure— "instead of"—and through the sound and the inner rhyme: "cross" / "Albatross." This reveals the sacrificial function of the albatross. The "bird" of lines 95 and 99 becomes the "Albatross" with a capital A. He has become a Christ-like figure, the Son of the Sun, of light (God's head). The mariner, by killing the albatross, has killed Christ. Nature becomes hell because it is the mirror of the mariner's guilt. Nature as the creation of God in which all the elements are God's creatures, becomes hell for the mariner and the crew, because one of God's creatures has been killed. Symbolically that creature of God becomes Christ. The trip on the sea becomes a journey into the mariner's own consciousness in which he is going to understand his guilt. The Albatross round his neck appears as the symbol of retribution. This poem shows the consequences of man's gestures when he breaks the harmony of Nature and it thus appears as a precursor of the ecological discourse. This poem was used by Mary Shelley in her novel Frankenstein in the first volume, chapter 5, where the stanza quoted conveys the hero's mood. Moreover, the final scene of the ship stuck in the ice of the Northern world also reminds the reader of the romantic poem. This shows that the poem is at

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the core of the romantic philosophy expressing man's necessary communion with Nature and at the same time it is included in the universal legendary and literary world where metaphysical journeys express the link between man and the cosmos. Coleridge and all the Romantics paved the way for all the poets of the following centuries on the five continents, whose poetry clearly expressed environmental preoccupations and the sense of connection between the respect of nature and peace in the world.

CHAPTER THREE ECOLOGICAL POETRY AND ECOPOETICS

"The faded leaves falling from the trees are words in search of a skilful poet to put them back on the branches." Mahrmoud Darwich1

Shakespeare, Milton or the Metaphysic poets used Nature in their texts and led people to some sense of responsibility towards Nature. Romantic poets gave Nature the first role and clearly showed the influence of each element constituting it: an albatross, a nightingale, the West wind or daffodils. Yet despite the huge role given to Nature and the clear connection Romantic poets saw between the human and the nonhuman, romantic poetry cannot be called ecological poetry. It is a form of poetry leading to the awareness of the beauty of nature and to its respect but it does not have the environmentalist dimension that ecological poetry can have even if it foreshadows it. The aim of this chapter is not to give an exhaustive survey of nature poetry that can be considered as ecological poetry. Its aim is rather to answer some questions raised by the very topic of ecopoetics, the first one being the question John Felstiner chose as the title of his seminal book, Can Poetry Save the Earth? (2009), where the question is answered through poets from the Bible to Gary Snyder, including John Clare, Emily Dickinson, Gerald Manley Hopkins, William Carlos Williams and many others. Starting from John Keats's line "The Poetry of Earth is Never Dead,"2 Felstiner considers that "the poetry of Earth […] [is] more vital to us than ever" (Felstiner xiii). It is that vital use of poetry that we would like to show by starting with the questions raised by ecopoetics to show its capacity of denouncing environmental destruction and its painting of the beauty of life. Ecopoetics raises questions. First how could we define ecological poetry and what is the difference between ecological poetry and ecopoetics? And as Forrest Gander says, "can poetry be ecological?" (Redstart, 1). And if poetry 1

Mahmoud Darwich, "Boulevard St Germain", in A River Dies of Thirst, translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham, New York: Archipelago Bos, 2009, 136. 2 John Keats in John Felstiner xiii.

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can be ecological, can this soft art become a political act? Poems will answer those questions. Ecopoetics is thus defined on the internet site of Poetry Foundation: Similar to ethnopoetics in its emphasis on drawing connections between human activity—specifically the making of poems—and the environment that produces it, ecopoetics rose out of the late 20th-century awareness of ecology and concerns over environmental disaster. A multidisciplinary approach that includes thinking and writing on poetics, science, and theory as well as emphasizing innovative approaches common to conceptual poetry, ecopoetics is not quite nature poetry.3

This definition encompasses criticism as well as poetic—but not only— creation, and all that links the poetic word with the human being and his environment is concerned by this definition. Some critics are more precise, like Chinese researcher Zeng Fanren quoted by Qingqi Wei in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism: "Zeng suggests two patterns in ecopoetics, namely, the creation of new principles and the transformation of old ones, and, on the whole, he finds it an ever progressing and open process."4 Qingqi Wei adds in a footnote: Other important summarizations of ecocriticism include Wang Yuechuan's delineation, which I generalize as follows: 1) interaction of culture and nature; 2) revision of literary canon; 3) political correctness; 4) cross-disciplinary studies; 5) ecological cultural spirit; and 6) double visions of life and Earth. (138-139)5

What is interesting in Zeng's definition is the notion of the creation of new principles, suggesting a theoretical transformation of poetic creation, and the idea that it is a "progressing and open process." Yet we can wonder if we cannot say the same of any form of poetry and any form of literary text in general. In fact, we might see ecopoetics as a combination of all those definitions. And what we would like to tackle here is ecological poetry, that is, poetry having a clear ecological message. Many poets have some ecological sensitivity and try to act for the preservation of the planet through their art. So, through a few collections of poems by poets from several geographical areas, 3 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/glossaryterms/detail/ecopoetics, accessed May 12, 2017. 4 Qingqi Wei, "Chinese Ecocriticism in the Last Ten Years", in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, 542. 5 Qingqi Wei, 545, quoting Wang Yuechuan's article, "The Contemporary Value of Ecological Literature and Ecological Criticism", Journal of Beijing University (Philosophy and Social Sciences), 46, n°2 (March 2009), 130-142.

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we will also wonder whether the very poetic form may take an ecological dimension.

Forrest Gander and John Kinsella: Redstart. An Ecological Poetics. "Can poetry be ecological?" At the beginning of the collection that the American writer Forrest Gander and the Australian poet John Kinsella6 wrote together, Redstart, subtitled An Ecological Poetics, Forrest Gander asks questions about the relationship between poetry and ecology in an introductory text entitled "The Future of the Past:" What we've perpetrated on our environment has certainly affected a poet's means and material. But can poetry be ecological? Can it display or be invested with values that acknowledge the economy of interrelationship between human and nonhuman realms? Aside from issues or themes of reference, how might syntax, line break, or the shape of the poem on the page express an ecological ethics? If our perceptual experience is mostly palimpsestic or endlessly juxtaposed and fragmented; if events rarely have discreet beginnings or endings but only layers, durations and transitions; if natural processes are already altered by and responsive to human observation, how does poetry register the complex interdependency that draws us into a dialogue with the world? (Gander in Gander and Kinsella, 1-2)

Any poem can lead the reader to be aware of the very notion of "interdependency." Poetic patterns, rhymes, and echoes show us the dialogue existing between apparently remote elements. There is apparently no relationship between the cross as a geometrical sign, as a Christian symbol or as an instrument of torture and a sea bird. Yet in Coleridge's ballad "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," in the lines "Instead of the cross, the Albatross / About my neck was hung," the internal rhyme and the comparison between the cross and the Albatross draw the connection between the bird's killing and Christ's sacrifice. Words and the music of words teach the reader how to perceive connections. This is what poets and generally writers revealing the road to the beauty of the world suggest. When Forrest Gander questions himself about the ecological ethics that might be expressed through the poetic form—"how might syntax, line break, or the shape of the poem on the page 6

Forrest Gander published many books of poetry, among which Core Samples from the World and Science and Steepflower. John Kinsella published more than thirty books, and he was awarded many prizes. Among his books of poetry, we can mention Night Parrots (1989), Full Fathom Five (1993), The Silo: a Pastoral Symphony (1995) and The Undertow (1996).

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express an ecological ethics?"—the very poetic systems answer him. Let us take a few examples in the very collection in which he asks this question, Redstart. In John Kinsella's poem "Codex for a Protest," dedicated to Forrest Gander, we can already pause on the title, which establishes connections from the start. The very word "codex" is polysemic as it refers to its Latin etymology, a "tablet meant to write,"7 and it is also a term linked with healing since, in France particularly, it designates the pharmaceutic book containing the list of medicines. In the title of the poem, the musical echo of the assonance in [e] through the false rhyme "Codex"/"Protest" establishes a connection between an original form of writing and a healing book on the one hand and the notion of fight on the other hand. Music suggests that protest has a healing function in writing. Only one sound establishes that triple connection. Through a long poem—seventeen pages—starting with a quotation from Benjamin Jonson, 8 between quotation marks—"It's not growing like a tree"—the poem develops to show connections. The 21stcentury Australian poet leads people to "environmental literacy," teaches them to see links, by starting with a literary connection thanks to a line by a 16thcentury English poet. "It's not growing like a tree" is a line by Ben Jonson. There was no environmental dimension in the natural references used by Ben Jonson but he used nature to show human connections. By starting with that line, Kinsella draws a link between the past and the present, he inscribes his own poem in Anglophone classical poetry and chiefly, he re-appropriates Jonson's line by using it as in the surrealist game of "cadavres exquis,"9 to build up his own poem: "It's not growing like a tree" But like a tree it perishes entirely: Its grey core wheedled by ants and elision, The distance from here to there constrained by vision: A nesting box falls, Yellow parrot palls. Lines and remembrances have their say 7

http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/codex, accessed May 16, 2017. Benjamin Jonson, or Ben Jonson (1572-1637) wrote many theatrical plays, comedies, among which Volpone (1606) and The Alchemist (1610), tragedies and masks and also collections of poems, among which The Forest (1610 and Underwood (published posthumously in 1640). 9 This is a game that surrealist artists played to create poems. The literal translation is "exquisite corpses." It consisted of starting a sentence or simply giving a word that the following player/poet was going to complete and so on until a surrealist text was created. 8

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Chapter Three All unfastens from surface as they stray. It's truly the time of the golden whistler, It dominates light-time, detail's arbiter. (Kinsella, in Gander and Kinsella, 19)

The whole poem is built technically with a "strophe," an "antistrophe" and an "epode," but it also occupies the space of the page visually by letting blank spaces that might appear as that space of "elision" evoked in the initial "strophe" in which the reader might see invisible images, like a tree reconstructed by the graphical writing of the poem. The initial stanza gives the key to the poetic system of connections leading the reader to other connections. Readers can question themselves about the opening "It," this small neutral pronoun coming from Ben Jonson's poem, from Ben Jonson's century and evoking life. Kinsella's use of the chiasmatic structure seems to take the relay and opposes the positive notion of growing to the idea of death ("But like a tree it perishes entirely"). Yet this is just to lead readers to another gliding as the "it" standing for life compared to a tree becomes the tree itself since the third line allows the tree to shift from the statute of symbol to that of reality. Ben Jonson's line has only been an opportunity to lead readers to see the real tree evoked by Kinsella. The poetic connection leads us to the connection between poetry and nature, and illustrates the "environmental literacy" evoked by Gander: Just now the United States and China are locked in a tug of war to determine which country can spew more carbon. For both, natural resources are snorted up for immediate highs. Perhaps these facts place particular responsibilities on the poets of both countries. Maybe the development of environmental literacy, by which I mean a capacity for reading connections between the environment and its inhabitants, can be promoted by poetic literacy; maybe poetic literacy will be deepened through environmental literacy. (Gander, 3)

Forrest Gander establishes the link between world politics as far as pollution is concerned and the poets' role and responsibility. He uses a very significant word: "literacy." He does not speak about environmental literature but about "environmental literacy," which he defines as "a capacity for reading connections between the environment and its inhabitants." Everything stems from every individual's and every statesman's capacity of seeing connections, of being able to read the writing of the Earth, the language of animals, plants and trees and to see in those nonhuman forms of writing and language, the sense of connection that can lead man to wonder and to awareness. By associating environmental literacy and poetic literacy, Forrest Gander suggests how the capacity of reading connections in a poetic text can help us to see connections in the natural texture, which is illustrated by Kinsella's poem in which the associations of words and of sonorities show significant links. The

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association of "ants" and "elision" connects the real natural world of insects and the abstraction of the word "elision," which is associated with the word "vision" through the rhyme. The musical echo suggests a visionary necessity. The tree is important not only as a visible growing tree representing physical life but also through its holes, its empty spaces created by the ants and allowing us to see beyond those ellipses. The hollow world created by the infinitely small and multiple animals, ants, becomes a space of vision. The ants—or other insects—creating their home in the tree speak about connections. They need the tree to live; the tree is their habitat and the reader of the poem is supposed to see the link between the ants and the tree, the poem and the ants, the elision of shapes and vision, the poetic trees—Ben Jonson's and John Kinsella's—and real trees. The poem teaches us "environmental literacy" by teaching us how to see in the holes of the tree as in the blanks of the page. The following lines—"A nesting box falls,/Yellow parrot palls"—, have the rhythm of a nursery rhyme yet paradoxically introduce a negative element in the fall of the "nesting box," a bird's home, followed by the reference to a bird normally associated with words, the parrot, whose colour, "yellow," suggests life and light, and whose presence ends yet on the monosyllable "palls." The semantic meaning of the word suggests that the bird "loses its charm" but the rhyme "falls"/"palls" and the homonymy of the verb with the noun suggesting an object associated with death, once again suggest a system of connections: the poet leads the reader to see death in life and the threat against all the creatures whose life depends on the tree's life. If it falls, the bird's nest is destroyed, the birds are destroyed, life is replaced by death. The ants appearing at the beginning suggest that the tree has fallen as the ants' habitat is under the ground. So, if they are present around the tree it is because the tree is on the ground and no longer growing in it. This is what its "grey core" suggests. The antistrophe develops with a natural world teeming with small animals: "ants" again, "wolf spiders"—spiders whose venom is dangerous for insects—and "lizards." Starting with this very structured strophe teaching readers to learn how to read the language of the tree and of the ants, Kinsella leads us to be aware of all the connections, seen or unseen, in nature: "environmental literacy" as Forrest Gander said. The poem develops between the beauty of nature and "exsanguinate soil" (21). The "socially monstrous / Epiphany" reveals a war between natural beauty and man's destruction: "growth makes splendid the air / We share with refineries, / Eponymous adversaries" (20). The rhyme that makes "refineries" man's "adversaries" poetically as in reality, reveals a distorted epiphany that, instead of revealing transcendence, reveals destruction. Presenting the world in terms of vision ("the seen and the unseen,"

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"emerald vision," "see"), the visionary ecological poet puts face to face the sparse flowers and "nuclear weapon[s]:" […] as sparse flowers floated through emerald vision: see triggers within hulls, facemask exactitude of a nuclear weapon: latched onto memory, Irish migrants on the Thames mixed with the tide, those patterns of English teachers setting out after husband and father dead on the tracks— you know that photo of Dharma Ginsberg on the tracks, plutonium triggers en route? (Kinsella, 20-21)

This part of the epode starts "on a foggy morning on a bridge / Between two countries between two religions" and ends on: so much travelling, so much migration.

The migration cut into two parts with that half word "mi-" meaning "half" when isolated, occupying a whole line, draws the reader's attention. The division of the word into two parts figures the division of the similar migrant into two halves, divided as he/she is "between two countries between two religions." Between "floating flowers" and "plutonium," the poet introduces a question again evoking roads and movements: "you know that photo of Dharma Ginsberg on the tracks / plutonium triggers en route?" The reference to the poet of the Beat Generation who was introduced to Buddhism by Gary Snyder links poets' peaceful fights through the road. The construction of the poem parallels "on the tracks" and "en route" in French and the shortened way of evoking Ginsberg's poetic fight: "plutonium triggers en route." Multiple poetic allusions show the itinerary of the poetic journey. A few words about plutonium are necessary to understand the poem. "Plutonium" is a radioactive and toxic metal that is used in nuclear plants and also in nuclear weapons. The production of plutonium was an important part of the Manhattan Project during World War II, a project that developed the first atomic bombs. The first bomb used in a nuclear test in July 1945 had a plutonium core, like the one used in the bombing of Nagasaki. The poem develops through associations: a photo of Ginsberg leads Kinsella to the poet as a Buddhist—his biography by Michael Schumacher was entitled Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allan Ginsberg. Ginsberg was travelling, "on the tracks." This leads to the mention of plutonium which, associated with the previous mention of "a nuclear weapon" a few lines above, sounds like some criticism of nuclear weapons. Added to the association with Ginsberg, it is a

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reference to the "Plutonian Ode" written by Ginsberg in 1978 to denounce nuclear weapons and the arms race. It is after reading a book by the Gnosticist and ecologist philosopher and historian Hans Jonas, that Ginsberg wrote this poem, where the detonation is poetic: "At last inquisitive Whitman a modern epic, detonative, / Scientific theme:" What new element before us unborn in nature? Is there a new thing under the Sun? At last inquisitive Whitman a modern epic, detonative, Scientific theme First penned unmindful by Doctor Seaborg with poisonous hand, named for Death’s planet through the sea beyond Uranus. 10

A chain of poets travels back to a bombless planet, from Kinsella back to Ginsberg back to Whitman. Ginsberg's oral voice reading the poem with all the strength of extreme rage against the bombs heard as a sonorous background is a thrilling experience that has probably the weight of thousands of protesters. After rage, he addresses the ode to all those who will relay him and the sonorous background becomes a birds' song, heard after Ginsberg's voice is no longer heard. This ode to you O Poets and Orators to come, you father Whitman as I join your side, you Congress and American people, you present meditators, spiritual friends & teachers, you O Master of the Diamond Arts, Take this wheel of syllables in hand, these vowels and consonants to breath’s end take this inhalation of black poison to your heart, breathe out this blessing from your breast on our creation forests cities oceans deserts rocky flats and mountains in the Ten Directions pacify with this exhalation […]. (ibid.)

And it ends on the poet's sigh: […] Destroy this mountain of Plutonium with ordinary mind and body speech, thus empower this Mind-guard spirit gone out, gone out, gone gone beyond me, Wake space, so Ah! (ibid.)

beyond,

10 Allen Ginsberg, "Plutonian Ode", https://coto2.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/alan-ginsbergs-plutonium-ode/, accessed July 19, 2017. Allen Ginsberg reads his poem while a film showing atomic explosions is projected.

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The bird's song follows the explosions of bombs that devastated Nagasaki. The poem destroys the bombs in the time of the poet's saying it while asking all people to act and prevent plutonium from destroying the world again. When Kinsella says that "Plutonium triggers en route," it is a way of sending the reader to Ginsberg's ode, itself sending us to Whitman and at the same time sending all poets and poetry readers, and all statesmen on the road, with Kerouac and the Beat Generation, to refuse the violence of plutonium used by men to destroy the life and beauty of the planet. The hidden reference to Ginsberg's "Plutonian Ode" is for Kinsella a way of demonstrating that poetry is ecological. The writing of a poem that sends readers to another poem with clear ecological intentions is part of ecological poetry. It is a way of sending all readers "on the road" to silence bombs and let birds sing. Other poets will use a darker poetic tone as if to imitate the dislocation engendered by a nuclear disaster. This is the case of Mario Petrucci who wrote lots of poems after Chernobyl's disaster.

Mario Petrucci's Heavy Water: a Poem for Chernobyl. When Poetry Denounces Ecological Destruction. "Even the robots refuse" Mario Petrucci11 wrote poems on Chernobyl's disaster in a collection, the title of which is Heavy Water, which is defined thus in the preliminary notes: "a form of H2O based in deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen. Has a crucial role as moderator and coolant in some types of nuclear reactors" (Petrucci, 6). Giving a collection of poems, subtitled "a poem for Chernobyl," the name of a chemical element, immediately reveals the choice of a telescoping, a clash between this chemical element and the notion of poetry. To choose it as a title also suggests seeing polysemy in the phrase and leading readers to question themselves about that "heavy water," about the Chernobyl disaster and about nuclear power at large. Heavy water is used in nuclear reactors, so it participates in the functioning of that type of energy that is responsible for so many deaths and diseases in the Chernobyl area. 12 The estimates of the 11

The poet is thus presented in the paratext of the collection (fourth cover): "Mario Petrucci is a freelance writer, a physicist and resident poet at the Imperial War Museum. His debut collection Shrapnel and Sheets (Headland) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation." In 2016 he was the winner of Pen Translates Award for his translation of the poet and 1975 Nobel Prize of literature, Eugenio Montale's Xenia. 12 As in Three Mile Island in the United States (March 28, 1979) before and in Fukushima in Japan later on (March 11, 2011).

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number of victims vary from around fifty—which corroborates the repeated metaphor of silence in Petrucci's poems—to 985 000.13 The area is contaminated for a very long time as decontamination after a nuclear accident is very slow. An article in Futura-Science states that "Twenty-five years after the catastrophe, the cesium 137 and the strontium 90 (the half-lives of which are close to thirty years) go on migrating vertically into the ground (from 1 to

After the accident of Three Miles Island, some epidemiology reports concluded that "the accident had no observable long term health effects" (Ahmed M. Elmallah, "The Facts behind Three Mile Island Accident," November 2014, http://www.academia.edu/34037403/The_Facts_behind_Three_Mile_Island_Accid ent, accessed May 23, 2018). Yet "Disease rates in areas further than 10 miles from the plant were never examined" (Joseph Mangano, "Three Mile Island: Health Study Meltdown", Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Metapress, September– October 2004, 60 (5): 30–35). Other studies concluded on the damage caused on wildlife and animals in general in the area. Thus Harvey Wasserman, an American journalist, writer, democracy activist and advocate for renewable energy said that the accident caused "a plague of death and disease among the area's wild animals and farm livestock," including a sharp fall in the reproductive rate of the region's horses and cows, reflected in statistics from Pennsylvania's Department of Agriculture," even if the Department denies a link with the accident (ibid. and Harvey Wasserman, "People Died at Three Mile Island", CounterPunch, March 24, 2009). The epidemiologist Steven Wing (1952-2016) published an article, in which he "found a significant increase in cancers from 1979-1985 among people who lived within ten miles of Three Mile Island. He stated that "radiation releases during the accident were probably "thousands of times greater" than the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's estimates" (S. Richardson D. Wing and al., "A revaluation of cancer incidence near the Three Mile Island nuclear plant: the collision of evidence and assumptions", Environ Health Perspect, January 1997, 105(1). 105 (1): 52–7. At Fukushima, the explosions are said to have made no direct victims. 17 people died but it was because of the tsunami. Yet the authorities recognize that today the province of Fukushima counts more victims killed by radioactivity (1656) than by the tsunami (1607). Moreover 434 people died because of radioactivity in the neighbouring province of Iwate and 879 in the other neighbouring province of Migayi. (Loïc Chauveau, " Fukushima 4 ans après : quel bilan de la catastrophe ?", Sciences et avenir, March 2015, https://www.sciencesetavenir.fr/natureenvironnement/4-ans-plus-tard-quel-bilan-a-fukushima_15666; and Loïc Chauveau, "Accident nucléaire: les leçons japonaises", Sciences et avenir, February 2016, accessed August 3rd, 2017). 13 This figure is given by Pr. Karl Grossman, Global Research, March 13, 2013 and Op-Ed News and Global Research, 4 September 2010.

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2 inches a year)."14 Alexei Yablokov (1933-2017), a great biologist who spent his life warning people about the nuclear dangers,15 said that "Chernobyl irradiation has caused structural anomalies and tumorlike changes in many plant species."16 This is what Petrucci's poem shows us: a dislocated world dominated by the colour black and the poems seem to reproduce the dislocation of the land. Heavy Water is that distorted water threatening all life in the area. But it is also a "moderator and coolant," so it is supposed to limit the damage. And it can also be taken literally without any chemical meaning and designate water, whose heavy quality may have several meanings. It may be heavy because it weighs on a land and people's fate, heavy because it is heavy with threat and also heavy with significance. Heavy Water is a chemical element but it is also "a poem" since, even if it is constituted with forty-five poems and an envoy, the whole collection is called "a poem" (emphasis mine), as if the homage— "for Chernobyl"—unified all the poems to make them a great one, a chain. And it is not by chance if the first of these poems is entitled "Chain of Decay." A chain it is, a chain of chemical elements bringing about a chain of actions in the reactor, bringing about a chain of events, leading to a chain of deaths. Heavy Water is one of the most violent and strongest forms of ecological poetry as it uses the very material that destroyed hundreds of lives to build up 14 http://www.futura-sciences.com/sciences/dossiers/physique-tchernobylconsequences-catastrophe-251/page/6/, (translation mine). Accessed August 4, 2017. 15 Alexei V. Yablokov wrote lots of articles showing how radioactivity "alters the living tissue of the earth" (http://www.nuclear-free-future.com/en/laureates/ laureates/alexei-yablokov/, accessed August 4, 2017). Alexei Yablokov received, together with Fran Macy, the Nuclear-Free Future Award in the category "Lifetime Achievement" in 2002 and as early as 1950, when environmental problems were not the main preoccupations in the world yet, when he was only 17 years old, he founded a youth organization for the protection of the environment. He was also a member of the Russian Academy of Science. In his obituary, he is called "Russia's green soul" and "a modern Don Quixote." Until the end of his life he worked to make the world know the truth and warn them." His book Chernobyl: The Consequences of the Disaster for Humanity and Nature was published in 2016, a few months before his death. In the homage paid to him, the author says: "With the very last of his energy and time, he dedicated himself to uncovering and releasing information suppressed by the military and civilian nuclear energy industry" ("Russia's Green Soul", http://www.nuclear-free-future.com/en/home/news/279alexey-yablokov-died/, accessed August 4, 2017). 16 Alexei V. Yablokov, "Chernobyl's radioactive impact on flora", Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2009 Nov;1181:237-54. doi: 10.1111/j.17496632.2009.04832.x.

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the poems. The dry writing of some poems like the first one, "Chain of Decay," freezes the reader who starts reading a poem and finds himself/herself reading a list of chemical elements and figures: Lead 207 Stable Via beta and gamma radiation Thallium 207—4.77 minutes Alpha radiation and x-rays Bismuth 211—2.1 minutes Beta and gamma radiation. (Petrucci, 9)

The whole poem is a list of data giving names of metals, numbers, temporal data and Greek letters indicating the radiation. It ends on a stanza on the same model as all the others but the meaning changes: Uranium 235 703.8 million years (ibid.)

The composition of the poem is chemical, the "chain of decay" is the cold chain of metals creating the existence of radioactivity and the eradication of life. Except for the dashes between the names of metals and the number on the one hand and the time on the other hand, there is no punctuation, no full stop, as if to suggest that this chain has no end. The last temporal data—"703.8 million years"—refers to the radioactive period and so the duration of the contamination of the land by this uranium. This poetry denouncing the terrible damage done by the nuclear industry on the particular site of Chernobyl on April 26, 1986 draws its ecological quality from its meaning but also from its form. It is nuclear poetry insofar as it uses the elements of nuclear energy to build the poems and also as the place, the plant, the reactor, each element composing it, constitute the nucleus of the great poem that is the collection. "Ukritye," which is the name of the fourth reactor of Chernobyl located at Pripyat in the Ukraine, as is said in a preliminary note, means "shelter." The fact of giving the meaning of the name could seem to appear as a mere piece of information. But it adds an ironical dimension as from the start, the reader knows that the naming of the reactor that killed so many people and destroyed the whole area for a long period, constituted a terrible lie, the notion of shelter being to supposedly reassure the population. The poem starts thus: Even the robots refuse. Down tools. Jerk up their blocked heads, shiver in invisible hail. Helicopters spin feet from disaster, caught in that upward cone of technicide—the ditch elsewhere, spill black running guts. (Petrucci, 17)

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The jerky rhythm of the poem makes it the reflection of the dislocation of the place and people. The alliteration in [r]—"Even the robots refuse"— emphasizes the opening notion of a general refusal and powerlessness. The run-on line—"Jerk up / their blocked heads"—highlights the idea of dislocation through a humanization of robots that "shiver." The second run-online makes the "helicopters" jump to the following stanza to bring readers to the core of the "disaster." No human presence appears first except that the poet uses the word "guts" to speak about the spilling of contaminating "black running guts." If the suffix designating murder, -cide, is used, it is to be applied to technology: "technicide." Before showing the eradication of all life in the area, the poet erases all living presence in his poem. The first human presence appears in the following stanza with the firemen, but it is preceded by a negation: "Not the Firemen," the negation being counterbalanced by the capital letter, like an homage. The terrible poem reveals an apocalyptic vision: "erect slabs with the wide stare of the innocent." Everything liquefies from the spilling of "black running guts" to "black and purple liquid life" and then to human beings who "liquefy:" "In soiled beds, in the dreams / of their mothers, they liquefy." They have lost all tangible presence and mingle with the liquid of the reactor. But just after this human liquefaction, there is a change, the word "Yet" seems to reverse the pattern by reintroducing nature into that general liquefaction where now the liquid mentioned is "rain:" Yet Spring still chooses This forest, where no deer graze and roots rise upwards. Fissures open in the cement—Rain finds them. They grow: Puff spores of poison. Concrete and lead can take so much. What remains must be done by flesh. (ibid.)

The break induced by the word "Yet" and the introduction of Spring and of the forest into the poem seem to let a possible note of hope resurface. But on the contrary the words generally designating vegetable growing and reproduction—"They grow," "spores"—are distorted to suggest a spilling of poison, the consonance and alliteration in [p] reinforcing the poet's anger and disgust: "Puff spores of poison." The ultimate sentence of the poem, "What remains must be done by flesh," again transforms the return of an element of life, "flesh," into the ultimate destruction. "Concrete and lead can take so / much," and yet, despite their power of absorption of poisoning elements, poison remains and it is that poison that will be absorbed by flesh. Once again, the ambiguity of the sentence, which could mean that what remains must be achieved by flesh, thus by life, which suggests the necessity of action, also shows that flesh is the ultimate receptacle contaminated by the nuclear poison.

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The modal "must" both suggests necessary action and shows an unescapable doom if nothing is done. After that world nearly devoid of any human presence, a world dislocated where the poet ends the poem devoted to the reactor on "flesh" and not on "man," humans appear in the following poems as the tragic victims of the disaster; they appear in the very titles: "Soldier," "Miners," Sleepwalkers," "Grey Men," "Two Neighbours;" they are linked with the narrator's fate: "'My parents kissed—and I was born';" and as the collection progresses, they are identified: "Ivan," "Olya," "Baba Nadya," "Nana." Those titles referring to human presences sound like an attempt at maintaining humanity alive through the text while it is destroyed on the land. The whole collection is coloured by the invading colour black, like "Powder/Stone" (a poem is even entitled "Black"): See how the film they bring back is black—their pictures all black. (28)

The five occurrences of the colour black in the poem show a blackened world in a text starting with the assertion of a power silencing people: "In our country it is not people you see / but the powers that bind them." The poem develops from that assertion which is factual and political. To show that world where everything is black, he uses nature as a metaphor reversing Aldo Leopold's ecological consciousness summed up by the words "Think Like a Mountain" that he used in A Sand County Almanac to show how the disappearance of a species because of man's action—wolves in that case— influences the whole ecosystem: Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the southfacing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn […]. In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers […]. So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf’s job of trimming the herd to fit the change. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea. (Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 139-140, emphasis mine)

While Aldo Leopold said that men damage nature and have the will to get rid of some species, like wolves or bears, because he thinks that they threaten his

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sheep without realizing that each species has its role in nature, Mario Petrucci reverses the idea and uses nature to show how the political power binds the population: "Be silent as a fish" and "Think like a stone," clearly echo Aldo Leopold's words to reverse them. When Leopold meant that man had to listen to the voice of the mountain to think like it, Petrucci uses the same expression to echo the voice of those who represent power and do not understand the sense of their own words, distorting the phrase as they distorted nature, as appears in the last picture of the poem showing a monstrous calf: A black calf With hair to the ground. It was Eating stones. Its black eyes shone.

The distortion of the physical appearance of the animal and of his mental health reflects the distortion of human behaviour and of a political power whose lack of awareness brought the Chernobyl disaster. In "Directive 1 A," the coldness of the title opens on a terrible poem, the stanzas of which describe life, changed into death after the nuclear disaster and are interrupted by short imperative forms in italics like "bury them," or "bury her quick," or "all in plastic and into the ditch" (34-35). The poem starts with an image of recent death speaking about life: Those men still warm from their beds with the smell of their women clinging to them—just like '37 bury them (34)

The strength of the poem comes from its subject but also from the telescoping between the poet's voice showing life fixed in death as after Pompei's disaster, and the power's voice coldly asking to bury everybody to avoid contamination. The description of all those human figures in a general burying changes the softness of life into absolute hardness as everything is mingled in that general burying, since "cabbage", "turnip and carrot" and "a slim flowered dress / and wedding band" are all buried with those men and women. Love, joy and life are buried and the "slim flowered dress" metonymically stands for the young girl who wore it but who no longer exists even in death since only the dress appears in the text. The last stanza is the longest one because it reunites all the nonhuman world, from the sparrow and the magpie to the cat, the hound, "the spider still in its web," fixed in its life like an echo to the men opening the poem, the forest, rivers, mountains, oceans, planets, seasons, "the cosmos the

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race to / the moon." That list of nonhuman nature and organic time, presented without any punctuation sign, is brutally stopped by the last words in italics figuring the voice of power: Make a sarcophágos— Bury them Soon (34)

The poem ends on the burying of the whole of nature, of the whole cosmos because of the nuclear disaster. The small word "soon" ending the poem is double; first it stands for the reality of the power's orders wanting to get rid of all life very quickly, not only to avoid contamination, but chiefly to hide the reality of the disaster. The sarcophagus hides corpses. The fact of giving the word with its Greek ending rather than the English one may sound like a burying of civilization together with the burying of nature. But it may also appear as a warning to the reader who understands that this general destruction can happen "soon" if nothing stops the nuclear threat which, in the case of nuclear plants, is called "civilian nuclear" and which in fact destroys life. The strength of that little book appears as a shout of anger warning people so that this should not happen again or else the whole cosmos will be buried in that sarcophagus built by man's unawareness. Di Brandt, a Canadian poet, also denounces the damage caused by the nuclear and technological progress but she adds a note of hope. The world she shows is not a total wasteland and her quest for living nature leads her readers to a possible escape.

Di Brandt's Now You Care: The "usual quest for a bit of wildness" Di Brandt's17 poetry also denounces the damage of the technological world destroying men and all living creatures. Her anger at the devastation caused by the modern world is perceptible, and she answers this devastation sometimes by irony, sometimes by symbolical paintings. In the poem opening Now You Care, "Zone: ," developing in five movements, she writes at the very beginning of the first movement: Breathing yellow air here, at the heart of the dream 17

Di Brandt is a Canadian poet and scholar who published several collections of poems and has taught Canadian literature and creative writing in several Canadian universities.

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She makes the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, the modern god "worship[ped]" by the modern civilization. With the semantic field of religion and "the 400 & 1 gods / of the Superhighway," she denounces a civilization worshipping technology and roads barring the green land. With those 400 &1 gods, she reminds us of Neil Gaiman's fantastic novel American Gods (2001) where the author stages gods from all religions and cultures in a fight where instead of the highest spheres, the reader is introduced to characters with a familiar language representing the American society having its own modern myths, which is also what Di Brandt suggests in her poem. Despite the choice of opening the collection on a vision of Detroit as a wasteland, of starting it on the verb "Breathing," but "Breathing yellow air," Di Brandt makes her anger a cry of hope and motivation, which the title of the collection suggests. "Now You Care" sounds like an injunction to all readers and to the whole world "to care." The adverb "Now" is opposed to a past made of unawareness and devastation and the small adverb appears as a break in the behaviours. This title is a peaceful weapon: only three words to reverse the tendency. The central "You" places the reader, that is to say everybody, at the centre of this action. Care as action: this is what the title says. And to convince us, she first presents readers with an image of devastation where the American Dream ("At the heart of the dream / of the new world," where all capitals have been removed) is made of "the bones of old horses and dead Indians," men and animals mingled in that general death, and where the fertile land ("lush virgin land, dripping with fruit / and the promise of wheat") is coldly "overlaid with glass and steel." The American Dream is a "dream of speed," the assonance in [i:] letting us hear a sort of ironical and angry grinding. In this "new world," bodies are "crushed" ("these our bodies" places the "our," the first person, each of us, at the centre of the crushing) and the worshipping of false gods as in Gaiman's American Gods or in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby 18

North American Free Trade Agreement.

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with the gigantic boarding showing Dr T. J. Eckleburg's eyes, men and animals are either dust or ghosts: here, where we are scattered like dust or rain in ditches, the ghosts of passenger pigeons clouding the silver towered sky, the future clogged in the arteries of the potholed city. (ibid.)

Like Aldo Leopold, she makes the vanished passenger pigeons the symbols of that general devastation. And the saviour she calls is an Indian chief, Tecumseh,19 whose presence is emphasized by his central position and the italics isolating him from the rest of the poem and from the general wasteland: Tecumseh, come back to us from your green grave, sing us your song of bravery on the lit bridge over the black river, splayed with grief over the loss of its ancient rainbow coloured ILVKVZROOHQMR\ီ ( Di Brandt, ibid., 13)

The poem opposes the poison of the polluted land to the "fisher king" of the Arthurian legend, the medieval character who was to watch over the Holy Grail: Who shall be fisher king over this poisoned country (ibid.)

Brandt's poetry looks for the real heir of a mythical character and the new Grail over which a modern fisher king should watch is simply the Earth. By placing face to face the realistic painting of the wasteland that the American city has become and the Arthurian legend and myths in general, the poet shows readers reality while shaking their consciences to call for a new fisher 19

Tecumseh (1768-1813) was a Shawnee warrior and chief. At the very beginning of the 19th century, he went from nation to nation to try to unite peoples whose languages were different and who had been rivals. He promoted Indian unity and acted to repel the Americans from Indian lands in the Old Northwest Territories."(http://www.encyclopediecanadienne.ca/fr/article/tecumseh-lesauveur-du-haut-canada/ accessed April 16, 2018). His political and military fights to preserve Indian lands explain why the poet chose him as a possible saviour.

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king helping Tecumseh to come back from his "green grave." The destruction of this land is widely due to the car civilization as is shown by the deification of what surrounds the Superhighway and the obsessive repetition of the word "cars" rapidly recurring on the line as in the city reality: blowing the world to bits with cars and cars and trucks and electricity and cars, who will cover our splintered bones with Earth and blood, who will sing us back into––(ibid.)

Cars generate a world crushed into pieces—"blowing the world to bits," "our splintered / bones"—, the dislocation of which is reflected by the run-on-line poetically dislocating the lexical bones. The second part of this polyptych concerns what looks like an evacuation in a nuclear war: Maybe they've been evacuated Maybe there's nuclear war (ibid., section 2, 15)

The number of occurrences of the word "maybe"—nine occurrences placed at the beginning and at the end of this part of the poem—and its place as an anaphora reveal the importance of the notion of doubt, suggesting, like Mario Petrucci's evocation of silence, the fact that things are hidden. Number 401 comes back, as a place name this time—"rush hour on the 401." But doubt is followed by the knowledge of what is happening and another anaphora replaces the notion of doubt: "You know" is repeated as if to address the reader and present him/her with the terrible painting of a world where people are distorted and dismembered. The "strange light in the sky over Detroit" and the darkness "over Windsor" 20 announce the dark picture that follows: You know how people keep disappearing, you know all those babies born with deformities, you know how organ thieves follow tourists on the highway at night on the motel turnoffs, you know they're staging those big accidents to increase the number of organ donors. (Ibid., 15)

20

Windsor is a city in Ontario situated on the bank of the river Detroit. The city of Detroit is on the other bank. London, mentioned before, is also a Canadian city in Ontario.

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The anaphora and the poetic structure of lines are used to depict the crudest reality, the traffic of organs seen through the mere depiction of facts where the road becomes the distorted theatre—"staging"—of murders distorting sciences by changing a scientific progress—organ grafts—into roads made into scenes of crimes for money: $100,000 for twenty bodies but only if the livers are good (ibid.)

"Facts, facts, facts" as Dickens said in Hard Times. Poetry, which is originally a genre singing beauty and love, here depicts real horror and ends on a chase in which the poet says: See that car that's been following us the last hour, See the pink glow of its headlight in the mirror? That's how you know. Maybe we should turn around, maybe we should duck so they can't see us, maybe it's too late, maybe we're already dead, maybe the war is over, maybe we're the only ones alive. (Ibid.)

The pronoun "we" includes the poet but we can wonder, who is part of the same journey? Is that "we" a companion in her real life? Or any readers and companions who are inserted into that journey of horror in order to know and to witness? The anaphora "maybe" makes the poem the space of a dystopia and yet the dystopia ends on the word "alive." For with Di Brandt, it seems that there is always some hope, hope perhaps coming from the poem itself, the poem as a letter sent to the rest of the world, so that everyone might know and act. The call for Tecumseh and for a fisher king in the first panel of the polyptych and the word "alive" ending the second one, show that the poet uses her poetry as a quest for the Grail that is nature and the Earth. This is what she says, very simply, in the third panel of the polyptych: So there I am, sniffing around the railroad tracks on my usual quest for a bit of wilderness, weeds something untinkered with, goldenrod, purple aster, burdocks, defiant against creosote. (ibid., section 3, 16)

The beginning of this third section could sound like a botanist's quest as is confirmed by the list of plants—"goldenrod, purple aster, burdocks"—as it can

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appear in any botanist's report. Yet those plants are what she has first determined as "a bit of wilderness," the word "bit" associated to the wilderness suggesting a shrinking of the natural world. Moreover, the list of plants is immediately followed by the mention of defiance and of a chemical, creosote, a carbonaceous chemical formed by the distillation of tars. The poem gradually becomes a symbolical painting denouncing the damage done by creosote on women's health. Coal-tar and wood-tar creosotes indeed have often been used for the preservation of meat and for medical purposes as well. A scientific report indicates the poisoning effects of creosote and the case of cancers that appeared in the vicinity of a plant that distilled coal tar products and, even if a clear connection could not be established between both things, the contamination of water by wastes from the plant was a real fact. The danger was recognized and wood treated with creosote was banned by the European Union in 2001 for its carcinogenic characteristic. In the USA, an excess incidence of breast and gastrointestinal cancers among women was observed in a community (St. Louis Park, Minneapolis, Minnesota) exposed to low levels of creosote components in municipal water. Apparently, the groundwater reservoirs became contaminated by deposited wastes from a plant that distilled coal tar products and treated wood from 1917 to 1972 (Dusich et al., 1980). However, a reanalysis attributed the difference to the confounding effect of other risk factors for breast cancer […] (Dean et al., 1988). In conclusion, a clear connection could not be demonstrated between breast cancer and coal tar creosote-contaminated water, nor was the increased incidence of gastrointestinal cancer more than slightly significant (ATSDR 2002). 21

The reference to creosote in the poem makes the botanist's "sniffing" shift to "fellow feeling," the lonely walk linking the poet with the suffering of women mutilated because of breast cancers:

21 "Coal Tar Creosote", Concise International Chemical Assessment Document 62, http://www.who.int/ipcs/publications/cicad/en/CICAD62.pdf, accessed August 9, 2017. The references in the quotation are to Dusich K., Sigurdson E., Hall W., Dean A. (1980). "Cancer rates in a community exposed to low levels of creosote components in municipal water." Minnesota Medicine, 63(11):803–806; Dean A., Imrey H., Dusich K. (1988). "Adjusting morbidity ratios in two communities using risk factor prevalence in cases." American Journal of Epidemiology, 127(3):654– 662; ATSDR (2002) Toxicological profile for creosote: Update. Atlanta, GA, US Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, Division of Toxicology, Toxicology Information Branch, 1–312.

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my prairie blood surging in recognition and fellow feeling, and O god, missing my dog, and hey, what do you know, there’s treasure here among these forgotten weeds, so this is where they hang out, all those women’s breasts cut off to keep our lawns green and dandelion free, here they are, dancing their breastly ghost dance. (ibid., 16)

The creosote is the negative connection triggering the reaction of defiance first, then of recognition as she is no longer the lonely woman walking along "the railroad tracks," she is part of a community and it is her "prairie blood" that brings about the "recognition," this "fellow feeling" reuniting the plants she was looking for, the dog she is missing and the women only present as dislocated body parts, those women whose "breasts / cut off" mingle with the Earth, with the dandelion and the grass. By opposing creosote and dandelion, she opposes two conceptions of men's relationship with the Earth. The choice of the dandelion, a flower that can survive everywhere, is significant. The dandelion was "well known to ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, and ha[s] been used in Chinese traditional medicine for over a thousand years."22 It is supposed to have been brought to Northern America on the Mayflower for its medicinal benefits. Dandelions recur three times in this section of the poem; first the structure suggests that they draw their freedom from women's mutilation; then they are distorted in a comparison in which their seeds speak about proliferation, a proliferation that is not only the natural proliferation of the seed but also the proliferation of pollution and of cancers. The last occurrence is more clearly centred on death, which suggests the defeat of nature since, whereas the dandelion is considered as a symbol of survival, even this plant "keeps dying." If this very plant dies, this seems to allow no hope for the Earth. Brandt's poem shows a Nature reshaped with the mutilated parts of suffering women who have been poisoned by the poisoning of the land. They are one with the weeds, with all that is rejected. The green world—"weeds" and "lawns," that is to say wild plants and trimmed grass—frames those women's breasts, body parts detached from women who become spirits connected with the Native American world through an invisible ghost dance they are dancing, their breasts cut off because of cancers probably given by 22

http://www.mofga.org/Default.aspx?tabid=756, accessed August 10, 2017.

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creosote used for pesticide to treat wood and to "keep […] lawns green," being reconstituted in their living function of mothers' life-givers through the adjective "breastly." The initial "usual quest for a bit of wilderness" becomes a questioning about the behaviour to have in front of those breasts telling the story of a pollution destroying women's lives through breast cancers. In front of "their featherwinged purple nipples / oozing sticky milk," the poet wonders whether she must speak or remain silent and blind to that reality: so what am I supposed to do, pretend I haven't seen them or like I don't care about all these missing breasts, how they just vanish from our aching chests and no one says a word (ibid.)

The questioning is an answer, the poem is an answer as she chooses to say the unnameable. The choice of presenting us with, not the mutilated women after the operations, but the breasts that have been cut off, makes the peaceful landscape of the botanist's quest a place of horror filled with "all these missing breasts." At the beginning of the poem, she simply suggested that nature was more and more reduced but there were still natural elements. As the poem develops, the landscape becomes a wasteland where the waste is made of parts of human bodies, of women's bodies which mingle with the ground. This section of the poem ends on the green colour but a green colour distorted by the vision that has just been described: and the dandelions keep dying, and the grass on our lawns gets greener and greener and greener. (ibid.)

The abundance of green emphasizes a fake green whose colour is generated by the creosote and other chemical products, fertilizers and pesticides. The poem describes a new nature where the wilderness represented by the dandelion "keeps dying" while cultivated nature treated with pesticides "gets greener." But the threefold comparative together with the run-on-line allowing the poem to end on the word "greener" appear as a new green colour weighing on true nature and killing it to take its place as it takes its colour. The symbolical painting starting from a botanical quest for wild nature is broken by a vision of dismembered women. The poet starts this section by evoking a quest. A quest normally leads to treasure—"there’s treasure here / among these forgotten weeds"—and this

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treasure seems to be nature at the beginning of the section. But the "treasure" is made of "women's breasts" "among these forgotten weeds." Considering those shattered bodies as "treasure" sounds strange and the discrepancy between the word and the facts obliges the reader to question his/her reading. A treasure being both a gathering of precious things, something hidden to people's sight and all that is characterized by its great beauty and also the great usefulness it can have, women's breasts are all that since they provide children with milk and thus life, stand for motherly love and also symbolize feminine beauty. But they are detached from women's bodies, discarded, forgotten like the weeds among which they lay; they stand for disease and their milk is sticky. They no longer stand for life but for death. Yet the poet uses the word "treasure." She does not say there is "a treasure" but there is "treasure," making this word an abstraction qualifying absolute value. This "treasure" she guesses in what looks like a wasteland close to rail tracks, may be the various vegetable species growing there, the objects of her initial quest, those weeds, considered by most human beings as "evil,"23 and what remains of genuine nature—agronomists and botanists designate them as "spontaneous plants." This treasure may also be the memory of those women's lives and sufferings. And it may be a third thing: the vision of what is hidden behind what sounds like disintegrated bodies, the vision of living women and of this "breastly ghost dance" bringing about the poet's vision of what she must do. Treasure perhaps dwells in her awareness, in her questioning, in her decision not "to pretend [she hasn't] seen them." Treasure perhaps dwells in the power of poetry, her poem allowing her to share that vision with the rest of the world and to make those women alive through an invisible ghost dance borrowed from Native cultures. The cut-off breasts of anonymous women "among the forgotten weeds" are taking a new life and the initial botanist's quest for plants has become a quest for the truth meant to warn the whole world and to change 23

Mauvaises herbes in French; mala hierba in Spanish, both languages adding the notion of evil to the noun designating grass; planta infestanti or malerba in Italian; erva daninha in Portuguese, daninho (a) meaning "harmful; belar txar in Euskara (Basque language), txar meaning "bad." In German, it is unkraut, the prefix undesignating the contrary of grass. In Icelandic, it is illgresi, which means "bad grass." This is a small sample but it shows that in many European languages, the words designating weeds allude to what people consider as the evil quality of the plants. It is less obvious in English at first sight with the word weed and yet, according to the Scottish National Dictionary, it might come from the Old English weden, meaning "mad, delirious." So it also has a negative connotation. On the contrary, Native Americans make no distinction between the various types of plants. In Navajo language, there is no distinction and only one word designates grass: ch'il. In Lakota, the term waptàye designates a plant (see Bruce Ingham, English-Lakota Dictionary, Richmond: Surrey, 2001).

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things so that the landscape should not be "greener and greener" but simply green. Dismemberment recurs in section 5 of the poem when she evokes the tunnel under the Detroit River and speaks about "the mouth of the tunnel / [that] is haunted by bits and fragments / of shattered bone" (18). The semantic field of fragmentation and shattering and the run-on-line cutting the line as bodies have been cut tell the stories of those who built the tunnel. She puts face to face the terrible work of those who gave their lives to build the tunnel under the river and the derisory reason of the building of such a tunnel: "shopping." […] young boys, risking limbs and lives, wordlessly, wrestling primordial mud so that we, mothers and maids, could go shopping across the border and save ourselves twenty minutes coming and going, chatting about this and that, our feet never leaving the car, never mind the mouth of the tunnel is haunted by bits and fragments of shattered bone. (18)

The series of enjambments reflects the natural fluidity of the river and the artificial fluidity of the car traffic; the poet expresses her anger by ironically opposing the "primeval mud" of the material sending us back to times immemorial and showing us a mud that is millions of years old, and the "twenty minutes" saved to chat "about / this and that." Once again, an enjambment ironically and tragically shows the absurdity of a world where the silence of those who gave their lives to build the tunnel—"wordlessly"—is opposed to the meaningless chat of those who simply go shopping. In a section starting with an ironically lyrical line, the lyricism of which is immediately debunked by an anatomical scornful description—"O the brave deeds of men! / M*E*N, that is, they with phalli dangling from their thighs"— , men and women are put face to face as destroyers. Men are those who achieve supposedly "brave deeds" and in fact condemn other men, as they are also those young boys giving their lives for the tunnel. Women are not seen as only positive creatures since they—including the poet herself as it is her crossing of the Detroit River "from down under, I mean," that triggers her reflexion—, are those who give such a construction its absurd reason. Di Brandt's poetry is full of wildflowers, weeds, dandelions, golden rod or purple asters, there is often a dog passing in her lines and the "glorious

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splendour" of trees in autumn, cherry-trees, blackbirds and hawks, but there are also cut-off breasts and "shattered bones," chemotherapies and poison. "The blackbirds are angry" ("Dog Days in Maribor. Anti (electric) ghazals,"24 section 5, 33); "[t]he cherry trees have all been cut" (ibid., section 129); the "glorious splendour" of trees starting section 4 is due to "[t]his red and gold autumn heat" because it's / much too hot for November" ("Zone: ", section 4, 17). Global warming, deforestation, pollution, wild animals' shrinking habitats and food loss, all these appear in Di Brandt's poems. She constantly puts face to face the beauty of wildlife and the new wasteland created by man's activities. She wants to shock readers into awareness and so, she mingles Earth and the human body, either in the reality of women's cut-off breasts "among forgotten weeds" or as a metaphor making the Earth a sick living body: "The Earth is spitting up blood" ("Dog Days in Maribor. Anti (electric) ghazals," section 1, 29). The five sections of this long poem presenting us with all the pollution poisoning Detroit and its surroundings and the tragic events due to men's work, progress from the opening line of section 1 "Breathing yellow air" to the concluding line of section 5 ending with those simple words: "just being there" without any period, as if the passing of the tunnel opened on a possible change: riding our cars under the river and coming out the other side illegal aliens, needing passports, and feeling like we accomplished something, snatched from our busy lives, just being there (18)

Becoming migrants, the poet and her companions—the readers of her poem?—find the possible key to a change in the awareness of their "just being there," in their presence in the world they see as it is, with all its deformities and the healing process appearing in the acceptation of not being blind to the truth, and of the passing of the tunnel and being aware we are part of this world and able to make things change. With Di Brandt as with Mario Petrucci and some other poets, the form of poetry itself is ecological as it draws a part of its strength from the fact that the poem reflects the general dismembering of the Earth that it denounces, that, to answer what Forrest Gander expressed, "syntax, line break, [and] the shape of 24

The ghazal is a poetic form, which has its origin in Arabic poetry. In Persian and Turkish poetry, it is a short lyrical poem (from four to fifteen lines). The poet's name appears on the last line, http://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/ghazal/69224, accessed April 16, 2018).

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the poem on the page express an ecological ethics."25 The poetic form itself is ecopoetic in its reflection of the reality of the Earth and of its way of expressing awareness and a desire for change.

Rhonda Collis's "Sudbury-1972," Marie-Lou Rowley's "In the Tar Sands, Going Down" and more Canadian contemporary poets: "until rivers dwindle to tears"26 In 2009, two Canadian poets, Madhur Anand and Adam Dickinson,27 the former being also a scientist, published a collection of poems by Canadian poets, all centred on environmental questions: Regreen. New Canadian Ecological Poetry. This small book is the example of what poetry can bring to people's awareness, how it can lead the world to restoration. Pamela Banting sums it up: This new anthology, co-edited by a poet and a scientist, takes us beyond environmental awareness into the zones of restoration, reparation and reinhabitation of the land. Poetry changes not just our minds but rewilds us all over again and sends us back outside with fresh, clean attention to our world. You can read this book with your sleeves rolled up, ready to make a difference. (Regreen, 4th cover)

Pamela Banting here shows the weight of poetry and of such a collection. The fact that it is edited by two poets, one of whom is also a scientist, is already a sign letting us understand that nothing must be separated and that poetry can and must use the sciences to feed its inspiration and to sing its argumentation. The double introduction written by the two editors borrows titles from scientific areas. Adam Dickinson's one is entitled "The Astronauts" and Madhur Adam's one is entitled "Gap Dynamics." The world of sciences provides poets with the material they need to restore the Earth inspiring them. The title of the collection, Regreen, sounds like an invitation to act. This imperative form using the colour green as a verb suggesting both change and a return to the normality of a green Earth, is an address to readers. The poems they are going to read are a way, as Pamela Banting puts it, to "[take] us beyond environmental awareness into the zones of restoration, reparation and 25

See above. Gander, 1-2. Madhur Anand and Adam Dickinson. Regreen. New Canadian Ecological Poetry. Sudbury: Your Scrivener Press, 2009, 61-66. 27 Madhur Anand and Adam Dickinson both published collections of poems. Madhur Anand's research in the fields of conservation ecology, forest ecology and ecological modelling won several awards. 26In

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reinhabitation of the land." As for the epigraph, it is an invitation to understand the ambivalence of the world we live in, its beauty and what can destroy that beauty. The lines by Erin Mouré, a Canadian poet and translator of Fernando Pessoa among others, place the collection under the sign of the moon: the moon is the romantic source of light par excellence but it is also a symbol of death; it is linked with organic rhythms and fertility but it is also "infamously associated" with the site of Sudbury, "synonym of environmental destruction" (Dickinson, Regreen, 10). NASA astronauts trained in locations around the city in the early 1970s because of unique geological features. The Apollo 16 astronauts came to simulate moonwalks in lunar shatter cones, which were believed to be similar to the impact crater that formed the Sudbury Basin approximately 1.8 billion years ago. Despite the purely scientific interest in Sudbury geology, it was popularly believed that the astronauts came because the landscape resembled the barren surface of the moon. Indeed, the denuded forests and contaminated soil caused by intensive mining operations made it easy for this myth to take hold. (Dickinson, Evergreen, 10).

Yet efforts were made to restore "the ecological health of [Sudbury's] sensitive and diverse ecosystems" and this is for Dickinson the opportunity to raise questions such as "How do we re-imagine spaces in the act of restoring their diversity?" Or "How is the capacity for re-imagination itself intrinsic to the ecology of such transformative achievements" (ibid). By prolonging Laurence Buell's assertion that "the environmental crisis is also a crisis of imagination" (ibid., from Buell, 2), Dickinson suggests that any landscape restoration is associated with man's capacity for imagining space. Rhonda Collis28 wrote a poem about Sudbury starting from a photograph, "a photo of me standing beside the big nickel" (Collis, Regreen, 61). From the start she links her life to the "big nickel," “the only glinting thing in this place to hold / a ten-year-old’s attention." The child she was, was attracted to the glinting element, like a butterfly about to burn its wings on the candle in which it perceives light but not danger, like the child and all those who saw "the big nickel" as a positive thing. The approach of Sudbury is shown as a progression corresponding to the journey by car with first an impression of "dusk," then "awe / in [her] father's voice" and the inclusion of reported speech in italics, corresponding to the child's father's remark: "It's like the moon, eh?" and then the child's vision of a devastated landscape:

28

Rhonda Collis is a Canadian poet and fiction writer, who has taught creative writing at Camosun College in Victoria and currently serves on the editorial board at Prism Magazine. (https://www.rhondacollis.com, accessed August 31, 2017).

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I always know when Sudbury is coming close. The trees start to disappear. Rock is exposed, clean at first, then singed Black, as if a giant held a lighter to each granite face. (Collis, Regreen, 61)

The landscape seen by the child is doubly metamorphosed by the devastation burning—"singed"—everything, because of the morning activity and the exploitation of nickel from 1750 onwards, and by the child's imagination changing the mine into an imaginary character of children's tales, a giant. The telescoping of the imaginary character and of the modern object—"a lighter"—associated to blackening the rock made human—"granite face"— suggests the past child's perception of a natural landscape metamorphosed by adults' activities. Blurring history, the poet glides onto "the Dionne quint's homestead" and Dr Dafoe, a Canadian obstetrician who delivered the Dionne quintuplets, the first quintuplets who survived. By calling that story "another Canadian point of pride," the poet associates this quintuple birth with the devastating nickel mine, she associates death in the landscape and human birth distorted through the transformation of babies into freaks in a theme park since the babies were shown playing in Quintsland, where objects linked with the quintuplets were sold. "Dr Dafoe there behind the curtains of Quintsland" both appears as a doctor hiding behind a leisure world exploiting everything including babies, and a doctor playing a role in the theatre of Quintsland as the curtains may suggest. The dark vision, made all the darker as it is a child's, reaches its climax with the perfectly balanced line centred in the colour black: Black rocks, black lungs.

The monosyllables, the parallelism between rocks and lungs united by common blackness, equate the landscape and human bodies, darkly connected by a colour representing a common disease. Either the hard rocks or the fragile lungs are equally burnt. The dark vision is reversed in the last stanza by a "But" opening the way to a change: But I blur history and place, smudge the imprint of humans, of nature that has been reclaimed. I want to retrace our steps, turn the station wagon around and head for Wawa where I stood under the belly of that giant goose that gave me such relief. (62)

The poem is built on a double journey in space and time, in which the poet remembers the little girl she was, feeling like travelling back in space as she is travelling back in time. Starting from "a photo beside the big nickel," which is a kind of monument to the modern world of money and earth exploitation, as

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it is a 30-foot replica of the Canadian nickel, standing in the grounds of the Dynamic Earth Science Museum in Sudbury, Ontario, 29 it ends at another monument representing a giant Canada goose in Wawa, "over the junction of the Trans-Canada Highway and Highway 101." 30 It was first made of plaster and then a new monument was made "with steel which was more representative of Wawa and its large iron ore mine" in 1963. Both monuments are linked with a metal exploited there but one represents money and the other one is the animal symbolizing Canada. The poet ends on this reassuring image since for the little girl the goose was simply a giant bird protecting her and opposed to the giant singeing of the rock in the first part of the poem. The poem develops according to a journey back symbolizing the child's awareness, a child who knows nothing about the symbols of the monuments she saw when travelling with her father as a child. By organizing the poem around her child's impressions, the poet offers a clear painting of a dark reality seen through the untouched eyes of a child who can recognize the destructiveness of an imaginary giant on the one hand and the reassuring gigantism of a sculpted animal on the other hand. By reconstructing her impressions as a child, the poet suggests that instinctively the little girl she was saw relief in a return to a past situation, which is here emphasized in a multiple way: return to the past, in that past wish for a return to the place they came from, return to nature through the shifting from the monument representing a giant nickel to the one representing a giant goose. This return also appears in the place names since the poem starts with Sudbury, an Anglo-Saxon name, and ends with Wawa, wa'wa being an Ojibway name meaning "wild goose." 31 The poem ending on the word "relief" suggests the child's clear vision of safety dwelling not in a world dominated by money and metal extracted from the Earth by English Canadians, but in a world dominated by animals named by the First Nations. The wild goose stands for a nature to which the child wanted to return and the poet shows it as it is in reality, by guiding the reader on the road of a trip she made years before. The blurring of history and place that she evokes is an impressionistic way of showing the clear reality of a nature burnt by human exploitation, where the only possible escape is the one suggested by the child that the poet was: "to retrace [one's] steps" and come back to nature to be reassured again by this nature that men have wounded and that they must look at it as a relieving presence. 29

It was built in 1964. http://sciencenorth.ca/dynamic-earth/exhibits/details/index.aspx?id=2976, accessed September 1st, 2017. 30 http://www.wawa.cc/living-in-wawa/about-wawa/our-famous-canada-goose/, accessed September 1st, 2017. 31 http://www.native-languages.org/hiawatha.htm, accessed September 1st, 2017.

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Another kind of exploitation is denounced by Marie-Lou Rowley32 in her poem "In the Tar Sands, Going Down." The poem starts with an address: Hey luscious baby By-product of the infernal machine. (Rowley, Regreen, 63)

The initial "infernal machine" opens on a world of pipelines crossing the continents, a world where dreams are a mark of vanilla dessert, "Dream Whip." The poet glides from this "Dream Whip" to another kind of dream, "dream rivers of oil" (63). "Brazil-waxed forests" and "radiation-seared flesh" (ibid.) unite the wounds against the land and those against people. The Earth is raped—"bitumen bite in the / neck arms thighs of Earth" (64)—and the poem alternates the poet’s words of anger and italics conveying the authorities: Identify and seize Invest and develop Reward and satisfy Strip and reclaim. (64)

The perfect binary rhythm, the economic language—"invest and develop", the notion of "stripping" the land—, the isolation of the stanza in italics may remind the reader of Orwell’s "Newspeak" in 1984, a language emptying the normal one of its meaning and existence. In this devastation, the Earth is a body raped and nature and the human body are one in the general destruction. To this economic imperative, the poet answers with an imperative conveying anger: Drink from the lakes of our bodies Until shorelines recede, Tumours become visible. (ibid.)

The Canadian landscape and people’s bodies are one as the lakes enter bodies, as they are the bodies. The lakes are in the bodies and the tumours are in the landscape. There is no distinction between the landscape and the bodies, no distinction between the wounds made to the landscape and human diseases. The exploitation of tar sands brings about a descent into hell making the exploitation underground another kind of descent: until rivers dwindle to tears until wells gush blood 32

Marie-Lou Rowley is a poet and science writer who has published nine collections of poems.

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until bankers weep sweat until hell freezes over until raw and singed as the forestless birds as the fishless rivers as the speechless politicians as the songless barren face of the Earth we go down we go down. (ibid.)

The anaphora "until" appears as a sign of hope while the final repetition of the downward movement emphasizes the descent into hell, a hell where absence is what prevails as the four words ending with less suggest. Tar sands leave a silent earth, as denounced by Rachel Carson.33 Those poets warn us against all the damage made on the Earth. Other poets will express their ecological thought through their wonder at nature and its living beauty.

Alison Calder and Jeanette Lynes: From Ghost Works: Improvisations in Letters and Poems: "ghosted birds."34 When Poetry Shows Life Using two genres in connection, Alison Calder35 and Jeanette Lynes36 start from the letter as a genre of the intimate to open the prose text relating personal impressions to a poem telling the same impressions in a poetic form. The two groups of letters/poems chosen by the two poets both evoke prints: prints of a leaf and of a bird. The letter, being the track of impressions tells of the meeting between the eyes and an ephemeral shape. The observation opens on a philosophical reflexion about prints. Each poem is deconstructed, like a living animal changed into its disseminated prints:

33 About the exploitation of tar sands in Canada, see Oriana Palusci, Green Canada, Brussels: Peter Lang, 2016. 34In Madhur Anand and Adam Dickinson. Regreen. New Canadian Ecological Poetry. Sudbury: Your Scrivener Press, 2009, 120-124. 35 Alison Calder is a Canadian poet, who teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Manitoba. Her book Wolf Tree won the 2008 Aqua Books Landsowne Prize for Poetry and the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book by a Manitoba Author at the 2008 Manitoba Book Awards. 36 Jeanette Lynes is a poet who published six collections of poems, and she is a professor at the University of Saskatchewan.

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The elliptic line opening Alison Calder’s poem, progressing in a staccato rhythm opening onto a series of questions, two of which are made of one word, seems to reproduce a mental questioning triggered by the "vanished print." Vanishing generates the writing of nature memory reconstituting life through poetry. The question suggesting that the print itself might be poetry, takes a philosophical dimension. The hectic music of the line suggests that the print is a filter allowing past time to emerge in the present. The association between the writing of nature through a print, a fossil and poetry, is still more precise in the last line: Go, dusty bird (writer?). Print. Write. Record. Literally. (Ibid., 122)

In this line composed of a series of short verbs in the imperative mood, the reader finds the memory of nature. This "dusty bird" is associated with the writer through a question in parentheses. It is the "dusty bird" that takes life through the act of writing its life on the Earth. Progressing from the act of printing, of marking a presence on the ground, to the act of writing and then recording, the line makes the print a sign of memory, whose literality actively speaks about a life coming from the past and inscribed in the present. By ending the poem on the adverb "literally," Alison Calder changes the dust of the past into letters, the print inscribed in the soil and the letters of the poem reflecting the print on the page. The hectic rhythm of the poem suggests the breathless activity of the mind trying to make the link between a small print on the soil and life at large, between the past of the nonhuman vanished creature in a remote past and the human poet in the present. Two writings telescope and meet: poetry, before being the text we are reading, is the print of the "ghost bird." The "perfect bird imprint" that she saw one day on a window and that she describes lengthily in a letter to her friend, becomes a fossilized print metatextually speaking about writing. Her friend’s answer takes up the poetic words to go on with the reflection in a letter: Imprints. Ghosted birds. Filters. These images you write of are compelling, sad, and speak to the strange paradoxes of urban space. What drives our desire to record the already vanished? Remember that leaf outline, including veins, imprinted in the newly-laid concrete outside my apartment building in Saskatoon, the one I was telling you about? The bird imprint you write of resonates with that. (Jeannette Lynes, "Letter to Alison Calder," Regreen, 123)

Their writing, uniting epistolary communication and poetry, reunites the leaf imprint on concrete and the bird’s print on a window, thus showing the virtual

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inscription of nature on the urban space. Her own poem occupies the space of the page in a deconstruction that is in fact a reshaping of the leaf imprint: leaf leaf leaf leaf leaf memory leaf AC

In her letter, Jeanette Lynes says that she "wanted to record the leaf skeleton" (123) and she adds: "Now I must rely on memory, on resemblance: a leaf that looks like a mouth" (123). And after that humanization of the nonhuman imprint, there is the poem, a visual poem that seems to reproduce the shape of the leaf by using exclusively its name. "Leaf" as a word, as the poem, as the imprint, as memory, and two letters below, the initials of Alison Calder, in an ambiguous inclusion. Are those two letters a signature of the poem written by Alison Calder? Or are they the inclusion of her friend’s imprint in Jeanette Lynes’ poem? The two friends and poets play with words, play with letters, the letters they write to each other and the letters that build words. These Ghost Works: Improvisations in Letters and Poems reconstitute the memory of nature through its prints on the urban space and in their minds, thus reconstituting nature poetically like a leaf shape on the paper page. The least natural element becomes a subject of wonder for the poet and the smallest nonhuman element may show her the whole cosmos.

Loren Eiseley's All the Night Wings: A spider leading to the stars Like John Kinsella, Loren Eiseley gave a great role to small animals like ants and other insects. It is as if the awareness of the weight of a tiny creature was one of the most important steps in the ecological conscience insofar as it reveals the connection between the human and the smallest nonhuman. The observation of a caterpillar made Kev Reynolds aware of the miracle of nature, while he was walking in the green meadows of Kent:

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Chapter Three It was then that I saw a caterpillar—no more than a centimetre in length— apparently hanging in the air, suspended by a microscopically thin line of gossamer—so thin, it was invisible to the eye. […] So there it was, the creamy-white caterpillar suspended by an invisible life-line, gently swaying in the baby’s breath of air that drifted across the meadow. […] And there it settled on a single blade, rested for a moment or two, then, moving its tiny head, detached itself from the gossamer and moved slowly down the grass to its stem. […] By the time I looked down again, the caterpillar had vanished in the grass, leaving me to speculate when I might see it again in the guise of a beautiful butterfly drifting across that same meadow, gathering nectar from one flowerhead after another. You see, I’d just witnessed a miracle. 37

From the observation of the nearly invisible thread with a caterpillar in suspension to the vanishing of the caterpillar and the imagined butterfly it will become, Kev Reynolds guides us on a path of invisibility revealing absolute beauty. By using the word "miracle" when simply observing the beauty of nature, Kev Reynolds shows that it is the admiration of nature that must lead us to give as much importance to the ephemeral caterpillar as to the fivehundred-year-old oak. And nobody observes nature better than a naturalist and poet. Loren Eiseley wrote poetry with his experience as a scientific observer. A naturalist, Professor of Anthropology and the History of Science, he published numerous books, like The Immense Journey (1957), Darwin's Century (1958), The Firmament of Time (1960), The Man who Saw Through Time (1973), The Star Thrower (1978) and several collections of poems, Notes of an Alchemist (1972), The Innocent Assassins (1973), Another Kind of Autumn (1977) and the collection we are going to evoke, All the Night Wings (1979). Eiseley's deep knowledge of the natural world gives his poetry a great weight. Paradoxically in a collection entitled All the Night Wings, the book starts with a poem devoted to wingless insects; it is simply entitled "Spiders." Built in four stanzas, each of them starting with a characteristic of the spider, it appears as a metaphysical text about time, life and death. Spiders Are poisonous, hairy, secretive. Spiders are old— They watch from dark corners while wills are made (All the Night Wings, 3). 37

Kev Reynolds, "Making the Connection," in Caliban n°59, Travel and Mountain Writing: Meetings between the Human and Non-Human Irina Kantarbaeva-Bill ed., Toulouse: PUM, 2018.

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Those real and poetic spiders are presented from the start as dark and gothic characters since the second stanza begins with these lines: "Spiders are antiquarians— / fond of living among ghosts and haunted ruins" (3). They become vampires living in graveyards in stanza 3: "Spiders are ghouls—." The reality of their life changed into gothic images finally gives way to a metaphorical spider associated with time. The spider is no longer the active subject but a predicate: "Time is a spider / The world is a fly" (4). The observation of the small insect creates images of death that gradually lead the poet to a metaphysical perception of spiders evoking the world taken in the trap of time. Thus, his reflexion leads him from the dark corners initiating the poem, to cosmic space and "[t]he stars weav[ing] over [the world]." Ending on the notion of forgetfulness—"It hangs / Forgotten," he says speaking about the world "caught in the invisible, stranded web of space"—, the poem seems more metaphysical than ecological. Yet there is an ecological dimension in the sense of connection existing between the humblest insect, the insect associated with death, poison and ugliness, and the beauty of the stars in the sky. A similar connection between Earth and sky appears in "Tasker's Farm" where the "brown leaf" and "blackened fruit," that is to say once again natural elements suggesting death or disease, are associated with "the polar star." The blowing of the wet brown leaf Along forsaken eaves, The dropping of the blackened fruit, The polar star that weaves Its cold blue circle near now Above the empty field, Betray the ruin, not the peace Upon them, that has healed The quarrel grown too deep for words. (11)

The animal presence is essential in Eiseley's poems and animals pervade his poetry: spiders, worms ("Warning to Lovers," 9), a caterpillar and a "gaudy bug" ("The Poet Surveys His Garden,"10), a cricket, a glow-worm and a "busy mouse" ("Sonnet for Age," 15), a crow, birds and rabbits ("Toward Winter," 17), mice ("For a Lost Home," 19), crickets ("Nocturne for Crickets and Men," 20) and many others. The animals mentioned are most often humble animals, very often insects, which may remind us of some Native American Creation

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myths, where it is the humblest animal that can bring the mud necessary for the Creation. 38 A chain of awareness seems to be drawn by poets and where Loren Eiseley shows the huge weight of the tiniest insect, Ann McCrary Sullivan makes her poetry a celebration of the beauty of the natural world, linking that beauty to "Ecology," which is the title of her collection.

Ann McCrary Sullivan's Ecology II: Throat Songs from the Everglades: walking to discover the beauty of life39 Ann McCrary Sullivan's collection of poems is a celebration of the beauty of nature. Entitling her collections "Ecology" as a first title, she clearly shows the adequation she perceived between the beauty of nature and its preservation. The awareness of beauty felt during simple walks makes people aware of the necessity of preserving that natural beauty. As environmentalists see the destruction of nature in its silence (Rachel Carson's Silent Spring), Ann McCrary Sullivan sees nature's life in the absence of silence as she writes in the poem "Impossible:" I have walked two miles into human silence Which is not silent—pig frogs make their low groan And insects buzz, whirr, vibrate, click. (Sullivan, 25)

It is the movement of walking that allows her to penetrate a "silence / Which is not silent" and sings the song of life, a life represented by the numerous sounds produced by animals. The world depicted and celebrated by the poet and naturalist is a world filled with natural music standing for life, a world filled with many nonhuman creatures filling the air with the sounds of their lives. Walking is the best way of feeling nature through all one’s senses, thanks first to the physical contact with the soil. Thoreau, in his essay Walking, 38 The link betweeen the animal world and original waters is pepetuated by oral tradition and every people has a myth close to the others and yet different where it is animals who provide man with the clay that is going to allow him to live. In all cases, a spirit successively asks animals to dive and bring back mud. "These animals are called 'earthdivers' and are sometimes small and unassuming heroes. For example, in the Cherokee account the earthdiver is a water-beetle, while the Chickasaw say it is a crawfish and the Cheyenne a coot" (Zimmermann 118). 39 Ann McCrary Sullivan is a naturalist and poet. A Florida Master Naturalist, she "has been Poet in Residence in Everglades National Park and in Big Cypress National Preserve" (Ecology II: Throat Songs from the Everglades, 4th cover).

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explains the deep relationship established between the walker and nature. He explains "the art of walking" by reminding his readers of the etymology of the word "saunterer:" I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks—who had a genius, so to speak, for SAUNTERING, which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. […] Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. […] the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels. (Thoreau 1980, 93-94)

The walker is both a "Holy-Lander" and a homeless man. Looking for a Holy Land, the crusader or homeless nomad, the walking man is in close contact with the soil. Thoreau speaks about a crusade. He re-appropriates the semantic field of war and religion to invent a peace crusade in search of a sacred element, nature destroyed by Infidels who rob and hurt it. They are the Infidel to the Earth carrying them. Walking is a way of feeling the beauty of the Earth and of all the elements composing it, from the tiniest flower to the powerful sun. Thoreau reveals the awakening function of the act of walking, which will be shown later on by the naturalist and writer Théodore Monod, making his walks in the desert poetic and philosophical reflections about man's connection with nature: So we saunter toward the Holy Land till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on the bankside in autumn. (Thoreau 1980, 136)

This awakening light is also felt by Linda Hogan, in a chapter from her book Dwellings, entitled "Walking," where she evokes her meeting with a sunflower and the metamorphoses of the flower observed in her walks. She discovers the different stages of the flower's life and also the ecosystem it represents with all the insects around it. When the petals are fading and she discovers a dead horse on the road, this observation of nature is for her a way of discovering the cycle of life and death and of learning the language of nature, "the sunflower's golden language or the tongues of its citizens [the

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insects]" (Hogan 1995, 157). Her walk allows her to gradually understand the language of the nonhuman world, that "inner language [that] passes among them, through space and separation, in ways we cannot explain in our language" (Ibid.). It is the movement of walking that allows her to be in connection with the living world, like Wordsworth's wanderer or Thoreau's saunterer. She shows that the condition to hear the language of the Earth is to be "willing to wait and receive," as is said by John Hay, whom she quotes: John Hay in The Immortal Wilderness, has written: "There are occasions when you can hear the mysterious language of the Earth, in water, or coming through the trees, emanating from the mosses, seeping through the undercurrents of the soil, but you have to be willing to wait and receive" (Hay quoted in Hogan 1995, 157)

When Ann McCrary Sullivan walks in the Everglades, she is "willing to wait and receive." In "I Came to the Everglades with a Grief," the beauty of the nonhuman world replaces her inner feeling of grief by an observation of teeming life: This is what I have learnt: weeping for beauty Replaces weeping for grief. (McCrary Sullivan, 19)

The beauty of the living world generates tears that people shed when looking at absolute beauty. The colours of life, "the blue heron's crest," "the purple gallinule's iridescence," make grief imitate nature and the movement of the river, to be integrated into ecological consciousness, the consciousness of a world where every element is necessary to the other. The feeling is associated to natural elements, it is compared to a "river of grass" and to "a bird;" the connection between all species is asserted: "the yellow panther in the understory / necessary, as everything here is necessary / each to the other in a complex ecology" (ibid.). By shifting from the language of psychology to the language of ecology, she shows the possibility of integrating human feelings, particularly dark feelings, into the vast network of nature. The whole poem is a series of comparisons showing the evolution of grief in the language of nature. The natural comparisons revealing the evolution of the poet's grief in nature are framed by the real observation of nature, from the "blue heron's crest" and "the purple gallinule" to "the gator's black back [that] stretches in the sun." In the first stanza it is grief that is "stunned" by the birds' colours and beauty. In the last stanza, it is the poet: "amazes me." The observation of life in nature replaces the initial grief by a simple conscience of beauty and life. The walk reveals a shared Earth as Linda Hogan's sunflower shares her life with insects living around it. In "Coontie: zamilla pumilla," Ann McCrary Sullivan still

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shows the nonhuman world in terms of sharing: "These ancient cycads, / experts in damage, shared the Earth with dinosaurs" (18). Her poetic ecology is multiple: it is the conscience of the necessary coexistence between species. It is also the link established between family life and the life of the Earth. She discovered the life of Nature with her mother who was a biologist, as she explains in a beautiful poem, "Notes from a Marine Biologist's Daughter" (45). Her mother's communion with nature is what makes her follow in her footsteps to listen to that nature she introduced to her. Her mother "lives / by an arithmetic of moon, / calculates emergences of mud, // waits for all that crawls there." She shows her mother as someone "willing to wait and receive," as John Hay said. The poem is an entanglement of natural elements and the simple pronoun "she," evoking her mother whom she admires so much, reveals her union with the whole natural space from subterranean darkness to the sun in the sky: My mother walks and sinks into an ooze, Centuries of organisms ground To pasty darkness. The sun Burns at her shoulders in its slow passage across the sky. Light waves like pincers In her mud-dark hair. (45)

Light and darkness mingle in her mother's movements through the natural world where she reveals to her the interconnection between everything, as light and mud are both revealed in her hair. Her mother has shown her the sense of connection, which is at the basis of ecological awareness. Her poetic ecology also appears in the inclusion of prose entries at the end of her collection of poems, in two sections entitled "Animalia" and "Botanica," where she presents us with the species living in the Everglades and mentioned in her poems. Her descriptions show both the beauty of every species and the fact that some of them are endangered. About the egret, she writes: The great egret was hunted to near extinction during the late 19th and 20th centuries when its beautiful white feathers (especially mating plumes) were all the rage in fashion and an ounce of feather was worth more than an ounce of gold. Efforts of the early Audubon Society resulted in the outlawing of the feather trade, but populations have never fully recovered (McCrary Sullivan, 83).

She does not describe the egret but chooses to speak about it as the endangered species that it is and the attempts at protecting it. It is the same for her

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evocation of the Florida panther, "the official state mammal of Florida" (84). She writes: This shy, tawny yellow panther is a seriously endangered subspecies of the western cougar. As destruction of habitat progresses, its outlook is dim, in spite of ongoing research and dedicated preservation efforts. Most panther deaths occur on the highway at night. (84)

The encyclopaedical concluding parts of her collection of poems are informative and show readers the risks endangering some species. Other animals, like the great blue heron, the ibis, the kestrel or the anhinga, a water bird, are simply described in their movements and activity. The pig frog, the male and the female, is described and she adds that "[i]n the Everglades, the loud bass frog in the chorus or the lone deeply resonant voice from the sawgrass prairie is usually the pig frog" (85). She thus places the animal in its ecosystem and teaches her readers to be able to hear the animal and recognize it in a particular geographical area. She operates in the same way for plants, most of which are described in their ecosystem. For one of them, the Brazilian pepper, she writes that "this invasive exotic plant was originally imported for landscaping. It has escaped into the wild and aggressively taken over thousands of acres in south Florida, displacing native plants and animals, destroying productive habitat" (89). By this example, she shows the damage done by human people influencing and transforming ecosystems either by making some species disappear or on the contrary by importing species, which proves to be dangerous for endemic species. Her "Ecology" mingles poems and scientific descriptions of animals and plants in their ecosystems, as well as information concerning endangered species or their protection. But she wants to show that all is part of her poetic work and she ends the entries of "Animalia" and "Botanica" by poets' words. Animalia ends on a line by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. (86)

And "Botanica" ends on a line by Lola Haskins:40 The gumbo limbo swoons in the arms of the oak. (91)

By ending her prose scientific sections by poets' lines, she wants to give poetry the last word, thus showing that one line by a poet sums up the whole ecological approach, an approach made of love and connection. 40 Lola Haskins is an American poet who published fourteen books and won several awards.

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Merrill Gilfillan's Red Mavis: "Every other rhododendron flower holds / A tiny bee" Like Ann McCrary Sullivan, Merrill Gilfillan is the son of a naturalist and he has a deep knowledge of trees, plants and animals. His poetry is filled with allusions to trees or animals. His fascination for nature is conveyed by his plays on words and sounds; his poetry is influenced by experimental poetry as Vincent Dussol says.41 In "Blue Ridge: Streams Are Roaring," Merrill Gilfillan's central stanza speaks about rhododendrons, those mountain plants that are both wonderfully beautiful and terribly dangerous. Rhododendrons show us the beauty of the world and warn us; they teach us to wonder and to be careful, both things suggesting respect for Nature, for the human and nonhuman other. They teach us that nothing in nonhuman and human nature is all black or all white. As Barbara Glenn wrote in a poem: "You live in twilight / even when you cannot see" (Glenn, 45).42 When Gilfillan evokes rhododendrons, he uses a surprising comparison: Every other rhododendron flower holds a tiny bee, just the way each macaroni shell in pasta e fagioli eventually holds a bean. (Red Mavis, 4)

In a poem beautifully starting "in the shade / Of a persimmon tree," the reader is surprised by strange associations, like the rhododendron with "macaroni shell in pasta e fagioli", or a list of Latin words in italics: (castanea, ruficapilla, caroliniana). In a short poem, a number of natural references people the landscape of the "blue ridge" only present in the title: "C'est par l'ornithologie ou le souvenir des Peuples Premiers qu'il peuple le paysage en naturaliste ou en anthropologue" 43 (Dussol, 184). If "castanea" designates the chestnut-tree in Latin, the other two words are adjectives that need a noun to 41

Gilfillan "vient de la poésie expérimentale, pour part assimilable à ce qu'on a appelé poésie du langage" (Gilfillan "comes from experimental poetry, which can be partly assimilated to language poetry" (translation mine), Vincent Dussol, "Motifs du paysage nord-américain: Merrill Gilfillan, entre Gerard Manley Hopkins, Olivier Messiaen et les peuples premiers," in Claire Omhovère (ed.). L'art du paysage, 179. 42 See my article about "Rhododendrons and Travels: a Forest of Colours to Open the World's Eyes" in Caliban n° 59, Travel and Mountain Writing: Meetings between the Human and Non-Human. Irina Kantarbaeva-Bill ed., Toulouse: PUM, 2018. 43 "It is by ornithology or the memory of the First Nations that he fills the landscape as a naturalist or as an athropologist" (translation mine).

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designate either a bird (like Leiothlypis ruficapilla) or a plant (like azolla caroliniana or bacopa caroliniana). What seems to matter is not the thing but the word. The inclusion of words in Italian and Latin and the down-to-earth comparison of the beautiful rhododendron holding a bee with macaroni holding a bean, looks like a poetic game, but this game has a deep meaning, the solution being given in the last stanza, after the Latin list, with the word "Paroles": a word in Italian, an intertextual reference, a poetic French title by Jacques Prévert, 44 those "Paroles" reveal a world of connections: Dogwood calls the catbirds. Black cherry calls the blue (ibid.)

Totally invaded by natural things, the poem regards them as mere parts of a linguistic game, each thing then each word calling another one. The line "Dogwood calls catbirds" reveals a poetic call in which it is the composition of the word that suggests another one. The dog in the word "dogwood" calls the "cat" in the word "catbirds" but the linguistic connection suggests an ecological connection as the catbird is one of the birds attracted to dogwood.45 The linguistic game in the poem just orientates the reader towards a sense of connection, also present in the last line with the polysemous "Black cherry." This "black cherry" first concerns the tree and the fruit and the "blue" that it calls may be a blue berry or the blue of the sky. But the reader can also be guided towards a Native American story, Black Cherry Blues, written by James Lee Burke and published in 1989. The novel tells the story of Blackfoot Indians, under whose territory gas has been found. So the drilling company kills Indian militants defending their territory. The novel reveals the double impact of natural resources exploited by companies destroying both the land and the people living on it. From the blue ridge of the title to the final blue of the poem, the poet guides his readers in a world of connections where the world and the words answer one another, where nature calls nature and words call other words to explain the necessity of connections to build up a poem as well as life, either human or nonhuman, since the poem alternates nonhuman elements and human people ("a shy man" and "a little Italian"). In "Boneset, and Wassail," the poet still reveals the sense of connections, through the music of words and sonorities. The anaphora "Wassail" makes this archaic word evoking festivities, a celebration of Nature:

44 Paroles is a collection of poems by French poet Jacques Prévert, first published in 1946. 45 See http://www.mortonarb.org/trees-plants/tree-plant-descriptions/gray-dogwood, accessed January 2nd, 2018.

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Wassail for the wahoo, For the maples with sweetmeats in their leaves Wassail to the willows, half yellow half yellow-green Wassail those chestnut castanets Enough to make the dead wren sing. ("Boneset, and Wassail" in Red Mavis, 23)

The sounds call the words, the music of poetry generates a teeming of natural elements linked by the same sound, the alliteration in [w] linking the "wahoo," the "willows" and the idea of celebration through the word "wassail" recurring like an explosion of joy at the beginning of several lines. This joy even changes death into life by making "the dead wren sing." The music of the poem makes the dead bird live and sing again. Gilfillan's poetry is filled with birds' songs. For him the memory of birds' songs "has the strength and the emotional depth of a mother tongue or a landscape" (quoted in Dussol, 184, translation mine). The short poem "So they Say," composed of only three lines, evokes vultures and reveals a heavenly nature in which human sounds introduce some questioning disorder: Clinch River breeze sugared by honeysuckle: Mead-speed—so they say. Even the vultures Sit resting in the soft May day. ("So They Say," Red Mavis, 15)

The initial line introduces us to a heavenly world where elements (water and air) and vegetation are united in a common sweetness ("breeze," "sugared," "honeysuckle"). This sweetness is reinforced by the word "mead" opening the following line and designating the drink of the gods—so they say—, a drink uniting all cultures since it has been known for thousands of years in Northern countries, China, Africa or Greece. The lexical construction of "Mead-speed" constitutes a break in the poem, conveyed by italics; the compound word, "mead-speed", called by the music of the two words and evoking, for modern readers, an English brand of motor cycle accessories, appears as a metaphor making the technological world of speed strangely echoing the drink of ancient gods to figure the beauty of nature. The vultures introduce the animal presence that was missing and instead of appearing as birds linked with death, they represent the general sweetness of a Spring day, "May day." The choice of the words "May day", once again associated through their musical proximity, also evokes the first May Day celebrations, the Floralia in ancient Rome, celebrations of the goddess of flowers, Flora. Even time is musically introduced to speak about nature's beauty and fertility. But Gilfillan's use of polysemy also appears here as Mayday in one word is an emergency word used as a signal of distress in radio communications (it comes from the French

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"m'aider" (Help me). Could the second possible meaning appear as a cry for help? This might be suggested by the poet who has introduced a break in the general natural harmony with the notion of speed and the reference to motor cycle accessories. As for the vultures, even if they "sit resting in the soft May day," their mere presence suggests the probable presence of corpses in the vicinity. The rumour suggested by the title ("So they Say") questions the reader on the meaning of this rumour associated in the poem with "meadspeed." The complexity of Gilfillan's poetry, in which words call one another to question the reader, follows a strange poetic path always starting from the beauty of nature. The discovery of nature offered by his father in his childhood feeds Merrill Gilfillan's poetry and he appropriates all the observations of nature to change them into music showing us the beauty of the world and questioning us about our relationship with it. His poetic style is a way of singing the beauty and richness of nature and at the same time, of leading us to think. And sometimes, environmental awareness can be shown through the joy felt in front of nature's beauty.

Joy Harjo's A Map to the Next World: "We Just Dance" Joy Harjo is a member of the Mvskoke Nation. She is a poet and she published seven collections of poems and won several awards.46 In the eponymous poem "A Map to the Next World," Joy Harjo depicts a wasteland created by men's industrialization destroying nature: Monsters are born there of nuclear anger. Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to disappear. We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to them by their personal names. Once we knew everything in this lush promise. What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the Earth behind us, leaving a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood. 47 46

"Her seven books of poetry, which include such well-known titles as How We Became Human-New and Selected Poems, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, and She Had Some Horses have garnered many awards. These include the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas; and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America," http://joyharjo.com/about/, accessed April 17, 2018. 47 Joy Harjo, "A Map to the Next World," in A Map to the Next World, New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2000, 19.

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The impossibility to "speak to [the birds] by their personal names" suggests the distance taken from nature by human beings in the modern world. That distance perhaps comes from our inability to read nature's writing and to listen to nature's voice, like Wangari Maathai listening to birds.48 The awareness that everything is linked and that the sacred is first the consciousness of life in everything opens the way to ecological conscience. But our economic world, by losing the capacity to wonder at nature, has also forgotten its language. Exactly as peoples have always been destroyed for economic or political reasons because dominating powers rejected their languages, the latter similarly refuse to hear the language of the nonhuman. Poetry gives an answer to the destruction of the land by reconstructing it through words while warning the reader. In the same collection, Joy Harjo's prose text "There is no such thing as a one-way land bridge" (38-39) gives another answer. It seems to be a text about ruins. In fact, it is a text about dance. This text built along eight paragraphs is a reflexion about colonizers' biased vision of Native Americans: "A colonizer will say that the people disappeared, though their descendants are still living in the same area and they are going to school with their children. The descendants of the Anasazi are my granddaughters and will be their children and yet they are catalogued as 'disappeared'" (38). Showing that the demonstration that a land was abandoned and that a people disappeared allows the colonizer to "assume a right to ownership," Joy Harjo starts a political, apparently ideological text about the right to the land established by colonizers, from the Bering Strait theory, claiming that Native Americans went to America in a relatively late migration. "The Bering Strait theory assumes that a land bridge was marked one way," she says. But she shows the irrationality of such a theory by asserting the natural logic: "There is no such thing as a one-way land bridge. People, creatures and other life will naturally travel back and forth. Just as we will naturally intermarry, travel up and down rivers, cross oceans, fly from Los Angeles to Oklahoma for a powwow" (emphasis mine). Through the double repetition of the adverb "naturally" and the mention of rivers and oceans, Joy Harjo opposes nature to the anthropological theory justifying colonizers' land ownership. And she also opposes Indian traditions since the last words of that sentence about Native Americans' migrations are "for a powwow," which is reinforced by the mention of an anecdote: "I like the response given to an anthropologist when he asked a teacher in a particular Asian culture about ideology and theory: ‘What ideology? We just dance’" (38). She presents herself as a thinker but her thought is no ideology, her thought itself is dance in harmony with nature. 48

See further on, part 3, chapter 9.

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Dance is the answer to the deepest questions of life: "When I am home in Oklahoma at the stomp grounds we may talk about the complexities of meaning, but to comprehend it, to know it intimately, the intricate context of history and family, is to dance it, to be it. To understand one's life, one's history, one's Indianness, is to dance; to be is to dance" (39). And when she contemplates her own death associated with the ruins of her house that opens this text, she shows her future past existence told in the presence of the written text as an obituary revealing connections centred on love: the love she received and the love she gave to all creatures: There was a woman here who was loved. She was good to look at because she was a quick and imaginative thinker. She liked the view of the peach orchard from the southern window, and loved the turquoise earrings that her mother had given her at her marriage. Her life mattered, utterly, to herself, to her children, to those she loved, to the birds she scattered crumbs to after the family had eaten. This was her house, and years later the house still remembered her, though it was almost gone and the woman's spirit had flown to the other side. (39)

Starting with a political vision of a will of dispossession of Native Americans by colonizers, it ends on the philosophical vision of the place remembering the woman who loved those who lived there, her family, extended to the nonhuman world, the peach orchard and the birds. The crumbs coming from the family's meal and scattered to the birds are the simple sign of a sharing of the place, of a sharing of the land. The ruin is only a ruin in the physical world but it has a memory. This shifting from ideology to memory took place thanks to the mention of the dance, at the centre of the text, the dance articulating the shifting from a historical discussion to a personal memory. Dance is the poetry of the body answering the wounds of history. It acts as living poetry meant to heal the land and man in the land.

N. Scott Momaday's In the Presence of the Sun: "I am an eagle playing with the wind"49 N. Scott Momaday's poetry is filled with the presence of the nonhuman to speak about man's relationship with the world. In some of his very selfportraits, "Self-Portrait with Leaves," introducing "Selected Poems," (1) and "Self-Portrait" (129), he is represented as a bear. 50 The association of the artist 49

In The Man Made of Words, 87 "Self Portrait with Leaves", 1988 (graphite and wash), In the Presence of the Sun, 1. "Self Portrait", 1989 (watercolour), 129.

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with the bear has a mythical dimension as in many texts, Momaday said that he considered himself as the reincarnation of the bear boy of the Kiowa myth. The myth tells the story of eight children running in the desert when the boy started running after his seven sisters while claws were growing at the end of his limbs, since he metamorphosed into a bear. The seven sisters were called by a tree that took them up into the sky where they became the seven stars of the Big Dipper while the stump of the tree marked with striations is supposed to be Devil's Tower in Wyoming. This shows the connection between all elements: myth and reality, the Earth and the cosmos, the human and nonhuman, the artist's individual life and the collective memory of his people. The very conscience of connections is a way to the ecological vision of the world as in this vision of things, nothing is superior to anything else. All is in all. Momaday's collection of poems In the Presence of the Sun, is inhabited by animals—geese, buffaloes, bees, crows, rabbits, blackbirds—; plants or vegetable elements—pollen, grass, leaves, meadows, trees, like elders or pines, wild flowers; stones like turquoise; planets, elements like water or wind. Man's life is inserted into the natural world as the Indian mask illustrating the paratext, the book cover and the title page, is included in the sun. In the introduction to this collection of poems written over a period of thirty years, he ends a long list of all the historical events he saw during those thirty years by the mention of a growing ecological awareness: My point of view is a plateau from which I view the world in my fifty-seventh year. Below I can see, in the very far distance, the dim figures of my ancestors, entering this continent thirty thousand years ago. Closer I can see Columbus touching about the island he named San Salvador, and closer and closer by degrees, such things as the founding of Harvard College and the publication of the first book on the first printing press in New England, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Battle of Gettysburg, the last Kiowa Sun Dance in 1887 […], the great World Wars […] the civil rights movements, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and of Martin Luther King, the footprints of man on the moon […] and a growing awareness, as yet vague, that human beings, for all their assumed superiority over the plants and animals of the Earth, have inflicted wounds over the environment that are surely much more serious than we have realized, that may indeed be mortal. (In the Presence of the Sun, XVII-XVIII, emphasis mine)

The mention of a growing ecological awareness among capital historical events and the choice of ending his list of important events on that kind of awareness, reveals that he considers it as essential. Asserting the importance of words, he says: "Words are names. To write a poem is to practice a naming ceremony" (XIX). Through that "naming ceremony" the poet says: "if you

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look closely into these pages, it is possible to catch a glimpse of me in my original being" (XX). Through a poetic autobiography, N. Scott Momaday guides people towards the sense of connection and the awareness of man's union with the nonhuman world. His poem "The Delight Song of Tsoaitale"—Tsoai-tale being his Kiowa name, given near Tsoai, the Kiowa name for Devils' Tower—, is the expression of that perfect connection and even equation between the poet and the nonhuman world: I am the feather in the bright sky I am the blue horse that runs in the plain I am the fish that rolls, shining in the water […] I am an eagle playing with the wind I am the farthest star […] I am a deer standing away in the dusk I am a field of sumac and the pomme blanche I am an angle of geese in the winter sky I am the hunger of a young wolf. (16)

Through the anaphora "I am" repeated all along the poem, the poet equates himself with each fragment of nature, from the light feather to the star, from the deer to the "hunger of a young wolf." He sees himself in every nonhuman element, aware that his life is all life. With the concluding stanza, by repeating, like a shout of joy, "I am alive" again and again, by framing the stanza with the line "You see, I am alive, I am alive," which constitutes the last line of the poem, Momaday equates the awareness of his being each element of nature, with life. To feel alive is to be in peace with the Earth, to feel it within one's own body: I stand in good relation to the Earth I stand in good relation to the gods I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful I stand in good relation to the daughter of Tsen-tainte You see, I am alive, I am alive. (16)

To "stand in good relation to the Earth," to the spiritual world, to beauty and to one's ancestry represented by the name of the Kiowa hero Tsen-tainte51 is to be alive. This form of poetry, which cannot be said to be ecological poetry, is yet the very expression of man's deep connection with the Earth and of the awareness that everything is linked. The four types of connection (ecological—"the Earth"—, spiritual—"the gods"—, aesthetic—"beautiful"—, 51

Tsen-Tainte was born in 1840 or 1845 and died in 1892. He was a Kiowa chief (White Horse in English).

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and historical, with the mention of Tsen-tainte, linking the poet with Kiowa history) appear as the condition for man to be alive through these four elements, like the four directions, linking him with the whole universe. Ecopoetics is not only environmental poetry asserting itself as such. The mere fact of expressing his union with nature or his sense of wonder in front of the beauty of nature, is for the poet a way of leading people to a better vision of the world. When N. Scott Momaday repeatedly evokes the "angle of geese" recurring in his poems, fiction or essays as they come back in nature from times immemorial, the innumerable animals he observes and mentions, his wonder at the beauty of the Earth, all that is part of ecological awareness. Every nonhuman element, every creature, either living or long dead, connects him with life in union with the cosmos through a zodiacal sign. Observing a fossil fish, "he wonders about it": His legend is secure He bodies resistance. The fossil is himself, His own indifference ("He Reckons Geological Time According to His Sign", In the Presence of the Sun, 53)

The poem mingles the movements of the fossil fish and of the living fish long dead, with the movement of a zodiacal sign, "Sagittarius / Must swim against the tide." The evocation of a water animal fossil to speak about a sign normally associated with air and fire suggests something wrong in the perception of the world, perhaps "his own indifference," which makes him find himself in a fossil fish, not because it stands for his zodiacal sign, but because it shows him geological time and sends him back to his ancestors. With Momaday there is always an equation associating him with the nonhuman world. He is the bear of the myth as in his self-portraits, but he is also every element, from "the blue horse that runs in the plain" to "the fish that rolls, shining in the water" or "an eagle playing with the wind" ("The Delight Song of Tsoai-tale"). And this is more perceptible in his poetry that makes connections more visible. In the poem entitled "Headwaters," he mingles a geological landscape with a mythical one: Noone in the intermountain plains: There is scant telling of the marsh— A log, hollow and weather-stained, An insect at the mouth, and moss— Yet waters rise against the roots, Stand brimming to the stalks. What moves? What moves on this archaic force

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The verb "telling" appearing in the middle of a landscape painting defined through its geological existence—"intermountain plains"—introduces the idea of the landscape as a storyteller: "There is a scant telling of the marsh." The notion of telling together with that of interconnection physically suggested by the situation of the plains between mountains and by the word "intermountain" brings about the close-up on a log that is much more than a piece of wood. It is a reference to the log of the Kiowa creation myth through which the Kiowa people are supposed to have come from the subterranean world onto the Earth. The log is hollow like the log in the myth and thus the natural landscape of the marsh tells the mythical story of the poet's people. In that simple world of interconnections, nature and myths united show the union between the animal and vegetable worlds, the insect and the moss, reunited in the line around the mouth of the log. Here again, the double meaning of the word "mouth" used either for humans or nonhuman creatures or elements, connects the human and nonhuman worlds, the world of natural reality and that of myths, and it also places in the landscape the part of the body letting voices out. It is the physical element allowing oral poetry to emerge. So the creation myth and the poem both emerge from this hollow log in the landscape, this log becoming the story told by the marsh. The story unveils an entanglement of the running waters and the static roots. This dynamic landscape raises one question linked with movement: "What moves?" And the answer designates "this archaic force," the energy of life emphasized by the music of the text: What moves on this archaic force Was wild and welling at the source. (19)

The alliteration in [w]—"was," "wild," "welling"—unites the notions of the past, of the wilderness and of a welling, an emergence of life heard in the story told by the marsh. The rhyme "force" / "source" unites the "archaic force" with the notion of a source, an element suggesting the birth of life. The source of life dwells both in that wild nature and in the mythical story it tells. In a very short poem whose title, "Headwaters," is another word for a source or a spring, Momaday reveals a watery landscape as a source of all life, the natural one and the mythical one; the story dwells in the interconnection existing between nature and myth, perceived by the poet who can hear the voice of nature and the story told by the marsh showing the hollow log as, not a piece of dead wood, but on the contrary, the living sentence of the story of a people and their

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interconnection with the landscape they come from. The voice of the Earth, of nature telling stories can also be found with some African poets and Niyi Osundare's work also lets us hear the Earth's voice.

Niyi Osundare's The Eye of the Earth: "What the Earth Said" The Eye of the Earth is both a hymn to the Earth and a warning against the damage destroying it. As the poet52 says in the preface: "Tomorrow bids us tread softly, wisely, justly, lest we trample the eye of the EARTH" (Osundare, xiv). In a wonderful hymn to the forest, he exposes the wounds inflicted on trees, hence on the Earth:53 A forest of a million trees, this, A forest of milling trees Wounded, though, by time's axe And the greedy edges of agbegilodo's** matchet […] ** timber lorry. 54

The poet conveys the repeated exploitation of timber ("time's axe") through anaphora ("A forest of") followed by two alliterative words whose partial homophony ("million" / "milling") echoes the shift from the luxuriance of wooded land to the ultimate destination of the trees once they have been hewn by sharp instruments ("axe" and "matchet") becoming the weapons wounding the forest. Men's greed is then transposed onto the very instrument of transport; the Yoruba word for timber lorry is used here for its sounding and

52

Niyi Osundare is a Nigerian poet and academic, professor at the University of New Orleans, and he wrote several collections of poems, some of them like The Eye of the Earth, have an ecological dimension. Some of those collections were translated into French by Christiane Fioupou. 53 I would like to thank Oriana Palusci and Héliane Ventura who gave me permission to use some parts of an article I wrote for Anglistica, "From Deforestation to Awareness: Literature opening onto a 'Canopy of Hope'," Anglistica AION (2015), 19.2, 163-178. 54 Niyi Osundare, "Forest Echoes", in The Eye of the Earth [1986], Ibadan: Heinemann educational Books, 2000, 5.

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also for the ubiquity of the lorry on Southern Nigerian roads. 55 In another poem, "Eyeful Glances," the "flame tree" and the "tinder season" give way to "a desperate match" that "stabs the night / in the gloomy alleys / of NEPA's* (*National Electric Power Authority) darkdom" (Osundare, 24-25). Tinder is no longer a useful element of everyday life, but a sign of the destruction of people's homes, of their lives: "Our farms are tinder" (25). The electricity company that is supposed to bring light, brings gloom. In "Hole in the Sky," he uses a body metaphor to denounce the destruction of Nigerian forests: The desert marches towards the sea With camel-loads of broken skulls, Roasting iroko trees for lunch The mahogany for early dinner Dandelions roar beneath its feet. The elephant grass has lost its tusks To the famished poacher from sandy regions The desert marches towards the sea Alas, the boundless rainforest of my youth Has shrunk to a frightened eyebrow On the forehead of the coast Koko gba kokodi. ("Hole in the Sky") 56

He gives the Earth a voice: Koko gbakokodi Koko didikokodi* "Tell my story," Said the Earth to me, "Oh, tell my story the way it is. Don't sugarcoat its ELOHီ'RQ t varnisKLWVUXVWီ'RQ t cover its scars with pretty wordVီ7HOO my pain the way it is 7KHZD\LWLVီ The way the way the way it is ီ7HOOP\SDLQ the way it is." 55 I am indebted to Christiane Fioupou for her illuminating analyses of Niyi Osundare's poetry and I would like to thank her particularly for her help in the comment on this poem. 56 Niyi Osundare, "Hole in the Sky", Choreo-poem, World Literature Today, MayAugust 2014, http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2014/may-august/two-poemsniyi-osundare. I would like to thank Niyi Osundare for making me discover those poems at the occasion of a conference on "Land's Furrows and Sorrows in Anglophone Countries," and a performance that took place in Toulouse, at the Hôtel d'Assézat, on April 5, 2018; and Christiane Fioupou for making me discover more poems by Niyi Osundare through her translations.

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Koko gbakokodi Koko didikokodi (ibid.)

Framed by Yoruba words, the dialogue between the Earth and the poet is initiated by the Earth: "Tell my Story." The anaphora "Tell" becomes the musical sound of a tom-tom warning the world's population about the suffering inflicted on the Earth. The repetition of words is music reproducing the Yoruba rhythm conveying the voice of the Earth. In "Head in the Sand," he tackles the topic of global warming in a poem framed by words in Yoruba and accompanied by a song in Yoruba: Global warming is a figment Of liberal imagination: Melting Arctic ice Is a dollop of cream in the sun Rising oceans Are bodies of water at play. 57

In two lines introducing the poem, Niyi Osundare sums up the whole problem, the link existing between liberalism and global warming. He poetically meets what the agronomist and environmentalist René Dumont said in his books, showing the link between liberalism and the unfair sharing of lands and resources in the world generating misery. As early as the 1970s, René Dumont warned people about the relationship between industrial growth and "a natural warming cycle."58 His books, Un monde intolérable. Le libéralisme en question (1988, with Charlotte Paquet) and Famines, le retour. Désordre libéral et démographique non contrôlée (1997), are echoed by the poet's lines. The title "Head in the Sand" makes the human being an ostrich refusing to see reality, a reality engendered by a distorted form of imagination "liberal imagination." The translation of the Yoruba song given in a note—"He deceives himself / Oh he deceives himself / He who tries to gather the rain in a sieve / He is deceiving himself"—unveils the meaning of the Yoruba words accompanying the poem in English, thus giving the global language a Yoruba background which appears as poetic common sense hidden behind a world of consummation and play. The Arctic ice becomes "a dollop of cream in the sun," "Rising oceans / Are bodies of water at play" and a drought is "a dusty joke." That poem strikes 57 Niyi Osundare, "Head in the Sand," in Moving Worlds, a Journal of Transcultural Writings, "Catastrophe and Environment," Anthony Carrigan (ed.), Volume 14 Number 2014. 58 http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Rene-Dumont-les-quarante-ans-d-une.html, accessed February 13, 2018.

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readers or listeners by the contrast the poet makes between the disasters due to global warming—"Melting Arctic ice," "Rising oceans," "drought," and "flood" burying the village of El Koma in North Darfur, 59 the desert's expansion, pollution, deforestation—and the lexical field of play—"at play," "joke,"—, sweet food—"a dollop of cream"—or cosmetics covering the elemental sea with a destroying make-up: "That viscous streak on the delta creeks / Is beauty cream on the face of the sea." What is first presented as a light play on words is in fact a growing shout of anger. The tone changes after the ironical mention of "glorious Progress" serving as a hinge in the poem. From then on, the poet's use of the imperative mood lets us hear his shout: Stop crying wolf You cowards of the Left The future (if it comes) Belongs to the strong and bravely blind (ibid.)

The small parenthesis is meant to be a shock making readers aware of the fact that without change there may be no future at all, which is another echo of René Dumont's words as early as 1973: L'Utopie ou la Mort! Will the poet succeed where the agronomist could not be heard by a great part of the world? The song in Yoruba accompanying the poem sounds like a warning voice. The Yoruba language acts as a mask hiding the meaning and revealing it through the poet's words. It is man's playing with the planet that generates global warming and all the disasters going with it. Yet the poet also shows another type of connection between man and the planet, a connection expressing a visionary communion instead of a blind exploitation of resources. In the poem "I want to touch the world," he writes: I am possessed by an urge to touch the world An urge keener than dawn's breeze Insuppressible like a stubborn faith To fling a bridge across the seas Tell every mountain a humble tale Watch trees join roots before the earth. 60 59 In June 2016, a flood partially or totally destroyed 579 houses (57 being totally destroyed) in the village of El Koma, North Darfur in Sudan. 60 Niyi Osundare, "I want to touch the world" in The Word is an Egg, Kraftgriots, 2000, 38.

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The poet's link with the earth is both a sensual relationship and a dialogue where he wants to "tell every mountain a humble tale." Before the world of contrasts depicting man's blindness that he will paint later in "Head in the Sand," he shows a world of union with "a bridge across the seas," where "trees join roots," where he wants "to have the moon join the sun;" where the colours of the world sing unions when he evokes "[t]he rainbow union of sun and rain" (ibid.). The poet who wants "to sing in the east and dance in the west" projects his joy of belonging to the world onto the whole space. Echoing Blake who, in the Auguries of Innocence, wants "[t]o see a World in a grain of Sand," 61 he wants "[t]o see the ocean in a drop of water." The echo of the visionary poet's line appears as his own assertion of a deep vision of his union with the Earth, a sense of belonging, which is stronger than the negative painting which is not really negative since it is a shout meant to arouse people's consciences. There is hope in his painting of man's relationship with the Earth as soon as we are conscious that "this earth" is "OUR EARTH." 62 The very title of the poem is a song of hope: "Our Earth Will Not Die." It does not erase man's damage on the Earth but shows that life is stronger: Lynched the lakes Slaughtered the seas Mauled the mountains But our earth will not die. (Ibid.)

Placing men's destructive action and nature face to face, the poet reverses the destructive process through his poetic construction. Man's action appears in verbs, past participles revealing a grammatical inversion suggesting the fact that nature's harmony is reversed. All the natural elements are preceded with the definite article, thus showing that they are determined by their belonging to the Earth. And yet this destructive inversion is reversed in turn through the conjunction "But" bringing about the hopeful assertion of a future marked by life: "But our earth will not die." The rest of the poem makes a list of all those ecological devastations: 61 http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/blake/to_see_world.html, accessed February 13. 62 "Niyi Osundare. "Our Earth Will Not Die," in The Eye of the Earth, Ibadan: Heinemann, 50-51

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" a lake is killed by the arsenic urine / from the bladder of profit factories," "a poisoned stream," "coughing chaos in the sickly sea," "the wailing whale, belly up like a frying fish." The poem "coughs" with the sea and the earth through the alliterations, it "wails" with the whales through its music. The tragic music of the poem accuses every man through the repetition of the question "Who?" changed into the repetition of "Whoever?" that is every man, everywhere: Here there everywhere. (Ibid.)

And yet, the dark painting goes on living with the hopeful burden "Our earth will not die." In spite of the "mercury tears" and the acid rains, of the "balding forests" and the "slaughtered" seas, "[T]he wind, unwound, will SOD\ LWV WXQHီ  WUHHV WZLWWHULQJ JUDVVHV GDQFLQJ In spite of man's destructions because of "profit factories," "Our earth will see again / eyes washed by a new rain." The poem ends with joy, with a "new rain" letting us hear its "drums of joy" (ibid.). Through that ultimate image preceding the hopeful conclusion, he shows the connection between the natural world and the music of his Yoruba roots. The Yoruba sense of joy in front of the living beauty of nature is the sign of absolute awareness, the answer to the industrial man's destruction is a joy conveying a sense of belonging that reveals the purifying renewal of rain: Our earth will see again this earth, OUR EARTH. (Ibid.)

Niyi Osundare's poetry sings the world through words that echo other poets while showing the beauty of the Earth and warning us against its destructions. His sense of ecology is conveyed through the double act of warning and celebrating, through a shout of anger and a song of joy which, if placed side by side as in the poem "Our earth will not die," can lead to that active awareness that can change our behaviours.

CHAPTER FOUR SONGS AS MODERN TIME POPULAR POEMS TO DEFEND THE EARTH

"Animals don't hate, and we're supposed to be better than them." Elvis Presley

In our modern times, songs are one of the most popular literary genres. The combination of texts and music and the shortness of a song seem to render the message easier to hear than the reading of a book. With Joan Baez who was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree by Antioch University and Rutgers University in 1980, and Bob Dylan awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016, songs were acknowledged as literature, even if some articles in the press and some reactions showed that people were perhaps not completely ready to accept that choice. Yet the greatest song authors and singers are poets helping us to become aware and to take our responsibility. While poetry at large unfortunately often reaches a small audience—even if now the use of the internet by poets makes poetry more visible—, musical poetry, that is to say songs, can easily reach the whole world. Many singers use that medium to denounce damage on the planet. Singers like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger made protest songs and in their lyrics they show that wars and human and ecological disasters are linked and their songs fight for a fairer world and a preserved planet. Joan Baez wrote and performed "The Story of Bangladesh" at the Concert for Bangladesh, Madison Square Garden in 1971. This song was based on the Pakistan Army crackdown on unarmed sleeping Bengali students at Dhaka University on March 25, 1971, which ignited the prolonged nine-month Bangladesh Liberation War. The song was later entitled "The Song of Bangladesh" and released in a 1972 album from Chandos Music."1 In Paul McCartney's "Wild Life" (1971), the initial relationship between two lovers—the word "wild" applies to the words "you" and "me"—is defined

1

https://ecologyenergy.blogspot.fr/2013/10/joan-baeza-great-singer-of-peaceand.html?m=0, accessed April 14, 2017.

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in terms of wildness, opening on the idea of imprisonment, the imprisonment of wild African animal prisoners in a zoo. While take a walk through an African park one day, I saw a sign say, "The animals have the right of way". Wild life, whatever happened to, Wild life, the animals in the zoo? We're breathing a lot, a lot of political nonsense in the air. 2

The poet mingles an intimate relationship with a political denunciation. The pronoun "you" of the beginning recurs in the line "You're breathing a lot of political nonsense in the air," taking up the previous evocation of a political dimension of the text by placing the love relationship in the general human conscience of confinement, the confinement of animals in a zoo becoming the image of any animal confinement, including the human one. The message is more directly ecological in Michael Jackson's "Earth Song" (2005) even if there is also an initial intimate link suggested by the address to a second person: "That you said was yours and mine..." The whole song is a question recurring through the anaphora "What about" repeated fiftytwo times in the song, like an obsessive question or an angry list of all the damage made by men: What have we done to the world Look what we've done What about all the peace That you pledge your only son... What about flowering fields Is there a time What about all the dreams That you said was yours and mine... Did you ever stop to notice All the children dead from war Did you ever stop to notice The crying Earth the weeping shores? (ibid.)

Man's responsibility in the destruction of the Earth and of animals is sung in a sort of cry relaying "the crying Earth," "the weeping shores," "the bleeding Earth;" the song is pervaded by the semantic field of murder and death ("killing," "blood," "bleeding," "all the children dead from war"). The Earth's 2 https://play.google.com/music/preview/Tktauraaoeljla2bmk7jpe5flpi?lyrics=1& utm_source=google&utm_medium=search&utm_campaign=lyrics&pcampaignid= kp-lyrics&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi-1_OkwqLTAhWHuBoKHdKGA6UQr6QBC B0oADAB, accessed April 14, 2017.

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"wounds" nearly rhyme with "our planet's womb," to emphasize man's murder of Mother Earth. The whole planet and its inhabitants are depicted as destroyed by man's violence: "All the children [are] dead from war" but also animals are. A whole stanza is devoted to their destruction: (What about us) What about animals (What about it) We've turned kingdoms to dust (What about us) What about elephants (What about us) Have we lost their trust (What about us) What about crying whales (What about us) We're ravaging the seas (What about us) What about forest trails Burnt despite our pleas (ibid.)

The chorus—"What about us" / "What about it"—insists on the connection between men and the nonhuman world: animals, seas or forests. Men have "turned kingdoms to dust," they are "ravaging the seas," and have burnt the forests. The rhyme "dust"/"trust" is the tragic musical expression of a collapse, the animals' loss of trust being musically equated to dust, the dust of all the countries destroyed by wars, of burnt forests and bleeding Earth. What have we done to the world Look what we've done.

Another way of leading people to awareness is to speak about animals' suffering. Prince claimed vegetarianism through the assertion of animal brotherhood in "Animal Kingdom": No member of the animal kingdom ever did a thing to me (Ever did a damn thing) So I don't eat no red meat or white fish Or funky, funky blue cheese We're all members of the animal kingdom Leave your brothers and sisters in the sea. 3 3

http://www.paroles.net/prince/paroles-animal kingdom#yIswYjUqsbDH8v04.99, accessed April 14, 2017.

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Bob Dylan's "Man gave names to all animals" (1979) is a reggae song with a repeated rhythm and a repetitive structure, evoking man's naming of animals in the Garden of Eden. Lots of songs evoke animal suffering or animal love, like "Free me," by Goldfinger; "The Promise (The Dolphin Song)" and "Silent Ruin" by Olivia Newton-John. In South Africa, Johnny Clegg and Savuka sang "Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World" in 1989. The mere title shows the double aspect of this world whose beauty is destroyed by man's crazy behaviour. In France, Francis Cabrel's "La corrida" ("The Bull-fight"), which is a beautiful text against bull-fights, or Michel Delpech's "Le chasseur" ("The Hunter"), are two songs drawing the attention of the audience by reversing the point of view. The two titles lead us to the world of man as a predator, in a game in one case, in the hunting activity in the other. But in fact, both songs draw their strength from the inversion of points of view. The fact of giving the bull a voice just before he dies by men's violence, moves the audience and is even a strong blow to their conscience. In Michel Delpech's song, the reversal is different as it takes place within the small textual space of the song since the hunter, who had come to kill birds, changes his mind as he admires the beauty of the world and of a flight of wild geese. Instead of killing a bird and bringing it brutally from the sky to the ground, he wishes he were accompanying them "up there in the clouds." One can think about the scene in which Abel, the main character of N. Scott Momaday's novel House Made of Dawn, sees the reflection of the moon in the goose that has just been shot and the new awareness of the break in harmony that appeared a moment before in the angle of the geese, makes him aware of the break of life. This new conscience appearing in the eye of a bird that has just been shot also appears in Jim Harrison's novel Farmer, in which the hunter sees a similar reflection in the eye of the grouse he has just shot. All those scenes of the sudden awareness of life in the dying animal's eye and/or beauty have something to do with what French writer Maurice Genevoix had said once in Les routes de l'aventure: "La grande ombre dont parlait Homère, on peut la reconnaître aux prunelles d’une perdrix qu’on ramasse, une goutte de sang au bout du bec, comme je l’ai reconnue tant de fois, à l’instant où le regard s’en va, dans les yeux des jeunes soldats tués" (Genevoix 177), 4 which he expressed otherwise in an interview, 4 See Jacques Tassin, ""L’ombre bleuâtre de la mort" dans l’œuvre de Genevoix", https://ceuxde14.wordpress.com/2013/08/23/lombre-bleuatre-de-la-mort-dansloeuvre-de-genevoix/, accessed May 18, 2017. "The big shadow evoked by Homer can be recognized in the pupils of a partridge that you pick up, with a drop of blood hanging from its beak, as I recognized it so many times at the moment when a gaze vanishes, in the eyes of young soldiers who have been killed" (translation mine).

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explaining that in the eye of the soldier killed at war and in the eye of the partridge killed in a hunting party, the shadow of death is the same. Laurent Voulzy's "Le pouvoir des fleurs" ("The Power of Flowers") reminds us of the message of the Hippie movement. As for Yannick Noah's "Aux arbres citoyens" ("To Trees Citizens"), it appears as a plea to change the world: Le ciment dans les plaines coule jusqu'aux montagnes Poison dans les fontaines, dans nos campagnes De cyclones en rafales, notre histoire prend l'eau Reste notre idéal, "Faire les beaux" S'acheter de l'air en barre, remplir la balance Quelques pétrodollars, contre l'existence.5

The song is a way of urging people to action and protection: Plus le temps de savoir à qui la faute De compter sur la chance ou les autres Maintenant on se bat Avec toi moi j'y crois Puisqu'il faut changer les choses Aux arbres citoyens! Il est grand temps qu'on propose Un monde pour demain! 6

Yannick Noah twists the lyrics of the burden of the French national anthem "La Marseillaise," and replaces weapons with trees in a shout for a pacific fight meant to propose a new world. Renaud's song "Fatigué" ("Tired") denounces hatred, racism and war invented by "the most advanced creature" and says that he is "tired of living on the Earth," which he first calls a "planet" before calling it "a speck of dust" and "a shabby pebble," then "a false star lost in the universe, cradle of stupidity and kingdom of evil." He makes a list of all the evils perpetrated by men, adding that 5

Yannick Noah, "Aux arbres citoyens", "Cement in plains flows to hills / Poison in springs, in our countries/ From cyclones to gusts, our history takes on water / Our ideal remains, 'To curry favours'/ To buy solid air, to fill the scales / A few petrodollars in exchange for existence"(translation mine) http://www.google.fr/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=paroles+des+chansons+deya nnick+noah+lesa+arbers&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF 8&gfe_rd=cr&ei=_hLwWMfME8iEaN3kk_gE#spf=1, accessed April 2nd, 2017. 6 Yannick Noah, "Aux arbres citoyens", "No time now ro know whosee fault it is / To rely on luck or on other people/ Now we must fight/ With you, I believe in it/ Since we must change things/To Trees, citizens!/ It is time for us to propose/ A world for tomorrow" (translation mine).

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he is "tired of those men who killed the Indians / Slaughtered whales and gagged life / Exterminated wolves, put collars around dogs' necks /And even managed to rot rain" (translation mine). Mingling violence against men, other animals and nature at large, he goes on with the beautiful wish of being a tree when he says "I would like to be a tree, and drink the water from storms / To feed the Earth, to be birds' friend / And to have my head so high in the clouds / That no man could fix a flag into it / I would like to be a tree and plunge my roots / Into the heart of that Earth that I love so much / And that those bloody men murder every day / I would like silence at last and the wind."7 In a century when nature shrinks more and more because of men's desire for an ever-growing society, singers try to warn the world and to make things change. More and more songs are devoted to ecological problems and more and more internet sites make lists of hundreds of songs devoted either to global warming or other environmental topics. Among some ecological French songs, we can quote: Pierre Perret's "Le monde change" ("The World Changes") and more recently Abd Al Malik's "Rock the Planet,"8 Francis Cabrel's "L'arbre va tomber" ("The Tree is Going to Fall"), Francis Lalanne's "Dépolluer la planète" ("To Remove Pollution Out of the Planet") or Christophe Mae's "C'est ma terre" ("It's My Earth"), Bénabar's "L'effet papillon" ("The Butterfly Effect"), Alain Souchon's "Le monde change de peau" ("The World Changes Skin") and "Pardon." Before this ecological musical and poetic movement, a few French singers had already tried to warn people about the dangers against the planet and the heavenly presence of a tree or a garden: Georges Brassens with "Auprès de mon arbre" ("Near my tree"), Jean Ferrat with "Restera-t-il un chant d'oiseau" ("Will there be a bird's song left?"), Bernard Lavilliers's "Etat des lieux" ("Inventory"), Maxime Le Forestier's "Comme un arbre" ("Like a Tree"), Georges Moustaki's "Il y avait un jardin" ("There Was a Garden") and "Heureusement qu'il y a de l'herbe" ("Fortunately There is Grass"), Maurice Reverdy's "C'est ma planète" ("It's my Planet"), Anne Sylvestre's "Le jour où ça craquera” ("The Day when it breaks"), Pierre Bachelet's "Pour un monde bleu" ("For a Blue World"), Roland Gerbeau's "Si l'écologie" ("If Ecology"), Michel Fugain's "La terre est servie" ("The Earth is Helped") and "Bravo Monsieur le monde" ("Bravo Mr World"), Serge Gainsbourg's "Torrey Canion" or Yves Dutheil's "La légende des arbres" ("The Legend of the Trees"). Our modern troubadours more and more often sing their love of the Earth. They are moden knights who try to save their beloved from monsters and villains, which are the world of growth and all the evils it draws after it. When 7

http://interfaceparoles.free.fr/texte.php?id=331, translation mine, accessed August 3rd, 2017. 8 http://chansons.ecolo.pagesperso-orange.fr/Base.htm, accessed April 14, 2017.

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speaking about the serious damage done to forests, seas, rivers, deserts, and the Earth in general, writers often use the metaphor of rape; the Earth is a beloved threatened by the modern world considering that all solutions dwell in growth whereas artists, and particularly poets and singers, assert that the Earth can only be saved if growth is abandoned. Singers show us the simplicity of a world where the essential dwells in trees, grass and gardens.

CHAPTER FIVE THE DETECTIVE NOVEL AS ECOLOGICAL WARNING

"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes." Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

Although The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes do not sound like an ecological manifesto, yet the author Arthur Conan Doyle in his adventure novel The Lost World, published in 1912, showed he was aware of the dangers threatening some species. In the 20th and 21st centuries other detective novelists used the genre to denounce some ecological evils of the time and particularly the link between the pollution of the environment and human diseases. Exactly as the gothic genre allowed writers to speak about women's condition at the end of the 18th century, detective novels in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, depict modern society’s issues, including the damage caused by industries. Jim Harrison's The Big Seven, by depicting the seven capital vices through a detective story, shows the violence present everywhere in the United States. The originality of the novel dwells on the choice of the setting. The narrator notes that great detective story writers situated their novels in big cities, whereas his place is an out-of-the way small city but what is interesting is the gap existing between the violence appearing in most characters and the quietness of the detective's hobby, since he is fishing, which is also Harrison's passion. To violence and death, the narrator opposes beauty, the beauty of nature, which is all the more striking as it often appears in one single sentence opposed to pages and pages of violence or questionings. The violence depicted silences the music of nature, and some writers used that notion of silence to strike their readers and make them aware. Leslie Marmon Silko expresses the destruction of nature through the silence of the toads, as we shall see. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is the most famous example, as her book brought about environmental awareness throughout the world. Some detective novels used the silencing of nature in their titles, like Bryan Eastman in his novel And No Birds Sing, the title being a quotation

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from Keats' "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," which is often used as a book title or an intertextual reference. This novel is an ecological thriller. The fact of making the two detectives two botanists with plant names (Laura Thyme and Rosemary Boxer) places the novel in the world of nature. Starting in a garden and going on with a character who is a botanist "tak[ing] students out on field trips" (Eastman, 27) as Linnaeus would do in Uppsala in the 18th century, the detective mystery will be solved thanks to the world of plants and to the two characters' knowledge of it. A dream questions Laura as a word is repeatedly pronounced in that dream; the word is "Withersedge." It proves to be linked with the trial of a murderess called a witch, who has something to do with the detective plot Laura and her new friend have to face. In fact "withersedge," at first sight seems to designate a common plant, sedge, which is withered. It is also a poetic reference to Keats' "La belle Dame sans Merci" in which the poet says: "The sedge is wither'd from the lake, / And no bird sings." This sends us to the title of the novel and it also reminds us of the fact that Rachel Carson quoted those two lines as an epigraph in Silent Spring. Often detective novels and the television series inspired by them use the detective genre to denounce some dangers threatening the environment. Toxic waste, the nuclear industry or the traffic of chemical products appear as the background of some detective stories and series. Such a topic is tackled by Betty Webb in Desert Wind (2012). The detective story is organized around the exploitation of the uranium mines and the damage caused by the bomb testing, which occurred in Arizona in the 1950s. With James Lee Burke's Black Cherry Blues (1990), it is the exploitation of gas resources in the territory of Blackfoot Indians that is denounced through a detective story in which Indians defending their land against a company destroying it are murdered. The link between the exploitation of natural resources and the destruction of Native people's lives is clearly shown by the detective genre with Tony Hillerman. A close analysis of some of his novels can show how the detective genre can become environmental writing. His novels associate the detective story with both the situation of a Native community, the Navajo, and ecological damage done on their land. Tony Hillerman evoked the damage caused by uranium mines in the Navajo reservation in People of Darkness. And his novel, The First Eagle, taking place in the Navajo Reservation like most of his novels, also uses the detective genre to show the relationship between men's use of chemicals and the diseases of people and of the land, which are thus united. In The First Eagle, a murder is committed on a Navajo Tribal policeman and in the meantime, a young Indian Health Service woman, researching bacteria causing a man's death, is reported missing. The detective story

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develops on the triple motif of the Indian link with the land, medical research and the opposed conceptions of investigation and justice defended by the FBI and the Navajo Tribal Police. Tony Hillerman's detective stories are first and foremost a way of speaking about Navajo conditions of living and the hard work of the Navajo Tribal Police as is suggested by his dedication to the six officers who "gave their lives in defence of their people" (Hillerman, v). Unlike what is said in the paratext of People of Darkness about the fact that any resemblance of the characters with any person existing or having existed would be a mere coincidence, the dedication of The First Eagle claims that the novel is linked with reality. The novel also deals with the difficult relationships between the Navajo police and the FBI which is ready to find all the motifs necessary to lead an Indian (here a Hopi) to prison and even to the death penalty. It also evokes the deep relationships of Natives with the natural world, the land and the animals living on it. The medical element is at the core of the plot. From the start, the reader is led to see the link between the landscape and the human body. The novel is organized around people's research on animals bringing various mortal diseases while men bring death at the same time. The detective story unites science and mythology to warn people against what threatens the environment.

A detective story reversing the pattern The genre of the detective novel is based on a series of stories as the inquiry is necessarily based on evidences, hence stories. Hillerman's novels are some of those "formula stories" evoked by John G. Cawelti. To define those formula stories, Cawelti says that if "the first usage simply denotes a conventional way of treating some specific thing or person [...] the second common literary usage of the term formula refers to larger plot types. […] These general plot patterns are not necessarily limited to a specific culture or period. Instead, they seem to represent story types that, if not universal in their appeal, have certainly been popular in many different cultures at many different times" (Cawelti, 5-6). Among those "popular story patterns," he mentions westerns and detective stories. Hillerman's novels follow the detective story formula as there is the usual pattern of a crime followed by an inquiry; but their first originality, which made their popularity, dwells on the geographical situation of his stories, the Navajo Reservation, and on the ethnic specificity of the detectives, who belong to the Navajo Nation. There are other original variations in his novel. Detective novels, from the nineteenth century onwards, have been a way of depicting society and the social troubles of a period. Cawelti underlines "the rise of a scientific and social approach to the

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analysis of criminal deeds" (Cawelti, 57). And he mentions Oliver Twist where "Dickens analyzed the terrible social environment that led to urban crime" (Cawelti, 58). Tony Hillerman reverses the pattern. In The First Eagle for instance, he depicts the hard conditions of living of the Navajos but it is not what leads to crime and on the contrary he makes the Navajos the winners. The hard conditions of work of the policemen from the Navajo Tribal Police—they are often alone and do not have the back up support that would be necessary, they have to oppose the methods of the FBI—do not prevent them from solving the mystery in the end. Tony Hillerman told what a Navajo librarian said to him one day. They were speaking about great Native American novels and she said: "We read them and their books are beautiful. We say ‘Yes, this is us. This is reality.' But it leaves us with no hope. We read of Jim Chee, and Joe Leaphorn,1 and Old Man Tso and Margaret Cigaret, and the Tsossies and Begays and again we say, ‘Yes, this is us. But now we win'" (Hillerman 2004, 43). The anecdote reveals a deep change in the use of the detective story. The political message that also existed in Dickens' depiction of poverty in England is reversed. There is also a depiction of the hard life of Navajo people but here the Navajos win the battle. They find out who committed the crime; they are not the criminals. There is another reversal dwelling on the use of science. The use of scientific methods in criminology appearing from the nineteenth century is present in Hillerman's novel—Chee insists on the necessity of analysing the tracks of blood appearing on the "first eagle," and this is what must prove that the Hopi man is innocent—but the insistence is rather on another type of science: medical research; the reversal dwells on the fact that it is this medical research that urges a scientist to kill two people. Moreover, another originality of the novel is that the detective story is part of Native storytelling as myths and reality are superimposed in some witnesses' evidences, which are as many stories. For the whole novel is organized around the theme of stories and everything seems to be a matter of stories. The motif of storytelling is multiplied as the action takes place in the Navajo Reservation and storytelling is essential for Native people. Stories here are linked with animals and Nature. The words "legend," "tale" and above all "story" recur again and again in the novel. Stories also appear through intertextuality with the story of the skinwalkers, coming from another novel by Hillerman (Skinwalkers, 1986). There are also many flashbacks, a map appearing as the object activating memory and past stories, the inclusion of another story within the story we are reading. And the final story, told by a goatherd woman, will give the solution 1

Chee is the Navajo officer who worked with Lieutnant Leaphorn for long years. In The First Eagle, Leaphorn is retired and acts as a detective.

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and solve the inquiry. All those stories are interwoven to give an ecological message. Native Americans see mythical stories in the natural world and pollution may appear as a way of erasing or hiding those stories. Science—astronomy— and imagination are linked through the cosmic space. In an interview Louis Owens speaking with Momaday about light pollution, evoked the relationship between light pollution and a "'mythic' loss."2 Momaday indeed sees the relationship existing between light pollution and collective memory, and Native life and people’s relationship with their past. Light pollution is not a mere matter of observation of the beauty of the sky. Momaday speaks about "a moral dilemma" and it is also a cultural problem and a philosophical problem. Native people's relationship with the cosmos and the stories they read in the stars send us to our link with the cosmos and with the nonhuman world. They remind us of the fact that all things are linked. By preventing people from seeing the stars, urban lights erase human memory and men's sense of connection. This appears in The First Eagle, when Chee, visiting his granduncle, looks at the starry sky, he sees "constellations carrying stories" (261). The beautiful scene of Chee's dying grand-uncle near the Hogan and under the starry sky in which Chee looks for the stories told by the stars—while the old man advises him to capture the first eagle to save the Hopi man that is to be condemned to death—gives readers the key to another story inscribed under the detective one, a story told by the landscape and by animals. The first political message is an ecological one.

Landscape reflecting the human body The opening of the novel on a man's corpse followed by a description metaphorically associating it with a Navajo landscape appears as a sign foreshadowing the ecological dimension of the novel: From the viewpoint of Shirley Ahkeah, sitting at her desk in the Intensive Care Unit nursing station of the Northern Arizona Medical Center in Flagstaff, the white shape formed by the corpse of Mr. Nez reminded her of Sleeping Ute Mountain as seen from her aunt's Hogan near Teec Nos Pos. Nez's feet, only a couple of yards from her eyes, pushed the sheet up to form the mountain's peak. 2

"there would seem to be a kind of dangerous "mythic" loss in being cut off from the stars;" and Momaday answered: "Oh yes. I see it that way, too. It's something that threatens me at my centre. The stars are very important to me mythically. To think of losing the stars represents to me a very deep wound." In Louis Owens, "N. Scott Momaday," in Matthias Schubnell (ed.), Conversations with N. Scott Momaday. See the introduction of the present book p. 22.

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Perspective caused the rest of the sheet to slope away in humps and ridges, as the mountain seemed to do under its winter snow when she was a child. (The First Eagle, 1)

The association of the human dead body with a peculiar landscape may first suggest a common origin of the disease. Moreover, the comparison sends the Indian reader back to a legend linked with the Sleeping Ute Mountain, which is said to look like a Ute chief lying on his back.3 This corpse becomes the reflection of a mythical landscape, suggesting that what is done to the individual body is done to the whole landscape and vice versa. This will be confirmed in a more hidden way later on when Leaphorn, the detective retired from the Navajo Tribal Police where he worked with Lieutenant Chee, is studying a map where some places have been marked by pins: The map was freckled with the heads of pins—red, white, blue, black, yellow, and green, plus a variety of shapes he'd reverted to when the colors available in pinheads had been exhausted. […] The first ones (plain seamstress pins) he'd stuck in to keep track of places and dates where people had reported seeing a missing aircraft, the problem that then had been occupying his thoughts. The red ones had been next, establishing the delivery pattern of a gasoline tanker truck that was also hauling narcotics to customers on the Checkerboard Reservation. The most common ones were black, representing witchcraft reports. (59)

Apart from the fact that the map brings him back to the past of his inquiries with Chee and, from a literary point of view, that it appears as an intertextual reference sending the readers to a previous novel by Hillerman, Skinwalkers, the reference to those skinwalkers suggests several things. The skinwalker is a kind of Navajo witch—called in Navajo, yee naaldlooshi, naaldlooshi meaning "animal" (Wilson 38)—characterized by the fact that those people wear animal skins—and they are supposed to have the supernatural power to travel in animal forms. Moreover, in the passage evoking Leaphorn's questionings about "skinwalker mythology," the pins are significant objects. Skinwalkers are supposed to practise some kind of "witchcraft,"—the scientist's figure is seen as a "witch" (239)—; the reader may remember that pins are used in witchcraft, for example in voodoo, as sorts of indirect weapons stuck into dolls to cause some pain in people's real bodies. Here the pins are stuck in a map, each of them appearing as the visual representation of a criminal act. The 3 Legends and Children’s Stories of the Ute Tribe, www.utemountainute.com/legends.htm, accessed on June 3rd, 2013.

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telescoping of the reference to Navajo witchcraft and criminal acts on the Navajo territory may equate the land to a body and the pins might appear as a symbolical representation of attacks on the land body. The mapped-out landscape seems to be aggressed by the tiny objects: "To the North, Short Mountain and the Short Mountain Wash Country had attracted another cluster of black pins" (61). The mountains of the Reservation appear as magnets for those objects having a double role: they act as landmarks in the detective's memory and as symbolical indirect weapons against the landscape. Through the pins following the allusion to witchcraft, the text may suggest that some modern witches destroy the landscape from a distance. The role of two researchers and their treatment of animals will confirm it.

Animals and men in a detective story Bacteria are at the core of the detective novel and it reveals the double relationship between men and animals who, being first seen as the creatures responsible for men's deaths are going to become the judges of men killing other men and the land in the name of some medical truth. The theory of one of the scientists, Woody, who wants to save all mankind by protecting a colony of prairie dogs, infected but resistant, threatens the whole Navajo community while the decision of another researcher to destroy the colony by poisoning its environment condemns all life on the spot. Three groups of animals build up the detective plot: eagles, appearing in the title, in the arrest scene and in one of the last chapters of the novel as both an opportunity to see the Indian link with animals and a possible solution of the detective story; secondly, the animals causing the plague and other diseases, rodents, mice and prairie dogs, as well as fleas carrying the bacteria; and finally the peaceful goats of the flock guarded by an old woman in the hills, whose story will give the solution of the mystery.

Animals and the protection of species The novel obviously speaks about environmental issues affecting human health and beyond that, it raises the problem of scientific research threatening men when scientists supposedly try to save their lives. Even if The First Eagle is not an environmental novel, the issues it presents us with, correspond to some of the criteria developed by Laurence Buell in The Environmental Imagination: the novel gives an important role to the nonhuman and speaks about the "ethical orientation that makes human beings responsible for the environment and accountable for its health and continuation" (Buell 8).

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The ecological dimension of the novel appears in some clear indications interspersed in the novel, particularly concerning the protection of species, which is openly mentioned at that moment when Jano, the Hopi man suspected of the murder of the policeman, is arrested with an eagle in a cage. The detective story starts from the fact that the policeman, Kinsman, went to Yells Back Butte "to catch that Hopi who is poaching eagles" (12). So, everything in the novel starts from an ecological act, the watching of wild life to prevent poachers from endangering some species—the term "endangered species" occurs twice in the novel. There is a close connection between the protection of species, Indian life and the detective process, particularly through the superimposition of the detective inquiry and medical research. At the moment of the arrest, Chee says: "A federal offense" […] "Poaching an endangered species. Not as bad as a felony assault on a law officer, but—" (23). The unsaid appearing in the dash ending the unfinished sentence sounds like an important fact that the reader must keep in mind. The reader knows from the start that the detective story will be superimposed on a subtext speaking about Nature preservation. "To poach an eagle" is clearly presented further on as "a crime in itself" (83). And still later on the fate of the first eagle—that is the second one in the narrative but the first one in the chronology of facts and in the organization of the detective story—will be evoked by the policeman's grand-uncle, whose wisdom reveals another way of looking at the animal world. On the one hand, there are the traditional Navajos and Hopi who imprison eagles to use them in a ceremony, respecting them even if they put them into cages; on the other hand, there are the researchers who also put animals in cages to study bacteria and a disease in order to protect the human population. Two conceptions of the world are at stake and the detective story will reveal the discrepancy existing between the two worlds, both needing animals.

Animals in cages Cages are numerous in the novel, from the many cages used to capture prairie dogs and rodents to the two cages used to capture the two eagles. Cages are one of the exhibits in the murder of the woman and an object allowing the possible liberation of Jano. The animals in the novel are seldom free and when they are, it is to be rapidly threatened by men, whether they are diseased animals meant to improve medical research, animals used as prey—like the rabbits used to capture the eagles—or the eagles themselves. The first eagle seen in the novel is the one that Jano has seized to bring the bird to his people for a ceremony. This eagle is in a "large cage, but barely large enough to hold the eagle struggling inside it" (22-23). This eagle has four

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functions: it is the symbol of arbitrary imprisonment and will be the proof that the man who is arrested after capturing it is not guilty. He is arbitrarily condemned to the death penalty—as the scientific experiments meant to analyse the blood on his feathers mean his death—as Jano will be. This noble symbol of wild life and freedom is first seen as a prisoner in the tiny closed space of a cage at that moment when the man who has imprisoned him is going to jail. It is also a sacred animal, being the aim of a "religious pilgrimage" (83). And finally, it is a specimen of a protected species. The eagle is part of the mystery necessary in a detective story. Two versions of the presence of the eagle in a cage, at the arrest scene, are given by Chee, the policeman, and Janet, the lawyer. Whereas Chee says that the eagle was released by Jano, Janet says: "he didn't fly away" and "was in a wire cage" (87). At that moment, the reader makes the link between this dialogue and the title of the novel and guesses there are two eagles. The dialogue and the divergence of opinions appear as a clue in the detective story but at the same time they have a deeper meaning as Chee gives a religious interpretation: "I'll bet I know what happened," he said. "Jano didn't want to talk about the eagle because it got too close to violating kiva secrecy rules. I think it would become a symbolic messenger to God, to the spirit world. Its role would be sacred. He just couldn't talk about it, so he said he turned it loose" (87). The Navajo spirituality and the detective story are superimposed. The religious explanation will be taken up by Janet to justify why Jano will not speak: If it goes to trial, he will say his reason involves religious beliefs that he is not free to discuss outside his kiva. He may say that two of its tail feathers were pulled out in the struggle, eliminating its ritual use. And then, if I have to do it, I will call in an authority on the Hopi religion who will also explain why an eagle stained by blood violence could not be used in the role assigned to it in this religious ceremonial. (228)

But it is through the decision to capture the first eagle, after Chee's granduncle advised him to do so, that the reader understands the spiritual link of Navajos with the eagle. The eagle appears as the saviour of the Native communities, Navajos and Hopi are united through the bird. Chee's granduncle says: "Tell [the eagle] that it dies to spare a valuable man of the Hopi people. […] Tell the eagle that he will also be saving you, my grandson" (261262). But beside the sacred animals, there are utilitarian animals sacrificed on the altar of science. The text suggests a telescoping between scientific knowledge and magic vision in the way that those scientists use animals. One of the researchers, Krause, "on his mouse-hunting expedition", is said to be "performing whatever magic biologists perform with mice" (239). The

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telescoping between biology and magic makes the scientist glide into an irrational, magic world.

Laboratory animals The novel is centred on double research, the detective one and the scientific one, in which laboratory animals are at the core of the problem. It is about a plague killing people while researchers try to find the origin of the plague. To do so, they capture mice and prairie dogs and Catherine Pollard, one of them, finds something that shocks her so deeply that she immediately starts out on a mission that will kill her. The technical language interspersed in the novel shows the medical background of the detective story. Numerous passages take place in a laboratory where the laboratory animals are dissected or studied for a better understanding of the evolution of the bacteria. The gap existing between the researchers' relationship with animals and the respectful Indians following ancestral traditions is further widened when one of the researchers, Dr Woody, wanting to save all mankind from such plagues, decides to protect a colony of prairie dogs infected by the bacteria but resistant to the disease. His happiness when he speaks about the fact that the man is dead but the prairie dog is alive, is a first clue showing the doctor as a sort of modern Frankenstein, a mad scientist not hesitating to take the risk of infecting the whole territory to have the chance of pursuing his research to perhaps save all mankind one day. During the search for Catherine Pollard, in the list of items found in her jeep, the policemen find a powder that one of the doctors will identify as a very dangerous poison killing everything and not only the fleas that she is supposed to capture. In fact, Catherine Pollard, to save the population from the disease disseminated by the prairie dogs, planned to poison the whole colony that Woody was trying to preserve, by blowing the poisonous powder into a hole in the soil, thus killing all species on the spot. Moreover, the suit protecting the researchers from the emanations coming from diseased mice's urine, shows that they know that a dangerous element may spread through the air and the researchers' actions may disseminate the plague. Both Woody and Catherine Pollard want to protect a whole community, but while doing so they become blind to the immediate pollution they provoke. Both will die, one murdered by the other and the murderer himself indirectly killed by the infected animals he tried to protect. The experiments are described in scientific terms giving the text a scientific weight. The medical discourse is constantly superimposed on the detective plot. Krause speaks about the names given by scientists to various viruses: he evokes "the Navajo flu and Legionnaire's disease" and adds:

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The use of Latin scientific terms and of a language of statistics and numbers, situates the text in the world of sciences. Yet the powerlessness expressed by the scientist—"if it infects you, there's no way to cure" (241)—shows the limits of experiments practised on animals. Moreover, the drift towards mad experiments, with Woody's preservation of infected animals and Catherine Pollard's poisoning of the ground, shows the limits of laboratory experiments made on animals for medical reasons. Some scientists have demonstrated those limits and the fact that working on human cells was safer. Through the omnipresence of animals, the novel also appears as a way of questioning animal experimentation. Anaesthesiologist Ray Greek says: Animals, because they have different evolutionary histories complete with differences in gene regulation and expression cannot predict responses for a different species, in this case humans. The same is true of using animals to study human diseases. There is an assumption that if scientists ascertain how HIV enters the white blood cell of a monkey then they have also learned how it enters the white blood cell of a human. Again, this is demonstrably false. So, what we are left with is the fact that society is using animals for drug testing and disease research thinking the animal models are predictive for humans when in fact they are not. 4

The case of the prairie dogs is not that simple as they are both a species to be protected and the animals responsible for the plague. They are at the core of the detective story since they carry the flea itself carrying the bacteria causing the plague. The researcher working on the case of a prairie dog that seems to have survived the bacteria because of a mutation, evokes those "reservoircolonies": Reservoir colonies. Host colonies. They've been studied for years. How come their immune system blocks the bacteria? If it kills the bacteria, how come the toxin released doesn't kill the dog? If our friend here just has the original version of Pasteurella pestis, as we used to call it, then he just gives us another chance to poke around in the blind alley. But if he has— (156)

4

Ray Greek, "Ray Greek on Medical Research," interview given to Antidote Europe, June 15, 2010, antidote-europe.org, accessed June 24, 2013.

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The closed space and impossible progression suggested by the phrase "blind alley" are counterbalanced by the final dash of the cue, opening a blank space and allowing Chee to prolong the sentence: a dialogue follows in which the two men end each other's sentences, showing that both look for the truth. Yet one is the detective and one is the criminal, as the reader will discover in the end; but in their common use of a scientific discourse, there is a blurring of frontiers misleading the reader. Woody's mad work on those infected animals threatens the whole Navajo community and to keep on acting in what he thinks is the right way, he murders two people, considering it is the price to pay; when the truth is revealed he says: "Two people. We're trying to save humanity" (321). This is the same will to save people that leads Catherine Pollard to "pump cyanide dust into the burrow" to exterminate the infected colony of prairie dogs that Woody wanted to protect because according to him, "They might be the key to saving millions of lives" (317). It is to prevent Woody, the scientist, from preserving those prairie dogs infected with the bacteria but surviving, and thus from contaminating the whole reservation, that she wants to pump "calcium cyanide" into the soil; now the chemical, according to another researcher, Krause, "wipes out everything. Pack rats, rattlesnakes, burrowing owls, earthworms, spiders, fleas, everything alive" (300). The use of the list emphasizes the danger of that chemical destroying everything. The researcher admits that researchers "used to use it to clean [the] infected burrows" (300). This confession and the fact that he says that "it's dangerous to handle," and the mention of the protective suit taken by Catherine Pollard when she wants to pump the chemical into the ground and worn by other researchers going to the spot, are a way of showing how researchers, animated with good intentions, have placed a very dangerous chemical into the Navajo ground and to kill infected animals, they have probably killed all fauna and quite probably caused other mortal diseases in men. The blind use of animals by those scientists who, in a sort of passionate megalomania, think they can save mankind, and to do that, run the risk of killing all life locally, shows two conceptions of the animal kingdom. The presence of laboratory animals close to beautiful nature also appears in Anita Desai's Fire on the Mountain, which is not a detective novel even if it ends on a murder. In a beautiful Indian landscape, there appears a kind of factory, which is in fact a medical institute, from which smoke inscribes in the Indian landscape the violent death of those animals. It is presented as "enormous concrete walls of what looked like a factory, for sharp chimneys thrust out cushions and scarves of smoke, black on the milky blue of the afternoon sky. Chutes emerging from its back wall seemed built to disgorge factory waste into the ravine" (Fire on the Mountain, 42). Two pages further, Ram Lal, the man working for Raka's great-grandmother, says to the young

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girl that it is the Pasteur Institute, "doctors make serum for injections." He adds that “[t]hey have rabbits and guinea pigs there, too, many animals. They use them for tests." Raka's curiosity gives the opportunity of evoking the implantation of European medical institutes, which have a positive side as they make serum to heal people, but at the same time they use animal experimentation and the rest of the evocation opens on death and pollution of the beautiful place by animal corpses. The chutes are said "to empty the bones and ashes of dead animals down into the ravine. It's a bad place" (44). Raka notes the quantity of smoke and sees the "incongruity" of those walls and "their oddly oppressive threat." Everything around the institute, although devoted to medicine and meant to cure people in the whole country, only appears as a strange element, "a square dragon" (42) for the little girl, a place contaminating nature and carrying death. The inclusion of such places in beautiful landscapes in Anita Desai's India or in Tony Hillerman's Navajo reserve warns readers while showing two conceptions of the animal world.

Two conceptions of animal life In Hillerman's novel, the Navajos have a relationship of respect for the animals like all First Americans, whereas the researchers, whatever their origin, regard them as useful instruments. For the Navajos, simple insects' lives have to be respected. A spider on the window is delicately taken by McGinnis, a former colleague whom Leaphorn visits to ask him questions and Leaphorn "remembered once seeing McGinnis capture a wasp the same way, evicting it unharmed through the same window." (The First Eagle, 71) A laboratory animal is seen with compassionate eyes: "The poor little deer" (241). The eagle that Chee wants to capture to save Jano and avoid his execution is respected and his grand-uncle asks him to explain to the eagle why he must capture him, which Chee will do. On the contrary, the researchers see in them only scientific specimens useful for their research. The way the animals are treated disrespectfully contrasts with the traditional Navajo attitude. Krause "held up the tiny form of a mouse, dangling it by its long tail," "dropped the animal into another of the traps." (240) Contrasting with that utilitarian, cold conception of the animal world, Lieutenant Chee, when considering the capture of the first eagle, thinks that he "would be violating the moral code of the Dine, who did not take lightly the killing of anything;" (254) and when he captures the eagle, he says to him: "First Eagle," […]. "Be calm. Be peaceful. I will treat you with respect. […].” "You will go where all eagles go, Chee said, but he was sad when he said it." (278) The sacred animal is opposed to the "lab specimen" (317). To the respect at the core of the Native American relationship with

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animals, is added the spiritual dimension since he evokes the world beyond; besides, the character's sadness shows some empathy with the bird, totally absent from the researchers' perception.

Animals as judges In The First Eagle, it is a simple goatherd woman who, by telling the story of what she saw on the day of the murder, allows the police to solve the inquiry. On the one hand there is the goatherd woman appearing there with her small herd of goats like all her ancestors from time immemorial. She is there with her herd as Nakai, Chee's grand-uncle, has always been—"His flock would be high in the mountain pastures. The coyotes would be waiting in the fringes of the timber, as they always were" (254). The immemorial face to face between animals tamed by men and wild animals is opposed by a more dangerous face to face between a new kind of man, dressed in futuristic clothes, protecting himself from the dangers of the chemicals he uses whereas those who are on the same land, like the goatherd and all people passing there, are unprotected. That strange clothing ("Positive Air Purifying Respirator suit", 241) gives the scientist the appearance of a supernatural creature in the old goatherd woman's perception: "Here was what Mrs Notah had seen behind the screen of junipers at Yells Back Butte. The witch who looked part snowman and part elephant" (239). Nature and supernature mingle behind the "screen" of nature (junipers); technology is mistaken for mythology and man is seen in his animality; the scientist is seen as a witch by the Navajo witness who seems to stand for the land's eyes and memories. But this character has nothing supernatural about him and simply gives the visible evidence of a conscious poisoning of the land since he protects himself. When Chee and Leaphorn go to the place to get the old woman's evidence, they "[find] themselves engulfed in goats. And not just goats. There, beside the track, was an aged woman on a large roan horse watching them" (310). It is as if they were engulfed in a world of original truth, made concrete by the goats' movement and the woman's gaze. While she is telling her story about what she saw on that day, the horse and the goats appear as the judges of men's actions: "The horse stared at Chee suspiciously, the goats milled around, […]" (310). The suspicious gaze of the horse and the goats' movement appear as both a judgement and an imprisonment of the human world. As they see Leaphorn and Chee leading their inquiry now, they have seen those who murder other men or women or those who murder the land, like Catherine Pollard poisoning the territory of the infected prairie dogs.

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Diseases and land pollution The numerous place-names clearly situate Hillerman's novel in an area that was affected by various kinds of pollution. "Black Mesa," alluded to several times in this novel and in others, is the place where a coalmine polluted the Navajo and Hopi's drinking water. Literary works often speak about reality. There are many examples of contamination of the Navajo land. The Black Mesa coalmine, situated within the Navajo and Hopi reservations, used water from the Black Mesa N. aquifer, which was the only drinking source for the Navajo and Hopi population. This mine was exploited by the Peabody Western Coal Company. The populations were asked to move off as their land was destroyed. Articles and reports mention the mortal diseases due to the pollution by nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide and mercury poisoning. The Center for Biological Diversity wrote in 2009: “Peabody’s pumping has depleted wells and decreased surface flows in area springs and creeks upon which residents and wildlife depend. Despite evidence of continuing aquifer deterioration, the Office of Surface Mining and Peabody are seeking to continue extracting 1,236 acre-feet of groundwater from the Navajo Aquifer for mining operations throughout the permit period ending 2025”5 Besides, uranium mining in the Navajo reservation, which took place from the 1940s until the 1960s still has impacts on the population nowadays: Hundreds of abandoned mines have not been cleaned up and the land is dotted with contaminated tailings. These mines were left with no warning of the health hazards. Within this area, the Navajo peoples have suffered from high cancer rates and respiratory problems. Cancer rates among Navajo teenagers living near mine tailings are 17 times the national average. It was in the 1970s, that Navajo uranium miners and their families began to see the effects of the mine. (Smith 2007, 8-9)

Obviously, Nakai's symptoms in The First Eagle ("a racking cough", 256, "his lungs making an odd sound", 256) reveal his "lung cancer" (257) making him die slowly. His cancer may be due to the pollution of the area. He lives "north end of the Chuska Mountains" (253) and went to see a doctor at Farmington (256). Now this region is affected by pollution due to power plants as some scientific papers show it: 5

“Pollution Permit for Peabody's Black Mesa Coal Mine Withdrawn by EPA Following Appeal by Tribal and Conservation Groups” https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2009/black-mesa-12-032009.html, accessed 6 September 2020.

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The potential impact of Sithe's SO2 emissions on the view from Mesa Verde into New Mexico was examined using a similar CMC modeling set up as that used to investigate the potential impact of Sithe's SO2 emissions on the Grand Canyon and national parks in Utah. However, instead of aggregating the concentration over the respective national park, the concentrations were averaged over the view shed from Mesa Verde to the Chuska Mountains. (Schichtel, 12)

The visual pollution that was to be demonstrated a few years after the novel was published, links the fact of preventing people from reading stories in the sky and the pollution affecting their lungs and killing them. The pollution by uranium in Navajo reservations is also shown in another detective novel by Tony Hillerman, People of Darkness. The starting point of the plot is the search for a box and an explosion at an oil well that occurred many years before. As the novel progresses, the reader guesses that there is a link between the uranium found below the oil well that allowed one character to become rich, the box containing some black stones and the death of several men who had participated in the exploitation of oil thirty years before and who all died of cancer. The end will reveal that the stones collected by a geologist were "pitchblende," another name for Uraninite, and that this mineral is "the hottest kind of uranium deposit" (People of Darkness, 289). The devastation of the land by exploitation also appeared in Australia where numerous sites were polluted and devastated by the Europeans appropriating the land. As Colette Selles writes: Conflicts were more and more numerous when European settlement developed, and with the exploitation of the land, of the surface—for the pastoralists, for instance—and of its depths whose treasures were soon discovered. After gold on the foothills of Mount Buninyong, in a spot which grew into Ballarat—the starting-point of the Australian goldrush in 1851—and in the Barrier Ranges near Broken Hill, other riches, tin, copper, silver, bauxite, were discovered, and later uranium. And to extract precious ore, many natural spaces were cleaved, dug into, torn, such as Mount Isa, Radium Hill, to name only a few, leaving scars on the landscape and on the men. (Selles 2010, 679)

She adds that "Uranium was first discovered there and at Mount Painter, in the Flinders Ranges, at the beginning of the twentieth century and other sites were discovered later. It has been a much-debated issue because of the potential danger linked to uranium, and because some deposits were in Aboriginal land."6 This is denounced in some Australian novels like Richard Flanagan's 6 http://www.southaustralianhistory.com.au/uranium.htm. Site accessed on 19/08/09. In Selles 679.

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The Sound of One Hand Clapping or Alexis Wright's Carpentaria. In Wright's novel, mining is assimilated to rape, as Colette Selles underlines: the diggings of the "multinational mining company" whose diggings are assimilated to rape: "they set about pillaging the region's treasure trove: the publicly touted curve of an underground range embedded with minerals." (Wright, 8) (Selles 2014, 240). In the same way, in Hillerman's novels, particularly in The First Eagle, the reader can guess a link between pollution and the plague. Scientists have put forward the hypothesis that factors other than microbial, and among them, the environment, caused Yersinia pestis infections: […] comparisons against modern genomes reveal no unique derived positions in the medieval organism, indicating that the perceived increased virulence of the disease during the Black Death may not have been due to bacterial phenotype. These findings support the notion that factors other than microbial genetics, such as environment, vector dynamics and host susceptibility, should be at the forefront of epidemiological discussions regarding emerging Y. pestis infections.7

The pollution of the land that affected the Navajo Reservation after scientific experiments were made there, demonstrates the link between habitat alteration and prairie dogs' disease inferring the plague at the core of the novel. A study reads: Our research focuses on the combined effects of habitat alteration and wildlife community structure on the risk of disease outbreaks in the black-tailed prairie dog, a species of conservation concern. […] Predicting disease outbreaks in this system involves consideration of multiple population stressors […]. Blood diseases like the plague spread through contact between black-tailed prairie dogs and the many alternate mammalian hosts that occur in the same habitat. Therefore, our research addresses effects of landscape structure and land use on the dynamics of black-tailed prairie dogs and on the dynamics of the alternate host community […]. Thus, our study addresses effects of habitat, host community and pathogen community on risk in this species.8

In history the plague only appeared in places where misery and an unhealthy atmosphere prevailed. As scientists have demonstrated it seems that the bacteria causing the plague can only develop against an unhealthy background. So, if the prairie dogs, which are central to the detective story, were infected, it may be because their environment was unhealthy due to the 7

N. C. Stenseth et al. "Plague: past, present, and future". Plos Med. 5, e3 (2008). "Habitat Alteration and Disease Effects on Black-Tailed Prairie Dogs" in EPA United States Environmental Protection Agency. www.epa.gov/ncer/events/calendar/2004/may12/agenda.html, accessed May 24, 2018.

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introduction of elements—wastes or anything brought about by human transformations—that changed their way of life and their biotope. The story takes place not far from Black Mesa and alludes to the transformation of the landscape, due to human constructions generating a land of "desolation:" The years that had passed since he'd accessed Short Mountain hadn't changed it much—certainly not for the better. The parking area in front was still hardpacked clay, too dry and dense to encourage weeds. The old GMC truck he'd parked next to years ago still rested wheel-less on blocks, slowly rusting away. The 1968 Chevy pickup parked in the shade of a juniper at the corner of the sheep pens looked like the one McGinnis had always driven, and a faded sign nailed to the hay barn still proclaimed THIS STORE FOR SALE, INQUIRE WITHIN. But today the benches on the shady porch were empty, with drifts of trash under them. The windows looked even dustier than Leaphorn remembered. In fact the trading-post looked deserted, and the gusty breeze chasing tumbleweeds and dust past the porch added to the sense of desolation. (The First Eagle, 62-63)

In this landscape painting, in which the intertexts of the valley of ashes in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and the ghost villages covered with wind-blown dust in many westerns mingle, the narrator opposes two worlds: this new world of desolation characterized by emptiness ("empty", "deserted"), and absence (absence of vegetation—"hard-packed clay, too dry and dense to encourage weeds," absence of wheels—"wheel-less"—). This sense of desolation is emphasized by the dust and the rusting car; even in this landscape transformed by the car civilisation, the very object causing the change is empty and useless, as is the "faded sign," echoing Dr T. J. Eckelburg's empty eyes on the sign situated in the valley of ashes in The Great Gatsby. This landscape of desolation is opposed to the only elements of life present here: the juniper and the "sheep pens" evoking life as it was before, where man was living in union with the vegetal and animal land. The landscape reveals two conceptions of the land and of man's relationship to it, as appearing in the dialogue between Leaphorn and Louisa, the ethnologist accompanying him in his inquiry: He waved at the ruined Hogan, its door missing, its roof fallen, its north wall tumbled. Beyond it stood the remains of a brush arbor, a sheep pen formed of stacked stones, two stone pylons that once would have supported timbers on which water storage barrels had rested. "Sad," he said. "Some people would call it picturesque." (187)

This sight of modern ruins reveals several things: the sadness appearing in Leaphorn's mind is linked with the fact that those ruins show that the young generation respects nothing—"But McGinnis was complaining that a lot of

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young Navajos, not just the city ones, don't respect the old ways these days. They ignore the taboos […]. He thinks some of them tore into this place, looking for stuff they could sell. He said they even dug this deep hole where the fire pit was" (188). The landscape tells the story of the gap between generations and of the loss of traditional and spiritual values replaced by a world dominated by money alone. Louisa's answer reminds him of exterior people's perception, a tourist's perception seeing picturesqueness there, that is to say literally something deserving to be painted, something detached from its reality, which is people's poverty or diseases. And there is a third thing suggested by this description, which is the allusion to "water storage barrels [that] had rested," linked with the notion of a remote past ("once"). This suggests that those barrels may still contain some water, but a stagnant, unhealthy water allowing the development of bacteria, hence of diseases. This landscape speaking about Navajo life tells many stories in the blanks of its missing elements or of its hollow elements (all the gaps replacing the missing elements—the door "missing", the roof "fallen", the north wall "tumbled," and also the barrel or the pit dug by young people looking for treasure). That landscape full of holes evoking time passing but also misery tells the story of the area. It shows the telescoping of a world speaking about tradition—"the fire pit"— and of a world speaking about an illusory quest for fortune only bringing emptiness and disease. Symbolically it is in the hogan that the murderer has buried his victim, which is the climax of that general lack of respect for life and for the Native American world. The devastation of the land, the human and nonhuman diseases and the criminal plot interweave and reflect one another to denounce the damage done on Navajo reservations by the exploitation of uranium mines. The reader cannot fail to remember reports, TV programmes and papers about the numerous breathing troubles that the Navajo population suffered after the setting up of plants or the exploitation of uranium mines. Using the language of fairy tales, Arnold Carrie wrote an article entitled "Once Upon a Mine. The Legacy of Uranium on the Navajo Reservation" in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives illustrated by photographs by Joshua Lott, showing waste outside a uranium mine on the Navajo Reservation. Nasem Racka, a geologist, journalist and writer, says: To see this land is to see the indifference of America, it's callous, self-serving, greed-infected side. The side that treats people like cogs in a machine, and treats machines as if it were gods. In the Navajo situation, the machine was the cold-war's military industrial complex. We needed uranium for bombs, and we, the US Government, "were willing to do anything to get it," according to LA Times Reporter Judy Pasternak in her important work Yellow Dirt. (Rakha, "A Killing Wind")

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She reminds the reader of the fact that "the Environmental Protection Agency has evaluated 683 abandoned mines on the Navajo Nation." Arnold Carrie writes that "the EPA has mapped 521 abandoned uranium mines on the reservation, ranging from small holes dug by a single prospector into the side of a mesa to large commercial mining operations," adding under the map showing all the red points corresponding to such poisonous spots that "[t]his map indicates the 521 sites mapped by the EPA, but there are estimated to be hundreds more" (Carrie, "Once Upon a Mine"). Nasem Racka is both a scientist and journalist and also a storyteller and writer. So, she can warn people about the dangers and denounce the wounds made to Native lands either through her scientific approach as a geologist, or through the media as a journalist. But she is also a poet and a fiction writer whose novel The Crying Tree was widely praised. She is one of those writers who, even when they have other ways of expressing their ideas, choose imagination as if it had more weight than reality. Leslie Marmon Silko denounced the poisonous wastelands left by abandoned uranium mines in her novels. And if the journalist Arnold Carrie uses the language of fairy tales to denounce the contamination of the Navajo landscape by the uranium mines—"Once Upon a Mine"—, it is to draw the reader's attention thanks to the pun and the discrepancy between the language of fairy tales and the fatal pollution of the Navajo land: the reader will be more attracted to the strange association than to a realistic title. The Navajo land is also highly polluted by the emission of nitrogen oxide due to the Four Corners Power Plant which opened in 1963 and the San Juan Generating Station. Studies demonstrate that the pollution in the area was "ten times worse than the city of Los Angeles."9 Sandra Steingraber, in her book, Living Downstream, showed the close link between cancer and the pollution of our environment. Native American writers, like Leslie Marmon Silko, spoke about the issue. She alludes to that pollution in Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead: In [Almanac of The Dead]—as in her first novel, Ceremony—Silko alludes to the history of uranium mining and the widespread, indiscriminate effects of that industry, in ways that move beyond oppositional rhetoric and unite nonindigenous and indigenous cultures in their concern for ecological sustainability. (Waterman 40)

Silko dealt with the theme of the contamination of the land in several books as Scott Slovic wrote: "the themes of ominous contamination and destruction and 9

Kimberley Smith, " Climate Change on the Navajo Nation Lands", Darwin, Australia, International Expert Group Meeting On Indigenous Peoples And Climate Change, 2008.

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the hope for re-purification, evident in Almanac and earlier in Ceremony, emerge in the meditation on water, too,"10 a meditation appearing in Sacred Water. Her depiction of the contamination of the land goes together with the observation of the nonhuman world and of a double recovery through the revival of animal life and her spiritual experience. The toads are the living sign of the change in the land. First she speaks about them in terms of music and harmony with a rich lexical field of sounds: "For a long time, I had a great many Sonoran red-spotted toads around the rain water pool behind my house […] Hundreds of toads used to sing all night in a magnificent chorus with complex harmonies" (Sacred Water, 63). This beautiful evocation of the chorus of toads is soon replaced by a silence provoked by the contamination of the land. As Scott Slovic says, quoting the passage: "Two pages later, she expands her explanation from one scene of destruction to the broader destructive implications of industrial technological disaster" (Slovic, 117). After the departure of her guests and their dog, she thus describes the new silence of the land: The night-long choirs of multitudes of toads ceased. The Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster occurred not long afterward and may also have affected the toad population. Last summer the pool had polly-wogs again, the descendants of the red-spotted toads which had survived radioactive fall out and the boys with the dog. The night-long choirs have not resumed yet; the toads need a few years more to recover. (Sacred Water, 66)

The passage starts with a sentence whose structure and sounds speak about the shifting from the music of life to silence. Long or compound words ("nightlong," "multitudes") and open sounds ("night," "choirs," "multitudes") give way to one unique word, "ceased," the semantism of which is duplicated by the strength of the rhythm, a monosyllable with a closed sound ending the sentence like a definite stop. But in the end, the lexical coming back of "[t]he night-long choirs" does not in reality foreshadow their future coming back since it is accompanied with a negation, but the sentence ends like a hope on the verb "recover." Silko described her book as "a soothing, healing antidote to the relentless horror loose in this world" (Sacred Water, 26). All her work in general appears as healing literature. This note of hope existing in Silko's healing books can also be found in Tony Hillerman's detective story People of Darkness since at the end the detective Chee only wants to find the beauty of the landscape again; he wants a ceremony of purification to change all the

10

Scott Slovic. "Leslie Marmon Silko Ceremony (1977)", in Literature and the Environment, 116.

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violence due to greed and to the contamination of the Navajo landscape by greed linked with the discovery of uranium: But he knew the cause and the cure. Changing Woman had taught them about it when she formed the first clans of the Dinee from her own skin. The strange ways of strange people hurt the spirit, turned the Navajo away from beauty. Returning to beauty required a cure. […] Then there would be another eight days for the songs and the poetry and the sand paintings to re-create the past and restore the spirit. […] The arrangements would take weeks—picking the site, spreading the word, getting the proper singer, arranging the food. But when it was over, he would go again with beauty around him. (People of Darkness, 304-305)

The detective story allows the writer to introduce the society’s problems and to speak about the wounds inflicted on the land and its inhabitants. The holes made in the ground to find oil and then uranium led to holes in men's bones and bodies. Land and men are linked by this destruction and it is through Navajo myths and spirituality that recovery can appear. The detective finds the reasons for the violence building up in the novel and necessary for the detective story to exist but in the end, once the mystery is solved, the detective story naturally glides into a spiritual dimension. The Navajo detective, who is a detective but who is first a Navajo who defends his land, needs to shift from "the white fur [of a polar bear] stained with blood" to the "blue and white purity" of the sky and snow (304). The last violent scene with the murderer seen as a witch, dying on the skin of a polar bear, is quite symbolical: the dying human predator's blood contaminates the dead predator's skin symbolizing wild nature crushed and killed. Arctic nature appearing out of place in a Navajo interior symbolizes all the violence done to nature and men and summarized by the detective genre in which the chain of killings might also reflect the chain of killings due to greed linked with resources in the whole world. The Navajo reservation is a microcosm and the white bear skin stained with the blood of the murderer becomes a sort of ecological allegory. And the eponymous people of Darkness whose symbol is the mole appearing in the amulets made of the highly radioactive black stone that gives those who bear it a cancer, reveal a dark connection: the mineral world, the animal world and the human world are linked through a half-symbolical half-real evocation of the underground: a place of darkness because it is the place where uranium has been found, darkness because of its radioactive power and because of men's greed. The Native American context of Tony Hillerman's detective stories gave him the opportunity to show the reality of Navajo life in his fictitious stories, never separating the detective plot from the Navajo culture. This is probably

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why we can find echoes between his novels and Native novels or essays like Silko's. Leslie Marmon Silko, in Sacred Water, by alluding to the Chernobyl disaster that was to come, includes the contamination of her own particular landscape and the small pond that was once living with multitudes of toads, in the world's contamination, thus showing that everything is linked and that the toads ceasing to sing near her little pool speak in their silence about the world silenced by pollution and disasters caused by technology like the nuclear industry. The toads' songs are a real and poetic way of speaking about balance and harmony, which Hillerman also did in People of Darkness, The First Eagle, The Shape-Shifter and all his novels. The resolution of Leaphorn and Chee's inquiries is for the Navajo detectives a way of recovering balance in the Navajo land. In Canada, Rudy Wiebe alluded to the contamination of Native populations by radium. In Playing Dead, he mentions the discovery of radium on the banks of Great Bear Lake in 1930. Whereas the Canadian Government had published texts indicating the dangers of an exposure to radioactive particles, the lore was carried by Sahtu Dene, who were not warned of the danger. Nature tells the stories of its roots and of its wounds. Sciences and myths may be related in fiction to show the human actions endangering immemorial nature. Thus, in Hillerman's novel, stories read in Nature and linking microbiology and mythology appear through the detective plot.

Mythology and Microbiology united to speak about preservation Science is at the core of The First Eagle. The language of sciences and particularly microbiology and epidemiology, is used in connection with the language of mythology. The researcher dressed in an isolating suit is mistaken for a mythological character. The language of sciences is very present with the scientific names of diseases—"bubonic plague", "lung cancer", "hantavirus" (8)—, the Latin names of the bacteria—"Pasteurella pestis" (7), "Yersinia pestis" (8)—, and the various medicines, either general ones like "a broadspectrum antibiotic," or more precise like "doxycycline" or "streptomycin" (7). And the laboratory, the experiments, and some objects—like the microscope and slides (197-199) add to this scientific context. On the one hand there are the researchers who carefully—and sometimes madly—study microbiology and on the other hand, there are the traditional Navajos and Hopi who come back to the sources of their culture—like Chee visiting his grand-uncle—, to situate themselves and understand what happened. Mythology and microbiology are linked, even through opposition. To the laboratory, are

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opposed the kiva, the hogan and the pastures where goats and sheep graze. Leaphorn speaks to Louisa about Dr Woody. "Even though Louisa's field was ethnology and, even worse, mythology—on the extreme opposite end of the academic spectrum from microbiology—Louisa had heard of Woody" (112). One character, and not the least, since he finds the solution of the detective story, makes the association between microbiology and mythology. This is even more obvious at the end when the old goatherd woman sees the woman in white as a mythical character, "a snowwoman" (271). The protecting suit made thanks to the highest form of technology and being at the same time the visible proof that some scientists pollute the Navajo land, metamorphoses the real scientist into a mythical character. It is because the goatherd, both a secondary character and an apparently eternal presence on the Navajo land, saw the double figure—the scientist and the myth—that the detective story is solved. Catherine Pollard was double indeed, since she wanted to preserve a community and at the same time took the risk of killing all life in their environment and polluting their soil, thus threatening their life. The association of microbiology and mythology is a way of speaking about the double aspect of those scientists, belonging to a community and threatening it to try to protect the world. Sandra Steingraber, in her study of the relationship between the Environment and Cancer, sees science "as a tool of persuasion" and also "as a shield," which it can be. But in his novel Tony Hillerman, like Mary Shelley nearly two centuries before, shows science as a dangerous weapon whenever it is used in an unconscious way. Using both a technical bacteriological vocabulary and beautiful landscape paintings, he leads his readers into the Navajo Reservation to show the dangers to which the Navajo and Hopi are exposed due to diseases with no visible explanations but at the same time he shows still more dangers in the presence of mad scientists participating in the contamination and/or pollution of the land. Detective literature is no mere entertainment here: it is a way of making us think about the relationship of men and the world, men and animals through the observation of two ways of thinking; the scientific way opposed to the traditional one, allowing us to have some insight into the Native world. The popularity of the genre—the detective novel—allows the ecological message to be more widely spread; and the detective inquiry is for the reader the opportunity to have a better knowledge of Native American life and to become aware of the dangers threatening their land and their health because of man's behaviour; it is also for them the opportunity to question themselves about their relationship with the land and the nonhuman world.

PART 2 LANDSCAPE PAINTINGS REVEALING MAN'S RELATIONSHIP WITH THE WORLD

CHAPTER SIX MAPS OF BIODIVERSITY: TRAVEL WRITERS' PERCEPTION OF THE DESTRUCTION OF NATURE

"Men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution." Aldo Leopold1 "The traveller must be born again on the road, and earn a passport from the elements…" Henry David Thoreau2

Travellers have an immediate contact with the land and their sense of observation shows their awareness of the nonhuman presence. The description of nature can appear as a step towards ecological awareness3 and the mere mention of tiny flowers or insects can lead the reader to be aware of his/her place in the world. The construction of travel books following the geographical organization of the journey makes them appear as literary maps on which precise descriptions give a good idea of biodiversity. This biodiversity reveals the richness of nature and sometimes the threat weighing on some species.

1

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac [1949]. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966, 117. 2 Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack River, [1849] Carl F. Hovde, William L. Howart, and Elizabeth Hall Witherell (ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, 306. 3 Some parts of this chapter have their origin in a conference I gave at Meliksah University, Kayseri (Turkey) on 30 April 2014, and I would like to thank Irina Kantarbaeva-Bill and the English department, who made the conference possible.

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Vegetable biodiversity: the tiny to lead to awareness through the botanist's eyes Nearly all 19th-century travel texts appearing in magazines, travel books and mountaineering accounts devote pages to the various species of flowers and plants seen during the travels or ascents. Yet those travellers were not all botanists but the botanical detail seemed to be very important for them to describe the places visited. There are two types of vegetable representations: romantic representations of intertwined trees and plants like Gustave Doré's representation of the Lake of Oo in the Pyrenees in Henry Blackburne's The Pyrenees (1870),4 the representation of giant ferns in the Amazonian forest in some nineteenth-century magazines or the giant groundsels beside which the traveller Mackinder poses.5 Those general views suggest romantic nature or exoticism. But more often in the text, the traveller gives a long list of all the plants encountered, particularly the smallest ones. The precision of those botanical lists and descriptions partakes of a scientific intention and links those travel texts with all the preceding voyages of discovery. But it can have a deeper function. French philosopher Gaston Bachelard links the botanist's eyes with a return to childhood: L'homme à la loupe barre—bien simplement—le monde familier. Il est regard frais devant objet neuf. La loupe du botaniste, c'est l'enfance retrouvée. Elle redonne au botaniste le regard agrandissant de l'enfant. Avec elle, il rentre au jardin, dans le jardin. [...]. Ainsi le minuscule, porte étroite s'il en est, ouvre un monde. Le détail d'une chose peut être signe d'un monde nouveau, d'un monde qui, comme tous les mondes, contient les attributs de la grandeur. La miniature est un des gîtes de la grandeur.6

4

Gustave Doré, "Le Lac d'Oo", in Henry Blackburn, The Pyrenees, London: Sampson, Low, Marston and Co., 1870, 265. 5 H.J. Mackinder. The First Ascent of Mount Kenya, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991, between page 216 and 217. 6 "The man with a magnifying glass crosses out—quite simply—the familiar world. He has fresh eyes in a deep vision of the world sending man back to his childhood in front of a new object. The botanist's magnifying glass is recovered childhood. It restores the child's magnifying eyes for the botanist. With it he comes into the garden again. [...] Thus the tiny, a narrow door if any, opens a world. The detail of a thing may be the sign of a new world, of a world that, like all worlds, contains all the attributes of grandeur. The miniature is one of the shelters of grandeur" (Bachelard 146, translation mine).

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Couldn't we go as far as saying that it may be a return to the childhood of the world? To a time when the tiniest elements of Nature were untouched? Is not the perception of "grandeur" in the tiny thing the reflection of the awareness of the deep richness of the world and of its beauty, that awareness that can only lead those who are going to read those apparently factual descriptions of plants to the will of preserving them? The English botanist George Bentham crossed the Pyrenees to make an inventory of vegetable species. Starting from the observation and description of vegetable species, then he speaks about the geological structure of the mountains and then about the local traditions. The apparently dissecting eyes of the botanist magnifying the detail to erase the general place is in fact a way of seeing the whole place by starting from the smallest element in a close-up that is gradually widening to make us see the whole landscape and the people living in it. The detail leads to the visibility of life in a region that the traveller discovers and it shows his/her awareness of what the detail reveals on a larger scale. John Muir, in his travels in Alaska, simply gives lists of flowers and plants to show the richness of the place: On the edge of some of the snow-banks I noticed cassiope. The thin, green, moss-like patches seen from camp are composed of a rich, shaggy growth of cassiope, white-flowered bryanthus, dwarf vaccinium with bright pink flowers, saxifrages, anemones, bluebells, gentians, small erigeron, pedicularis, dwarf willow and a few species of grasses. Of these, cassiope tetragona is far the most influential and beautiful. (Muir, 217)

The list is dominated by the cassiope, the name of which recurs three times in the small passage and once with its scientific Latin name; the Arctic white heather (since it is its popular name) is shown both through its aesthetic aspect ("beautiful"), its mythical origin (its name) and in its relationship with the other elements of the land ("influential"). The list reconstitutes the vegetable landscape and by reproducing the proximity of the plants on the page, the traveller gives an idea of the ecosystem. The function of lists of plants in many travel books may be explained by two nature defenders and mountain lovers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Muir, who perhaps give the key of the botanical list. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote Lettres élémentaires sur la botanique, said in his first letter: "I always believed that you could be a very great botanist without knowing the name of one plant" (Lettres élémentaires, translation mine). This is a paradox from the philosopher who was interested in botanics and in the identification of plants. He said that you have "to see before naming" but he evokes the notion of naming. Besides, to teach a

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student botanics, he used technical terms, and even published a Dictionary of Botanics. The fact that Rousseau came back to naming in spite of his initial assertion, may show that the naming of the plant is necessary to recognize it, to give the plant its identity. The plant exists in nature without needing a name. But naming is the assertion of the human relationship to the plant. Of all living creatures, man alone can name things. Animals have a language, they can communicate, but they cannot name anything. The botanist or the traveller becoming a botanist, by inserting lists of plants into his narrative, originally reveals the relationship between man and nature. By naming the plant, he simply asserts his belonging to mankind. John Muir is among the travellers who convey the importance they perceive in plants by what could be called a "fever of naming," to take up Thomas Wharton's words in his novel Icefields when he speaks about the "fever of [place-]naming" in Canada after World War 1 (Wharton 217). In fact, this only reveals the joy of discovery for the traveller who can see the tiniest particles of nature. Muir had become a botanist and in The Mountains of California, he speaks about "mints, gilias, nemophilas, castilleias, and innumerable compositae [that] were so crowded together that, had ninety-nine per cent of them been taken away, the plain would still have seemed to any but Californians extravagantly flowery."7 The whole chapter is filled with lists of flower names to show the vegetal variety of the place, a biodiversity he constantly emphasizes in his descriptions. He makes the distinction between the native flowers and those that have been introduced, insisting on profusion and colours, evoking "a few new species introduced, such as the hill lupines, mints, and gilias. The colors show finely when thus held to view on the slopes, patches of red, purple, blue, yellow, and white, blending around the edged, the whole appearing at a little distance like a map colored in sections" (ibid.). This vegetal map is split up into "manzanita and ceanothus of different species, mixed with rhamnus, cercis, pickringia, cherry, amelanchier and adenostoma, in shaggy, interlocking thickets, and many species of hosackia, clover, monardella, castilleja, etc., in the openings" (ibid.). The reader feels as if the text became the projection of the vegetable luxuriance and colours. Further on, associating, as many nature lovers do, visual beauty to music, he adds: "To the northward, in Humboldt and the adjacent counties, whole hillsides are covered with rhododendron, making a glorious melody of bee-bloom in the spring" (ibid.). And he adds a list of plants found there: 7

John Muir, The Mountains of California, chapter XVI "The Bee-Pastures," http://vault.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/the_mountains_of_california /chapter_16.aspx, accessed July 21, 2017.

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Chapter Six And the Western azalea, hardly less flowery, grows in massy thickets three to eight feet high around the edges of groves and woods as far south as San Luis Obispo, usually accompanied by manzanita; while the valleys, with their varying moisture and shade, yield a rich variety of the smaller honeyflowers, such as mentha, lycopus, micromeria, audibertia, trichostema, and other mints; with vaccinium, wild strawberry, geranium, calais, and goldenrod; and in the cool glens along the stream-banks, where the shade of trees is not too deep, spiraea, dog-wood, heteromeles, and calycanthus, and many species of rubus form interlacing tangles, some portion of which continues in bloom for months. (Muir, ibid.)

John Muir's lists echo all the lists made by botanists and naturalists, when they observe nature and want to represent it with the greatest precision. Yet the list has a deeper function.

The list as an epiphany The man who was the first president of the Sierra Club, the president of the American Alpine Club from 1908 to 1910, and who was at the origin of the protection of the wilderness in the United States of America and in the world, made lists of plants that revealed the botanist's enthusiasm. Muir's lists evoke both mountains and the protection of vegetable species through the pleasure of naming plants, of recognizing them. In those lists of plants inserted in texts, the didactic aim is obvious. Travellers want to make readers discover the vegetable profusion they have discovered, and to reconstitute it on the page through the technique of the list. But there is also a deeper dimension. By noting all the vegetable names, including Latin scientific names, the traveller and botanist comes back to the moment of the identification of the plant: when he names it on the page, he introduces it to the reader, but he also comes back to the moment when, after meeting it in nature, he identified it on the spot or later in a closed space, at home or elsewhere, thus prolonging the moment of discovery and the mountain space that he makes enter his space, which is never closed in fact. The named plant is the image of the botanist's deep link with the wild space in which he saw the plant. Naming it is not an act of appropriation for the botanist; it is an act of recognition and gratefulness: scientific identification but also gratitude in front of that small element of nature showing both the force of life in its apparent fragility and speaking to him about his relationship with the world. The French astronomer Hubert Reeves opens his book J'ai vu une fleur sauvage. L'herbier de Malicorne with a Japanese haiku saying how the beauty of the flower is enhanced when we know its name:

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J'ai vu une fleur sauvage. Quand j'au su son nom Je l'ai trouvée plus belle.8

Hubert Reeves speaks about a friend of his family, a Trappist monk and a botanist, Father Louis-Marie, who, when Hubert Reeves was a child, took the children to the country in Quebec and "introduced the flowers to them." The choice of this verb "introduce" ("présenter") suggests a meeting and this is highlighted by the story of the woman who said to him that she "did not want to crowd her mind with all those flower names" and then changed her mind since she said that "now, she loved acknowledging those flowers with their names. It is part of the pleasure to meet them again" (Reeves, 15). This is exactly what I felt when my father introduced flowers to me. First, I did not understand his joy when he found the name of a flower after enthusiastically making researches in books and suddenly giving me its name with a smile full of intense joy. One day I understood as I understood why my mother kept her first herbarium like a treasure that she showed me one day. The identification of plants is part of the awareness of our common belonging to the Earth. This is what Hubert Reeves explains when he speaks about his happiness to walk among trees and when he says that "among them, he confusedly feels our common participation to this powerful stream of life appearing in the chain of billions of generations of living creatures on our planet, in a lost corner of the Milky Way."9 When naming a flower, the botanist welcomes it into a circle of friends. And if naturalists and travellers often insert lists of flowers, trees, animals or stones in their descriptions, it may have a didactic function. But it chiefly reveals the deep feeling of a common belonging, the enthusiasm for the same space shared by the traveller and the nonhuman elements, the multiplicity of the list conveying enthusiasm. The dry list becomes poetic through its deep connection with the observer's inner world. The list can be a way of reconstituting, in the writer's eye, an exterior landscape that allows him/her to understand his/her own inner landscape and thus to reach the awareness of poetic creation within nature. Pattiann Rogers, who did not like the new place where she lived, had some 8

"I saw a wild flower/ When I knew its name/ I found it more beautiful," translation mine (Reeves 6). 9 "Parmi eux, j'ai le sentiment confus de notre participation commune à ce puissant courant de vie qui se manifeste dans la succession de milliards de générations d'êtres vivants sur notre planète, dans un coin perdu de la Voie lactée" (Reeves 14, translation mine).

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nostalgia for Missouri and decided to "try to remember what it was like in Missouri, in the Ozark hills and woods in the fall, [her] favorite season" (Rogers, 6). So she started naming all the natural elements composing it, reconstituting the landscape through the combined work of memory and imagination: I tried to recall every detail I could and to name each detail to myself, to recreate the land with language—the sharp angle of the gold autumn light, the thin feel of the air, the fragrances of trees and damp earth, auras of moving shadows in a dense forest, the abundances of bronze oak leaves and yellow hickory leaves and walnut, wine and scarlet hedges of staghorn sumac, the rocky earth, sometimes orange with iron, greygreen curls of lichen on boulders, frost and its graces on the ground, the sight of breath on cold air, the taste of October. Creating this litany brought a strange, calm comfort to me, a joy I hadn't expected, and during those moments I realized for the first time that I loved a landscape, loved it like my own body, that it was my own body, my body and my pattern of perception, that it had informed and constructed me, that I had defined myself by it, that I had a union with it, a union I only recognized now because it was broken. This naming of details of the land and season, this litany, recited to myself in a moment of despair, eventually became, during the next few days, my first poem coming from the earth, submerged in the earth. (Rogers, 6)

The list, the "naming of details," in which the whole landscape is reconstituted thanks to the poet's naming, transforms not only her perception of the landscape but the perception of herself and leads her to a revelation of poetry. Not only does the name of the thing recreate the thing as in a botanist's scientific listing; it becomes "[her] first poem." Exactly as Joyce, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, sees the first step in poetic creation in the child's distortion of a nursery rhyme, Rogers sees poetic creation in the naming of the details of nature that constituted the landscape for which she feels nostalgia. Like Stephen Dedalus living an epiphany when seeing a girl emerging from the sea as an incarnation of beauty and poetry, she sees the list of the details making the landscape of the Ozark hills as poetry "coming from the earth, submerged in the earth." This first poem that the list is, both has its origin in the earth and is "submerged" in it, and it is the poet's imagination that can draw it out of this submersion while being paradoxically submerged in it. The list triggers a new love for the landscape, a carnal love ("like my own body"), as Barry Lopez suggests when, in Arctic Dream, he evokes "a beauty you

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feel in your flesh" (Lopez 2001, 404).10 The landscape reconstituted by imagination and memory reveals the creative power of language to the poet: But, possibly even more important, I realized in those moments a power of the language that I hadn't been fully aware of before, a power beyond relaying information or instruction, beyond rhetoric or making patterns, rhyme and meter, on a page. It was a power I could possess, the power of my own creation to enter and alter my soul. The language had created me. This thought of reciprocal creation has remained central to my writing since. (Rogers, 7)

Nature reveals all the details of its beauty to her, which appears in the mention of colours and the music of words, it reveals both the recreation of the landscape in the poet's words and the recreation of the woman's self as the list brings to her the consciousness of the natural world's presence. We can make a distinction between this epiphany-like perception of the natural list and the classical list appearing with scientists.

The scientific list: mapping out living nature for imperialist purposes Scientists always intersperse their narratives with lists of insects, butterflies, plants or rocks. Those lists have an informative value but it is much more than that. If we take the example of Alfred Russel Wallace evoking all his finds in the Malay Archipelago, we can find many lists in his narrative. In a letter to Samuel Stevens (December 1st, 1856), he wrote: There is also a curious little brown thing, like a Trichius, which eats away roses and orange-blossoms. I have two Euchloras, which I think are rare, E. dichropus, Blanch., and a large one, very like E. viridis, but which seems to agree best with E. Dusumieri, Blanch. Besides these I have only a lot of obscure Melolonthidae, Aphodii, &c., &c. I had quite forgot, however, among the Carabidae, what will perhaps be considered my greatest prize, Catadromus tenebrioides; but it is very scarce. I have not found a single Lucanus (Wallace, 113-114).

This list is centred on the possession of samples: "I have" is repeated three times. Théodore Monod underlines the importance of samples for scientists: "Il faut l'avouer, la simple observation visuelle demeure pour le zoologiste un pis-aller: celui-ci ne se contente pas de voir, il veut avoir. Ce 10

On Barry Lopez, see pp. 167 in this book.

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serait pour lui un cruel supplice de Tantale que d'être condamné à regarder à travers une glace11 d'intéressantes espèces sans pouvoir les examiner de plus près. Il lui faudra donc des specimens."12 When the landscape is poetically reshaped by the poet through imagination, the scientist tries to understand the reasons for the presence of such and such plants or animals. This is what will lead Darwin and Wallace to the theory of evolution. The list of samples also has an imperialistic fragrance as it is centred on the notion of dispossession and capture. Yet those scientists did not take samples for their own sake but for the whole planet. Their work, even if it is inscribed in the imperialist way of seeing the world as they were sent to distant countries to find new territories, new species, all the tiniest natural elements that could help their governments and widen their territories, really or through soft power, that is to say the expansion of knowledge, was also the result of a passion that threw light on the whole world and revealed the sense of connection. And sometimes poets also use lists of flowers to tell stories. Laurence Durrell's mention of plants speaks about the relationship between everything, the connection of places and of times. From the Egypt of The Alexandria Quartet to The Greek Islands, Durrell's work lives with Mediterranean places. His painting of Greek landscapes in The Greek Islands gives plants a prevailing role and it is not by chance if that journey through Greece ends on "Flowers and Festivals," a chapter associating Mediterranean flowers and myths. The book is at times a collection of stories and what is original is that the stories are told by vegetation, more particularly Mediterranean vegetation. The writer tells the story of the "acanthus pattern which crowns the Corinthian columns," born from the gesture of the nurse of a young Corinthian girl who, after her death, had placed the treasures she loved in a basket and placed the basket on her tomb "over the roots of an acanthus plant" and placed a tile over the basket: When spring came the acanthus grew its leaves around the basket. The tile bent them back. The keen eye of Callimachus […] fell upon this striking combination of forms and he adopted the motif for the Corinthian column 11 He speaks here about an exploration with a bathyscaphe, but this can be applied to any naturalist research. 12 "We must confess it, simple visual observation remains a last resort for the zoologist: he does not content himself with seeing, he wants to have. If he was doomed to look at interesting species through a plate glass without being able to examine them more closely, he would be tortured like Tantalus. So he will have to get specimens" (Plongées profondes, in Thesaurus, 1411-1412).

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he was just designing. So the head of this column—the most perfect of the Greek style became a monument to a young girl who died some 2500 years ago. It is an attractive story. (Durrell, 248-249)

The history of Greek art is presented as a story of death and life told by an acanthus whose wide leaves were fixed forever by a Greek sculptor to become the symbol of classical Greek art. Durrell also sees a story of life, death and immortality told by another typically Mediterranean plant, the cypress, yet originating from the Himalayas. Durrell writes: This tree which runs wild in Greece and can be seen rising in groves from bare rock-faces over the blue sea, is really an exotic; I mean that it came originally from the Himalayas with the Phoenicians and was planted in Cyprus—that orphan among Greek islands—about I think 1000 BC, whence it worked its way into the Greek decor. Once adopted as a symbol of the immortal soul and equally of eternal death, the Greeks pressed it into more material service. Perhaps the impulse came from Egypt [where it was used for mummy-cases] […]. The island of Cyprus probably took its name from the tree. (Durrell, 276-277)

This tree marking so many graveyards in the world, was growing in the Himalayas before becoming a symbol of Mediterranean landscapes evoking death and life growing on. It was a symbol of the immortal soul in the Mediterranean world—it is present in the Garden of Eden situated in Jerusalem in the Canticle of Canticles (Sinclair, 17). It also introduces Mediterranean vegetation to the map of the world since it gave its name to a Mediterranean island, Cyprus, itself giving its name to a mourning fabric quoted in some of Shakespeare's plays.13 Mountaineers also represent the nature they meet during their climbs with animal or flower names. H. J. Mackinder, in his First Ascent of Mount Kenya, insists on the flora met during the climb. Here is his description of what he sees and we can note a mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar, typical of travel books in which European people compare what they discover with what they know at home: At one point we passed a rhinoceros skull, at another we heard an elephant trumpeting, and there were many evidences— freshly broken shrubs, fresh dung—which showed that elephants were very near. Yet everything seemed strangely familiar.14 There were stinging nettles with leaves only a little larger than those at home, equisetum, which clung to our clothes like 13

See chapter one. The oxymoron associating the familiar and the notion of strangeness underlines defamiliarization in the evocation of familiarity. 14

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Chapter Six the weed in our ditches, dead nettles, red, pink, and salmon-coloured pea blossoms, purple mallow, forget-me-not, thistle, clover, convolvulus, all no doubt, specifically different, yet producing a general impression similar to that of our English flora. For the rest, the flowers were the same as those in Meranga. A shrub with yellow blossom like laburnum, a pagoda-like spike with mauve circlets of blossom, white heliotrope, and large hanging bells of a pale yellow with a copper-coloured centre. Many of the trees had leaves like the laurel, the lilac, and the camelia. Evidently all Kikuyu was once clad with forest, and in Meranga, with the clearing of the forest, the wild flowers of the glades have overspread the whole country. Some Bates or Wallace15 should make this land his home for a couple of years before it is spoilt by civilization. (Mackinder, 153)

Mackinder's precise descriptions of the plants and flowers show several things: first the reader cannot fail to be struck by the gap existing between the man with a disparaging colonial mind, describing an African man by comparing him with an actor playing the role of Mephistopheles, and the beauty of his admiring perception of "all Kikuyu once clad with forest" in a vision of communion between man and forest opening once again onto a double point of view: the suggestion of the coming of European naturalists, in the wake of a colonizing mind, and at the same time the consciousness of the gradual destruction of this nature by "civilization," that is to say the European presence. The "clearing of the forest" was obviously made by European colonizers and the replacing of trees by wild flowers is the consequence of that act. Those wild flowers have "colonized" the country. It is interesting to note that the notion of colonization is also used in scientific language to speak about the propagation of certain vegetable species invading a particular area and destroying the endemic species. The plant list shows both a beautiful picture with a riot of colours and a disquieting sign of the transformation of the landscape because of the destruction of the forest.

Biodiversity and the awareness of the rarefaction of some species in travel books It is through travel books that Jean-Marie-Pelt, who was a professor of plant biology and pharmacology and the founder of the European Institute of Ecology in 1971, warned people about the threats against the Earth and 15 H.W. Bates was a naturalist and the author of A Naturalist on the River Amazon, 1863; and Alfred R. Wallace was the author, among other works, of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, 1853.

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said that "when you study the whole solar system, the Earth is our only oasis"16 (Pelt 2005, 4th cover, translation mine). From Le Tour du monde d'un écologiste (1990), to the Nouveau Tour du monde d'un écologiste in 2005 and the Carnets de voyage d'un botaniste in 2013, Pelt brings his reader behind him through travel books of a particular sort as their function is clearly to make us aware of the great biodiversity on our Earth and of all the threats endangering it. His books have the characteristics of classical travel books except that he emphasizes the natural riches of this Earth and the necessity to preserve them. In past centuries, European explorers and particularly British ones went to other continents to reinforce the power of their European country by discovering new territories and bringing specimens to Europe. But at the same time their observation and classifications allowed Europeans to be aware of biodiversity. Robert Hood, the artist of the first Franklin expedition, in his paintings, knew how to depict the history of Arctic nature and of the populations living there. By showing animals in context, he did not only show the various species present in the Arctic but he introduced Europeans to Canadian ecosystems. His art finds its roots in all the naturalist artists preceding him and in a form of art dating back to the origins of painting: The origins of natural history art can be traced back to the cave paintings of prehistoric man, developing through different cultures in a variety of forms—in the naturalistic imagery of Roman mosaics, in the Chinese silk flower paintings of the Han Dynasty, the decoration of Medieval illuminated manuscripts and in the development of flower painting in Europe, through to woodcut illustrations in natural history books of the 16th century. With few exceptions, early natural history imagery was formalised, even geometrical, in construction. However by the late 17th century, the ideas of Newtonian science and philosophical advances encouraged a more natural approach to art with a new freedom of expression. (Tom Lamb in Tony Rice, 10).

It is that natural approach and that freedom of expression that characterize Hood. His plates representing birds are scenes of life. He showed flying or fishing animals placed in their environment. The artist's eyes reflected the life of nature as he saw it at one particular moment and fixed it in the instant. His biographer C. Stuart Houston notes to what extent his animal paintings are innovative: 16

"Quand on a parcouru l'ensemble du système solaire, la Terre est bien notre seule oasis."

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Chapter Six In the early 1800s, the art of bird painting had been mastered by few men; even the work of the best of these early artists now appears stodgy and lifeless. Hood did not live to see or participate in the advances of the art that became evident when John James Audubon began publication in 1827, followed by John Edward Gray in 1830 and John Gould in 1832. (Stuart Houston, 168)

The ornithological quality of Hood's animal representations is underlined by Jim Bruant: Hood's paintings of wildlife, particularly birds, are among the best of their time. Five winter birds painted at Fort Cumberland were until then unknown to ornithologists, and had his paintings been published on their arrival in London and the species named, Hood would have been credited with priority in their discovery.17

In his book on Arctic birds, Richard Vaughan writes: Hood's bird paintings, which were done from field sketches and skins in January and May 1820 at Cumberland House equal or surpass the best work of other bird artists of his day. Moreover, the species is in every case easily identifiable. The tragic death of this talented young artist was a sad loss to ornithology. (Vaughan, 106)

Robert Hood's naturalistic observations and representations show environmental awareness as he wanted to show all the living creatures he met in their Arctic ecosystems. His plates show life instead of presenting motionless specimens. Through his way of painting nature, he participated in the opening of a new era in the representation of animal or vegetable life. In previous centuries, plants were isolated in their representations. It is what can be seen in herbariums such as Sloane's Jamaica herbarium and his Calalogus Plantarum (1696). Each of the new animal or plant species discovered had long been isolated on a page. Animals were either static or monstrous. Their representation corresponded to one type of reality: natural reality was transformed by the psychological reality of Europeans' perception of wild nature, which was a vehicle for fright and terror, a terror figured by the close-ups on animal representations giving them that monstrosity that was a projection of Europeans' fears. With Hood, there was a significant change. He started representing animals in their environment, not separating animals and plants, as in the real world, showing an ecological vision of nature in the etymological sense of the 17

Jim Bruant, Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, www.biographi.ca/EN/009004-119.01-e.php?id_nbr=2919, accessed April 3, 2013.

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term "ecology," not invented yet. He painted with a deep science of the environment. In his engravings, the subjects are living and even feeling animals. In an engraving representing a wolverine, the dark colours of the trap in which the animal is taken show the animal's point of view as the observer has the feeling he/she is in the trap with the wolverine and feels an impression of confinement, which is suggested by the painting.18 The lynx painted in the act of hunting shows a scene of animal life and at the same time the powerlessness of the animal killed, both included in their environment. We could make a similar analysis of all engravings showing animals in movement. Hood was one of the first naturalist painters who transformed the representation of natural life by showing it in its ecosystem and not as detached specimens shown apart. He insistently showed the nonhuman. A little later all animal or plant representations emphasized the connection between all elements of nature. Hood was a pioneer and he had foreshadowed this small revolution in naturalist representation: a representation of animals showing empathy with the animal world. Hunting was much practised in mountain areas and wild areas in general in the 19th century. It was no ecological problem as long as it was only practised by Natives, who killed only enough animals to feed their families. But things changed when English and European travellers in general introduced sports hunting and killed great quantities of wild animals—elephants in Africa, buffaloes in America, bears, ibexes, chamois, izards and foxes in European mountains—for profit or just for the fun of it. This new activity threatened the species and some travellers were aware of that. Some of them had a paradoxical attitude, like Sir Victor Brooke, who hunted and killed so many ibexes that the species completely disappeared from the Pyrenees. He was unaware of the damage he did to the Pyrenean fauna, but he was rightly shocked because his fellow countryman, Peter Barr, wanting to earn money from the British fashion for new species of plants, had uprooted all the narcissi belonging to a rare species in a whole valley. To be aware of life in nature, one must first have a clear perception of nature. Sir Victor Brooke had that conscience concerning the vegetable world, but he ignored the animal world that, for him, was only an object for the practice of his "sport." 18

For a development of the analysis of the journal and engravings of Robert Hood, one can refer to my article published in e-rea, "Le Journal et les aquarelles de Robert Hood: une œuvre du paradoxe", E-rea [online], 11.2 | 2014, accessed July 20, 2017. URL : http://erea.revues.org/3835 ; DOI : 10.4000/erea.3835. I would like to thank Catherine Delmas for giving me the opportunity of working on Hood's journal.

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Yet from the first quarter of the 19th century onwards, travellers showed their care and worry in front of the fact that some wild animals became scarcer and scarcer like the Pyrenean bear. The increased scarcity of some wild animals is mentioned in several travel books. As soon as 1825, Thomas Clifton-Paris was shocked by the worrying disappearance of Pyrenean bears. Everything starts from a place-name, "the Step of the Bear:" The Step of the Bear is some twenty feet across, so Bruin19 must have been a wonderful beast, a fit inhabitant of this colossal region, which might well be fancied the abode of giants of "mighty bone and bold empire” [...]. Throughout the wild mountains of the Pyrenees, this animal reigns supreme, although of late years, it has become scarce from the extermination war that is waged against it. (130)

Clifton-Paris goes as far as assimilating bear hunting in the Pyrenees to an "extermination war." This is a strong phrase but it shows that the traveller was aware of the rapidity with which the species might disappear, which unfortunately proved to be true. In a novel published roughly at the same period by an Irish novelist, Thomas Grattan, Caribert, the Bear Hunter, the hunting scene is presented from the dog's point of view and the dog is clearly on the side of the hunted animals against the hunters. This is another way of criticizing this form of sports hunting. Clifton-Paris goes on giving some information about the Pyrenean fauna, showing his interest in the ecosystem of the area visited: Besides the bear, the wolf and izard inhabit these mountains. The former is the Lupus Lycaon, the black wolf or lobo of Spain: it is stronger in the limbs and shoulders than the common species—and is generally found in rocky and elevated ranges. They are exceedingly shy and ferocious, and formerly frequented in vast numbers the passes of the Pyrenees, where they have been seen bounding from bush to bush by the side of a string of mules, watching an opportunity to select a victim. (131)

The animal seems to come out of a manual of zoology. The traveller gives his reader all the technical information concerning the wolf: its scientific Latin name, its name in English and in Spanish; its constitution, temper and behaviour. All travellers speak about the animal world they discover in the mountains they visit. But where Victor Brooke evokes his "sports," Clifton-Paris speaks about the rarefaction of a species. The scientist's point 19

Bruin is the nickname given by Pyrenean people to the bear, Bruin or Dominique or Monsieur, which shows the great respect they had for the animal.

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of view meets the poet's as Grattan, a poet and satirist, shows the sad end of a living creature killed by human beings who are the ones who have "wild eyes." Clifton-Paris's observations in a book published at the beginning of the 19th century sound strangely topical as in some areas of the French Pyrenees, some stock breeders refuse the reintroduction of bears initiated in the 1980s as the species was at risk of disappearing. Cohabitation was possible in Spain, but in some areas in France, several bears were killed, among them the last female bear of Pyrenean roots, and in September 2017, a video was made by people from a French area, who wore black hoods hiding their faces and said that they were going to reintroduce bear hunting. In Italy on the contrary, shepherds use "Patou" dogs who protect the cattle, and wild animals like wolves do not approach them. Patou dogs were exported to Italy and Canada but they are not used in the areas where some people violently refuse bears. In Italy, a young sheep breeder peacefully lives with wolves around his farm, as his Patou dog protects the sheep. In the plain to the South of Cuneo, Chiusa di Pesio. […] Across the frontier, in the edge of that rural borough, Maurizio Mauro watches over his herd […] It is in that sheepfold situated beside his little house, at the limits of the village in the middle of the natural park of Marguareis, that the ewes spend winter. "Wolves live around us, the other morning, three of them were just in front of the house. When I started, I had no dog. But for 5 years, I have taken one who helps me to keep the herd and keep the wolf far away. It's very efficient." His "guard," a Pastore Maremmano Abruzzese was raised in a centre dedicated to that and was born among a herd. 20

For five years, Maurizio has had no victim. He watches his four dogs in the herd and stays permanently on the mountain. A technician in charge of the prevention of wolf attacks for 14 years in the area of Cunéo, Davide Sigaudo says that "the physical presence is a key factor. It has been observed that where breeders stayed with their animals again and initiated means of prevention the number of attacks decreased. So it is necessary to improve breeders' conditions of life in alpine pastures" (ibid.). Davide Sigaudo gives technical advice, particularly that of the veterinary in charge of the European project Life Wolf Alps for Piedmont, Arianna Menzano: "The solution is to make fences as round as possible to avoid the accumulation of ewes in the angles, which creates points of fragility, and 20

http://www.nicematin.com/environnement/cet-eleveur-italien-a-trouve-la-bonneformule-pour-cohabiter-avec-le-loup-il-nous-explique-comment-10263, translation mine, accessed September 15, 2017.

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to make a double pen" (ibid.). The breeder concludes laughing: "What I fear is the two-legged wolf. Thefts, particularly of lambs are not rare. So it's better to be prudent" (ibid.). In the province of Cuneo, where there are between 9 and 11 packs of wolves, when there had been a peak of 329 sheep killed at the beginning of the 2000s, in 2015 there were 80 sheep killed out of 16 000 sheep present in the pastures and this was linked to an absence of watching or to fog. So the presence of shepherds accompanied with dogs in the pastures changed things. Starting with a book written by a shepherd a few years ago, the situation on the Italian alpine pastures changed and shepherds and wolves cohabit. What works in Italy and in Spain does not exist in France and particularly in the French Pyrenees and one can wonder why breeders refuse to accept solutions of cohabitation that had existed for centuries. For centuries there were hundreds of wild animals in the European mountains and more cattle. Now, only a few wild animals are left, and they are accused of all evils while there is much less pastoralism and breeders often let their cattle alone in the mountains, which was never the case in the past. In Tibet, shepherds protect snow leopards while they sometimes kill ten per cent of their yacks. Frederic Larrey, a French wildlife photographer, spent several months in a Tibetan valley, waiting for snow leopards and speaking with Tibetan shepherds. He wrote that "in a valley that remained secret, some shepherds have preserved large predators and wild herbivores for fifteen years. They even accept predation on their herds of yacks, the domestication of which dates back about ten thousand years. The large fauna returns not without some difficulty, but thanks to the shepherds' desire to recover a life in harmony with the fauna and the snow leopard."21 If those Tibetan shepherds not only accept cohabitation but contribute to the preservation of snow leopards, it is because they know mountains as well as they feel it. In his beautiful travel book The Snow Leopard, mingling nature observation and spiritual quest, Peter Matthiessen wrote: I know this mountain because I am this mountain, I can feel it breathing at this moment as its grass tops stray against the snows. If the snow leopard should leap from the rock above and manifest itself before me—S-A-AO!—then in that moment of pure fright, out of my wits, I might truly perceive it, and be free. (Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard, 253)

Peter Matthiessen's spiritual experience and the Tibetan shepherds' everyday life meet as all of them "think like a mountain." They "feel it," 21

https://leica-camera-france.fr/les-lecaistes/reportage-la-vallee-gardee-secrete-dutibet-12, accessed May 27, 2018. Translation mine.

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and they are one with the mountain, as Matthiessen powerfully expresses it when he says "I am the mountain." Fear is not a destructive feeling; on the contrary it reveals something else, it reveals the deep presence of the snow leopard as part of an interior journey. When he says "I might truly perceive it," Matthiessen does not only speak about a visual perception, but about the perception of the animal's true life in connection with his own interior life; it is an inner perception liberating him from his human way of thinking, revealing harmony in a common freedom, in a common osmosis with the mountain, with the world, a freedom opening on a deeper freedom, in connection with a Buddhist vision of the real world. But in order to reach the spiritual experience, he has to feel the mountain, which shepherds and mountaineers do. The Tibetan and Italian examples initiated by shepherds and relayed by photographers, writers or journalists, speak about a possible cohabitation, the cohabitation that had existed until a recent period, before the industrial man or the colonizing man refused to see pastures as places to be shared by all mountain inhabitants. The experiences of Tibetan and Italian shepherds remind the world that the solution dwells in the sharing of space; it dwells in the memory of mountain life, in the necessity of feeling and sensing the mountain and in man's sharing the mountain space with its first inhabitants. Those shepherds' way of raising cattle while preserving wild predators appears as a note of hope for the whole world, whereas colonization has transformed man's link with nature.

Nature exploitation bearing the mark of colonization From Africa to the Arctic, there was the same desire, in the minds of the travellers of the previous centuries, to fill in the blanks of a map that was not drawn yet. Before the Berlin Conference in 1885, which was to divide Africa and share it between the different European colonial powers, explorations were meant to bring European countries both new knowledge and new territories and chiefly to extend their power. This is what Joseph Conrad showed in his novel Heart of Darkness, in which, while denouncing colonization, he denounced the ivory trade. The novel is founded on a journey to the Congo, and shows the exploitation of Africa by Europeans who exploit men, and kill elephants to steal their ivory. In the novel, the exploitation of the resources of colonized countries becomes a game: a domino game for Conrad, taken up as a chess game by Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four. At the beginning of Heart of Darkness, one of the European characters, "[t]he Accountant had brought out already a box of

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dominoes, and was toying architecturally with the bones."22 This simple gesture has a symbolical dimension: it reminds the reader of the fact that white men play with Black people, with Africa, represented by the dominoes, which were made of ivory in those days. They play with pieces of dead elephants, pieces of a part of Africa that has been killed. They regard Africa and its human and nonhuman inhabitants as toys. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, more colonized countries appear through the colonizing imaginary country, Airstrip One, Oceania. It is a fictitious place, but in that imaginary country, the main town is London, which makes it the fictitious projection of the real British Empire, itself representing all colonizing countries. In the pages devoted to the war and the conquest of territories, the fictitious states, Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania are mingled with the real ones—the British Isles, "areas that were once to be known as France and Germany" (204), Persia, Egypt, Java, or Ceylon, "the Brazilian forests," "the Australian desert" and "lost islands of the Antarctic;" the Congo, with "Brazzaville and Leopoldville" appears as a colony of Oceania at the moment when the war threatens the Congo and the territory of Oceania (301). That blending of real and imaginary places creates a blurred space with enough real spatial landmarks to allow the reader to situate those false states in our real world space. And when, one page further, Winston examines the chess problem and thinks twice: "White always mates," all spaces are mingled through the game. The African space mentioned one page before, the imaginary space of the Chestnut Tree Café, the chessboard and the literary space are one space. Moreover there is perhaps an echo of Joseph Conrad's denunciation of colonialism. The chessboard has replaced the dominoes, the Chestnut Tree has replaced the ship, but Winston like Marlow says that "White always mates." The West African coast seen in his mind is superimposed on the space of the chessboard: the colonial map, Africa, his mental space and the chessboard are all superimposed to denounce colonialism. In that new map of the world, the names given to that space freshly discovered—very often names linked with kings or the royal family (Alberta, Victoria Falls, Prince Edward's Island...)—, are the visible elements of this colonization on maps. The narratives of those explorative travels were thus the written materialization of the colonial spirit on which the idealized mask of knowledge and dreams was put: During the period [1720-1914] […], travel writing became increasingly identified with the interests and preoccupations of those in European societies who wished to bring the non-European world into a position 22

Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness, chapter 1, 1.

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where it could be influenced, exploited or, in some cases, directly controlled. In the case of Britain, the identification was particularly close. (Bridges, 53)

That identification is present in all British travel books. Travel writing always mingles the precision of the description and the subjectivity of personal perception. Roy Bridges underlines that complexity linked to the genre: Travel writing […] had a complex relationship with the situations in which it arose. […] Travel writing may embrace approaches ranging from an exposition of the results of scientific exploration claiming (but rarely managing) to be objective and value-free to the frankly subjective description of the impact of the area and its people on the writer's own sensibilities. (Bridges in Hulme and Youngs, 53)

This is what appears for example with Mackinder's First Ascent to Mount Kenya, where the scientific geological or botanical descriptions appear beside a tone suggesting the claimed superiority of the colonizer over the colonized one. Yet there is a real will to show all the richness of the areas visited and through their representations, travel writers lead readers towards the necessity of the preservation of the natural world. But travel writing can also be a way of showing the transformation of landscapes because of new forms of exploitation. Concerning the exploitation of tar sands in Canada, Oriana Palusci evokes the travellers who were the first to mention tar sands as soon as the eighteenth century.23 She notes that "tar sands were first described by the explorer and fur trader Peter Pond while crossing the Athabasca watershed in 1778" (Palusci, 70). In his Voyages from Montreal on the River St. Laurence Through the Continent of North America to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans In the Years 1789 and 1793, Mackenzie spoke about "bituminous fountains" (Mackenzie cxxxiii). Oriana Palusci adds that "by the turn of the 19th century, travel writers had already captured the beauty of the boreal landscape, but also the strangeness and ghastliness of the tar sands" (Palusci, 71). And in those days, the traveller's perception was sometimes already an economic one; John Muir, in his travel narrative, Through the MacKenzie Basin: a Narrative of the Athabaska and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899, wrote that "when the hour of development comes, it will, I believe, prove to be one of the wonders of Northern Canada. We 23 Oriana Palusci, "River of Hell: Athabasca Tar Sands Narratives", in Green Canada, Oriana Palusci (ed.), Brussels, Oxford…: Peter Lang, Canadian Studies, vol. 31, 70. See part 3, chapter 11 of this book.

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were all deeply impressed by this scene of Nature's chemistry, and realized what a vast storehouse of not only hidden but exposed resources we possess in this enormous country" (Muir, 121, in Palusci, 72). In a sort of travelling chain, like an echo to Mackenzie's own observation of tar sands, the traveller visiting an area named after Mackenzie, also observed this new resource and evoked it first in terms of wonder, but chiefly in terms of development and possession: "development," "storehouse," "resources," "possess." Nature, however beautiful it might be, is considered as a storehouse and as man's possession. Oriana Palusci also mentions the scientists who had observed the tar sands from a geological point of view, like John Richardson, who had been a member of the first two Franklin expeditions, and, in 1848, had led an expedition to try to find Franklin's missing third expedition in the Arctic. During that journey he studied the geological aspects of the tar sands and "the thick deposits of bituminous shale" (in Palusci, 73). In those narratives, the travellers only observed a geological element in nature. It is the devastation caused by the method of exploitation from the middle of the twentieth century onwards that changed the perception of things and triggered people's awareness. Oriana Palusci reminds us that Karl Adolf Clark who, after the Second World War, had "initialled the exploitation and industrialization of the Athabaska River region" (Palusci, 75) with other experts, "was deeply affected by the outcome of his discoveries when the Great Canadian Oil Sand Company (now Suncor) started its bulldozing and extraction operation on a large scale" (Palusci, 75). It is when the devastation was obvious that voices rose to denounce the transformation of a once beautiful landscape into a horrible gothic black devastated area, particularly in visual books in which air travellers present us with beautiful photographs of devastated areas.

Visual travel books. The way to awareness in the representation of the world. The Canadian art photographer and pilot Louis Helbig showed the reality of the transformation of Canadian landscapes by the exploitation of resources in his book with an oxymoronic title, Beautiful Destruction (2014), where he shows aerial views of landscapes destroyed by the exploitation of tar sands or oil shale. His air journeys are meant to show the metamorphoses of the Canadian landscape because of the extraction of oil and tar sands. The beauty of the photographs strikes the viewer by the paradox existing between the beauty of the picture as a work of art and the ugliness of the new real landscape it represents. The photographer's eyes change real ugliness into virtual beauty because of his angle of vision. For

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example, the "Open pit bitumen mine, Suncor Millenium Mine, Alberta, Canada (B24011894)"24 shows a devastated landscape but the geometrical shapes, the lines and pools of water of different colours have an aesthetic dimension that paradoxically makes the image of devastation all the more disturbing. The photograph entitled "Overburden Removal, Suncor Millenium Mine, Alberta, Canada (B2410449)" shows a central part revealing a land whose trees have been cut as the upper part of the picture shows since the remaining trees appear as part of a cake into which some giant would have bitten. The small spots of the "Tonka trucks," as these trucks are designated on another photograph, show different sorts of miniature vehicles evoking a toy world—Tonka being an American producer of toy trucks. The true beauty of the photograph and the false beauty of its subject added to the caption suggest that man plays with the land as if it was his toy, like Conrad's sailors playing with ivory dominoes at the beginning of Heart of Darkness. All the photographs representing the Canadian forest show a forest either crossed by a gigantic pipeline or surrounded by pipe construction, or interrupted by a "SAGD Pad in Muskeg."25 The aesthetic quality of the pictures due to the photographer's angle of vision emphasizes the gap existing between the small part of nature that is left and the huge wound made to nature. Still more disturbing is the wonderful photograph representing "Slick Sunset, Albian Sands, Muskeg River Mine, Alberta, Canada (B2401541)" showing a mottled picture in orange and blue, like an abstract painting, yet representing a very concrete oil sands mining project. The devastation of the landscape is transcended by the association of the sunset and of the photographer's air journey. The same impression can be felt when we look at a photograph entitled "Rainbow lava, Canadian natural resources limited, Horizon project, Alberta, Canada (G1741107)." We can see another mottled landscape viewed from the photographer's plane, and it looks like a painting or like a binding paper, that kind of paper that was used for ancient or artistic book bindings. As was said in the magazine National Geographic, "Shot through acclaimed aerial photographer Louis Helbig's lens, a swirling black and white bitumen slick becomes strangely reminiscent of an abstract expressionist painting."26 The rainbow colouring of the black and white extraction site situated north of Fort MacMurray is the beautiful screen hiding the reality of the production of synthetic crude oil that started there in 2008 and was then developed in three phases. The 24

http://beautifuldestruction.ca/beautiful-destruction-gallery/ accessed February 27, 2018. All the photographs commented upon here can be seen on this site. 25 The initials SAGD designate Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage. 26 http://beautifuldestruction.ca, accessed February 28, 2018.

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rainbow colouring is just the physical reflection of light in oil, and the transformation of that physical reality into a beautiful picture showing a land in movement paradoxically denounces the metamorphosis. When looking at those pictures and at the telescoping of their aesthetic beauty and of a terrible issue, we can only ask ourselves questions about what we see in fact. Is this picture an image of beauty or an image of danger and horror? How can it be that such beautiful representations disturb us and instead of provoking admiration in front of the subject, appear as beautiful visions of horror? Louis Helbig wants viewers to think by themselves. The mechanism of paradox, the clash between an aesthetically beautiful image and a devastated landscape, disturbs us and thus questions us. When we look at a beautiful mountain landscape, a field of flowers or a butterfly, we feel a sense of wonder. In the case of Louis Helbig's aerial views of oil sands, wonder is impossible. Yet we see beautiful pictures but wonder is impossible because that beauty is associated with destruction, with artificial devastation. In an interview, Louis Helbig said: So you have this landscape that is all sort of situated in a broad swath of boreal forest with the Athabasca River running north, more or less due north, through the entire thing and then on both sides there is this incredibly large surreal, beautiful destroyed landscape. I guess, in a way, it was a kind of emotional response. We were stunned by it. After, I don't know, maybe a half an hour or something of flying around, I blurted out on the intercom, Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness (sic). 27

It is probably that "emotional response" in front of devastation changed into beauty, an "emotional response" associating the "beautiful destruction" of Canadian landscapes with Conrad's novel about colonization in Africa, that makes viewers aware of the horror of that beauty. "The horror! The horror!" as Kurtz, the colonizer stealing ivory from Africa said. The beauty of Conrad's novel denouncing colonization and the beauty of Louis Helbig's photographs showing the exploitation of oil and tar sands in Canada both show the strength of art. But is the fact of showing a reality aestheticized by an artist's point of view a denunciation? The photographer's technique—he takes photographs from a small plane— gives him the position of an omniscient narrator—photographers tell stories and Sebastião Salgado uses the word "stories" to speak about his photographs—having a view of the situation from above. In his interview, he constantly alludes to airports, "aircraft, helicopter or plane," to his flying over those places. The movement of the journey is important as it is 27

http://louishelbig.com/aurorainterviewa.html, accessed February 28, 2018.

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because of that type of journey that he becomes aware of things he could not have seen from the ground. Flying over those devastated landscapes reveals many things to him: I was expecting to some extent, despite my desire to come at it with as few preconceptions as possible, to see holes in the ground and big trucks riding around and there were lots of that. But I did not expect to see these incredibly beautiful, massive, massive man-made lakes of brown toxic water with bits of oil floating hither and thither, being pushed around by the wind (ibid.)

The surprise comes from the telescoping of beauty and toxicity, from a land torn by lots of holes and "these incredibly beautiful, massive, massive man-made lakes of brown toxic water with bits of oil floating hither and thither," beauty stemming from destruction. In fact, the telescoping between the horror of the facts and the beauty of the representation is meant to develop people's capacity to think for themselves, to develop people's imagination and through that imagination, their awareness, as an echo to Laurence Buell's use of the notion of imagination to define environmental writing: There is something I guess that I find the most encouraging (sic) is that the art seems to open a place in people's imagination, a space or a place where they relate to the image, however they might, and in so doing, they own that image in a sense or they certainly own whatever it is that populates their imagination, their conscience, their feelings, emotions, whatever it might be. Whether they are absolutely for it, or absolutely against this thing, whether their views are more convoluted or contradictory, what I find most remarkable is the power of the art to create that space for people to think and reflect and to own it themselves. (ibid., emphasis mine)

Imagination, conscience, feelings, and emotions are placed on the same level. The sense of beauty in front of devastation necessarily arouses something in viewers' minds, a feeling that has something to do with awareness. The beauty of horror raises questions, arouses the imagination, and the addition of all those elements creates awareness. The journalist interviewing Louis Helbig quotes the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, and his photographs of gold miners in the Amazon; a debate had started, people saying: "Well, they're beautiful and you made it look so beautiful and it's a horrible hell hole, right?" and Salgado said, “well you know maybe through the aesthetic people can still achieve a kind of reflective politicalness, right?" (ibid.). The answer explains the double

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response to that kind of photograph, the beauty of which is in fact meant to accuse and to make people aware of the issues which the aesthetic representation throws light on: Those images that Salgado took of the miners have become part of our visual vocabulary, and they are part of our visual vocabulary I think, first and foremost, because they are stunningly beautiful images, and insofar that they are, that has in turn anchored them in a way that it also then sheds light on the issues that are portrayed in the images, of these people working and falling over each other in these holes that are being dug in the jungle and whatever else he portrayed. He has shined a light on that in a way that nobody else has shined a light on that particular issue. (Ibid.)

Unlike Helbig, Salgado's photographs are taken from the ground, not from a plane. He often walks and has direct contact with the ground from where he seizes scenes, portraits or landscapes. Lelia Wanick Salgado said that in 1984, "the urgency of current events led Sebastião to travel for fifteen months in Africa to photograph that huge tragedy—famine—which fell on the Sahel. The essential thing was then to bear witness to the disappearance of the human being" (Lelia Wanick Salgado, in La main de l'homme, 396, translation mine). Salgado's black and white photographs are poignant but extraordinarily beautiful. The representation of "Korem Camp, Ethiopia, 1984"28 shows a family wrapped in simple clothes protecting them from an apparently violent sand wind. The sad eyes of the adults framing the child in the foreground highlight the tragedy contained in the child's face. His eyes lowered showing an extreme exhaustion tear the viewers' hearts. And yet the picture is beautiful: the Ethiopian family with great dignity and a noble appearance stands in the foreground of a beautiful landscape, with hills in the background, separating a cloudy sky from the desert; everything is beautiful, tragically beautiful. The immensity of the landscape underlines the tragedy lived by the population who have nothing to eat because of the drought. "Kalema camp, west of Tigray. Ethiopia. 1985" is very different as far as the composition is concerned. Around an old tree placed nearly at the centre of the picture, with another tree in the background, lots of people are sitting, looking sad and exhausted. Yet sunbeams shine through the tree branches to throw a nearly supernatural or magic light onto those men, women and children. It is as if they were in a magic forest and yet their sad appearance goes against the impression of magic aroused by the sunbeams crossing the tree 28

https://www.amazonasimages.com/travaux-sahel, accessed February 28, 2018. The photographs commented upon here can be seen on this site.

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foliage. There is something nearly mystical in this beautiful representation of the hardest reality. The beauty of some other photographs comes from the depths of people's eyes and the beauty of their faces. All those men and women have sad eyes turned towards the photographer. In the eyes of all those people waiting in a clinic in Ade, Chad, or in the sad and angry eyes of the "refugee from Eritrea, carrying his dying son, [who] arrives at Wad Sherifai camp. Sudan. 1985," there is the same exhausted sadness. No despair, no fear, only exhaustion and some impossibility to understand. While fixing those gazes in pictures, the strength of which goes on haunting all those who have seen them, Salgado wants to be a witness and show the rest of the world, comfortably settled in their habits and only thinking about their immediate troubles, another reality, the same reality in fact as the quiet comfortably settled viewers are also partly responsible for the horror of that famine. Can they understand that the steaks they are quietly eating can have some incidence on the lives of those people with such beautiful faces, who starve in such beautiful places?29 How can anybody forget those deep eyes, or this beautiful picture of the progressing desert in Mali, "Lake Faguibine dried up with the drought and invasion of the desert. Mali. 1985." The caption speaks about the dried-up lake, the picture shows the desert, which is not really the desert as there are small stunted trees desperately trying to survive like the human population. And nearly at the centre of our field of vision, in the foreground, we can see, the frail figure of a child, walking. The child is in connection with the trees, as frail as them, and like them he wants to live. His noble gait, his walking step show that in spite of the natural disaster, he is still standing, he is still advancing, he is still living. The French title of the book, Sahel, l’homme en détresse, and its Spanish and English titles, Sahel-El fin del camino and Sahel, The End of the Road, seem hopeless. And yet there is hope in the tragical beauty of those pictures, hope in the dignity of those who try to live on in spite of the fact that they have nothing to eat, that lakes are dried up. There is hope in the beauty of the picture showing a fragile child alone on a lake changed into a desert, in front of poor trees also trying to survive, a child who walks on with determination, who walks towards the limit of the picture, a fictitious limit masking the reality of the invisible path in the desert, which has no end. For years, travelling in all the countries of the world, the Brazilian photographer, fixed images of tragedies and showed them through beautiful pictures. As with Louis Helbig, or Yann Artus-Bertrand or many photographers showing us the 29

About the incidence of our consumption here onto devastation and famine overthere, see part 3 chapter 9 of this book, and about the invasion of the desert because of man's action, see part 3, chapter 10.

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wounds of the Earth and its beauty, those pictures do not show us a hopeless world, but a world in which tragedy and beauty are always side by side as if tragedy could never erase the human beauty of a walking child or of a family standing in the desert; as if the insistence on beauty was necessary to make the whole world aware of a distorted world and that each of us contributes to that distortion. Those traveller photographers, by showing the movements of the world, its natural beauty but also the strange, disturbing beauty generated by its devastation, hold out a beautiful question mark to us. Do we enjoy those pictures? Do we enjoy the picture of a child walking in the desert? We enjoy the beauty of the picture and we also enjoy the beauty of the silent fight visible in the child's step. Do we enjoy the sunset on extracted tar sands as deeply as a sunset in the Himalayas or on the Ocean? Can we see a difference? Of course, all viewers can see the difference as they can see the questions contained in that strange beauty. That beauty unveiled by the connection between the photographer's eyes and the silence of the starving family in the desert; the connection between the photographer's eyes and the movement of the plane, the sunlight and man's industrial destruction, contains a questioning in its very existence. When he shows workers' gestures, Salgado sometimes connects beauty and the terror we can feel in front of the extreme danger threatening those workers, as in an oil deposit in Kuwait where a man alone is facing a huge flame springing from the ground in front of him.30 The caption informs us that he is protected from the extreme heat of the flames by the spraying of chemicals. The photograph shows us a beautiful face to face between the huge flame on the one hand and the cloud of chemicals surrounding the man on the other hand: protected from a danger by another danger, he seems alone in a hell on Earth. The photograph is terrible and yet it is beautiful. Those very strong, poignant and beautiful pictures speak to us. Beauty is not always beautiful. Beauty can be fatal. Beauty can deceive those who are taken in by its appearance and it can kill them. Louis Helbig and Sebastião Salgado and other photographers throughout the world show those questionings in their beautiful representations of horror; because they trust us, because they know that we are going to become aware. Yet awareness can be so heavy to bear sometimes that artists want to show more clearly that there is hope. Could awareness be active if it was hopeless? Sebastião Salgado, who showed all the devastation he met in his travels around the world, decided to show the simple beauty of nature in Genesis, a book that is the result of thirty journeys throughout the world. 30

Salgado, La main de l'homme, 336-337.

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So many times I've photographed stories that show the degradation of the planet. I had one idea to go and photograph the factories that were polluting, and to see all the deposits of garbage. But, in the end, I thought the only way to give us an incentive, to bring hope, is to show the pictures of the pristine planet—to see the innocence.31

Both representations are necessary. It is necessary to see the suffering of a part of the world, the bleeding Earth wounded by our society in which consumption is the keyword. But the simple beauty of mountains, of a blooming flower and of a bird singing in an old tree reminds us that our Earth is this simple, wonderful beauty and that all the scars devastating it, however beautiful in their air representations, threaten all life on it. The beauty of horror and the beauty of wonder are both necessary to show us what we have to do; to go on wondering at extraordinary natural landscapes or at a mere blade of grass with an insect on it, to wonder in order to have the strength to fight against a devastated world. Those who represent beauty in the sunlight as in scars and holes show us the way to heal a wounded and yet wonderful Earth.

The preservation of nature in its literary representation Classical travel books reveal the wounds made to landscapes in a more direct way. In his Travels in Alaska, John Muir, one of the first initiators of environmentalism, evokes mines (9, 22), logging (15) and the presence of the Northern Pacific Railway (9), the construction of which transformed the landscape and destroyed a part of nature. Here is how he evokes some cities at the beginning of his narrative: Seattle was famed for its coal-mines, and claimed to be the coming town of the North Pacific Coast. So also did its rival, Tacoma, which had been selected as the terminus of the much-talked-of Northern Pacific Railway. Several coal-veins of astonishing thickness were discovered the winter before on the Carbon River, to the east of Tacoma, one of them said to be no less than twenty-one feet, another twenty feet, another fourteen, with many smaller ones, the aggregate thickness of all the veins being upwards of a hundred feet. Large deposits of magnetic iron ore or brown hematite, together with limestone, had been discovered in advantageous proximity to the coal, making a bright outlook for the Sound region in general in connection with its railroad hopes, its unrivalled timber resources, and its far-reaching geographical relations. (Muir, 9) 31 Sebastião Salgado, https://www.icp.org/exhibitions/sebastião-salgado-genesis, accessed February 28, 2018.

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It is interesting to note that this Scottish-American man who was to be one of the first advocates of the preservation of the wilderness in the USA, whose activism led to the preservation of Yosemite Valley and Sequoia National Park, the founder of the Sierra Club (one of the most important conservation organizations in the USA and in the world), started his travel book by speaking about cities and exploitation. The passage seems to be quite objective and describes facts, as is underlined by the numerous metrical indications. But the telescoping of scientific information with the use of the lexical field of geology ("coal-veins," "aggregate," "deposits of magnetic iron ore," "hematite," "brown limestone") and of the notion of human discoveries and the desire of progress, transforms the point of view. The use of the passive form ("has been selected," "were discovered," "had been discovered") shows that man has the upper hand on nature there and that nature becomes a passive object in his hands. At the end of the passage, he underlines the link between human feelings and ambitions and the transformation of nature into resources: the railroad is associated with "hopes," the proximity to coal is said to be "advantageous," and the passage ends on the notion of a place used for "geographical relations." It is as if John Muir, in an apparently very objective tone, wanted to lead his readers to understand the problem. In this introductory passage, he shows a nature only meant to be used by men. As a sign, the river has been named with the mineral that is going to be "advantageous" for this population (Carbon River). John Muir softly leads his readers to have their own point of view on the issue of exploitation, to understand that there is a twofold perception of nature: the useful conception linked with the development of towns and the construction of means of communication to erase distances and a vision led by an aesthetic point of view leading to some awareness of the close connection existing between nature and all its inhabitants including man who is one of them, but no more.

Mountaineering accounts to reveal ethical conscience Awareness appears first in the painting of beauty as seen in the mountain. If you look at mountain photographs, the small size of the mountaineers in sublime mountains reveals both the objective situation of man in nature and the beauty of those mountains. Photographers, by revealing those two elements, suggest the necessity of preserving that beauty. When they show mountain-climbers surrounded by the grandeur of mountains, they show both the awareness of the absolute beauty of the natural world and of man's place in it; a small creature that still has the

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power to show the beauty of the world and protect it. Mountaineers, who live in communion with mountains, have the ethical conscience evoked by Laurence Buell because they are in direct contact with nature. This awareness can take a different form when mountaineers change an element of industry into a mountain refuge. To show ecological adaptation by mountaineers, we can take the example of a small Pyrenean refuge, close to Pouchergues Lake. What had been originally a simple metal cabin used by the national company of electricity was changed into a refuge by the mountaineers of a small mountain club32 to which it had been given by the company. What might have been an abandoned industrial shed visually and industrially polluting the mountain landscape became a refuge for mountaineers thanks to the alliance of an industrial structure and of mountaineers. The refuge was used by climbers for more than forty years. This particular case shows that mountain climbers' awareness can find ecological solutions to the damage caused by industry.33 Awareness appears in mountaineering accounts; S. E. S. Allen, in his narrative of an ascent in the Canadian Rockies in 1896, precisely indicates the relief and the names of the rocks seen. His geographic map is completed by a geological map in which "cliffs or stratifications of quartzite" lead to corridors leading to a ridge allowing the mountaineer to discover the contrast between the "cliffs of yellow limestone" and "white snow." The factual progression is regularly interrupted by a poetic and pictorial description of the landscape, projecting the vision of a remote place onto the dry map: The western, southern, and eastern ridges of Mount Temple meet in a summit of broken rock corniced to the N. Our camp was visible, a dash of white by the river, 4,800 ft below us. The Sentinel and the Cathedral looked insignificant beneath us, and the Wastach and Wenkchemna Valleys with their peaks and glaciers lay mapped out for our inspection. When we looked down upon the beautiful Wastach Valley, shining with its green meadows, its darker forests, its sapphire glaciers, its graceful peaks and silver stream, we seemed translated to some fair scene in the Italian Tyrol. The other valley was all ice and rock and snow, swept with avalanches from and guarded by the dark walls of the stately crest, and seemed like some frowning recess of the Oberland. (Allen, 223)

The mathematic precision in the description of the itinerary in the mountainous space becoming a cartographic line ("mapped out") opens 32

L'Escagarol, in Toulouse. See Jean Besson, "Lac de Pouchergues : histoire d’un refuge disparu", PyrénéesBulletin pyrénéen n°221, 1-2003, 67-74. 33

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onto beauty. At the moment when the map enters the landscape through the vocabulary, the perception is modified: lines and numbers are replaced by colours and light. "Western, southern, and eastern ridges" are replaced by a world of precious stones and metal ("sapphire," "silver"). The technical opacity of the stone gives way to luminous transparency, to a world where everything shines, which allows the mountaineer to see beyond real shapes. The methodical progression of the climber becomes a magic translation ("we seemed translated") and on the black and white world of "avalanches" and "black walls," is superimposed the far-off image of the Italian Tyrol and Oberland. The Alps appear in the middle of the Canadian Rockies in a visionary integration of a known landscape into a discovered one. Geology is inserted into human history through the comparison to an abandoned city, which is not a rare metaphor in 19thcentury travel books, but in the mountain the everyday urban space takes a mythical dimension: As we stepped upon its surface our hot faces were cooled by a whiff from the ice-fields and before us, the grey pavement gently sloping to meet it, lay a placid lake, a dark blue circle of about 1/2 mile in diameter. The glaciers clustered around its further end, whence floating blocks of ice dotted with white the sapphire surface, while behind and above rose the slopes of a grand amphitheatre, their ice-fields glowing like Pentelic marble in the mellow light of the afternoon sun, like a vast Dionysiac theatre, the upper tier of seats outlined against a Grecian sky. (Allen, 226)

The landscape painting is articulated around a gliding from Canadian ice to a Mediterranean sky. The references to ancient gods project a mythical time onto the natural landscape coming from another place, thus suggesting that each particular place is our place whatever our origin. "The locality is the only universal" as American poet William Carlos Williams wrote.34 S. E. S. Allen projects a Grecian sky onto the Canadian landscape: glacial geology is inscribed in a classical mythical time, which corresponds to Buell's first criterion of environmental writing, "the 34 "Already in 1920, as John Beckhas pointed out, Williams was impressed by an article John Dewey wrote for The Dial that argued that 'the locality is the only universal' (Dewey 697); he used that phrase in a manifesto in the second issue of Contact, a little magazine he edited," Antonia Rigaud, "A Phosphorous History: William Carlos Williams' In the American Grain", European journal of American Studies [Online], 11-1 | 2016, document 5, Online since 02 June 2016, connection on 23 February 2018. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/11505 ; DOI : 10.4000/ejas.11505.

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inscription of natural history in human history." There are other examples as when Henry Russell sees temples, obelisks, buddhic monasteries, idols and minarets in the Pyrenean mountains, thus inscribing the natural mountain landscape in the religious history of the world. Those projections of remote spaces are common with mountaineers. Henry Russell in his Souvenirs d'un montagnard, while looking at the landscape from a Pyrenean summit has the impression of seeing Mongolia, and the hills of the Altaï, and he also evokes the desert of Gobi. Elsewhere in the same book, he compares the Pyrenees with Mount Ararat. H. J. Mackinder, in the narrative of his ascent of Mount Kenya, evokes Krakatoa, the volcano situated in the Pacific Ocean between Sumatra and Java. Altitude, orientation, toponymy, all the elements that appear in the conception of a map, are indicated in the narrative of the ascent. But an incident transforms the cartographic description. A fire inadvertently caused by a match interrupts the geographical progression but this destructive human fire, is going to be replaced in the text (as in the Canadian Rockies with Allen) by another natural fire creating another space: Night fell on a magnificent sunset. We had created our own Krakatoa. Water was cupped in the lobelia leaves, and as the plants smouldered the water evaporated and volumes of steam went up. This formed a great cloud of yellow smoke and white moisture above us, visible at night time, as we afterwards heard, eighty miles away. As the sun set limpid greens and pinks coloured the sky high to the zenith. The banks of smoke clouds were rimmed with orange and purple as the sun changed from blood red to burnished gold. Afterwards the whole sky turned a dull copper till it merged into the dense blackness of the velvety burnt hillsides. In the midst of the blackened domes of grass the white silvery groundsel gleamed out, and, rising high on three sides, was the red glare of the fire in the neighbouring valleys. Behind us, towards the centre of the mountain, a space of darkness testified that our combat had not been in vain. (Mackinder 1900, 102)

The dry cartographic indications are replaced by a real painting where the colours underline the beauty of this spectacle paradoxically caused by a destroying gesture. We might question ourselves about the telescoping of the aesthetic vision and the destructive act (even if it is unintentional, it is destructive and due to some unconsciousness). The dominating man shows himself as a creator: "we had created our own Krakatoa." And instead of showing some regret for his act and using the accident to warn people about the danger of such an unconscious attitude, he shows his pride in front of the fact that his companions and he managed to put out the fire.

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Instead of seeing the desolation of that "space of darkness" and "the dense blackness of the [...] burnt hillsides," he sees that as the proof of their victory. Another painting allows the reader to see and hear the mountain, as appears at the end of the book when the mountaineers finally managed to reach the summit of Mount Kenya: The light effects were wonderful that evening. On the hanging glacier we had frequently been enveloped in thin cloud which shielded us from the equatorial sun, but at sunset we came again into clear air on the top of the southern arête. All the eastern horizon was glorious with a deep purple belt rising like a wall from the end of the landscape. […] The sound of the Nairobi river, swelling suddenly from time to time as the breeze changed, and even the occasional hoot of an owl made no break in the silence of the great peak standing brown and white in the glare of the setting moon. The Pleiades twinkled over the centre of the Lewis Glacier, while overhead the stars in the black vault were steady and without twinkle. Our camp was on the broad floor of a deep valley shut in by steep slopes to north and south, by the moraine of great blocks and tree groundsel35 on the west, by the red cliffs to the east, and by the cleft peak itself to the north-east. Those evenings, this the most wonderful of them all, were spent monosyllabically, warming our hands and feet at the fire, amid the mysterious shadows of the tree groundsel and the white gleams of the creeping groundsel.36 Our thoughts and rare words were divided between our conquest and the red cinders which spoke of home, until presently the scene around would break silently into our dreams, compelling our worship. (Mackinder: 1990, 220-221)

A black and white landscape painting follows the previous painting full of colours and the three repetitions of the word "groundsel" designating two typically native African trees and plants, associate the colouring of the landscape with the abundance and picturesqueness of vegetation. The visual dimension of the description is reinforced by the metaphor of a sketch "in black and white crayons." As for S. E. S. Allen, he evokes the surroundings of Oesa Lake in the Rockies in a pictorial way:

35

The tree groundsel or giant groundsel (Dendrosenecio) is an alpine tree growing in Kenya. 36 The creeping groundsel (Senecio angulatus) or Cape ivy, is a native of South Africa, naturalized in North Africa. See Umberto Quattrocchi, CRC World Dictionary of Plant Names: Common Names, Scientific Names, Eponyms. Synonyms, and Etymology, CRC Press, 1999.

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Picture the colours of morning darting from pyramid to pyramid, then slowly creeping down into the valleys, as sunlight puts a crown upon the summits, while still rapt in the purple gloom sleep the circling glaciers, the winding stream, and the emerald water of Lake Oesa. Here was a harmonised chaos, a stable union of warring elements—the portrayal under forms of the most entrancing symmetry of that majesty which terrifies and that vastness which overwhelms—of the spatially sublime. (Allen, 28)

The blending of pictorial descriptions and projections of a far-off space onto the mountains climbed suggests seeing that each place is integrated into a great whole: Mackinder describes the beauty of the mountain together with the stars in the sky, "the Pleiades [twinkling] over the centre of Lewis glacier," he evokes "the sound of the Nairobi river," "the mysterious shadows of the tree groundsels and the white gleam of the creeping groundsel" (220-221). The fact of showing the beauty of the mountain seen, heard and felt, makes people aware of this beauty of the world, perceived in one's flesh, as Barry Lopez suggests in Arctic Dream. At the same time, the pictorial descriptions link ecological and ethnological perceptions of space.

The link between ethnology and ecology in travel books Most travellers show through their texts that man and nature cannot be dissociated and this vision of things mingles ecology and ethnology. Thus, William Moorcroft gives a textual painting of a fishing method that blends the ethnological dimension as he gives details about the particular technique used by the Srinagar fishermen, and information about the fish thus trapped and also the plants growing there. It is the whole ecosystem that is reconstituted to speak about a human activity linked with nature: The Alakananda produces a species of trout which differs from any variety known in Great Britain. The lines employed in catching it are made here of the fibres of a creeping plant called murwa (Sanseviera zylanica) and are remarkable for fineness and strength. In fishing, a small yellow flower is attached to the loose end of the line, and several nooses of white horse-hair are fastened round it: a leaden weight is passed through the centre, by which the line is sunk. (Moorcroft, 7)37

37

I would like to thank Irina Kantarbaeva-Bill, who made me discover William Moorcroft and other British travellers in Central Asia through her beautiful PHD, "Les récits des voyageurs britanniques en Asie centrale au XIXe siècle (18401890)."

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The fishing technique is mixed with the scientific name of the plant used and the species of fish. As for Mackinder, who may have a condescending and even mocking perception of Natives, he can also mix the description of nature and of human activities with some consciousness of the misery of the country crossed: The plain has trees scattered over it, mostly mimosas in leaf, but the baobabs are naked. There are some very fine euphorbias (?) [question mark in the text]. We twice saw some herds of zebra, and also a couple of Thompson's gazelle. We saw a Makamba go off making game, first testing his arrow in his bow. [...] We saw a poor wretch writhing on the plain beside his burden of reeds from the Makindu stream, doubtless dying of famine. Squatted in the grass were here and there natives, eating roots. Welby told me that some have even followed donkey caravans to pick up undigested grains of corn. (Mackinder 1990, 87)

In less than ten lines, starting from the vegetable scarcity in the plain from which the Kilimanjaro appears, he evokes the vegetation then the fauna, and logically speaks about hunting through the presence of one man to end with the idea of famine. In a superimposition of two types of travels, the European traveller exploring mountains of Africa, reveals the terrible condition in which some populations live and to do so he speaks about caravans, which are supposed to bring riches to the population, either by leading them to more fertile places or by carrying Europeans who make them live while exploiting them. In fact, it is misery and hunger that are shown.

The ethnological eye as a way of speaking about our relationship with the world All travellers speak both of men and the environment in their narratives, first because they want to give a faithful picture of the place visited, at least as faithful as possible to the reality they perceived. But through those factual representations, their insistence both on the characteristics of the populations living in every place and of Nature, the animals and plants surrounding them, they suggest to the reader that they see in those precise types of information concerning a particular place at a particular moment, here and now, the relationship between man and the world. The association of the ethnological and ecological information gives a philosophical message about man's place in the world. To take an example, let us come back to Robert Hood's voyage in the Arctic. He gave great importance to the description of clothes and insisted on the fact that

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everything concerning dressing was linked with animal life. He understood the importance of animals in Cree everyday life; moose skin for the clothes, marten or otter for the head-dressing generally adorned with eagle feathers and quills adorning moccasins. In his factual descriptions of Arctic clothes, Hood suggests the vital relationship of man and animal, man dressed with animal skins as he has been from times immemorial. French philosopher Michel Onfray shows to what extent those clothes made of animal skins reveal the relationship of man with the world: Endosser l’habit bestial rapproche les hommes et les bêtes, d’où un tropisme chamanique: dans ce monde hostile, les poissons, le mammifère, l’oiseau et l’homme ne se distinguent pas mais se répondent, se complètent, se mélangent—se parlent […]. La peau de bête revêtue met en contact avec le monde réel des autres vivants qui peuplent la banquise.38

Clothes link the mere representation of everyday life with man's awareness of his belonging to nature. Among factual information, we can wonder whether place-names, which give travel books their cartographic aspect, appear as a link between ethnology and ecology.

Place-names as a link between ethnology and ecology? Place-names are the visible image of a language in the landscape. They also speak about a people's relationship with the world. If colonizing Europeans changed many Native place-names, it was because they wanted to show their power through this appropriation of the territory symbolized by a new naming in their own languages. Hence the number of big cities with English, French or Spanish names in America for example. The act of re-naming appears as an act of disappropriation and re-appropriation. But where colonizers introduced their Christian religion in topography (Los Angeles or San Francisco), or the projection of the old continent on the new one (New York, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia), Native populations showed a direct relationship with their natural environment. The names of some American states and Canadian provinces designate natural elements and travellers noticed the meaning of those names. In his journal, Robert 38

"Putting on bestial clothes brings together men and animals, hence a shamanic tropism: in this hostile world, the fish, mammals, birds and men do not distinguish from one another but echo, complete and mingle one another—they speak to one another [...] The animal skin put on brings man into contact with the real world of the other living creatures inhabiting the ice field" (my translation) (Onfray 39-40).

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Hood evokes many place-names; and sometimes he refers to the travellers who gave the etymology of the name, referring for example to Mackenzie. The Woody Lake is 13 miles in length, and a Small glassy channel at its northwestern extremity, leads to the Frog Portage, the source of the waters descending by Beaver Lake to the Saskatchewan. The distance to the Missinnippi or Churchill River is only 380 yards, and as its course crosses the height nearly at right angles to the direction of the Grande Riviere, it would be superfluous to compute the elevation at this place. The portage is in Latitude 55°26'0'' N. and Longitude 103°34'50'' W. Its name, according to Sir Alexander Mackenzie, is derived from the Crees having left suspended, a stretched frog's skin, in derision of the Northern Indian mode of dressing the beaver (Hood in Stuart Houston, 107-108).

We can note the alternation between European names and Native ones, like Saskatchewan (coming from a Cree word meaning "rapid river") and Missinnippi. To speak about water is to speak about travelling but it is also a way of showing the rewriting of the map of colonization in water through toponymy. The way he speaks about Missinnippi is interesting. He first gives the Native name, "Missinnippi," and only then the name given by Europeans to pay homage to the man who had been the governor of the Company of Hudson Bay, John Churchill. By juxtaposing the two names he establishes a face to face showing two readings of space: the one of the colonizers and/or explorers who re-appropriate the landscape and erase nature to replace it by their identity, and the one of Natives who chose to give rivers names that only speak about nature and particularly about water; it is the case for the Missinnippi, which, if we refer to the etymology of the name "Mississippi" proposed by Pierre-Etienne Du Ponceau in his book about Native American languages, means "big water." Du Ponceau notes that the word Mississippi would come from "mesi, misi, michi," which, in several Algonquian idioms, means big, and from "sipi, river," and thus Mississippi designates the "Big River" (Du Ponceau, 386). If this study is applied to the Canadian word Missinnippi, we can note that in several Algonquian languages water is designated by the words nipi or nebi (384-385). So, the river Missinnippi would designate the "Big Water." There is a sort of chain made by travellers to interpret the space where they travelled, either by their observation of nature, of people's life, or of languages, spoken or inscribed in the landscape through toponymy. But whereas place-names are numerous in all travel books, their meanings are not always given. African place-names are innumerable in Mackinder's First Ascent of Mount Kenya but he never gives their meanings. They are not given either in Henry Russell's narrative telling of his journey through Asia and Oceania, nor in William Moorcroft's Travels in the Himalayan

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Provinces of Hindustan and the Punjab. What matters is the place-names to lead the reader on the same journey through a text where the original place names evoke some exoticism proper to the colonizing spirit. When the traveller makes the effort to look for a translation and a meaning, this shows another vision of things as he or she wants to penetrate the other's world not superficially but from the inside. The translation of place-names or its absence is more important than it seems as it reveals the gap between the mere colonizer and the traveller who wants to understand the other. Canadian novelist Rudy Wiebe sums up this idea in his novel A Discovery of Strangers, which is a rewriting of the journals of the members of the first Franklin expedition. The explorers must travel on a river they call Coppermine River. But the text explains that the real name of the river, the one given by the Natives, was The River of Copperwoman, named after a mythical character. The explorers, because they had misheard the name— which may show some incapacity to listen to the other—, changed the name to make it the reflection of material exploitation. In the transformation of the name, metal exploitation and materialism replaced the myth. This shows the deep role of place-naming in the conception of one's relationship with the land. Where Natives see it in connection with collective memory and myth, explorers and colonizers see it through exploitation and instead of mythical names, they will give places their own names as if to occupy space even through their identity naming the wilderness. Yet sometimes, travellers understood the connection between place and myth and their own naming showed the respect of the Other's culture, as is the case with Mackinder. He wrote: The Masai have a legend that their race originally came down on to the plains from Kenya, where dwelt their divine ancestor. I have therefore felt it appropriate to apply to the highest summit of the mountain the name of their hero chief, Batian, and to the second summit, only a little lower, the name of his son, Nelion. It will be remembered that we carried Lenana's knobkerry for a safeguard in Laikipia (Mackinder 1990, 192).

The European mountaineer reunites the Masai legend and mythical history of the place with his action as a traveller and climber and his choice for the naming of two summits reveals his respect for this mythical memory. Place-names speak about connections. N. Scott Momaday evokes the deep role of place-names in Native American cultures in an essay about Navajo place-names: Where language touches the earth, there is the holy, there is the sacred. In our deepest intelligence we know this: that names and beings are indivisible. [...] If we are speaking of place, which is (or ought to be) a

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In this philosophical and even sacred dimension of place-names, Momaday shows the Native American philosophy of place and of naming and in that way, he acts as an ethnographer; on the other hand, he speaks about man's relationship with the place, with nature, as a relationship of respect. So, only by speaking about place-names he unites ethnography and ecology. Momaday tells about what sounds like an anecdote and takes a deeper dimension; he said that one day he gave a lift to a young Navajo hitch-hiker and spoke with him in the car as "a remarkable thing happened" (125). Momaday told he had learnt some Navajo and in Navajo he asked the young man, a hundred times "the question in Navajo that means ‘what is the name of that place.’" And each time the boy gave the name, which made Momaday conclude: "He was eminently familiar with the places that defined him. [...] Not only did he know them [...] but he knew their names" (126). And when he saw men riding in the canyon, he thought about the deep value of place and names: In the distance under us there were two men on horseback, Navajo men going slowly towards history, toward a memory that would keep to my mind forever. They were singing a riding song, and the song rose up to us with the clarity of a bell. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew then and there that the essential things of the world and the universe are in place, in place. They are fixed forever in their names. (Momaday, ibid., 126).

The traveller seeing Native men, also in a travelling movement, understands the philosophical quality of the place-name. The colonizers' materialist naming ignored the philosophical, even sacred Native naming, a form of sacredness dwelling on the respect of the place and the awareness of one's belonging to it and one's reciprocal relationship, the awareness that one's story must be read in the place, that the natural history of the place is forever linked with, and contained in, the human history. Place-names reveal the link between land and men and in that element of connection established by languages, they emphasize the ecological dimension of the place-name appearing as the connecting thread between man and nature.

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Travel books and mountaineering accounts as ecological writing? The acceptance of differences is a first step to ecological awareness and to a responsible way of thinking of the world as a great household. As is suggested in the texts we have evoked so far, the inclusion of natural history in human history is quite present in textual or iconographical mountain representations. And when in an essay, N. Scott Momaday speaks about the union of man and place, he suggests that the natural history of the place is contained in man's particular history. They are inseparable. This philosophical essay speaks about respect and responsibility. By evoking Native Americans' way of thinking of the place, he shows that they are responsible for it forever. This is the meaning of the name their ancestors gave to the place, a name that all of them have known from generation to generation. Moreover, the nonhuman plays an important part as is shown by the importance given to stones, trees, waterfalls, animals and flowers. Many travellers insist on the fact that over-exploitation threatens nature. So, we can feel their sense of responsibility in their travel accounts. And all those texts assume the processual order of nature and show the evolution of the natural world in connection with the human presence. They correspond to the criteria given by Laurence Buell to define environmental literature. The traveller, to have a fair view of the country he/she visits, has to be able to see the world around him/her and to be able to listen to people. The ethnologist Violet Alford ends her book The Singing of Travels saying that for her, "enthusiastic teams of students sent into the fields" will not obtain the proper information as "they seem irritating and odd to their informants." And she adds: "It is still the freelance, with ample time to listen to everything his singer or storyteller has to tell, who has the best chance of hearing something worthwhile" (Alford 1956, 249). Violet Alford, whatever her great talent as an ethnologist, shows here some sense of superiority reminiscent of the colonizing spirit of the old days. Either enthusiastic teams of students or freelance observers can get information if they look and listen not only with their eyes and ears but with their hearts. The term "worthwhile" that she uses is also questionable as this would mean that among all the information collected some would not be worthwhile. Any kind of information is important as the tiniest element is part of the life of one particular person or animal or plant or place. Everything is worthwhile. Violet Alford showed English-speaking readers the specificity of traditions in regions that were different from what they knew. She looked at the people from Southern France and Northern Spain with the same eyes as nineteenth-century ethnologists studied African or

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Native American populations. Wherever in the world, even in our street, differences can be found. What is important is to be able to see in those different places, dresses, languages, traditions, and religions, the sign of our belonging to the same world, a world that must be observed in its present reality and in its memory to be preserved. As in Robert Hood's journal, all texts or iconographical representations of mountains or nature and the human communities around them speak about the relationship of man with nature but also of man with time. They are precious evidences of the life of populations at certain periods in some particular areas as those travellers prove to be real ethnologists. They are both explorers and artists. They tell readers about the Other while showing them the natural world around them, leading them to a living visualizing of man's relationship with place, a place telling the story of a land and its inhabitants, and also of the Earth and its inhabitants. It is an ecological message that is given by those texts and pictures insofar as the representation of a place is the image of the consciousness we have of that place and it is a step towards the absolute necessity of its preservation. Wallace Stegner (quoted by Scott Slovic) spoke about the wilderness as a "geography of hope."39 All those travellers, through their way of looking at the world, suggest how man should learn how to read the writing of the earth—which is the meaning of the word geography—and to recognize hope in its memory. As N. Scott Momaday says: "Once in our lives we ought to concentrate our minds upon the Remembered Earth."40 It is the message that all those travellers left us: to concentrate on the memory of the earth in order to read in it that geography of hope and to marvel at the world, from the frail gentian to the sublime summits, from the ephemeral insect to the bear, as fragile as the insect. They taught us to read in mountains the sense of life, a life to be preserved as if the disappearance of an insect on the path threatened our own existence. Kev Reynolds writes: To gain most from the mountain experience I believe one should retain a childlike sense of Wonder for each segment of the natural environment and, where possible, refine the art of awareness; that is, strive to become conscious of each moment of being, and be sensitive to the world about you.41

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Wallace Stegner, "Wilderness Letter," beginning of the 1960s, in Roberta Moore & Scott Slovic 126. 40 N. Scott Momaday in John Grabowska (dir.), Remembered Earth: New Mexico High Desert, Idaho Public Television, 2005, Idahoptv.org, 2005. www.pbs.org/rememberedearth/script.html. Accessed July 28, 2013. 41 Kev Reynolds, Alpine Points of View, Cumbria: Cicerone, 2004, 12.

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To write and to paint one's travelling experiences to change the world and preserve the Earth and its most threatened populations: this is the message of all those travellers who made their personal experiences a collective message to preserve our Earth and to be aware of its beauty and richness that must be preciously kept for all the living creatures inhabiting those wild areas and for the future generations, so that they might inherit both the beauty of our world and the consciousness of the life it contains. Pastoral scenes as can be seen in engravings or photographs representing mountain places might give a key to the fundamental function of travel writing which, starting from personal experiences, can help readers to better understand their relationship with the world. The representations of shepherds in the mountains say two things: they show shepherds at one particular place but those mountain guards might be on any mountain of the world; their eternal gestures, the mountains and animals surrounding them, make them the wardens of all the wild spaces of the world. Their eyes are generally turned towards the mountain, suggesting to us being able to see the beauty and life contained in those wild places. The union of the pastoral scene with the sublime mountains also shows the relative place of man in that nature that he should thank for welcoming him instead of using it without limits. Mountaineers can see immemorial mineral landscapes as well as the tiny flowers that only the attentive eyes can perceive. Through photographs, texts or paintings and engravings, travellers show how those wild spaces and particularly mountain areas can be preserved: the traveller or mountaineer able to look at the world around him or her and writing his impressions and descriptions guides readers towards the consciousness of beauty, life and connection. Travel writing, through the ethnological information given by the authors and through the ecological warning that are their beautiful paintings, gives us a key to our understanding of the world. Those works show that we must be able to see the world to protect it, that travel literature and art are essential in the preservation of the world.

CHAPTER SEVEN WRITING THE COLOURS OF THE WORLD TO SHOW THE BEAUTY OF NATURE

"Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways." Oscar Wilde1

Colours are present in all literary descriptions, either to show the reality of the natural world seen by travellers or to suggest symbolical associations in books of fiction. But the symbolism of colours has changed along the centuries and changes are according to cultures. The European medieval binary opposition between blue—associated with faithfulness— and green—associated with falsehood by Chaucer for example, but also linked with Nature—can be contrasted with the association between blue and green in Chinese painting since the word designating landscape in Chinese meant "paintings in blue and green." Gillia Rudd writes about the mere word "green": The simple word has an unexpectedly wide range of associations, several of which have been noted by earlier scholars either in fairly straightforward linguistic terms (Heather, 1948)2 or in particular literary studies […]. Now that it bears new meanings in the twenty-first century, it is surprisingly revealing to revisit this small word and explore the associations available in Middle English. Green for many now is Good. It is, for some at least the colour of political awareness, equal respect for the human and nonhuman world, animal, vegetable, and mineral, both collectively (as part of a larger and complete system, perhaps) and in its

1 Richard Ellmann (ed.). The Critic as Artist: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, New York: Random, 1968, 318. 2 The reference is to P.J. Heather, "Colour Symbolism: Part 1," Folklore 59:4, 1948, 165-83.

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constituent parts as each animal, plant or landscape is accorded intrinsic worth.3

Michel Pastoureau, in his study of the green colour in Europe, speaks about the "ambivalence" and "uncertainty" of this colour that has positive as well as negative symbolical values. According to him, "it is only at the romantic period that it became the colour of nature and later on, of freedom, health, hygiene, sports and ecology" (Pastoureau, 9). Along the centuries, there has been a drastic evolution of the meaning of the green colour, from Chaucer's "Green Knight" (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) or Shakespeare's "green-eyed monster" designating jealousy in Othello (III, iii), to the green movement emerging in the 1960s and 1970s to preserve the environment, with for example the international organization Greenpeace. Green, which is logically associated with nature, is nowadays also associated with its preservation. When reading the deep role of colours in various texts, we can wonder whether colours might be ecological instruments. Is the textual painting of the world a way of suggesting the necessity of its protection?

An illusion as one of the greatest wonders of reality French physicist and chemist Bernard Valeur reminds us that colours are only an illusion, when he says that "light is constituted of electromagnetic waves, but those waves are in no way 'coloured' waves, so how do we perceive colours? In fact, colours do not exist as such; it is our brain that makes us perceive coloured pictures reconstructed thanks to various kinds of physiological mechanism involved in visual sensation."4 As Manlio Brusatin writes in his Histoire des couleurs, "colours are not real bodies, they are not life, nor exactly a law of nature; they are the reflection of an abstraction of nature, artifice in the natural, that is to say

3

Gillian Rudd, "Being Green in Late Medieval English Literature", in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, 30. 4 "La lumière est constituée d'ondes électromagnétiques, mais ces ondes ne sont en aucun cas "colorées," alors comment percevons-nous les couleurs? En fait, la couleur n'existe pas en tant que telle, c'est notre cerveau qui nous fait percevoir des images colorées reconstruites grâce à divers mécanismes physiologiques impliqués dans la sensation visuelle." Bernard Valeur, "La couleur dans tous ses éclats," http://www.futura-sciences.com/sciences/dossiers/physique-couleur-tous-eclats1396/page/3/, accessed March 16, 2017, translation mine.

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'figures.'"5 When we admire the beauty of the natural world we are first attracted to the profusion of its colours. This is the first paradox of our link to nature: our aesthetic admiration of natural reality comes from an illusion, which is the scientific association of immaterial elements, electromagnetic waves, and our brain, that is to say, our body. When we admire the beauty of blue mountains in the distance, which so many writers have depicted like a dream, saying with Samivel that mountains are "like a blue dream floating above the plains,"6 we dream in front of an illusion created by the telescoping, or rather the meeting between the materiality of the rocky mountain and the immateriality of the air. An illusion depicting the most wonderful reality appears in the virtual world of texts to enter every reader's inward eye and thus convinces them to protect that wonderful illusion making reality bearable. When Rimbaud, in his poem "Voyelles," gave each vowel a colour, thus changing writing into a visual painting, he clearly made colours the key to our understanding of all the codes of the world. As is said by Chevallier and Gheerbrant, "colours are always and everywhere supports of symbolical thought."7 Giving natural reality all its diversity and beauty, colours appear in many cosmogonies and are part of creation myths particularly with Native Americans. They are at the core of the Navajo myth of creation, which was taken up by N. Scott Momaday in the opening of his novel House Made of Dawn. Dypaloh. That was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old and everlasting. There were many colours on the hills, and the plain was bright with different coloured clays and sands. Red and blue and spotted horses grazed in the plain, and there was a dark wilderness on the mountains beyond. The land was still and strong. lt was beautiful all around. (Momaday 1968, 1)

Taking up the colours of the Navajo song evoking the creation myth, Momaday makes the landscape a reproduction of the myth and of the creation through the colours of the landscape. 5

"… les couleurs ne sont pas la réalité des corps, elles ne sont pas la vie, ni exactement une loi de la nature ; elles sont le reflet d'une abstraction de la nature, l'artifice dans le naturel, c'est-à-dire des 'figures'" (Brusatin 24). 6 Samivel, L'Amateur d'abîme, Paris: Stock, 1940. https://enkidoublog.com/2014/08/02/reflexions-sur-la-montagne-au-refuge-ducouvercle-extrait-de-lamateur-dabime-de-samivel/, accessed July 21, 2017. 7 "Les couleurs restent […] toujours et partout des supports de la pensée symbolique," Chevalier and Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des symboles, translation mine.

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The symbolism of colours meets their scientific existence as the green colour, which symbolizes nature and life, comes from the shifting from shadow to light, according to Manlio Brusatin, "[t]he dialectic laws of colours are neatly always resolved in a triangular rotation, where the shifting from light to shadow or vice versa produces a colour that is new (from yellow to blue or from blue to yellow) in comparison to the primary colours, but which is the most widespread in nature: green. Being the true colour of nature, it simply explains the appearance of the two principles ruling every hue: shadow (blue) and light (yellow)."8 The fusion of scientific research and illusion in the very existence of colours leads us to a questioning of the world.

Colours as a questioning Alfred Russel Wallace, in Tropical Nature and Other Essays, organizes a great part of his book around colours, and the word appears in the titles of many chapters: "The Colours of Animals and Sexual Selection" (Tropical Nature, 36), "Classification of Organic Colours" (40), "Protective Colours" (40), "Warning Colours" (41), "Sexual Colours" (41), "The Nature of Colour" (42), "Colour, a Normal Product of Recognition" (43), "Colour as a Means of Recognition" (46), "Local Causes of Colour Development" (53), "Attractive Colours of Fruits" (54); he speaks about "general phenomena of colours in the organic world" (58), "perception of colours" (59), "protective coloration and mimicry in plants" (53): the great number of phrases and titles using the notion of colours shows that colours are at the core of his thought. In Natural Selection and Tropical Nature: Essays in Descriptive and Theoretical Biology, published in 1895, he writes: Among naturalists, colour was long thought to be of little import, and to be quite untrustworthy as a specific character. The numerous cases of variability of colour led to this view. The occurrence of white blackbirds, white peacocks, and black leopards, of white blue-bells, and of white, blue, or pink milk-worts, led to the belief that colour was essentially

8

"Les lois dialectiques des couleurs se résolvent presque toujours en une rotation triangulaire, où le passage de la lumière à l'ombre ou inversement (du jaune au bleu, ou bien du bleu au jaune) produit une couleur nouvelle par rapport aux couleurs fondamentales, mais qui est la plus répandue dans la nature : le vert. Véritable couleur de la nature, il explique simplement les apparitions des deux principes qui gouvernent toute teinte : l'ombre (le bleu) et la lumière (le jaune)" (Brusatin 21-22, translation mine).

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The abundant lexical field of colours in this text shows a profusion that, while allowing the reader to see the multiple colours offered by nature for its plants, birds and butterflies for example, invites the reader—a unique reader since it is a letter and was not supposed to be published when it was written—to see the biodiversity that his letter reproduces. Wallace here wrote letters9 for his colleagues or friends to speak about his experience in Malaysia, and his letter clearly shows his questionings about what the colours prove: "leads us to the conclusion," "it must serve some purpose in nature," "it must be well worthy of our attentive study, and have many secrets to unfold to us." The term "conclusion" and the modal "must," reveal a thought in movement, and the progress in the naturalist's reflexion is generated by the colours of nature. The scientific observation of colours as a means of protection is sometimes taken over by fiction writers. For example, Tony Hillerman, in his detective novel People of Darkness, makes one of his main characters, 9 I would like to thank Isabelle Keller-Privat and Karin Schwerdtner, who, thanks to the volume they edited, La lettre, trace du voyage à l’époque moderne et contemporaine, gave me the opportunity to discover Alfred Wallace's letters and gave me permission to use some parts of the chapter I had written and adapt them for this book.

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detective Jim Chee, thus comment upon a black landscape of lava: "Even the rodents out here tend to be black," Chee said. "Protective coloration, I guess" (People of Darkness, 122). That remark revealing the Navajo's sense of observation, also reveals the close connection between the land and its inhabitants, whether human or nonhuman, and some writers intersperse their fictitious texts with that kind of observation suggesting connection. Wallace's observation of colours led him to see the link between colours, the disappearance of some of them, and natural selection: It seems a fair conclusion that colour per se may be considered to be normal, and to need no special accounting for; while the absence of colour (that is, either white or black), or the prevalence of certain colours to the constant exclusion of others, must be traced, like other modifications in the economy of living things, to the needs of the species. Or, looking at it in another aspect, we may say that amid the constant variations of animals and plants colour is ever tending to vary and to appear where it is absent; and that natural selection is constantly eliminating such tints as are injurious to the species, or preserving and intensifying such as are useful (Natural Selection, 359).

Wallace sees the trace of natural selection in colours. He positions himself as the explorer and predator who kills living creatures to observe them ("The very first time I fired my gun"), but after that, the description of the birds appears as a profusion of colours. Only two Latin words between parentheses break the very visual description; and one of them, Megaljema versicolor, bears its multiple colours in its name. The scientist's writing allows his readers to see the beauty of nature, even if it is uprooted. Writing reconstitutes it and the brutal and ephemeral gesture, the violent shooting, is quickly disposed of to give way to a world of colours showing the reader not the dead bird and its drying skin ("As the skins dry"), but a multicoloured life reconstituted by words. The very first time I fired my gun I brought down one of the most curious and beautiful of the Malacca birds, the blue-billed gaper (Cymbirhynchus macrorhynclius), called by the Malays the "Rain-bird." It is about the size of a starling, black and rich claret colour with white shoulder stripes, and a very large and broad bill of the most pure cobalt blue above and orange below, while the iris is emerald green. As the skins dry the bill turns dull black, but even then the bird is handsome. When fresh killed, the contrast of the vivid blue with the rich colours of the plumage is remarkably striking and beautiful. The lovely Eastern trogons, with their rich brown backs, beautifully pencilled wings, and crimson breasts, were also soon obtained, as well as the large green barbets (Megaljema versicolor)— fruiteating birds, something like small toucans, with a short, straight bristly bill,

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This riot of colours describes killed birds ("I fired my gun," "as the skin dries," "when fresh killed"), and the text reconstitutes their living beauty, thus guiding the reader on the way to the recognition of natural beauty. Even if the killing of the birds was done for the sake of the sciences, the reader will choose the colours of the living birds rather than the drying skin of the dead bird. The colours of the textual painting, by reconstituting the life of the birds on the page, lead readers to the awareness of the choice to keep them alive.

Colours reflecting the modern metamorphosis of the world When mountaineers represent a mountainous landscape, it is already a way of preserving it, of showing its beauty before changes transform it. All of them speak about the different forms of exploitation that they meet on their way. The construction of roads in mountain areas often worries them. Thus Kev Reynolds, a contemporary English traveller, mountaineer and author of mountain guide-books and travel books, tells about a Pyrenean area that, when he first visited it and walked in it, was a real garden of Eden with flowers everywhere. The transformation of nature is mentioned but the valley is transformed by nature itself as if in a magical metamorphosis: "Day by day the valley was being transformed by nature" (Reynolds 2013, 20). When he comes back there, there is another kind of change. He first quotes another traveller who had mentioned the beginning of the construction of a road there in 1897: In 1897 Harold Spender came down the valley of the Esera from its source among the glaciers. In his account of the journey he mentioned this track: “We passed the baths of Venasque ... and a little below came across some Spanish workmen employed on a road in a desultory fashion. Whether that road will ever be finished is a matter that must rest on the knees of the gods.” Now, as we came to the Baños de Benasque—Spender's baths of Venasque—I saw that the gods had made their decision. Below, on the broad river plain, a contractor's vehicle belched clouds of diesel smoke. Dusk was drawing on by the time we turned the bend into the upper sanctuary, and we were still on the bulldozed track that had not been there 18 months before. It led deeper into the valley with an urgency I feared. A concrete ford had been created through the river, and where vehicles had used it their skidding tyres had ripped the vegetation on both banks. A

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once-sacred meadowland was scarred with dry mud and the imprints of wheels, not animals. Dwarf rhododendrons had been desecrated, and rainbow swirls of oil coloured puddles in the track. A sense of foreboding hung over me, and with every step I slipped deeper into a pool of dejection. Fifty metres from the site of the idyllic terrace on which Keith and I had camped, the rough track finally came to a halt. Three cars were parked there; two Spanish, one French. Cardboard boxes lay strewn among the shrubbery, rotting after a shower of rain. Wine bottles had been smashed against a rock. Toilet paper fluttered from the branches of a pine tree, and tin cans were rusting in the stream. “Urban motorised man,” wrote Fernando Barrientos Fernandez, “has no responsible conservationist regard for nature.” [...] “Where,” I wondered, “will the izard go to drink now?” (Reynolds 2013, 21-22)

The colours of the flowers he had described previously are replaced by the artificial colours of refuse and by the false rainbow polluting mountain water. The strength of Kev Reynolds's description of the place stems from the true shout of revolt and anger that the painting becomes. His poetic style allows him to warn readers with sad echoes: the "once-sacred meadowland" is now "scarred" and this near anagram sums up the situation and the message: the sacredness of nature is literally scarred, irremediably wounded by "the 'Urban motorised man.’" The frame of quotations also sums up the shift from the beginnings of the construction of mountain roads as perceived by the Welsh mountaineer Harold Spender, and the result nearly a century later. But in fact, the damage had been made in eighteen months only. In eighteen months, for profit motives (to bring more tourists, more easily, to a wild area) "the valley's innocence" had been "betrayed." "Mountain beauty" had been "desecrated" by "the ugly intrusions." The strong words used by the mountaineer are meant to urge the reader to revolt, to become aware in turn of the destruction of mountain areas by the construction of roads meant to bring more tourists. Yet, before ending his chapter, he writes: "Up in the Maladeta's slopes a shepherd's campfire glowed like a beacon. The glaciers were barely perceived, yet a shadowy profile against distant snows announced that the mountains still remained" (Reynolds 2013, 22). The mountain remains but all the terms suggesting an ominous future, like "foreboding" (to speak about his immediate discovery of the place transformed by urban industrial man but leading the reader to see in this foreboding a more distant warning) are meant to draw the reader's attention to the necessity of preventing that kind of transformation from destroying the "beauty" of mountains, their "innocence," their

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"sacredness," that is to say, simply their life. The text ends on a question about an izard, the izard which, eighteen months before, the mountaineers had seen as he drank in the clear stream. The pollution of the place shows that it is mountain life as a whole that is threatened.

Preservation starting with the conscience of beauty perceived in colours Dian Fossey's love for the beauty of the mountains of Rwanda started with her conscience of the beauty of Glenmary, an old farm she had rented near Louisville. The colours of the landscape show that everything started for her in her capacity to enjoy beauty: Never have I seen any place as beautiful as this is now in autumn. At Glenmary the creeks are full of golden, red, green and brown leaves from the forests. The pastures are still vivid green and are framed by trees that you would swear on fire. When I wake up in the morning, I just run to the windows all over the house and am blinded by the beauty. Quite often I'll see a raccoon or possum scurrying by, or else the ninety heads of Angus cattle will be taking their morning meal off my backyard. When I come home from work, I have to take about twenty minutes to feed the multitude of barn cats and the big white shepherd dog from over the hill who stops by for a handout, along with our farm dogs, Mitzi, Shep, and Brownie, who have adopted me as one of their own. (Dian Fossey, in Farley Mowat's Woman in the Mist, 3, emphasis mine)

Starting with a beautiful landscape painting where all the colours of autumn are emphasized to insist on the beauty of the place, which is reasserted several times, the text goes on with first the wild animals ("raccoon or possum") and then the farm animals (her neighbour's cattle, a Pyrenean shepherd dog,10 her feeding the cats and her own dogs whose names she gives, exactly as later on, she will give the gorillas' names. The beauty of Glenmary allows her to show the link between the beauty of nature seen in its multiple colours and all the life contained in it, a life that can be peaceful when animals and humans live in harmony, which is the case in her depiction. In the mountains of Rwanda, she reveals the beauty of the place in the most original way. After saying that she has "seen the 10 Her description of the dog, "a big white shepherd dog" lets little doubt about the fact that it was a "Patou, this Pyrenean dog used in the Pyrenees since the fourteenth century to fight against predators and imported in North America as well as England from 1930" (http://www.montagne-des-pyrenees.ch/files/historique _du_montagne-des-pyrenees.pdf)

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most fantastically gorgeous country she never dreamed existed" (Dian Fossey in Mowat, 62), she reveals the beautiful colours of the place by night, while she is under the tent: When the moon is full here it seems a sacrilege to be inside one's tent, for outside are screaming the violet, iridescent demands of snow-peaked volcanoes and etchings of lacy mosses and leaves against the silver-blue sky. Each tree assumes its own character when silhouetted against the moonlit sky—some are sinister, some are comical, but none is just a plain tree and none belongs to the daylight world. Walt Disney would be pleased to know Mr. Pluto—a gangly hypericum tree whose moss-tipped limbs exactly resemble Pluto, even to the whiskers. But even Mr. Pluto is just another tree in the daylight world. (Dian Fossey, ibid., 63, emphasis mine)

The gap that seems to exist between the beautiful landscape painting and the activity of Dian Fossey in that place on the one hand, and on the other hand, the comparison of a tree seen in the moonlight with an animal character from a cartoon, may seem surprising. The relationship established between those trees in the night—more generally compared to fantastic shapes by travellers or novelists than to an animal in a cartoon—, and Walt Disney's Pluto, can look like an Americanization of the African wilderness. It is perhaps a way of showing the scene to the American people she loves and to whom she would like to show the beauty of what she sees. She explains that beauty with American references. Her writing adds a symbolical dimension: she compares a real tree to an imaginary dog who was named by Disney to pay homage to the recent discovery of the planet Pluto. Dian Fossey's description draws a circle uniting the real moon with a virtual Pluto only present through the name of a dog in a cartoon. It is as if through her gift for writing she wanted people to feel a connection between those trees, some "sinister" and some "comical," and life with its sinister and comical moments, with moonlit imaginary Pluto and a mere tree "in the daylight world." Starting from the lexicon of the sacred ("sacrilege") to end with a dog in a cartoon, she simply paints the joy of seeing the beauty of the world in the daylight or in the moonlight.

A carnal relationship with nature In several interviews and texts, N. Scott Momaday evokes the necessity of preserving the planet and shows his own ecological conscience. In the preface to his collection of poems In the Presence of the Sun, he frames the main historical events that transformed the world with the reference to his ancestors at the beginning and to ecological conscience

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at the end,11 thus showing that the main line making us aware of our relationship with the world, starts with our ancestral memory, the wisdom transmitted by the ancestors and it should lead to ecological conscience. In his conversations with Charles Woodard, he says that "there is a growing concern for the preservation of the wilderness, landscape and natural resources" (in Woodard, 69). But he insists on the link between the aesthetic perception of the world and its preservation: But I still believe that aesthetic principle holds: western man doesn't really perceive the world as beautiful. He perceives it, rather, as useful. And to be exploited for its economic value. And I think that's wrong. I believe that unless we change our view, we will simply destroy the earth. We will destroy its beauty, and that will be a very shameful thing (Momaday in Woodard, 69).

Momaday would like to see an aesthetic concern even with environmentalists; according to him they "can be too use-oriented, although their uses are not threatening to the Earth. Use is not the first truth" (Momaday in Woodard, 71). For him the aesthetic dimension of the perception of the world is fundamental. He thinks that the landscape can only be perceived as such if man is conscious of its aesthetic dimension and for Native Americans, the landscape is an element like earth, water, air and fire, which means that they consider the landscape as both aesthetic and vital: "For him the landscape is an element like the air" ("A First American Views his Land" in The Man Made of Words, 31). This explains the link between the perception of the beauty of the world and its preservation. To see its beauty is to feel its life, because the perception of beauty means awareness. We have already seen that this earthly paradise is photographed or filmed by artists such as Sebastião Salgado,12 Yann Artus-Bertrand or Art Wolfe, who show us the beauty of the world and its scars to convince us of the emergency of its preservation. Wade Davis, in his introduction to Art Wolfe's "Hymn to the Earth," evokes the impact a photograph can have on changing people's way of thinking. It was an "earthrise" photographed on Christmas Eve 1968 by Bill Anders, one of the American astronauts of Apollo 8, condensing "all the imagination and conscience of mankind."13 11

See page 153 of this book. Sebastião Salgado, La main de l’homme [1993]. Paris: Editions de La Martinière, 1993. Also see Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado's film Le sel de la terre, un voyage avec Sebastião Salgado, DVD Francetv distribution, 2014. 13 Wade Davis in Art Wolfe, Earth is my Witness, Earth Aware Editions, 2014. French edition: Hymne à la terre, National Geographic France, 2015, 18. 12

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This underlines the role of art on our consciences. Sometimes artists show the beauty of the earth to make us realize the absolute necessity of preserving our human and nonhuman family. Barry Lopez who, in Arctic Dreams, mixed his own experience as a traveller in the Arctic and the numerous travel and exploration books he had read, evokes the carnal relationship with nature through the awareness of its absolute beauty; here is what he says when he has the impression to pass the line leading him to the Far North: I had a clarity of mind that made the map in my lap seem both wondrous and strange in its approximations. I looked west into Mokka Fiord, to a chain of lakes between two whitish gypsum domes. Beyond was the patterned ground of the mesic tundra. The browns and blacks and whites were so rich I could feel them. The beauty here is a beauty you feel in your flesh. You feel it physically and that is why it is sometimes terrifying to approach. Other beauty takes only the heart, or the mind. (Lopez 2001, 404)

Through the music of language and the repetition of the same sound with the alliteration in [f]—"you feel in your flesh"—, he reunites flesh and feelings. The perception of the beauty of the world is carnal. The landscape is a visual philosophy of the perception of alterity and nature. The internal rhyme of "the map in my lap" makes cartography enter the traveller's body. The landscape is perceived sensually in a synesthetic relationship, he "feels" the colours musically united through the alliteration and the ternary rhythm, the alliteration in [b] sounding like a drum—"The browns and blacks and whites were so rich I could feel them." The sound [b] initiating the word "beauty" that recurs three times in this passage comes back six times like a percussion instrument on the text. And it answers the softness of the alliteration in [f] also recurring six times and appearing in the verb "feel," recurring three times like the word "beauty." There is a kind of mathematics of words leading the reader to perceive the physical relationship with beauty. The text develops from "the map in my lap" to wonder and strangeness ("wondrous and strange"). The geographical landscape and its colours open onto the lexical invasion of beauty generated by a physical sensation of the world underlined by an alliteration in [f], the threefold occurrence of the word "feel" and the adverb "physically." This physicality of the perception of beauty is musically and mathematically rendered (beauty stems from feeling as is suggested by the same number of occurrences of the two words and the alliteration in [f] suggesting a shiver). This can also be illustrated by Robert Hood in a hunting scene in which the artist gives

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his representation an ecological dimension. The watercolour is entitled A Canoe of the Northern Land Expedition Chasing Reindeer in Little Marten Lake.14 The engraving represents a hunting scene by Cree men; besides the hunting technique represented (some men chase two reindeer in a canoe, while two others hide behind a bush), the viewer can note the perfect symmetry in the foreground. The two reindeer are swimming in the lake and arrive near the banks. There is a perfect symmetry between the men in the canoe on the right side and the reindeer on the banks of the lake on the left side. The same symmetry can be observed between the two swimming animals and the two hidden Natives forming a square. Symmetry is underlined by the birds flying away in a slant line separating the animals from the human beings while warning the former of a danger. This symmetry between human beings and animals in a wild landscape shows the perfect balance that Hood observed between the human world and the nonhuman world. Of course, it is a hunting scene, but it shows a mutual respect between men and animals. The animals have an opportunity to escape. Men are not more numerous than them. The play on gazes (the men look at the animals who look at the human beings) shows an exchange in this struggle for life. Before the terms were used, Hood gives us an example of sustainable hunting. In this hunting scene, everybody has their place, their role, in a world that is different from what the European explorers knew, and which is yet so similar to any hunting scene for life. The Other is in the foreground; the human Other and the animal Other, all essential to life. Moreover, if we observe the canoe, nothing allows the viewer to distinguish who those men are: Indians or explorers, the painting blurs the differences while underlining them by the gestures and scenes of life, as if to show that the Other is any of those who are there. The landscape is not only a landscape; it is a visual philosophy of the perception of otherness and nature.

14 Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1970-188-1275 W.H. Coverdale Collection of Canadiana.

CHAPTER EIGHT COMICS AS ECOLOGICAL ALLEGORY THROUGH VISUAL IMAGINATION

"The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness." John Muir1

Comics are an intermingling of text and pictures; they are read while being looked at. Some authors choose that genre to propose a world that holds out a distorting mirror to us and in so doing, warns us. Neil Gaiman's Black Orchid and Alan Moore's Swamp Thing are not only meant to entertain readers, they guide them towards some environmental awareness that will be reached in an original way: through the meeting with horror stories and monstrous characters. If Swamp Thing can appear as a monster, if the world shown in Alan Moore's series of Swamp Thing is monstrous, it is in the double etymological sense of the term. The word monster comes from the Latin words monstrare meaning "to show" and monere meaning "to warn." The monster is the creature whose horrible appearance shows us something special and warns us about some vices of our society and world. Before the popular success of the film Avatar on the screen, popular graphic fiction and comics gave ecological messages, particularly with Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. The strength of the two writers' texts and of strikingly beautiful and at the same time disquieting pictures makes those works, speaking about nature, threatened nature, and killed nature, real allegories. We are going to see that those comics match the definition of an allegory as given by M.-H. Abrams: An allegory is a narrative in which the agents and action, and sometimes the setting as well, are contrived so as to make coherent sense on the

1

John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir; edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe [1938], reprinted by University of Wisconsin Press, 1979, July 1890, 313.

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Abrams distinguishes two forms of allegory: historical or political allegory, and allegory of ideas on which the "central device […] is the personification of abstract entities" (5). This is what we can find with Black Orchid and Swamp Thing in which Gaiman's Black Orchid and Moore's Swamp Thing stand for nature threatened by man's violence and greed.

Neil Gaiman's Black Orchid Gaiman's Black Orchid, with drawings by Dave MacKean, gave a new life to the superheroine Black Orchid, created in 1973 by Sheldon Mayer and Tony DeZuniga for the illustrations. The publisher of DC Comics, Karen Berger, asked Neil Gaiman to take up the character of this superheroine specializing in the infiltration of crime groups.3 Black Orchid is a metatextual work proposing a reflexion on the creation of superheroes and at the same time it appears as an ecological allegory. Black Orchid is a flower woman with super powers, particularly the power to fly; it was created by a botanist, Professor Philip Sylvian— clearly associated with the world of forests through his name. Sylvian is a sort of soft Frankenstein—he is called Frankenstein at one moment in the book—who, instead of creating a monster destroying everything because he is not loved by his creator and is rejected by society—like Frankenstein's creature—, created an ideally beautiful female character trying to destroy the world of crime. Like the original Black Orchid, she starts as a character infiltrated in a powerful criminal organization. But the originality of this work is that the superheroine is unmasked and killed at the very beginning of the novel, giving the reader the impression that even a superhero cannot do anything against the power of violence, corruption and crime. Yet the fact of taking the usual superhero pattern backwards may give the reader a more active role. When they generally read 2

M.-H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms [1957]. Fort Worth, Chicago, London…: Holt, Rinehart and Wonston, Inc., 4. 3 See Cyril Camus’s book, Mythe et fabulation dans la fiction fantastique et merveilleuse de Neil Gaiman, Rennes, PUR, 2018, and his article "Forêts symboliques de la bande dessinée fantastique américaine contemporaine", Otrante, Arts et Littératures fantastiques, Forêts fantastiques, n° 27-28, Autumn 2010, Paris: Editions Kimé, 2010. I would like to thank my former student, Cyril Camus and say all my debt to him for making me discover Alan Moore's and Neil Gaiman’s rich works in his remarkable PhD, book and articles.

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superheroes' adventures, readers are quiet and passive as they know that the superhero will triumph in the end. Here the superheroine is destroyed from the start, obliging the readers to react. Moreover, the clear graphic division between the black and grey human world of the American city and the wonderful sparkling colours of the vegetable world and of the flower superheroines, clearly establishes a dichotomy between good and evil, death and life, male power and female apparent victimization gradually changed into female power representing the power of nature as opposed to the one of human violence. In spite of this apparently simple dual pattern, this work is quite complex and its ecological dimension is brought out gradually, softly, after the initial metatextual reflexion on superheroes. The picture opening the first chapter is a frame made of a scotch tape and containing plants, one of which goes out of the frame, thus suggesting that the vegetable world is going to leave the frame attributed to it by human eyes, to have its own life. The very first page of the book gives nature the first role as the first picture represents a flower, a black orchid in the foreground and a sunset, with soft orange colours and the city in the misty background. The following two pictures are nearly similar except for the fact that the orchid's size slightly diminishes as it recedes in the picture. In the following three pictures, the human presence reverses the point of view: the orchid steps into the background while there is a huge human hand in the foreground on the first image, half the human character in the foreground and half the orchid in the background of the second one whereas the last picture on the page shows the complete human character in the foreground, half a character in the middle ground and the orchid is now hardly visible. The vegetable element discreetly comes back in language through the narrator's words as he says that he has "followed the command channels of this corruption for half a year, from the pretty flowers of the street down the vine of the organization." The discrepancy between the theme of the sentence and the vegetable metaphor, instead of giving weight to the metaphor, underlines the distance existing between that human world and the world of nature. Nature comes back after Black Orchid's death, with the picture of the greenhouse seen from above and a double page with light colours in green and pink showing a tap, a frog, pink flowers, a bird gathering pollen from the flower to finally seeing two arms emerging from a black orchid and, in full page, the character of Black Orchid shouting in pain. In the blanks of the double page, green concentric circles appear like a wave of nature gradually increasing. The black and white world of human beings comes back and the transition is made through the gradual shifting from prison bars to bamboos. Nature thus comes back with the frog and the bird

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bringing about botanical notes and a scientific botanical language: "Blossoms 12, 25 and 27 are apparently purely epiphytal."4 This brings us to the origin of Black Orchid—"This is where I come from"— and her arrival at the house of the botanist who created her. But even if natural elements appear as signs at the beginning of the book, nature is chiefly present in the third and last chapter taking place in the Amazonian forest in Brazil where the people sent to kill the flower girls try to find them. The bright green and light purple colours present us with the beauty of the natural world defended by the flower women. When the "game is over" and the flower women remain alone after the killers, touched by the beauty of everything around them, agree to listen to Black Orchid, as they are surprised she should have spoken to the Indians, her daughter says: "It's easy. They say they could look after the valley." The Indians, who will also appear, together with the Amazonian forest, in Swamp Thing, in The Parliament of Trees, with the same characteristics of wisdom, are the humans who have the same connection with Nature as them and when they fly together into the sun, her words express communion with Nature through colours: "I am alive in the colour of the leaves, and in the sunset, and in the moist tropical air." In the final picture, a green one, Black Orchid, with a radiant smile and her face and hands turned upwards in the position of the creature making an offering to the sky, thanks God in the way Indians thank the Great Spirit or Francis of Assisi thanks Brother Sun and Sister Moon, in the same position as Alan Moore's Swamp Thing in one frame, but she accompanies this gesture with words by the poet e. e. Cummings: I thank you God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes (I who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun's birthday, this is the birth day of life and love and wings: and of the gay great happening illimitably earth. (Black Orchid, last page)

The meeting of a superheroine, an American poet, Native Americans and Francis of Assisi can only be done through nature and nature's revival as the sun's birthday becomes the birth day—in two words—of life. The choice of giving a plant changed into a female character the role of a superheroine was Sheldon Mayer's but Neil Gaiman insisted on the ecological dimension of the story he created.

4

This botanical term designates a plant growing on another plant.

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Alan Moore's Swamp Thing: an elemental superhero Alan Moore's Swamp Thing is another fantastic creature meant to awaken people's ecological sensitivity. Colin Beineke thus evokes the creature: Swamp Thing could not be a human transformed into a plant-being and play the role of the Green Man. Swamp Thing would then merely be a man in a vegetable shell. Swamp Thing would be human at its core and thus biased towards humanity and civilization. Indeed, Holland's primary ambition in the original series was to uncover a way to return to his human state. In order to portray Swamp Thing as the Green Man, Moore had to rewrite Swamp Thing's origin and reverse the dynamic. Moore's rewriting is explained by character Jason Woodrue, an important figure we will encounter momentarily, as such: "We thought that the Swamp Thing was Alec Holland, somehow transformed into a plant. It wasn't. It was a plant that thought it was Alec Holland! A plant that was trying its level best to be Alec Holland." (Moore Saga, 24) (Beineke)

The elemental quality of the creature places it in a near mystical connection with Nature, which he defends. As Cyril Camus says, he is an "elemental" being in the mythological sense of the term, a "magical personification of a natural force," as he adds, quoting John Clute (Clute, 313-314, quoted by Camus 2010, 206). As such he becomes the allegory of nature. According to Camus, "he is the ambassador of ‘the green,’ the collective conscience of all the plants of the planet" (ibid., translation mine). The forest is no longer scenery as it is in most comics, nor a symbolical space speaking about children's fears in children's books. It "rises to the rank of metaphysical concept" as Cyril Camus suggests. It becomes a living entity whose wisdom is supposed to change the relationships between the human and nonhuman world. Swamp Thing's body appears as an entanglement of plants emerging from the swamps and conveying the elemental strength of original life since it is also linked with water. The illustrations show us entangled shapes from Swamp Thing's recreation after his teleporting to Brazil, to the Amazonian forest where he meets the Parliament of Trees and then Indians. This notion of entanglement as the conscience of belonging to nature appears with Native American writers and particularly with Linda Hogan. She expresses that awareness in Solar Storms: Maybe the roots of dreaming are in the soil of dailiness, or in the heart, or in another place without words, but when they come together and grow, they are like the seeds of hydrogen and the seeds of oxygen that together

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The vegetable metaphor takes the whole world in its "stems and vines" and even the two gases making water are associated with the world of plants since instead of speaking about molecules of hydrogen and oxygen, she speaks about "the seeds of hydrogen and the seeds of oxygen." This entanglement appears as a beautiful dissemination of life uniting everything. This is also what Alan Moore's creature and universe reflect. In Louisiana, the bayou is called "home" and the Amazonian forest is "the place where the green wisdom concentrates" (Camus 2010, 211). Alan Moore's Amazonian forest contains a "Parliament of Trees." The gliding of the political human democratic notion of Parliament to the vegetable world reveals Moore's intention of awakening readers' awareness to the necessity of protecting Nature that, in his comics has to protect itself by projecting men's political concepts onto its elemental world. Cyril Camus notes that Moore's position is different from classical horror comics as regards his "environmental stance" (in Camus 2010, 211). The visual quality of the comics renders the messages clearer for the public who will memorize the notion of "the green" as well as its artistic representation. The dominant green colour becomes obsessive and invades the artistic space of the comics as well as the reader's mind. Annalisa Di Liddo writes: Swamp Thing is thus endowed with a proper "pantheistic consciousness" that urges it to fight against the threats of growing industrialization and uncontrolled urban expansion. As Swamp Thing develops the awareness of its ability to enter a state of communication with the environment, it becomes a sort of green superhero, the incarnation of the primeval force of the elements, ready to rebel against man's violent invasion of natural spaces. (Di Liddo, 51-52, also quoted in Beineke)

Green superheroes come to rival all superheroes, like Superman, Batman and others, whose function is to bring more justice into the world, very often the urban world. Alan Moore's green superhero brings its elemental existence to the service of nature and of men in nature. The either nightmarish or poetic illustrations, the somewhat psychedelic style at times, bring readers into the depths of their own inner world, in which they can see their relationship with the natural world.

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If we take the example of The Parliament of Trees,1 in book four, the contrast existing between the boxes presenting us with the pictures taken by the so-called nature photographer Howard Fleck and showing the love story between fair-haired Abbie and Swamp Thing, is the first visible symbolical element leading the reader to side with nature from the beginning. The paratext reveals the allegorical dimension of the comics by giving us a visual epitome of the meaning of this story. The title page, containing the general title Swamp Thing—the title of this particular story appearing as in all stories at the bottom of the previous page with the mention: "next: The Parliament of Trees" (Moore, Book Four, 106)—, the DC logo and the date, April 86, shows a very significant picture: exclusively coloured in greens and browns, the colours of the earth and of vegetation, the colours of nature, with some black parts figuring shades, it shows us what looks first like monstrous figures, their apparent monstrosity dwelling on their huge size and chiefly the distortion of their features. In fact, those apparent monsters are Swamp Thing, the green creature with a human body, with its back to the reader, and trees, which Swamp Thing faces. Swamp Thing's gigantic size is put into perspective when we discover the huge size of the trees, whose shapes also reflect human bodies. The apparent monstrosity of the picture comes from the fact that the reader sees faces at all levels— on the trees, in a bush in the foreground, in a hole of light green appearing like a soft clearing into which the ghost-like face introduces horror. So, when they recognize the monstrous figures as trees facing Swamp Thing and see them in parallel with the title "The Parliament of Trees," readers realize that what seems to be monstrous at first sight is in fact the silent voice of the eponymous Parliament of Trees. As monstrosity comes from the anthropomorphizing of the natural shapes, we can infer a link between humans and nonhumans. And the originality dwells in the fact that if the title page picture looks monstrous, it is because of the insertion of human features into natural shapes. More than the distortion of the features, which is just an allegorical reading of nature, it is the presence of man in nature that gives a visual impression of horror. It is only an impression, as readers will realize that horror does not dwell in those apparently monstrous figures but in the "normal" man, that is the man corresponding to the physical norm of a human being, like Howard Fleck who introduces himself on the following page as "a photographer." Enclosed in a small box between a table and a partition with a closed door, he introduces 1

Illustrated by Stan Woch and Tom Randall, Tatjana Wood being the colorist, John Costanua the letterer and Karen Berger the editor.

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himself as a photographer who "mostly [tries] and [sells] pictures to the Nature magazines" (108). He introduces himself as having a connection with nature, and as someone who is supposed to know how to look at the beauty of nature. Yet his link is commercial and the presentation appears in black and white on the page showing his pictures from the "Bayou Lafourche" in Louisiana. First the choice of the place is not made at random. Bayou Lafourche, situated to the south-west of Louisiana, has been transformed by the construction of a dam. Its surroundings were long inhabited by Indians (the Washas, then the Chitimatchas) before Acadians settled there at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Until 1904, it received 10 to 20% of the Mississippi flow. But in 1904, a dam was built at Donaldsonville, thus depriving the bayou of a great part of its water.2 The double page introducing the photographer starts with the small box in colour showing the photographer followed by all the other boxes in black and white, which stand for the photographs as they are figured drying and hanging from a thread thanks to clothes pegs. The first one appears as the natural alibi of a nature photographer since the heron occupies the whole space of the first box. But his sudden flying off transforms the reader's perception of things as in the following box, a woman's leg replaces the heron's wings. From then on, the pictures gradually unveil Abbie, first dressed then undressing, and the supposed nature photographer appears as a paparazzo until the moment when he takes the photograph of Swamp Thing. When he says: "they were beyond earshot so only the bushes could hear what they said or judge if it was proper," the sentence has a double meaning. It is mere irony on the photographer's part but it foreshadows the elemental dialogue between Swamp Thing and the Parliament of Trees paradoxically announced by the puritan photographer projecting his Puritan conception of proper behaviour onto the natural world. The black and white double page is followed by the complete title page, with the title of the series, the title of the story and the names of the writer, artists and editor. A romantic picture follows the initial monstrous presentation of the human-faced trees with Swamp Thing. Light instead of darkness, and light colours added to a red rising sun on a pink sky follow the previous title page. The coloured paratext frames the black and white pictures and the photographer's lecture: the rigid appearance of the frail man with a dark suit and spectacles alone in front of an unseen audience, contrasts with the image of communion appearing either through the face to face between Swamp 2

http://www.nola.com/environment/index.ssf/2013/03/engineers_hired_for_bayou_ lafo.html, accessed May 34, 2018.

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Thing and the trees or on the romantic picture of the kiss between the girl and Swamp Thing, beautifully integrated into the landscape—green Swamp Thing is in connection with the green of the trees while a blue dragonfly reflects Abbie's blue shorts. We might have thought that the spectators' eyes were in the same position as the photographer's since the first vision the photographer has of Swamp Thing is followed by the kiss in full page on the title page. But instead of being behind the photographer's camera and eyes, we soon realize that we have a different point of view since a shining spot reveals that the camera is in front of us and in a new close-up, we can see the couple of the woman and the elemental creature close up in the camera lens. Yet the circular shape of the lens creates a sort of whirl in which the two beings seem to be taken as if in a whirl of energy replacing the photographic imprisonment. So, when the small box with the lecturer comes back and when he says that he has "never seen nothing so disgustin'! There was bugg and mold on that thing, an' she was kissin' it," the reader places face to face the notion of "disgust" of the paparazzo's point of view and the beauty of the union between the girl, Swamp Thing and nature. The impression of freedom emerging from the long boxes, the natural background and the dynamism of the pictures contrasts with the fixity of the lecturer who may be a nature photographer, but who is unable to take the photograph of the heron flying away. In other words, the paratext and the very first pages of the story show readers that they are in front of a work defending the beauty and natural strength of nature symbolically represented by Swamp Thing. If we remember that according to Abrams, in the allegory of ideas the "central device […] is the personification of abstract entities," we can really see Swamp Thing as the personification of the energy and strength contained in nature, a force of love represented by the love story between Abbie and Swamp Thing, which, allegorically, might evoke a love story between the woman standing for a part of mankind, and nature. The two characters merge with nature. The Eden-like quality of those pictures is transformed in the following one (112) showing Abbie and Swamp Thing tenderly walking in the river towards a cluster of trees while two grey hands in the foreground hold a film. The dramatic irony of the situation where the reader knows about what is happening and knows that Abbie and Swamp Thing's peace is threatened, has also something of a detective story about it. It is as if the reader was the investigator. The threat against the couple's peace is in fact a threat against nature. The boxes showing us the beauty and energy of the natural world are broken by the presence of the small box with the photographer classifying his pictures as if they were a game of cards (112). Yet the presence of the man who wants to show his own perception

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of things and show people how "disgusting" the scene was, makes the reader side with the photographed couple and not the photographer. The composition of the speech bubbles emphasizes that. The photographer's words are presented with a kind of enjambment since the sentence "pictures like these, I could take'em and sell'em anywhere…anywhere in the world" is divided into two parts, the final one, "anywhere in the world," appearing on the following page just before we could see Swamp Thing's own thoughts within yellow speech bubbles while he is taken in a sort of whirl through which he is teleported to South America. We understand what is happening because of the previous dialogue between Swamp Thing and Abbie. He told her that "in South America [he should] learn everything…," that he could "regrow [himself]" (111). While the "world" of the photographer is a colourless mercantile world—the word "sell" appearing in a black and white speech bubble—, Swamp Thing's "planet" is ruled by love, memory, energy and colours: "The memory…of our good-bye kiss…is with me…as I crackle through the green lattice…that girds the planet" (113). His words speak about memory, love and protection around the green colour. Where Howard Fleck—whose name "Fleck" designates a small spot, something dirtying things—, speaks about disgust and financial interest in a static position, Swamp Thing speaks about love while representing energy and movement constantly in the making. The first three boxes of the page, in blue and green, reveal first the circular outlines of the whole planet, then the angle of vision goes closer and we can see the outlines of South America with the lines of the rivers and the names of the countries, the main rivers and cities, while Swamp Thing comments upon his journey: "out of Louisiana…humid and sensuous…down through the mineral-rich soil of Mexico…through Nicaragua…and Colombia…" (113) and in another speech bubble under the previous one: "and finally…to Brazil." The very position of the bubbles reflects the movement of the journey, thus connecting the text visually to the picture. Still more visually striking, the circular lines give an impression of movement and the blue web within the map of South America suggests a system of connections that may suggest the interior of a brain coloured by the colours of water (blue) and earth (green). This may send us back to Chinese painters who invented landscape painting in the fifth century calling it "paintings in blue and green." So, the colours of the boxes make them both a primordial natural landscape and aesthetically, a landscape painting of the origins of the genre. The system of connections is deepened in the third box where the eye goes still closer onto a real close-up on a seed. The seed is yellow, like the background of Swamp Thing's speech bubbles, the colour once again reuniting the text and the

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picture visually. From a sort of explosion of light in a yellow star-like spot surrounding the seed, there appear green tentacles on a background in blue and green whose small bubbles suggest water in movement. Swamp Thing's words framing the picture speak about "source," "seed" and "web" in a visual language: South of Concordia…I find the source…of the Téfé. The green about me suggests exciting new possibilities…for form…and colour… I locate…a single seed…within the web… (113)

The choice of Concordia is important and its multi-levelled semantics is significant. Factually it designates one of the two Brazilian cities named Concordia, one in the State of Santa Catarina, the other in the State of Para, Condordia do Para. It is also a Latin word suggesting union and reconciliation. And finally, in a story in which the hero is a green creature intending to save the natural world and the planet, the reader necessarily thinks about Concord in Massachusetts, the birth place of Henry David Thoreau, who initiated environmentalism in the middle of the nineteenth century and wrote about Concord and about the "hideous swamps" that the settlers saw around the Merrimack.3 The movement visually represented on the page is prolonged with the new creation of Swamp Thing, who is recreated in the reader's eyes, through a visual and sonorous representation—thanks to the onomatopoeia figuring in the sounds of the plant growing out of the soil. The blue and green pictures give way to a prevalence of green with an interweaving of snake-like things gradually becoming a plant and then in the last box of the page, Swamp Thing in his new appearance, is more leafy than in his appearance in the bayou of Louisiana, as if his appearance reflected his connection with the environment. At the moment when Swamp Thing reaches his full form, we catch sight, on the right side of the picture, of a trouser leg and a shoe, suggesting that Swamp Thing takes shape just before a man. We 3

Speaking about the Merrimack, Thoreau evokes "the "hideous swamps" about it, as [the white settlers] supposed," H.D. Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1906, 90. Thoreau's book and his quotation of settlers' words speaking about "hideous swamps" thus become the ecological intertext of Alan Moore's series, who changed the supposed "hideous swamps" reflecting the point of view of those who colonized the country, into a superhero in a horror story, the superhero being born from the swamps and his "hideous" appearance being the biased vision of those who are unable to see nature's reality but colonize it and destroy it.

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understand on this page that the man, taking notes in the following picture of the following page, is Constantine with whom Abbie had said he had an appointment: "He said he'd meet you near the source of the river Tefé tomorrow" (111). The depth of the visual symbolism is sometimes made lighter by some humour as when Constantine first says to Swamp Thing: "you must introduce me to your tailor" (114). Together with the humour of the cue,4 we can also infer that Constantine is not surprised by Swamp Thing's appearance, that is, he is on nature's side and understands the creature as the embodiment of the nature he knows and defends. He is the intermediary, the "passeur" who will introduce the green creature to the Indians, who will in turn introduce Swamp Thing to the Parliament of Trees. In the chain of nature lovers, starting with a couple's kiss in nature, going on with Swamp Thing's journey and his recreation, or rebirth or regrowing rather, to end with a naturalist, then Indians and finally trees owning essential wisdom, Swamp Thing is the pivotal vegetable element connecting everything, through his human-like vegetable existence. The choice of River Tefé is also important from an ecological point of view as the river flows through an ecoregion and is the eastern boundary of the Tefé National Forest, which protects a part of the Amazonian rainforest. Yet farming, even if it is experimental, demands the removal of patches of forest. WWF writes that "near Tefé, a large patch of forest was removed for an experimental agriculture project, but it has returned to secondary forest."5 The choice of this Brazilian place and of Indians leading the green creature to the Parliament of Trees places the reader from the start in a real ecological background. Swamp Thing alone is allowed by the Indians to enter the Parliament of Trees, as they recognize the embodiment of nature in him, which is the definition of the allegory of ideas. The 4

That kind of humour with a double meaning also appears when Abbie, in the first box following the title page, says to Swamp Thing: "something smells strong this morning;" and he answers: "A dead muskrat…I absorbed it…into me yesterday…it's almost gone…" (111). The humour of the realistic remark evoking some organic mechanism may have another subtext. The choice of the muskrat is perhaps another sign given the reader of Swamp Thing's connection with the mythical world as the muskrat is an important animal in several Native American Creation myths (particularly in Canada) since it is the small animal allowing the creation of the Earth. Swamp Thing's remark of his having absorbed one might suggest that he has absorbed the myth and if "it's almost gone," it may be because the myth now is becoming reality and if it was the animal responsible for the creation of the Earth, it disappears now behind Swamp Thing, this new myth appearing as responsible for the protection of the Earth. 5 https://www.worldwildlife.org/ecoregions/nt0133, and also see https://www.britannica.com/place/Tefe, accessed May 24, 2018.

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double page presenting us with "the Parliament of trees" appears as a beautiful, living landscape painting dominated by greens and browns where Swamp Thing walks to penetrate this virgin forest dominated by vegetable shapes with only a few animals: a green lizard, a blue bird and a small brown mammal in the foreground and a grey snake hanging from a tree above Swamp Thing in the background. That is to say, the animals present here seem to represent all animals through their movements since here are represented creeping, flying and walking animals. Moreover, the similitude of shapes between the snake and some vegetable roots once again projects a system of connections figuring the allegorical dimension of that vegetable character entering a natural world where trees speak and hold wisdom that can save the Earth. From now on the visual representation of Swamp Thing's meeting with the trees of that natural parliament is accompanied with the narrative of his impressions. When he says that he is "touched…by an unbearable nostalgia…a haunting sense…of familiarity…and déjà vu" (118), the close-up on his head with red eyes and white lines appearing like long teeth, mingles monstrosity and emotion. There is a moving human-like expression of sadness in his apparent monstrosity, as if the visual representation of his impression of familiarity with the trees needed the association of monstrosity and feeling to make readers aware of Swamp Thing's message. It is as if this close-up on his "face" aimed at showing readers the connection existing between nature and men, as if they were supposed to recognize their nonhuman origins in this human vision of a false monstrosity paradoxically showing us the beauty of nature. The allegory shows us a visible literal sense, the creature appearing as a monster in its strangeness, and a more hidden sense, which is the fact that he stands for all nature and reveals our connections as humans with the whole natural world. Swamp Thing's dialogue with the trees, evoking their past as humans, underlines a human/nonhuman link to guide readers towards a sense of connection. The colours of the rainforest, contrasting with the black and white pictures taken by the photographer whose aim is to denounce something he cannot understand as he is totally disconnected from the nature he photographs— not because he does not know how to look at it but only because he wants to earn money from it, to profit by it—, are reflected by Swamp Thing's narrative in the yellow bubbles; he speaks about "the afternoon light" that "falls in shafts…golden and timeless," or "each new texture…each new color…brings a pang of recognition," "the vivid red shriek of a parrot…splashes out…over the green" (118). In a synesthetic evocation where the parrot's shriek is associated with its colour, Swamp Thing

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presents us with a vivid world of colours to lead us towards the reason for his presence among those trees: I was told…that I would…find answers here… I've found marvels…I've found a garden…of graveyard…of legends… (119)

enigma…and

a

Swamp Thing's investigation among the trees does not bring answers to him and his poetic words reveal a telescoping between space, mystery and imagination. The speaking trees reveal "marvels," that is to say a tale-like world, "a garden of enigma" suggesting mysteries and "a graveyard of legends" revealing the forest as both a space of death and of collective memory, a space to be read, if we refer to the etymology of the word "legends." Swamp Thing is presented by the trees as "a necessary creation…of the world…as are we all" (120), in a metatextual answer making Swamp Thing both a creation of nature like the trees and a creation of imagination in the comics we are reading. This answer appears in a box, the graphical construction of which is quite symbolical as it is built according to a triangle constituted by the speaking tree, Swamp Thing and a nest with two eggs in it. The blue humming-bird flying back to its nest constitutes the height of the triangle. This geometry of life places an element of true nature in the drawing to complete the triangle and this element of true nature—the eggs—, symbolizes birth, life to come.6 The moving, living line of the flying bird seems to show the nest like a graphical arrow designating life. In this context, the adjective "necessary" takes a fundamental value. Swamp Thing is "a necessary creation" in the plot, meant to try to save the planet from evil: "there is evil in all the wood…hiding in a cave…wearing the waistcoat of human skin...planning the destruction of heaven" (127-128). And Swamp Thing as an imaginary hero is a necessary literary creation, meant to make people aware of the dangers threatening nature as the Parliament of Trees tries to 6

There is perhaps an intertextual reference to Magritte's "Domaine de Arnheim," a title taking up the title of a short story by Edgar Allan Poe ('The Domain of Arnheim," 1846). The painting he made obsessively for nearly thirty years (from 1938 to 1965), represented first a window opening on a blue mountain with the shape of a bird and a nest with eggs being on the window sill. In the last version of the painting, entitled "Le printemps" and painted around 1965, the bird, who is no longer mineral but made of green leaves, flies away in an image of freedom and renewal that was probbaly significant for Alan Moore who integrated the blue bird and the eggs into a scene where the character evoking freedom and renewal is not a bird but a creature coming from the swamps, as free as Magritte's bird made of leaves. The illustrations with surrealist inspiration highlight this pictorial intertext.

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make Swamp Thing aware of his connection with nature, with his ancestors the trees. When he tries to dissociate himself from the elemental world, saying "I was not born…a plant elemental…if that is truly…what I am," "my consciousness…is borrowed…from a dead man…I…am not…like you," the tree answers "you…are exactly…like me. I…was Alec Olsen" (120). And all the trees give their names as humans in the past, thus appearing as natural reincarnations of human beings, or rather resurrected creatures as is explained by a tree using the semantic field of storytelling: All…our stories…are subtly…different…yet the underlying…pattern…remains constant…a man…dies in flames…a monster...rises from the mire…sacrifice…and resurrection…that is always…our beginning… (121)

The Parliament of Trees functions as a symbolical and metatextual entity describing their own "beginning" as "monsters" in a horror story—they use the words "stories" and "patterns"—thus giving the keys of this literary creation. At the same time, they appear as symbolical Christ-like creatures evoking the notion of "sacrifice" and "resurrection." But this is an elemental resurrection, where the shifting from the fire of destruction to the water and earth ("mire") of rebirth makes this monstrosity a literary way of showing the connection existing between men and nature. In a surrealist picture mixing Swamp Thing's face, an eye and vegetable shapes, Swamp Thing evokes his human limits: "They understand…so much…about this curious…vegetable…form of ours… […] I see now…how limited…how human…I have been in my thoughts" (124). He makes the adjective "human" a synonym of "limited." His plunge "into the unmappable continent of their mind" (124) contrasts the outlines of the map of South America with the whirl of the "unmappable continent" leading him to see all possibilities, learning who he was in old China and prehistoric Africa. Looking for knowledge, he does learn lots of things and when he asks how to use his power, they tell him to "avoid power." In real aphorisms like "Flesh…speaks. Wood…listens" (122), "Flesh doubts. Wood knows" (125), the trees sum up their superiority to humans, which echoes St Bernard de Clairvaux speaking about forests' teaching: "Tu trouveras plus dans les forêts que dans les livres. Les bois et les pierres t'apprendront plus que n'importe quel maître."7 7

"You will find more in trees than in books. Woods and stones will teach you what no master will tell you" (translation mine), Bernard de Clairvaux, Œuvres, quoted in Jacques Le Goff, Les intellectuels au Moyen Age, Paris: Seuil, 1969.

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An heir of the medieval Green Man that appears in several cultures and whose representations often adorn Christian architecture, sculptures or stained-glass windows,8 Swamp Thing keeps from his ancestor the mixed appearance of human features and leaves and a part of its symbolism, as that figure was supposed to symbolise renewal and life. The meeting between Swamp Thing and the trees in the Parliament of Trees and the close resemblance existing between the shapes of those trees and of Swamp Thing, all of them including human shapes in their vegetable existence, are echoed by a woodcarving by Paul Sivell, the Whitefield Green Man. The figure of the Green Man is carved directly from a tree, the head of the mythical figure prolonging a long wooden beard carved in the bark of the tree. Thus, the wound in the bark gives it a new life by integrating the sculpture directly into the tree in which it is made. We can also think about all the fountains in the world, in which the pipes letting the water out, are human faces surrounded with leaves, like the fountain in Campo San Giacomo in Venice. The examples of human figures with leaves are innumerable and show that the myth of the Green Man has long existed. The originality of Alan Moore's character is to make it an allegory, not only of nature but of the defence of nature. Swamp Thing's aim being to save the planet, he appears as an allegory both of nature always renewing itself and of ecological thought. The colourful oneiric drawings add to the strength of the allegorical dimension of the creature whose constantly renewed shape tells about a world in constant movement where the thing to be rejected is power, which brings about all forms of destruction. Mingling the oneiric world, surrealist painting, psychedelic graphy and medieval legends and references, Moore's creation is deeply rooted both in the world of nature and in the world of art and literature. It is that ecological, literary and pictorial composition that gives the allegorical dimension its strength and while 8

See for example a stained-glass window in Pennal, Gwynedd, North Wales. St Tannwg and St Eithrias Church. Royal Chapel of the Prince Owain Glyndǒr or a sculpture on the cathedral of Saint-Bertrand de Comminges in the French Pyrenees, a thirteenth-century Romanesque carving on the archway of the church of Garway, Herefordshire, or in the abbey church of Vendôme in France, a painted wooden roof bow at Rochester cathedral. The common points between those sculptures is the mingling of a human face with leaves and branches and their monstrous appearance. There are some modern reinterpretations like Banskia Man, a sculpture by Graham Wilson, an Australian artist, incorporating Australian flora into his work of art, or else Tony Adams's The Green Man, which can be seen at the Custard Factory, Birmingham. On this topic, see Lady Raglan "The 'Green Man' in Church architecture" in Folklore vol. 50, n° 1 (March 1939), 45-57.

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entertaining us, guides us on the path of awareness, like Swamp Thing in the Parliament of Trees.

PART 3 IMAGINATION TO DENOUNCE DEVASTATION

CHAPTER NINE FROM BEECH TO BOOK AND VICE VERSA: DEFORESTATION AND REFORESTATION OR THE WEIGHT OF TEXTS

"When I consider that a single man, relying only on his own simple physical and moral resources, was able to transform a desert into this land of Canaan, I am convinced that despite everything, the human condition is truly admirable." Jean Giono, The Man who Planted Trees1

Everywhere in the world forests are threatened by the rush for profit combined with our ways of living. Alan Moore's Parliament of Trees in Swamp Thing appears as a clear warning given by the trees' voices translated by artists. Everywhere in the world writers let their voices be heard to defend the living world of trees. Lebanese literature evokes the desertification of Lebanon. Marianne Marroum mentions Fifi Kallab's essay "God Always Forgives, The Human Being Often, As to Nature Never" and quotes: It breaks my heart to see that Lebanon is going through a process of desertification, and that its green areas are shrinking, in contrast to its description in the Biblical texts. Fires are destroying its green and dry areas. Our mountains are gnawed and mined and replaced by mountains of trash, cities are expanding and following their own rules. Our beaches have lost their sand, their fish and their beauty. Our exploitation of nature has no boundaries and does not take into consideration nature's potential for the regeneration of its bounties. Means of production are not concerned with pollution and its detrimental consequences. All of this is in the name of civilization (66).2 1

Jean Giono, The Man who Planted Trees, translation from the French by Peter Doyle, http://www.perso.ch/arboretum/Man_Tree.htm, accessed March 25, 2017. 2 Fifi Kallab, "God Always Forgives, The Human Being Often, As to Nature Never", in The Lost Space: The Views of Lebanese Authors and Artists on Nature,

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Yet there is hope suggested by some Lebanese writers, as Marianne Marroum says: Some of the authors and artists who contributed to this anthology put forth solutions to the environmental problems at hand. Some call for pragmatic solutions such as the reconfiguration of landscape in a sound ecological manner. Such is the case of Rahif Fayyad, the Lebanese architect. In "The Architectural Perspective and Nature," he asserts that the architectural vision of greater Beirut needs to be congruent with its nature. He recommends preserving Greater Beirut’s close historical relations with the sea, and restricting the city to its natural boundaries. (54-55, in Marroum, 130)

In Africa, poets and playwrights revolt against deforestation. Nigerian poet Niyi Osundare alternates anger and hope when he entitles a poem about the poisoning of the Earth "Our Earth Will Not Die" 3 (Osundare, The Eye of the Earth, 50-51). When he writes in a choreopoem: The desert marches towards the sea Alas, the boundless rainforest of my youth Has shrunk to a frightened eyebrow On the forehead of the coast Koko gha kokodi, 4

He changes the shrinking of the African forest because of man's devastation into poetry to warn the world, as Wole Soyinka does in The Lion and the Jewel when he speaks about those who "break the jungle's back" (Soyinka, The Lion and the Jewel, 23). To make people understand the gradual killing of the planet, poets use the metaphor of the body, thus reminding readers of their connection with the nonhuman world, which is a way of making them aware of the fact that trees, like humans, suffer. The exploitation of wood is not a new problem and forests were already threatened in Shakespeare's days. The innumerable forests covering the land in Prehistory gradually disappeared for economic reasons. 5 From Cultural Association of Georg Yammin, 2009 (in Arabic, translated by Marianne Mammoun in "Lebanon's Greening Imagination," Ecozon@ vol. 4, n° 2 (2013) 3 See part I, 138. 4 Niyi Osundare, "Hole in the Sky", Choreo-poem, World Literature Today, MayAugust 2014, http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2014/may-august/two-poemsniyi-osundare 5 I would like to thank Héliane Ventura and Oriana Palusci for giving me permission to use some elements of an article—"From Deforestation to

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the 16th century, deforestation has been denounced in texts revealing the healing power of literature. Trees are our shelters, the symbolical link uniting earth and sky, and also our image, solidly planted in the ground. Michel Serres, starting from a small word designating a part of our bodies, suggests that, by calling a part of our bodies the "trunk," we consider we are like trees: Quand nous disons: notre tronc, nous nous prenons pour des arbres. Quittons-nous la Faune pour entrer en Flore? Mieux, pour capter la lumière, les arbres étalent leurs branches dans le plan, comme des bras étendus. Ce livre dévoile l'origine florale de la construction. Les murs jaillissent vers le haut, comme des troncs, les étages s'étalent selon l'horizon, où les pièces s'entourent de cloisons, comme les cellules dures de Flore. Nous n'avons point quitté les arbres, nous les habitons toujours. (Serres 2011, 28) 6

Michel Serres here comments upon the photographs illustrating his point of view: the highest skyscraper in the world in Dubai and, on the following double page, an extraordinary oak in Brittany. Michel Serres's reflexion leads him to become the book he is writing—as the English word "book" has its origin in the name of the beech. So, when the philosopher, writes: "Je suis plus hêtre que taon" (Serres 2011, 22), 7 he explains his deep proximity with the tree: "[…] je viens de découvrir pourquoi je vis en une harmonie si étroitement musicale avec l'arbre" (ibid.). 8 Trees have been our protectors and our sources of life for centuries. Forests are enchanted places in many tales all around the world, from the Celtic forest of King Arthur's legend where King Arthur and his knights start their quest for the Holy Grail, to the Cedar Forest in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, where Gilgamesh and Enkidu travel to fight monsters. In the Roman world, Julius Caesar and Pliny the Elder mention the Hercynian Forest as an Awareness: Literature opening onto a 'Canopy of Hope'"—, I wrote for Anglistica. An Interdisciplinary journal, Università degli studi di Napoli "L’Orientale", 2015, 163-178, https://www.anglistica-aion-unior.org/copia-di-19-1. 6 "When we say: our trunk, we think we are trees. Do we leave Fauna to enter Flora? Better, to catch the light, trees spread their branches in the plan, like stretched out arms. This book unveils the floral origin of construction. Walls spring upward like trunks, the floors spread according to the horizon where the rooms are surrounded with partitions like Flora's hard cells. We have not left trees, we still live in them" (translation mine). 7 "I am more of a beech than a horsefly," translation mine. 8 "I have just discovered why I live in a harmony that is so closely musical with the tree" (translation mine).

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enchanted forest. The mysterious aspect of forests led men to invent an enchanted world in those forests, places of life and shadow at the same time, places of nature hiding an invisible, unknown world, either threatening or enchanted. So, storytellers and writers appropriated forests to invent imaginary stories that were supposed to guide readers towards reality. From chivalric romances to modern fantasy, from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings to J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter, the forest is a magical place. And yet we dramatically destroy those magical natural places that have lived in our imaginary for centuries, we cut those trees that look so much like us. This resemblance is sometimes used in a comical way among tragedy as in Charlie Chaplin's film Shoulder Arms, in which the soldier saves his life and the life of another soldier by entering a hollow cardboard tree and his arm being mistaken for a branch of the tree within the real forest, he can thus knock out the German soldiers who were about to fire on his friend. Burnt trees recur in representations of the war, and photographs, paintings, like those of Paul Nash, and films show those burnt, beheaded trees that seem to reflect the destruction of human bodies. This kind of landscape appears in Chaplin's Shoulder Arms, painting the devastation caused by the First World War, and at the beginning of The Great Dictator, starting during the First World War. 9 Annette Becker underlines the proximity that artists see between men mutilated and trees burnt by war: "Moignons d'arbres, métaphores d'hommes mutilés […]."10 Becker reminds us that some artists, like Ernest Pignon-Ernest, "have chosen the metaphor of the landscape, more particularly of the tree, to express the disappearance of bodies" (Becker, 202). Chaplin's films show that the greatest tragedy may be denounced in terms of comedy and the hollow tree in Shoulder Arms is the theatrical prop borrowed from the natural world that helps him to change tragedy into a comedy meant to relieve those who are wounded by the war. The proximity existing between men and trees, seen by artists and philosophers, has not prevented the wild destruction of huge parts of forests in the world. Here again, the tone of comedy can be helpful to denounce that. In Canada, a satirical drawing, by Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, shows "the monster of gluttony" stealing the resources of the First Nations 9 About the tree in Chaplin's representation of the war, see my article, "L'écriture en creux du paysage de guerre dans le cinéma de Charles Chaplin," in Caliban n° 53, Héliane Ventura and Françoise Besson ed. La guerre de 14 re-présentée: l’art comme réponse à la guerre /Representing World War One: Art’s Response to War, Toulouse: PUM, 2015, https://caliban.revues.org/942 10 "Stumps of trees, metaphors of disabled men." Ciné-Magazine, 1924, quoted by Annette Becker 203, translation mine.

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in British Columbia. 11 The monster is swallowing forests; his tail ends with a plug that is going to be connected to a factory. He stands not only for the logging companies ignoring Aboriginal rights but also for all the countries that destroyed forests. In the 18th century, British travellers in the Pyrenees observed the damage of deforestation. Thus, Henry Swinburne evoked the exploitation of the forests of the Valley of Aspe where the Escot mast factory felled thousands of trees for the construction of French warships. He said that two thousand trees were necessary for the construction of one warship. 12 Charles Richard Weld alluded to the preservation laws meant to fight against the worrying shrinking of forests: But the forests are now very distant, and would have disappeared entirely before this had not a law been enacted about a dozen years ago for the preservation of certain timber districts, and the creation of new forests. (Weld, 329)

Awareness of the worrying exploitation of forests is not an isolated fact in Pyrenean travel literature. Chausenque also evoked the rampant exploitation of forests. 13 In the 19th century, some writers drew people's attention to the ecological consequences of human action, like George Perkins Marsh, in Man and Nature. Or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864), or in France, Elisée Reclus, who wrote about the relationship between man and the environment, mentioning the damage caused by human action on forests and saying that "[o]ur forests' giants become scarcer and scarcer and when they fall, they are not replaced. In the United States and in Canada, most of the high trees that astonished the first settlers have been felled, and still recently the Californian settlers fell the gigantic sequoias that were 120, 130 or 140 metres high to saw them up into boards. That may be an irreparable loss. [...] The expansion of agricultural lands, the needs of sailing and industry also reduce the number

11

http://www.firstnations.de/development.htm, accessed December 14, 2015. H. Swinburne. Travels through Spain, in the years 1775 and 1776, the 2nd edition to which is added a journey from Bayonne to Marseilles, London: P. Elmsly, 1787; quoted by par Alain Bourneton in Grands Ports des Pyrénées, Sirius, 1986. 13 Vincent de Chausenque. Les Pyrénées ou Voyages Pédestres dans toutes les Régions de ces Montagnes depuis l’Océan jusqu’à la Méditerranée, Paris: Lecointe and Pougin, 1834. 12

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of trees." 14 In nineteenth-century Canada, parts of forests were replaced by cities built with their wood. Rudy Wiebe's novel, A Discovery of Strangers, starts with a chapter in which the animals discover the settlers through the sound of tree felling: They noticed creatures that looked like humans standing motionless here and there, abruptly pointing and shrieking, pounding! pounding! scuttling about all day and sometimes at night as well, when tendrils of bush along the river might spring up suddenly into terrifying flame. (Wiebe 1994, 2)

The rhythm and sonorities of the military words "pointing" and "pounding" suggest aggression on trees. The shrieks are both the human shrieks of violence and the shrieks of the suffering trees that are felled. This aggression on the land also appears in Australia where "forests were devastated in a few years." 15 In his novel, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Richard Flanagan alludes to the felling of trees in terms of a massacre: "occasional gum trees stood as if brooding survivors of some terrible massacre," 16 associating the massacres of Aborigines with that of trees: The torments inflicted on human beings echo the damage caused to the natural environment by the colonial enterprise. The sufferings and broken lives of immigrants, and the even worse lot of the convicts, the decimation of Aboriginal people, of animals, parallel the devastation of nature symbolised by felled trees […]. (Selles, Mountains…, 627-628)

In lots of countries the devastation of the land coincides with the destruction of the populations living there. The basic connection between land and men was distorted everywhere by the race for profit, and writers—fiction writers, poets or anthropologists and ethnologists— underline another kind of connection, the link existing between people's behaviour in industrialized countries and the impoverishment of populations and lands in Africa, Asia and South America. 14 Elysée Reclus, De l'action humaine sur la géographie physique, "L'homme et la nature," in Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 December1864, 766, translation mine (https://www.bibnum.education.fr/sites/.../Reclus-analyse-vf.pdf, accessed December 4, 2014). 15 Colette Selles, "Australian Mountains—Myth and Reality, Devastation and Regeneration", in Mountains Figured and Disfugured in the English-Speaking World (Françoise Besson ed.), Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010, 628. 16 Richard Flanagan, The Sound of One Hand Clapping. Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1997, 20.

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How our consumption here contributes to devastation over there Deforestation is linked with men's race for profit and with several factors like the increasing taste for rare wood essences in western countries, the changes in agriculture like the raising of huge herds of cattle in Brazil for example or the choice of a monoculture like soy, coffee or sugar cane, to take only a few examples. Consumers in western industrialized countries are not necessarily aware of the consequences of what they eat and drink on the situation of southern countries. The 2014 WWF report explains the dramatic increase of the growing of soy: Soybeans have been cultivated for thousands of years in Asia, but over the last century cultivation has expanded dramatically. In the last 50 years, the area devoted to soy has grown tenfold, to over 1 million square kilometres—the total combined area of France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. The fastest growth LQီUHFHQW \HDUV KDV EHHQ LQ 6RXWK America, where production grew by 123 per cent between 1996 and 2004. And this expansion shows no sign of stopping: the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) suggests soy production will almost double by 2050. […] 17

Soy production is increasing rapidly 18 as the increasing of economic development is accompanied by an increasing consumption of meat and animal proteins, it goes together with the destruction of more forests and ecosystems: Over the last few decades, vast areas of forest, grassland and savannah have been converted to agriculture. In total, the area of land in South America devoted to soy grew from 17 million ha in 1990 to 46 million ha in 2010, mainly on land converted from natural ecosystems. Between 2000 and 2010, 24 million ha were brought into cultivation in South America: soybean production expanded by 20 million ha in the same period. (ibid.)

17 "The Growth of Soy. Impacts and Solutions", http://awsassets.wwfdk.panda.org/downloads/wwf_soy_report_final_jan_19.pdf, accessed July 25, 2017. 18 "Recent FAO projections suggest an increase to 515 million tonnes by 2050; others project a 2.2 per cent increase per year until 2030. Soy consumption in China doubled in the last decade, from 26.7 million tonnes in 2000 to 55 million tonnes in 2009, of which 41 million tonnes were imported" (ibid.).

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This report lays stress on the relationship existing between the devastation of ecosystems and our consuming behaviours in industrialized country. Yet solutions exist as the report shows; those solutions are both collective and individual. Of course, producer country legislation is necessary as well as transparent land-use planning and market responses. The report asserts that "[r]esponses include individual and collective pledges to avoid deforestation, such as the Soy Moratorium in the Brazilian Amazon, and voluntary certification schemes developed in collaboration with civil society organizations, such as the Round Table on Responsible Soy (RTRS)" (ibid.). Among the solutions, we must also consider the role of the consumer countries, "Better Management Practices" that "can help farmers improve soil health and productivity, reduce the use of inputs such as agrochemicals and water, and mitigate negative environmental impacts" (ibid.). Banks can also play a role with responsible investments by avoiding financing projects threatening ecosystems. And the solutions first come from the responsibility of every citizen in the world, as it is the responsibility of every man and woman to reduce waste and to eat fewer animal products demanding soy production. In the 1980s, Plantu, a French drawer who makes drawings for the paper Le Monde, made a lot of caricatures to denounce our responsibility on the misery of poor countries. One of them, which was taken up by a non-governmental organization, "Frères des Hommes," for its newsletter, and which appears on the internet to illustrate an article on the connection between meat consumption and the damage to the planet and to men, represents a planet whose southern part is changed into a bowl with the map of Africa, South America and India drawn on it, in which there are seeds, and a poor, sad, thin man sitting there. In front of him, a huge cow is quietly eating the man's seeds. In the 1980s, the caricature illustrated a file demonstrating how the production of meat wasted cereals and impoverished what was then called the Third World. Now it illustrates an article by Michel Tarrier, entitled "La viande est source de maladies, de cruautés, de disparités, de déforestation, désertification, pollution, mais nous continuons à en manger de plus en plus…" 19 The artist's voice and his way of looking at the world 19

"La viande est source de maladies, de cruautés, de disparités, de deforestation, desertification, pollution, mais nous continuons à en manger de plus en plus…" ("Meat is the cause of diseases, cruelty, disparities, deforestation, desertification, pollution, but we go on eating more and more meat," translation mine), https://fredericbaylot.wordpress.com/2012/07/22/la-viande-est-source-demaladies-de-cruautes-de-disparites-de-deforestation-desertification-pollution-maisnous-continuons-a-en-manger-de-plus-en-plus/, accessed July 25, 2017.

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and of making it progress can be seen all over the world. The whole world can see his tragic-humorous vision of the exploitation of poor countries by rich ones, an exploitation coming not only from States, governments and multinational companies, but from each of us whenever we eat a steak. His drawings give more weight to the technical articles accompanying them and they will go on leading us to awareness. At the time when Plantu published this drawing and when the organization "Frères des Hommes" made campaigns to lead people to a sense of connection between their own behaviour and what happens very far from their homes, children wrote poems to relay those who wanted to improve the situation in southern countries. Here are some extracts from those poems, showing that we should listen more closely to children's voices: Quand vous gaspillez du pain, de l'eau, Pensez à lui, oui! Pensez Pensez à cet enfant Là-bas loin dans l'Afrique Noire Là-bas où il fait chaud Où il ne règne que les tombes De pauvres innocents. (Farida Saaidi) Cette bouchée de pain que nonchalamment tu jettes Eux voudraient bien l'avoir dans leur assiette, Eux, aux ventres que la faim rend ronds Pense à eux quand tu te gaves de bonbons. Et toute l'eau dont tu te sers Pour eux effacerait la misère. (Sarah Benchachoua) La faim que tu n'as jamais connue est Le quotidien des pays lointains. Ces gens pleurent aux portes des villes Pour un morceau de pain, repoussés Par leurs propres frères, ne sachant Plus quoi faire: tendons-leur la main Et faisons ensemble un bout de chemin. (Nathalie Sroka) 20

20

"When you waste bread and water, Think about him, yes ! Think / Think about that child / Far overthere in Black Africa / Overthere where it is hot / Where it is only the reign of tombs / Of poor innocent ones" (after Farida S.); "This piece of bread that you nonchalantly throw / They would like to have in their plates: Those children with bellies that hunger makes round / Think about them when you gorge on sweets. / And all the water you use / Would make their misery vanish" (after Sarah B.); "The hunger you have never known is / The everyday life of remote countries. / Those people cry at the doors of cities / For a piece of bread, pushed

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They were twelve to fifteen years old and their poetry, their deep way of looking at the other goes on making us aware. What they wrote thirty years ago could unfortunately concern our world today and when we listen to their simple way of "stretching out their hands," we can see the most simple solution: just to understand the connections and understand that between the migrant obliged to leave his country while risking his life just to survive, and the quiet man or woman in his/her western home, the distance is not that great and the quiet man or woman in his/her western home could behave in such a way as the migrant would not need to leave his country. Wars are provoked by misery. It is up to everybody to stop misery over there by changing their behaviours here. Two young girls gave a message of hope: Oh vous enfants perdus Qui mourez de faim […] Ce n'est pas encore votre fin Car notre esprit est tourné vers vous Vous verrez bientôt la lueur du bonheur Un jour vous entendrez le chant du coucou Annoncer la fin de votre malheur. (Dorothée Baksalary and Magalie Montsauret) 21

Children's intuition…The young pupils made the poetic choice of adding a cuckoo to their message of hope. In so doing they reinforced the message of connection between us ("our minds") and them ("you") by adding this connection with the nonhuman world. Children's intuition…They chose the cuckoo to announce hope, a bird known for living in other birds' nests, a bird that might be a metaphor for colonization. They did not think about that. They just chose that bird to speak about hope brought about by their listening to nature, because the word was helpful in the music of the poem, away / By their own brothers, no longer knowing / What to do: let's stretch out our hands / And let's walk together" (after Nathalie S.) Translation mine. Those poems were written in 1986 by some of my pupils from the "Collège Paul Langevin," Rouvroy (Northern France) and published in the little magazine they edited once a year, Terre de Tous (n° 1), (ed. by Nathalie Sroka and Christelle Boscart). I would like to thank all of them, who worked for Terre de Tous for five years and through their poems and reflexion, led adults on the way to awareness. Thank you to them and to the head of "Collège Paul Langevin," Mr Michel Debruyne and to Mrs Jane Dzielicky, who both trusted us. 21 "Oh you, lost children / Who starve […] / It's not your end yet / For our minds are turned towards you / Soon you will see happiness shining / One day you will hear the song of the cuckoo / Announce the end of your misfortune" (translation mine).

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because it rhymed with "you." Their intuition showed the connection between all things. Those poems reveal a chain of action and writing between the North and the South, from people from the South to a nongovernmental organization, to a school in Northern France, to young children and to a bird singing in their poem. Everything is linked. This is what they had realized and made us aware of through their poems. From children in their school to Nobel Prize winners, the distance is not that great when it is a matter of awareness. Wole Soyinka often refers to deforestation in his work and in a homage to Wangari Maathai's action, he evokes the damage caused by plantations of oil palms, the oil of which we consume in many products. He writes: Land speculators—even when disguised as government—are of course a breed apart. When they see a tree, they see an obstacle—to be eliminated by the most efficient agency—the bulldozer. On the other side of the divide are the fanatics who have to be restrained as they watch the bulldozer ripping through a green belt without a thought for the void that is brutally opened up in a landscape that has become an integral part of what we are–—or, if you prefer–—a landscape of which we have become an integral part, through which we sense ourselves as breathing objects and thus, a meaningful part of a humbling network of Nature actualities. […] ("Parables") 22

He reminds us of the problems caused by the plantation of oil palms replacing native trees. He writes: "in the past decade or two, trees have attained apocalyptic dimensions—sitting in judgment over humanity—will the proceeding end in a reprieve, or a death sentence on the planet itself?" (ibid.). 23 While native forests drastically recede, plantations of oil palms are disastrous for the environment: The oil palm tree is actually native to west and central Africa. A century ago, British siblings William and James Lever, whose company would become Unilever, ran a 17-million-acre palm concession in what was then the Belgian Congo. But it's only in the past few years that the crop has begun to transform the landscape of this continent. […] The crop takes a 22

Wole Soyinka, "Parables from Wangari Maathai’s Trees", presented at the Storymoja Literary Festival in Nairobi, Kenya- September 2014, http://www.africanstudies.org/blog/121-october-2014/418-parables-from-wangarimaathai-s-trees-by-wole-soyinka, accessed January 4, 2016. 23 Wole Soyinka, "Parables from Wangari Maathai’s Trees", presented at the Storymoja Literary Festival in Nairobi, Kenya- September 2014, http://www.africanstudies.org/blog/121-october-2014/418-parables-from-wangarimaathai-s-trees-by-wole-soyinka, accessed January 4, 2016.

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dramatic toll on the environment. In 2007 the United Nations Environment Programme reported that oil palm plantations were the leading cause of deforestation in both Malaysia and Indonesia, removing a vital carbon sink and devastating the native habitat of orangutans and endangered Sumatran tigers and rhinos. The trees thrive at latitudes of roughly five degrees to the north and south of the equator, and in Africa that swath of earth runs thick with natural forest. The Guinean Forests, which stretch from Sierra Leone to Nigeria and once covered all of Liberia, have been identified as one of the 25 most important biodiversity hot spots on the planet, and what happened in Asia is a harbinger of what may happen here. As with any industrial-scale agricultural endeavor, the plantings have far-reaching impacts on both water supply and water quality and, given the pesticides and other agrochemicals involved in growing oil palm, on the soil itself. 24

This tragedy appears in Africa as well as in Asia. In Malaysia, where Swiss ecologist Bruno Manser spent several years with the Penang in the 1980s, defending their community and the rainforest before his disappearance and probable death in the 2000s, deforestation was drastic; incidentally between 2000 and 2013, Malaysia had the highest rate of forest loss in the world. 25 Like Bruno Manser in Malaysia, Chico Mendes, a rubber tapper and trade union leader, who tried to preserve the Amazonian forest by creating the National Council of Rubber Tappers to valorize the forest resources while preserving the forest, was murdered in 1988. He spoke about the link between his particular action and the preservation of the world: "At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees, then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest. Now I realise I am fighting for humanity." 26 Claude Lévi-Strauss already wrote about the destruction of the virgin forest in 1961: Erosion has done much to ravage the country before me; but above all it was Man who was responsible for its chaotic appearance. Originally it had been dug and cultivated, but after the few years continual rain and the exhaustion of the soil made it impossible to keep the coffee-plantations in being. They were therefore moved to an area where the soil was fresher and more fertile. The relationship between Man and the soil had never [in 24 Jocelyn C. Zuckerman, "Africa’s Vanishing Forests." http://archive.onearth.org/articles/2013/12/palm-oil-land-grab-africa, accessed December 14, 2015. 25http://news.mongabay.com/2013/11/malaysia-has-the-worlds-highestdeforestation-rate-reveals-google-forest-map/, accessed December 29, 2015. 26 Chico Mendès, http://newgenerationplantations.org/multimedia/file/43a97d1f31af-11e6-88e8-005056986313, accessed May 27, 2018.

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It is when he saw the devastation due to the culture of coffee along the coastline from Rio de Janeiro to Santos, that Lévi-Strauss insisted on the "destruction of 'virgin forest lands by rapacious pioneer populations’" (Scheper-Hughes, 41). Land was not better preserved with the cultivation of sugar cane in Pernambuco since "[a]fter several harvests, old fields were abandoned for newer ones, with no attention to preserving or replenishing the fertility of the soil" (Scheper-Hughes, 41). In that general devastation and violence, voices rise to fight against the destruction of nature. Those voices reach the other end of the planet and those activists risk their lives for that. Some of them are murdered, but their voices are still heard nowadays as Bruno Manser's and Chico Mendes's voices are still heard and echoed by other nature preservers prolonging their action. Through either texts or actions, or texts as actions, they show that nature can still be healed and that our survival depends on nature's life. Fiction writers underline the link existing between literature and the political management of the planet. What can be said of Brazil might be said of many South-American countries. Concerning Peru, in a part devoted to "[m]undane surrealism," Nancy Scheper-Hughes evokes the connection established by the narrator of Mario Vargas Llosa's novel The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, between "imagination [and] politics" and "literary fiction [and] history" (Scheper-Hughes, 228): Information in this country has ceased to be objective and has become pure fantasy—in newspapers, radio, television, and in ordinary conversation. To report among us now means either to interpret reality according to our desires or fears, or to say simply what is convenient. It is an attempt to make up with our ignorance of what is going on—which in our heart of hearts we understand as irremediable and definitive. Since it is impossible to know what is really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream, and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary. (Llosa 1986, 246, emphasis mine)

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In this passage quoted by an anthropologist 27 who uses fiction to demonstrate the new reality in South America, the scientist—and activist—shows a reality situated in "illusion," "imagination" and "fiction," as true reality cannot be grasped because the distortion of information is too great. Thus, writers manage to fight against this distortion of reality by creating another distortion of reality, which is fiction. The text she quotes, borrowed from a novel, establishes a face to face between two sorts of lies: destroying lies meant to maintain people in ignorance in front of the terrible facts she depicts in her book, and the lies of the imagination meant to make people aware. She evokes the life of women in favelas in the plantation town of Bom Jesus de Matas—where she worked for 25 years—, she shows a world dominated by hunger and violence, since after the abolition of slavery in Brazil 28 in 1888, as Mintz put it, "the discipline of slavery" was replaced by "the discipline of hunger" (Mintz, 70). She depicts human fates, the tragic fates of children dying in infancy, of mothers losing child after child. The title of her moving and seminal book, Death Without Weeping, is borrowed from a song by Geraldo Vandre, Disparada, which opens her book as an epigraph. The poem also opens an article bearing the same title but in that case, she attributed it to an anonymous Brazilian singer. The author of the song is Geraldo Vandre, a Brazilian singer, composer, poet and guitarplayer. 29 Whenever she evokes that Brazilian tragedy, this quatrain 27

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She received the Margaret Mead Award in 1981. She also served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Brazil in the 1960s. She was an activist defending rural workers and working against the death squadrons in Brazil and also defending the rights for street children in Brazil. She was also a civil rights worker in the United States. She thus united action and reflection to try to denounce and to improve the situation of America (South and North). 28 About four million slaves had been taken from Africa to Brazil, that is one third of the number of slaves brought to the New World (Steven Mintz, "American Slavery in Comparative Perspective", https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/origins-slavery/resources/americanslavery-comparative-perspective, accessed July 24, 2017). 29 One may have read some comments claiming that "the Geraldo Vandre quote on the very first page of the book, which gives the book its name was completely fabricated […]." The author of the comment adds that "the verses Scheper-Hughes quoted do not exist in "Disparada"," which is wrong, except if the author means that they do not appear in English, which is true, since the song was written in Portuguese. The second stanza of the song starts with those words: "Aprendi a dizer não / Ver a morte sem chorar," (https://www.letras.com/geraldovandre/46166/, accessed accessed July 27, 2017), which means: "I have learnt to

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appears for her to be the strongest voice denouncing it. Again and again, in her article and in her 616-page book, she chose the opening line of a song by a poet who was first relayed by an "anonymous Brazilian singer" in an article she had published in 1989, before the book was published: I have seen death without weeping The destiny of the Northeast is death Cattle they kill But to the people they do something worse. 30

She chose a song, a poetic form of expression, to reveal the unnameable, the innumerable deaths of young children because of starvation and their mothers’ resignation. […] the death of hungry babies remains one of the best kept secrets of life in Bom Jesus da Mata. Most victims are waked quietly and with a minimum of ceremony. No tears are shed, and the neighborhood children form a tiny procession, carrying the baby to the town graveyard where it will join a multitude of others, Although a few fresh flowers may be scattered over the tiny grave, no stone or wooden cross will mark the place and the same spot will be reused within a few months' time. The mother will never visit the grave, which soon becomes an anonymous one. (ibid.)

Scheper-Hughes situates this everyday tragedy in the context of history when she adds that "[t]hroughout much of human history—as in a great deal of the impoverished Third World 31 today—women have had to give say no /To see death without weeping." The author of the comment says that "Disparada is a great song." He is right and the fact that the words of the song should be used to make people aware of the terrible situation that appeared in Brazil in the 1990s shows connections between all forms of writing and it suggests the strength of a song. The most important thing is that a song sung everywhere in Brazil, in the streets or on stages, might have been chosen by an anthropologist as the strongest words she could use to make people aware. 30 Nancy Scheper-Hughes, "Death Without Weeping. How poverty ravaged mother love in the shanty towns of Brazil?", Natural History, 10/1989, http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~dperry/Class%20Readings%20Scanned%20Docume nts/Intro/Scheper-huges.pdf, accessed July 24, 2017. 31 The phrase "Third World" has first been used by the "French demographer, anthropologist and historian Alfred Sauvy, in an article published in the French magazine L'Observateur (the title of the magazine changed several times and at the time when Sauvy's article was published, it was called L'Observateur politique, économique et littéraire), August 14, 1952. He coined the term Third World (French: Tiers Monde), referring to countries that were unaligned with

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birth and to nurture children under ecological conditions and social arrangements hostile to child survival, as well as to their own well-being. Under circumstances of high childhood mortality patterns of selective neglect and passive infanticide may be seen as active survival strategies" (ibid.). Nancy Scheper-Hughes' terrible investigation shows the relationship between that extreme misery leading desperate mothers to place their weak babies on the floor just waiting for his/her death, and our industrialized behaviour. The beautiful introduction of her book is entitled "Connection" and she reveals the connection between that unbearable situation in Brazil and the small piece of sugar that we put into our coffee. For everything stems from the damage done by cane plantations and cane factories. This connection was revealed to her by another connection: the one between art and reality as it is a painter's work that made her aware, when she was a child, of the terrible role of sugar. In the same way as soja cultivated in Africa, South America and India to feed Western cattle to allow us to eat meat, starves Native populations who no longer cultivate what they need to live, in the same way sugar plantations increase misery and sugar factories poison everything and bring death. The connection is established between food consumption in the western world and misery in the countries where what feeds us brings about Native populations' misery and death. In the prologue, Scheper-Hughes describes the sugar factory dominating the landscape, in terms of monstrosity, as it is a monster she saw in a painting in which she first discovered that place generating misery in the whole area. As a child, she was invited with several neighbours to the "dark, damp, cold-water flat" where Morris Kish 32 painted, which required, Scheper-Hughes said, "great powers of imagination." It is in one of his paintings that she discovered the "Domino Sugar refining factory:" But what I remember most of all in those huge surprise canvasses were the men of Berry Street and South First and South Second all rushing and converging together on the front gates of the black monster that either the Communist Soviet bloc or the Capitalist NATO bloc during the Cold War.' Derek Gregory et al. (Eds.) Dictionary of Human Geography (5th Ed.), Wiley-Blackwell 2009. accessed July 24, 2017. 32 Morris or Maurice Kish was born in Dvinsk, then in Russia (now Daugavpils, Latvia) in 1895. It was a poor Jewish city and a centre of Jewish culture. He immigrated to New York when he was a teenager. Thanks to Nancy ScheperHughes's prologue, we know that he was living "on South Third Street in the Williamburg section of Brooklyn" and was a painter and a poet. (See http://www.askart.com/artist_bio/Maurice_Kish/103127/Maurice_Kish.aspx, accessed July 27, 2017).

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The anthropologist's childhood memory presents us with a factory that is linked with monstrosity, bestiality and hell. Before entering the book with the presentation of facts, she writes a literary prologue, opposing the whiteness of the sugar to the darkening of the people's homes. She uses alliterations that emphasize the darkness brought to the place by the factory ("foul fumes", "dirtied and darkened," "damnable") and she plays on an intertext connecting the sugar factory with the presentation of the new industrial town in England as presented by Dickens in Hard Times, where the imaginary city Coketown is darkened by the ashes—"brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it." 33 The children's "imagined darkest Africa," followed a few lines further by "a descent into a Brazilian heart of darkness" (xiii), adds a Conradian intertext equating the industrialization of sugar destroying Brazilian populations with the ivory trade destroying Africa. After an epigraph borrowed from a song, the prologue sets the terrible story that the anthropologist is going to tell—starting with the birth of a child so tiny that she cannot look at the poor baby that is dead like hundreds of other babies—in a world of art and imagination. It is a painting that triggers the child's awareness of the monstrosity of the factory, she goes on using a poetic language while reminding readers of writers denouncing the evils brought by the industrial revolution (Dickens) or by colonization (Conrad). She thus shows that imagination appears as the strongest way of making people aware of reality. She presents us with a world of misery where women go and fetch water polluted by the factory. She says that "there was a single source of running water" where "Alto women lined up twice a day (between 4:00 and 6:00 in the morning and again at night)." She adds that "[t]hose who arrived late or at the end of the long line […] were forced to fetch water at the banks of the chemically and industrially 33

Charles Dickens, Hard Times, Book 1, chapter 5.

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polluted Capibaribe River, which ran through the town carrying debris from the sugar factories as well as from the local hospital and the tanning factories of Bom Jesus" (9). Together with the pollution of the water, misery obliged women to work either on the plantations or at the homes of rich people and so they "had to leave their babies (even newborn) at home unattended or watched over by siblings, sometimes barely more than babies themselves. These constraints on infant tending, imposed by the economic realities of Alto life, contributed to an exceedingly high infant and child mortality" (10). Nancy Scheper-Hughes shows us the terrible situation of the Alto before telling us the tragic story of those women she accompanied and helped. Mingling her experience with Brazilian women, her readings of anthropologists and ethnologists' researches, she starts from imagination as if she saw there a means of reinventing this world. However tragic the stories, however dark the painting, she says that "these lives, these faces, although pained and as fleeting as photos, have also been touched with beauty and grace" (xiii). Her book is a book of awareness. As the child she was realized the monstrosity of the domino sugar factory while watching a painting, she wants readers to become aware of the misery that destroys hundreds of lives and yet is not a fatality. The anthropologist presents us with facts. The writer gives us keys to change things, to reverse the movements of the domino sugars. Her book ends on celebration: The goal of the moradores 34 of the Alto de Cruzeiro 35 is not resistance but simply existence. And in the context of these besieged lives I find human resilience enough to celebrate with them joyfully and hopefully, if always tentatively. (532)

Nancy Scheper-Hughes's book is a book of hope; it is a letter sent to the rest of the world to make people understand the connections existing between life in our rich countries and misery among those who work and live and die for us to put sugar into our coffee, the plantations of which have destroyed native forests. Nothing is separated and the horror described by the anthropologist is not a mere report. It is a cry of hope

34

Inhabitants, residents. Alto de Cruzeiro," "(Hill of the Crucifix) in Timbaúba, A sugar-belt town in the state of Pernambuco, in Northeast Brazil," Nancy Scheper-Hughes, "No More Angel Babies on the Alto do Cruzeiro," http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/features/282558/no-more-angel-babies-on-thealto-do-cruzeiro, accessed July 27, 2017. 35

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suggesting that things can change. And they have changed. In an article she published in 2013, she shows how things have radically changed: I saw infants and toddlers who were plump and jolly, and mothers who were relaxed and breastfeeding toddlers as old as three years. […] Powdered milk, the number one baby killer in the past, was almost a banned substance. […] Then, beyond the human factor, environmental factors figure in the decline in infant mortality in the shantytowns of Timbaúba and other municipalities in Northeast Brazil. The most significant of these is the result of a simple, basic municipal public-health program: the installation of water pipes that today reach nearly all homes with sufficient clean water. It is amazing to observe the transformative potential of material conditions: water = life! […]. (Scheper-Hughes, "No More Angel Babies") 36

The anthropologist showed that the population's struggle together with the world's awareness made things change. The book and articles she published showed the whole world the links existing between misery and the destruction and pollution of the environment but also between consumption in rich countries and misery in poor countries. The short prologue she wrote for her long book, which is an anthropologist's report as well as a testimony and an alarm call, by evoking the domino sugar factory through a painting, makes the notion of connection visual for the western reader who realizes the connection between the consumption of some products like sugar, the pollution of a land, misery and deforestation. Nancy Scheper-Hughes shows that in Brazil, the destruction of the rainforest for the culture of sugar cane was accompanied by the pollution of rivers due to the sugar factories and a high rate of infant mortality. The story she told suggests that everything is linked, and that everybody in western culture has some part of the responsibility. The advertisement for sugar conceived in 1986 and presenting spectators with an extraordinary show of sugar lumps living various adventures in a domino-like manner— a campaign that led to an increase in the consumption of sugar—could be used in another way. The domino chain bringing about a series of events linked in the advertisement with appetizing desserts might be seen otherwise and remind the viewers that the first lump of sugar reveals a 36

Nancy Scheper-Hughes, "No More Angel Babies on the Alto do Cruzeiro. A dispatch from Brazil’s revolution in child survival", in The Berkeley Review in Latin American Studies, Spring 2013 and Natural History, http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/features/282558/no-more-angel-babies-on-thealto-do-cruzeiro, accessed July 27, 2017.

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structure leading to a cane plantation and factories in South America, themselves leading to hundreds of children's deaths. Nancy ScheperHughes evokes a "Brazilian Heart of Darkness" (Scheper-Hughes, xiii) to denounce what happens in the favelas, and we could see a parallel between the sugar dominoes we think about and Joseph Conrad's ivory dominoes with which the characters of Heart of Darkness play. In one case, Europeans play with Africa, in the other one, they play with South America and in both cases, their greed destroys the land and thousands of lives. If forests have often been threatened and partly destroyed, it is because trees have often been obstacles to the so-called development in Africa, Asia or America, particularly in Brazil, where huge parts of the Amazonian forest have been erased to be replaced by pastures for the cattle of big land-owners, thus bringing misery to small peasants gathering in favelas or Indian tribes continuously pushed away. Wole Soyinka writes: The tree still stands as a primordial presence, but now it has also become an eloquent critique of ill-conceived and often, ill-fated social engineering experiments that involve human uprooting, are based on the text-books of ideologues who fail to relate social theories to the precipitates of accumulated history, human psychology, a reality so simply but profoundly captured in Jeremy Cronym's lines to which I often make recourse, even to the point of seeming addiction: To live close to every tree you had ever planted Our century has been the great destructor of that, The small and continuous community, lived in solidarity With seasons, its life eked out around Your fore-mothers' and fore-fathers' burial-ground (Soyinka, "Parables," ibid.).

He quotes Wangari Maathai: "The future of the planet concerns all of us, and we should do what we can to protect it. As I told the foresters, and the women, you don't need a diploma to plant a tree" (ibid.). The simple agricultural gesture is relayed by two Nobel Prize winners' texts since Wole Soyinka's text is a homage to Wangari Maathai who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for her reforesting of Kenya with Kenyan women. Peter Matthiessen, in his beautiful travel book The Tree Where Man Was Born, meets Wangari Maathai's vision of the ecological role of the fig tree and of all the connections it reveals, 37 when he links and opposes times through a baobab: 37

See the introduction of this book, p. xxiv.

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The women are out gathering roots and tubers, and also the silken green nut of the baobab which, pounded on a stone and cooked a little, provided food for five months of the year. The still air of the hillside quakes with the pound of rock on rock, and in this place so distant from the world, the steady sound is an echo of the Stone Age. Sometimes the seeds are left inside the hull to make a baby's rattle, or a half shell may be kept to make a drinking cup. In the rains, the baobab gives shelter, and in drought, the water that it stores in its soft hollows, and always fiber thread and sometimes honey. (Matthiessen, The Tree Where Man Was Born, 253)

Matthiessen's peaceful description, like Wangari Maathai's explanation of the multiple roles of the fig tree, shows the ecological role of the baobab, providing people with food, everyday objects, water in time of drought, shelter, all that is needed for human beings to live peacefully. The "still air of the hillside quak[ing] with the pound of rock on rock" gives an answer of life to the destructive pounding sound of the strangers felling trees in the Arctic in Rudy Wiebe's A Discovery of Strangers. 38 This pounding sound is a sound of life, connecting the baobab nut, the rock on which it is broken, the woman's hand and the air carrying the sound of the seed becoming food. Yet Wiebe's strangers in the Arctic are also present in Matthiessen's East Africa and the regular sound of the baobab seeds pounded on stones by women is replaced by fires burning young trees that will no longer tell the story of our life and our origins, like the old baobab. Matthiessen thus ends his painting of the baobab: Perhaps the greatest baobabs were already full grown when man made red rock paintings at Darashagan. Today young baobabs are killed by fires, set by the strangers who clear the country for their herds and gardens, and the tree where man was born is dying out in Hadza land. (Mathiessen, The Tree Where Man Was Born, 253)

The "echo of the Stone Age" is not heard by the "stranger," the man who thinks in terms of immediate comfort or profit. This stranger does not recognize "the tree where man was born," he does not recognize the tree that can provide him with a shelter, with food, with water. He cannot recognize his own memory in the old tree. He cannot recognize the tree that can save his life. So, he burns the young one, because he is unable to see his connection with the tree. In California the famous Pioneer Cabin Tree or Tunnel Tree, between one and two thousand years old, was uprooted during a storm in January 2017. Is it only the storm that destroyed the old tree? Of course, even those 38

See p. 193.

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millenary trees are not eternal but the tree had been fragilized by a fire and by the tunnel dug in its trunk in the nineteenth century so that vehicles might cross it. What was the need for transforming a wonderful piece of nature into an attraction for tourists? In January 2017 the tree ceased to be crossed by men, ceased to be an attraction. It came back to the soil where its seed had grown nearly two thousand years ago, when men did not make nature an attraction park but respected it. As The Mercury News titled it, "Famous Pioneer Cabin Tree will help new life in the forest where it fell." 39 After nearly two thousand years of majestic life in the forest, a little more than one hundred years as a fair attraction, it comes back to Nature and its death makes it live again through the future life of the forest that its wood will feed. It is the image of redwood trees that John Steinbeck took to evoke a mystical translation in a humorous way. He wrote: It seemed to me that a Long Island poodle who had made his devoirs to Sequoia Sempervirens or Sequoia Gigantea might be set apart from other dogs—might even be like that Galahad who saw the Grail. The concept is staggering. After this experience he might be translated mystically to another plane of existence, to another dimension, just as the redwoods seem to be out of time and out of our ordinary thinking. The experience might even drive him mad. [...] The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It's not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time. (Steinbeck, Travels with Charley, 143)

The unexpected comparison of the down-to-earth scene of the poodle peeing against a tree with the Arthurian legend making the dog a medieval knight in search for the Grail, that is the redwood, brings about the reader's smile. The gap between the physiological register of the dog peeing and the mythical reference to the Arthurian legend and to the Grail, reinforced by the scientific Latin names of the trees and the theoretical vocabulary of the "concept" leads Steinbeck to another level of writing suggesting man's link with those trees, an immemorial link revealed by the dog's gesture. These trees are the link between us and our origins, like the tree ferns of Conan Doyle's Lost World, Jules Verne's Voyage au centre de la terre or 39

The Mercury News, 13 January 2017. https://newsela.com/articles/remembering-historic-giant-tree/id/25595/, February 20, 2017.

accessed

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James De Mille's Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder. If novelists so desperately try to imagine impossible stories with fabulous trees, it is perhaps because they know, sometimes before scientists, the dangers threatening them and us. Poets are sometimes ahead of science.

When "Vanishing Forests" give way to "Seeds of Change" Our Vanishing Forests and Seeds of Change are two films whose titles could sum up a possible and positive evolution of the situation. Our Vanishing Forests 40 is a film by Arlen Slobodow, which is narrated by Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday, whose ecological concern is asserted again and again in his essays. The film is about the history and policies of the United States Forest Service. Seeds of Change—which is also the title of a chapter in Wangari Maatthai' s autobiography—, is a film by Lisa Miller, Ava Karvonen, Scot Morison and Francis Damberger about the cleaning up of the Yangtze River in China, devastated by erosion due to deforestation. 41 Our Vanishing Forests exposes the preservation policy that was abandoned, thus provoking disaster since the U.S. Forest Service, "once the steward of wilderness, has abandoned its conservation ethic and now favours the interests of the timber industry." 42 Seeds of Change opens new ways for hope. Those two ways of leading people to awareness are meant to show the threat hanging over the Earth and the necessity to fight and change our behaviour, which many writers, since Thoreau's Walden, have suggested. Writers suggest that the main way to ecological awareness dwells in communication, particularly between the human and the nonhuman. David Abram tells the story of a Peruvian doctor, Manuel Cordova-Rios, 43 who was captured in 1907 when he was only fifteen, by Amahuaca Indians living in the Amazonian rain forest. The language of the tribe was understandable to the young boy once he had been steeped in the forest's and the people's life. It is the rain forest that gave him the key to the 40 Our Vanishing Forests, film directed by Arlen Slobodow, produced by Public Interest Video Network. 41 Seeds of Change, film by Lisa Miller, Ava Karvonen, Scot Morison, Francis Damberger, Films for the Humanities & Sciences (Firm). Hamilton, NJ : Films for the Humanities & Sciences, [2009]. “Seeds of change: the ECO story”, http://www.worldcat.org/title/seeds-of-change-the-eco-story/oclc/503076994, accessed December 14, 2015. 42 http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/vf.html, accessed December 14, 2015. 43 See F. Bruce Lamb, Wizard of the Upper Amazon: the Story of Manuel CordovaRios, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971.

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understanding of a language unknown to him: "[…] the tribe's language, which remained largely meaningless to Cordova-Rios for six months or more, became understandable to his ears only as his senses became attuned to the subtleties of the rainforest ecology in which the culture was embedded." 44 A key to the understanding of a people dwells in the understanding of their physical environment and the consciousness of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman. This is also expressed by Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac: It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise. 45

For Aldo Leopold, "that land is a community is the basic concept of ecology […] but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics" (Leopold, xix). The scientific perception of the land (Darwin's) must never be dissociated from the ethical and affective one. Darwin himself closed On the Origin of Species on the notion of "wonder." 46 These texts suggest that the union between knowledge, ethics and wonder is essential to save the planet. All forms of representations of nature and of the relationship of man with nature may be the seeds that will allow forests to grow again on the Earth and to make wastelands recede in their turn.

Literature and commitment Rick Bass's The Book of Yaak, which he describes as "a sourcebook, a handbook, a weapon of the heart," was planned to save a valley from

44 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous [1996], New York: Random House, 1997, 141. 45 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac [1949] with Essays on Conservation on Round River [1953], New York : Ballantine Books, 1970, 116-117. 46 “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, Evolved,” Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species [1859], Mineola, New York: Dover Publications Inc., 2006, 307.

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destruction. 47 "I don't know if a book can help protect a valley, and the people who live in that valley" (Bass, The Book of Yaak, xiii); it is a shout of anger at the deforestation of the valley of Yaak, a soft weapon meant not to destroy anyone but to save everybody. Depicting the beauty of the place, "the music and harmony of large and small things" (67) in "this land that congress forgot," Bass provides us with statistics. After poetically depicting the beauty of the valley and the interrelation between all its inhabitants, he gives dry numbers and facts: Despite the influx of cheap Canadian timber—the results of the obscene forest liquidation going on up there, which rivals Brazil's deforestation rates—the timber companies working on public lands in the West continue to post record quarterly profits for their stockholders. By the end of 1994, despite a drop in timber prices, Plum Creek posted a record profit of $112 million; Georgia Pacific, based in Newt Gingrich's home state, had a 1,000 per cent increase in profit… (88)

The notion of "profit," hammered into the text, replaces "the spirit of [the] place," previously mentioned when the seasonal migrations are described by the writer and anthropologist Richard Nelson "as a pulse, a tracing, ‘a luminous sheath' of passages" (64). Rick Bass's book is a fight to save the valley by showing its beauty and life, the interrelation between all species and the damage done to its forests by man for profit. Yet if Bass's book starts with a "shiver," it ends on a glimmer of hope, "the hope of fallen rotting trees" (187), trees dying naturally to make the forest live on. Likewise, Canadian Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro, initiated the choice of straw-based paper to print books without destroying forests as underlined by Orianna Palusci in an article studying the Canadian writer in the new light of ecocriticism: "With this edition of Dear Life, our intention is to demonstrate the potential for straw as an alternative to wood in the making of books and other types of paper products," said Munro. "Let's hope that this pioneering effort helps turn the page for our endangered forests and that many more books are printed this way." The quotation is from the Canopy website; Canopy is an environmental not-for-profit organization. Munro's involvement with Canopy started in 2001 during the publication of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, when she found out that her book was being printed on virgin fibre from ancient and endangered forests. Munro highly disagreed, thus she arranged with her publisher that a 100 per cent recycled paper was to be used for the printing 47 Rick Bass, The Book of Yaak, Boston, New York : Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996, xiii.

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of her collection, becoming the first green-friendly title by a prominent literary figure—a historical landmark for North American literature. Going back to the initial quotation, in 2013, a signed special edition of Dear Life was printed on straw-based paper, proving that ancient forests do not need to be the victims of award-winning books. Only 70 copies were printed and signed while all profits of the book went to support Canopy's campaigns to protect the world's forests and green Canadian economy. 48

Wole Soyinka, in the play The Lion and the Jewel, dramatizes deforestation in a flashback representing the construction of the railway: Well, the workers came, in fact It was the prisoners who were brought to do The hardest part…to break the jungle's back… [Enter the prisoners, guarded by two warders […] They begin felling, matchet swinging, log dragging, all to the rhythm of the work gang's metal percussion (rod on gong or rude triangle, etc.). The two performers are also the song leaders and the others fill the chorus. “N'ijo itoro”, “Amuda el'ebe l'aiya”, “Gbe je on'ipa,” etc.] 49

The felling of the trees to the sound of percussions distorts African music muffling the sound of the death of trees. Mime songs and play within the play are theatrical ways of exposing the damage of colonization on African forests in colonial and present times. The writer makes the jungle a body—"to break the jungle's back"—like Niyi Osundare, who also uses a body metaphor to denounce the destruction of Nigerian forests; both writers reunite the human and the nonhuman: 50 Alas, the boundless rainforest of my youth Has shrunk to a frightened eyebrow On the forehead of the coast Koko gba kokodi. (Niyi Osundare, "Hole in the Sky")

Both of them end the allusion to deforestation with Yoruba words as if the Yoruba poetic language was a way of recreating the environment of the destroyed forest. 51 48 Oriana Palusci, "Plymouth Rocks and Christmas Turkeys: from Ecology to Metafiction in Two Short Stories by Alice Munro", in Caliban n° 57, The Animal Question in Alice Munro's short stories, Héliane Ventura ed., 2017. 49 The Lion and the Jewel [1963], in Collected Plays 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976, 23. 50 See on page 189. 51 See the ecological function of Native languages further on in part 5, chapter 17.

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In Kenya, Wangari Maathai, in her autobiography Unbowed: A Memoir, proposed a response to deforestation in Africa by the plantation of thousands of trees, an action giving reality to Jean Giono's tale L'Homme qui plantait des arbres. 52 In the same country, a few decades earlier, a woman colonizer, Karen Blixen, who had contributed to deforestation, gave her testimony in Out of Africa: "If I had had the capital, I thought, I would have given up coffee, have cut down the coffeetrees, and have planted forest trees on my land." 53 Thus admitting her economic motivation, she adds that she "would have had then […] a good market for both timber and firewood" (ibid.). But the reader feels that her point of view evolves when, just after speaking about trees as an element of trade, she reveals her own pangs of remorse concerning deforestation: It is a noble occupation to plant trees, you think of it many years after with content. There had been big stretches of native forest on the farm in the old days, but it had been sold to the Indians for cutting down before I took over the farm; it was a sad thing. I myself in the hard years had had to cut down the wood on my land round the factory for the steam-engine, and this forest, with the tall stems and the live green shadows in it, had haunted me. I have not felt more sorry for anything I have done in my life, than for cutting it down. (Blixen, 277)

All these stages—her cutting down Native trees, planting coffee-trees, realizing the damage caused by such a change on the land, her decision to plant new trees—, led her to the ultimate decision to create a new forest. Yet troubles with the coffee plantation prevented her from achieving her plans. The way she evokes the Natives as they tried to help her stay on the land shows how conscious she was of their superiority and at the same time she is the patronizing colonial woman who still considers herself as the leader: "A flock of sheep may be feeling the same towards the herdboy, they will have infinitely better knowledge of the country and the weather than he, and still will be walking after him, if needs be, straight into the abyss" (Blixen, 285). However colonial and derogatory the animal comparison might sound, at least it shows she was torn between her colonial vision and her awareness of the damage she and the other settlers caused to Africa and African people. Her perception is akin to the consciousness Natives have of the close link uniting men, animals and the 52 Jean Giono, L’homme qui plantait des arbres [1953 ; Eng. The Man who Planted Trees, 1985], Paris: Gallimard Jeunesse, 2010. Wangari Maathai wrote a foreword for the 2005 English edition. 53 Karen Blixen (Izac Dinesen), Out of Africa [1937], London: Penguin Books, 1954, 277.

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land. With Wangari Maathai things are different and yet one can remember that Karen Blixen's hope was to plant a Native forest to recreate "a singing wood," thus foreshadowing the bird singing at dusk about which young Wangari Maathai asked her mother what it was saying (Maathai, 44). This face to face between two women, a Native Kikuyu and a colonizer, between two autobiographies, reveals that people with radically opposed motivations can meet once they have realized the link between them and the nonhuman world, in this case, the trees and the forests, on which so much depends. In the same vein, Gary Snyder writes: "Not so long ago the forests were our depth, a sun-dappled underworld, an inexhaustible timeless source. Now they are vanishing. We are all endangered yokels." 54 His association of men with a bird—the yokel, besides being a rustic, is here a green woodpecker, as is said in a footnote—stresses our dependence on the nonhuman world; by underlining our fragility he stresses the force of life that the nonhuman represents. All those writers, be they novelists, poets, anthropologists or scientists, show the tragic situation of forests all over the world and our responsibility in deforestation. Both showing the positive connections of a tree and all life around it and the negative connections of our consumption of products cultivated at the other end of the world after the native forests have been cut to allow those cultures, all those texts are meant to make us realize our responsibility and to urge us to act simply through our everyday behaviour. They show how dietary changes, changes in our everyday consumption, could save forests and the human and nonhuman populations living in them. This sense of awareness triggered by texts speaking about deforestation or about the link between our behaviour and tragedies in Africa, South America or Asia, can also emerge from texts speaking about water pollution, echoing Nancy Scheper-Hughes's painting of Brazilian tragedies.

54 Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild [1990], Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010, 153.

CHAPTER TEN STREAMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS: THE WORLD’S WATER AND LITERARY WARNINGS

"In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water along with other resources has become the victim of his indifference" Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 39

The stream of consciousness, that narrative technique invented by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, introducing readers to fictitious characters' interior worlds, could become a lexical guide to the world's situation as far as water is concerned. What about the idea of giving the phrase its original meaning? What about the water of the world seen as real streams of consciousness, that is to say, as dynamic flows triggering our consciousness? The environmental reporter Fred Pearce, in his book When the Rivers Run Dry, offers us a journey both into the world and its rivers and into our consciences and our role in the drying of the world's water resources. His exploration is echoed by fiction writers warning us about the pollution of rivers or of the sea.

A travel book and an environmental inquiry to warn the world Fred Pearce's When the Rivers Run Dry is both a travel book and a journalist's essay on the water crisis. It is partly through literary references that he first guides readers towards the importance of rivers: "Is there a better book about America than Huckleberry Finn's journey on the Mississippi?" he asks (Pearce, ix). From Mark Twain's hero to Coleridge's ancient mariner saying "water, water everywhere / Nor any drop to drink" (Coleridge quoted by Pearce, 19) and to the Southern slave song "Ol' Man River," Pearce activates readers' consciences by inserting literary references into his presentation of facts as if these literary references were

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the key to a better understanding of the importance of water, not only in our lives but also in our collective memory. From Pakistan's "Unhappy Valley" to Lake Chad's "tragedy of the Floodplains," from India's "colossal anarchy" to the "poisoning of the wells of peace in Palestine", from all the "dams that cause floods" to the Aral Sea as "the end of the world," Pearce presents us with a precise, even mathematic painting of the incidence of man's action on the diminishing water resources. His book is not a pessimistic depicting of a worldwide catastrophe. It depicts the reality of facts but shows the way of reversing the tendency by changing our behaviours when we become aware. To show how "the death of a wetland is a terrible thing" (Pearce, 77), he gives the example of Lake Chad: Welcome, then, to the death of the Hadjeja-Nugu wetland in northern Nigeria. This dramatic kite-shaped expanse of green and blue stretching for more than 60 miles along the edge of the Sahara Desert was once a bulwark against the advancing sands. Its lakes were full of fish, and their fertile waters washed annually across the land, creating lush pastures that sustained tens of thousands of cattle and watering more than half a million acres of fields […]. The wetland supported a million or more people and provided exports of fish and vegetables to cities across the largest country in Africa. Some of this remains. But much has been destroyed as dams divert water upstream for irrigation projects, the lakes shrink, and the summer flood dries up. (Pearce, 77)

The Eden-like landscape of fertility and plenty has been replaced by dams and irrigation works thanks to which "the government promised that the dams and irrigation works would turn the landscape green and create bounty" (77-78). But the reality is different and Fred Pearce, who travelled throughout the whole country and continent for his inquiry, says that "[a] journey across the wetland shows the hydrological devastation and the tensions the dams are creating. […] Many villages have lost their wells and lakes and woodlands" (78). In only a few decades, since the first dam had been built on the Haldejia in 1974 (80), devastation replaced fertility. Those big works brought deforestation and "huge areas of forest had been cleared to make way for the irrigation channels" (80). The soils, forests, rivers, wells and lakes that gave people and animals all that was necessary for their lives, were metamorphosed by a project that alienated nature and changed it into a desert: "Soils that had nourished a forest before the trees were chopped down have baked hard" (81). This is one example among many taken from all the continents. Fred Pearce's journey around the world is a journey towards awareness, the awareness that the Earth and its

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soils, if they are not transformed by a race for profit, contain all that is necessary for people to live. He shows that famine is not a fatality and more than that, that it can even be provoked by our western world. The race for productivity creates deserts while hypocritical speeches make people believe that the constructions changing the river flows are for their good. In Hamlet-le-Malécite, Laerte, in his speech, evokes how hydroelectricity and the project of the company Hydro-Quebec, can bring a lot to the small Native Canadian community of the imaginary Kinogamish. The theatrical rewriting of Shakespeare's play echoes Pearce's inquiry and another one published by Boyce Richardson in 1974, Strangers Devour the Land. Hamlet-le-Malécite is a Canadian play written by a playwright from the Wendat nation, Yves Sioui-Durand and a Canadian from Quebec, Jean-Frédéric Messier. It was first performed in Montreal in 2004. A rewriting of Shakespeare's play, it transposes the story of the Prince of Denmark to the Canadian First Nations. Dave, an Indian from the reserve of Kinogamish, wants to play Shakespeare's Hamlet; he says to his fatherin-law Claudius that Hamlet "uses a theatrical play to denounce rottenness." He only wants to play Hamlet whereas his life is the reflection of the plot of Hamlet in the First Nations' world. Shakespeare's original text appears in some famous cues like "To be or not to be," pronounced by Ophelia and not Hamlet, and the whole text is recited by two secondary characters called "medieval rats." They recite Shakespeare's text but in Attikamek, which is not any language. The Attikamek had few contacts with Europeans and they got diseases from them and underwent damage from the construction of dams near their lands. Floods and poisonings because of the mercury rejected by the power plants and contaminating their reserves of water, greatly affected Attikamek (or Cree) life. Yet they stayed on their lands and kept their culture and their language. The fact of reciting this canonical English play, which is the story of some resistance to corruption, in their own language, makes the linguistic choice of the play within the play an act of resistance. And the fact that they should be called "medieval rats" makes them mythical creatures attending the spectacle of the story of Hamlet eternally re-enacted. The rats indeed designate the mythical muskrat, a very important animal in the Creation myth of some First Nations as the author himself said. 1 Giving the 1 I would like to thank Yves Sioui-Durand who told me that the use of the phrase "medieval rats" was a way of speaking about the mythical muskrat and of suggesting that the plot was watched by mythical creatures: "The muskrat is a central character of the Algonquian myth of Creation. The muskrat dived into the waters of the flood to bring mud to the future humans. In Hamlet, they are the

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mythical animal a voice on the stage is giving nature its voice as the myth is wholly built on nature. In the same way in the play, the women, Ophelia and Gertrude, speak the language of myths and nature when Ophelia tells her dialogue with the river or when Gertrude tells how she became a bird. This is opposed to the destruction of rivers by dams and to the false ecological projects defended by Laerte. To the river that speaks and gives Ophelia advice, he opposes Hydro-Quebec: Brièvement, depuis les années 1979-80 et 81, un litige demeure, lié à l'exploitation forestière intensive sur les territoires traditionnels et plus précisément sur les terrains ancestraux désormais sous la juridiction souveraine du Chef Claudius. Et comme vous le savez, Hydro-Québec, en juin dernier, a rendu officielle son intention d'acquérir certains droits d'exploitations des ressources de ce même territoire. […] Et c'est pour cela que nous pouvons nous présenter devant vous aujourd'hui, non pas comme des gens qui veulent se défendre contre le développement économique de notre région par des intérêts externes, mais comme une communauté qui veut participer à son propre essor. L'industrie forestière est une réalité, celle de l'hydroélectricité aussi, et aujourd'hui nous voulons joindre à ces projets notre propre vision de développement économique de la région, fondé sur les valeurs tradionelles autochtones. Depuis quelques années, l'industrie récréo-touristique a fait renaître de façon spectaculaire plusieurs régions du Québec laissées pour compte par la chute de l'économie industrielle. Ces régions, par la mise en valeur de leur patrimoine écologique et culturel spécifiques, ont pu se bâtir un autre avenir que celui de région fantôme qui leur était destiné. 2 mythical witnesses of the drama acted again and again from generation to generation and the property men of the play." (Yves Sioui-Durand, electronic interview, March 23, 2011, for an article in Anglophonia/Caliban—Françoise Besson, "Une réécriture amérindienne du théâtre de Shakespeare : Hamlet-leMalécite", Anglophonia/Caliban, 29 | 2011, 295-310. In the myth of creation of some First Nations, including the Wendat, to whom Yves Sioui-Durand belongs, the world was created after the sky daughter fell from the sky, was saved by wild geese who put her on the back of a turtle. Several animals were sent to find some mud to surround the turtle and create an island on which the girl could rest. After several animals' failures only the muskrat succeeded in bringing some mud and it was thus that the Island of the Great Turtle was created; this island was America, which was the world (a legend I collected in Wendake, Canada in 1994). 2 "In a nutshell, since the years 1979-80 and 81, there has been a contoversy, linked to intensive exploitation on traditional territories and more precisely on ancestral fields, which are from now on under the sovereign jurisdiction of Chief Claudius. And as you know, Hydro-Québec, last June, made his intention to acquire some rights for the exploitation of the resources on that same territory official. […]

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The play is the opportunity to denounce the damage done by HydroQuebec among the First Nations. The fictitious name of the reserve of Kinogamish stands for all the reserves hit by the dams built on their rivers. Sioui-Durand and Messier evoke, on the stage, what the journalist Boyce Richardson denounced in Strangers Devour the Land, first published in 1974. He showed the terrible damage caused by the Hydro-Quebec project on the James Bay Coast; and the words of the people directly touched and betrayed, as they had been convinced that it would improve their life, found an echo on the stage nearly forty years later. The journalist relays the testimony of an old hunter, starting with the old man's words to give his own interpretation, using the water image to make his journalistic report a real piece of poetry conveying the old hunter's words: An old hunter like Abraham Weapinacappo now says, "I am one of those who went to Quebec City to put my signature on the James Bay Agreement. 3 I should not have gone."

And this is why we can appear in front of you today, not as people who want to defend themselves against the economic development of our region by external interests, but as a community that wants to participate in its own rise. Forest industry is a reality, the one of hydroelectricity too, and today we want to join our own vison of economic development of the region to those projects, a development founded on traditional Native values. For a few years, recreation and tourism industry has dramatically revived several regions from Quebec that were abandoned by the decline of industrial economy. Those regions, thanks to the emphasis put on their specific ecological and cultural heritage, have been able to build a new future, different from the one making them ghost regions as was expected for them." Yves Sioui-Durand and Jean-Frédéric Messier, Hamlet-le-Malécite, III, 8, translation mine. 3 "The James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement of 1975 was the first major agreement between the Crown and the Indigenous people in Canada since the numbered treaties of the 19th and early 20th centuries. This agreement was negotiated from 1973 to 1975 following decisions by Judge Malouf, and one week later, the Court of Appeals. The agreement was signed on 11 November 1975, after four years of negotiations, court cases and bargaining following the 1971 announcement of plans to build a system of hydroelectric dams in northern Quebec. The Aboriginal people exchanged their rights and territorial interests for different rights and benefits specified in the agreements. The Cree whose lands were at the centre of the proposed project and the Inuit further north agreed to joint management of wildlife with the governments of Quebec and Canada. In 1978, the agreement was amended after the Naskapi First Nations joined the accord through the Northeastern Quebec Agreement." (http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/james-bay-and-northernquebec-agreement/ accessed March 20, 2017).

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When we arrived in Eastmain with our cameras, the words burst out of him like a torrent. He was wounded, hurt, he said, hammering his hands against his chest: it was like he had been punched, when he saw what had happened to the land and to the animals. With his friend Charlie Mayappo, he marched on a bitterly cold September day across the broad rocks that once were covered by the water that poured over the first rapids of the Eastmain River, thirty miles or so above the village, and he shouted at us against the wind, pounding one hand into another to make clear to us his abiding sense of betrayal, his pain at what the land he so loves, had had to endure. It was, he said, the first time he had had a chance to say what he has to say. He talked for forty minutes, and afterwards insisted that in our film we must use all of what he had said. (Boyce Richardson, 336-337)

The insertion of the old man's name at the very beginning of the text expresses the author's will in showing the link between the First Nations' identity and their land. The inclusion of his oral speech into the journalist's written report lets his voice and the voice of his people surface in the text. On the one hand there is the white television team with their cameras, and on the other hand, one man, representing a whole people, with his words; words that are assimilated to the water: "When we arrived in Eastmain with our cameras, the words burst out of him like a torrent." It is as if the journalist understood, through the choice of his metaphor, that the old man's words reconstructed his land destroyed by the water of profit. The journalist uses a literary style to reflect the old man's suffering in front of not only the destruction of his land by Hydro-Quebec, but the fact that he has some responsibility in it, as he trusted those men and gave his signature at the James Bay Agreement: "I should not have gone." The repetition of the notion of a wound, conveyed by two different words— "He was wounded, hurt"—, the alliteration in [h] showing the old man's breathlessness—"He was wounded, hurt, he said, hammering his hands against his chest," (emphasis mine)—his gesture reproducing a gesture of penitence or showing what he sees as his responsibility—"hammering his hands against his chest"—, all those literary devices stress the Cree man's strong testimony and are there to spread it to the rest of the world and transfer the Cree man's awareness onto Canada's and the whole world's awareness. The man has realized the terrible connection between his signature and the destruction of the land and animals: "it was like he had been punched, when he saw what had happened to the land and to the animals." Hence the text shows the metamorphosis of the suffering into action, into a fight through the words: "he marched on a bitterly cold September day across the broad rocks that once were covered by the water that poured over the first rapids of the Eastmain River, thirty miles or so above the village, and he shouted at us against the wind, pounding one

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hand into another to make clear to us his abiding sense of betrayal, his pain at what the land he so loves, had had to endure." The marching, that is, the traveller's gesture, the contact of the Indian with the land whose fertility and water have been replaced by sterility and rocks, is accompanied with words, words as a fight: "he shouted at us against the wind." The gesture suggesting betrayal is accompanied by a shout "against the wind," another element of life that is not seen here as opposed to him but carrying his words. Richardson relays the action of the wind by repeating again and again the verb "to say," in an indirect speech first but also to report the Cree man's awareness that "it was, he said, the first time he had had a chance to say what he has to say." The connection between the man's awareness of a betrayal, the wind, the television team and Boyce Richardson's written translation of the scene multiplies the strength of this meeting, expressed in a theatrical way by two Canadian playwrights. Fiction helps people to understand environmental troubles even if the works dealing with the topic claim to "bear no direct or indirect resemblance to any existing place or people" as Percival Everett says in the acknowledgements opening his novel Watershed (1996). He adds: "The landscape of Plata Mountain [where the action is situated] is also complete fiction, including, and especially, the hydrologic data presented" (Everett, acknowledgements, n.p.). The very assertion of the absence of a "direct or indirect resemblance to any existing place or people" draws the readers' attention; the plot indeed, even if places, characters and data are fictitious, reminds them of existing troubles in the United States or Canada. The main protagonist is a hydrologist going north of Denver into the wilderness for personal reasons. He goes fishing to try to forget his sentimental failure. This part of the plot might seem commonplace if the novel did not start with a chapter entitled "Landscapes evolve sequentially" where the protagonist introduces himself in a very simple sentence before situating himself in the context of a scene invaded by violence: "My blood is my own and my name is Robert Hawk" (Everett, 1). He then situates things in a very calm way and that presentation of the situation questions the reader from the start. He is "sitting in a small Episcopal church on the northern edge of the Plata Indian Reservation, holding in [his] hands a Vietnam-era M-16, the butt of the weapon flat against the plank floor between [his] feet. There are seven other armed people […]" (Everett, 1). The gap between the calmness of the tone, the sitting position and the type of place on the one hand, and the references to violence and conflict on the other hand—the weapon, its link with the Vietanam war, the "other armed people"—brings questions and trouble into the readers' minds. That picture of people obviously entrenching

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themselves in a church against an enemy who is at first unseen lets readers suppose that the novel is going to speak about a conflict probably linked with Native Americans' situation since the narrator who is also the main character says that they are in an Indian Reservation. The enemy appears several sentences further on: "Out there, there are two hundred and fifty police—FBI, all clad in blue windbreakers with large gold letters, and National Guardsmen, looking like the soldiers they want to be" (1). The violence increases as the text progresses, since we discover three dead men: an FBI agent and two Indians: "He lies dead between two dead Indians, brothers, twins" (2). Having shown the situation, he can tell the story: "I do want the story told" (2), which is a way of letting the truth emerge. Truth defended by fiction. The following part of the chapter lets us know that the conflict is due to troubles linked with water; the initial scene appears as a sort of tableau vivant representing the conflict opposing the Indians and the FBI. The murder of two FBI agents makes the conflict still harder and the hydrologist, a black man, seeing the troubles that the colour of his skin causes, identifies with the Indians and with their fight for the rights of their tribes. The novel throws light on the relationship between a certain kind of exploitation of waters and American Indian troubles, as the construction of dams has disastrous consequences on Indians' life. We saw how Boyce Richardson shows the terrible incidence of many dams on people's life in many countries. It is interesting to note that journalists' inquiries meet artists' works to lead people to the consciousness of their role in the preservation of the world's water. The murder of the FBI agents takes place near the Plata watershed. The main protagonist listens to what the Indians say to him and helps them to disclose a clandestine dumping ground in the Plata mountain. The dam, which is supposed to improve the situation, in fact diverts contaminated water into the reservation where it brings about disease and death. An Indian woman, Louise Yellow Calf, is the first person drawing the hydrologist's attention to the pollution of the mountain water, even if she does not pronounce the word pollution: "The mountain is dying," she said. "My grandfather told me that before he died. He said the river is no longer any good. He said the Plata can't feed the fish" (Everett, 19). And as the hydrologist says to her that "[t]he Plata is in trouble, but it's not dying," she just asks him to meet her people and he understands her: he "could feel her thinking, ‘How can a river be in trouble and not be dying?’ she asked" (19). She reminds him of the link between the pollution of a river and the troubles of the people whose life depends on it: "Our way tells us that when the river dies, so will our people" (19). In spite of what the novelist says at the beginning about the fact that the novel is only fiction and that

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there is no resemblance to anything existing, the pollution of rivers due to dams and the destroying of Native American tribes are not fictitious and correspond to real facts. "Four dams constructed on the lower Columbia River in Oregon and Washington," added to "ten other dams in Oregon, Washington and Idaho" caused the declining of the population of some trout and some subspecies of salmon, which are essential in some Native American tribes' life, as is shown in an article by Chris Ahlstrand: Major dams such as the Bonneville, the Dalles, John Day, and McNary dams have all contributed to the declining population of Steelhead (trout) and certain subspecies of salmon, especially the Chinook, Sockeye, Coho. Not only have the dams contributed to the decline in fish population but also logging, cattle pollution, road building and other various forms of pollution have decreased harvest quantities every year for almost the last 150 years. 4

The plot of Everett's novel does not take place in the same reservation but it corresponds to some reality. Fiction is supported by non-fiction texts as the whole novel is interspersed with documents, like topographical reports, extracts from treaties and particularly a 1916 treaty granting water rights to the Plata Indians. The originality of the novel appears from the acknowledgements in which the first half claims that it is only fiction and has no resemblance to any "existing place or people" whereas the second half quotes the documents on which he worked to write his novel, Indian Treaties 1778-1883, "compiled and edited by Charles Kappler" and the authors of Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and American Indian Movement. This double position shows that readers must read between the lines and if the novel is fiction, they must, like the author, refer to the reality that it evokes in a fictitious way. It also dwells on the non-linear narrative, which, together with the real documents interrupting the fictitious narrative, shifts from the moment of the action to the past and memories of the character's grandfather. What was to be a peaceful retreat into nature for the hydrologist becomes a fight in which he helps the American Indians to defend their rights and face the FBI. As Alexia Weik Von Mossner says: "what was planned as a Thoreauvian wilderness retreat quickly turns into an ecological murder mystery" (Weik Von Mossner, 73). The opening scene with the main character and seven other people facing two hundred and fifty FBI agents and National Guardsmen shows 4

Chris Ahlstrand, " Four Tribes Four Dams", in Econ 4535, December 1999, https://www.colorado.edu/Economics/morey/4535/students/4dams.pdf, accessed March 11, 2018.

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the inequality of the fight. After his meeting with Louise Yellow Calf, the American Indian woman telling him about the dying mountain, the main protagonist will help the Indians in their fight and use his job as a hydrologist to determine why "the mountain is dying." Trekking through the mountain, he finds a dam and a pipeline and discovers that "the water would feed down into the Plata, which ran through the Plata Creek Indian Reservation and not onto Hell-hole Lake, which held water for both Indian and non-Indian ranchers" (167). The first element of his discovery lets him suppose that if non-Indians do not receive that water, it may be because they are preserved. While he is eating in the mountain, he sees "an unnatural clearing" (179). Walking toward it, he finds a dead elk and observing the snow thinning and "melting evenly across the surface," with the centre "crusting over, just like snow looks over a septic tank," he takes "a picture of the clearing and of the dead elk, then marked the spot on [his] map" (179-180). Followed by the real words of an American Indian—in italics, as is the case for all the non-fiction texts inserted into the novel—, the narrator goes on with a dream following the real discovery. The dream depicts a beautiful landscape full of flowers and the "hooves of the elk [falling] heavily among the flowers" (ibid.). The dream mingles life and death in the elk's eyes as they remind the reader of the animal's "glassy eyes hollow and still alive-looking" (179); at the same time they are linked with the trees: "the eyes stick into the bark of the aspens" (180). The man's feet are "falling effortlessly into the tracks of the elk" and the dream and the chapter end with the narrator saying: "And then I was outside of myself and looking into my own big, glassy elk eyes" (181). The dream shows the narrator's link with the nonhuman world. The dead elk lives again in his dream and there is a sort of transfer from his eyes showing death to the man's eyes. First walking in his tracks, he then sees the world with the elk's eyes and at the same time the elk's death becomes his own death. The dream shows him the link between the elk's death and human death due to the poisoning of the water because of the dam. Dicky, the Plata Indian who wants to go to the dam with Hawk, the hydrologist, sums up what happens: "When you said dam, I thought you meant like a bunch of sticks and rocks, like a beaver dam or something." He whistled again. Then he saw the pipeline stretching away as far as we could see. "I don't get it." I pointed up the mountain. "Somebody doesn't want to contaminate the lake with whatever's up there. But apparently they don't give a shit about Indians." (Everett, 189)

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Watershed is a social novel, a thriller and an environmental novel speaking about contamination, pollution and American Indian rights. It also speaks about racism and what Alexia Von Mossner calls "environmental racism," a form of racism protecting some communities from pollution and poisoned rivers and condemning others. The reader has to follow the narrator on a winding textual path, partly reflecting the hard way that led the main protagonist to the discovery of the source of pollution. The reader becomes active through the awareness aroused in him thanks to the addition of a fictitious story and parts of real treaties and reports. Alexia Von Mossner speaks about the role of the reader in such a complex novel: Watershed challenges such closely held beliefs, not only about authorial authority, but also about the relationship between race, ethnicity, and the natural environment, and their role in American history and present-day society. In the novel, the protagonist learns to understand this complexity and acts accordingly. Whether this is meant to be a call to political action can only be decided by the individual. 5

It is up to every reader, individually, to relay the novelist's textual action. Fictitious texts evoking water, its pollution, its diverting, the condemnation of some communities by the construction of dams, complete real reports, journalists' papers and activists' fights. They lead readers to the consciousness of the worldwide problem of water and all the environmental elements linked to it.

Pollution of rivers by factories: literature to help anthropology Water pollution is denounced everywhere in literature. We saw the anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes's investigation 6 denouncing the hard conditions of life of Brazilian women seeing their babies die because of the polluted water contaminating their milk. The monstrosity underlined by her text echoing a painting can be found in the whole world and in India for 5 Alexa Von Mossner, 86. "Mysteries of the Mountain: Environmental Racism and Political Action in Percival Everett’s Watershed" (PDF Download Available). Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269520270_Mysteries_of_the_Mountain _Environmental_Racism_and_Political_Action_in_Percival_Everett%27s_Waters hed [accessed March 11, 2018]. 6 See pages 201-207.

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example, it is in a novel that we can find a comparable image. Anita Desai's Fire on the Mountain alludes to the contamination of water by the carcasses of dead animals thrown into the river by a factory and discovered by the young girl who, walking in the mountain, sees a strange building she perceives as a "dragon." Anita Desai's dragon and Nancy Scheper-Hughes's monster are the two nightmarish visions of the same reality. The Indian novelist opposes the beauty of Indian landscapes to the dragon carrying death into the mountain. The American anthropologist opposes the whiteness of a perverted purification of sugar to the darkening of people's homes, contaminated by the factory. Yet even if those books denouncing the devastation of rivers warn us, they are not shouts of despair. Fred Pearce like Nancy Scheper-Hughes shows that the situation can be reversed. We have seen that Nancy Scheper-Hughes's book is also a cry of hope suggesting that things can change. And they have changed indeed since "Women on the Alto today do not lose their infants. Children go to school rather than to the cane fields." (Scheper-Hughes, "No More Angel Babies"). Scheper-Hughes showed that the population's struggle together with the world's awareness made things change. Hope is also present in texts by Pedro Casaldaliga, who also denounced the terrible situation of poor people, particularly landless peasants and Native Americans. Pedro Casaldaliga was a Spanish bishop in Brazil from 1970 to 2005 and he is a poet who has defended landless peasants and Native Americans for decades. In his Nicaraguan Journal, he gives a poetic view of the river where the mere presence of herons appears as a message of hope. The birds are more important than the damage done by men on the land and the river: The San Juan has been the river most lusted after in Central America, due to its strategic location as an easy route between two oceans. Conquistadors and pirates, their masts straining, and then landholders and tourists, have gone up and down this San Juan river as they pleased. Mark Twain could plumb many depths of scoundrel behavior and battered humanity in these treasured waters. The river is about 220 kilometers long, with green all along its banks, and with large farms and ranches here and there among its smooth hills and intermittent valleys. White herons—the same white herons I see in Araguaia—dot the river with stylized dreams of peace. Along the River San Juan The herons take off, the herons land. But by the verdant shores, Like peace—will it come?—they stand. (Casaldaliga, Prophets in Combat, 46)

The literary reference to Mark Twain plumbing the river depths not only concerns a plumbing of the natural waters but of symbolical waters containing the memory of human violence. The "large farms and ranches" are opposed to the "white herons [that] dot the river with stylized dreams of peace." They

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evoke the beauty of a peaceful world, but a dream world. And yet the question introduces some hope. Fred Pearce also ends his disquieting book When the Rivers Run Dry, on hope. After hammering the phrase "When the Rivers Run Dry" in an anaphora recurring at the beginning of every chapter title, he ends by presenting us with ethical experiences leading us to hope. After showing us the state of the world as far as water is concerned and our responsibility in it, he ends with hope to show us that we can have a part in the transformation: "The good news is that we never destroy water. We may pollute it, irrigate crops with it and flush it down our toilets. […] But somewhere, sometime, it will return, purged and fresh, in rainclouds over India or Africa or the rolling hills of Europe. […] Water is the ultimate renewable resource" (Pearce, 307). It is a renewable resource that links all of us, humans and nonhumans, plants and animals; the renewable resource that links all lands through seas and rivers. The problem is not one of resource but one of method. Pearce quotes "the late American hydrologist Robert Ambroggi" who said thirty years ago: "The problem facing mankind is not a lack of fresh water, but a lack of efficient regimes for using the water that is available" (in Pearce, 307). In this chapter entitled "Water Ethics," he simply mentions experiences all around the world showing some people's sense of responsibility and their will to change things to stop the drying of rivers. He sees hope in India: "One image of hope is the disciples of Dada and others in Gujarat who are pouring monsoon water down their wells. Why not develop the concept on a much larger scale?" (308). A "global strategy for encouraging rainwater harvesting" (309) is starting in some places. There is hope in Los Angeles, where "some people talk of turning the most paved urban area on the planet into a "porous city" that can catch the rain, banish floods, and become self-sufficient in water" (310). There is hope in Spain where "opponents of plans to divert the Ebro River […] called for a 'new water ethic'" (310). There is hope in Iraq where "the inhabitants of the Mesopotamian marshes are returning to tear down Saddam's dykes and plug his drainage canals, remaking the wet lands that once gave birth to the Garden of Eden" (310). All those writers first lead us to be aware of the reality of a world where the simple act of drinking a glass of water can become a lethal act when that water is polluted or can be impossible when the river has run dry. The first ecological candidate to France's presidency in 1974, René Dumont, an agronomist who spent all his life travelling around the world and writing books to make people aware of the connections existing between our behaviours here and famine in Africa, made his campaign speech with a glass of water, saying that he was drinking a glass of water and that before the end of the century, we would be short of water if we went on with such an

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overflowing.7 He had surprised all the spectators when at the end of his speech he had simply drunk his glass of water. Through the simplest gesture, he wanted to strike everybody, to make them aware of their own link with the lack of water in the world. Journalists, agronomists, anthropologists, novelists or playwrights, all those writers use their knowledge of the world to lead people to a triple kind of awareness. They want to show them first the danger threatening the rivers of the world. But they also want to show them that all people are responsible for that situation and in the same way all people can reverse it and prevent the rivers from running dry. They use both their fieldwork and texts that they often clad with literary elements to let readers visualize the situation of fresh water in the world and to understand that millions of people depend on this situation. Why do most of them add literary and aesthetic elements to their inquiries—a song and a painting used by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a poem and a reference to Mark Twain inserted by Pedro Casaldaliga in a tragic historical report, a slave's song and a reference to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn in Fred Pearce's book? It is as if literature and arts could help readers to see reality more clearly, to be more sensitive to it. It is as if those small literary incursions into anthropological, historical or journalistic inquiries were meant both to strike readers and to relieve the weight of the tragedy, like René Dumont's glass of water. The darkness of the painting might lead to despair, that is to the certainty that nothing can be done. Now the aim is the reversal. There must be hope to make things change. The relief brought by the popular reference to a song or the aesthetic reference to a painting allows the reader to keep his conscience open to be able to act. The awful painting of the situation reveals hope within despair and this is summed up once more in a poem inserted into his own text by Pedro Casaldaliga quoting Antonio Machado: Hour of my heart The hour of a hope and a despair. (Antonio Machado in Pedro Casaldaliga"s Prophets in Combat, 7)

All those writers point to the misery caused by men's greed poisoning rivers and people but they want to show that it is no fatality. All of their texts give us keys to change things, to reverse the movements of the domino sugars. Nancy Scheper-Hughes' book ends on celebration: "The goal of the moradores 8 of the Alto de Cruzeiro 9 is not resistance but simply existence. 7

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_weZ8284-0, accessed February 27, 2018. Inhabitants, residents. 9 Alto de Cruzeiro "(Hill of the Crucifix) in Timbaúba, a sugar-belt town in the state of Pernambuco, in Northern Brazil", Scheper-Hughes, "No More Angel Babies." 8

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And in the context of these besieged lives I find human resilience enough to celebrate with them joyfully and hopefully, if always tentatively" (ScheperHughes, 532). Texts denouncing the poisoning of rivers by cane factories in Brazil and the drying of wells in Africa by the exploitation of uranium are ways of showing the rest of the world an everyday resistance synonymous with existence. In the Aïr region of Niger, Tuareg poet Hawad denounces the devastation of the desert and the destruction of the Tuaregs by the companies exploiting uranium. The desert is devastated by electricity companies wanting uranium and provoking the drying of wells and thus destroying people or pushing them away. Thirst is at the core of Hawad's poetry as Hélène Claudot-Hawad underlines: Parmi les thèmes fondateurs, se retrouve celui de la "soif", quête philosophique qui éperonne les voyageurs cosmiques (Caravane de la soif, 1985; Chants de la soif et de l'égarement, 1987; L'Anneau-Sentier, 1989). À la recherche de l'eau, l'assoiffé sort des chemins tracés, pénètre dans le désert, perd son orientation, s'égare, divague, pour être enfin prêt à inventer sa propre route.10

His poetry is a shout translated into words: Linceul vent rouge fournaise le pays est ligoté civière de la soif chagrin timbre gris du soufre dans la gorge Ô terre veuve de l'eau! Le grillon crisse À l'abri des crevasses De l'argile en carême. ("Soif—2012", Hawad 2017, 169)11

10 "Among the founding themes, we can find "thirst," a philosophical quest that spurs cosmic travellers (Caravane de la soif, 1985; Chants de la soif et de l'égarement, 1987; L'Anneau-Sentier, 1989). Looking for water, the thirsty man gets out of opened tracks, penetrates into the desert, loses his orientation, wanders, to be finally ready to invent his own road." Hélène Claudot-Hawad, in Hawad. Furigraphies. Poésies 1983-2015. Paris: Gallimard NRF, 2017, 12. Italics in the original. Translation mine). 11 "Shroud blazing red wind / the land is tied up / stretcher of thirst / grief grey tone colour / of sulphur in one's throat / Oh ! Land widow of water! The cricket screeches / sheltered in the crevices / of clay in Lent." Hawad, ibid. Translated from the Tuareg (tamajaght) by the author and Hélène Claudot-Hawad. My translation from the French.

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The poet evokes the machines penetrating "the breast of the earth" ("le poitrail de la terre," ibid.) into the earth, the "plain shouting" ("et la plaine se mit à crier," ibid.), the suffering and pangs of agony of the land from which "they" extract "Uranium gas oil" (ibid., 170). The poet does not name those people: "they" are the western world, the industrialized world extracting resources from the African soil to feed their power plants and give electricity to the rest of the world by depriving the Tuareg land of their water: et la margelle s'effondra et la flaque miroir du puits s'éclipsa. (ibid., 170) 12

The strength of the poet's words relays journalists' investigations to add the weight of a rooting into the land expressed through writing. The water of the desert stolen by European companies to feed their power plants becomes the ink of the poem accusing those who destroy Tuaregs and their land. The absent water of the land dried up by industrial greed is changed into a poetic ink writing a shout onto the world's consciences. Poetry makes people aware and gives them hope. The poet Wang Ping founded and directs the "Kinship of Rivers Project." On the Yangtze or the Mississippi or near the Snake River, she entreated "fishermen, rowers, park rangers, and fellow travellers—[…] to be stewards of the river by marking a flag with a poem, drawing." 13 Poems and prayer flags are used to make the world aware and to give hope; to say that "we are all water," the water that carries the migrants' tragedies and the water that carries love, peace and hope in all languages. We carry old homes along the spine, new dreams in our chests We carry yesterday, today and tomorrow We’re orphans of the wars forced upon us We’re refugees of the sea rising from industrial wastes And we carry our mothertongues 䈘(ai)㸪ΐΣ (hubb), ʲʡʩʬ (libe), amor, love ᖹᏳ (ping’an), ϡϼγ ( salaam), shalom, paz, peace ᕼᮃ㸦xi’wang), Ϟϣ΃ (’amal), hofenung, esperanza, hope, hope, hope As we drift…in our rubber boats…from shore…to shore…to shore. 14

12 "and the coping of the well collapsed / and the pool mirror of the well disappeared" (translation mine). 13http://mspmag.com/arts-and-culture/we-are-%28all%29-water/, accessed October 27, 2018. 14 https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/things-we-carry-sea accessed October 27, 2018.

CHAPTER ELEVEN THE FANTASTIC TO DENOUNCE THE DEVASTATION OF LANDS BY THE EXPLOITATION OF RESOURCES

"For that's what it was, plain as day now, tucked tight into the oozing black cliff, an angel." Rudy Wiebe. "The Angel of the Tar Sands"

Writers sometimes risk their lives to denounce the abuses of power when this power is totalitarian. Writing can change the world and fiction writing can sometimes send messages and hold out a mirror to readers who are not always aware of what happens to the land at the other end of their comfortable world.

Science fiction to denounce the exploitation of resources In a book about world famine, the author, Hugues Stoeckel, evokes the fact that our human conscience has not accepted the limits concerning energetic production. He thus explains the mechanism of photosynthesis: La photosynthèse est la clé de voûte de la vie sur la terre. Installée partout où les conditions géophysiques le permettent, elle élabore en continu un ensemble merveilleusement complexe de molécules organiques, bien plus diversifié que tout ce que l'Homme pourra jamais synthétiser et qui pourvoit tout le vivant en nutriments assimilables dispensateurs de matière et d'énergie. Malgré son faible rendement de conversion de l'énergie solaire en énergie chimique (en moyenne moins de 1% en éclairage naturel), elle est ainsi en amont de toute vie, dont la nôtre. La surface de captage accessible à la photosynthèse fixe toutefois une limite indépassable à la quantité d'énergie solaire qu'elle est en mesure de collecter, et donc à sa capacité de production nourricière. […]

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Notre conscience collective n'a pas encore accepté cette limite. (Stoeckel, La faim du monde. L'humanité au bord d'une famine globale, chapter 1, "Energie et nourriture") 1

In that scientific explanation of life and the suggestion of what we should do to maintain it, the author quotes science fiction authors saying that "they seldom burden themselves with scientific verisimilitude. For example, when they describe a land overcrowded with humans in a moribund nature, they do not show science but pure fiction" (ibid.). And in a note, he refers to Richard Fleisher's Soylent Green, adding that "the laws of entropy do not allow such outputs in food cycles" (Stoeckel). He is right, but science fiction authors do not claim to be scientists. They just want to entertain readers while warning them and in so doing leading them to the awareness of the limits evoked by Stoeckel. They are not scientists but their messages are the same even if the method is different and they cannot be reproached with exaggerating the situation to lead to awareness. Science fiction is not science. It is just fiction using science and technologies, in a fictitious and imaginary way, to invent stories. Those stories, like all fictitious stories, are rooted in reality but this reality is distorted to bring questions to the readers’ or spectators' minds. Stendhal said to define the novel: "It is a mirror that is taken out along a road." 2 A mirror reflects reality but distorts it since it gives you a reversed image of reality. Readers must accept that and once they have seen the image proposed in the mirror, they are free to see reality in the light of fiction and to deepen what is not knowledge but imagination to reinforce what fiction suggests by turning to the reality of science. There is a common point between scientists and fiction writers; both observe the world and in most cases, both would like to improve it by leading people to awareness. Both see connections between all things and creatures. And Einstein said that

1

"Photosynthesis is the keystone of life on Earth. Appearing wherever geophysical conditions allow it, it continuously elaborates a wonderfully complex set of organic molecules, much more diversified than all that man will be able to ever synthesize, and it provides the whole living world with easily absorbed nutriments, dispensers of matter and power. In spite of its feeble output from the conversion of solar power to chemical power (less than 1% for natural lighting on average), it is thus uphill from all life, including ours. Yet the harnessing surface open to photosynthesis fixes an impassable limit to the quantity of solar energy that it can collect, and thus its capacity of sustaining production. […] Our collective consciousness has not accepted that limit yet" (translation mine). 2 Stendhal, Le rouge et le noir, 1830.

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before equations, imagination came first. The paths are different. But there are always several paths to lead people to the top of a mountain. So Hugues Stoeckel is right to say that science fiction writers are not scientists but yet they can draw people's attention to the fact that men's excessive exploitation of the resources of the Earth and of energy, endangers the Earth and all forms of life on it. Among science fiction writers, Frank Herbert's saga Dune evokes the over-exploitation of the desert planet Arrakis's spice, the most important substance in the universe. Transposing the over-exploitation of the Earth by men to imaginary planets and interstellar societies, Herbert shows what might happen on our planet. In Isaac Asimov's trilogy Foundation, the plot is situated in a remote future after men have lost the Earth. On all the planets that have been colonized, all flora and fauna have disappeared. Novels are a way of denouncing over-exploitation and short texts like short stories can also reach readers' consciences.

A fantastic short story to fight against the exploitation of tar sands in Canada In Northern America, Canada and the United States, the exploitation of tar sands and shale gas destroys wide areas and the populations, particularly the Native communities living there. In Canada, Alberta is one of the most important greenhouse gas producers in the world. The report Reality Change: Climate Change and the Tar Sands indicates: Canada is among the world's 10 largest greenhouse gas producers and the tar sands are a significant contributing factor. If Alberta was a country, its per person emissions would be the second highest in the world after Qatar.3

It is with a fantastic ecological short story that Rudy Wiebe answered this new form of exploitation endangering lands and water and the surrounding populations. The short story "The Angel of the Tar Sands" starts with a 3

The notes in the report mention: "Alberta’s total greenhouse gas emissions in 2008 were 244 megatonnes of CO2 equivalent. (Environment Canada, “National Inventory Report - Part 3 1990-2008 Greenhouse Gas Sources and Sinks in Canada”) Alberta’s population in 2008 was estimated to be 3.51 million people. (Alberta Finance, Alberta Population Report (2008) (accessed January 15, 2013));" and: "Dyer, S., Huot, M., Grant J., Lemphers, N., The Pembina Institute (2013). Beneath the Surface: a review of key facts in the oilsands debate. Retrieved from: http://www.pembina.org/pub/2404" http://environmentaldefence.ca/report/reportreality-check-air-pollution-and-the-tar-sands/, accessed February 15, 2017.

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landscape in spring mingling the beauty of Nature and the smoke from a plant chimney: Spring had most certainly, finally come. The morning drive to the plant from Fort McMurray was so dazzling with fresh green against the heavy spruce, the air so unearthly bright that it swallowed the smoke from the candystriped chimneys as if it did not exist. 4

The initial superiority of Nature is asserted from the start since even if the destination is an industrial place—"drive to the plant"—, light and life dominate with the "fresh green" of spruce and the prevailing light— "dazzling", "unearthly bright"—"swallowing the industrial smoke of the chimney reduced to children's candy and to nothingness—"as if it did not exist." The adverb "unearthly" qualifying the light introduces a sign of strangeness and lets supernature enter the text little by little. After the introductory landscape painting, the story properly starts with the strange discovery made by archaeologists. "A shape emerged:" For that's what it was, plain as day now, tucked tight into the oozing black cliff, an angel. Tak had seen only a corner of bones sheared clean but now that Bertha had it more uncovered they saw the manlike head through one foldedover pair of wings and the manlike legs, feet through another pair, very gaunt, the film of feathers and perhaps skin so thin and engrained with tarry sand that at first it was impossible to notice anything except the white bones inside them. The third pair of wings was pressed flat by the sand at a very awkward – it must have been most painful–(Wiebe, ibid…)

The whole short story is based on an opposition as appears in the initial landscape painting suggesting the gist of the story, the opposition between nature and industry. Within the initial factual opposition, the adverb "unearthly" introduces an opposition between nature and supernature that is going to take the shape of an angel found in the soil. Those two fundamental oppositions are inscribed within a temporal contrast between modern times and ancient times symbolized by the archaeologists' gestures and activities. The gesture belongs to the present but the Earth preserves the past. And all that introduces another opposition between the said and the unsaid, which is a way of making the fantastic enter the text. For the text is a fantastic text with the codes of the short story, thanks to which Wiebe warned his readers about the dangers weighing on the Earth because of the wounds made by the 4

Rudy Wiebe, "The Angel of the Tar Sands", in The Conrad Grebel Review 22, no. 10 (Spring 2004), https://uwaterloo.ca/grebel/publications/conrad-grebel-review/ issues/spring-2004/angel-tar-sands, accessed February 14, 2017.

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exploitation of tar sands. One of the definitions of the fantastic is to say the unnameable and it is what happens here. The staccato rhythm of the superintendent's cues and the many suspension points—"Wouldn't it . . . he . . . fly with all six . . . six . . . ." —, his interrupted words and the impossibility for the characters to pronounce words and to determine what they see—"Wha. . . ."—, illustrate the impossibility for him to verbalize what he sees. This reveals some hesitation, which is necessary for the fantastic to exist, as Tzvetan Todorov says.5 The fantastic enters the text in a most matter-of-fact way, out of the earth, as an archaeological find. And as is the case for most fantastic or gothic texts, in which the fantastic is a way of speaking about society and of criticizing its vices, the angel appears as an ecological messenger. The language is violent against the environmentalists to convey the scorn those who run the plant feel for them: "cut out all the visible crud, shut up the environmentalists." The violence of words—"cut out," "crud", "shut up"— together with the monosyllables and the assonance in [š]—"cut," "crud," "shut," "up"—emphasizes the scornful tone of the character towards those who defend nature. To make things change, Wiebe's imagination creates the intervention of a supernatural environmentalist, the angel found in the tar sands. Being first "a shape" and then "that," it appears as a neutral object: "that's what it was, plain as day now, tucked tight into the oozing black cliff, an angel." The strange creature is first the visible proof of the pollution of the place. The "wings pressed flat by the sand" and the skin "engrained with tarry sand" conjure up the thousands of birds destroyed by oil in sea disasters. The angel physically comes from the earth as an archaeological find. But unlike any archaeological find, it first moves and then speaks "a language from Europe," that is from the old continent; it has an "ancient face." It is first taken for a prehistoric creature, a dinosaur, with the restoration of his shoulder, and it is finally associated with the wise words of the elder linking it with the sky: "Our Elder always said they spoke Hutterite in heaven." First seen as a dead animal body, his kind of resurrection, with the restoration of his wounded shoulder, makes him a Christ-like figure and at the same time the image of all ancient men warning modern ones. The Christ-like dimension of the angel is emphasized by the Biblical reference, the superintendent seeing himself "as an altar boy." The mixture of languages (the English of the dialogue, the hesitating Latin due to the characters' awe, their dread in front of a figure they consider as sacred—"Pax vobis . . . cem . . . cum [...] Magnifi . . . cat . . . ave 5

See Tzvetan Todorov, "The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event" (Todorov 25).

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Mar. . . ."—, the Hutterite that only Bertha can recognize, and the Japanese of the future possible angels humorously evoked in the last line of the story ("‘Next time you'll recognize what it is,’ she said happily. 'And then it'll talk Japanese'") gives the strange meeting a world-wide dimension. Humour is there as some comic relief to alleviate the dread in front of the unnameable. The angel found in the tar sands is a fantastic, supernatural figure but the real vision is not this apparition found dead within the earth and living again; it is the superintendent's last vision: And at her words the superintendent had a vision. He saw like an opened book the immense curves of the Athabasca River swinging through wilderness down from the glacial pinnacles of the Rocky Mountains and across Alberta and joined by the Berland and the McLeod and the Pembina and the Pelican and the Christina and the Clearwater and the Firebag rivers, and all the surface of the earth was gone, the Tertiary and Lower Cretaceous layers of the strata had been ripped away and the thousands of square kilometers of black bituminous sand were exposed, laid open, slanting down into the molten centre of the earth, O miserere, miserere, the words sang in his head and he felt their meaning though he could not have explained them, much less remembered Psalm 51, 6 and after a time he could open his eyes and lift his head. The huge oil plant, he knew every bolt and pipe, still sprawled between him and the river; the brilliant air still swallowed the smoke from all the red-striped chimneys as if it did not exist, and he knew that through a thousand secret openings the oil ran there, gurgling in each precisely numbered pipe and jointure, sweet and clear like golden brown honey. (Wiebe, ibid.)

The angel leads him to an epiphany. He sees the whole world linked through its rivers: the Canadian landscape of Alberta spreads in front of his inner eyes and the list of river names appears as the revelation of his new vision of nature: "He saw like an opened book the immense curves of the Athabasca River swinging through wilderness down from the glacial pinnacles of the Rocky Mountains and across Alberta and joined by the Berland and the McLeod and the Pembina and the Pelican and the Christina and the Clearwater and the Firebag rivers;" but those veins of life of the Earth disappear in the simple verb "was gone." He understands that the "black bituminous sand" thus exposed destroys the whole earth "down into the molten centre of the earth." 6 Psalm 51 reads: " Have mercy on me, O God, / because of your unfailing love. / Because of your great compassion, / blot out the stain of my sins. / Wash me clean from my guilt. / Purify me from my sin." In the psalm David repeatedly asks for God's forgivenss. The Latin words "O miserere, miserere" open the psalm but they cannot be explained religiously by the superintendent. More than cultural memory, it is an epiphany. He feels his guilt deep within him, his guilt towards the earth, revealed by the angel in the tar sand.

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He has the vision of the relationship between the plant and the exploitation of the tar sands and the destruction of the earth, its present and its past since "the Tertiary and Lower Cretaceous layers of the strata had been ripped away." All times and all places are united in the contamination by the exposed, laid open "black bituminous sand." The impossibility to utter words is replaced by an "opened book" which is nature. The "candy-striped chimneys" of the beginning, linked with children's sweets, have become "red-striped chimneys," with the colour of blood; but in both cases, the air swallowed the smoke "as if it did not exist." The frame made by the repetition of this small phrase at the beginning and at the end of the text reveals that even if men are children placing their toys on the part of nature they pollute, nature is the strongest. The angel's apparent death in the earth polluted by the exploitation of the tar sands has become a message of life and an ecological message about man's destruction of nature by industry. Answering such a disaster as the pollution of a whole region and of the world by the two pages of a short story could seem a hopeless fight. And yet, to take up the phrase of the organization Survival International, "the weight of the pen," writing may invert the process of destruction of the planet. Thus in the 1990s, an international campaign of letters organized by Survival International and the local organization FENAMAD led the oil company Mobil to leave a region of South-Western Peru where uncontacted Indians lived. The ink of imagination is strong: academic articles sometimes choose to start their demonstrations by extracts from poetry or fiction rather than real facts. Oriana Palusci starts an article about tar sands with a quotation from H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, evoking "the abrupt transformation of the natural world, fields and trees, gardens and parks, surrounding suburban London." 7 We have already seen how she reminded us that it was travel books that first revealed the existence of tar sands in Canada. 8 Fiction prolongs them, adding a dimension of imagination that the photographer Louis Helbig wants to trigger in those who look at his photographs. Fantastic imagination founded on real facts or real facts leaning on literary references, beautiful photographs revealing the horror of landscape destructions, all those who speak about oil and tar sands show the reality of destruction by referring or appealing to the imagination, as if it was the only possible rescuer of a world adding up its losses.

7

Oriana Palusci, "River of Hell: Athabasca Tar Sands Narratives," in Oriana Palusci (ed.), Green Canada, Bruxelles, Oxford…: Peter Lang, Canadian Studies, vol. 31, 67. 8 See part 2, chapter 6 of this book.

CHAPTER TWELVE ABORIGINAL LITERATURE AND THE WAY TO ECOLOGICAL AWARENESS

"Once in our lives we ought to concentrate our minds upon the Remembered Earth." N. Scott Momaday 1

Why devote a chapter to Aboriginal literature while African, American, Canadian, Australian, Indian, and British literatures are not separated and while some of the authors appearing in this chapter are also quoted in other chapters? This choice even seems to counter the opinion of some of the writers quoted here. In an interview he gave in Toulouse, N. Scott Momaday answered the question about his reaction when he was called an Indian writer: "It's true, yes I'm an Indian writer but I do also think it's demeaning in a way to categorize writers in ethnic terms. I would rather be known as a writer than as a Jewish writer or an Indian writer or a Black writer." 2 This is true and a writer is first and foremost a writer whatever his/her geographical origins. Yet his/her land and landscape and the myths linked with this land build him/her and are part of his/her vision of the world. N. Scott Momaday's work would not be the same if he was not deeply impregnated with the Kiowa myth of the Bear Boy and the Seven Sisters. It is probably because Native American and all Aboriginal writers are more conscious than others of the relationship of their own life with the myths that have constructed their people that their texts are different. Linda Hogan writes in Dwellings: "As an Indian woman I question our responsibilities to the caretaking of the future and to the other species that share our journeys (Dwellings, 11). Linda Hogan starts the 1

N. Scott Momaday in Remembered Earth: New Mexico's High Desert, film by John Grabowska, Idaho Public Television, 2005. 2 "An Interview with N. Scott Momaday", Christiane Fioupou and Françoise Besson, directed by Jean Jimenez, SCPAM Université Toulouse II-Le Mirail, December 12, 2000. https://www.canal-u.tv/video/vo_universite_toulouse_le_mirail /entretien_avec_n_scott_momaday.800

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preface of her book with these words: "As an Indian woman," thus meaning that her Indian identity makes her more responsible than others. It is probably because they feel geological time in the landscapes they cross that they feel timelessness, they feel as if they entered eternity while entering some particular landscape as N. Scott Momaday felt when crossing the Grand Canyon, as he said in this interview. It is also because they feel more than others the sense of connection, connection between times, between time and eternity and connection between man and the nonhuman world, a sense driven and preserved by the importance of myths. He said in the same interview: [Man, Nature, animals] They're all of a piece. We exist in the element of Nature in spite of the fact that we sometimes want to destroy Nature. Men and Nature are closely related as they both cross a large spectrum of experiences. (ibid.)

The texts he chose to read on that day were a poem about crows and an extract from his novel House Made of Dawn, which was a wonderful landscape painting showing both the vegetable world of melons and corn and the animal world, with a hawk in the sky. N. Scott Momaday, like all the writers who will be evoked in this chapter, is a writer. But if I chose to devote a chapter to what I called Aboriginal literature, it is because I think that Aboriginal writers are more than writers: they are writers indeed, but writers with an overdeveloped sense of connection, an overdeveloped conscience of their connection with the land, with the cosmos and with the whole nonhuman world. More than non-Aboriginal writers, they can open the world's eyes on man's connections with all the elements constituting the world. The word "Aboriginal" comes from the Latin words ab (meaning "from") and origo (meaning "birth," "origin" or "source"). The first definition given by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is "being the first or earliest of its kind present in a region." 3 The neutral possessive adjective shows that the definition first applies to non-human elements. The examples given are "aboriginal forests" and "aboriginal rocks." The second definition given is: "relating to the people who have been in a region from the earliest time: or relating to aborigines." And the examples given are "aboriginal languages" and "aboriginal tribes/customs/art." The last definition is "specifically, often capitalized or relating to the indigenous peoples of Australia" (ibid.). So, if we often use the word to designate Australian Aborigines or Canadian Aboriginals, the word can be 3

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aboriginal, accessed May 5, 2017.

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applied to all humans and nonhumans originating from the soil where they live. There are aboriginal plants as there are aboriginal animals and everywhere in the world we can speak of populations native to the soil where they live as Aboriginal populations. The question was asked at an international conference on Ecocriticism in Perpignan 4 when a young Finnic Sami researcher said that her people, the Sami, were the last Aboriginals in Europe. The isolation and geographical distance of some communities are not the only criteria of Aboriginality; the immemorial link of any population with their land makes various populations in industrialized countries aboriginal populations in the etymological sense of the word. Thus we could say that all mountain populations from the Alps, the Pyrenees and all the mountains of Europe are also Aboriginals in that sense as most of them are originating from the land where they live. They are not cut off from the industrial transformations of civilization but this does not change the fact that they have been linked with their mountains for centuries. It might be interesting to wonder whether the notion of aboriginality only applies to some populations in the world whereas it is abandoned for most of them as if aboriginality was a politically incorrect term in industrial countries. Yet, all those populations particularly attached to their natural land are also linked by mythical memory and we can observe that there are many connections between myths and particularly myths of creation all over the world, those connections appearing specifically through the role of animals.

Myths and collective stories as a sign of the Aboriginal awareness of the interrelation between the human and the nonhuman Once in our lives we ought to concentrate our minds upon the Remembered Earth. We ought to give ourselves up to a particular landscape in our experience, to look at it from as many angles as we can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. We ought to imagine that we touch it with our hands at every season and listen to the sounds that are made upon it. We ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. We ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk. (Momaday, Remembered Earth) 5 4

"Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth", 22-25 June 2016, Université de Perpignan-Via Domitia. 5 Remembered Earth, film by John Grabowska, Momaday: voiceover, Idaho Public Television, 2005. Script on: http://www.pbs.org/rememberedearth/script.html, accessed February 28, 2018.

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Native Americans' awareness of man's deep relationship with the nonhuman world is immemorial and their myths of Creation are a sign of it. Everywhere in America, the creation of Man according to original myths depends on the nonhuman world: vegetable elements like the maize in South America, the wind for the Navajos, the raven on the North-West Coast, the turtle and muskrat with the Hurons and Iroquois and many others. The spider, at the centre of the Pueblos' cosmology appears as the emblem of the weaving between all things in the world. Bernadette RigalCellard writes: Dans la cosmogonie des Pueblos, l'Araignée [...] est une manifestation de l'Intelligence suprême, la Créatrice Ts'its'tsÏnako. De la soie qu'elle secrète naissent les pensées qu'elle projette dans l'espace. Elle a façonné la lumière, les sons, les créatures. Les rayons et les cercles qu'elle engendre représentent la chaîne rayonnante qui unit entre eux les éléments, les états d'existence, figurés concentriquement, de plus en plus éloignés du centre tout en les maintenant reliés à ce centre, image du Principe. Tisserand primordial, l'Araignée unit par le lien ombilical qu'est son fil la Créatrice et la Création, et le cosmos tout entier par les relations tissées entre les quatre points cardinaux et le centre du monde, S'hipap en Pueblo. 6

The spider is a creating being linked with weaving, and that reference to weaving through this small animal brings us back to a great weaving of the universe linking all elements; man is part of that great structure that can bring him back to the ecological conscience of the world thanks to what might be called the philosophy of the spider. Everything being linked as in a cobweb, the tearing of a thread breaks the whole structure. The spider also appears in an African myth from Nigeria, the "Spider and the Crows," (Mandela, 51). We can observe connections between all parts of the world through those collective stories centred on animals. Thus the snake can be a positive animal linked with water in Native American and South African

6"In

Pueblos' cosmogony, the Spider [...] is an expression of supreme Intelligence, the Creator Ts'its'tsÏnako. From the silk it secretes, arise the thoughts that she projects into space. She has fashioned light, sounds and creatures. The rays and the circle she engenders represent the radiant chain uniting elements and states of existence between one another, figured in a concentric way, more and more distant from the centre, while keeping them linked to this centre, the image of the Principle. The primordial weaver, the Spider unites, through the umbilical link that is her son, the Creator and the Creation, and the whole cosmos by the relationships woven betwen the four cardinal points and the centre of the world, S'hipap in Pueblo," Bernadette Rigal-Cellard 359, my translation.

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myths. We can also note that in all parts of the world, animals are the world bearers or earthdivers. Larry Zimmerman writes: Familiar animals are often said to play a crucial role in the creation process—for example in the many stories that feature an "earthdiver." The earthdiver myth is a heroic creation story found in different forms all over the world. In many Native North American versions, the earth begins as an endless watery chaos with no dry land. A being asks various animals to dive to the bottom of this ocean to bring up mud. Eventually, one creature succeeds and the dry land is formed from the mud it has retrieved. These animals are called "earthdivers" and are sometimes small and unassuming heroes. For example, in the Cherokee account the earthdiver is a waterbeetle, while the Chickasaw say it is a crawfish and the Cheyenne, a coot. (Zimmerman, 116-118)

And while the earthdivers are small animals, the earth bearers may be either small or big: from insects to elephants, all types of animals originally bore the earth. With the Iroquois and particularly the Hurons, it is a turtle, and this is also the case in Egypt; in Japan it is a fish; in India, it is a beetle; and in South-west Asia, it is an elephant. The natural world bears the mark of collective memory and of the initial myths of creation. Thus when Momaday makes an initiatory journey, his meeting with a tree trunk at the end of his journey appears as a meeting with the myth of Creation. I bore westward across the Powder River and the Bighorn Mountains, and after many days 1 took leave of the plains. The way was rocky then and steep, and it seemed that my horse was bearing me up to the top of the world. All the rivers ran down from that place, and many times I saw eagles in the air under me. And then there were meadows full of wildflowers, and a mist roiled upon them, the slow, rolling spill of the mountain clouds. And in one of these, in a pool of low light, I touched the fallen tree, the hollow log there in the thin crust of the ice. (Momaday, The Names, 176)

When he "touched the fallen tree," it is the myth of the Creation of the Kiowa that he touched, as they were supposed to arrive on the earth from underground through a tree trunk. The landscape depicted here is a visionary landscape seeing in its own shapes the roots of the world, the roots of the Kiowa and showing the poet traveller his own roots and his relationship with the world. The pool of light literally throws light on the conscience of the world. It is the deep link between a mythical past and nature seen here and now that triggers man's awareness of his presence in

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the world. This is something that can also be found with Australian Aborigines, as Colette Selles underlines: […] in the Aboriginal cosmogony, the Creation story is not disconnected from the present or from reality, which explains why Aborigines question the term Dreamtime or even Dreaming: "this matrix of dreams does not correspond to a golden age which belongs to the past, but to a space and time continuum which is both eternal and in continuous creation," Barbara Glowczewski writes (43). (Selles, 677)

For Aborigines as well as for Native Americans, Creation myths become political discourse. For example, in 1915, Indian chief Weninock, a Yakima said: "God created Indian country, and it is as if he spread out a great blanket. He put Indians on it. And all the animals and plants in that country were for the Indian people" (quoted in Lowenstein and Vitebsky, 31). He defended that "blanket" and eventually the right to fish where they had always fished was acknowledged to the Indians (McLuhan, 18). He started from the beginnings of the world to assert Indians' rights, Indians' anteriority and thus preserved his people's land. The Creation myth, by being part of a political discourse, asserted all its strength in modern space and guided the settlers towards awareness. In Canada Tatanya Mani (Walking Buffalo) (1871-1967), a Stoney Indian from Alberta, reminded his listeners of the fact that unlike the white settlers' vision based on profit, the Indian vision is founded on listening to Nature and he thus links Nature and supernature through the "Great Spirit's hand:" Did you know that trees talk? Well they do. They talk to each other, and they'll talk to you if you listen. Trouble is, white people don't listen. They never learned to listen to the Indians so I don't suppose they'll listen to other voices in nature. But I have learned a lot from the trees: sometimes about the weather, sometimes about animals, sometimes about the Great Spirit. […] We saw the Great Spirit's work in almost everything: sun, trees, wind, and mountains. Sometimes we approached him through these things. Was that so bad? I think we have a true belief in the Supreme Being, a stronger faith than that of most whites who have called us pagans… The red savages have always lived closer to nature than have the white savages. Nature is the book of that great power which one man calls God and which we call the Great Spirit. But, what difference does a name, make? 7 7 "Words from the Wise Man: Tatanga Mani," by the MOTHER EARTH NEWS editors, May-June 1977, https://www.motherearthnews.com/nature-and-environment /tatanga-mani-zmaz77mjzbon, accessed May 28, 2018. Also quoted in T.C. McLuhan, Pieds nus sur la terre sacrée, Paris: Denoel, 1971, 29.

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The reference to Creation leads to the awareness of nature. Native Americans have a narrow relationship with the natural world naturally linking the world of words with the origins of the world through first narratives. Nature speaks to those who can listen, which Native Americans like Australian Aborigines and African people always did, whereas Europeans are cut off from their natural origins and nature is silent to them. N. Scott Momaday's references to myths in his literary work are part of this connection with the origins. And the recurrence of the bear boy myth in his fiction as well as in his autobiographies may appear as a sign of this relationship between nature and collective memory. The story of the child changed into a bear whereas his sisters were called by a tree and taken into the sky where they became the seven stars of the Big Dipper, speaks about the connection between everything. Tsoai, or the rock tree in Kiowa, Devil's Tower in the landscape of Wyoming, the cosmos with the Big Dipper and Momaday's inner world are linked as he sees the connection with that myth within himself. His presence in the world is a presence both in nature and in collective memory. In most Native American Creation myths, those founding stories tell that man exists only because one or several animals, or a tree, or a plant like maize, allowed him to exist in the world. In those stories we can read the essential respect towards the animal and vegetal world. Those myths tell about our relation to nature and they are all variants of the same idea: without nature, neither man nor the world itself could exist. In many myths, it is the smallest and most humble animal—a muskrat, a coot, a toad, a water insect, a crayfish—the creature who has no glorious appearance that allows the world's birth. In the mythical discourse, we can read some conscience of nature, an ecological message coming from times immemorial. It does not speak about preservation, it speaks about conscience and coexistence, which necessarily implies preservation. In all those mythical tales, man is presented as a consequence of animal will, animal cunning, animal solidarity, or a sort of pass provided by the earth. They reveal a conscience that the nonhuman creature has a deep link with the human being, which appeared much earlier than the birth of the term "ecology" at the end of the nineteenth century, but dates back to the beginnings of times. Those tales suggest a humble conscience in front of the world that carries us and above all the conscience that nothing must and can be dissociated. When the question is raised about the fact that activism might compromise intellectual life, Alison Hawthorne Deming, quoted by Scott Slovic in his book Going Away to Think, writes:

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It is that relationship between all that constitutes our being to the world, nature and culture, that is revealed by myths and particularly Creation myths, which the First Nations read in the landscape. Collective memory, expressed through myths, suggests that nature contains our memory and our origins in its shapes and they show that we must preserve what is the image of our birth to the world. N. Scott Momaday, like all Native American writers and artists, shows his conscience of the world and his will of sharing it to preserve the planet.

The octopus as a sign of the reciprocal concern between the human and the nonhuman Animals and plants play a great part in Momaday's work and among animals, the octopus plays a brief but important role. I like to think that [the octopus] might have been dealing with me, that in its alien, ocean mind it was struggling to take my presence into account, that I had touched its deep, essential life, and it should never lose the impression that I had made upon it…And now I wonder, what does it mean that, after these years, I should write of the octopus? It may be that I saved its life […] And I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, there, deep within its own sphere of instinct, the octopus dreams of me. ("Octopus", Momaday 1998, 208)

In the dream he imagines, isn't there the deep consciousness of our relationship with the nonhuman world? For in terms of reciprocity we might see some advantage in the nonhuman animals who not only destroy less and in a less durable way than humans but also save either men or nonhuman creatures when they are endangered. In other words, numerous examples show that they are conscious of danger for others and in that case, their choice is to help and try to rescue the endangered others. As Momaday wondered about the octopus' memory of himself, nonAboriginal writers had similar experiences. Karen Blixen wondered about the N'Gong Hills at the beginning of her autobiography, Out of Africa. In the same way, the poet Pattiann Rogers evoked a wren as the sign of imagination and of her own power of creation:

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Imagine the marsh wren making himself inside his own dream. Imagine the wren, created by the marsh of his own creation, unaware of his being inside the dream of mine where I imagine he dreams within the boundaries of his own fixed black eye around which this particular network of glistening weeds and knotted grasses and slow-dripping gold mist and seeded winds shifting in waves of sun turns and tangles and turns itself completely inside out again here composing me on then stationary silence of its own existence. 8

Imagination pervades the field of perception, the verb "imagine" recurs three times and opens this part of the poem. The dream is the poet's but it is the imagined dream of the bird that "compos(es) [her]." The polysemy of the verb "to compose," suggesting literary or musical creation, a material typographical association of letters, a chemical composition and also, when it is reflexive, that is, associated with the self, meaning the recovery of one's calm, or composure, suggests that the landscape surrounding the wren creates the poet's existence through "its own existence." As far as plants are concerned, the peyotl has a particular role situated between ecology and spirituality. 9 Cactuses are among the vegetal species evoking ideal landscapes. Cactuses stand for the American West with their green flames rising skyward at the heart of the desert to speak about an arid land becoming the meeting place between two worlds: the Indian world, called thus by white settlers and representing a thousand-year-old tradition and a communion with the Earth and all that lives on it, and the white world in search of material wealth and changing the dream of a small number of settlers into a world of globalization founded on the 8

Pattiann Rogers, The Dream of the Marsh Wren: Reciprocal Creation, in Scott Slovic (ed.). The Dream of the Marsh Wren: Writing as Reciprocal Creation, Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1999, 4. 9 A part of this chapter is inspired from a paper I presented at the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle in Toulouse in June 2011, in the Explora series of conferences organized by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas (this conference was entitled "Mystères et pouvoirs du monde végétal : de la magie à la médecine" / Mysteries and Powers of the Vegetal World: from Magic to Medicine"). I would like to thank Laurence TalairachVielmas for her work on the relationship between literature and sciences, which is of paramount importance to bring about a non-divided vision of nature and men in nature.

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power of money. In that ambivalent world, strange plants rise in the middle of western landscapes that have peopled the childhood of the white western world, strange plants, apparently aggressive and non-usable in the modern world, which are in fact a symbol of that ancestral language written in the landscape and sometimes ornamenting the screens of the virtual world of electronics. In the desert, the cactus, far from being the aesthetic object it is in white western imagination, is a vital element. It constitutes an important reserve of water. Moreover, its fruits are picked by certain tribes, particularly the fruit of saguaro, the biggest cactus in the desert; the juice of its fruit is boiled and produces a wine drunk during a ceremony meant to obtain rain. Among those cactuses, one is essential in Native American culture, the peyotl.

The peyotl in literary representations or when spirituality meets nature preservation Because of illegal trade and collectors, one-third of the cactuses in the world are threatened. 10 With their disappearance it is other species that are threatened as cactuses are the main source of water and food for many animals. Cactuses are one of the most threatened species in the world and their disappearance threatens a whole ecosystem. Among those cactuses there is the peyotl that is also an element of Native American spirituality. The Huichols in Mexico fight to defend their land with an exceptional biodiversity against the exploitation of gold and silver by mining companies. 11 In this land, many animal and vegetal species are present, including the peyotl, used in ceremonies and evoked in many artistic works, either painting or literature: Antonin Artaud and Henri Michaux in France and N. Scott Momaday in the United States, wrote about it. Those Indians are called "the last wards of the peyotl." Writers like J. M. Le Clézio, Orhan Pamuk, Paul Auster or Serge Pey supported those Indians through a petition addressed to the Mexican president. Tourism threatens the peyotl whose spiritual dimension, which meets its ecologic preservation, is often forgotten by tourists. 10

"Un tiers des espèces de cactus menacées de disparition", Reporterre, February 18, 2016, https://reporterre.net/Un-tiers-des-especes-de-cactus-menacees-dedisparition, accessed January 16, 2018. 11 http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2015/06/06/la-bataille-des-indienshuichols-au-mexique-pour-defendre-leur-terre-sacree_4648823_3244.html, accessed February 16, 2017.

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The peyotl (lophophora williamsii or Echinocactus Williamsii) is a small globe-shaped cactus with a beautiful flower and draws its name from a nahuatl word meaning "bright and silky," as unlike most cactuses, it has no thorns. It can be found mainly in the south of the United States, Texas and New Mexico, as well as on the central Mexican plateau. It has a lot of proprieties because of the alkaloids composing it. Moreover, it contains an antibiotic substance, peyocactine, which is efficient particularly against eighteen strains of Staphylococcus aureus that resist penicillin. For Native Americans, this plant heals bodies and souls. It is at the centre of religious ceremonies and spiritual quests for visions and is first of all a medicinal plant. The Delaware use it against tuberculosis. The Kiowa use it as an analgesic. It can also heal skin troubles and is a febrifuge. It can also heal gastric and pulmonary troubles as well as the flu and scarlet fever. But it is also often used as a sacred plant. The Omahas use it as a ceremonial plant in many rituals. The Ponca eat dried buds to provoke hallucinations or fight against disease. The Winnebago, Black-Feet, Ponca and Comanches use it in ceremonies. The peyotl has been used for religious ceremonies for more than three thousand years. In Momaday's novel House Made of Dawn, the peyotl is used in a ceremony by Tosamah, the priest of the sun. He defines it as the "vegetable representation of the sun" (House Made of Dawn, 109). A great part of the novel takes place in the "urban reserve where thousands of South-West Indians were relocalised, which became Los Angeles in the 1950s," Bernadette Rigal-Cellard writes in Le Mythe et la plume (RigalCellard, 154). Natives are lost there and the preacher Tosamah, tries to save them "by reuniting them around the peyotl ceremony" (154). This shows that the peyotl, in its ritual use, may have the function of Indian reunification. Many artistic representations of the peyotl ceremony show its importance in the claiming of Indianness, in which religious tradition is centred on an element of nature, a vegetable element that has been essential for thousands of years, and whose role is relayed by art, either literature or painting. Native American painters indeed represented the ceremony, like Cecil Murdock (Kickapoo), 12 and Woodrow W. Crumbo (Potawatomi), 1946. 13 In this painting, we can see cedar burning, and the 12 "The Medicine Man-¨Peyotl ceremony", 1946, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma (and in David Hurst Thomas et al. Les Indiens d'Amérique, Turner Publishing, 1993). 13 "The Offering of the Cedar", Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and in David Hurst Thomas et al. Les Indiens d'Amérique, Turner Publishing, 1993, Editions du Rocher 1994, 208. In the same museum, we can mention another painting representing the peyotl ceremony, by Herman Toppah (Kiowa), Philbrook

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cedar, which symbolizes eternity in the three monotheist religions, is one of the sacred plants used by Native Americans for rituals of purification, the other sacred plants being sage, juniper, tobacco and sweetgrass. Through art, painters, poets and novelists managed to go beyond the polemics raised by the use of peyotl, which were at the heart of a social debate. The banning of some rites, like the Dance of the Sun, or of the consumption of peyotl—to fight against drug addiction—caused great disarray in Native communities and a will to react both politically and artistically. To give an example of the incidence of the banning of such traditional ceremonies by American society, we can mention the fact that two members of the Native Church of America lost their jobs because they used peyotl in their religious rites. The court had claimed they were fighting drugs. The religious leaders reacted by saying that infants were given wine every Sunday in many religions and that it was in violation of certain laws. They organized to try to obtain legislation that would restore the interpretation of traditional religious liberty in America (Thomas, 447). But "Natives were not invited to participate in this effort" (Thomas). The initial banning eventually opened onto some active resistance and a regeneration of the rite. In the nineteenth century the foundation by peyotl members of a new Church had already come from the threat of a ban (see Rigal-Cellard, 326). Nowadays in south-west reservations, the communities learn how to practise the old ceremonies again and some Native American writers like N. Scott Momaday and others become good advocates of the Indian world. The peyotl is at the core of Native tribal life and of the integration of Native Americans into American society. The various bans those peoples had to face generated another form of resistance through painting, sculpture and literature, particularly what Bernadette Rigal-Cellard calls "ceremonial literature." The poem or the novel itself becomes a ceremonial space. Many Native American novels, as is noted by Bernadette Rigal-Cellard, insert ceremonies into their plots. This can be seen with Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich and N. Scott Momaday particularly. For example, Leslie Marmon Silko, in Ceremony, considers reading as a ceremony, and writing has been a sort of healing ritual for her. Bernadette Rigal-Cellard writes: Les écrivains actuels estiment que leur art participe au travail collectif de guérison et que leur poésie, leur théâtre ou leurs romans deviennent des Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and in David Hurst Thomas et al. Les Indiens d'Amérique, Turner Publishing, 1993, Editions du Rocher 1994, 208.

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œuvres rituelles, au sens fort du terme, permettant à leurs lecteurs de bénéficier de la puissance spirituelle qu'ils y mettent en scène. (RigalCellard, 253-54. 14

That ceremonial form of writing is also a way for them to show readers a world where everything is connected; the spiritual dimension of their writing and the staging of the ceremonies of their particular communities open onto a path to a wider form of awareness concerning the whole world and not only the members of their community. Through their ceremonial writing they lead non-Indian readers to the awareness of their own connection with the nonhuman world. N. Scott Momaday's novel House Made of Dawn, tells the story of a Southwest Indian Abel, returning from the Second World War totally devastated. Having lost all his Indian landmarks, he experiences a descent into hell in Los Angeles, and then starts a quest for his Indianness that he will gradually find when, at the end of the novel, he achieves all the Indian rites that are necessary for him to accompany his dead grandfather. He will run desperately, thus offering "his energy to the earth in exchange for the energy of the soil and elements" as Bernadette Rigal-Cellard writes (RigalCellard 365, translation mine). The exchange is brought about by peyotlism. In its evocation by Tosamah (House Made of Dawn, 58), it appears as a syncretic religion founded on Christianity and transformed into a polytheist religion founded on the quest for harmony. Tosamah defines the virtues of peyotl and its precise characteristics: “Peyote is a small, spineless, carrot-shaped cactus growing in the Rio Grande Valley and southward. It contains nine narcotic alkaloids of the isoquinoline series, some of them strychnine-like in physiological action, the rest morphine-like. Physiologically the salient characteristic of peyote is its production of visual hallucinations or color visions, as well as kinesthetic, olfactory or auditory dérangements.” Or to put it another way, that little old woolly booger turns you on like a light, man. Daddy Peyote is the vegetal representation of the sun. (House Made of Dawn, 109)

Starting from the visual and physical representation of the plant, the preacher ends on its connection with the cosmos through the very theme of representation. Through the mingling of familiar terminology like "daddy," and of cosmic symbolism, he makes peyotl a plant of in14

"Present writers consider that their art participates in the collective healing work and that their poetry, their plays or novels become ritual works, in the strong sense of the word, allowing their readers to profit by the spiritual power they stage in them" (translation mine).

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betweenness, situated between tribal everyday life and cosmic harmony. Moreover, by celebrating the peyotl ceremony in Los Angeles, the white city, whose name was given by colonizers, a name in Spanish that faces the Native language of Walatowa, the Native city occupying in the novel the two parts framing those that take place in Los Angeles, it is Indian culture that Tosamah reintroduces to the white city. To the prayer is added the body painting which is part of the ceremony as "he had painted himself for it": "The part in his hair was a Bright yellow line; there were vertical red lines on either side of his face; and there were yellow half moons under his eyes" (House Made of Dawn, 110). The symbolical moon crescent is written on his face, his eyes are highlighted by a cosmic element. Body painting, the colours of fire and light make the celebrating man the living page of a cosmic writing linking him to the universe. The ritual is precisely described, all the ritual objects of the ceremony are mentioned in the form of a list. The inclusion in the text of a list of the ritual objects, mingling nature and culture, animal and vegetable worlds, a list ending with the peyotl buds that are at the centre of the ceremony, is no mere information. The reader is invited to participate, partially at least, in the ceremony. He/she cannot see the thing really, cannot smell the cedar incense and will not chew the peyotl buds, for only Indian people are allowed to do it. But the door of sacredness is half-open to him/her. In his autobiography The Way to Rainy Mountain, Momaday still describes the peyotl ceremony. The communion with the natural elements, here water, is superimposed on vision. The reader no longer knows what belongs to reality and what belongs to the vision. The rain and the flood are part of the most matter-of-fact meteorological reality. But this real fact is placed after the mention of the fact that Mammedaty was a peyotl man, after a list of sacred and ritual objects, and after a sentence indicating that he could see beyond the visible. The text reveals the interior landscape of a peyotl man carried into another space by the vision. The plant opens the inward eye. The quest for the invisible through the vegetable world links the world of things and spirituality, thus making the peyotl ceremony a ritual that opens the channel leading from the visible to the invisible, from the material to the transcendent. The very text enters the ceremonial world and becomes a ritual moment, like Leslie Marmon Silko's novel, Ceremony, which becomes an initiation. The reader enters the reserved space of the Native American spiritual world and its reading becomes an initiatory reflection. In House Made of Dawn, a flame and a fetish united by the music of the alliteration, generate the word coming from the inside. One of the characters, Ben, Abel's friend, "shows" his own vision: "Look! Look! There are blue and purple horses…a house made of dawn …" Those blue

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and purple horses, the house made of dawn are the text of the Navajo chant and also the beginning of the novel. Ben's vision is generated by peyotl and the prayer surrounding the ceremony appears as an entering into his people's chant. Peyotl gives those men their voices again before giving them vision, it gives them their Indianness again. "Look!" the verb repeated twice is an invitation of the character to his friend but also of the novelist to his readers who can also see the blue and purple horses, the house made of dawn, which is the novel he is reading but which is also the world translated into poetic terms by a Navajo chant. Poets, like Antonin Artaud in "Dans le Pré-Conscient, le peyotl me tiendra," 15 show the connecting link of peyotl. We will end this chapter with lines by Serge Pey, a poet from Toulouse, who says in his "Poème de marche vers le peyotl:" Quand je pleure sur le Monde fais-moi voir la poignée d'oiseaux infirmes qui soutient ma poitrine […] Arme-moi d'air pour voir l'air Arme-moi de feu pour voir le feu Arme-moi de terre pour voir la terre arme-moi d'eau pour être l'œil de l'eau (Serge Pey, "Poème de marche vers le peyotl") 16

The natural elements are shown as peaceful weapons to allow the poet to be able to see them: the peyotl is the linking element uniting all natural elements, uniting nature and spirituality. The preservation of the ceremony both preserves a fundamental element of a Native culture and the plant itself by maintaining its connecting role between the reality of nature and man's spiritual relationship with the whole cosmos.

15

"In the Pre-Conscious, peyotl will hold me" (translation mine). "When I cry / Over the World / Let me see the handful / Of infirm birds / Which supports my breast / Arm myself with air to see the air / Arm myself with fire to see the fire / Arm myself with earth to see the earth / Arm myself with water to be the eye of water" ("Poem of Walk towards Peyotl," translation mine). 16

PART 4 ANIMALS TO SHOW MAN THE WAY: NATURE, SCIENCE AND IMAGINATION

CHAPTER THIRTEEN REAL AND IMAGINARY ANIMALS TO SPEAK ABOUT CONNECTIONS AND RESPONSIBILITY

"The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and a little child shall lead them…They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain; for the Earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea." Isaiah 11:6-9 "Not to hurt our humble brethren is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission—to be of service to them wherever they require it." Francis of Assisi "A good deed done to an animal is as meritorious as a good deed done to a human being, while an act of cruelty to an animal is as bad as an act of cruelty to a human being." Prophet Mohammed

The nonhuman world increasingly occupies philosophers and thinkers and books about animals are more and more numerous. From Elizabeth de Fontenay to Donna Haraway or Jean-Christophe Bailly, philosophers and intellectuals show the new importance of animals in the way man positions himself in society and in his relationship with the rest of the world. Donna Haraway, in her book When Species Meet, starts by evoking the presence of tiny living organisms in our bodies, thus showing that the first meeting between species takes place not in the outer world but in our own bodies, which should urge us to see the other, whatever the species, with positive eyes since it is that nonhuman multitude that allows us to live: I think we learn to be worldly from grappling with, rather than generalizing from, the ordinary. I am a creature of the mud, not the sky. I am a biologist who has always found edification in the amazing abilities of slime to hold

Real and Imaginary Animals to Speak about Connections and Responsibility 257 things in touch and to lubricate passages for living beings and their parts. (Haraway 2008, 4)

Her words echo Alan Moore's Swamp Thing. "I am a creature of the mud," he says. The human being is a creature of the mud, as is said by the myths as well as by scientific reality. We come from the water and our bodies are mostly composed of water. In the Christian religion, God makes the first man out of mud. In Native American myths of creation, it is mud that animals go and fetch from the bottom of the sea to make an island allowing the first woman to live. Donna Haraway's words echo myths and religions while describing a biological reality. The epigraphs of this chapter, borrowed from texts belonging to the three monotheistic religions, contain, in their assertions of our duties to animals and in their associations between animals and men, the key to tolerance and peace. The famous beautiful picture of the Old Testament, in which Isaiah speaks about a future time when all creatures live in peace, besides its spiritual dimension, gives us a key. There is no need to wait for the moment evoked by Isaiah, when all violence has been torn out of the earth and when eternal life has replaced mortality, to try to be tolerant to the Other. Any naturalist, any observer attended such a scene one day. Antelopes grazing quietly while lions are sleeping in Africa or, without going very far, some garden scenes. I remember such a scene in our garden one summer afternoon: birds were singing while cats were sleeping below them, bees were gathering pollen from flowers while, just beside, their terrible carnivorous enemies, Asian hornets, were quietly eating the food left by the cats. In front of that heavenly and quite earthly scene, I realized that the key for Isaiah's scene to appear on this earth and in this life, is food. Food for everybody. Only a sharing of resources, as was the case in this garden scene on that day, is the key to peace in the world. As long as we are "gambling with the future of our planet for the sake of hamburgers" as Peter Singer said,1 our lives will be threatened wherever we are. Violence cannot be accepted or justified; it can be explained. If Northern countries did not increase their riches by taking the resources of Southern countries, there would be no possibility of all the fundamentalists of the world convincing poor men and women who have nothing to follow the first man who will give them a reason to "have the impression they exist," to paraphrase Samuel Beckett's words. Philosophers and writers all over the world have stressed the relationship existing between men's treatment of animals and human violence against men and women. The physician and winner of the 1952 Nobel Prize for Peace Albert Schweitzer wrote: 1

Peter Singer. Animal Liberation, Ecco Press, 2001.

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Chapter Thirteen We must fight against the spirit of unconscious cruelty with which we treat animals. Animals suffer as much as we do. True humanity does not allow us to impose such sufferings on them. It is our duty to make the whole world recognize it. Until we extend our circle of compassion to all living things, humanity will not find peace.2

And, in the sixth century B.C., the Greek philosopher Pythagoras said: "As soon as men slaughter beasts, they will kill one another. The man who sows murder and pain can't harvest joy and love."3 Our behaviour towards nonhuman animals reflects our behaviour towards human beings. And it is perhaps in the speaking silence of animals that we can find our own way to a fair relationship with the world. All literary genres in all countries and in all periods use animals to speak about man and among all those animals, the smallest of them, insects, recur in a nearly obsessive way as if to show us a way to follow, as if to lead us to be aware of living existences behind those creatures that brought about, in scientists' brains, the invention of pesticides, which generated all the damage we know. Poetic insects open the way to lots of animals present in literature but also in scientists’ autobiographical reports of experiences lived among wild animals. Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall and many others turned their lives into actions that they told in books or in autobiographical notes published later as is the case for Dian Fossey. From the microcosm of poetic insects4 to the hugeness of imaginary and mythical whales, texts about animals speak about an immemorial connection between the human and nonhuman worlds and reveal the role of animals in our understanding of the world.

The world of insects to show us the way […] les animaux ne parlent pas et c'est depuis ce fond silencieux, peutêtre, sans doute, traversé de cris, mais silencieux quant à ce que nous entendons comme sens, c'est depuis ce silence insensé qu'ils nous regardent. (Jean-Christophe Bailly in La question animale, 17)5 2

Albert Schweitzer in Jennie Richards. "Albert Schweitzer said "Fight Against the Spirit of Unconscious Cruelty"", Published November 11, 2014, Updated December 1, 2015, http://www.humanedecisions.com/albert-schweitzer-said-fightagainst-the-spirit-of-unconscious-cruelty/, accessed April 10, 2017. 3 Quoted in Kelen 84. Translation mine. 4 We can remember the role of ants in John Kinsella's "Codex for a Protest" in part I of this book. 5 "[…] Animals do not speak and it is from that silent depth, perhaps, undoubtedly, crisscrossed by shouts, but silent as far as what we can hear as meaningful is

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As Albert Schweitzer said, "when I rescue an insect in distress, I only try to pay something of the ever-renewed debt of man towards beasts" (quoted in Kelen, 137). Men's consciousness of animals as our fellow creatures might come from a better observation of their ways of living. It is more difficult to kill a creature whose life you have observed for a long time than an unknown animal that you only consider as a resource and an object of consumption. The observation of insects may give some keys to our presence in the world. As Eric Orsenna writes, "In all fields, insects give us lessons" (Orsenna, 21). The eighteenth-century Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828) wrote haikus in which he interpreted insects' gestures to throw light on men's behaviour. Butterflies, flies, omnipresent katydids, and dragonflies allowed him to speak about man's relationship with life and death: A butterfly flits as if wanting nothing in this world.6

The butterfly's flutter appears as the expression of the deep understanding of the absolute harmony found between a creature and its environment, the poetic illustration of what Epictetus said in The Enchiridion: "Don't demand or expect that events happen as you would wish them to. Accept events as they actually happen."7 The poor black rejected insect, the fly, also appears in the poet's haiku: Swatting a fly and a blooming wildflower. (ibid.)

The haiku sums up the human distorted connection to nature, which is one of violence as man wants to eradicate what he cannot use or what bothers him like the fly or the wildflower. Yet the poem chooses its side: the subject is absent and only present in the act of destruction while the fly and the wildflower are named and the wildflower is blooming, opposing its life and beauty to the human gesture of destruction. A fly is also the concerned, it is from that extraordinary silence, that they look at us." (translation mine, from Jean-Christophe Bailly, "Les animaux sont des maîtres silencieux," in La question animale, 17). I would like to thank Colette Selles for her reflection around Jean-Christophe Bailly's words and for her help to translate his idea. 6 http://haikuguy.com/issa/search.php?keywords=butterfly&year=, accessed April 7, 2017. 7 https://www.get.gg/epictetus.htm, accessed April 13, 2017.

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symbolical central character of a short story written by Katherine Mansfield, "The Fly." Insects often appear in her stories to reflect human powerlessness. In The Garden Party, she writes about a little boy: "he looked like a baby fly that had fallen into the cream."8 And in the same story, the character, Jonathan, compares himself to an insect: I'm like an insect that's flown into a room of its own accord. I dash against the walls, dash against the windows, flop against the ceiling, do everything on God's earth, in fact, except fly out again. And all the while I'm thinking, like that moth, or that butterfly, or whatever it is, “The shortness of life! The shortness of life! I've only one night or one day, and there is this vast, dangerous garden, waiting out there, undiscovered, unexplored.” (Mansfield, "The Fly", chapter 1, X)9

The comparison with the insect is symbolical and is used by the character to represent man's fate. Katherine Mansfield's use of insects is not only a writer's device. It shows that she was a great observer of insect behaviours as we can see in this passage. Moreover, the fact that she so often insisted on speaking about man's powerlessness in front of life, about flies falling into cream or prisoners in glasses, or moths and butterflies that "dash against the windows" and "flop against the ceiling," shows empathy with those tiny animals. The observation of the moth that does not "fly out again" shows that through her characters' voices, she puts herself in the place of the insect. One can also observe that the character assigns a capacity of thought to the insect: "I'm thinking, like that moth, or that butterfly." The fragility of individual insects and their collective strength have often been used in literature, from Shakespeare10 to Nabokov11 and many 8

Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party, chapter 8, "The Voyage", E-Book # 1429, release date: August 20, 2008, Last updated: November 11, 2016, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1429/1429-h/1429-h.htm, accessed August 1st, 2017. 9 "The Fly" was first published in The Nation and Athenaeum, March 18, 1922 and then in a collection of short stories, The Dove's Nest and Other Stories in 1923. 10 Tom Turpin, a Professor of entomology at Purdue University, says, in "The Bard and Bugs," that "Shakespeare mentioned insects over 100 times. Only two of Shakespeare's plays are devoid of insects." He notes that Shakespeare often mentions flies, but also "fleas, lice, beetles, crickets and grasshoppers […], [l]ocusts, […] [b]ees, ants and wasps." He also quotes Jonathan Swift, who uses the metaphor of the flea to speak about poetry in a long poem, "On Poetry: a Rhapsody:" "So nat'ralists observe, a flea / Hath smaller fleas that on him prey; / And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em / And so proceeds Ad infinitum."

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others. Everybody knows La Fontaine's fable "La cigale et la fourmi" ("The cicada and the ant") often adapted and set to music, for example by Django Reinhart in 1941. It was itself adapted from a fable by Aesop, "The Ant and the Grasshopper." All poems and metaphors using insects reveal the writers' observation of insect life. They note their characteristics and the fragility of those tiny animals is changed into phenomenal strength when they are seen collectively, which gives birth to fantastic or science fiction stories like H. G. Wells' The Empire of the Ants (1905), telling the story of intelligent ants destroying a human community in Brazil and thus threatening the whole human civilization. This only reflects the reality of other invading insects, like locusts devastating the crops of entire areas in Northern Africa for example, those locusts that entered the Bible as one of the seven plagues of Egypt (Exodus, 10:1-20). The demonstration, by fiction, that the individual is fragile and that the group is strong, only reflects the reality of life concerning solidarity as animals often demonstrate it, which Jean-Marie Pelt explained in his book about solidarity in nature.12 To take but an example, let us quote the case of ants making nests in trees and thus protecting the trees from predators: […] les fourmis ont développé avec les plantes d'autres types de symbioses qui s'apparentent aux services proposés par l'hôtellerie. Nul mieux qu'elles n'a su se ménager, dans les feuilles ou les branches d'arbres, le gîte et le couvert. Chez les Œcophylles d'Asie du Sud-Est, les fourmis se disposent sur le pourtour des feuilles et s'arrangent pour rapprocher deux feuilles bord à bord. Ensuite elles les cousent en utilisant, pour ce faire, les fils de soie sécrétés par leurs bébés; si la production du bébé est trop chiche, elles le chatouillent du bout de leurs antennes, ce qui provoque de vigoureuses https://www.agriculture.purdue.edu/agcomm/newscolumns/archives/OSL/2014/Ma y/140507OSL.html#.WYBSzq3pP6Y, accessed August 1st, 2017. 11 With Vladimir Nabokov, insects, particularly butterflies, are no simple metaphorical objects. He knew lepidoptera quite well and was even "one of the world's authorities on them," as is said in an article from LIFE, "The Master of Versatility," published in November 1964. He even said in a written interview he gave Jane Howard, of LIFE magazine, that rather than being a writer, he had "often dreamed of a long and exciting career as a curator of Lepidoptera in a great museum," http://time.com/3876664/vladimir-nabokov-and-his-butterflies-photos/, accessed August 1st, 2017. Jane Howard had sent Nabokov questions on August 18, 1964. They appeared together with the photographs taken by Henry Grossman in Montreux, where he and Jane Howard had met Nabokov the same year in midSeptember, in the November 20 issue of LIFE. https://spad1.wordpress.com/ 2010/03/31/the-fourth-nabokov-interview/, accessed May 10, 2018. 12 Jean-Marie Pelt, La solidarité chez les plantes, les animaux, les humains (in collaboration with Frank Steffan), Paris: Fayard, 2004.

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Chapter Thirteen sécrétions. Ainsi les fourmis œcophylles parviennent-elles, en soudant des feuilles deux à deux, à tisser jusqu'à cent cinquante nids par arbre! Mais elles édifient aussi des étables de soie à l'intérieur desquelles elles séquestrent des poux suceurs de sève et producteurs de miel dont elles font leur nourriture. Naturellement ces poux attirent des insectes prédateurs qui se font déloger sur-le-champ par les fourmis. L'arbre porteur de nids se trouve ainsi protégé de toute attaque et la symbiose fonctionne au bénéfice des deux partenaires.13 (Pelt, La solidarité, 64-65)

Such an observation of insect behaviour should show humans that collective participation, even between different species, like animal and vegetable ones, contains the key to the safeguarding of not only those ants and trees but of the whole planet and of humans on the planet. It is to mosquitoes that the French writer Erik Orsenna confided the task of speaking about globalization in his book Géopolitique du moustique. Starting with an epigraph from William Faulkner's novel Mosquitoes (1927), he tells the story of globalization from the point of view of mosquitoes. His essay is a writer's book of investigation, where the style is the writer's while the core of the book is constituted of scientific information collected from scientists and scientific books. By first introducing readers to the history of insects, their role and the life of mosquitoes, the writer explains life. In this objective presentation, the mosquito is not the villain but just a female trying to give her eggs some food for their survival. And by showing our role in the proliferation of diseases brought by mosquitoes—or other animals—he shows man's responsibility in this story told by mosquitoes since as he says, "they tell a story. Instead of swatting them all at once on the wall, it was worth venturing into their world and listening a little to them over there" (Orsenna, 267, my translation). And the first story they have to tell, he 13

"[…] Ants have developed with plants other types of symbioses close to the services offered by hotel industry. No creature better than them has been able to find board and lodging, in the leaves or branches of trees. With the Œcophyllae from South-Eastern Asia, the ants place themselves on the rim of the leaves and manage to bring two leaves ege-to-edge. Then they sew them, using the threads of silk secreted by their babies to do so; if the baby's production is too stingy, they tickle them with the end of their antennae, which provokes abundant secretions. Thus the œcophyllae ants, by welding the leaves by twos, manage to weave no less than 150 nests in each tree! But they also build silk sheds in which they sequester lice sucking sap and producing honey which is their food. Of course those lice attract predatory insects which are immediately ejected by the ants. The tree carrying the nests is thus protected against any attack, and the symbiosis works to the benefit of the two partners" (Pelt, La solidarité, 64-65, translation mine).

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says, is that "in nature there are no frontiers." He adds that there are "no frontiers between all animals, including men and women, us." His conclusion is significant: Pas de frontières entre vertébrés, insectes et parasites. Tout ce petit monde voyage sans se gêner ni donner de passeport à quiconque. Pas de frontières pour les moustiques qui envahissent à leur rythme, rapide, la totalité de la planète. Les premiers œufs d'Aedes albopictus, le moustique-tigre, ont débarqué aux Etats-Unis dans…un stock de vieux pneus. Quoi de plus symbolique? Quelle mondialisation sans passagers clandestins? (Orsenna, 267)14

It is also very symbolical that this mosquito should arrive in men's lives with tyres and with the car civilization that brought so much pollution and damage to the world. Erik Orsenna goes on by showing clearly the link between the animals bringing diseases to cities and man's behaviour: Pas de frontière entre ce que nous appelons fièrement la "modernité" et ce que nous nommons, avec un mélange de terreur et de mépris, le monde sauvage. Rendez-vous à Cayenne, dans cette si passionnante Guyane. Des chauvessouris pleines de redoutables virus vivent à vingt minutes du centre-ville. Continuez d'urbaniser et vous les verrez se venger. Qui accepterait sans réagir d'être sans cesse chassé de son logis? (268)15

Orsenna clearly suggests that the problem is not to eradicate some animals carrying viruses with them, but to avoid bringing those animals to the doors of our cities by transforming the ecosystems and deleting their habitats. The choice of the notion of revenge—"se venger"—no longer belongs to the scientific investigation he has led but to the style of the writer who wants to make readers react into awareness. When animals bring diseases to men, nature does not take revenge. It simply tries to 14 "No frontiers between vertebrates, insects and parasites. All that little world travels without being ashamed or giving anybody a passport. No frontiers for mosquitoes that invade the whole planet at their quick pace. The first eggs of Aedes albopictus, the tiger mosquito, arrived in the United States in… a stock of old tyres. Is there anything more symbolical? Is there globalization without stowaways" (translation mine). 15 "No frontiers between what we proudly call "modernity" and what we name, with a mixture of terror and scorn, the wild world. Go to Cayenne, into so fascinating Guiana. Bats full of terrifying viruses live twenty minutes away from the centre of the town. Go on urbanizing and you will see them take revenge. Who would accept to be unceasingly chased out of his/her home?" (translation mine)

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survive because we make it shrink more and more and we reduce all animals' and plants' habitats more and more systematically. Orsenna ends by asking us to have "a little more humility. But first and above all a sense of wonder" (269). And he quotes a book by Cesare Pavese as he considers that its title is "the most beautiful title that has been invented;" this title is The Business of Living.16 The last sentence of his own book is left as it were to the moquistoes' voices: "It is that business that is told to us by mosquitoes" (Orsenna, 269, translation mine). Eric Orsenna's half-scientific, half-literary book guides us on a path making us understand our role in the globalization of some diseases transmitted by animals that we have carried from one continent to another.17 As if answering Orsenna's book in a haiku written two centuries earlier, the Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa takes sides and chooses the fly: Look, don't kill that fly! It is making a prayer to you by rubbing its hands and feet.18

Like Katherine Mansfield in her short story "The Fly," he observed the fly's habit of washing, which he transforms into a prayer for the person he addresses in his poem. How could a reader see the fly in the same way when thinking about the poet's vision? It is also to insects that Kobayashi Issa entrusts the task of saying that life always wins even in the fragile insect that man uses or destroys. Grasshoppers and katydids (a particular species of grasshopper), recur again and again, always singing: the katydid in the paper bag... still singing.19

or:

16 The Italian title of this posthumous book published in 1952 is Il mestiere di vivere translated into French by Erik Orsenna in the conclusion of his book as "Le métier de vivre"). 17 Like the Asian hornet introduced into France on ships carrying Chinese pottery containing eggs of those insects thus arriving in Bordeaux before flying to many other French places. 18 http://www.logos3.net/ainet/issa.html#haiku, accessed April 7, 2017. 19http://haikuguy.com/issa/search.php?keywords=butterfly&year=, accessed April 7, 2017.

Real and Imaginary Animals to Speak about Connections and Responsibility 265 the katydid-even while they sell him singing. (ibid.)20

The katydid is always shown as singing even when a prisoner, even when close to death, when facing the elements, fire or flood. So it becomes the guard of a man's house and of his grave. when I die guard my grave katydid! (ibid.)

Death, either human or nonhuman, is transcended in the energy and beauty of an insect or of thousands of insects. The dead tree lives with another life, the life of all the butterflies making its branches their resting place and changing it into a blooming flower of life: blooming with butterflies the dead tree. (ibid.)

The infinitely small eye of an insect contains the majestic mountain. The shortness of this kind of poem corresponds to what is said in the poem, to the smallness and density contained in the insect's life. the distant mountain reflected in his eyes... dragonfly. (ibid.)

By observing insect life, the poet sees the beauty of the world and his own relationship with time and death. The observation of butterflies and grasshoppers makes him aware of his own relationship to the world and to the nonhuman, of his own relationship to life. By addressing readers in haikus, he wanted to give them keys to the observation of the world, the conscience of an insect's life and the absence of separation between the insect and the man reading the haiku.

20

The katydid recurs again and again: "katydid-- / on his way to being sold / still singing" (ibid.) or "a burned field / but soon he's singing.../ katydid" (ibid.), or else: "evening moon-- /surviving the flood /a katydid" (ibid.).

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In a very pregnant study of styles in an article entitled "Styles animaux" ("Animal Styles"), Marielle Macé gives another key to our awareness of all the forms of life: Si chaque espèce est un style, alors c'est, avec la leçon animale, toute l'attention aux "formes de la vie" qui se déploie et se rénove. Cette nécessité de faire attention aux formes de la vie est nommée par la pensée actuelle, de Foucault à Agamben. Mais la littérature (tout particulièrement la moderne) est peut-être le lieu principal où s'affûte une attention aux styles, aux styles de l'être, à la foule des manières d'être, aux façons infiniment différenciées d'habiter le monde et de lui donner sens ; je crois que cette capacité à percevoir et à restituer des styles (à les penser comme tels) est même son privilège : la force de la littérature réside dans la façon dont elle relance vers nous, dans sa propre tâche expressive, la différenciation des expressions du vivant, témoignant ainsi du souci qu'il faut avoir d'une stylistique de l'existence et, surtout, prenant en charge ce souci. Il y a là toute une morale, en acte, des formes qui font la vie.21

That kind of ethics linking forms and life guides writers to show us all the threats endangering many species, and thus endangering the whole world. The historian, novelist and journalist Jean Duché reminded us that "man arrogated to himself the power of life and death on the whole creation quite unconsciously," and yet as he said, "brown bears or ladybirds, any living species is irreplaceable."22 When Aldo Leopold evoked the 21

"If every species is a style, then it is, with the animal lesson, all the attention to the "forms of life" that spreads and is restored. That necessity to take care of the forms of life is named by current thought, from Foucault to Agamben. But literature (more particularly the modern one) is perhaps the main place where an attention to styles can be sharpened, an attention to the styles of being, to the multitude of ways of being, to the infinitely differentiated ways of living in the world and of making sense of it; I think that capacity to perceive and restore styles (to think them as such) is even its privilege: the strength of literature dwells on the way in which it throws back towards us, in its own expressive task, the differentiation of the expressions of the living, thus demonstrating our necessary worry about a stylistics of existence and chiefly taking care of this worry. Here is, in acts, some real ethics of the forms making life" (Macé 97, translation mine). I would like to thank Claire Cazajous-Augé for an interesting presentation of Marielle Macé's thought she gave at the Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès. 22 "L'homme s'est arrogé le droit de vie et de mort sur toute la création en toute inconscience. Que l'on songe seulement : chacun reconnaît que l'incendie de la bibliothèque d'Alexandrie fut une perte irréparable. Mais la destruction d'un peuple primitif ? Mais la destruction d'une civilisation comme celle des Aztèques ? La même désinvolture stupide raye de la surface de la terre des espèces vivantes, végétales ou animales. La question n'est pas de savoir si elles sont utiles ou

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extinction of passenger pigeons, it is the whole mechanism of inconscience towards the nonhuman world that he showed.

Aldo Leopold and the extinct passenger pigeon: just to become aware When people look at pigeons and see them as creatures responsible for urban pollution, they forget their role to help mankind in wartime or the mere beauty of a flight of wood pigeons in peacetime. Timothy Findley's novel The Wars integrates animals as protagonists seldom evoked in war narratives. Yet horses, war mules, mine-clearing dogs and carrier pigeons also paid a heavy tribute to men's conflicts. In Northern France, in Lille, a monument pays homage to 20,000 pigeons killed on the French side.23 Timothy Findley's novel speaks about rabbits, coyotes, dogs, horses, hedgehogs, and frogs; it speaks about human beings becoming others, becoming animals, human beings becoming friends with the animal world when the human world is brutal. Findley's novel speaks about the bestiality of wars and the humanity of animals. During the First World War, the allies even used pigeons as spies: agents carried the birds to England, then to Holland, and introduced them at last into the occupied zone by crossing Belgium. The pigeons were then given to trustworthy people who sent precious information to France. On November 11, 1918, the French army had, together with the stationary dovecotes, more than 350 mobile dovecotes for a total of 30,000 pigeons (Calvet et al.). At the beginning, most pigeons were used by civilian volunteers: "as soon as 1915, the use of carrier pigeons became more important under the impulse nuisibles : ours brun ou coccinelle, toute espèce vivante est irremplaçable" (Jean Duché). "Man arrogated to himself the power of life and death on the whole creation quite unconsciously. Let's think: everybody admits that the fire that destroyed Alexandria library was an irreparable loss. But what about the destruction of a primitive people? But what about the destruction of a civilization like the Aztecs? The same stupid casualness crosses off the earth living species, either vegetable or animal species. The question is not to wonder whether they are useful or harmful: brown bears or ladybirds, any living species is irreplaceable" (translation mine), in Jean Duché. L'ours brun des Pyrénées: disparition ou cohabitation. Paris: Société Française pour l'Etude de la Protection des Mammifères, 1985. 23 Florence Calvet, Jean-Paul Demonchaux, Régis Lamand and Gilles Bornert, "Une brève histoire de la colombophilie", in Revue historique des armées 248 (2007): 93-105. [En ligne], 248 | 2007, accessed November 3, 2014. URL: http://rha.revues.org/1403.

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of civilian pigeon fanciers. The pigeons were carried from Paris towards the front line by those amateurs and they brought back information on the German progress" (Calvet et al.). It is between 1917 and 1919 that the use of pigeons was most important. At the beginning of 1918 the army had 24,130 pigeons (ibid.). Instead of stationary dovecotes, the army started using double-deckers as dovecotes, which could go forward and backward depending on the enemy's movements (Taquet). The pigeon fanciers' companies, engineering units since 1872, were gathered in the 8th RG in 1913. Every regiment had a pigeon bus.24 Thousands of carrier pigeons were killed during the war to save men's lives and to save a whole country and all of Europe. On another continent, passenger pigeons were exterminated because of mass hunting. Aldo Leopold speaks about that extermination when evoking the monument that was inaugurated in 1947 in Wyalusing State Park, Wisconsin, by the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology. In A Sand County Almanac, in a chapter entitled "On a Monument to the Pigeon," Aldo Leopold writes moving and seminal words that should reverberate in every man or woman's mind whenever economy or a mere taste for sports hunting puts in balance hunting parties and the extinction of a species. This is a rather long passage but it contains everything every man or woman should remember when there is an encounter between a gun and a flight of birds coming back freely in the sky after an exhausting journey, coming back to show men and women that spring, the time of life and rebirth, comes back with them: We have erected a monument to commemorate the funeral of a species. It symbolizes our sorrow. We grieve because no living man will see again the onrushing phalanx of victorious birds, sweeping a path for spring across the March skies, chasing the defeated winter from all the woods and prairies of Wisconsin. Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons. Trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a decade hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know. There will always be pigeons in books and in museums, but these are effigies and images, dead to all hardships and to all delights. Book-pigeons cannot dive out of a cloud to make the deer run for cover, or clap their wings in thunderous applause of mast-laden woods. Book-pigeons cannot breakfast on new-mown wheat in Minnesota, and dine on blueberries in Canada. They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of

24

pages14-18.mesdiscussions.net/.../voiture-pigeonnier-genie-sujet_161_1.htm, accessed November 3, 2014.

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Leopold's written commemoration reflects the stone monument but it is much more than a commemoration. It is a three-storey word building leading the viewer/reader gradually to his/her personal sense of responsibility. First he presents us with the reasons for our grief: the stone monument is shown as a "funeral," a word that should speak to all human beings. Then the military metaphor of "the onrushing phalanx of victorious birds" might evoke pigeons' victorious role in wars.25 But it is another kind of victory that is evoked, the cyclical victory of spring over winter symbolized by the arrival of migrating birds, including passenger pigeons, until their total extermination in America. Leopold associates memory and life as carried by those birds remembered by the human world ("men") as well as the nonhuman world ("trees"). Is there a more beautiful image of life than those "trees who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind?" Leopold's beautiful words show a significant paradox of nature with that wind that is artificial because it is not a meteorological wind and yet it is the most natural and living one since it is the result of thousands of passenger pigeons' flapping wings. The living communion between the flight of birds in the sky and the tree rooted in the soil is invisibly materialized by this wind, this breath of nature's life. Leopold opposes that life to what is left of this species, images, "book-pigeons." Those bookpigeons recurring in an anaphora conveying the writer's anger in front of an irremediable murder of life are associated to death, their own death— they are "dead to all hardships and to all delights." The obsessive negation erasing life in the text through the negation of all the acts of life that characterized the pigeons when alive, makes it still more poignant. "They live forever by not living at all." For a writer who devoted his life to lead people to awareness through writing, this assertion of writing as death has a great strength. It shakes the reader and urges him/her to oppose such a kind of extermination, for an extermination it was. Stanley Temple tells that sad story in Wisconsin Natural Resources Magazine:

25 Even if passenger pigeons and carrier pigeons are different, all of them are pigeons and all of them have undergone men's violence in different circumstances. About pigeons in cities, see Le pigeon en ville. Ecologie de la réconciliation et gestion de la nature, http://www.association-oiseaux-nature.com/wp-content/ uploads/2017/02/Le-pigeon-en-Ville-écologie-de-la-réconciliation-et-gestion-dela-nature-Naturparif-2012.pdf, accessed May 29, 2018.

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Chapter Thirteen In the mid-19th century several billion passenger pigeons roamed the East and Midwest in huge flocks that were once a spectacular feature of the Wisconsin landscape. Early Wisconsin naturalists, such as John Muir, described flocks darkening the state's sky. Pigeons nested in huge colonies wherever they found an abundance of "mast," the nuts produced by forest trees such as oak, beech and chestnut. The largest nesting ever documented was in Wisconsin in 1871. It numbered in the hundreds of millions of birds and covered 850 square miles with pigeon nests in almost every tree. Today, Quincy Bluff and Wetlands State Natural Area, centrally located within the 1871 nesting area, still has oak woodlands that look much as they did when passenger pigeons nested there. How could such an abundant bird have gone extinct in just a few decades? The simple answer is: we killed them and ate them. Because they congregated in such large numbers it was easy to kill them en masse. An expanded telegraph system alerted market hunters to when and where the birds were nesting, and railroads allowed the birds they killed to be transported to growing urban populations hungry for pigeons. Market hunters descended on the breeding colonies year after year, slaughtering the birds by the millions and preventing them from nesting. Killed in such large numbers and unable to reproduce, the passenger pigeon was doomed. John James Audubon, James Fenimore Cooper and other 19th-century naturalists deplored the unregulated massacre of the birds, but few efforts were made to save the passenger pigeon until it was too late.26

From John Muir's descriptions of the beauty of the flight of such passenger pigeons to John James Audubon and James Fenimore Cooper's condemning of the massacres of birds that had taken place in Northern America, Temple frames his own text by allusions to writers. This gives his text more strength and at the same time it shows the two necessary kinds of perception that men must have of nature: the awareness of its beauty and the necessity to protect it. This is where Aldo Leopold's evocation of the destruction of passenger pigeons leads him. He considers that Darwin's work on the origin of species should have changed our perception of the nonhuman world: "This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise" (A Sand County Almanac, 117). And yet, nothing changed in most people's perception of the nonhuman until recent days, since a small, slow evolution has seemed to appear. 26

Stanley Temple. "Remembering a Lost Bird", Wisconsin Natural Resources Magazine, April 2014, http://dnr.wi.gov/wnrmag/2014/04/Pigeon.htm, accessed April 14, 2017.

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A French politician opposed to the reintroduction of brown bears into the Pyrenees where only a few specimens were left, said once: "diplodocuses did disappear and we do not miss them." To answer him I wrote an article in the journal of an environmental organization, suggesting that if men disappeared, no other species would miss them. Is it a reason to let them, us disappear? I guessed that those who are not aware yet can be more sensitive to their own fate than to that of other species, because they are not aware yet that their fate is linked to the fate of all the other species. The reason why they should protect them is the awareness of their beauty and of the life they carry like those passenger pigeons that were exterminated. But if they protect them by being conscious that their own lives as humans are linked with those of all nonhuman species, this will necessarily lead them, at one moment, to realize the beauty of those animals they have not killed but have observed instead. When I was in Canada in 1994, we were on a ship in the Saguenay fjord and the naturalist who was explaining the landscape to us said that belugas had been nearly exterminated at the beginning of the twentieth century. They were considered responsible for the decreasing number of fish and so bombs were dropped from planes into the fjord. Most belugas were killed—and most fish with them. After that sad period, they were protected and no ship was allowed to approach them, even scientists were forbidden such an approach. At the very moment when the young woman said that to us, a group of belugas came and merrily accompanied our ship. They seemed to say that we might have no right to approach them, but they were allowed to if they realized that there was no danger, and they knew there was none. The meeting with wild animals in whose behaviour and eyes you can perceive trust is an extraordinary experience. They remain wild animals but they show you that they respect you as you respect them. This is all the beauty of cohabitation between all species. That trust in wild animals' eyes or companion species' eyes is one of the things reenchanting our world.27

Companion species: fabulous dogs' and cats' stories Donna Haraway, in her Companion Species Manifesto, writes about herself and Ms Cayenne Pepper, her dog first entering the book through the name she gave her and not through the mention of the species she belongs to, which is a way of asserting some equality of rights: 27

To quote the title of the beautiful conference that was held in Perpignan in June 2016 by Bénédicte Meillon and Margot Lauwers: "Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth," University of Perpignan, June 22-25, 2016.

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Chapter Thirteen We have had forbidden conversations; we have had oral intercourse; we are bound in telling story upon story with nothing but the facts. We are training each other in acts of communication we barely understand. We are, constitutively, companion species. (Haraway (2003) 2015, 2, italics in the text)

The mere fact that a scholar should make the choice of writing such a manifesto, that she should assert that she "consider[s] dog writing to be a branch of feminist theory" (3) proves the length of the road to be travelled by a part of mankind to simply admit the notion of tolerance for the creature that is different. The subtitle of her seminal book, "Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness" clearly shows this manifesto written from her own experience of life with her dog as a key to men's relationship with the concept of otherness first and then with the Other, either human or nonhuman like our companion species or in fact any species. To reach men's ears, Donna Haraway discarded the affective relationship to change animal love into theory as if the human species could accept the theory but could only smile at the notion of animal love. And yet, it is that nonhuman love that gives mankind keys to man's own behaviour towards all those who are different. Lots of books have been written about man's relationship with a dog or a cat. We will evoke three examples, all showing the reciprocal love relationship uniting a dog or a cat with the human person who decided to take this small animal as a companion. Bulu African Wonder Dog tells the story of a couple's life in Africa with a little Jack Russell they had adopted. The story is first and foremost the story of a double love, for a dog and for Africa. It is for the author, Dick Houston, a conservationist, safari leader, writer and teacher, who is the co-founder of the organization dedicated to elephant conservation in Zambia, Elefence International, the opportunity to show the dangers threatening African wildlife together with a simple love story between a dog and a couple of American conservationists, Anna and Steve Tolan, who lived in Zambia. Dedicated "to Anna and Steve Tolan, champions of Zambia's endangered wildlife and guardians of the wild orphans" and "to Saint Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals, who was the first to give animals a voice, and their dignity," the book introduced from the foreword as "a true story," appears from its very dedications as a text meant to speak about wildlife preservation and animal respect. It speaks about two ways of living with animals: to be the "guardians" of wildlife and "to give animals a voice." Bulu is first seen as an "unresponsive" little dog with too long legs that nobody wants and that the couple adopts even though the man owning it warns them that in the Luangwa Valley, "he has ‘never seen a pet survive here beyond a few months.’" Yet this apparently

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fragile creature "stood before lions" (Houston, 315) and the "incredible story" of "one of the most extraordinary dogs" (Houston, xi), of this "African Wonder Dog" as he is introduced in the title in the manner of superheroes, is a way for the author to depict, at the same time, all the dangers threatening the African wilderness, the action of a few people of goodwill and the close connection existing between animal love, love for a place and for its inhabitants. The text starts in a very simple way: "I first met Bulu several years ago in Zambia's Luangwa Valley" (Houston, ix). That small book is the story of a meeting: a meeting with a dog, which is also the meeting with people working to preserve wildlife in Zambia and a meeting with African life and people. The action unusually starts in the foreword where the author tells about his first meeting with Bulu, which reveals a chain of actions: he "was meeting with Rachel McRobb, the head of the SLCS" [South Luangwa Conservation Society] and they were discussing "plans to build the rangers an anti-poaching base," when Ann Tolan, of the Chipembelee Wildlife Education Centre, called "with an emergency from a nearby village [as] [a] hyena was caught in a snare." The author adds that "she was using the radio of the Zambia Wildlife Authority (ZAWA) on the scene" (ibid.). The following part of the short foreword consists of giving readers technical information about the way the veterinary acts to save the animal and free it from its trap. The story is the opportunity to show all the devastations appearing in the area. When Steve Tolan says angrily that "the rhino's now extinct in Zambia" (Houston, 27), Chief Kakumbi explains all the devastation occurring in the valley: The valley had become a killing field in the 1970s and 1980s. Poachers used machine guns to mow down entire herds. All for ivory. Smuggled to China and Japan to be carved into souvenirs. Over ninety thousand elephants in the valley slaughtered. (Houston, 27)

The narrative of the meeting between the English conservationist and Chief Kakumbi who owns the land that the couple would like to rent to build a wildlife centre there, gives readers a lot of information concerning the destruction of wildlife in the area. Since the time when Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness, things have changed but greedy men are still there to tear living Africa into dead pieces. Chief Kakumbi's words also show us a system of connections which tragically answers the natural connections that should unite everything as in a web, according to the Native Americans' conception of the world. Poachers in Africa killed and still kill dozens of thousands of wild animals only because people in industrialized countries find it fashionable to have objects made of materials coming

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from Africa. Gorillas were killed in Rwanda because rich American or Dutch men wanted to have trophies on their walls or original ashtrays made of gorilla's hands. This is why Dian Fossey was murdered. Without the trade of objects made out of ivory or other living materials, poachers would be obliged to find another activity. Chief Kakumbi's evocation of China and Japan, with the carving of ivory tusks into souvenirs, reveals the terrible connection between Africa's devastation as far as wildlife is concerned and Western or Eastern fashions. This shows the responsibility of the rest of the world in this destruction. This also shows the necessity of treating animal protection without setting it against men's ways of living. Peter Matthiessen, after showing the tragedy of elephants' fates and their beauty, explains how the problem of their protection must be dealt with in connection with men. Of all African animals, the elephant is the most difficult for man to live with, yet its passing—if this must come—seems the most tragic of all. […] There is mystery behind that masked gray visage, an ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea. (Matthiessen, The Tree Where Man Was Born, 147)

Matthiessen's use of the phrase "that masked gray visage" to evoke the beauty and mystery of the elephant, a mystery reinforced by such words as "awesome and enchanted," symbolically connects the animal with men; The use of the word "visage," sometimes used for nonhuman elements but more often designating a human face, and the notion of a mask, link the animal with human ceremonies. Having both a "visage" and a "mask," he is part of the great mystery uniting African men and the nonhuman world. Matthiessen goes on with an anecdote about "a businessman of narrow sensibilities who, casting about for a means of self-gratification, travelled to Africa and slew an elephant" (ibid.). The shift from the beauty and mystery of the elephants observed by the traveller "for hours at a time" to the reality of sports hunters sounds like the first significant clash in the text. This is reinforced by the hunter's daughter's words, revealing the disconnection between her father and life: […] staring at the huge dead bleeding thing that moments before had borne such life, he was struck for the first time in his headlong passage through his days, by his own irrelevance. "Even he," his daughter said, "knew he'd done something stupid." (Ibid., 147)

Peter Matthiessen feels it necessary to show that sudden awareness by a sports hunter "of narrow sensibilities." Showing things in a plain way,

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simply opposing "the huge dead bleeding thing" to "life," is already powerful. Moreover, he chooses not to be the judge of the man but to let facts and his daughter speak. The weight of his sudden awareness in front of the absurd and useless killing of the elephant is both tragic and hopeful. It shows that even in such a man, totally unaware before shooting, the sight of death and blood following the sight of beauty and life can trigger a new way of thinking. Yet Matthiessen underlines the necessity of protecting elephants while linking that protection with African ways of life. The human factor must never be dissociated from the animal one. Education, governments' actions and the consciousness of the link existing between animal protection and human life are all necessary: African schoolchildren are now taught to appreciate their wild animals and the land, but public attitudes may not change in time to spare the wildlife in the next decades, when the world must deal with the worst consequences of overpopulation and pollution. And a stubborn fight for animal preservation in disregard of people and their famine-haunted future would only be the culminating failure of the western civilization that, through its blind administration of vaccines and quinine, has upset the ecology of the whole continent. This wildlife must be treated in terms of resource management in this new Africa which includes, besides gazelles, a growing horde of tattered humans who squat for days and weeks and months, and years on end, in a seeming trance, awaiting hope. In the grotesque costumes of African roadsides—rag-wrapped heads and the wool greatcoats and steel helmets of old white man's wars are worn here in hundred-degree heat—the figures look like the survivors of a cataclysm. (Ibid.)

Matthiessen's provocative association of the gazelles and of "a growing horde of tattered humans [….] awaiting hope" sums up the double vision of Africa: on the one hand, the beauty of quiet wildlife often meant for tourists and summarized by the lightness of the gazelle, and on the other hand, the miserable human beings qualified as "a horde" and whose clothes, far from being the coloured and aesthetic traditional clothes and body paintings described in ethnological books or appearing in catalogues for tourists, are "tattered humans" with "grotesque costumes," whose "ragwrapped heads" reveal their misery, while "the wool greatcoats and steel helmets of old white man's wars" realistically and symbolically show the incidence of white men's conflicts on Africa's poverty. Matthiessen gives a symbolical painting of the situation while showing its reality and clearly explains the connection between that poverty and white men's transformations of the African landscape:

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Chapter Thirteen The elephant problem is the reverse side of the problem of livestock, which are also out of balance with the environment. In small numbers, cattle were no threat to the African landscape; it is only in the past century, with the coming of the white man, that the conflict has emerged. (Ibid., 148)

Matthiessen explains that "the white encouraged a contempt for game, not only as fit food for man but as competitors of cattle and as carriers of the tsetse fly. In Uganda, Zambia, Rhodesia, Tanzania, the solution has been the destruction of the bush and a wholesale slaughter, over vast areas, of the native creatures, in a vain effort to render these regions habitable by men and cattle […]"(ibid.). This is what also happened in many other countries like Brazil, where powerful owners chased the peasants and cut enormous parts of the Amazonian forest to replace all that life by cattle. Matthiessen sums up the incidence of those changes on men's lives: "The European and his paraphernalia were all that was needed to upset the balance of man and the African land" (ibid., 148-149). Matthiessen gives a technical explanation of the problems met by the replacing of wild animals, whose biological systems have adapted to the land, by cattle, whose needs are much more important. For example, as far as heat and water needs are concerned, he explains that "[o]nly a few herbivores require shade, and all have water-conserving mechanisms that permit them to go without water for days at a time […]. Cattle, by comparison, must be brought to water every day or two, and waste coarse grasses used by the wild animals" (ibid., 149). Published in 1972, published again in 2010, with an introduction by Jane Goodall, Peter Matthiessen's analyses are as telling as they were nearly fifty years ago. All problems are generated by a distorted use of the land by cattle, brought about by white people, and leading to the death of thousands of wild animals, to deforestation and to the misery of African people. Matthiessen, in this beautiful book speaking about our common origins through the history of baobabs in East Africa, shows how things are linked and reveals western countries' responsibility for African people's misery. Either squatting in tattered clothes on African roadsides or migrating to European countries in search of hope, to be eventually gathered in camps or rejected to the suburbs of our great cities, all the men and women leaving their countries because of misery or war are chased in fact by western countries' race for power, oil, uranium and all the natural resources exploited on their lands while they just try to find something to feed their family, crossing the Mediterranean sea or Europe at the risk of their lives. Many of those who leave the beautiful colours of Africa, who leave their "blue and golden world" (Matthiessen), who "leave the elephant trail, circling west through windy glades toward high rocks bright with orange, blue-gray, and crusting gray-green lichens"

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(Matthiessen, 247), all those who leave the strong and soft shelter of the baobab, to try to find hope in western grey and polluted cities, do it because those who live in grey and polluted western cities transformed their land to erase its nature as well as its history. Peter Matthiessen's journey to East Africa reminds us of the fact that the African man's fate and the elephants' fate and the baobab's fate are linked. They are linked to the changes we provoked without understanding what the millennial tree told us. In Bulu African Wonder Dog, Chief Kakumbi's words appear as the voice of responsible Africa facing greed. He says that "[m]any people have become greedy—wasting the valley's natural resources. They chop down the trees for charcoal businesses, causing erosion. They never replant. They overfish the river. They trap wild animals for—" (28). The interruption is due to Bulu's "ruff ruff ruff ruff ruff," his voice entering the conversation as if to be a part of this terrible report. In the narrative, the dog's intervention allows the reader to stop at the African chief's interrupted words and to complete them. In the real situation, Bulu is a merry little dog. But in the literary narrative, he is the adjuvant helping readers to stop at Chief Kakumbi's words. The latter will add later on that "West Africa is the worst. They've logged over ninety per cent of their forests into wasteland. Ate most of their antelope, monkeys, elephants, giraffes, chimpanzees—even the birds! About all that is left in the meat markets are rodents" (29). Here again he shows that the destruction of wildlife has consequences on African people's everyday life since what is left to them are rodents. The complete conversation reported in the text allows the author to insert Africa's voice into his dog's story, to show the confrontation between two visions of Africa, one that is founded on the wild exploitation of resources and the other one, defended by Chief Kakumbi, which is a responsible perception where connections are underlined. The conversation is taken up by Anna after Steve has shown the chief "hundreds of wire snares" (30). Anna underlines the fact that "local people don't need to poach wild animals for food," that "most of the smoked bush meat is smuggled to the city market or exported overseas to African expatriates." She opposes the argument that "people defend eating bush meat by saying it is an African tradition" by saying that "[g]reed should never be a tradition" (30). When the chief thinks the elders will not change their ideas and wonders what two people can do to change things, Steve answers: "We do not plan to change the elders […]. But we think we know who will listen. The children" (30-31); and Anna prolongs the idea:

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Chapter Thirteen Let the children be the eyes for the future in Luangwa. A wildlife education can teach them to replant trees. Fish responsibility. Fertilize the soil. Conserve wild animals to protect the food chain. (30)

The richness of the exchange between the three people, and the dog joining in the conversation, opens onto the climax brought about by some suspense maintained by Chief Kakumbi when he finally says: "I have reached my final decision. I can no longer rent you this land." And the text goes on: Anna and Steve looked at each other, stricken. How had they failed? "But I will"—Chief Kakumbi turned to face them—“give you this piece of land. For the wild life centre and for your home.” […] "You have the heart for this place," Chief Kakumbi said as he stood tall in the firelight. "You shall build this wildlife centre. You shall have the ears of our children." (31-32)

Bulu's story is really the wonderful story of a wonderful companion and the inclusion of the story of the wildlife centre within his own story shows the connection between the two, something that is summed up by Chief Kakumbi, "You have the heart for this place." The structure of the narrative reveals that all is a matter of heart perception. Anna and Steve's love for Bulu, Bulu's love for his human family and the creation of the wildlife centre are all guided by a sense of connection between human and nonhuman creatures, by love for the other, whatever the species, by the consciousness of connection between all forms of life. Bulu is the improbable superhero that guides readers towards awareness. The title of the book concerns only Bulu, the numbers of the chapters are inserted into a dog's print, the story of the centre is inserted into Bulu's story and vice versa. The little dog with too long legs is our guide. The text is interspersed with photographs of Bulu, the dog's prints appear everywhere, they even frame the dedications. Many things are told in this book about our sense of responsibility, about devastation in Africa, about what can be done to change things, even by only two people and a dog. Bulu's story is a love story between two human creatures and a nonhuman companion, it is a story of hope told by the merry writing of a dog's prints. After the last page, when the narrator told about Bulu's death, Bulu is still present through the book, the photographs, the book cover and chiefly the message of connection and love that his story transmits. The very last words of the story question the significance of such a dog's life: Perhaps there are those who would diminish the significance of a little white dog in the African bush. They would consider attributing self-

Real and Imaginary Animals to Speak about Connections and Responsibility 279 sacrifice and courage to him sentimental or anthropomorphic. But Bulu stood before lions. His spirit will continue to watch over the new orphans of Luangwa until they too are set free. (Houston, 315)

Bulu's story is a love story between a little dog, a man and a woman, between a little dog and animal orphans, which were taken care of by the couple in the centre and accompanied by Bulu. Such a relationship between human people protecting African wildlife, wild animals and dogs also appears with Dian Fossey's dog Cindy. In his biography of Dian Fossey, Farley Mowat quotes the epitaph Dian Fossey had written for the dog that had accompanied her for years; she mingles happy memories of the dog and the sadness of her companion’s loss, the memory of Cindy's "failing as a watchdog" narrated in a humorous way and the merry frolicking of the dog with the elephants: I'll never forget watching you with your little stump wagging madly, running in between the legs of those old mammoths, making them squeal and trumpet and flap their ears. Your play partners increased as you learned about buffalo, antelope, gorillas, mongeese—and the list was probably a lot longer, but that only you can tell (Dian Fossey in Mowat, Woman in the Mists, 278).

Like Bulu, Cindy played with wild animals in some reciprocal trust. Dian Fossey's hard fight against poachers was relieved by some friendly nonhuman presences added to the few human people who helped her: Cindy, Digit and the other gorillas she tried to protect, and two chickens, Wilma and Walter. Those nonhuman friends brought her the quiet, trustful love that was necessary for her to lead her fight in very hard conditions. Cindy, like Bulu, showed a deep understanding of the relationships that are possible between humans and nonhumans. Those companions only guided by love and freedom, showed a world in which links work better than divisions and frontiers. Up to the ultimate days of his life, Bulu gave love; he "took an interest in fostering his last orphan, Elton the buffalo, and trotted along beside Steve and Anna on their bush walks with the calf" (315). Bulu gave his last energy to those he loved, humans and animals, even when he was very ill and about to die a few days later; he chose to share his last days with those he loved, and it gave him strength. Steve and Anna "believe he was determined to live out his final days not confined to a hospital cage, but under the vast Luangwa skies. […] He lived free; he died free" (315). Between his childhood days when he was adopted by the couple and his last active day since he "continued his walks with Elton up to his last day,"

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there is a life of adventures and love, told by Dick Houston in a lively, funny and moving way at the same time, which is what life is. Bulu who scared off "whatever bird [Anna] was trying to photograph" revealed the wonderful life of Luangwa valley. The humour of the narrator's words when he said that "Even the sacred ibis was not sacred to Bulu" (36) is a way of projecting this wonderful movement of life revealed by Bulu's merry moves onto the text. Bulu also reveals the beauty of this wild world: Sitting on the embankment, Bulu was outlined against the red sky. He was facing the wide opening in the bank a few hundred feet away—the driedup mouth of the Chowo tributary. Elephants often used the gap to enter the riverbed. During the dry season, sometimes a hundred elephants from various herds crossed the sand at the same time. Bulu, hearing footsteps, turned his head. (Houston, 38)

Bulu quietly frames the beautiful living picture of an ecosystem uniting the sky, the water, and the herds of elephants. Merrily running after birds, quietly lying beside hippos, bravely facing lions, leopards or crocodiles or kindly accompanying animal orphans until they recover their freedom, Bulu's life shows us both the beauty and dangers of the African bush, the connections existing in the nonhuman world, and the power of an animal's love. Bulu is the companion showing everybody the way as he showed the way to the little orphans arriving at the wildlife centre. The moving paragraph ending the story of Bulu, dying as free as he had lived after accompanying the little calf, seems to equate freedom and love. If Bulu refuses to end his life in a hospital cage, it is because he chooses freedom, but if he gathers all his strength to be able to leave the hospital, it is because he wants to end his life with the humans he loves. His freedom dwells in the absolute love he has for those humans who adopted him and accepted letting him free. This freedom in love or through love is also what appears in Rachel Wells' Alfie the Doorstep Cat. The behaviour of those animal companions shows that harmony in life dwells in that sense of connection that is love. In Rachel Wells' book, Alfie's story is told from the cat's point of view. From the start we can hear his thoughts when he listens to the couple planning to sell the house where he lived after the death of Margaret, the woman whose companion he had been for four years. In the introduction, the cat tells us that before Margaret, he lost Agnes, his sister cat, who had died the year before. The book starts with a deep sense of loss and from the start the narrator, that is the cat, speaks about the love uniting Margaret, Agnes and himself, Alfie. He erases the frontiers between the human and the nonhuman when he says:

Real and Imaginary Animals to Speak about Connections and Responsibility 281 When Agnes went to cat heaven, a year ago, I felt a pain that I had never thought possible. It hurt so much that I didn't think I would even recover. But I had Margaret, who loved me very much, and we clung together in our grief. We had both adored Agnes and we missed her with every ounce of our beings, united in our suffering. (Wells, 5)

The text starts on the sense of loss, loss within loss, since the cat tells about Agnes' death while Margaret has just died. In that sense of loss, the animal’s point of view reveals the animal’s suffering and the reciprocal healing attitude of the human and nonhuman companions. Deciding to leave when he hears the couple planning to send the cat to a shelter, Alfie, who had been since the beginning of his life a "lap cat" (5), becomes a homeless cat and has to face many dangers like roads and cars, aggressive cats defending their territories and humans hostile to cats. There seems to be some anthropomorphism in the narrative, for example when the cat returns to his house one last time before leaving for good: I went back to Margaret's house one last time so I could remember it before I left. I wanted a picture to lock in my memory and take on my journey with me. I hoped it might give me strength. […] This house was me, and I was it. (7)

But if the interpretation of the cat's thoughts has something anthropomorphic about it, the facts correspond to animal reality. Those who have observed cats' behaviour have noticed that cats are deeply attached to their houses. I remember a cat whose owner had moved into a new house farther along the same street and had taken her cat with her. The cat went back to her former house and spent the rest of her life with the new owner. One can also observe that cats make plans and think about the way of achieving them and at the same time they keep some attachment with their human companions to whom they try to explain the problem. One day, a she-cat stayed with me much more than usual and spent all day "speaking" to me with small repeated mewings that I did not understand at the time. She looked at me with deep eyes while doing so. The day after she disappeared and never came back. I concluded after her departure that the day before she had tried to warn me and to explain her decision. When cats willingly left our garden and home, it was generally because a new cat had arrived or because they found there were too many cats around them. A couple of cats—a mother and father—had come and brought their three kittens to us. The mother only came intermittently but the father stayed and took care of his children. I observed that very often when a she-cat is not particularly motherly, the father spends a lot of time taking care of and raising his kittens. I have sometimes met she-cats who

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had no motherly instinct but seldom a cat with no fatherly instinct when the mother decided not to take care of her kittens. One day one of the three kittens decided to leave without any warning. But six months later she came back, mewed to us as if telling us a story, she stayed three weeks and then left again. She had probably come to say good-bye and to explain to us that she had freely made her choice. We could say that interpreting animal language may sound anthropomorphic. It is, if you project your own way of thinking onto your companion's mind. But if you accept thinking differently—and as Aldo Leopold suggested, "to think like a mountain," thinking like a dog or a cat is possible if you content yourself with observing and listening—, you can understand your companions' true messages, their true language. To communicate with animals is somewhat like learning a foreign language. You must acquire their own language, their signs and sounds, and observe the situations when they use them. Our languages have vocabulary and syntax together with sounds and tones. Theirs have no syntax and no vocabulary but they communicate and express many different feelings and ideas. For observation shows that our companions think. Such books as Alfie's story or Bernard Werber's novel Demain les chats, also written from a cat's viewpoint and presenting the horror of terrorist attacks from a cat's point of view, question us both on animal thought and language and on our own perception of things. Yves Christen shows the limit of the theory of D. Dennett: trying to demonstrate that freedom only exists in man, he wrote that "as [Amazonian Indians] did not know they were Brazilian, no buffalo has ever known that he was a buffalo."28 Christen considers that it is an "absolute mistake as far as reasoning is concerned" (Christen, 78). He adds that it is true that those Indians did not know they were Brazilian, but "were they Brazilian?" The important thing was not for those people to know about the label that other people had given them (Brazilians) but about their belonging to a particular community, which they knew perfectly well. Christen prolongs his reasoning about buffaloes. What is sure, he says, is that "they do not know the Latin word that zoologists use to designate them. Nor the ‘vulgar’ word of the common language. But they know they belong to a particular zoological group"—even if they do not know the word "zoological," they know they belong to a particular group of animals— "they know who is a buffalo and who is not" (Christen, 70, translation mine). Dennett's mistake is due to anthropomorphism and to a projection of his own way of thinking onto that of buffaloes. Christen adds that he 28 D. Dennett. Théorie évolutionniste de la liberté, Paris: Odile Jacob, 2004, 16; translated from Freedom Evolves, Viking Press, 2003, quoted by Christen 78.

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"would be infinitely more interested in the way buffaloes represent themselves than in Dennett's way, which is in [his] opinion hugely reducing" (Christen, 79, translation mine). One can think about the logical reasoning of chimpanzees or octopuses or other animals, which have been observed in scientific experiments. Animals do have a language. Man, because he has lost most of his connections with the primal language of Nature, has long thought that only his articulated languages—or at least human languages—could be defined as languages. Ethological research has shown the importance of animal languages.29 Animals communicate, which is another way of saying that they have a language. And animals do think and scientific experimentation as well as observation by people simply observing and "listening to" their companions has proved it. The question is: why do so many people refuse the idea that they are not the only animals able to think? Christen evokes Marc Hauser's theory on the subject. According to the American psychologist, most animals are like Kafka's hero after his metamorphosis in The Metamorphosis. They are "Kafkian creatures, organisms widely provided in thoughts and emotions but with no system to translate what they think into something that they could say to others."30 When novelists give animals a voice by writing their novels from the animal point of view, they try to take all those "Kafkian characters" who share our lives out of the dark labyrinths into our so-called superior thought which has imprisoned them since the beginning of times, except in myths. N. Scott Momaday, for example, reminds us of the time when dogs spoke in Native American myths.31 The recognition of animal communication might encourage modern man to read the book of Nature. Unlike what happens in our industrialized countries, First Nations are still aware of the place of animals as being at the origin of the first narratives. David Abram reminds us that many peoples consider language to have been given to them originally by animals: 29 See Konrad Lorenz and Boris Cyrulnik’s works for example. One may also cite the books by Fernand Méry, Les bêtes ont aussi leur langage, Paris: Ed. Presses Pocket, 1971. 30 M. Hauser, A quoi pensent les animaux ? , trad. M.-F. Desjeux, Paris: Odile Jacob, 2002, 238, from Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think, 2000, quoted by Christen 162, translation mine. 31 See my article on first narratives, "Real and Mythical Animals in N. Scott Momaday’s Work: Who Is at the Origin of First Narratives?" in Françoise Besson, Claire Omhovère and Héliane Ventura, The Memory of Nature in Aboriginal, Canadian and American Contexts, Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014, 215-234.

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Chapter Thirteen Many tribes, like the Swampy Cree of Manitoba, hold that they were given spoken language by the animals. For the Inuit (Eskimo), as for numerous other peoples, humans and animals all originally spoke the same language. According to Nillungiaq, an Inuit woman interviewed by ethnologist Knud Rasmussen early in the twentieth century: In the very earliest time / when both people and animals lived on earth, / a person could become an animal if he / wanted to and an animal could become a human being, / Sometimes they were people / and sometimes animals / and there was no difference. / All spoke the same language. / That was the time when words were like magic. / The human mind had mysterious powers, /A word spoken by chance / might have strange consequences. / lt would suddenly come alive / and what people wanted to happen could happen— / all you had to / do was say it. / Nobody could explain this: / That's the way it was. Despite this originary language common to both people and animals, the various animals and other natural forms today speak their unique dialects. But nevertheless all speak, all have the power of language. (Abram, 87-88)

The Native American mythical idea according to which animals spoke at the beginning of times is a poetic way of evoking the memory of language, since human language is based on signs that were first produced by animals. And as Boris Cyrulnik says, "[a]nimals help us to better understand the language preparing us for speech."32 He demonstrates that animals teach us the origins of our behaviours (Boris Cyrulnik in Karine Lou Matignon, 115). The ethologist thinks that "a symptom is a proposition of communication."33 Animals propose a language, from myths to medicine, which men can only interpret if they do not reject Otherness or if they do not consider animals only as food and useful objects. Boris Cyrulnik underlines the universality of a language uniting men and animals when he says that "it seems that there exists a universal language between all species, a sort of sensorial loop linking us to animals."34 Novelists and poets understand that universal language, and their works are a sort of translation of the animal language into the human one, a translation superimposing two kinds of reality: the reality of the story that is told and the reality of the animal language and thought that is offered by the story of one particular companion animal and his connection with the human world and his human interlocutors. All those stories have a common point: they show that inter-species communication 32

Boris Cyrulnik, preface to Karine Lou Matignon 14-15 (translation mine). Boris Cyrulnik, in Karine Lou Matignon 110 (translation mine). 34 Boris Cyrulnik, in Karine Lou Matignon 114 ("Il semble exister un langage universel entre toutes les espèces, une sorte de bande passante sensorielle qui nous associe aux bêtes," translation mine). 33

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between humans and a dog or a cat is only possible through love and trust. When Alfie, after many wanderings and dangers, after being rejected by many humans, finds another home, it is because of a reciprocal affective need, because he brings hope to people who were hopeless and the reciprocal healing relationship is created through trust and love, because Alfie's first years were marked by a deep love shared between the old woman and her two cats Agnes and Alfie. Alfie concludes: Because I was still happiest being a lap cat, and I had now the perfect number of laps to sit on. At night, I would sometimes go out and look at the stars. I would look at the sky and hope that Agnes and Margaret were up there somewhere, winking at me, because although I had apparently done a lot of good things since I lost them, I had only done it because of the love and lessons they had taught me. And I was a better cat for them and for everything I'd been through. And that, I had learnt, was how life worked. (Wells, 311)

Alfie's story is more than an animal story. It is a stone added to the human construction of human and nonhuman relationships but also to the construction of mere human relationships. What Alfie's story shows is that if he could cope with life and bring hope and love to humans it is because he had received love at the beginning of his life. His final words concluding the story may be anthropomorphic, but they can guide humans on the way to relationships starting with the love given by parents to their children. When Alfie says that "he had only done [what he had done] because of the love and lessons [Agnes and Margaret] had taught [him]," those words reflecting an animal experience, may sound like a way of guiding humans on the way of education and sharing. Alfie suggests that he would not have survived and helped humans if he had not been given love at first. That book, which appears as a cat's autobiography, brings about hope like most books about the deep relationships uniting men and their animal companions. This exchange is what is also at the core of James Bowen's true story, A Street Cat Named Bob. James Bowen, a street musician in London, found a cat on a frosty winter’s day in 2007 and from that moment onward, the two never parted. The meeting is for the author the opportunity to make a historical survey of the presence of cats in London: London has always had a large population of street cats, strays who wander the streets living off scraps and the comfort of strangers. Five or six hundred years ago, places like Gresham Street in the City, Clerkenwell and Drury Lane used to be known as “cat streets” and were overrun with them. These strays are the flotsam and jetsam of the city, running around fighting

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Shifting from the history of London and the city's link with cats to his own story, the narrator and author starts with the assertion of a "kindred" link. The street musician and the battered cat recognized each other. The beginning of the book clearly reveals that the book is not only a beautiful animal story exclusively meant for animal lovers. It is true evidence of the healing role of animals and of the close connection existing between broken creatures, either human or nonhuman, and of their reciprocal act of rescue. Bob the street cat sends all broken men and women a message of hope transmitted by James Bowen. Bob’s story is also for James Bowen the opportunity to show social phenomena and to speak about responsibility. Thus, when he takes Bob to the RSPCA centre, he says "it was like stepping into a scene from hell. It was packed mostly with dogs and their owners, most of whom seemed to be young teenage blokes with skinhead haircuts and aggressive tattoos. Seventy per cent of the dogs were Staffordshire Bull Terriers that had almost certainly been injured in fights with other dogs, probably for people's amusement" (Bowen, 17). The journey that was meant to heal the wounded cat allows his new owner to discover an aspect of street violence where dogs' violence is the reflection of their owners' uneasiness. Like Rachel Wells with Alfie or Dick Houston with Bulu, James Bowen presents the situation in terms of love or rather, its absence: "People always talk about Britain as a 'nation of animal lovers.' There was not much love on display here, that was for sure. The way some people treat their pets really disgusts me" (Bowen, 17). A Street Cat Named Bob is an autobiography in which the author tells about his descent into hell, explaining "how people like [him] end up on the streets" (27), that "often drugs and alcohol play a big part in the story. But in an awful lot of instances, the road that led them to living on the streets stretches all the way back to their childhoods and their relationship with their family" (27). James Bowen tells about his life. The fact that he went out of his home and experienced such a hard life like so many homeless men and women, is not due to an absence of love. His parents loved him as was shown by their terrible worry when, as an adult, he seemed to have disappeared from the surface of the earth. But they were separated, his mother never stayed long in the same place, travelling between England and Australia, and for a child, the fact of constantly changing homes was the same as having no roots. If he "became a tearaway, a wild kid" (30), it was only because he was suffering as all those apparently terrible teenagers suffer either from a lack of love or a lack of roots. Even if his

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mother had "tried her hardest to get [him] off drugs" and "did all the things mothers do" (31), nothing worked probably because there was too much anger in the young boy's heart. Retrospectively, he realized everything and says that "with the benefit of hindsight [he] can see that [his] mother must have been worried sick. She must have been powerless and terrified of what was going to happen to [him]" (31). But, he adds, "I was oblivious to other people's feelings. I didn't care and I didn't listen to anyone" (31). James Bowen's story is no mere autobiography, no mere beautiful tale of a wonderful friendship between a formerly homeless man and a cat. It is a guidebook, a medicine, which can help all despairing parents of such children to understand them and to be able to help them. It is also a mirror held out to society and to the way it treats the people it rejects instead of trying to offer them a possibility to get out of hell. James Bowen is very clear about that: Living on the streets of London strips away your dignity, your identity— your everything, really. Worst of all, it strips away people's opinion of you. They see you are living on the streets and treat you as a non-person. They don't want anything to do with you. Soon you haven't got a real friend in the world. While I was sleeping rough I managed to get a job working as a kitchen porter. But they sacked me when they found out I was homeless, even though I'd done nothing wrong at work. When you are homeless you really stand very little chance. (Bowen, 33)

What James Bowen says about living on the streets of London could be said for every big city in the world. His story is for him a way of handing out a mirror to all the people who one day walked past a homeless man and pretended they did not see him or what is worse, they really did not see him. What is true is that the presence of an animal beside the homeless man makes him more visible to society. But it is deeper than that. All those dogs and cats are real companions, real friends, changing loneliness and misery into a friendly relationship, which transforms those people's way of looking at themselves. The warm presence of an animal gives them strength and saves their lives. Sometimes they really can save their lives. I remember what two homeless friends, Gino and Ismaël, told me one day. They were living in a tent in the forest with their two dogs. Some people living nearby did not like the idea that some men should live in a tent there. Several times they had burnt their tent. One night, they burnt the tent while one of them was in it. Without his dog, he would have died. The dog barked and shook him until he woke up and could put out the fire. One can wonder whether it is a true story or a tale. Who knows? What is sure is that, in what they told me, there was the truth of intolerance and the truth

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of animal love at the same time. It is both a terrible and beautiful story they told me one day—terrible as long as it was only created by men's violence and it became beautiful from the moment when there was an animal intervention. Those who speak with homeless people know their capacity to tell stories, often beautiful stories, perhaps because storytelling is the best way for them to leave, for a moment at least, the reality of their existence. And often, the animals they adopt change the tale into a real-life story. A dog can save his companion's life from violence one day but the very presence of such dogs or cats saves their owners every day. James Bowen's autobiography is such a story, a true story guiding us on the way of sharing. When James Bowen took Bob with him and decided to take the cat to the vet, he had only thirty pounds. He spent all his money on the cat that day. He shared the thirty pounds he had earned playing the guitar on the streets with that other broken creature, a wounded cat that had found shelter in the hall of the building where he lived. Once again, Bowen's book shows connections: connections between our society and the misery in which some people live, but also the connection between all events in life. By the spring of 2007, James Bowen had decided to stop taking any kind of drugs and "get completely straight." He had moved to a flat in Tottenham "that was a key part of that process" (36-37). It is at that moment that he found Bob "on a gloomy, Thursday evening in March" (1), "curled up on a doormat outside one of the ground-floor flats in the corridor that led off the hallway" (2). From that moment onwards, James Bowen invites us to follow him and Bob on the streets around his friend's neck or on the bus on his lap. The cat's so-called sense of independence does not exclude his way of being one with his companion in a real fusion. The whole book makes us smile or be moved in our journey with James Bowen and Bob, who became a celebrity as he was filmed by Chinese passers-by and by his entering the world of books when a publisher asked James Bowen to write the story that we are reading. What is a beautiful tale of friendship between a man and an animal is also a way of showing us human distress and misery in big cities and to remind us that sometimes, often, animals save momentarily lost human beings when no human being has been able to do it. Autobiographies about men and companion species are both entertaining and moving books leading us on the road to responsibility to animals and through them to those people rejected to the margins of society and saved by dogs or cats who achieve a task that men fail to achieve. Autobiographies can also tell the stories of scientists who devoted their lives to study and protect one particular species.

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Women's scientific experiences with animals, told in literary texts Dian Fossey and Farley Mowat's Gorillas in the Mist Gorillas have had a double relationship with humans for a long period: a tragic one first when they only meet them to be killed and dismembered for money, to provide rich people from industrialized countries with original ashtrays in the shape of gorillas' hands. And there is a deep relationship growing between them and those who try to protect them and rescue their species while rescuing some individuals threatened by the world of money in which those living are but a toy. Dian Fossey died of the clash between that double relationship. She spent her life protecting gorillas and trying to save them in Rwanda and she was murdered because she was an obstacle between poachers working for some European or American customers and the gorillas. Those who saw the film Gorillas in the Mist cannot forget the strength of that story: the deep union of Dian Fossey with the gorillas, her death and the death of the gorillas she was protecting. United with them all her life, she was united with them in death. Before coming back to Dian Fossey's extraordinary life, the key she gave us about our relationship with the nonhuman world and the urgency to protect all the species that are threatened like the gorillas she loved so deeply, another gorilla story will bring some hope. Today while I was enjoying a sunny spring day in Southern France, a friend of mine sent me a video about two gorillas remembering a young girl they had not seen for twelve years.35 The video presents us with Damian Aspinall36 and his

35 "A Gorilla Remembers a Girl It had not Seen for Twelve Years," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xarwk2d5Jm8, accessed April 9, 2017. I would like to thank Catherine Lanone, the friendly messenger who sent me that video today. 36 The Aspinall Foundation was founded by John Aspinall in the 1970s. "The Aspinall Foundation founder, John Aspinall, dreamt of reintroducing gorillas bred at Howletts and Port Lympne back to the wild almost as soon as he started collecting and breeding them in the early 1970s. Today, this dream is being carried forward by his son, and current chairman of The Aspinall Foundation, Damian Aspinall. We believe that the reintroduction of animals into their natural habitats can help conserve wildlife and their habitat. Over the past few years alone, we have released Back to The Wild a range of animals including 8 black rhino, 49 Javan langurs [monkeys: Trachypithecus auratus], 9 Javan gibbon, 11 European bison and over 60 western lowland gorillas back to their natural

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daughter who are on a river in Gabon. The man reminds the viewers that they are looking for two gorillas they had released years ago. As is said at the beginning of the video, "For 15 years the Aspinall Foundation has been reintroducing captive gorillas into the wild from Howletts Wild Animal Park in England to their million acres in West Africa." The expression in the eyes of the two baby gorillas clinging to the legs of the man who has obviously taken care of them so far, has a depth in it that questions us from the start on the "humanity" of nonhuman species and what is called "bestiality" in those who kill them for money. Bestiality is the least adequate word ever as nothing is more "humane"—since the capacity of empathy between creatures bears the name of our belonging to the human species—, than the look of empathy of an animal. In this particular case, when we see one of the two gorillas looked for by Damian Aspinall and his daughter, who had released them there years ago, emerge from the vegetation growing on the banks of the river, we can see that physical emergence as the physical manifestation of the animal's memory. From a distance, the gorilla has recognized the visitors and he appears on the banks of the river, in the welcoming position of one who is waiting for family members he had not seen for a long time. For, unlike mankind, he acknowledges the belonging to the same family. The expression on his face and his eyes is clearly one of joy. The meeting between the man and the gorilla is like the reunion of two long-separated family members or friends. This might look like anthropomorphism. But we should not forget that we are animals, like them, we are mammals, like them, we are primates, like them. With them more than with other animals we can think about a family relationship without anthropomorphizing the thing. This is a scientific reality. Damian Aspinall notes that one of the gorillas keeps staring at his daughter Tanzy, whom he had not seen for twelve years. When he thinks his daughter can come, he summons her. It only takes the gorilla a few seconds to show his happiness to see the young girl. They hug for a long time in the gorillas' manner as he had hugged her father. He is the first to have gestures of tenderness to the young girl, putting his head on her shoulder. Damian Aspinall says that "he clearly recognized her." The group picture with the father sitting and one of the gorillas behind him while the other communicates with Tanzy reveals that all of them illustrate a common belonging. When they have to leave they see that the gorillas do not want them to leave, but they have to. The gorillas' gestures are gestures of tenderness before separation. When they come back the day after, the habitat. " Site of the Aspinall Foundation. https://www.aspinallfoundation.org/, accessed April 10, 2017.

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two gorillas are waiting for them on the banks of the river, "ready to see their friends again," Damian Aspinall said at the end of the report. Dian Fossey quotes the founder of the Foundation, John Aspinall, in her journal quoted by Farley Mowat: Like myself, Aspinall often gets bad press, but I found him to be basically a humble man who has a passionate love and appreciation of animals. Every weekend he goes into the enclosures with his gorillas, lions, tiger, rhinos, elephants, wolves, etc., because he feels the animals need a personal relationship with humans if they are going to trust their surroundings, breed, and remain content. (Dian Fossey in Mowat, 306-307)

Animals’ love and desire to create trust, unites those who devote their lives to animal protection. When Dian Fossey went to Rwanda in 1966, this was not by chance and her beautiful biography written by Farley Mowat, using all the writings, notes, and journals, written by Dian Fossey, shows her life had been linked with that of mountain gorillas in Rwanda for a long time and corresponded to her deepest wish and will. Farley Mowat starts the biography with this quotation from Dian Fossey, which explains many things: Neither destiny nor fate took me to Africa. Nor was it romance. I had a deep wish to see and live with wild animals in a world that hadn't yet been completely changed by humans. I guess I really wanted to go backward in time. From my childhood I believed that was what going to Africa would be, but by 1963, when I was first able to make a trip there, it was not that way anymore. There were only a few places other than the deserts and the swamps that hadn't been overrun by people. Almost at the end of my trip I found the place I was looking for. Right in the heart of central Africa, so high up that you shiver more than you sweat, are great, old volcanoes towering up almost fifteen thousand feet, and nearly covered with rich, green rain forest—the Virungas. (Dian Fossey, in Farley Mowat's Woman in the Mist, 1)

Dian Fossey's own words explain her will to see wild places in Africa, "wild animals in a world that hadn't yet been completely changed by humans." From the start, her future defence of mountain gorillas started from a conscience of the modifications of the wilderness by humans. The dream of the young American girl to go to Africa, to spend her life working around animals, came from both her consciousness that the wilderness and animals were threatened and her love for animals, all animals, which dated back to her childhood. As Farley Mowat writes, "Like many lonely children Dian loved animals and took comfort from their undemanding acceptance of her" (2). He adds the testimony of a

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young man who had known her while she was learning to ride and writes: "A young man who knew her at the ranch remembered her as being 'completely wrapped up in animals—the horses, dogs, a pet coyote, anything that walked or flew. She liked people well enough, but didn't seem to rely on them as much as the rest of us do'" (2). Her love for animals appeared from the start of her life and it is that love for animals added to the dream of discovering Africa that led her to become one of the greatest nature preservers in the world and to die for her defence of mountain gorillas, as Bruno Manser died for defending the forests of Malaysia, Chico Mendes for defending the Amazonian forest or George Adamson, the lions' protector, was killed in Kenya like so many more.37 It is thanks to the Kenyan palaeontologist, primatologist and archaeologist Louis Leakey's trust in her that Dian Fossey could start her research and preservation work on the mountain gorillas of Rwanda. Leakey had also led Jane Goodall to study chimpanzees and Biruté Galdikas to study orangutans. The three women, who were among the first to work on the observation of big apes in their natural environment and on their protection, were called "Leakey's angels" or "trimates": Many years ago, Louis Leakey, the great paleo-anthropologist whose work at Olduvai Gorge and other sites in East Africa revolutionized our knowledge of human origins, encouraged me to study wild orangutans— just as he had encouraged Jane Goodall to study chimpanzees and Dian Fossey to study gorillas. Later, he laughingly called us the "trimates," or the three primates.38

Those three individual women did more for the protection of some parts of our world and their inhabitants than all the countries put together, which shows the weight of individual action, as Biruté Galdikas said at a lecture she gave in Lithuania. She ended her lecture with a story about her listening to Al Gore once in Los Angeles and she said: "he said that 'the conservation crisis was a spiritual crisis' […] and if it is a spiritual crisis it is a crisis that will have to be solved by individuals."39 And she added that 37 In 2015, 185 activists were killed, "Environmental activist murders set record as 2015 became deadliest year", The Guardian, June 20, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/20/environmental-activistmurders-global-witness-report, accessed April 11, 2017. 38 Birute Mary Galdikas, "The Vanishing Man of the Forest", http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/06/opinion/06galdikas.html?ex=1168750800&e n=eb87fc08333eabee&ei=5070&emc=eta1, accessed April 13, 2017. 39 Birute Galdikas, "Shares ancestors, Shared planet, Shared Future", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5t0GodfutQc, accessed April 13, 2017.

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we had "to look into ourselves and try to decide whether the future of orangutans, whether the future of nature was important to us. It is. Perhaps we have a responsibility, a spiritual responsibility to deal with them" (ibid.). Dian Fossey's fight against poachers and those who, from distant countries, gave their orders, is one of light and blood: the light of the African sun shining over the mists of Rwanda forests and the blood of all the gorillas and of those who defended them, slaughtered out of greed. Mowat's biography, interspersed with fragments of Dian Fossey's notes, is full of the blood of the adult gorillas killed for a baby to be stolen, in spite of the patrols and huge work of the guards; it is full of weapons and scenes of slaughter and the fight is so hard that at times it takes on the dimension of a war: when David Watts comes back saying that one young gorilla had been "caught in a trap by one leg and [was] surrounded by the rest of the group, who were in a terrific state," Dian Fossey's reaction is immediate: "I sent him out again right away with three of my men, armed with two pistols, in case the poachers returned and slaughtered the whole group in order to capture the youngster" (214-215). The other question is to know whether they must intervene and take care of the gorilla's wound or, follow some students who "don't agree that [they] should interfere" (215). Dian Fossey wrote to Dr Snider to explain that the wire becomes more deeply embedded into the gorilla's foot that "is becoming increasingly swollen and is oozing pus" (216). She adds that Lee, the female gorilla, "will either lose her foot or die of systemic infection." Dian Fossey is normally opposed to human intervention but she knows that in that case, it is the only thing to do to save the gorilla that was trapped.40 If a human intervention (the snare) condemned her, why should scientists be opposed to another human intervention that could save her? Dian Fossey says: "I deplore any artificial interference with the gorillas, but I remain convinced that the seriousness of his case warrants the extreme measure of darting…" (216). Farley Mowat's short interventions add to the strength of the scientist's message: Dian concluded with an appeal to the arbiters of her destiny at National Geographic: "We now have invested twelve years in the few remaining Mountain Gorillas; I would like to secure that investment, for the sake of the animals, for the sake of the research center. I think it is difficult for someone on the other side of the world to understand all of the problems involved; it is also unfair to draw absolute conclusions without fully understanding all the 40

The guards remove around 1,000 snares every year.

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Mowat's short sentence following Dian Fossey's letter, sounds like a death sentence showing that Dian Fossey's defence was not heard. Where some students and doctors refused to intervene out of scientific reasons, the animals just showed compassion. The attitude of some gorillas around the young dying female showed animals' empathy or love, particularly on the young female's mother's part: Instead of leading the group off on the usual morning foraging expedition, Nunkie remained close to the sick youngster, answering her pathetic whines with low rumbling noises that were clearly intended to encourage her to come along. Lee tried, but collapsed and lay spread-eagled in the wet vegetation while a drenching shower swept over the clearing. Thereupon Nunkie—four hundred pounds of massive silverback—returned to Lee's side and lay down beside his suffering daughter as if to warm and comfort her. (Dian Fossey in Mowat, 217)

Dian Fossey had already observed such an example of compassionate behaviour on the gorillas' part, when a young male had been wounded by a bullet. Kweli was dying and his companions tried to help him: On the morning of his death he was found breathing shallowly in the night nest he shared with Tiger…The gorillas returned to his side repeatedly throughout the day to comfort him…Every animal seemed to want to help but could do nothing…each member of the group went to Kweli individually to stare solemnly in his face for several seconds before silently moving off to feed. It was as if the gorillas knew Kweli's life was nearly over. (Dian Fossey in Mowat, 198)

"To comfort," "to help": the words used by Dian Fossey insist on the moving attitude of compassion of the dying gorilla's companions. The gorillas show human beings how they support their dying companions. Farley Mowat shows, through Dian Fossey's texts, which he accompanies with discretion and strength, that each gorilla's death is for the scientist a terrible wound making her sick and provoking nightmares. She has a team working with her, she works for the progress of natural sciences and thus for the whole world, but she is lonely, as a little boy coming after her dog's death says to her. She is lonely except when she is with the gorillas she studies, protects and with whom she establishes a deep relationship of trust.

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After the happy hours of observation of young gorillas' games, of gorillas' behaviour, there were the dark hours of fighting against poachers, whereas at the beginning, in the articles she wrote in 1970, she only evoked poachers trapping antelopes or cutting trees to steal honey but she said that they did not trap gorillas. Things changed when rich people in the United States or in some European countries ordered gorillas' heads or hands or youngsters were trapped to be sold to private zoos. So young gorillas like Lee were trapped. As far as she was concerned, gangrene progressed and she was eventually "carried down the mountain to the hospital" but "it was too late." Farley Mowat here relays Dian Fossey in one of those short sentences meaning so many things. He adds: "That evening, Lee became the seventh Karisike gorilla to perish because of poachers" (Mowat, 217) and he ends this part of the text on Dian Fossey's "staring out into the fog:" Dian sat for hours at her window staring out into the fog that had obscured the clearing. Mechanically she wrote one word over and over on her open journal. Digit … Digit … Digit … Digit… (Ibid.)

Digit was a gorilla she found in 1967 and he became quite close to her. He was killed by poachers in 1977. This caused great suffering for her like all the other wounds and deaths she had to face. The fact that she could only write her name after Lee's death sounds like a prayer to the gorilla, like a desperate shout of love. She revives him through his name written again and again to relieve her sorrow. She thus evokes Digit's death in the April 1981 issue of National Geographic magazine: It was Digit, and he was gone. The mutilated body, head and hands hacked off for grisly trophies, lay limp in the brush like a bloody sack. Ian Redmond and a native tracker took the initial shock. They stumbled on the spear-stabbed and mangled body at the end of a line of snares set by antelope poachers. Stunned with grief and horror, Ian composed himself and set out to find me in another part of the forest. An outstanding student helper, he shared my aim to balance research with the goal of saving the imperiled mountain gorillas that I was studying from my base camp in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda, in central Africa.41 41

Dian Fossey, "The Imperiled Mountain Gorilla: A Grim Struggle for Survival", in National Geographic, April 1981.

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Her suffering and her anger did not prevent her from giving all the reasons why mountain gorillas were on the verge of extinction: And now, through our sorrow, anger welled up—rage against the poachers who had committed this slaughter. Yet poaching is only one of many pressures—human encroachment, land clearing, illicit collecting, tourist presence—that have brought the mountain gorilla to the edge of extinction. Digit's sad end in 1977 was sheer tragedy, yet in the course of my research, such devastating events have been balanced by many rewarding beginnings in the enlargement of our understanding of these animals. (Ibid.)

Dian Fossey never wanted to end on tragedy but on the contrary, she insisted on those "many rewarding beginnings in the enlargement of our understanding of these animals." And she ended her article on a note of hope: "The births of Cantsbee and, more recently, of Effie's latest, Maggie, help replenish the population of surviving mountain gorillas. Perhaps we will find—we may hope, at least—that the gorillas' own strategies of group growth and maintenance will circumvent group disintegration caused by man's encroachment" (ibid.). Her hope proved to become reality since when she wrote that article, she mentioned 200 gorillas and a census made in 2010 indicates an increase in the population of gorillas in the area: "The analysis of the census conducted in March and April 2010 indicates that there was a total of 480 mountain gorillas, Gorilla beringei beringei, in 36 groups along with 14 solitary silverback males in the Virunga Massif."42 The protection of wild animals is a long story of suffering and blood and yet all those who, like Dian Fossey, devote their lives to animals keep hope even when death is everywhere. Dian Fossey's story is a story of blood and light. The blood is the blood of Digit, Kweli, Lee, and all the other gorillas murdered by poachers just because they were gorillas and rich people felt like having pieces of their dead bodies to ornament their houses. Light is in the birth of Mwelu, the baby of Dimba and Digit: Mwelu, "which in Swahili means Bright and Shining Light" (Dian Fossey in Mowat, 180). The blood is the blood of the guards who were murdered while trying to protect animals. Light shone on all the moments of complicity when the gorillas came close to Dian Fossey, who was patiently expecting them. The blood is their murder by poachers and by those who practise some trafficking of young animals or 42

"Increase in the Virunga Gorilla Population", Gorilla Journal 41, December 2010.

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African objects. The blood is Dian Fossey's blood spilled because she wanted to protect gorillas in the mist of the mountains of Rwanda. Light is in her action, going on long after her murder, light is in the gorillas still living in the mountains, light is in Farley Mowat's conclusion, full of hope: Meantime Karisoke Research Center functions much as Dian Fossey would have wished. Research students continue to go there to study the gorillas, and Digit Fund patrols still sweep the forests to keep them free from poachers and their traps. As for the mountain kings of the Virungas, who can say what fate awaits them at our hands? But if they do survive, it will be due in no small measure to the dedication of a woman who was in love with life—with all life—a woman who did what great lovers must always do: who gave herself completely to those she loved. (Mowat, 371)

Farley Mowat tells a story of scientific research and of animal protection, which is a love story between a woman and gorillas, a woman and life in the mountains of Rwanda. This is a story of blood and light; the blood spilled by men only turned towards money and the light of the sun shining over the mists of the mountains of Rwanda, the light shining in the gorilla's eyes full of trust, the light in the love of a merry dog, the light in a team accompanying a woman ready to risk her life to protect the gorillas she had first come to study and whom she loved so deeply; the light shining forever in the action of that exceptional woman whose strength goes on protecting gorillas in Rwanda thanks to the Research Center and to the Digit Fund43 prolonging her direct action. Farley Mowat's book is a homage, a love shout and a lesson to show the whole world the extent of Dian Fossey's action and her strong and moving personality. The to and fro movement between Dian Fossey's scientific and personal notes and journal and Farley Mowat's biographical comments makes Dian Fossey's life surprisingly present, or perhaps this is not that surprising… Dian Fossey, Biruté Galdikas, Jane Goodall, George Adamson and all those who study animals and protect them and nature at large are among those individuals who show us the way to responsibility. Of course, only a few women and men can go over there and live with gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees or elephants in their environment and transmit their experience to the rest of the world so that the rest of the world might feel aware and responsible and prolong those "angels of nature" or eco warriors' messages, to allow the planet's inhabitants to live on. The choice 43

Digit Fund was founded by Dian Fossey in 1978 and it is the original name of Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, as it was renamed.

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of some writers to make their own texts the echoes of those scientists trying to save life against money and giving their lives to their passion and to threatened nonhuman animals is a way for them to relay the scientists' messages and to let their voices be heard, even long after some of them have been murdered, to show that their actions live on.

Jane Goodall and Dale Peterson's Visions of Caliban "During the winter of 1610-11, William Shakespeare created his vision of Caliban. Caliban is a "monster," simultaneously man and beast […]" (Peterson and Goodall, 1). To introduce the two-voice book on chimpanzees that he wrote with Jane Goodall, Dale Peterson refers to one of the most famous theatrical characters in Shakespeare's last play The Tempest. Once again, literature is conjured up to give readers a clear vision of the connection existing between the human and nonhuman worlds, here, between men and chimpanzees. Peterson's "brilliant idea," in Jane Goodall's words, "of weaving the various strands of this book together with the Shakespearean vision of Caliban" (Peterson and Goodall, 5) becomes a wonderful guidebook to connections. In Visions of Caliban, Dale Peterson and Jane Goodall tell about "chimpanzees and people" by connecting the story and an analysis of the situation. The book starts with the reference to Caliban, the title of every chapter is a quotation from The Tempest and each starts with an epigraph by Shakespeare. Shakespeare's Caliban is the literary thread weaving together men and chimpanzees through Jane Goodall's lifelong observation. She sums up the connection between our developed world and the fact that chimpanzees are doomed if men go on chopping down forests. But the dark vision still contains some hope: Thus to summarize, development is inevitable in Africa, given the everexpanding needs and the legitimate aspirations of the people living there. Beyond all doubts, mile upon mile of forest and woodland will fall to the chain saws and pit saws, and, through clear cutting, be totally destroyed: the chimpanzees living there are doomed. (Goodall in Peterson and Goodall, 308, italics in the text)

Jane Goodall spent her whole life studying chimpanzees and transmitting her studies to make people aware of the link uniting them with men and the threats against them because of deforestation and hunting. To Jane Goodall's scientific research on the population of chimpanzees, Dale Peterson added many observations noted in his travels. Even if Peterson says that "chimpanzees are seriously hunted as meat in several West and

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Central African nations including Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Congo and Zaire" (59), he differentiates "subsistence hunting" and "hunting for sport." He adds that "Europeans killing orangutans in Borneo and gorillas and chimpanzees in Africa just for the fun of it have, in a few instances, decimated local populations" (Peterson in Peterson and Goodall, 59). He gives the example of an Englishman who had "killed 115 gorillas for sport and had donated their remains to European museums" (59). What is surprising is the ambivalence, underlined by Peterson, of one of those sportshunters' description of a gorilla's death. He mentions an American explorer, Paul du Chaillu, who constantly compares the gorilla's death with a man's death: "the gorilla dies as easily as a man," he "tingles his ears with a dreadful note of human agony," and he adds that "it is thus lurking reminiscence of humanity, indeed, which makes one of the chief ingredients of the hunter's excitement in his attacks on the gorilla" (quoted by Peterson, 59). This seems to be the dark side of the human connection between men and chimpanzees or gorillas or orangutans. All the studies made by Jane Goodall show to what extent the chimpanzee is close to man to make men aware of the connection existing between the two species. The quotation given in a footnote by Dale Peterson reveals how this connection may be perverted and transformed by a sportshunter into a murderous excitement revealing man's obscure tendency. The "dreadful note of human agony" seems to reveal some humane uneasiness, which is immediately erased by the excitement suggesting that the death of the gorilla is a sort of ersatz of a man's killing. The explorer's ambivalent words also suggest that sportshunting is the result of some will of power that hardly makes a difference between killing a man and killing a nonhuman animal. Peterson's assertion of the proximity of the chimpanzee with man is much more poetic and, here again, he is helped by Shakespeare's Caliban. Recalling a "big chimpanzee in Uganda" who was "walking upright quite like a man" on the limb of a giant fig tree, he writes: Who or what is this being, that touches two worlds, recognizably beast yet somehow approaching human—a peculiar hybrid that, like Caliban, the despised slave of Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611), repels yet intrigues? (Peterson, 13-14)

In a poetic way, Peterson suggests what scientists like Jane Goodall demonstrate, that is the fact that we share 99 per cent of our genes with chimpanzees. Peterson and Goodall's book is fundamental to show us the plight of chimpanzees and the role of industrial countries in the

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devastation of African wildlife. Many books are written on the subject and they are necessary. Why is it that these Visions of Caliban have such a great incidence on our consciences? Perhaps because of a constant to and fro movement maintaining the reader's activity, leading the reader to participate in the reflexion and thus in the protection. It is a to and fro movement between two voices—figured by two different graphies—, Dale Peterson's and Jane Goodall's, both having a deep knowledge of Africa and of the populations of chimpanzees. To this structural face to face is added a to and fro movement between dark connections and connections of life leading to hope: there are the dark connections destroying everything—it is because of greed in our developed countries that forests are devastated, it is because trees are chopped down that chimpanzees are doomed—, the dark connections making the sportshunter's instinct of death feel excited by a gorilla's death because it has something human about it. But there is the fundamental awareness of connections of life, of the relationship of trees and chimpanzees, of our deep ancestral connection with chimpanzees. We discover lots of information as if we travelled with the two scientists, as if we observed the situation with them. The poetry of Shakespeare's references is the red thread obliging us to constantly question ourselves; and when Jane Goodall ends up saying there is some hope, we have the feeling that Shakespeare's Caliban is behind us, asking us for help to save him and his island. Jane Goodall, echoing Peter Matthiessen in The Tree Where Man Was Born,44 writes: There is still hope for the wildlife of the continent, as well as for the human populations, if development goes hand in hand with family planning and sustainable use of natural resources. If people nurture their long-term wealth and attempt to recreate fertility in degraded land instead of cutting down more and more trees to create ever more desert. And if the industrialized nations cease their cruel exploitation. Chimpanzees—at least some chimpanzees—can survive if humans choose that they do so. And humans will make this choice only when they realize that in fighting for the chimpanzees' survival they are also fighting for their own. (Goodall in Peterson and Goodall, 308)

Dale Peterson chose to add Shakespeare's poetic voice to Jane Goodall's scientific observation and to his own writer's voice both as a biographer of Jane Goodall and an observer of primates. He echoes Jane Goodall's conclusion by letting us see things through Caliban and Prospero's story: "By enslaving Caliban we enslave ourselves. Only when we free Caliban will we free ourselves" (Peterson in Peterson and Goodall, 310). 44

See p. 274-277 in this book.

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This book "on chimpanzees and people" speaks about our own history seen in connection with chimpanzees' history and fate. It is that connected story that is told by Dale Peterson, Jane Goodall and Shakespeare… Shakespeare adds the literary connection enabling us to hear chimpanzees' voices transmitted by those humans who try to save them by showing all people their responsibility in the destruction; those people who try to save a species that looks so much like the species that can either make them disappear from the surface of the Earth or let them live with them as in the same family.

"The strange silence of bees." Denouncing pesticides through investigations using literature In her seminal book Silent Spring, which was a turning point for the ecological fight and awareness, Rachel Carson warned people about the dangers of pesticides and her book was of paramount importance to launch activist ecology. The paratext of the book clearly asserts its active role as the cover reads: "The classic that launched the environmental movement." And Peter Matthiessen himself said about the book that it was "the cornerstone of environmentalism" (Carson, back cover). The epigraph is a quotation from Keats' poem "La belle dame sans merci," "And no birds sing." And she starts her book, an essay, a testimony telling about reality, like an imaginary text since she entitles her introductory chapter "A Fable for Tomorrow" and starts as if it were a fairy tale: "There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with the surroundings" (Carson, 1). Literary genres of imagination are conjured up to open a book about the most terrible reality concerning our environment and life. After the first part listing the natural richness of the place, the text becomes darker: There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example—where had they gone? […] The few birds seen anywhere were moribund, they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound, only silence lay over the fields and wood and marsh. […] The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruits. (Carson, 2-3)

The silence weighing on the American landscape is first shown as an imaginary fact to be soon transferred to the reality of the world. The first

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part of this text of imagination ends with that sentence: "No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life on the stricken world. The people had done it themselves." The brutality of a short sentence charging only men is the answer to the list of nonhuman, animal and vegetable life. The conclusion of this small introductory fable explains the shifting from imagination to reality: This town does not really exist but it might easily have a thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere in the world. […] What has already silenced the voices of spring in countless towns of America? This book is an attempt to explain. (Carson, 3)

She analyses all the causes of pollution and the role of pesticides in the silencing of nature. She does not content herself with showing all the damage made by pesticides; she proposes "the other road" and speaks about the solutions offered by scientists and foresters in the United States, Canada and Europe: In the United States our foresters seem to have thought of biological control chiefly in terms of introducing insect parasites and predators. The Canadians take a broader view, and some of the Europeans have gone farthest of all to develop the science of "forest hygiene" to an amazing extent. Birds, ants, forest spiders, and soil bacteria are as much part of a forest as the trees, in the view of European foresters, who take care to inoculate a new forest with these protective factors. (Carson, 293)

She mentions the experiments of German scientists who "developed a method of cultivating [a special species of] ant and establishing colonies" (293). Dr Heinz Ruppertshoffen, who was a forestry officer, said: "Where you can obtain in your forest a combination of birds' and ants' protection, the biological equilibrium has already been essentially improved" (294). As a "single spider may destroy in her life of 18 months an average of 2000 insects" and as there are "50 to 150 spiders to the square meter" in a sound forest (295), one can guess the great number of insects destroyed by the spiders. Thanks to the net umbrella that the wheel-net spiders spin "above the top shoots of the trees," Dr Ruppertshoffen said, they "protect the young shoots against the flying insects" (295). Rachel Carson mentions more examples of that solidarity between species described later on by Jean-Marie Pelt.45 This solidarity between species protecting nature without the use of fatal pesticides is echoed in fiction literature when for 45 Jean-Marie Pelt (with Franck Steffan). La solidarité chez les plantes, les animaux, les humains, Paris: Fayard, 2004.

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example Piers Torday, in his children's book The Last Wild, wrote a story where animals ask for a child's help so that the wild might be saved from the human attack by chemicals killing all of them.46 Insects, mammals, birds, all have a role in that tale and the saving of the mammals thanks to the insects which allow the child's escape, might appear as a marvellous translation of the reality depicted by Rachel Carson. In Piers Torday's tale, animals speak and are organized in a sort of crusade but the result is the same as when the spiders save the trees from the destruction of their shoots by flying insects. Piers Torday's children's tale speaks about solidarity between species in a half-fantastic half-marvellous story, but this story reflects the reality of the Earth and species threatened by pesticides. The children's book mirrors Rachel Carson's essential book starting like a fable and showing the world the terrible reality of men destroying and silencing all nature. Rachel Carson's charge against pesticides will be relayed decades later by a French journalist warning people against the situation of bees. Vincent Tardieu, in a book on the reality of bees' disappearance, with a title also echoing the silencing of life, L'étrange silence des abeilles, makes an inquiry about the decline of bees. The disappearance of entire colonies of bees—he quotes the case of one man who found only 36 colonies living out of the 400 he had; another one found 35 out of 145— which constitutes the beginning of the book, is associated, as in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, with silence; the man discovering his bee-hives empty discovers "nothing but a long silence" (Tardieu, 15). Tardieu's essay echoes Carson's book and also literary texts in a more humorous way: for example the title of the second chapter, "To bee or not to bee," echoes Hamlet's monologue. The book is built like a detective story and the titles of the chapters humorously echo titles in a detective novel: "un odieux complot chimique," "le poison ne fait pas le cadavre," "c'est un virus israélo-australien qui a fait le coup," and the subtitle "un assassin exotique: la traque se précise," or "un Espagnol met la main sur l'assassin," and last but not least, the ultimate chapter, "Meurtres diaboliques entre amis"47 echoes Agatha Christie's detective novels. Those detective titles are no mere ironical ornaments as the essay is a real investigation about bees' decline. It starts with a date: "C'était le 12 novembre 2006, à 4h de l'après-

46

See chapter 14 in this part of this book. "A hateful chemical plot," "Poison does not make a corpse," "it's an IsraeloAustralian virus that did it," "An exotic murderer," "The hunt becomes clearer," "a Spanish man catches the murderer," "Diabolical murders between friends" (translations mine). 47

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midi."48 It starts with the words of David Hackenberg, remembering the moment when he found all his bee-hives empty. He lives in California and rents colonies of bees to big farmers in all the Eastern United States for the pollination of their cultures. He says: "nos abeilles assurent une bouchée sur trois du repas des Américains."49 Pollination allows Americans to produce nearly one-third of the food consumed in the United States (Tardieu, 12). The light tone of the detective titles is a way for the scientific journalist to reach the widest audience and arouse their curiosity. It is the same when he uses literary references, not only in the titles but also in the text. He starts chapter 9 with a quotation by Michel Aubert during a meeting on the decline of pollinisers at the French Parliament, the speaker asserting that the decline is due to "a well-known disease: the varroase" and adds that there are lots of proofs that "imidaclopride—Vincent Tardieu says in a parenthesis that it is the active molecule of Gaucho— was a false track" (Tardieu, 167). Tardieu says that Michel Aubert "hammers that." Ironically relaying the speaker's hammering, he writes: "le Varroa! Le Varroa, vous dis-je,"50 which leads him to find an echo to Molière's play Le malade imaginaire as he quotes the scene between Argan and Toinette disguised as a doctor and answering Argan at each symptom: "Le poumon!" and ending with "Le poumon! Le poumon, vous dis-je!"51 (Tardieu,167-168). The humorous conjuring up of Molière's comedy makes those who give such a false diagnosis, the counterparts of false and real doctors mocked by Molière. Tardieu uses literature to give more weight to figures and facts. Thus conjuring up Shakespeare, Molière, Cervantès, Homer and Agatha Christie, he makes his investigation apparently lighter in tone to give it the universal weight of authors who used the theatre, the epic or the detective novel to give their readers a true vision of society and its evils. All those texts written from real experiences lived by scientists with or around animals, give us a true painting of a situation in which, when species are endangered, those who try to protect them sometimes risk and lose their lives like Dian Fossey. And in the long run, it is mankind that is endangered by the disappearance of some species. As Einstein said, if bees disappeared from the surface of the Earth, mankind could only survive

48

"Ir was on December 12, 2006, at 4 p.m." (Translaton mine, italics in the text). "Our bees produce one mouthful out three mouthfuls of Americans' meals" (translation mine). 50 "The Varroa, the Varroa, I say!" (Translation mine). 51 "The lung, the lung, I say!" (Translation mine). 49

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four years.52 The mere fact that people invented a polemics to know whether Einstein said it or not, or at least whether it is proved that he said it or not, shows the problem. The problem they see is the precise reference of an assertion that should guide them and that they refuse to listen to by raising formal problems instead of looking at reality.

From mythical whales to the conscience of animal life "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated." Mahatma Gandhi

In the many books speaking about endangered species, some use mythical and allegorical animals, like Melville's Moby Dick. Even if this masterpiece is allegorical and not environmental, it evoked excessive whale hunting in the nineteenth century. When Melville wrote Moby Dick, whale hunting was at its climax and there were few people who were aware of the danger of the extinction of some species. Yet, even if Moby Dick is first and foremost a symbolical novel, Melville devoted a chapter to the danger of the extinction of that species: Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo, which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and scowled with their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous river-capitals, where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar an inch; in such a comparison an 52 See Didier Van Cauvelaert: "On sait que 80% des fruits et légumes n'existent que par la pollinisation des abeilles. D'où la fameuse phrase d'Einstein: "si l'abeille disparaissait de la surface du globe, l'homme n'aurait plus que quatre années à vivre." Il est de bon ton aujourd'hui de la contester, d'en attribuer la paternité à des apiculteurs désireux de s'inventer un prestigieux parrainage. Mais Rémy Chauvin me l'a confirmé en 2000 : c'est à leur ami commun Karl Von Frisch qu' Einstein a confié ce pronostic—simple mise en équation de ses découvertes" (Dictionnaire de l'impossible, 26). "We know that 80% of the fruit and vegetables only exist thanks to bees' pollination. Hence Einstein's famous sentence: "if bees disappeared from the surface of the globe, man would only have four years to live. It is fashionable today to contest it, to attribute it to apiarists willing to have a prestigious sponsorship. But Rémy Chauvin [the author of L'énigme des abeilles, Editions du Rocher, 1999, ndla] confirmed it to me in 2000: it is to their common friend Karl Von Frisch [the author of Vie et mœurs des abeilles, Albin Michel, 1955, ndla] that Einstein confided that prognosis—a simple equation of his discoveries" (Van Cauvelaert 26)

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Comparing the probable extinction of whales to the rapid decline of buffaloes, he draws readers' attention to the necessity of slowing down the process. But he also adds that if "these Leviathans, in small pods, were encountered much oftener than at present," it is because "those whales, influenced by some views to safety, now swim the seas in immense caravans, so that to a large degree the scattered solitaries, yokes, and pods, and schools of other days are now aggregated into vast but widely separated, infrequent armies. That is all. And equally fallacious seems the conceit, that because the so-called whale-bone whales no longer haunt many grounds in former years abounding with them, hence that species also is declining. For they are only being driven from promontory to cape; and if one coast is no longer enlivened with their jets, then, be sure, some other and remoter strand has been very recently startled by the unfamiliar spectacle" (ibid.). Even if he thinks that the species is not as endangered as people think, and if it is not the topic of his novel, he evokes the problem. Of course, the white whale chased by Ahab is the allegory of the quest for the impossible object. But as it is a whale, this gives the novelist the opportunity to evoke their possible extinction. More than a century later, many species of whales prove to be endangered because of excessive hunting or of their reduced habitats. Native American writer Linda Hogan wrote a novel entitled People of the Whale, which takes up real events that took place in 1995. The novel starts with a strange octopus walking out of its cave onto the beach, suggesting that ocean animals will have both a real and mythical dimension. The novel introduces the whales through the grandfather whale hunting in a relationship of respect. Animals play a great part in Linda Hogan's work and her choices once more show that imagination is often preferred to essays to make a voice audible. In an interview, she said: Anyone reading my work knows that I write about animals more than anything else. They are the spirit of the world, again each with their own intelligence. It would be difficult for me to write a book without them. Whales were one of my topics for many years, and will be again. Then the Florida Panther called me there and that call became the book, POWER. I'm sure it was also to write about the difficult conditions in Florida affecting the panther, the toxic environment. It began as an accident. I was in a working group on reauthorization of the Endangered Species Act and 53

Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 105. "Does the Whale's Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?"

Real and Imaginary Animals to Speak about Connections and Responsibility 307 said those two words. I don't even know why. But at the time it divided the room. Great conflict followed. The conflict came from a case in which a Seminole man had killed a panther. So I went to Florida and researched the incident involving the killing of a panther and discovered that few were left and that those few were very ill.54

Linda Hogan's first intention was to write an article with the objectivity of a journalist. But she soon changed her mind: I stayed with the ranger and went to read the court records. I planned to do a legal article. But I was stopped on the road by a powerful storm. While I sat in the car, I heard the main character's voice and then I never wrote the article. Instead, I heard the voice of Omishto, the main character, and I followed that voice, that girl and what she tried to say. It became a novel. I hoped the book would send attention to the beautiful, secretive, endangered cat. And also to the environment, but I did include the killing of the panther in the novel. (Ibid.)

Linda Hogan does not speak about the genesis of her novel Power for its own sake but to reveal a series of events that led her to defend the last Florida panthers through fiction rather than through a journalist's article. Between the planning of "a legal article" and "the voice of Omishto," there is a "powerful storm." Linda Hogan listens to the voice of nature in which she can hear the voice of the future character of her novel. She situates the seat of imagination in nature in movement. Writing a novel becomes a sort of half spiritual half fantastic experience in which she "followed [a] voice." Linda Hogan's Native American conscience both of the beauty of animals and of our connection with them leads to the conscience of our duties to preserve their lives. Her beautiful texts mingle myths and natural reality to show the rest of the world our deep relationship with animals, from the octopus to the whale and from the panther to a flock of birds flying away in the sky. In People of the Whale, she intertwines myths and social reality when she starts her novel on a flashback staging a walking octopus to whom she confided about her new-born baby Thomas, the one who, years later, was to kill a whale in a hunt during which the traditional way and respect for the animal were forgotten. The initial scene with the octopus going out of its cave allows the narrator to evoke new ways of fishing whales that are opposed to traditional fishing. The novel situates the action near Neah Bay 54 http://ecopoeticsperpignan.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Linda-HoganWriters-interview.pdf, accessed February 14, 2017.

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and evokes real facts, particularly the conflict opposing the Makah55 to environmental organizations. Bénédicte Meillon reminds us of the facts: Suite au retrait, en 1995, de la baleine grise de la liste des espèces en voie de disparition, certains Makah décidèrent de renouer avec leurs traditions autour de la chasse à la baleine, causant la mort de deux baleines et une polémique sur le droit à exercer des traditions ancestrales lorsque celles-ci touchent à des espèces protégées. (Meillon, 131)56

The novel does not oppose the respect of Native traditions to the protection of animal species but on the contrary, as Bénédicte Meillon says, "Hogan's fiction reads as an attempt to recall and renew ‘the ancient pact land had made with water, or the agreements humans had once made with animals’" (Solar, 22) (in Meillon, 132 and a forthcoming article).57 Linda Hogan constantly asserts her connection with the nonhuman world: "In that moment, I understood I was part of the same equation as birds and rain," she writes in Solar Storms (Hogan Solar Storms, 79). The totem whale and the living whale are united in the Indian vision and as a totem animal it is supposed to protect "the people of the whale." Natives' life has been connected to the whale from times immemorial. The allusions to myths, petroglyphs transmitting the meaning of the whale from generation to generation, reveal the whale as an important part of the Makah cosmogony as Bénédicte Meillon shows (Meillon, 133). Witka, the grandfather of the main character Thomas, was "a well-known whaler" and he is said from the start to have a deep connection with nature since he can hear its language: "By the age of five he had dreamed the map of underwater mountains and valleys, the landscape of rock and kelp forests 55

The Makah live near Neah Bay, Washington, which is a fishing village. The name they give themselves is Kwih-dich-chuh-ahtx, which means "the people who live on the cape by the seagulls." Their very name shows their relationship with the landscape and the animal world. See Ann M. Renker and Erna Gunther, "Makah". In "Northwest Coast," ed. Wayne Suttles. Vol. 7 of Handbook of North American Indians, ed. William C. Sturtevant. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1990, 429. Also see Makah Cultural and Research Center Online Museum, http://content.lib.washington.edu/cmpweb/exhibits/makah/index.html, accessed Match 4, 2018. 56 "After the withdrawal, in 1995, of the grey whale from the list of endangered species, a few Makah decided to take up their traditions around whale hunting again, causing the death of two whales, and a controversy about the right to exert ancestral traditions when the latter concern protected species" (translation mine). 57 I would like to thank Bénédicte Meillon who kindly provided me with that quotation and reference from one of her forthcoming articles.

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and the language of currents" (Hogan, People of the Whale, 19). The entangling of oneiric vision and natural reality reveals a cartography of the ocean defined in terms of an earthly landscape where the water has a "language." The merging of the real world of the ocean and of the oneiric world is achieved through an initiatory journey as "[l]ater, as a man, he visited the world he dreamed. He travelled there" (19). He is presented as "a medical oddity, a human curiosity, a visionary, a hunter and a carver, and a medicine man who could cure rheumatisms and dizzy spells" (19), his whaling activity is much more than mere hunting; it reveals his connection with the ocean through a spiritual ("visionary"), artistic ("a carver") and healing ("a medicine man") relationship to it. His knowledge also connects him with the non-Native scientific world since "[h]is knowledge of the ocean was so great that scientists came to question him. Scientists and anthropologists then wrote papers about what he told them" (19). His whaling activity, instead of opposing people, connects them; instead of being seen as animal killing, this form if hunting is seen as animal respect. When men went hunting, they first explained to the whale why they had to hunt for it and the dialogue reveals a spiritual union between the hunter and the animal: Everyone had to be pure in heart and mind. By then the whale would be coming gladly toward the village. "Oh, brother, sister whale," he sang. "Grandmother whale, Grandfather whale. If you come here to land we have beautiful leaves and trees. We have warm places. We have babies to feed and we'll let your eyes gaze upon them. We will let your soul become a child again. We will pray it back into a body. It will enter our bodies. You will be part human. We'll be part whale. […] We will treat you well. Then one day I will join you. (2223)

It is not an animal murder; it is the animal who comes willingly and even "gladly" to feed its people, "the people of the water. People of the whale" (20). The family link—"brother, sister whale," "Grandmother whale, Grandfather whale"—makes the animal an ancestor, a totemic creature uniting all the members of the tribe. The hunt is preceded with a song that sounds like a dialogue where the two communicating creatures are not separated but united: "You will be part human. We'll be part whale." Through a language of spirituality guiding the whale about to be killed on the way to resurrection or reincarnation, the traditional hunter shows his respect by claiming the part of whale in him and the human part in the whale. This respectful way of hunting is opposed to the violence of those who hunt out of greed and not out of necessity. Added to that respectful

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connection with whales making them a totem animal, there is one of mere admiration and love, leading to wonder and to spirituality through that admiration of animal beauty. This is what characterizes Ruth, Thomas' wife. Her portrait is made in connection with whales: Ruth. She was beautiful, with hair graying, with intention, the woman of water, the woman of whales. Ruth watched the whales and never ended her wonder at them. Her love for them was ceaseless. When she saw them rise and return to the sea, when she saw them breathe spray she was aware that there was at least one god. (64-65)

Her wonder at the beauty of the whale and at their visible breathing as the inscription of life between water and air, becomes a spiritual revelation. She is linked with the grey whales through the colour of her hair. She is part of them as they are part of her. The ocean is for her "the garden of heaven" (65). She is the one who will sing to try to make the whale flee to escape the hunters. The theme of whale hunting intertwines the traditional conception of whale hunting respecting the animals as much as oneself, and a distorted way of hunting, slaughtering the whales just out of greed once they are no longer protected by environmental laws. This corresponds to reality and to the fact that the Makah started hunting them again, which brought about conflicts with environmental organizations. Ruth is the one who asks a question about "the lower number" of them (69), who insists on saying "[t]here are fewer whales" (70). She is the one who opposes, in very simple words, the two conceptions of hunting: "[…] the old people are against this. Only these few men stand to gain" (71). "Gain" is the keyword, opposed to Witka's prayer to the whale in which they ask the animal to feed their babies. The notion of power replaces the notion of sharing. The hunt itself emphasizes the gap in the two conceptions of man's relationship with animals. Three women try to save the whale by projecting their thoughts over the water: "Their eyes closed, the women sent their hearts across the water, willing the whale not to come near the land" (People of the Whale, 86). The soft and fluid sound [w] unites the water, the whale and the women's will. But communication is no longer possible between the women and the animal as is explained a page further on: "The three women told the whales not to come. But the whales no longer heard their voices or thoughts. Perhaps because this hunt had become a spectacle and not a holy thing" (87). The relationships of man/animal have been perverted and the spiritual link has been changed into a spectacle. Short sentences seem to reflect the hectic rhythm of the new hunting way and the breathlessness of the women, of the whale, of life: "This was not the way it had ever been done in the past. This was the

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first whale hunt since the 1920s. Everyone was there" (87). Marco, Ruth and Thomas' son, is the only man seeing the relationship to the hunted whale as in the old days: "He was given to prayer, as he had been taught" (88). Marco prolongs the spiritual relationship to the animal that his grandfather and the old generation had. The whale coming is a young one: '"It was friendly and it was too young to be killed" (89). Marco relays the narrator: "This is the wrong whale to kill" (ibid.). But the hunters do not listen to him, they do not have the respect for the whale that the old hunters had: "They didn't apologize to the spirit of the whale, nor did they sing to it or pray as they said they were going to do" (95). While praying silently so that the men should not laugh at him, "he realized they didn't even believe in the lives of their ancestors, that it was as if those old ones, the ones whose presence he often felt, were only stories to them" (95). The stories evoked here are not stories building up myths, collective memories and lives; they are stories as fiction disconnected from the reality of those men, whereas Marco "feels" those ancient presences, thus uniting the spiritual dimension of the link with the ancestors and the whale, who thus appears as a totem animal representing the link to the ancestors. The discrepancy existing between the two conceptions will end in Marco's murder. Marco has the same fate as the young whale, which is another way of tragically showing the deep relationship uniting the young man and the animal. Marco says to his father: "Do you hear it? Do you feel it?" (99). Like Abel showing his brother Vidal the beauty of an angle of geese in another hunting scene, in N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, Marco tries to connect his father to the whale. But Thomas cannot feel the whale: "'no, son. I wish I did,' because he'd lost all his capacity to feel. Did he even feel the soul of water?" (99). The change in the hunting technique is presented as a break of the spiritual connection with the nonhuman world, the whale or the water. It is Thomas who kills the whale and from the moment when it is killed, Marco disappears, linked to the whale in death. The whale's killing brings about a break of the harmony of the universe, like the killing of the albatross in Coleridge's poem bringing about the absence of wind: "But suddenly it is realized that the moon no longer pulls water back and forth with its love and will" (124). The whale hunting is a story of blood revealing all the blood shed during wars— Thomas was coming back from the Vietnam war—or individual conflicts, like the murder of Marco. The friendly whale's killing brings about chaos in Thomas' mind as Thomas remembers the time when he killed men in Vietnam, and it also brings about chaos in nature since a drought follows and the ocean is upset. The parallelism established between the violence of war in Vietnam and the violence against the whale shows a system of

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connections. The changes of point of view, the flashbacks, the narrative movements from Dark River, a fictitious reservation, to Vietnam, emphasize the gap existing between two conceptions of the human/nonhuman relationship. The novel is a story of listening and not listening, of the relationship with the ocean and its creatures: the octopus to which Ruth confides about her son when he was born, the whale to which Marco listens. It shows that it is a rupture in the listening chain that brings about chaos. The novel ends on Marco's fate according to what "some say," repeated again and again while Marco's name is not pronounced. Some say the day he died, the day Dwight shot him in the chest or heart, that they saw him moving above water, dead, as if it was his soul, carried straight out to sea. Others say his body travelled to land. Some are certain a wave took him under and there was a great stillness on his face that made them less afraid of death, therefore of life. They saw a whale carry him; and some saw an octopus tentacle wrap around him like a snake and hold him into the air. Some just say the spirit world searches for us. It wants us to listen. (People of the Whale, 301)

Linda Hogan's novel starts from a realistic report and ends on supernature. It starts on a report of what happened at one particular moment in the history of the United States and of the world, linking the reintroduction of whale hunting in some villages to the conflicts with environmental organizations. But in fact it links all conflicts, from the trauma of the Vietnam war to the murder of a young man respecting the ancient hunting tradition and respecting the animals that were to be hunted. Marco's murder sounds like the murder of the old Native way of hunting, the murder of a spiritual connection with nature and the animal world. Yet the ultimate sentence of the novel following several supernatural visions of Marco, always in connection with the sea animals, shows that the end is not hopeless and in a very brief way, it gives the solution: "to listen." The novel ends on supernature and on "the spirit world" as if that spirit world alone could give us the solution, or at least as if it expected something from us: "Some just say the spirit world searches for us." The short sentence "It wants us to listen" is an open one. The neutral pronoun referring to "the spirit world" conjures up all that constitutes that spirit world, the world of ancestors and the world of animals and nonhuman creatures. The absence of a complement to the verb "to listen" is food for thought for the reader who is too often deaf to the sounds of nature. As Aldo Leopold is saying, in the "Song of the Gavilan," Sand County

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Almanac, that "you must know the speech of hills and rivers,"58 Linda Hogan's novel reminds us that we must listen to the language of the sea as all her texts urge us to listen to the speech of nature, of the whole nonhuman world telling the story of an immemorial relationship with the Earth that only men separated from their ancestors' sense of connection and respect, seem to have forgotten. So, writers like Linda Hogan imagine stories to tell reality, to narrate the story of a reality that destroys the world and to change it into a reality reenchanting the world by reminding us of a sense of wonder and respect.

58

In A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold writes: " This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. To hear even a few notes of it you must first live here for a long time, and you must know the speech of hills and rivers. Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it—a vast pulsing harmony—its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries" (Leopold 1987, 149, emphasis mine). Aldo Leopold's words show that the music of the natural world is a speech telling its immemorial story, like a living record of the nonhuman world's presence on the Earth.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN CHILDREN’S BOOKS TO EDUCATE HUMAN CHILDREN THROUGH ANIMAL AND NATURE DISCOVERY

"Of the telling there is no end. And . . . in whatever . . . place by whatever . . . name or by no name at all . . . all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one." Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

The reading of children's books sometimes makes us discover healing tales through nature and living sciences. Young readers discover animals and plants, water and rocks, they discover forests not in a direct way but through tales that allow them both to prolong those imaginary human constructions and to have a deep understanding of nature. Imagination perceived in a reshaped reality has a healing strength, which is often used nowadays and which Arabella Buckley suggested using as early as 1879. She wrote in The Fairy-Land of Science: I have often thought when seeing some sickly child drawn along the street, lying on its back while other children romp and play, how much happiness might be given to sick children at home or in hospitals, if only they were told the stories which lie hidden in the things around them. They need not even move from their beds, for sunbeams can fall on them there, and in a sunbeam there are stories enough to occupy a month. The fire in the grate, the lamp by the bedside, the water in the tumbler, the fly on the ceiling above, the flower in the vase on the table, anything, everything, has its history, and can reveal to us nature's invisible fairies. (Buckley)1 1

Some of the commentaries of this chapter have their origins in two articles I wrote in the previous years, "La Double vie des contes : Invraisemblables métamorphoses, espaces parallèles ou leçons de sciences ?", in Science in the Nursery (Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, ed.). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011, chapter 8, 189-206; and "Real and Mythical Animals in N. Scott Momaday’s Work: Who Is at the Origin of First Narratives?" in The Memory of Nature in Aboriginal, Canadian and American Contexts (Françoise

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The healing aspect of those stories may partly come from the blurring of the frontiers between reality, imagination and spirituality. The imaginary, sometimes oneiric space creates a new world where all spaces are connected, which will open the child to his own interior world. And in that new world, nature plays a prevailing role. In many tales, the hero is a young solitary child who is confronted by the exterior world, often having to face death, violence or disease, and who only finds comfort in the company of one or several wild animals, which is the case of Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. In the Victorian era, many children's books spoke about animals. The white rabbit, the caterpillar or the Cheshire cat in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland are more parts of a literary game than educative animals. Yet the caterpillar speaks about natural metamorphosis. Margaret S. Gatty published Parables from Nature in 1855. The discovery of nature she proposes is made through the narrative of a bird, a sedge warbler. From Victorian children's books to tales speaking about environmental defenders of animals or African or Native American children's books making young readers discover Native cultures together with nature, children's books guide young readers towards the double discovery of the world and of the Other. Among contemporary authors writing children's books, we must mention the English author Michael Morpurgo, who wrote around three hundred works in twenty-five languages. Those children's books are sometimes inspired by English or world literature or history but most often, they tell animal stories or stories linking human beings and animals. Fables, tales or true stories like the one about the elephant who saved a little girl during the tsunami in Thailand (Running Wild, 2010), or about a cat who is supposed to have survived the sinking of the Titanic (Kaspar, 2010), or stories telling about war animals (War Horse, 1982 or A Medal for Leroy, 2013), also speak about animals raised to run, or bears raised to dance. Inspired by writers like Ted Hughes, whose poems are read by the great poet he introduced in an audio-book, or by Ernest Hemingway,2 Morpurgo's books lead young readers to know about animal life and conditions of life and chiefly about the links that can be created between human beings, particularly children, and animals. His often award-winning books—he was also the children's laureate from 2003 to 2005—introduce Besson, Claire Omhovère and Héliane Ventura ed.). Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014, 215-234. 2 Poems for Children: Read by Ted Hughes. Selected and Introduced by Michael Morpurgo. London: Faber and Faber, 2011. Stories for Children: Read by Ted Hughes. Selected and Introduced by Michael Morpurgo. London: Faber and Faber, 2011.

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young readers to animals through real life, literature and history, thus making real or imaginary animals their educators. Sometimes children's books simply combine pictures and numbers to help young readers to remember important data. Thus Rochelle Strauss' Tree of Life. The Incredible Biodiversity of Life on Earth, illustrated by Margot Thompson, makes biodiversity a sort of genealogical tree having the characteristics of a real tree, each branch being a natural kingdom and each leaf a species. Every page ends on a small green tree with a more or less wide yellow spot representing the proportion of the species evoked on the page. Starting from the assertion that "all living things are related— from bacteria […] to the largest mammal, the blue whale" (Strauss, 5), it gives a first number meant to allow the child to figure biodiversity: "If every species were represented by a leaf, there would be 1,750,000 leaves on the Tree of Life," to lead the young reader to enter the book without forgetting that "[e]very part of the tree is important. A problem with one branch, one twig or even just one leaf may affect the whole tree" (ibid.). Knowing that, the young reader will first discover the number of species for each kingdom, the great abundance of numbers being alleviated by the peaceful presence of the little tree ending each chapter, with the yellow spot visually summing up the great amount of numbers. It ends with the human presence—"1 species" (33)—, our human presence emphasized with the anaphora "We are one of." The anaphora emphasizes man's belonging to primates—"We are one of the 233 species of primates"—, mammals—"We are one of the 4,540 species of mammals"—, vertebrates—"We are one of the 52,500 species of vertebrates"—, animals at large—"We are one of the 1,318,000 species of animals"—, to sum it up by gliding from "We" to "Humans," once the young reader is convinced of a common belonging: "Humans are one of the 1,750,000 species on the Tree of Life. We are one leaf on the tree" (33). Drawing those numbers from "the best estimates" of scientists—numbers "have been rounded up or down to make them more manageable" (2)—, about whom it is said from the start that "there are too many to be sure," the author opposes the multiplicity of biodiversity to the unicity of man's presence. Man is only one leaf and yet "we have the greatest impact on the Tree of Life" (33). Thus after presenting young readers with dry numbers meant to strike them, after involving them with the repeated pronoun "we," the author presents them with the number of species "at risk" in a chapter devoted to "Changes in the Tree of Life" (34-35), before making them actors of a new change in a chapter entitled "Becoming Guardians of the Tree of Life" (36-37). This small book (only 40 pages), meant for children but also for "teachers, parents and carers," as the last chapter in the form of a "Note to

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teachers, parents and carers" lets us suppose, appears as a hand-over, a pedagogical tool showing young readers that there is no fatality and that they can reverse the process by "[l]earn[ing] more," "[r]educ[ing] their impact on the Tree of Life," "[c]reat[ing] a wildlife habitat," "[i]nvolv[ing] their school or community in cleaning-up a local park or an area of wasteland," and finally "[e]ducat[ing] others" (37). Today's readers will become tomorrow's actors. The imagination of such a pedagogical book dwells in the association of numbers and pictures, information and the suggestion to act. The technique can be less scientific and a simple story and simple drawings such as James Thurber's The Last Flower. A Parable in Pictures, have a great impact on young—and less young—readers.3 The story starts in wartime, World War XII—the number showing that it is science fiction—, and the first picture represents soldiers attacking an unseen enemy. The text is very short: apparently an elliptic sentence for every page, which is in fact, the same sentence that goes from the beginning of the book to the end. The shortness of the text gives it all its strength: "Brought about the collapse of civilization" (n.p.) and on the following page: "towns, cities and villages disappeared from the Earth" followed by "all the groves and forests were destroyed." The drawing showing the human world, with the multiplicity of similar soldiers threatening a frightened family composed of a man, a woman and a dog, is opposed to the emptiness of the following drawings, representing broken architectural elements, the only living creature being a bird pierced with a piece of that broken world and falling from the sky, then beheaded trees, like all the trees seen on war photographs, films or paintings.4 Like cities and forests, the same is said of gardens and works of art. The drawings very simply show "men, women and children [who] became lower than the lower animals," who were deserted by dogs who were "discouraged and disillusioned" in front of the absence of reaction of "their fallen masters." Those human people reached such a lower condition that "rabbits descended upon them." "The former lords of the Earth" are changed into the weakest creatures because of what war made. The text evokes the fact that "books, paintings and music disappeared from the Earth," that "Love had passed from the Earth." In front of that general yielding to nothingness, it is a dying flower that saves mankind:

3

James Thurber (1894-1961) is an American writer who wrote, among other works, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. 4 See part 3, chapter 9.

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That text covers three consecutive pages as if the author wanted to create some suspense concerning mankind's survival. From the moment when the man and the girl bring the flower to life again, a bee comes back, then a humming bird, then "there were two flowers and then a great many." Love comes back, and with love, children and dogs come back. The young man builds a shelter, everybody builds shelters, joy comes back with "song" "and troubadours and jugglers … and tailors and cobblers…and painters and poets…and sculptors and wheelwrights." The small flower has shown them the way to life, where art is as important as handicraft, more important perhaps as it brings about imagination, dreams and joy and thus allows life to come back. The story could be read as a counterpart to Jean Giono's tale L'homme qui plantait des arbres, except that Jean Giono's story is a tale with a happy ending whereas The Last Flower proposes a circular narrative always ending on destruction; since after the list of artistic or manual activities, there is a break: "and soldiers…" come back, occupying two double pages and a half. And the list of military people goes on with "lieutenants and captains…and generals and major-generals…and liberators" represented facing each other on two stages above the crowd and making the Nazi salute. People separate and every group wants to be where the other group lives. The text, in a very efficient way, sums up the way totalitarianism works and suggests the link between totalitarianism and some religious speeches perverting spirituality to claim a distorted guidance: "The liberators, under the guidance of God, set fire to the discontent;" and they bring another war that destroys everything and after a Guernica-like drawing reflecting chaos, the book shows just a line on the blank page: "Nothing at all was left in the world." Yet the following pages come back to the beginning and in three pages, we have: "except one man…and one woman…and one flower." And the book stops there, on that sad bending flower, which had saved mankind before mankind fell into the same mistakes again. That fable shows the role of wars in the destruction of the world, humans and nonhumans equally destroyed,5 but it also shows men's inability to draw 5

Like a sign, Keats's line "And no birds sing" appears in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring that is one of the main books that triggered ecological awareness, and in Farley Mowat's autobiographical book about his time as a soldier during World

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lessons from history. A mere flower looks like a sign of hope and it is, like the seed planted by the shepherd in Jean Giono's tale. Jean Giono ended the tale on a note of hope. James Thurber gives a more pessimistic vision, but both of them say the same thing: they speak about man's capacity to save the world by simply becoming aware of the smallest sign of life, whether human or nonhuman, that can help him to understand the way to life, that is the way to peace. As Michel Serres said, "We must decide to make peace between one another to safeguard the world and to make peace with the world to safeguard ourselves." (Le contrat naturel, 47).6 It is another way of striking young readers that Dr. Seuss7 chose in his small book The Lorax, starting with another echo to Keats' line on the introduction page. The text, placed in the lower part of the meadow crossed by a winding road lined with scrawny trees and leading to strange buildings on a cliff falling into the sea, reads: "At the far end of town where the Grickle-grass grows and the wind smells slow-and-sour when it blows and no birds ever sing excepting old crows…is the street of the Lifted Lorax" (Thurber, n.p.). The enigmatic sentence containing such invented words as "Grickle-grass" and "Lorax" lets us guess yet that the sad-looking trees and the echo to Keats' evocation of the silence of birds, foreshadow some environmental trouble in that fictitious place. In the strange landscape, there is a child, at the foot of the board indicating "The street of the Lifted Lorax." The children's book is a near surrealistic story where strangeness is meant to denounce the huge damage of the economical race on the environment. The child can see the fictitious "truffula-trees" that coloured the landscape in bright colours "in the days when the grass was still green / and the pond was still wet / and the clouds were still clean" as appears in a flashback written in the manner of a poem so that young readers could see more clearly the consequences of deforestation. For if we can see such a deserted place with apparently dead trees at the very beginning of the tale, it is a consequence of the Once-lers chopping the trees to make thread out of them. The story is told by the character chopping the trees to create his own factory. We can only see two long green arms of this character, just as we only see the green arms of all his family knitting this exceptional thread, while life in the area is

War II, And No Birds Sang, and in many more literary works. The Romantic poet's line appears as a sort of universal translation of all destructions in the world echoed by the silence of birds. 6 See the introduction of this book. 7 Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904-1991), an American author and illustrator who took the name Dr. Seuss as a pseudonym.

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devastated. The Lorax, in the position of great speakers, places himself on the stump of a chopped tree to say to the manufacturer: I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees for the trees have no tongues. (Ibid.)

The hammering of the words "I speak for" and "trees," together with the chiasmatic structure "I speak for the trees for the trees have no tongues," shows the strange character's gift for public speaking. The efficiency of the message comes from the discrepancy existing between the seriousness of the subject (deforestation and pollution erasing all life from some areas) and the fantasy of the visual representation (the trees' spokesperson has a ridiculous appearance; the manufacturer only appears as two green arms, the trees are made of brightly-coloured tufts on long trunks) and of an invented language with many created words (the Truffula-Trees and also the Bar-ba-Loots—the animals who were living in their shade and are obliged to leave because the chopping down of the trees deprives them of their food). The child's reading of that book will necessarily lead him/her to ask himself/herself questions, as things are not like what he knows in real life. Yet the notion of trees chopped down, of birds no longer singing, of animals starving and being endangered because of deforestation (like orangutans in Malaysia and so many animals everywhere in the world), all these facts shown in the book speak to the child. The manufacturer tells the story of his success then his failure when, as there are no more trees, there is no more thread and "all that was left 'neath the bad-smelling sky was my big empty factory…the Lorax and I" (ibid.). The manufacturer's failure appears as the beginning of awareness. But he has not made the link yet between what he has done and what he could do to change things. It's up to the young reader to anticipate the manufacturer's awareness. The second stage in the narrator's awareness appears in the Lorax's glance. He, the speaker that spoke for the trees, "said nothing." The absence of words, the Lorax's glance, have more weight than all his previous speeches. The following stage in the gradual awareness is an enigma left by the Lorax before taking "leave of this place, through a hole in the smog, without leaving a trace." The rhyme "place"/"trace" emphasizes the link of the strange defender of trees with the place and of the destruction of the place with the erasing of all trace of him. The Lorax left "a small pile of rocks," like a cairn, which is what mountaineers leave to mark the way and to guide walkers. On the pile of rocks is "the one word / UNLESS," isolated in one line and in capital letters. The narrator does not understand and it is only after a long time and much worrying, that he reached the last stage of awareness and understands the enigma when seeing the child in the circle

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of stones. The child is the one appearing on the first page, coming back later at the foot of the building, before the Once-ler is aware, and paying him as it was said that the Once-ler might tell him the story of the Lorax if he was paid. The child has followed the indication and is now in the circle of the pile of rocks built by the Lorax. It is when he sees the child in the circle that the Once-ler, manufacturer, narrator, understands the meaning of the word UNLESS, which the young reader might have anticipated: Now that you're here, the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear. UNLESS someone like you Cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It's not. (Ibid.)

The Lorax's words and his final silence plus the Once-ler's failure generate some awareness making him transmit to the child the thing that will allow him to bring life again into the area: a seed. As in Jean Giono's tale or in James Thurber's fable, it is a seed that can save the world, that can bring life again to a landscape destroyed by over-exploitation and pollution. The last page is really environmental writing on the part of the character who caused the destruction of the place: "Catch!" calls the Once-ler. He lets something fall. It's a Truffula Seed. It's the last one of all! You're in charge of the last Truffula Seeds. And Truffula Trees are what everyone needs. Plant a new Truffula. Treat it with care. Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air. Grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack. Then the Lorax and all his friends May come back. (Ibid. Last page of the book)

The binary rhythm and the rhymes appearing in the text with the awareness of the solution to bring back life to the area he has devastated, are a text within the text. The rhyme "Seeds”/“needs" makes the seeds the core of the world's needs. And the rhyme "care”/“fresh air" suggests that the condition for having a breathable planet is to take care of it. Writers have invented many ways of making young readers aware, from an informative document filled with numbers, in which the illustrations and the central metaphor of the tree change into a tale, to

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genuine tales that may also lead young readers to the understanding of their belonging to a world where all species, including the human one, are closely connected. This is what happens with Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book.

Connections between Species We evolved to live in the interpenetrating energies and subjectivities of all the life there is so far as we know, which coats the rocks of earth like moss. We cannot live without connection, both psychic and physical. We begin to wither in isolation even if some of us can hang on for a long while connected to nothing beyond our imaginations. (Kittredge, 78)

William Kittredge's assertion of the "interpenetrating energies and subjectivities of all the life there is so far as we know" and his metaphorical association with connections in nature, are at the core of most children's books, which guide children to the conscience of a common belonging to the same home, the Earth, and of a family link with nonhuman species.

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling The very first lines of The Jungle Book (1894) show the young reader the image of a reassuring quiet family, which is a wolf family. It was seven o'clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day's rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips. Mother Wolf lay with her big gray nose dropped across her four tumbling, squealing cubs, and the moon shone into the mouth of the cave where they all lived. (The Jungle Book, "Mowgli's Brothers")

From the start, the text associates the reassuring scene of a whole family with the animal world, which is confirmed by the title of the chapter, "Mowgli's Brothers." Yet the animal world is not presented as a heaven since immediately after those lines, the young reader will discover the hard law of the jungle, with immediately afterwards, the perfidy of the jackal evoking the tiger Shere Kahn to change his quarters, in contradiction with "the law of the jungle." For this introductory chapter that will introduce Mowgli, not only presents young readers with animals, but it also has a didactic function showing where real dangers are and asserting the fact

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that wild animals are not the first threat to man, which is clearly said by the narrator: The Law of the Jungle, which never orders anything without a reason, forbids every beast to eat Man except when he is killing to show his children how to kill, and then he must hunt outside the hunting grounds of his pack or tribe. The real reason for this is that man-killing means, sooner or later, the arrival of white men on elephants, with guns, and hundreds of brown men with gongs and rockets and torches. Then everybody in the jungle suffers. The reason the beasts give among themselves is that Man is the weakest and most defenseless of all living things, and it is unsportsmanlike to touch him. They say too—and it is true—that maneaters become mangy, and lose their teeth. (Ibid.)

The didactic tone of the beginning of this passage—"The Law of the Jungle, which never orders anything without a reason"— seems to give the child a lesson of natural sciences. The text develops with a series of reasons, the first one being mere wisdom as one man-killing generates the suffering of the whole jungle with the arrival of a real army—"the arrival of white men on elephants, with guns, and hundreds of brown men with gongs and rockets and torches." The second one reverses the process while giving the animal point of view—"The reason the beasts give among themselves"— since the animal considers man as the weakest creature: "Man is the weakest and most defenceless of all living things, and it is unsportsmanlike to touch him." The last reason still reverses the process and introduces some sort of humour by the reference to the fact that "maneaters become mangy, and lose their teeth," which suggests a contamination, responding to the numerous contaminations animals are judged responsible for. So from the start, animals are shown as living a normal and quiet family life, killing only out of necessity and not dangerous to men. When the little man appears, all elements have been given for the child to understand life in nature before identifying himself with the child of the tale. The baby's trust does not surprise the young reader since he has been prepared for it by the family scene and the quiet didactic dialogue between Mother and Father Wolves. Because of the dialogue and of the mother's words that are said "softly," suggesting the Mother Wolf's natural tenderness for the baby, the young reader is not surprised when "[t]he baby was pushing his way between the cubs to get close to the warm hide" (ibid.). The cues alternate food for emotion and food for reflexion with a cultural suggestion initiated by Mother Wolf asking if "there was ever a wolf that could boast of a man's cub among her children," Father Wolf answering "I have heard now and again of such a thing, but never in our Pack or in my time." The vagueness of the answer

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may evoke in the adult reader the history of Rome and the mythical legend of the Mother Wolf suckling the human twins Romulus and Remus, thus humorously adding a cultural element to the natural scene. All the conditions are reunited in the text for the child to find it normal for a human baby to be adopted by the animals. In fact, imagination corresponds to some reality since the adoption of a child by animals is not a creation of the imagination. It corresponds to what happened in real nature in several periods and in several kinds of environment. Besides the mythical story of the creation of Rome thanks to a she-wolf saving two babies, there are many other examples of human babies or children or weak adults being rescued and/or adopted by animals. In Rwanda, a child, whose family had been slaughtered during the terrible war opposing Tutsis and Hutus, was adopted by a family of monkeys, who took care of him for several months.8 A disabled boy abandoned by his parents was saved and raised by chimpanzees in the Falgore forest in Nigeria.9 In the French Pyrenees, in the nineteenth century, a woman lived for two years, winters included, on the mountain and she was saved by bears who protected her and probably accepted her in their cave.10 Men then captured her and caused her death while wild animals had allowed her to survive. In Argentina, a one-year old child stayed for one week on the street and was saved by a pack of cats who lay down on him in turn to warm him up and brought food to him.11 In Russia, a cat saved the life of a baby who had

8

There are more examples of children raised by animals. See http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/siberian-boy-7-raised-by-dogsafter-parents-abandoned-him-555343.html; http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/466616.stm; http://articles.latimes.com/198505-19/news/mn-9225_1_wolf-boy; 9 https://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/04/15/1018333473435.html, accessed March 6, 2018. 10 See Christian Bernadac and Christian Brun, Madame de... qui vivait nue parmi les ours, au sommet des monts perdus, Paris: France-Empire, 1984 and Christian Bernadac, La femme nue des Pyrénées, Paris: France-Empire, 1995. 11 " The boy, whose ordeal mirrors that of the character Mowgli from Rudyard Kipling The Jungle Book, was discovered by police in Misiones, in Argentina, surrounded by eight wild cats. Doctors believe the animals snuggled up with him during freezing nights which would otherwise have killed him," Chris Hastings, "Real-life Mowgli kept alive by cats", in The Telegraph, December 20, 2008, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/argentina/3866797/Re al-life-Mowgli-kept-alive-by-cats.html, accessed March 6, 2018.

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been abandoned in the hallway of an apartment block.12 In a French mountainous area, a young child stayed outside for twenty-one hours while the temperature was -8°. He could survive thanks to two dogs who stayed with him and huddled up against him and warmed him up until human assistance arrived and found him. As for the case of the baby saved by Argentinian cats and called the "Real-Life Mowgli" by the journalist, such real stories remind us of the animals' empathy whenever they save human babies when they see that their lives are threatened. Mowgli's adventures tell the story of animal instinct saving human beings in distress. The Jungle Book, like many other tales in which animals play an important part, throws light on the fundamental role of animals in the mind of a child who has been deprived of love and of his voice through suffering and abandonment. Protected by the wolf family, the panther Bagheera and the bear Baloo, Mowgli fears nothing: "Why should I be afraid?" he says. As is said in the title and repeatedly in several parts of the dialogue, Mowgli considers the animals as his brothers and they consider him as their "little Brother." The young reader, even if he/she is taken by the suspense of the threat of the enemies (Shere Khan the tiger and the monkeys who kidnapped Mowgli), trusts the fictitious animals protecting Mowgli and his/her identification with the little jungle boy makes him/her trust animals. The reading of the tale creates affective links with the animal world while educating the child on the dangers of some behaviours and the laws of the jungle, which are laws of respect. When the animals teach Mowgli about "the strangers' Hunting Call," the text gives the translation of this call: "It means, translated, ‘Give me leave to hunt here because I am hungry.’ And the answer is, ‘Hunt then for food, but not for pleasure.’" (The Jungle Book, "Kaa's Hunting"). Moreover, the young reader knows about the ecosystem and the relationship between each animal's life and its environment, particularly about the role of water reuniting all animals. He also learns about the exploitation of animals by men throughout history since the work of elephants is mentioned in a sort of summary of their historical link with men through exploitation: Kala Nag […] had served the Indian Government in every way that an elephant could serve it for forty-seven years, and as he was fully twenty years old when he was caught, that makes him nearly seventy—a ripe age for an elephant. He remembered pushing, with a big leather pad on his forehead, at a gun stuck in deep mud, and that was before the Afghan War of 1842, […]. He had been hoisted into a ship at the end of a steam crane 12

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/11356266/WatchStray-cat-saves-Russian-babys-life.html, accessed March 6, 2018.

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Through the fate of one Indian elephant, it is the fate of all elephants since the remote period that is tackled. Elephants in history were used wherever they were needed for war and work. The fate of this fictitious elephant in a children's book reveals many things: the connection existing between history and the damage to nature; it shows that wars, the exploitation of forests and of animals are all linked. And the paradox of the second paragraph is quite significant: on the one hand, the government is said to preserve a species—"Elephants are very strictly preserved by the Indian Government"—, and this notion of preservation appears in a very short and simple sentence, while the following sentence explains why they are preserved: "[t]here is one whole department which does nothing else but hunt them, and catch them, and break them in, and send them up and down the country as they are needed for work." The simplicity of the previous sentence devoted to the notion of preservation gives way to a long sentence built around a list of violent actions and the recurrence of the conjunction "and": "hunt them, and catch them, and break them in, and send them up and down the country," the fall of the sentence being the reason for that false preservation and true exploitation: "they are needed for work." And paralleling the free animals in the jungle, there are the animals used for war: the troop horse, a horse imported from Australia to serve the Indian army, the battery mule, the battery oxen, the gun bullocks, the elephants of the gun team, "the screw-gun mules," and the "commissariat camels."13 To Mowgli's brothers, opening the series of stories, there corresponds at the end "Her Majesty's Servants." The family link among free animals in the jungle has given way to a service 13

War animals will appear later on in Timothy Findley's novel The Wars.

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Relationship in a military camp. At the beginning, there is a poem speaking about freedom and the jungle's law: Now Rann the Kite brings home the night That Mang the Bat sets free— The herds are shut in byre and hut For loosed till dawn are we. This is the hour of pride and power, Talon and tush and claw. Oh, hear the call!—Good hunting all That keep the Jungle Law! Night-Song in the Jungle (The Jungle Book, "Mowgli's Brothers")

At the end, this initial free song is answered by the "Parade Song of the Camp Animals." Even if the song seems to end the last story on a merry note, even if the animals sing together in the last part of the song, the latter ends on the notion of imprisonment and slavery: See our line across the plain, Like a heel-rope bent again, Reaching, writhing, rolling far, Sweeping all away to war! While the men that walk beside, Dusty, silent, heavy-eyed, Cannot tell why we or they March and suffer day by day. Children of the Camp are we, Serving each in his degree; Children of the yoke and goad, Pack and harness, pad and load! (The Jungle Book, "Parade Song of the Camp Animals")

A song it is but a song of suffering speaking about a common suffering shared by men and animals in war time, all of them "[m]arch[ing] and suffer[ing] day by day." The initial song before Mowgli's adoption by animals started with a bird in the sky, relayed by a bat, a kite and a bat uniting the organic time of day and night and united by the notion of freedom to introduce "the law of the jungle." The final song unites men and animals in the suffering of war, the jungle is replaced by dust and the flying animals are replaced by creatures, men and animals, "like a heelrope bent again." Through a very didactic way of presenting the young reader with the historical situation, seen in an animal environment, Kipling gives the

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young reader all the elements necessary for him/her to understand the relationship existing between men and animals and to choose his side, which is Mowgli's. An author of children's tales leads his young readers towards an imaginary country looking like the real world, but with either mysteries or adventures added to normal reality, and very often those mysteries and adventures are built around nature.

Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit In a lighter way, Beatrix Potter's illustrated tale, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, first published in 1902, allowed young readers to discover the animal world and to make friends with imaginary animals, which is a way of becoming acquainted with real ones. Even if the distance between an imaginary character dressed like a human one and a real rabbit is huge, Peter Rabbit is a rabbit and it is what a child keeps in mind. All the more so as the very beginning of the tale presents the young reader with a family of rabbits seen in their natural environment: "They lived with their Mother in a sand-bank, underneath the root of a very big fir-tree."14 The gap existing between that simple sentence evoking an animal family in its ecosystem, accompanied with a picture showing a she-rabbit with her kids whose heads or tails appear in the holes of a big tree in the forest, and the following picture showing the same family dressed in human clothes, guides the young reader in two ways: by leading him/her to feel some sympathy for the young rabbits first and then by helping an identification between the young rabbits with their mother and their own life and family. The nonhuman in children's books is a way for the authors to educate young human readers by holding a mirror out to them, but a mirror situated in wild nature dressed in the clothes of the child's everyday human life. The rabbits’ fate in their relationship with carnivorous men is simply evoked by Mother rabbit: "your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor"; the telescoping of the notion of accident and of the culinary reference—"put in a pie"—mixes black humour and some emotion in young readers starting to identify with the young rabbits. The whole story has some moralizing function since it shows Peter's carelessness and the dangers he runs when disobeying his mother and going to the garden of the man who put his father in a pie. While he is disobeying and going to Mr McGregor's garden with his blue jacket and

14 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14838/14838-h/14838-h.htm, accessed April 4, 2017.

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nice shoes, his brothers pick mulberries in the woods without any human clothes. The alternation between human actions and objects and wildlife corresponding to the reality of nature has a double function: the moral one is driven by the clothes and everyday objects allowing identification; but there is another didactic function allowing the young reader to discover rabbits' habitat. The association of the two elements leads the young reader to keep some attachment for the little rabbit in which he sees a reflection of his own disobedience and mischief and some respect for the little nonhuman animal is generated by the humanity he can see in him, more than by his existence as a rabbit.

To Be Aware of Threatened Species John Burningham's Oi! Get Off Our Train John Burningham15 dedicated this children's book Oi! Get Off Our Train (1989), which he wrote and illustrated, to "Chico Mendes who tried so hard to protect the rainforest of Brazil" (Burningham n.p.). This shows his will for connecting everything and for showing that the protection of forests and the protection of endangered animal species, which is the topic of the book, are one and the same. The book tells the story of a night train journey made by a little boy scolded by his mother at the beginning because he was playing with his toy train; she asks him to go to bed and gives him his pyjama-case-dog. The following page shows the boy sleeping while holding the pyjama-case-dog. From then on everything changes. The greyish colour of the night is changed in the following double page where the bottom of the bed is sky-blue and occupies the greatest part of the space as if it was the sky. The colourful toy train is in the foreground, at the bottom of the bed as it is in reality but the construction of the picture changes it into a real train, with smoke suggesting that it is in movement, the little boy being in the locomotive and the pyjama-case-dog being now a dog shovelling the coal to feed the 15

John Burningham is a children's book writer and illustrator who "began his career in 1963 with the Kate Greenaway Medal-winning story of a goose without feathers called Borka" ("John Burningham, a Life in Pictures," The Guardian, March 21, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/gallery/2011/ mar/21/john-burningham-illustrator-pictures, accessed August 22, 2017). John Burninhgam's stories generally stage animals. He wrote more than 60 books that won many awards. His wife, Helen Oxenbury is also an award-winning writer and illustrator.

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engine. The boy says on the following page "We're ready to go now," and the journey can start. The illustrations mingle the naive representations of the child and the animals and more complex illustrations inspired by famous paintings. Thus the left-hand page represents the boy and the dog acting then facing animals. One species after the other asks for hospitality after the boy and the dog, then the boy, the dog and the animals already on board, shout the title of the book: "Oi! Get off our train!" To answer this rejection, this violent refusal to welcome anybody, the animal asking for hospitality always answers politely and explains why he is endangered. Thus the elephant says "Please let me come with you on your train. Someone is coming to cut off my tusks, and soon there will be none of us left." The repetitive phrases— "Please let me come with you on your train” […] and “soon there will be none of us left"—have a pedagogical function as the repetition allows the child to remember the most important thing, the fact that all those species are endangered. The reasons why they are endangered species are explained by every animal. The elephant evokes ivory traffic, the seal speaks about sea pollution, the heron, living in the marshes, evokes the draining of water from them and the fact that he has no more habitat to live in, which is also the case for the tiger mentioning the cutting down of the forests where he lives; the white bear speaks about the fact that "somebody wants to make [his] fur a coat." The contrast between one precise member of a species on the one hand and the anonymity of the pronouns "they" and "somebody" on the other hand, emphasizes the fact that everyone is involved in that general destruction of animal species. To show that the message is also addressed to adults, the author alternates children's illustrations and real paintings inspired by famous painters. Thus to face the elephant's message, there is a dark and red landscape, with a village in the foreground and chiefly a sort of red sun whose beams look like an explosion coloured with blood. This painting may remind the adult reader who reads the story to his/her child, of paintings by the English painter C. R. W. Nevinson who represented the tragedy of WW1 by dark pictures showing the beams of shell explosions. The child will feel compassion on seeing the small sad elephant saying that he is being chased and may be killed, and his parents, through the pictorial association, will think about the violence of the war and see only suffering. The illustration facing the heron's message represents a restricted landscape crossed by the train and barred by hundreds of black intertwined lines as if it was taken in a net. The landscape once again becomes a war landscape of destruction. The train in the snow facing the tiger's message may remind the adult reader of Turner's or Monet's

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representations of trains, the light and energy surrounding Turner's train are here a mass of white suggesting winter and death while the small village on the left appears only as a sketch as if it was gradually disappearing from the landscape and the picture. The dark symbolical pictures obviously meant for adults are counterbalanced by light representations of games since whenever the weather changes, this is for the boy and the dog and the other animals the opportunity for playing with the elements of nature: in the fog they "can play ghosts;" if there is a hot day, they "must find somewhere for a swim;" if a strong wind is blowing, they "can all fly kites;" if it is raining, they "can all muck about with umbrellas;" if there is snow, they “can all throw snowballs." The sadness of the endangered animal alone in front of rejection is transformed into a collective merry game—"all" is repeated—where all of them accept one another. In this modern Noah's Ark that the toy train has become, the messages are multiple: there are endangered species due to man's overexploitation of, and violence against, nature. And everyone can change things and transform the darkness of the world as men make it into a merry game where everyone uses nature to live—and for children, to play soft games—and not to destroy it. At the end of the book, whereas the reader thinks that all that was a dream, there is a coup de theatre changing the dream into a tale. The boy's mother asks her son to get up to go to school but she is smiling more and is less severe than at the beginning. She gives the conclusion, appearing as the adult's acceptance of the child's dream becoming real: There are lots of animals in the house. There's an elephant in the hall, a seal in the bath, a crane in the washing, a tiger in the stairs and a polar bear by the fridge. Is it anything to do with you?" (last page)

Children's books blur the frontier between dreams and imagination. What had started like a dream takes more strength when it is changed into a tale by the boy's mother as she is the adult reference, she is the severe one at the beginning, so she must be the one who enters the tale to make it work in children's minds. Her quiet remark and the fact that she seems hardly surprised at the presence of all those animals in the house is a message to the child who knows that adults can enter that world and accept helping them to change the world. The rescuing of endangered species is also the core of a children's novel by Piers Torday.

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Piers Torday's The Last Wild Piers Torday, who was formerly a producer and playwright, was born in Northumberland, and the way that he introduces himself on his internet site shows that animals are a real preoccupation for him since he adds with some humour that Northumberland "is possibly the one part of England where more animals live than people."16 He decided to start writing novels after his father wrote his first novel in 2007 when he was 59, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, which was adapted for the cinema in 2011 by Lasse Halström, the screenplay made from Paul Torday's novel being written by Simon Beaufoy. The Last Wild (2013) is a children's novel staging a young mute boy enclosed in a sort of hospital who is helped by animals to escape as the animals ask him to rescue them from a terrible virus that is supposed to have killed all the animals on earth. For Piers Torday, The Last Wild was an "attempt to make sense of how we are changing our environment and the natural world around us" (ibid.). And if the novel mingles several genres—fantasy, fairy tale, dystopia, the fantastic, poetry—, it clearly appears as an ecological tale warning young—and less young—readers about the dangers threatening many animal species because of human behaviour. He said about the writing of his novel: "One of the reasons I began writing The Last Wild was my deep sadness at the rate the wildlife around us was—and still is—disappearing."17 This tale, often dark and full of despair but opening on hope, reveals a multiple intertext: from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four—when the boy has been enclosed for six years in a sort of hospital where his identity is destroyed and where he has become dumb since his mother's death—to James Barrie's Peter Pan: the child's journey through forests with a hundred animals whereas all animals should have been dead, looks like Peter Pan's journey to Neverland with the children, all the more so as the threatening figure of evil is a captain with crutches reminding the reader of Captain Hook. The pet name given by Polly to Kester, Kes, might also remind us of Barry Hines' novel, The Knave with a Kestrel, in which the young boy finds comfort with a kestrel he names Kes. For the aim of the novel is clearly to bring young readers to the way to animal life and to make them aware of the dangers threatening them. And the novel or tale ends with a list of "real creatures who inspired [his] imaginary ones": the Lake Erie Watersnakes, who "nearly became extinct when their habitat was destroyed" (ibid.), but were saved because of collective work by "[t]he government, local environmental campaigners 16 17

http://www.pierstorday.co.uk/about, accessed April 18, 2017. "Piers Torday tells about The Last Wild," in The Last Wild, n.p.

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and residents" (ibid.). In the novel, it is the watersnakes who save the little girl Polly from drowning. The passenger pigeon, which had lived on the Earth "for over 100,000 years, in flocks as big as 3.5 billion, disappeared in a few decades, as Aldo Leopold evokes their fate when he speaks about the monument to the last passenger pigeon erected in 1947.18 In the novel, they save the boy by taking him out of the hospital and making him fly to the first forest where he finds animals, while he thought they no longer existed. And at the end, when Kester's father has been found and has the remedy against the virus killing the animals, each pigeon is given a dose of the medicine so that they can carry them to the animals of the forest and thus save them (as pigeons saved many human lives when carrying messages during the two World Wars). The grey wolf is not extinct but Piers Torday reminds us that "the last wolf in the UK was killed in 1776" (ibid.). He adds that "it's estimated that over eighty per cent of wolves born in the United States each year are shot for sport." In the novel they are the Guardians of the Wild and the wolf cub, who joins the whole group of animals following the boy to be saved, tries at the end to destroy Captain Skuldiss but is seriously wounded and will be saved by Kester's father, who is the vet who can save the animals. Piers Torday adds that "some Native American tribes revere them as hunter spirits to this day." Last but not least, the Irish elk, "the biggest deer that ever lived—was extinct long before humans were around. You might have found him some 7,700 years ago roaming forests like the Ring of Trees." The "great stag" plays a prevailing role in the novel: he is the animal that summons Kester and asks the animals (pigeons and cockroaches) to help him escape and to bring him to the Ring of Trees because he knows that "he has the voice," that is he can speak to animals—whereas he cannot speak to humans since he is now mute. The great stag had a dream and he knows that the boy can save all the remaining animals. Once the tale is over, the author comes back to the reality of the extinction of species to make children realize to what extent the tale they have just read is also a warning. By mingling science fiction, tales, suspense and elements of scientific reality with references to the extinction of some species, Piers Torday leads the young reader in a worrying and beautiful adventure where he/she must be aware that the smallest and most rejected animal like the cockroach can help men to save the Earth, which meets some Native American creation myths in which it is often a very small animal that allows the creation of the world. It is no coincidence that he ended his evocation of his animal choices with the cockroach when he said that he 18

See chapter 13.

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"created a cast of animal characters who would capture the essence of animals long gone and animals under threat, as well as some who might even outlive us—like the most indestructible of species, the cockroach"19 (ibid.). The most rejected of insects reuniting reality, fiction and myths guides us on the way to solidarity.

Traditional folktales to be aware of one's roots: Nelson Mandela's Favourite African Folk Tales In 2002, Nelson Mandela, the leader of South Africa's fight against apartheid, who spent 27 years in prison before being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, and served as the first black president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999, published an anthology of African tales illustrated by 16 South African artists and one artist from the Ivory Coast.20 Starting the foreword "with the words with which Ashanti storytellers begin their stories" (Mandela, 7), he thus explains the aim of this book: It is my wish that the voice of the storyteller will never die in Africa, that all the children in the world may experience the wonder of books, and that they will never lose the capacity to enlarge their earthly dwelling place with the magic of stories. (Mandela, 8, emphasis mine)

Nelson Mandela shows the weight of storytelling and by publishing this anthology of illustrated African folktales meant for children not only in Africa but all over the world—"all the children in the world"—, he emphasizes both the importance of every African child's identity found in stories echoing his/her ancestors' voices and the transmission of those local voices to the whole world for those stories deeply rooted in the African soil, can and must be read—which is a new way of listening to storytellers' voices—by the whole world. Those stories also show connections between the human and the nonhuman. The cover illustration by Natalie Hinrichsen shows a man quietly sleeping, his back leaning 19 'Piers Torday tells about The Last Wild," in The Last Wild, n.p. Those cockroaches helping the boy to save the other animals and the world could echo the waterbeetle of the Cherokee, allowing the creation of the world by diving to bring back mud. See part 3 chapter 12, p. 243. 20 Neels Britz—whose nom de plume is Baba Africa—, Jonathan Comerford, John Fullalove—whose nom de plume is Nikolaas de Kat—, Lyn Gilbert, Dick Grobler, Piet Grobler, Jo Harvey, Marna Hattingh, Robert Hichens, Natalie Hinrichsen, Tamsin Hinrichsen, Nicolaas Maritz, Padraic O'Meara, Véronique Tadjo, Geoffrey Walton, Teresa Williams and Judy Woodborne.

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against the trunk of a palm-tree near a river, surrounded by a panther, a crocodile, a flamingo, a green lizard, a crab, a butterfly, a monkey, three colourful birds in the trees and in the background, behind the forest, two giraffes. All the animals look at the man without any aggressivity while he seems to be dreaming. The picture shows us a world where all species could live together. It may also appear as a figuring of what the children are going to read, which is within the smiling black man's mind and is composed of all the animals and nature surrounding him. In both cases it suggests connections between the human and the nonhuman world, a connection here established by stories and storytelling. Collective wisdom is transmitted through stories staging animals, trees, natural elements and men who are guided through those tales. Mingling real nature and magic, those stories are deeply rooted in African nature and while showing the dangers and gifts of nature, they lead young readers or listeners onto a path of life so that he/she might be aware of his connection with the rest of the world. From myths of creation to moral fables, the stories chosen by Nelson Mandela are full of animals—birds, hyenas, mantas, hares, cats, spiders, and many more. Even a tick, this small insect, regarded as a parasite by human beings, is the animal chosen by the moon to deliver a message to people as "Moon wanted the people to know this truth: 'Just as I die and come alive again, so you shall die and live again.'"21 This message, which connects life and death, is also given by European and Native American writers.

Animals and Nature to heal children George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind and James Barrie's Peter Pan Animals and nature in general tell young children about life, life from beginning to end since even the theme of death may be tackled and softened by its association with the natural world. In George MacDonald's tale At the Back of the North Wind (1871), written after the author's son's death, the young hero Diamond, who is seriously ill and dies at the end of the tale, makes a wonderful journey "at the back of the North Wind," and when he is dying, he is going to discover that country at the back of the 21 "The message," "a Nama variation of how death came into the world, retold here by poet, novelist and short-story writer George Weideman," translated by Margaret Auerbach (in Mandela 23). The Nama are an African ethnic group of South Africa, Namibia and Bostwana. George Weideman (1947-2008) was a South African poet and writer.

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North Wind since during his journey, North Wind, a character who is a natural element, had told him that he only saw the shadow of that country and its reality would appear to him after his death. So disease and death are metamorphosed by the language of the tale into a beautiful journey meant to take suffering and fear out of the hearts of those who live the life of the author and his son. In James Barrie's Peter Pan (1911),22 also written after the death of a child, reality gives way to an imaginary journey, above the real world here again, to an imaginary island, Neverland. Peter Pan is supposed to take dead children on a path beyond this life: Mrs. Darling did not know, but after thinking back into her childhood she just remembered a Peter Pan who was said to live with the fairies. There were odd stories about him, as that when children died he went part of the way with them, so that they should not be frightened. (J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan, 14)

Tales using nature and natural elements transmit to the child a way of reading the world, of discovering its beauty and of facing its hardness. Healing tales thus appeared in Victorian England and they also appear in Native American children's books.

N. Scott Momaday's Circle of Wonder In N. Scott Momaday's Christmas tale, Circle of Wonder (2001), it is animals that are instruments of resilience for the child who recently lost his grandfather. The story starts in the house of Tolo's parents on Christmas Eve. Tolo is a mute child and his life changes after the moment when, during the procession, he thinks he sees his grandfather. Before his death, the old man had taken him to a place where he had shown him wild animals. He follows his grandfather who takes him to the foot of a mountain; it is this place, the Circle of Wonder, that gives the tale its title; several animals appear there: an eagle (a symbol of vision for Native Americans), an elk and a wolf. All of them bear a mortal scar, and yet the child, with his grandfather, sees them as living creatures. During Christmas time animals tell the child another story coming from the Native American world, allowing him to recover his voice. The frontier between life and death, reality and dreams is blurred since the boy walks with his grandfather who is dead, and at the end, he wakes up, letting his readers 22 The character of Peter Pan first appeared in the novel The Little White Bird in 1902.

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suppose that it was a dream. But the dream changed things since the boy now speaks. In the presence of the animals, the latter do not speak but he, the dumb boy, speaks to them: "Old Elk, please share with me the gift of fire" (Momaday 1999, 31). It is his voice that transforms the silence of the night: "Each time he spoke Tolo's voice rose like a song upon the deep silence of the night" (35). The child and the animals draw a "circle of wonder around the real gift of fire. […] Tolo knew then that he had been led to the centre of the Holy Season. He thought again of his grandfather, who, he knew it, was near among the trees, and of his parents, and of the Christ child, who had come to live the ten days of Christmas in his home. Never before had Tolo's heart been so full of joy" (36). It is the meeting with the animals, offered as a gift by his grandfather coming back to life through a dream that is not presented as a dream, that heals the child and gives his voice back to him by bringing him back to his origins. When he speaks to the animals, living again because of his presence, he recovers the missing part in himself and his voice can be heard again. To the spiritual dimension of Christmas time in the Christian tradition, is added the spiritual Native vision of the world. The transformation of the child, unable to speak to his parents at the beginning of the tale, reveals the healing quality of the meeting with the animals. The meeting with his grandfather was not enough to heal the child; his grandfather had to be a guide, only visible in his dreams, leading him to the sources of his own self in a world that reminds him both of his own life and of Native mythical or totemic animals. The three animals bring the image of life in death to the child, the image of the absence of separation between life and death. The last sentence of the tale reveals that, in his mind, the child has united the three dimensions of reality, myth and dreams in his acceptance of mystery: "His spirit wheeled above the great meadow and the mountains, his loneliness was borne with the wild strength of a great elk, and he sang of his whole being with a voice that carried like the cry of a wolf. Qtsedaba" (40). He is at once the eagle, the elk and the wolf, who gave him their vital strength through a visionary dialogue. The tale suggests that resilience comes from the awareness of an absence of separation between the world of the living and the world of the dead, between everyday life and sacredness; animals reveal to the child the truth found in the circle of Nature. N. Scott Momaday's tale meets Karine Lou Matignon's experience when she says that she has "tattooed mythical Pegasus on [her] shoulder, this winged horse born from Medusa's blood, whom [her] grandfather, once he was dead, took [her] to meet in [her] dreams. Like a secret link

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between our two worlds."23 A body painting telling a Greek myth celebrates a spiritual experience secretly linking the world of the living and the world of the dead through a mythical animal. As in Momaday's tale, where the boy's grandfather guides the child to a meeting with real but dead animals, Karine Lou Matignon evokes her own experience expressed on her body by the likeness of a mythical animal. Whether in a poetic tale or in a real autobiographical experience narrated in a book where scientists and artists meet, we can see healing animals secretly speaking about resilience. Animals heal men and they also indicate to the medical world a way of communication. As Boris Cyrulnik put it, "a symptom is a proposition of communication."24 Animals propose a language, from myths to medicine, which men can only interpret if they do not reject otherness or if they do not consider animals only as food and useful objects. When Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in The Little Prince (1943), created the dialogue between the little prince and the fox about responsibility, he chose an animal to give the message: "You become responsible forever for what you've tamed." Of course, the word "tame" is defined as a reduction: "reduced from a state of native wildness especially so as to be tractable and useful to humans" (Merriam Webster).25 The English word supposes a reduction of wildness for the use of human beings. It is a little different with the French word "apprivoiser," which may explain the philosophical dimension of the assertion more logically. Of course, the little prince tames the rose and makes it useful to him as he can admire its beauty day after day. The wildness of the rose has been reduced to a human use through gardening. But what about the fox? It speaks to the little prince and yet it remains a free fox, the one who explains to the little boy the weight of responsibility towards a nonhuman creature you have tamed. In French, the language in which Saint-Exupéry wrote the tale before it was translated into three hundred languages, the word is apprivoiser, which etymologically means "to make something private" (Littré). So, the kind of taming alluded to is an allegorical one suggesting that the rose, like the fox, has entered the little prince's intimate space. It does not mean he deprives them of their freedom in order to use them. It means they are now linked through his interior world, through 23

Karine Lou Matignon 96 ("J’ai tatoué le mythique Pégase sur mon épaule, ce cheval ailé né du sang de Méduse, que mon grand-père, une fois décédé, m'emmenait rencontrer avec lui dans mes rêves. Comme un secret entre nos deux mondes," translation mine). 24 Boris Cyrulnik, in Karine Lou Matignon 110 ("Un symptôme est une proposition de communication," translation mine). 25 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tame, accessed April 12, 2017.

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friendship. Boris Cyrulnik underlines the universality26 of a language uniting men and animals: "Il semble exister un langage universel entre toutes les espèces, une sorte de bande passante sensorielle qui nous associe aux bêtes."27 When reading books in which there are animals, animals speaking or animals having a different behaviour from the one they know in reality, young readers can only be curious. The world of children's literature is a mysterious space, guiding children both in an imaginary world that liberates them and sometimes heals them, and in our real everyday world in which each element creating surprise is meant to make them ask themselves questions, to arouse their curiosity or to give them hope. All tales ask the child one thing before all: to open his/her eyes on the world; nature, sometimes even science in the middle of the imaginary, and guide him towards the awareness of life. All tales remind children of SaintExupéry's sentence in The Little Prince: "You can see rightly only with your heart, essential things are invisible to the eyes" (Saint-Exupéry, my translation). Children's books open a space of dreams, allowing an escape from reality that is at the same time an exploration of the world. Tales staging speaking animals may also convey a medical reality since animals are used to heal autistic children and the results obtained thanks to meetings between children and dolphins or horses among others are surprising. Even the medical world now acknowledges the healing power of animals and zootherapy, riding therapy, dolphin therapy programs, are more widely used than in the recent past. I lived a surprising and beautiful experience with a she-cat having real healing powers and being able to detect the spot she had to heal. She had healed me several times thanks to massages on the spot that was painful. But one day she practised her massage on a spot corresponding to a meridian point—according to the technique used in acupuncture or aromatherapy—linked to a particular organ. She made a headache disappear by massaging under my arm. Later on, a bioenergetician said to me that the spot corresponded to the small intestine. The scientific tests that followed confirmed the cat's diagnosis. The doctor acknowledged that she had found the problem before him. The power of cats, whose contact lowers blood pressure and absorbs negative energy28 has been acknowledged for a long time. And doctors recognize 26

The word "universal", often controversial, should not be so if it was taken in its etymological sense, from the Latin unus vertere, "to turn as one body." 27 Boris Cyrulnik, in Karine Lou Matignon 114 ("it seems that there exists a universal language between all species, a sort of sensorial loop linking us to animals," translation mine). 28 See Allison Daniels, Le chat Feng Shui. Paris: Fammarion, 2001.

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that dogs can detect some cancers before human beings. If animals can heal children, it is perhaps because the animal, first seen on the pages of books, leads the young reader to make acquaintance with the animal world while revealing the child to himself or herself in his/her relationship to the other, to the one who is different and in whom he recognizes himself/ herself. Children's books may also be a way of learning reading and the learning of letters makes children see the link between writing and nature.

Alphabets and word lists to learn Nature: Polar nature and men's relation to it Ted Harrison's A Northern Alphabet is an original way for Inuit (and non-Inuit) children to learn the alphabet together with Arctic life but also to think about the telescoping of the traditional life and technological aggressions of the Arctic landscape.29 The way the book is presented at the very end equates this alphabet book with home: This alphabet book was created by one of the Yukon's most famous and beloved artists, Ted Harrison. In A Northern Alphabet, children of the North will find a little piece of home in its pages, and children from everywhere else can experience the beauty of a Northern year. (Ted Harrison, last page)

Every letter is introduced through one or two short sentences containing words starting with the letter. The coloured drawing accompanying the short text presents the child with an Arctic scene. So, while discovering the letters of the alphabet, the child discovers his own environment: he learns that he lives in the Arctic (letter A), which belongs to Canada (letter C introducing the flag of Canada) and that he/she is an Inuit child (letter I). The children from the rest of the world learn the name of those people living in the Arctic. The letters give children the opportunity to discover Arctic landscapes, with snow, mountains, icebergs, and Northern lights; they also discover animals since one or several animals are present in each scene: domestic animals—like the husky, necessary to their life— and wild animals, who are often mingled in the same scene: in the scene 29

Ted Harrison was born in England in 1926, and after teaching in several countries, he moved to Canada. He died in 2015. See https://tedharrison.ca/pages/ about, accessed May 2nd, 2017. His personal archives are at the University of Victoria's Library. A biography of the artist was made by Katherine Gibson in 2009, Ted Harrison: Painting Paradise (Victoria: Crown Publications, 2009).

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illustrating the letter B, "Brenda and Billy being chased by a bear," beside the bear, there is a beaver cutting a small tree in the left-hand corner of the picture and birds flying in the sky; with the letter C, "above the cabin flies the flag of Canada," there is a cat in the foreground and a moose in the background. Letter D mixes the Inuit children's activities and the animal world since "the ducks watch the children do a dance." Together with two ducks, there is a dog also watching them. Migrating birds, rabbits, a killer whale jumping behind "Kate and Kevin kissing behind the kayak," a "lonely loon float[ing] past the lemming," a moose, a trout, a "wet walrus [that] watches the whales," this is a world full of life that appears there. The mixing of some cultural elements like the presence of a yukulele—an instrument from Hawaii—or a xylophone —which has its origins in Europe and Africa—suggests the fact that the Inuit are no longer an isolated people but that they are connected with the rest of the world. The pictures and words introducing children to letters mingle three elements: nature, traditions and modern technology. Nature is present in all the pictures, and the colours and circular lines suggest the energy contained in nature. Many animals show the coexistence of the humans and nonhumans; moreover, each ecosystem is underlined: the mountains, the snow and ice with the icebergs and igloo: "The Inuit children are interested in a new igloo." The letter M shows a little girl, "Mary [running] by a moose munching in the muskeg." The beautiful picture shows two ecosystems: the mountain in the background and the muskeg in the foreground with the moose at the centre of the picture, lit by the moonlight. The Northern lights, typical of Arctic and Northern meteorological phenomena illustrate the letter N. Along with the importance given to nature, the Inuit's activities are shown: wood cutting appearing in the first picture with a character—"Alex [who] lives in the Arctic"—holding a small axe while walking towards three dry trees; hunting since on the page illustrating the letter G with "Georgie greeting his grandmother," we can see that the character holds a gun and on a stick, two dead rabbits are hanging, while a flight of migrating birds passes above the scene. Fishing appears to illustrate the letter T: "Trapper Tom had three frozen trout." In another picture, animals are hanging from a wooden bar. Inuit traditional activities are shown: dance—traditional dance watched by the ducks to illustrate letter D and imported dance such as the jig to illustrate letter J; sports like hockey for letter H; traditional activities like quilting for letter Q, traditional modes of transport: kayak, for K, sled for S. But the pictures also show modern vehicles like a paddle wheeler or planes flying over several scenes. The modern world is present from the first page with a plane flying over the character who is going to

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cut wood; letter E introduces "electric light" and electric pylons appear to the right of the house at the foot of the mountain. Two pictures that are facing each other evoke oil extraction in the Arctic. The letter O is introduced through the simple sentence "The owl can see the oil rig from the outhouse." The blue colour dominating most of the pictures appearing so far is replaced by the red colour giving some violence to the picture. The ground is red, the green sky is as if barred by three wide red or orange stripes. The sad-looking grey owl appears quite isolated in an environment dominated by the outhouse at the centre, the oil rig in the background and a blue empty oil tin lying on the ground. The beautiful natural landscape of the previous pages is replaced by a landscape where the world of oil extraction literally bars nature. This is emphasized in the following picture: there is some discrepancy between the text—"The man in the red parka is passing the paddle wheeler"—and the picture. The two elements mentioned in the text—the man in the red parka and the paddle wheeler— are there but the picture is chiefly occupied by a wide pink space which has nothing natural about it and in the middle of that space, there is a pipe, which might have been mentioned in the text since the text concerns the letter P. But it is not, as if it was voluntarily erased and shown at the same time, as if the child learning the letters should learn important words and be aware of what the Arctic landscape is in some places. But the absence of any mention of the pipeline, reflected in a dark blue pool which is probably a pool of oil, beside an empty bowl and an empty bucket, suggests a negative transformation of the landscape. The author of the text erases the pipeline, as the beautiful natural landscape seen in the previous pages is erased by the pipeline and the extraction of oil. The letter Y allows the author to evoke gold diggers "beside the Yukon River" and the last page of the book, about the letter Z, shows a natural Arctic landscape with three Inuit on the white snowy landscape, blue mountains in the distance and footsteps in the snow leading to yellow buildings: "In zero weather, Zach makes a zigzag path to the zinc mine." The end of the book insists on the extraction of resources: oil, gold and zinc. It is as if the author of this Northern Alphabet superimposed two texts: the simple text introducing letters through precisely chosen words, often hard ones and not the most common ones for a child. If "Arctic," "anorak," "Inuit" or "igloo" are words we might expect, or "dance," "snow," "flame," "fish," or "duck" are simple words, such words as "muskeg," "oil rig" or "paddle wheeler" are much more surprising and more complex for a child learning the letters of the alphabet. The book ending on a character making "a zigzag path to the zinc mine" becomes symbolical. It ends on a path leading to the exploitation of the Arctic without saying it. The word

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zigzag, apart from allowing the child to learn the letter Z, appears like a reflection and distortion at the same time of traditional Indian symbolism. The zigzag associated with the flash of lightning appears on the page introducing the letter L—"The lonely loon floats past the lemming," a text sounding like a poetic line. On that page, the few human objects, a spoon, a lamp and logs on which the lemming is resting, are integrated in wild nature. At the end, the human zigzag leading the character and the young reader's eyes to the zinc mine shows human constructions standing for the exploitation of natural resources dividing the natural landscape. The zigzag, so often present in Native American art and handicraft, either on jewels or pottery or baskets, is drawn in the snow by human footsteps. But instead of representing nature as is the case for those geometrical motifs standing for flashes of lightning or mountains, it is a path leading to a mine, to a human construction hurting nature by digging holes in it and extracting the resources from its ground. The aim of this alphabet book as expressed on the last page makes this particular form of writing, the first written book a child can discover, a piece of home for Inuit children and an experience of beauty for all the others. Ted Harrison thus proposes several ways to awareness through the simple discovery of the letters of the alphabet: awareness of Inuit identity, awareness of the beauty of the North and awareness of the threats weighing on those beautiful landscapes; all that is present in this little book. The words opening his internet site explain that double vision of the North, both wonderfully beautiful with all its natural colours, and dark: Life is a rainbow road, multicoloured with the most brilliant hues and contrasting with the darkest tones. It is illuminated by the light of success, and rutted by the tracks of failure. Tears of sadness and joy wash its surface while the clouds of doubt and insecurity dapple its course. As we traverse this highway we can reach the highest pinnacles or descend to the darkest valleys. Finally, when the end of the road is in sight, we may cast our eyes to the distant horizon where everything began; and say with conviction, "That sure was one hell of a journey."30

It is that contrast between the "rainbow road" and the "darkest tone" that he shows to young children who, while learning the alphabet, will discover life, its beauty and its hardness or dangers.

30

Ted Harrison, https://tedharrison.ca/pages/about, accessed May 2nd, 2017.

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The very typographical choice of the words in bold letters is significant. To teach letters to children, he should have underlined all the words starting with the letters presented. It is not the case. This shows that it is not only the letter that he wants to show them but the important things they will face in their Northern life. All the names are in bold characters, which shows the importance of the name, of the child's or man's or woman's identity. He is not a Native and the names are English names but his vision of things meets that of Natives. The underlining of some words, whereas others starting with the same letter are in standard characters, leads the young reader towards what is important: his name, nature and particularly animals, traditions, particularly dance, home—Arctic, Canada, igloo, family links—grandmother, mother, uncle—, the progress of the modern world like vaccination but also its dangers like the exploitation of resources: oil rig and zinc mine are emphasized whereas the letter is the first letter of oil and zinc; but what he wants to emphasize is the compound word that makes sense and designates the transformation of the landscape. That way of working on those small texts is accompanied with beautiful pictures showing both the beauty of the colours of the North and the worrying transformation of the landscape. Ted Harrison's alphabet book shows that any form of book creation can warn people from their earliest childhood. This alphabet book, like his whole work, appears as "a testament to the influence of place and the power of imagination," as Katherine Gibson said.31 J. Patrick Lewis, the 2011 American Children's Poet Laureate and Winner of the National Council of Teachers of English, who published a hundred children's books including many books of poems,32 wrote a little book entitled My Home on the Ice, belonging to a series of books about animal habitats.33 This book presents children with life in the polar regions, the Arctic and the Antarctic. Each couple of pages is composed of a word or group of words appearing as a title in big wave-shaped capital letters in a gradation of blue and below it is a quatrain, on the left page. On the right page, there is a photograph illustrating the title of the left page: the habitat, that is to say Arctic ice floating on water on the title page and 31

Katherine Gibson, "Curator's Statement," Ted Harrison: Painting Paradise, Leegacy Art Gallery and Café, University of Victoria, August 19 to November 29, 2009, http://uvac.uvic.ca/gallery/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Catalog.indd_.pdf 32https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/69692, accessed May 12, 2017. 33 Among them, My home in the desert, My Home in the Rainforest or My Home in the Water. The Poetry Foundation named the author, J. Patrick Lewis the third U.S. children 's Poet Laureate. (24)

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the first page, and Arctic animals are on the others. In one corner of the photograph, there is a white cloud-shaped balloon explaining the animal's relationship with its habitat and its life in the Arctic. Thus, the child discovers a she-white bear and her three cubs on the ice on the cover, then after the presentation of the habitat, successively the emperor penguin, the polar bear, the Weddell seal, the Arctic fox, the Antarctic krill and the snowy albatross. The last couple of pages present children with "icy homes" and show an iceberg with the various animals presented before, on or around it. Some illustrations are photographs whereas others are photomontages with a real photograph as the background and an isolated animal borrowed from another photograph and placed on the background to give the effect of a close-up allowing the child to better discover the animal. This is the case of the Arctic fox and the albatross. The last pages are more classically didactic with a table taking up the animals presented and giving some scientific information about them, which answers these three questions: "How big am I?" "How much do I weigh?" and "What do I eat?" (20-21). The last two pages are devoted to the habitat with some humour in the title: "ice…the freezing facts" concerning the very low temperature in the Arctic tundra, the fact that "during the winter months, it's dark 24 hours a day" and "in the summer, the sun never sets!" (22). The page also evokes the few animals who can live there because of the cold. It explains what permafrost is and speaks about the extinct animals found there like woolly mammoths. And it ends on the different appearance of the tundra in summer when "[t]he ground is covered with colorful wildflowers that grow in the top layer of the soil" (22). Thus in one page and five entries, the child can have a good idea of polar life and the organization of the book makes information easy to memorize. Facing that page, a glossary explains a few words. Together with the scientific information given to make the child know about the habitat and the animals' relationship to it, the poem adds another dimension. The text in the balloon on the photograph or the photomontage gives a factual explanation, the photograph reveals the beauty of that nature and the poem introduces a subjective dimension meant to lead the child to awareness. It starts with humour with the emperor penguin: This birdie was missing a part— Doctors noticed no knees on her chart. But she knows how to flap with a flipper. A butler with wings—pretty smart!

There is a mixture of information and humour since the word "flipper" in bold characters is explained in the glossary, while the final

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anthropomorphization, with the human comparison, allows the child to learn things merrily. An interesting fact is also that there is an alternation between the third person and the first person since in some cases the author gives the animal a voice. This is the case for the polar bear, who, being also the subject chosen for the cover of the book, seems to take the role of a spokesperson. The progression from the cover photograph to the photograph—two real ones—presented on the page devoted to him (9) is already a way of making the child aware of the threat weighing on this animal. The cover illustration shows a bear family in an icy area. The family is in the foreground and one can note that the mother seems wellfed and the three cubs, leaning on her side, seem quiet. This is very different on the page illustrating the "polar bear." There is an isolated bear, with sad, desperate eyes, alone on his small ice raft in the middle of the water. To the beauty and peace of the initial family image, the author opposes the reality of the situation now, which is emphasized by the poem: I am the king of the icebergs, Standing tall in my white fur coat, Alone on the melting sea ice, Trying to stay afloat. (8)

The phrase "sea ice," in bold characters, is explained in the glossary and the balloon gives a factual piece of information: "A polar bear can smell prey from up to 20 miles away" (9). But the child can only be struck by the terrible image of that solitary animal who seems lost in the middle of the sea. The quatrain starts with the classical well-known image of the polar bear as the "king of the icebergs," but whereas the first two lines present the child with the near mythical image, the last two lines show the sad reality: the melting sea ice and the loneliness of the animal. The last line—"Trying to stay afloat"—reflects reality and is symbolical at the same time. The bear seen there on his "melting sea ice" is really trying to stay afloat, that is to stay alive as an individual. But we can also interepret this as its species trying to stay afloat. It is a way for the author to suggest that his species is threatened and the shift from the family on the cover to the lonely bear in the new reality of the presentation should lead the child to question himself/herself about the necessity of preventing the disappearance of polar bears. This bear appears as if he was the last of his species. So in this very small children's book, thanks to the association of real photographs, photomontages, scientific information and poems, the author leads the young reader to become aware through a triple process: first he/she can see the beauty of the natural world, secondly he/she can

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understand the connection between nonhuman creatures and their habitat and last but not least, he/she will become aware of reality and of the dangers threatening some species. The child reading that book will discover the world, learn many things and think about his own role in that world. It seems to suggest the equation: to see and to know are the equivalent of action.

Life in the world through animal meetings: Arctic life in Tomson Highway's children's tales Tomson Highway, a Cree award-winning playwright and novelist from Manitoba, wrote several illustrated children's books, all bilingual, in English and Cree, and all centred on one or several animals. All of them tell stories of the same family and particularly of the brothers Joe and Cody and their dog Ootsie. The fact of taking the same characters in every story allows the young reader to identify with one of the brothers and to follow their adventures as if they were his own. Caribou Song, first published in 2001, tells the story of Joe and Cody following the caribou all year long, playing music and dancing to entice the caribou, until thousands of caribou can hear their call and the boys become part of a magical adventure. The beginning of the tale situates the characters in their environment, a family living in the far north: "Joe and Cody lived with their mama, their papa, and Codie's black dog, Ootsie. They lived too far north for most trees. Most of the year the lakes and islands and rivers and hills were covered in snow" (Highway, Caribou Song, n.p.). The illustrations by the painter John Rombough, from the Dene people, whose work was featured at the 2010 Olympic Games, are part of the magic of the tale. The many jewel-like spots of colours give the impression of a magic landscape. The illustrations show the child a world that is his own Native world mingling the reality of a "sled pulled by eight huskies," wild animals, caribou and birds, everyday family life—with the two boys' parents "sitting near the fire, drinking tea"—on the one hand, and the landscape's supernatural dimension on the other. The trees framing some of the illustrations have human faces and seem to look down on the young boys, suggesting the animist perception of nature. They are surrounded by real trees and the spirits of the trees. The whole tale is centred on the relationship between this First Nation family and caribou, as the tale starts with the assertion that "[a]ll year long, they followed the caribou." This shows young readers first that caribou are vital to them and secondly that men's life is closely connected with the presence of caribou. But it is not an introduction to the theme of hunting. The coming of the

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caribou is provoked by songs and dance and when they arrive it is like an epiphany. By mingling nature and music as in its title, the tale reveals the harmony existing between humans and nonhumans, harmony being conveyed by an association of shapes: the trees with human faces and the way the dance for the caribou is described. Joe says to his brother: "You dance with your arms like antlers." And then "Cody raised his arms to look like antlers." He seems to be in communion with caribou when he "danced like a little caribou." The boy dancing reproduces the animal shape, thus suggesting a communion between humans and animals. This may also be connected with the Inukshuk, or "men of stone," placed in the Arctic by Inuit hunters when they hunt for caribou. In the tale, when the herd of caribou arrives, they are associated with other natural elements: "Faster than lightning, a thousand caribou burst from the forest. Two thousand caribou ran between the cooking fire and the boys. Ten thousand caribou filled the meadow like a lake." The metaphorical frame of natural elements—lightning and water—makes the caribou the very essence of Arctic nature uniting opposed to elements like fire—the fire of the sky and the quiet everyday "cooking fire"—and water, and also uniting fire and earth. The caribou herd is presented as a fluid element, "a lake," a sea of life in which the boys seem to swim—"seemed to float right through the herd—, a "river of caribou" and finally "a trickle." Taken in the flow of running caribou that they have called with their songs, music and dance, the two boys end the story in joy, "laughing and laughing and laughing." This seems to convey the joy of sharing an exceptionial relationship with nature through traditions (dance and music, the name of the accordion given both in English and in Cree even in the English text: "the kitoochigan"). Tomson Highway's tale, like all children's tales, is both an educative entertaining book and an initiatory journey leading Cree children to their own world and showing all children, either Cree or non Cree, the close connection existing, through Cree traditions and spirituality, between human life and nature. The story, the illustrations, the metaphors and comparisons, everything shows an Arctic world where nothing is separated, and it shows that life is possible only if that sense of connections is understood. At the end of the tale, the boys' voice is echoed by "the voice of the herd." And the reality of a concrete gesture is associated with the spiritual revelation: "And the boys opened their arms to embrace the spirit." Perched on their rocks, the two boys seem to be rooted in the solidity of the Arctic land, looking at the immemorial journey of migrating caribou. The same family appears in Dragonfly Kites, first published in 2002, and published in 2016 with illustrations by Julie Flett, an award-winning

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illustrator with a Cree-Metis ancestry. This tale is "the second book in the Magical Songs of the North Wind Trilogy" as is said in the paratext. The two brothers and their dog, first presented in the text through family relationships, and in the illustrations through their natural environment, are shown through their close relationship to nature and more particularly to animals. A very brief text is meant to guide young readers on the way to wonder and awareness. The close relationship existing between the children and animals appears from the start since we read that Ootsie the dog "was almost a person." This connection with animals also appears in the boys' will of "making friends" with rabbits, squirrels and even ants, but also in the fact that, by "making pets of" or "making friends with" baby animals—a baby Arctic tern, a baby loon and two baby eagles—, they make those young animals their nonhuman doubles. And from making pets of the Arctic tern and the loon, to making friends with the young eagles, there is the first progression, from a relationship of domination and taming of the young nonhuman creatures by the young humans, to a relationship of friendship, hence of equality with the baby eagles. As the eagle is a symbol of vision in Native American symbolism, it is not surprising that the appearance of the eagles in the text should lead the children to see the world in another way. For it is after the eagle story that the dragonflies appear. They are two, like the baby eagles, and in spite of their smallness in reality, they occupy a wide space on the illustrated page as in the tale. First changed into kites by the two boys who catch them and "tie" them to a thread borrowed from their mother's sewing kit, they are in the situation of prisoners until they get free from the boys' artificial link, to be linked to them in another way since when they fly above the lake, the children wave them goodbye as if to show they have understood the sense of freedom. And when, on the following page, the text reads "It was time to go to bed," the illustration shows the two sleeping boys and the two dragonflies outside the tent as if watching over them or representing their dream made real. The last double pages describe the two boys' dream: In their dreams, the boys still ran behind their kites. They ran down the beach and into the water. They hopped from wave to wave. They bounced over islands and leaped over forests. The dragonflies soared high above at the end of long long strings. (Highway, Dragonfly Kites, n.p.)

The landscape, which is absent from the text at the beginning of the tale and present in the illustrations, now reappears from another angle of vision. The boys are no longer rooted in their landscape as was the case before. They fly over it in the wake of the two dragonflies. But there is still a change in the last pages. The dominating colour of the illustrations

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changes since the cold blue colour of the lake is replaced by the warm orange, "gold and pink" colours of a sunset: "Joe and Cody dreamed they jumped so high that they didn't come down. Off they flew with their dragonfly kites into the gold and pink of the the northern sunset, laughing and laughing. Until it was time to get up." The use of a similar phrase— "Off they flew"—a few pages before, to describe the moment when the dragonflies fly free (on the last page), to speak about the boys' oneiric space, is a discrete way of showing children the sense of freedom revealed to the boys by the two insects they wanted to transform into kites, that is to say into objects. Thus in a symbolical tale and with a very short and dense text, Tomson Highway, with the beautiful illustrations by Julie Flett, teaches young readers a lot of things and the knowledge he transmits to the young reader is of three sorts: first, on a factual level, young readers will learn what life looks like in Arctic regions; they will learn the names of animals—rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks (typically Canadian animals), Arctic terns, loons, eagles, ants and dragonflies. They will also learn about human activities in the Arctic, like fishing, since the boys' parents are said to be fishing at the beginning of the tale. Secondly he transmits to them the knowledge of their Indianness, through a bilingual text in English and in Cree, through the translation of the name they gave one of the eagles: "They named one Misigoo, which means "eagle" in Cree. The other they named Wasigoo, which doesn't mean anything but rhymes with Misigoo." Through the boys' frenzy of naming sticks that they imagine as characters or animals, Tomson Highway shows children the importance of the name for Native people, as Scott Momaday said in The Names.34 At the same time, he reminds them of the importance of their language and when evoking the second Cree-sounding name without any meaning, there is still a double dimension since together with the humour of the remark, the idea of two rhyming words leads children on the way to poetry and shows the musicality of the Cree language. As for the eagles, the last animals appearing before the dragonflies, they seem to be the instruments of vision, as they are in Native American symbolism. So the tale educates young children on their Cree culture. And there is a third level of knowledge, a philosophical and ecological one at the same time, leading young readers to wonder at the beauty of the world and, as said in the paratext, encouraging them and "us all to remember that the best things in life are, indeed, free." Thus a short tale can teach a lot about a child's 34 N. Scott Momaday said that the storyteller Pohd-Lohk who had given him his Kiowa name, "believed that a man’s life proceeds from his name, in the way that a river proceeds from its source," N. Scott Momaday, The Names, before the prologue, no page numbers.

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culture but is also a vision of the world that does not separate the human and the nonhuman but always links them, as the thread from the mother's sewing kit linked the boys to the dragonflies. But the thread had to remain a symbol and the dragonflies had to remain free like the boys in the end. Fox on the Ice (2011) is different insofar as it is entirely rooted in Arctic reality without any oneiric or magic elements. But like the other tales, it is multilayered. It still depicts the same family as they go fishing on the ice. The first part of the tale gives young readers didactic information about traditional fishing in the Arctic. The two brothers' father's fishing is included in a family scene of joy starting with a picnic and "a big lunch of bannock baked over the fire, broiled whitefish right out of the lake." The connection is established from the start between nature and people's life since their life depends on the fish in the lake. Then indications about fishing—the "holes in the ice," the net, the hook and "the long piece of wood called a jigger"—teach young readers about traditional fishing in the Arctic. The objects are described carefully before the boys' father's gestures are described in turn. The realistic element of traditional fishing ends on a poetic description showing that, even when using nature for a living, the fisherman is aware of its beauty: "The glimmering, emerald-green net stretches out. Sunlight shining through the ice made it look like lace. Seeing the net dancing nearby, trout, whitefish, even pike, swam over to take a look." The fishing movement becomes a dance and the beauty of light and colours reflected in Brian Deines' illustration shows a world full of life and energy. And then after a page simply evoking the peaceful scene of Cody and his father setting off to the second hole in the ice and Ootsie the dog leaping and barking merrily, there is a change brought about by the adverb "suddenly" introducing a "stranger:" "Suddenly, the sled dogs woke up. They had smelled a stranger. On the other side of the lake sat a fox, her fur as bright as flames. She sat perfectly still, sniffing the delicious lunch smells that lingered in the air" (Fox on the Ice, n.p.). The eponymous fox painted on a full page in a quiet attitude, appears as a transitional element of both suspense and revelation. Stillness has changed sides. The quiet family scene of the picnic and fishing is followed by a "perfectly still" fox simply "sniffing the delicious lunch smells." The reality of the lunch smells is going to take another dimension. From that moment onwards, everything speeds up since the huskies run after the fox with the sled with Joe and the brothers' mother in the sled. The agitation and danger of the scene are opposed to the quietness of the fox: "The fox just yawned, shook herself, and wandered off. She didn't even give the dogs a second look." This fox, which constitutes the title of the tale though, disappears and will never reappear.

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If she is the eponymous character while she only appears on two pages of the text and in only one illustration, which is also the cover of the book, it is because she has more than a realistic function. Of course she evokes Arctic natural life. But from the moment that she appears she introduces anguish, panic and a rapidity of action contrasting with the slow movement of fishing. The whirl provoked by the rapidity of the huskies' race also appears in the father's head as he has "a problem:" "If he didn't scoop the jigger out of the hole, it would just keep moving under the ice. Then he would lose both his jigger and his net. But if he waited for the jigger, he would lose Mama and Joe." The question "What should I do?" is a question the father asks himself as well as a question asked of the young reader. This is a way of teaching him to see the essentials. Of course "Papa decided. He cursed the fox and ran after the sled." The emergence of wildlife into the quiet family scene generates a revelation about what is essential. The father's decision brings about the happy ending since "Cody and Papa caught up with the sled" and "Cody hugged Joe. Papa hugged Mama." The decision opens onto a scene of love reminding the young reader that what matters is life and love. The tale ends on joy and dancing once again since Ootsie, the dog, has saved the net: "the dog was dancing with joy, but no sound came out of him. His teeth were clamped on the net. He had saved it!" Once again the tale ends on the two boys "laughing and laughing." The tale leads the young reader to multiple knowledge linked with his environment: traditional knowledge through fishing techniques, the knowledge of the beauty of nature appearing in the wonderful description of the lace-like ice in the sunlight and even in the scene of danger, where the jets of snow are compared to "rainbows [that] danced inside them" and where the sled is seen by Cody as "a faraway angel taking off on wings of rainbow snow." A spiritual dimension is discretely added to the awareness of the beauty of nature. Finally the third kind of knowledge given by nature in the form of the eponymous fox whose only action is to sniff the lunch smells, to yawn, to shake herself and to leave, that is nothing very threatening, is knowledge of the essentials. The father has made a good decision by running after the sled to save his wife and son and, as the good decision is made—everything turns out well, since even the net, which is an important element for their life— hence the dilemma for a short moment—has been saved. Animals play a central role in the tale: the fish provide food but they are also admired for their beauty and respected; the husky dogs allow the journey to the source of food but they also cause the incident that obliges the father to make a choice; Ootsie, Cody's dog, replaces the father to save the net and the family's source of living. And the eponymous fox is the

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wild animal that brings about the revelation, the main question: what is essential? A coincidence or not, it is interesting to remember that in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's tale Le Petit Prince, it is also a fox that reveals the essentials to the little prince: "On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux."35 Tomson Highway's Arctic fox is the wild presence teaching young readers the essentials, as Saint-Exupéry's fox is the animal presence leading the child to awareness. Tomson Highway's tales are multilayered and their apparent simplicity, which corresponds to the genre of the children's tale, makes the tale a polyphony where the Cree language echoing the English one makes us hear the Cree voice together with the voice of all the elements of nature living in the text and the illustrations. These tales guide children to show them their relationship with their natural environment, a relationship that encompasses everyday life as well as the spiritual link with nature. Through simple, deep stories, Tomson Highway shows children the sense of belonging: belonging to nature and to their Cree culture is part of the same sense of connection and wondering. It is through that vision of a family's relationship with their environment—a family with human and nonhuman members like the dogs—that Tomson Highway shows young readers the way to wonder and respect, where the hardships of life always end in dance and joy, which are the expression of the family's deep connection to nature.

The transformations of the Canadian landscape seen through Holling C. Holling's Paddle-to-the Sea The Canadian Paddle-to-the Sea by Canadian author Holling C. Holling36 inserts the travels of a sculpted wooden Indian in his small canoe into the world's travels. This is a very well-known children's book published in 1941 and read by a whole generation of school children; it was adapted to the cinema in 1966. As is said by Harry Vandervlist, "[the work] develops a highly inclusive quasi-mythic symbolism of wholeness 35 "You can only see properly with your heart. The essential is invisible to your eyes." Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince [1943], in Œuvres, 474, translation mine. 36 I am indebted to Harry Vandervlist who made me discover this book in a paper he gave in Toulouse at the conference " Les Rencontres de l’humain et du nonhumain dans la littérature de montagne et d'exploration anglophone / Anglophone Mountain and Exploration Writing: Meetings between the Human and Nonhuman", Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, October 14, 2016: "Watershed Literature? Paddle-to-the-Sea and "Minisniwapta: Voices of the River.”"

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and connection. […] Holling knits this ancient symbolic pattern to local Canadian environments."37 Harry Vandervlist evoked the "desire to make the local 'mythological'" and the inclusion of First Nations’ elements "in the character of the model canoe's creator, and in the canoe imagery itself." The tale tells the story of the journey of a toy canoe carved in wood and of the Indian in it called Paddle-to-the-Sea. The reader follows the little wooden Indian through twenty-seven chapters from the moment when the young Indian boy carves the object to the moment when it reaches the sea after a lot of adventures. From the beginning, the tale, both written and illustrated by Holling Clancy Holling, an American author and illustrator (1900-1973),38 establishes connections between the environment and the Indian boy, who is going to be represented by the little Indian in the canoe in a vicarious initiatory journey. Along its journey, the "paddle person" meets the wilderness, human constructions and activities as well as nonhuman creatures. The very beginning of the tale in chapter 1 is a landscape painting uniting the wilderness and the Indian boy: The Canadian wilderness was white with snow. From Lake Superior northward the evergreen trees wore hoods and coats of white. A heavy blanket of cloud hung low across the hills. There was no sound. Nothing moved. Even a thread of gray smoke stood up like a pole, keeping the sky from falling on a log cabin in the valley. Then far off a sound began, grew louder, louder—and swept overhead in a wild cackle of honks and cries. “Geese!” cried the Indian boy standing in the door of the cabin. “They come back too soon. I must hurry to finish my Paddle Person!” (Holling, ch. 1, n.p.)

The introductory presentation links everything, nature and man-made construction, earth and sky united through the thread of smoke solidified into a metaphorical pole to unite the sky and the cabin by protecting the latter. Then the dark interior in which the boy has made the Paddle Person, where the only spots of light are the boy's face and hands, the canoe he has just made, and the skin and painting and tools on the ground, is followed by a luminous page illustrating chapter 2, showing the Canadian landscape from above like a map with Paddle-to-the-Sea and a huge sun lighting the picture and appearing as a background of light. The visual part of the 37

Harry Vandervlist, "Watershed Literature? Paddle-to-the-Sea and 'Minisniwapta: Voices of the River,'" conference "Anglophone Mountain and Exploration Writing: Meetings between the Human and Nonhuman", Toulouse, October 2016, "Book of Abstracts," 7. Also see his article in Caliban 59 (see the bibliography). 38 Holling Clancy Holling received the Commonwealth Club of California Literature Award in 1948 for Seabird.

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book, while telling a story, helps the child to learn the physical and human geography of Canada and its nature. To memorize things, the author transforms some places into animals, vegetables or objects known by the child. They are compared to bowls and represented like bug bowls (ch. 2), Lake Superior, giving the title of chapter 8, "The largest lake in the world," is represented in four pictures gradually evolving to the shape it conjures up, "a wolf's head." Lake Michigan (ch. 17) is represented in two pictures and the caption mentions that "its outline makes a squash with leaves." Lake Huron (ch. 20) "makes the outline of a trapper with a pack of fur" and this is a mnemotechnical way for the child to associate the map of the area and the human activity characterizing it. It is the same for Lake Erie (ch. 22) whose "outline makes a lump of coal," thus reminding the child that the area is characterized by the exploitation of coal: "Tons of white-hot metal lighting the insides of steel mills. Mountains of black coal, ridges of red ore." And facing the description framed by the map of the lake and a "diagram of a lake freighter," the colour illustration represents pure nature, a waterfall occupying the whole page and crossed by a rainbow. Lake Ontario (ch. 23) is represented like the others with a small map at the bottom of the page and on its left, the figurative image it evokes since the "outline makes a carrot," helping the child to remember that "Ontario is a farming country." Along its voyage from Nipigon country to the Atlantic Ocean, Paddle-to-the-Sea meets many human activities practised in every region: it shows timber and sawmills, ships loading and unloading coal, iron ore or boxes of vegetables, fishing nets, and big cities. But it also meets a rich natural world, with animals all along the voyage: the geese coming back in the first chapter are followed by wood mice, white owls, rabbits, two wolves, a wolverine and a weasel visiting it just before its departure as if showing that the wild world is going to accompany the wooden Indian all along its journey. Then it meets beavers, deer, a mink with a fish, a muskrat, a skunk, fish and birds; a warbler alights on the canoe to rest and this saves the little bird's life (ch. 8). In the marsh (ch. 10), lots of animals can be seen: dragonflies, butterflies, turtles, frogs, wild ducks, "woodpeckers, kingfishers and ruffed grouse," ducks and a cow moose. All those animals are not only seen but heard and many sounds are mentioned throughout the book, giving the impression of all the life animating each ecosystem since the toy's journey is the opportunity for the reader to see the life of all the ecosystems appearing between Nipigon country and the ocean throughout Canada and the United States. The adventure of the wooden Indian called by some a "toy" has something deep about it as it seems to meet the history of the country and also its mythical life through its nature as many animals are symbols of clans and

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totems. The final map representing Paddle's journey is ornamented with some Indian motifs, amongst which is a flying goose, as if the initial flying geese and the mythical goose were united in Paddle's initiatory journey. When at the end, the picture shows Paddle standing against the sun while the Indian boy is sitting in his canoe in a parallel line, the young reader understands that Paddle's journey, which lasted several years, prepared the boy's own journey: "You now know the things I have yet to know," he says to Paddle (ch. 27). The ornament that the boy has painted on the canoe and paddle makes Indian myths cross Canadian and American nature. The forest fire shows one of the threats weighing on wild nature and the painting of animals, "from bears to mice," from the smallest ones to the biggest ones, trying to survive, evokes the fragility of nature. This book is a story of initiation and connections. The small wooden canoe and the Indian in it are saved several times by human hands and eyes and the Indian boy who had made it and let it leave, knows it has succeeded when he sees its photograph in a paper. It is also a story telling about the necessity of human links. Whenever Paddle is in danger or its journey may stop, someone takes it, contemplates the idea of keeping it—giving it to a character's daughter or placing it in a museum—, but each time the person understands why the wooden Indian must be put on the water again. At each stage, the person saving the Indian object, adds something to the plate below the canoe. They create a collective writing representing some solidarity and the same way of looking at the world. The book reveals connections in nature, connections between men until the ultimate connection, when the man working on a wharf recognizes, in a photograph in a paper, the small canoe he has saved and the boy working with him recognizes his Paddle Person. This tale is a way of guiding children both to a discovery of Canada, of the First Nations, and of the wilderness and to show the necessity of preserving the beauty and life of nature and of understanding that a person's aim can only be reached if human solidarity and nature help him.

Children's books to show that changing the world is possible: the example of some African and Aboriginal Australian and Canadian children's books A children's book by Aunty Joy Wandin Murphy, senior Wurundjeri elder of the Kulin alliance, Welcome to Country, presents young readers with indigenous Australia, its fauna and flora and its symbols and customs. Angela Crocombe, who is the author of two books on sustainable living, A Lighter Footprint: A Practical Guide to Minimising your Impact on the

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Planet and Ethical Eating: How to Make Food Choices That Won't Cost the Earth, says about it: Welcome to Country is a spectacular celebration of Indigenous land and culture that takes us through a beautiful Wominjeka (welcome) ceremony which gives yannabil (visitors) permission to enter traditional lands. Each community has its own way of welcoming to country, but in this book we learn about the tree sacred to the Wurundjeri–– the River White Gum. We also learn of the creator spirit, Bunjil the eagle.39

Young Australians and all English-speaking children thus discover the original inhabitants of Melbourne, the Wurundjeri people, through this book illustrated by Lisa Kennedy; they learn about their roots, their traditions, their link with nature and the nonhuman world, rivers, trees or animals, real and mythical ones. A book can also be for the child a way of discovering to what extent the history of the world and the history of nature are interrelated, corresponding to one of Laurence Buell's criteria about environmental literature. Thus Gillian Richardson's book 10 Plants that Shook the World, published in 2013, tells how ten particular plants changed the history of the world, sometimes in violent ways, and sometimes to heal it. The book reminds children that wars were waged for the trade and control of trade centres for pepper. The growing of tea, coffee and chocolate generated a race for profit and brought about the replacing of endemic trees by plantations of tea or chocolate. Izak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) speaks about that in Out of Africa.40 She tells the story of her evolution from her cutting down Native trees and the planting of coffee trees to her realizing the damage caused by such a change on the land and her decision to plant new trees to create a new forest. That little book reminds young readers of the impact on native life of plants giving products that are part of their everyday life. Cotton, which has become a basic element in people's everyday life and is used in the medical field, also brought about tragedies as its cultivation is inseparable from slavery. The discovery of rubber was a revolution in technology, allowing the making of tyres thanks to which everybody moves everywhere nowadays. But it also generated a race for profit and was a threat both for the Amazonian forest and for those who defended it. Thus Chico Mendes, a Brazilian rubber tapper and union leader, was murdered in 1988. He had worked to preserve the Amazonian rainforest thanks to 39 40

https://www.readings.com.au/profile/angela-crocombe, accessed May 3, 2017. See part 3, chapter 9.

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"the creation of the National Council of Rubber Tappers and he argued for the creation of forest reserves run by the communities and having the goal of conservation and the valorization of sustainable forest resources."41 When reading the summarized history of some very precise plants that they know, not as plants but as products they use in their lives, young readers may feel like discovering these kinds of historical elements. The very title of this little book, 10 Plants that Shook the World and the use of the verb "to shake," which suggests violent changes whereas the world of plants would rather evoke a quiet life, let young readers guess the weight of some plants on the human history of the world. Taking up those social problems, children's books often suggest that reversing the process and changing the world in a positive way are possible. Some children's books tell the stories of great environmentalists and this is a way for children to see what can be done and at the same time to become aware of the connections those environmentalists showed through their actions and writings. Thus, Jen Cullertton Johnson, an educator, writer and environmentalist, wrote the story of Wangari Maathai in a children's book illustrated by Sonia Lynn Saddler, an illustrator working mainly on "the cultures, lives and stories of peoples of African descent" (Seeds of Change, dust cover). The simple text, to which are added quotations by Wangari Maathai and coloured illustrations inspired from quilts and emphasizing the beauty of African nature, makes that small book a pleasant and easy way for children to know about for example the mugumo42 and many other things. The book starts with the simple word "Feel," whispered by her mother to little Wangari, and this also sounds like an address to all children who have first to feel the texture of nature and trees, to understand the connections of those trees with them. Children's books have long been a way for children to discover the world and to start understanding and loving animals and plants; and in the last decades, more and more children's books have been precisely devoted to ecological topics. The painting of nature or the identification of children with animals was not enough; children are now shown ways of changing the world. Some books speak about environmental "heroes" or "heroines" like those devoted to Wangari Maathai, who initiated the plantation of thousands of trees in Kenya with Kenyan women, or Isatou Ceesay, who recycled plastic bags with women from Gambia. When Isatou, who hardly noticed the ugliness of more and more plastic bags covering the soil, learnt 41

Translation mine, http://www.nn-chicomendes.org/association/les-origines/quiest-chico-mendes, consulted April 12, 2016. Also see Guillain, Harding, Besson, Sharing the Planet, Caliban n° 55, 22. 42 A special sacred fig tree in Kenya.

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that her grandmother's goats had died because they had eaten such plastic bags, she decided to act and picked up the bags. She and other women washed the bags and started knitting small bags or purses with threads made with those plastic bags. So, the soil was clean, the new hand-made bags were sold on the market and with the money she could buy goats for her grandmother and everybody lived peacefully in a village cleansed from its polluting leftovers. In Canada, one could think about Jeanne Lafleche Picotte (18651916), a young Omaha Indian who was the first Native American woman who studied medicine, graduated and then helped her people. In 1906 she was at the origin of a law against the sale of alcohol in Omaha and Winnebago reservations. In 1913, she founded a hospital in Omaha reservation (Nebraska). Jerri Ferris tells her story in her book, Native American Doctor: the Story of Jeanne Lafleche Picotte and this book has a pedagogical aim and was first meant for schools and libraries. By reading about people who became extraordinary because of their acts but were first ordinary children like the ones who read those books, by reading books showing connections between all species, by reading books showing that the transmission of one seed can save the world, young readers have food for thought and can transform their reading into action. Every book presents readers with the natural evolution of the main character, a child first living in his/her family environment and realizing one day that there is something wrong in the transformation of the place where he/she lives. It is that sudden awareness that urged those young people to dedicate their lives to the preservation of their environment or the healing of the population around them. Those simple books show real people living a new life on paper, and the story told allows their action to reach young people's consciousness, leading them to act in their turn. Thus Sneed B. Colard III, a biologist, computer scientist and writer, together with the organization Action for Nature and Carl Dennis Buell for the illustrations, published a little book (around 100 pages) relating the stories of young people around the world, whose actions contributed to preserving the planet. The book is entitled Acting for Nature and its subtitle is What Young People Around the World Have Done to Protect the Environment. The very dedication sounds like action since the book is dedicated "[t]o all young people throughout the world who strive to make the world a better place for humans and for nature" (n.p.). The book contains 15 stories of young people who acted either against pollution or to protect animals and nature. The stories show that whatever the age of the child, the country or the damage caused to the environment, children find solutions to change the world and drag the adults' world behind them.

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Children in England, Scotland, Germany, Spain, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, the United States of America and Japan decided to find solutions to improve the world around them without being impressed by the hugeness of the undertaking. Thus, Caroline, a little 6year-old English girl "decided that while her parents restored the buildings of the brickyard, she would set about restoring the land as a nature preserve" (Colard III, 2). In that region of England—Lincolnshire—in which "clay pits had been in operation since the sixteenth century," nature had replaced the industrial site when the brickyard closed in 1905. The story tells how a family who settled there were interested in history and decided to restore the "kiln and other surviving buildings." The story does not oppose the industrial site representing a part of the history of England to the natural world colonizing the site. On the contrary, the little girl's decision is presented as a logical consequence of her parents' wish to come there and "to restore" something. She was more interested in nature and it is not by chance if the word "family" is used both to speak about the family coming there and the "family of barn owls that nested in a nearby ash tree." With the help of her father, Caroline cleared the place, "making the ponds more attractive to people and safer to wildlife" (2). As in this sentence, throughout the story of her action, the stress is laid on the double aspect of her action: to preserve wildlife and to make people aware of its beauty. The story is also the opportunity for the author to make people aware of all the dangers threatening nature. In that specific case, the meeting of the little girl with a dead owl is the opportunity to give data that may be useful to any reader, so that they might understand the relationship between some gestures, like the cutting down of hedges, and the decreasing number of some species: During the past decades, however, farmers had been cutting down their hedgerows to squeeze in more crops. In the past forty years, 140,000 miles of hedgerows had been destroyed and with them, the homes and hunting grounds of many animals, including the barn owl. (4)

But if the book shows the reality of the damage caused to nature by men's behaviour, the aim is not to stop on that sad reality but to show that a change is possible and as the damage is done by adults, it is up to children to change things and make adults aware. The book is in fact an educational handbook meant as much for children as for adults. All those children lead other children and adults to awareness: from this little girl who was invited by England's Ministry of the Environment, to the House of Lords and the House of Commons at 8, and organized a walk at 9 to raise funds for conservation groups in England, to a thirteen-year-old girl in Saudi Arabia,

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taking care of hundreds of birds as the oil spilled because the rupture of pipelines during the war had "killed fish, coastal mangrove trees, coral reefs, sea turtles, and thousands of sea birds" (35); from a young Mexican boy who organized a group of "‘Explorers’ [who] installed trash cans and organiz[ed] a system to collect and bury wastes" (49) to a young American boy and his friends who made a long video about the "mountain of trash" (60) under which the town of Durango was buried, together with interviews and debates, and presented it at a local Sierra Club meeting, the book introduces readers to children and teenagers who one day, were shocked by a dramatic situation concerning the environment and all those living in the place and, instead of being simply shocked and going on with their comfortable lives, they decided to act and change things. The young American boy said that "[f]ive middle-school kids were able to get the full attention of policy-making adults, both through the video and through personal interaction" (64). The term "Personal interaction" is probably the keyword. Children show adults the way. Their stories are true stories of life: they show the rest of the world and particularly the adults' world the importance of each gesture made to connect things and beings and to take care. Children's deep vision of the world, a vision through which they never separate but link everything, perhaps because they can dream more easily than adults, because they can also hope more easily than adults, because they think that everything is possible, show it is possible. Let's end with the story of William Kamkwamba told by himself and Bryan Mealer in the autobiographical book The Boy who Harnessed the Wind. William Kamkwamba, who was born in Malawi in a rather poor family, had to give up school after a great famine and he could not return to school. But as he was very much interested in the sciences, he read many books in the village library. It is after reading one of them, Using Energy,43 that he decided to try to build a wind turbine to power several appliances in his parents' house in Wimbe. To do so, he used blue gum trees, parts of bicycles and other material found in a scrapyard. His intelligence together with his will and imagination and what he had read in books, made him see immediately the connections to establish between the disparate objects that had been thrown away and the future mill that could help a whole village. With the harvest finally over I was able to return to the scrapyard and continue searching for windmill pieces. I'd find one piece in the grass, pick it up and think, Now what is this? Only to spot something else that

43

Sally Morgan, Adrian Morgan, Using Energy. London: Evans Brothers, 1993.

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The discarded fragments that were supposed to have no more use became, in the young boy's mind, precise parts of the mill he was going to build and which was already in his head. This kind of construction, mingling imagination and scientific knowledge has something to do with the creation of a story. The objects found in the scrapyard were like words that were going to be gathered together to be part of the mill, like a sentence of the whole story that the mill would be and that the boy had in mind. To create the mill, the young boy imagined all the stages of its building. Perhaps his curiosity, his interest in sciences and in the functioning of things, had something to do with the stories told to him by his father and grandfather. His autobiography starts with magic: "Before I discovered the miracle of science, magic ruled the world" (Kamkwamba, 3). His admiration for his father was great and it was linked to his strength and knowledge of stories: "My father was strong and feared no magic but he knew all the stories" (5). His autobiography shows the life of a young Malawian, the family link, the games under a mango-tree, but also the context and the damage done to the country by the new plantations generating deforestation: The stories Grandpa told were of a different time and place. When he was young—before the government maize and tobacco estates arrived and cleared most of our trees—the forests were so dense a traveller could lose his sense of time and direction in them. (9)

He thus evokes "the invisible world," the presence of many wild beasts as the forest was their home and the danger that the villagers had to face. But when he was "walking in the forest as a boy," he said that he "didn't worry so much about cobras and lions, since most of them had vanished" (11). He evokes the "empty fields where the ghosts of trees seemed to whisper their sadness" (11). His autobiography leads us to understand how he had the idea to build the mill and at the same time, it is a rich narrative about life in Malawi and all the damage that transformed the African natural landscape. William Kamkwamba's story is the story of the power of imagination; from the stories told by his father and grandfather to his own story as a boy, from the scientific stories he read in books to the story he invented for discarded objects that he revived to bring power to his village, he shows the power of imagination to change the world. William Kamkwamba was fourteen when he built the mill in 2002. Then he built a solar-powered water pump supplying drinking water for the first time in

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his village. He also built more wind turbines (one of them being twelve metres high). His imagination added to his will to take care of those he loved, led him to bring power first when he was still a teenager and then to bring drinking water to his village. His readings were very important as he said, to lead him to do what he did. His book in turn becomes a guidebook for other children and students as it was selected as the University of Florida common book, required for every common student to read44 and in 2013, Time Magazine named William Kamkwamba one of the "30 People Under 30 Changing The World."45 Reminding people that his first initiative was only meant to "help ease the burdens of day-to-day life— from helping young people continue their studies at night to helping families avoid spending on disposable batteries and kerosene," "it received international attention,"46 which reminds us of what Chico Mendes said when he first thought he was fighting for a few trees and then realized that he was fighting for the whole world. Kamkwamba's action, started when he was a child in a small African village, has some impact on the whole world and his story is action: it relates his own action and is a book of hope that can generate many people's actions. He reminds us that it is the union of all individual actions that can change the world: I believe a renewable energy future can become our reality in our lifetimes. But the climate crisis will not be solved by a single big idea. It will be solved by everyday people working both on their own and together, and combining their best approaches to make the biggest incremental impact. (Ibid.)

William Kamkwamba started as a teenager to bring hope to his family, to his village and to the world. His action started when he listened to his father and grandfather's stories, it went on in the village library. Books and stories simply gave him the feeling that he could change the world, which he did, because he was curious and enjoyed reading books and was listening to those who surrounded him and he knew their needs. His father and grandfather's stories about nature, about animals in the forest, his own discovery both of the book of nature and of scientific books in the village 44

Harn, UF Common Reading Program, sponsor contest for students' art, University of Florida. 25 January 2011. 45 Maya Rhodan, " These are the 30 People Under 30 Changing The World", Time, December 17, 2013. 46 William Kamkwamba, "When it Comes to Climate Change, We Should Start Small, Fail Fast, and Dream Big", HuffPost, May 18, 2016, updated December 6, 2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ef-education-first/when-it-comes-to-climate_ b_9994172.html, accessed March 5, 2018.

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library, led a young boy to make his imagination founded on observation the spring that could change life and improve his family’s life, his village’s life, Africa's life and the world's life. Curiosity and care led him to be one of those people sowing hope, just because they can see the bonds uniting them and the nonhuman world. In the title The Boy who Harnessed the Wind, there is the notion of taming a natural element symbolizing freedom. This kind of taming has something to do with the one suggested by Saint-Exupéry's fox in The Little Prince, a taming establishing ties, which are not chains of domination but bonds of reciprocal responsibility. When the little prince repeatedly asks the fox to explain the meaning of the word "tame" to him, the fox eventually answers: "Just that," said the fox. "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world. […] if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. […] Men have forgotten this truth," said the fox. "But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed." (SaintExupéry, The Little Prince47)

That notion of responsibility given by an imaginary fox to a child in one of the most famous children's books in the world, throws light on the bond uniting men and animals, a bond replacing chains by this invisible music of inter-species friendship evoked by a speaking fox.

47 http://www.angelfire.com/hi/littleprince/framechapter21.html, visited March 8, 2018.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN ANIMALS TO SHOW MAN THE WAY: THE ANIMAL BOND

"Les animaux sont la force de ceux qui ont peu" Yann Artus-Bertrand, Terra

"We are all animals," Greenstockings, the young Indian woman telling Robert Hood about her people's relationship with wolves, says in Rudy Wiebe's novel A Discovery of Strangers, thus revealing the natural bond uniting man and other animals: The wolves […] taught us how to hunt these honey animals that feed us. Perhaps sometimes we are born as wolves, but they have always been our sisters and brothers, we never kill them. They will feed you too, if you are careful and let them. […] we are all animals […]. (Wiebe, A Discovery of Strangers, 173)

The bond between Hood, the English explorer, and Greenstockings, the young Indian woman, unites them through love and a connection with wolves. Hood had dreamt that he killed a silvery wolf and then Greenstockings speaks to him about "the compassionate wolves" (Wiebe, 173). While he cannot speak her language and she cannot speak his, when Greenstockings speaks about the bond uniting men and wolves, "Hood is looking into Greenstockings' eyes and sees there, it seems, the shape of the silver wolf he dreamed" (Wiebe, 173). He then thinks about his dream, how he tried to draw the wolf, why he shot it; the dream and Greenstockings' voice speaking about wolves raise questions in him: "Why did he shoot it? How in the dream could his gun be loaded, since he has always refused that when he is awake?" (Wiebe, 174). Greenstockings' words about the bond uniting her people with wolves are read in her eyes by the young explorer who understands the meaning of her story without understanding the words. His dream and her story oppose two conceptions of man/animal relationships. Hood's dream, whose violence he cannot understand as he generally draws animals and does not kill them, questions

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him about white men's disconnection with the wild world, with the wolf. Greenstockings' soft words about wolves together with Hood's violent dream about a wolf meet in his mind and articulate language has no role in that sudden awareness. It is as if their love created a connection in which the wolf is the connecting link. This is something we can find in Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf, relating his experience as a naturalist as he had been sent to try to understand why wolves were killing Arctic caribou. This naturalist who always saw connections, humorously—and philosophically—starts his book by saying that "the story of [his] sojourn amongst the wolves begins properly in Granny's bathroom" (Mowat, 3) where, to find a shelter for catfish he had seen "gasping out their lives" at the bottom of a stagnant pool, he had placed them in the bowl of his grandmother's toilet. The choice of showing the beginning of his life as a naturalist with such a story mingling childhood memories, the family bond, life and death and humour is probably the best way of showing bonds. Obviously young Farley Mowat's sense of observation and questioning about nature—in that case dying fish and then the way of letting them survive—was rooted in him. From his grandmother's bathroom to "the desolate wastes of the subarctic Barren Lands" (16), Farley Mowat guides us to animal understanding. Mowat's observation of wolves—to whom he gave names, which is a way of reinforcing the relationship—led him to see that if the population of caribou was declining, it was due to human hunting and not to wolves, who preferred to attack smaller prey. The slaughter scenes he saw were the result of men's actions. Once he and his Cree companion had been to Fishduck Lake, where they "found a sickening scene of slaughter. Scattered on the ice were the carcasses of twenty-three caribou, and there was enough blood about to turn great patches of snow into crimson slush" (Mowat, 236). Among them "there were bucks—minus their head" and "a young and pregnant doe" (ibid.). If he was supposed to find proof that wolves did much damage to the caribou population, the horror of the scene proved the contrary: "Unfortunately for the 'proof,' none of these deer could have been attacked by wolves" (ibid.). He adds that "[t]here were no wolf tracks anywhere on the lake. But there were other tracks: the unmistakable triple trail left by the skis and tail-skid of a plane which had taxied all over the place, leaving the snow surface scarred with a crisscross mesh of serpentine lines" (ibid.). And he adds that "[t]hese deer had not been pulled down by wolves, they had been shot—some of them several times" (ibid.). The horror scene and the scars left on the snow were due to men and not to wolves. Farley Mowat's investigation, which was ordered to add more reasons to bring wolves to their doom, provoked lots of criticism

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first and some people questioned his scientific approach and considered his real story as fiction. Perhaps when he published his book, in 1963, people were not ready yet to admit that cruelty is on man's side, as the slaughter scene discovered by Mowat and his Cree companion showed, and not on the side of wild nature. Mowat's book is the story of a bond between a man respecting animals and trying to understand their way of living, and wild animals. The end of his book is full of nostalgia: Somewhere to the eastward a wolf howled; lightly, questioningly. I knew the voice, for I had heard it many times before. It was George, sounding the wasteland for an echo from the missing members of his family. But for me it was a voice which spoke of the lost world which once was ours before we chose the alien role; a world which I had glimpsed and almost entered…only to be excluded, at the end, by my own self. (Mowat, 246)

"A voice which spoke of the lost world which once was ours before we chose the alien role…" Farley Mowat's words united with the wolf's voice speak about the break of the bond between men and nonhuman animals. We became "alien," "strangers," we alienated ourselves from the world where we come from, from our animal roots. And sometimes, a fictitious wolf, like Rudy Wiebe's one, or a real one like Farley Mowat's George, reminds us of our link with them. Will we be able to hear their voices and to remember our bond? We should listen to those wild voices. Nonhuman animals, who only take what is necessary for them to live, show us the way to the preservation of the planet and of those who live on it, including human beings. The French novelist and playwright Eric-Emmanuel Schmidt, during a journey in the desert that was eventually a strong spiritual experience opening onto a revelation, observed dromedaries and in his text, a travel book as well as the narrative of a spiritual experience, La nuit de feu, he wrote: Précautionneusement, ils se contentaient d'une fleur par-ci, d'une fleur parlà, respectant les végétaux pour que leur vie se perpétue. Silencieux, quasi immobiles, ils devenaient de grandes plantes parmi les arbustes, empreints d'une sérénité végétative, leurs longs cils évoquant des pistils et des étamines qui voilaient leur regard débonnaire (Schmidt, 32).1

1 "Cautiously, they contented themselves with a flower here and there, respecting plants so that their lives could carry on. Silent, nearly motionless, they became tall plants among the shrubs, marked with vegetative serenity, their long eyelashes conjuring up pistils and stamens that veiled their soft eyes" (translation mine).

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The writer interprets the animals' intentions but his interpretation is founded on ecological reality as plants are rare in the desert and animal instinct guides them to avoid any food waste that would mean eventual starvation. The ecological reality of the instinctive preservation of plants by the dromedaries is duplicated by the poetic reunion of the animal and vegetable worlds through the metaphorical assimilation of the animals with "tall plants" and the comparison of their lashes with parts of flowers, "pistils and stamens." Becoming the plants that feed them in the traveller's eyes, they reveal to him that nothing is separated in nature if the traveller takes time to observe it. The observation of animal behaviour reveals solidarity, often some interspecies solidarity, which might suggest to us the way to take between humans, and between humans and nonhuman species. I remember a TV report that was shown in France on the 8 o'clock news like the most important human news of the day: it was about the attack of an antelope by a crocodile and the extraordinary behaviour of a hippopotamus trying to save her. He rushed to make the crocodile move away and drew the antelope out of the water. As she was seriously wounded, he stayed with her until her death, supporting her head within his mouth wide open. There are so many examples of animals saving other animals that more and more videos are devoted to the theme on the internet. Thus a scene similar to that scene shown around twenty years ago shows two hippopotamuses saving a young deer. The first one fights the crocodile so that it should release its grip and when the deer is free from the crocodile's mouth, the second hippopotamus quickly accompanies the deer onto the bank of the river. Another scene shows a group of hippopotamuses saving a zebra. Elsewhere, baboons save an impala from a leopard. Even a lioness protects a baby calf against another lion. Those animal scenes are filmed in wild nature. Some also filmed such rescuing scenes in zoos. There is that astonishing scene of a bear saving a raven from drowning. The raven has fallen into the icy water and is in a desperate situation. The bear starts taking it out of the corner where it seemed to be wedged. But the raven swims and flaps its wings without managing to fly out of the water as it is too wet. So the bear who had taken up its occupations, turns round, comes back to the raven and, bending towards it, catches one of it wings to take it out of the water and place it on the ground before turning its back on it again. An ethologist said that the bear's intention was probably rather to fish it than to save it and the peckings of the raven dissuaded the bear from going on trying to eat it. Maybe. Yet a mere blow would have been enough to kill the bird and avoid more peckings. The bear preferred abandoning it. And whatever its initial motivation, the raven could live on. Another

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similar scene shows an orangutan thoughtfully watching a little bird in the water, while holding a leaf. Suddenly, noticing that the bird is drowning, it delicately catches it thanks to the leaf, puts it on the grass and watches it again. Dozens of similar scenes of animals saving other animals have been filmed. One of them is quite significant showing the different behaviour between an animal and a human being, the latter being yet apparently an animal lover. The scene seems to take place on the deck of a ship. A dog is in front of three dying fish on the deck slightly covered with water. Seeing that the fish are dying, the dog sends water on them with his nose, checks if they live on and more and more rapidly, sends water on them. Then seeing that it is of no use, he turns towards the people who are filming him, with eyes clearly showing that he cannot understand what’s happening. The viewers can hear the person behind the camera laughing in front of the dog's repeated attempts to rescue the fish. The dog turns towards them once more, more imploringly this time. But seeing that they do not let go of their camera, he goes on splashing the fish with water. Obviously the dog's owners found their animal's behaviour extraordinary and they admired him. But while the dog was desperately trying to rescue the fish in which he still felt some anima, some breath of life, they only saw a dog's funny behaviour after a successful fishing party. Of course, there was apparently nothing wrong with them. They obviously loved their dog and shared moments with him, they had fished only a small number of fish and they respected nature. But if the viewer could feel shocked by the scene, it was because of the discrepancy between the dog's desperate attempt at saving the lives of three creatures, his eyes full of anxiety and a lack of understanding and the human beings' laughter. In fact, this small film revealed the human's beings' lack of awareness and the dog's awareness and compassion. He was aware that life was still in those fish and that just the contact with water could save them. His owners could have sent the fish back to water if they had felt the depth of the dog's feeling of powerlessness and desire to save those three animals. But they were just happy to live a beautiful moment of friendship during a fishing party with their animal companion. They were not aware that the dog had not the same point of view as them. They saw the fish as their prey, already reified as a future meal. He saw them still as living creatures. The dog's eyes turned towards the person filming him give this little film a depth that was not intended. It was just a holiday scene of joy. The dog changed it into a tragic moment of human unawareness when he showed what could be done to save the three lives he tried to save and only got laughter as a response. However trivial this scene might seem, it symbolizes the gap existing between nonhuman animals' instinctive

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awareness of life and their instinctive desire to save other creatures when they are not their prey and man's utilitarian use of nature. This does not mean that those people had no right to fish. The problem is that while their dog felt compassion in front of the dying fish, they could not see dying fish. They only saw a dog making surprising gestures towards their prey. The dog saw the fish's desperate attempt at breathing out of the water, while the people filming them could not feel the weight of this feeble breath, which the dog could feel. Animals refuse death: first their own death, when they fight against it and find incredible resources to overcome it. Once we had a dog, a stray dog, chased by the hunter who owned him because of his worn-out paws. One day he had followed my mother's car when she had picked me up from school, he entered the garden and never left us after that. Once while we were in the countryside, my grandmother found him nearly dead on the roadside. He had been knocked over by a car. The vet that came said that there was nothing to be done but euthanasia. My grandmother, who was a mountain woman and knew animals, refused that. For three days she placed warm compresses on the dog's flank, never despairing. He remained motionless, apparently in a coma, for three days. On the fourth day, we saw our dog merrily come to us to ask for his lunch. The scientist's rational examination had concluded in an impossible recovery. Everything in the dog's condition showed the same thing. Nobody could see that the dog wanted to live, nobody but a person aware of the feeble breath that was still there. A mountain woman could see it because she had seen farm animals saved when they seemed condemned, because she knew nature, because she had this fundamental awareness that is the capacity to understand a breath of life. Animals know how to spare their energy when they are seriously wounded or ill. It is by saving that energy that they can save their life. It is the union of thought between the dog and my grandmother that saved him. He was apparently unconscious but perhaps he was simply sparing his energy. He knew that he could live. My grandmother also knew it. A life was saved that day thanks to the double consciousness of an apparently dying dog and a woman listening to his breath. The same happened to a young female blackbird that my father found on the road. He delicately took it and brought the young bird into the garden. My mother and he took care of the little bird who recovered and lived happy years in the garden. Car drivers had passed beside the bird knocked over by a car and had thought it was dead. My father stopped because, like my grandmother, he felt there was still a breath of life and listened to it. The bird's will to live and my father's awareness saved the young she-blackbird. Sometimes an animal affected by a mortal disease

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can surprise human people by its resistance to death. This was the case of a young she-cat who had a mortal disease and according to the vet, was going to die during the weekend. But the little cat wanted to live. For three weeks she surprised everybody by her strength. She had neurological troubles and had no balance. She should not have been able to jump or to climb. But she refused my help and, studying the height of things, jumped when she wanted. One day I found her on a roof and, as she could hardly walk, I wondered how she had managed to climb there. But she had. She changed the supposed two days that were left to her into three weeks of happiness. One night, she inadvertently bit my finger while eating and the pain made me shout. I was not aware of the weight of this shout. She saw the new life she had built by dint of will and strength and above all, by dint of love, fall into pieces in my shout. I stayed with her all that night like all the previous nights but at one moment, she held her little paw to me and I understood that she wanted to say that she could go then. In the morning I took her to the vet. She was ready. She had decided the moment of her death. All the animals that I brought to the vet for euthanasia, have said the moment to me. I mean that they have shown a will to live on for days or weeks until one day they showed me that they could no longer resist their coming death. Animals also refuse the death of other animals. Examples of animals lying beside the corpse of another animal are multiple. But there are also those who are sure they will make them revive. Thousands of Internet surfers have seen the video showing Kaipur railway station in India, where a monkey tried to revive an unconscious monkey, perhaps knocked over by a train. He shook it violently, bit his neck then his head without anybody seeing the least reaction in the other monkey who seemed to be dead. But the monkey believed in that feeble breath of life that he felt in him. After a long time, he chose another method and plunged the monkey into the cold muddy water between the railway and then the apparently dead monkey revived and the film showed them quietly sitting beside each other. A similar scene happened with two small birds. One of them seemed dead and stiff. The other one started doing a sort of beak-to-beak respiration. As that did not work he rained blows on it, and as that did not work either, he became apparently more and more violent, shaking it as the monkey had done, throwing it and shaking it again until finally the two birds flew away together. Both animals, the monkey and the little bird, seemed sure that they would revive their fellow creature. Patiently and with a sort of rage of life they tried several methods to finally succeed in reviving the little animals that would have seemed dead to any human

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passer-by. Animals communicate and there are many examples of their language that can make humans aware of the weight of communication.

The bond between man and wild animals: Gavin Maxwell's Ring of Bright Water and Robert Franklin Leslie's The Bears and I I want to realize brotherhood or identity not merely with the beings called human, but I want to realize identity with all life, even with such things as crawl upon earth. Mahatma Gandhi

Some books reveal that the bond between men and animals can go beyond the usual companion species and that wild animals can also become companions. Stories of such friendships are ways of showing the bond uniting human and nonhuman species. The story told by Gavin Maxwell in his book Ring of Bright Water (1960)2 tells such a deep relationship. Gavin Maxwell was a Scottish naturalist born in 1914, who died in 1969.3 He is particularly famous for his researches on the European otter. In 1960, he published an autobiographical book, Ring of Bright Water, in which he told about his life with an otter that he had brought back from Iraq and raised in Scotland. From the beginning of his book, Maxwell speaks about the familiar relationship uniting him with the nonhuman world in that part of Scotland4 where he feels at home: This place has been my home now for ten years and more, and wherever the changes of my life may lead me in the future it will remain my spiritual home until I die, a house to which one returns not with the certainty of welcoming 2

The title of the book was borrowed from a line in a poem by Kathleen Raine (1908-2003): "The Ring," which is printed at the very beginning of the book and starts thus: "He has married me with a ring, a ring of bright water / Whose ripples travel from the heart of the sea." The book was adapted for the cinema in 1969 by Jack Couffer. Two more books were published in the same vein: The Rocks Remain (1963) and Raven Seek Thy Brother (1968), the three of them being republished in 2011 under the title Ring of Bright Water: A Trilogy. 3 About Gavin Maxwell, see the article by John Lister-Kaye, "The Genius of Gavin Maxwell", in The Telegraph, July 4, 2014, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/wildlife/10943319/The-genius-of-GavinMaxwell.html, accessed March 9, 2018. 4 In Sandaig—to which he gave the name of Camusfeàrna. Sandaig is on the northwest coast of Scotland, to the southwest of Glenelg.

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fellow human beings, nor with the expectation of comfort and ease, but to a long familiarity in which every lichen-covered rock and rowan tree show known and reassuring faces. (Maxwell, 3)

In the foreword, he unites the human and nonhuman worlds through the autobiographical dimension of the book: "This book, then, is about my life in a lonely cottage on the north-west coast of Scotland, about animals that have shared it with me, and about others who are my only immediate neighbours in a landscape of rocks and sea" (Foreword, n.p.). He gave the place a fictitious name, Camusfeàrna, "the Bay of the Alders,5 from the trees that grow along the burn6 side" (ibid.).7 By renaming the place with a Celtic name speaking about trees, Gavin Maxwell speaks about the connections between the place, trees, the nonhuman world in general and writing. The poet Robert Graves thus evoked the Celtic alphabet of trees in which the Alder, designating a tree, a letter and a temporal period, is also called "the goddess tree": I had found out that the word "trees" means "learning" in all the Celtic languages, and since the alphabet is the basis of all learning, and since (as I remembered from Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars) the Druidic alphabet was a jealously guarded secret in Gaul and Britain—indeed, its eighteen letternames were not divulged for nearly a thousand years—well, the possession of this secret must have been something worth struggling about. I also found out that the alphabet in Caesar's days was called Boibel-Loth, because it began with the letters B.L; and that [...] the Boibel-Loth had displaced an earlier, very similar, and equally secret Celtic alphabet, the Beth-Luis-Nion, whose eighteen letters were explained as referring to a sequence of forest trees—including the Alder. [...]

5

He gave that name because there are lots of alders there but we can also remember that the alder is the third letter of the Ogham tree alphabet or Celtic alphabet (see https://thriveonnews.com/druid-alphabet-alder-tree/, accessed on March 9, 2018). See also: http://arfe.fr/calendrier/presentation_calendrier.htm and http://www.arbre-celtique.com/encyclopedie/ogam-ogham-l-alphabet-des-arbres2551.htmr The fact of giving the place a Celtic name evoking both the trees growing there and the old Celtic writing, roots the place in its Celtic origins through the union of nature and writing. 6 A burn is a Scottish brook. 7 One can see beautiful photographs of the place, its landscapes and colours, as well as Gavin Maxwell with some of his otters, and also glass designs inspired by Gavin Maxwell's Camusfeàrna on this site: https://www.brightwatercoral.com/?lightbox=dataItem-jckar1w4, accessed on March 9, 2018.

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Chapter Fifteen Then I found that the eighteen-letter Celtic tree-alphabet could, for various reasons, be regarded as a Celtic counterpart of the eighteen-letter Greek Orphic alphabet, associated with moving trees; the Orphic alphabet is known to have preceded the Classical Greek alphabet, the characters of which betray its Phoenician origin. [...]ီ[T]he busy, rational cult of the Solar God Apollo, [...] rejected the Orphic tree-alphabet in favour of the commercial Phoenician alphabet—the familiar ABC—and initiated European culture and science.8

The poet's analysis of the alphabet founded on nature and replaced by the "commercial Phoenician alphabet" sums up, through a history of alphabets, the evolution of man's thoughts and his gradual alienation from nature, including in his very codification of writing. By renaming this place in Northwest Scotland with a Celtic name designating the alders growing there, Gavin Maxwell already showed his connection with the place and his will to get closer to the natural world. His landscape paintings have the multiple colours of the place and its beauty; he thus describes the "kaleidoscopic patterns before [his] mind's eyes": […] that of wild roses against a clear blue sea, so that when I remember that summer alone with my curious namesake who had travelled so far, those roses have become for me the symbol of a whole complex of peace. They are not the pale, anemic flowers of the south, but a deep intense pink that is almost a red; it is the only flower of that colour, and it is the only flower that one sees habitually against the direct background of the ocean, free from the green stain of summer. The yellow flag irises flowering in dense ranks about the burn and the foreshore, the wild orchids bright among the heather and mountain grasses, all these lack the essential contrast for the eye may move from them to the sea beyond them only through the intermediary, as it were, of the varying greens among which they grow. (Maxwell, 121)

The reader could already find the landscape painting particularly lively and colourful, and yet it is only to show the explosion of colours that is going to follow: It is in June and October that the colours of Camusfeàrna run riot […]. There at low tide, the rich ochres, madders and oranges of the orderly strata of seaweed species are set against glaring, vibrant whites of barnacle-covered rock and shell sand, with always beyond them the elusive

8

Robert Graves, The White Goddess [1948]. London: Faber and Faber, 1997, quoted by Antoine Hatzenberger and Jean-Louis Vincendeau in their article, "Essere Albero, Giuseppe Penone aux Tuileries", Interfaces n° 17, 2000, 159-160.

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changing blues and purples of the moving water, and somewhere in the foreground the wild roses of the north. (Maxwell, 121)

The pictorial description of that riot of colours is not merely aesthetic. It reveals the writer's link to the place and his will to share it with readers and to share not only its beauty but the awareness that this beauty comes from a nonhuman world uniting the vegetable world, the animal world, water, rocks and the sun. The key to his presentation of the bond uniting him with the place and those who live in that place is his search for "essential contrast," which he did not find in the colours of nature except in June and October. The contrast in his autobiographical narrative dwells in the choice of inserting such a pictorial description of the landscape between a presentation of the otter in natural history and a description of Mij, his familiar otter, taking possession of "this bright, watery landscape" (121), as if his bond with the wild animal coming from the other end of the world could be explained by the beautiful depiction of the place. The painting is framed on the one hand by references to three naturalists: a long quotation from Buffon, "the otter's principal detractor" (120), a description offering a very negative picture of otters, which Maxwell opposes with his own experience and "the great American naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton" who, in Life History of Northern Animals (1910), speaks about the otter as "the Chevalier Bayard of the wilds—without fear and without reproach" (in Maxwell, 120) and he adds: "that is the otter, the joyful, keen, and fearless otter, mild and loving to his own kind, and gentle with his neighbours of the stream; full of play and gladness in his life, full of courage in his stress, ideal in his home, steadfast in death; the noblest little soul that ever went four-footed through the woods" (ibid.). To this rhythmical presentation, Gavin Maxwell adds: "In his writings I recognized the animal that I knew, 'the most beautiful and engaging of all elegant pets'" (ibid.). The dialogue that appears in the book between naturalists is all the more interesting as Thompson Seton, who says a little further on, that he "never owned a pet otter," uses the word "pet" whereas he has just spoken about the animal as "the Chevalier Bayard of the wilds," emphasis mine). It is as if the nearly humane characteristics he saw in the otter made the animal shift from the wilds to man's companionship. This naturally leads to an evocation of Mij, Maxwell's otter, following the landscape painting. The only transition after the last reference to a third naturalist is: "We arrived at Camusfeàrna early June, soon after the beginning of a long spell of Mediterranean weather" (121). This is what triggers the memories of the place, memories full of colours, leading him back to his otter. And the way he describes the animal makes the reader understand the structure of the narrative. The beautiful landscape painting

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was necessary for us to understand the double bond uniting the narrator and the place on the one hand and the otter and the place on the other hand, which leads to a sort of transitive relationship between the narrator and the otter linked by the place before being united by their link of friendhip: Into this bright, watery landscape Mij moved and took possession with a delight that communicated itself as clearly as any articulate speech could have done; his alien but essentially appropriate entity occupied and dominated every corner of it, so that he became for me the central figure among the host of wild creatures with which I was surrounded. The waterfall, the burn, the white beaches and the islands; his form became the familiar foreground to them all—or perhaps foreground is not the right word, for at Camusfeàrna he seemed so absolutely part of his surroundings that I wondered how they could ever have seemed complete to me before his arrival. (Maxwell, 122)

The landscape is painted here through the entering of the otter into the landscape, as an essential part of the landscape, first as a "foreground," which already places him as the first element of the landscape; but even that spatial situation is rejected to be replaced by a total inclusion, an absolute belonging to the landscape: "he seemed so absolutely part of his surroundings." In fact, the affective bond between the otter and the man who brought the otter to Scotland creates another bond between the animal and the landscape into which he was imported. It is the close link with the landscape, the joy of the otter's gestures in this "watery landscape," that replace an articulate language and are as significant. Throughout the book, Maxwell describes the otter's behaviour, his [sleeping] in Maxwell's bed, his "nuzzl[ing] his face and neck with small attenuated squeaks of pleasure and affection" (122). Maxwell often insists on the animal's affection and yet he distinguishes his attitude from that of a dog: "Otters usually get their own way in the end; they are not dogs, and they co-exist with humans rather than being owned by them" (123). The otter clearly appears as his companion, sharing many moments of life with him. A great part of the book is devoted to the description of the otter's activity as he fishes with Maxwell, plays in the burn, and his quiet life in the house is also described: "Camusfeàrna house remained Mij's holt, the den to which he returned at night, and in the daytime when he was tired" (122). The assimilation of the house with a "den," that is a wild animal's shelter, shows the superimposition of the otter's companionship with a human being, and his wild nature. He has the gestures of a wild animal when he fishes and is in the contact of water as "[i]n the sea, Mij discovered his true, breath-taking aquabatic powers" (128); it is in Scotland indeed that

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the otter discovered deep waters for "the lakes and lagoons of his native marshes are rarely more than a fathom or two deep" (128). And yet, even in his natural element, he is always close to his human companion; "He would swim beside me as I rowed in the little dinghy" (128). The precise description of the otter's activities is both a naturalist's observation of animal behaviour and the narrative of a love relationship between a human being and a nonhuman creature. The otter is so trustful that he even "adjusted himself quickly to the absence of his beloved burn and foreshore" when Maxwell took him to London. The naturalist shows the animal's power of adaptation, obviously increased by his absolute trust in his human companion: "During the car journey from Camusfeàrna to Inverness he seemed, in a long deep sleep, to shed his wild nature and to awake metamorphosed as a domestic animal" (142). The otter even "walks round the grubby London streets," even enters local shops and "was allowed to make his own selection before purchase" (ibid.). This may sound quite strange when speaking about a wild animal and it rather reminds people of such scenes of fiction in TV series as in Kommmissar Rex, where the German shepherd working for the police helps his human colleagues in human activities and sometimes chooses his toys in shops where he goes with the chief inspector to whom he is also a companion. What makes spectators smile in front of a scene showing a classical companion like a dog behaving like a child—because this appears as anthropomorphism, as a projection of human behaviour onto animal behaviour—, is still more surprising with a wild animal. This seems to show that the friendly connection between the animal and his human companion is stronger than his wild nature, which he never gives up. Maxwell reveals the animal's despair when he was boarded at the zoo sanatorium while Maxwell had to lecture in the Midlands for three days. The otter's "first and only imprisonment from the people and surroundings that he knew" (144) caused the animal's despair as he "insulated himself from the world by the same deep coma into which he had sunk when shut into a box during the air journey" (ibid.). The wild animal who lived a happy life as a man's companion was free in his companionship and he could not understand the cage episode which was for him both imprisonment and abandonment. Being abandoned by his human friend was for him the equivalent of death and he ceased to give any sign of life and refused any food. Maxwell drove as quickly as possible when he learnt about his animal friend's condition; when he arrived and called his name, there was no reaction. The narrative Maxwell gives of the otter's coming to life again is quite moving and reveals the strength of the bond uniting the two:

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Chapter Fifteen Only when I thrust my hand in beside him until I could touch his face did he begin to awaken, with a slow, dazed air as if he were emerging from a trance; then suddenly he was out and leaping in a frenzy of joy, clambering over me and inside my coat, and rushing round and round that barren cage until he threw himself down panting in front of me. (145)

Maxwell uses human psychology to determine the otter's feelings during those days when he was imprisoned far from him; "he had lost his selfrespect and fouled his own bed" (ibid.). Perhaps it was just that nothing mattered for him any longer since the being whom he trusted most had given him up to that cage, far from the wild nature that was his element, that wild nature he was able to forget when he walked in London streets with his friend, just because he was with his friend. Yet Maxwell looks for a solution to find "a temporary home for Mij" (146) for the periods when it is necessary. "But by the time [an otter-keeper] was found, Mij was dead" (147). The shortness of the sentence concluding months of efforts to find a solution is terrible in its sobriety. Maxwell was in London and had planned to spend spring and summer in Camusfeàrna with Mij. He was to leave London "early in April" but he "needed a fortnight's freedom from his incessant demands upon [his] time and [he] arranged that [Mij] should precede [him] in Scotland in charge of a friend" (147). It is on the day he was to return to Camusfeàrna, "the 16th of April," that he received a telephone call and was told that "an otter had been killed at the village four miles north of Camusfeàrna and Mij was missing" (148). The certainty of the drama is gradually brought about by writing that is so much invaded by negations that the text becomes a great negation, the negation of the truth, its denial: There was no detailed information. Nor was there to be any yet; no tidy end, no body to identify, no palliative burial at the foot of the rowan tree; no human kindness that would spare to those who had been fond of him the day-long search, the door standing open all through the night. (148)

Maxwell knew that his animal companion was dead in spite of the fact that some said they had seen him. But he wanted to know how he had been killed. Once again the comparison with a human being when he imagines he could find the otter's skin, shows the strength of the bond uniting him to the otter: "for me it would have felt like finding the skin of a human friend" (149). From the moment when he learns about Mij's death, the bond between the otter and him is constantly conveyed in terms of human friendship. Already when Mij had disappeared for one day, he had realized the bond uniting him to the otter: "I knew by that time that Mij meant

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more to me than most human beings of my acquaintance […], I knew that Mij trusted me more utterly than did any of my own kind, and so supplied a need we are slow to admit" (139). Trust is a word that recurs many times in Maxwell's book. He also speaks about "mutual esteem." Maxwell's meeting with the man who killed the otter leads him to some inner violence. Maxwell's need to tell all the stages of his investigation appears as a way of freeing himself from that violence and at the same time of denouncing such a stupid and inhuman act. The man said to him that he thought it was a wild otter and fetched the pick-head he had in his lorry and then threw the otter into the river. Mij, who had spent his short life as a companion animal, living some wild activities in the river, ended his life because of his wild nature and of human stupidity together, because of man's obsession with being the most powerful inhabitant of the place. Another person evoked the drama "with more humanity;" this person is the one who had said to the killer that it was Maxwell's otter and so the killer could not ignore it. Maxwell said to that person: "You want to get your head seen to […] if you think that's a wild otter, or if you think a wild one would wait for you to kill it in broad daylight" (150). Mij had died of his double life as a wild animal and a human companion animal. Mij was trustful and could not suspect a human being, having the appearance of the one who gave him so much love and happiness, to want to kill him. Mij trusted men. He died because he had become a companion to a man. He died because of the strength of his link for a human being. The killer transformed the truth and Maxwell's anger is conveyed by the strength of his writing: Brave murderer; for his lies and deceit I could have killed him then as instinctively and with as little forethought as he had killed the creature I had brought so many thousands of miles, killed him quickly and treacherously, when he was expecting it no more than Mij had, so that the punishment could fit the crime. (149-150)

The Dostoyevskian reference to "crime" and "punishment" definitively places Mij's fate in the sphere of human feelings. Maxwell's painting of his life with the otter reveals his love for the animal and the reader accompanies their relationship in such a deep way that he/she can only be sad in front of the brutal death of the animal killed by an unknown man meeting him on a road in his beloved Highlands. After Mij's death, Maxwell could not return to this place for one year, as the bond was too strong and the place without Mij too empty. Later on, he adopted more animals and told about his life with them but the animal that fills the book, which is present even when he is absent from many pages, is Mij, who is

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the example of human/nonhuman companionship beyond life. The title of the book, "Ring of Bright Water," poetically designates a place and in fact the book tells about the place and what made it as bright as the water described in Kathleen Raine's love poem opening the book. Her unrequited love for Gavin Maxwell, which had generated so much suffering in her, offered Maxwell the words of his own love story with a place and with an animal. In a way, the transfer of Kathleen Raine's love onto Maxwell's love for the nonhuman world and the choice of her poem as an opening and the title of this story, appear as a way of making her enter this "ring of bright water," of offering her the only story he could offer her by including her in the ring through her own words. Mij who separated them in a way, reunites them through her poem chosen by Maxwell: because the merry otter could only be a bond. The small animal had been given to him in Iraq where he wanted to write a book on the Marshes. As he wanted an otter pet, Wilfred Thesiger, who writes in his book The Marsh Arabs that he had taken him round the Marshes for seven weeks, had given him a baby European otter, but the cub rapidly died. He found another one and it is the second pet that he brought to England. He took it to the London Zoological Society where they considered that it was an unknown subspecies of the smooth-coated otter. That subspecies supposedly living in the Marshes of Iraq, was named after Maxwell: Lutrogale perspicillata maxwelli or Maxwell's otter. He writes about it: So Mij and all his race became Lutrogale perspicillata maxwelli, and though he is now no more, and there is no ostensible proof that there is another living specimen in the world, I had realized a far-off childish fantasy, and there was a Maxwell's otter. (Maxwell, 113)

Even if the naming of an animal specimen belongs to the scientific field, as is emphasized by the Latin name, Maxwell shows it as the achievement of a "childish fantasy," something belonging to the intimate sphere. There was undoubtedly some scientific pride in the naming itself, but the fact that he ends the chapter with the words "Maxwell's otter" emphasizes the bond between the two, united forever through the otter's scientific name as they were united through the affective link. He observed the animal as a naturalist, as it was a species that was unknown so far. But this meeting with the Iraqi otter had a great impact on his personal life as it brought him the affective bond that he seemed unable to create with

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human beings. It also had an important environmental role. John ListerKaye,9 in the article he published about him, writes: Gavin Maxwell's legacy is immense. I know of no naturalist or conservationist of my generation who was not profoundly influenced by Ring of Bright Water, and through heightened public awareness he greatly aided the return of the otter to our rivers and wetlands.10

The naturalist John Lister-Kaye shows the impact that a book can have to "[heighten] public awareness." Maxwell's naturalist observation and the affective bond uniting him with the otter brought from Iraq, both of them present in Ring of Bright Water, doubly helped to develop people's awareness, first through their knowledge of otters, an animal which is not often evoked in literary books, and then through the depicting of the bond uniting the animal to him and to the place where he had brought him. It is there that he lived with the otter with whom real bonds of friendships were created. This is an autobiographical book telling about the strong relationship of a man with a place and with the animals living there, the native ones and those he brought into that lonely house on the north-west coast of Scotland. His companionship with the otter Mij is not the only story told there but it is the one that is most lengthily described, as if, by describing their life together, he made Mij live again through his memories and writing, as if writing fixed the affective bond between the man and the animal forever. With the Canadian author Robert Franklin Leslie, of Cherokee and Scottish origins, it is a story of friendship between three orphan bears and the author that is told in The Bears and I (1968), another autobiographical book about the bond between a man and wild animals.11 While teaching languages, Leslie studied ecology and botany. His true story of the saving of three bear cubs reveals the point of view of a naturalist conscious of the relationship uniting species and their habitats and also of the bond uniting 9

John Lister-Kaye is a naturalist and conservationist, the owner and director of the Aigas Field Centre, opened in 1977 by ecologist Sir Frank Fraser Darling. The centre offers wildlife holiday in the Highlands and islands of Scotland to observe wildlife, landscapes and animal habitats. It offers environmental education for adults and schoolchilden. Among other books, he wrote At the Water's Edge. A Walk in the Wild, Canongate Books, 2011; Song of the Rolling Earth, Abacus, 2004 and The Seeing Eye: Notes of a Highland Naturalist, Aigas Books, 1980. 10 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/wildlife/10943319/The-genius-ofGavin-Maxwell.html, accessed March 9, 2018. 11 It was adapted for the cinema in 1974 by Bernard McEveety under the same title.

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species. An interesting painting of the Canadian wilderness and a moving true story of the bond uniting three young orphan bears and a man, the book, through that double aspect, leads the reader to the consciousness of a bond uniting man and the wild world. The book is an opportunity to present readers with the natural Arctic world and its dangers, revealing the connections linking everything in the wilderness. This is for example the case with the painting of a fire destroying a forest. The narrator and observer can see animals from different species which all plunge into the lake to save their lives: "As the heat from the fire increased, deer, elk, moose and one grizzly bear plunged into the lake and began to swim toward the eastern shore" (Leslie, 39). It shows animals' natural instinct, as they know exactly what to do to try to escape natural disasters. This was exemplified by animals' behaviour during the tsunami where elephants saved many human beings because they knew about the coming wave before the human beings and quickly ran inland.12 Leslie evokes that wonder of nature making animals aware of an impending danger and knowing exactly what to do: How marvellously nature coached most of her creatures—even bears and squirrels—to leave the timber during an electrical squall! By habit I used to rush to trees that had just been struck, hoping to rescue any nestlings thrown to the duff by the impact. Without exception the ones I found were dead. (Leslie, 195)

It is like an exchange of skills showing the interconnection between species, the desire of some human beings to take care of endangered animals and the instinct of animals urging them to rescue endangered humans. The particular story of a meeting between a man and three bear cubs also shows readers the life of wild animals in their ecosystem, but the main element in the book is the story of the bond uniting Leslie and the bears. Robert Franklin Leslie tells his own story as he saved three young bears, after their mother had been killed and the old she-bear who was raising them so far brought them near his cabin. The way he speaks about the first bond established between the old female and himself reveals the trust a wild animal can have for a human being: 12

Michael Morpurgo tells such a true story in his children's book Running Wild (2010). We can also think about Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), in which the main protagonist, Janie, can see a file of animals of all species running or creeping towards the same direction (chapter 18). It is just before the bursting of a hurricane and the human characters have not realized yet whereas all animals know.

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The gentle old female was no stranger. For the past two summers I had put out scraps for her. I know she was much too old to be the dam of those cubs. Their mother had been shot. The older female had adopted the orphans, as is almost always the case up here in the northland when little animals are abandoned. […]. (Leslie, 4)

Once he has shown the solidarity between animals and the fact that there is nearly always one adult to take care of abandoned orphans, he goes on with the description of the she-bear's behaviour:13 How many times, during the more than thirty intervening years, have I recalled what that venerable old she-bear did next! Almost on her belly, the scarred veteran timidly and slowly approached the porch where I sat. With a look of anxiety I had never before observed in a wild animal's eyes, she sat down on the grass directly in front of me at a distance of six feet. Moving her head slowly back and forth while gargling out purposefully soft tones that seemed to form deep within the cavern of her throat, the bear impressed me as if she were trying to convey some message across that insuperable barrier between man and beast. […] During her strange behaviour, she often shifted her gaze between me and the well-treed cubs, soon leaving me little doubt that her message concerned the little ones. (Leslie, 4-5)

Leslie's text leaves no doubt about the fact that the "insuperable barrier between man and beast" is placed by man as the she-bear had obviously no doubt about the fact that her language was going to be understood by the man. He speaks about "preconceived negative images of beggar bears," about his difficulty to understand the message or, more than a difficulty, he speaks about the fact that he "hardly believed, at first, that [he] could interpret her supplication" (4). The weight of man's cultural representations prevents him from understanding animal language "at first." It is when he accepts thinking like the animal that the animal language becomes understandable. He had doubts whereas the she-bear had no doubts and was sure that at one moment, the man she had chosen would necessarily understand her message. This is also a matter of trust, which Leslie mentions when he says: "It was not that I distrusted her" (5). Obviously sure that the little bears would be protected by a foster-father after the foster-mother, the she-bear eventually left while the three little bears remained:

13 This is also what happens in the French film by Jean-Jacques Annaud, L'ours (1988), adapted from James Oliver Curwood's novel The Grizzly King (1916).

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Leslie does say "[f]rom all outward appearances" as he knows that far from abandoning them, the old she-bear has given them over to a man's care, which he will do when confiding the last bear to the forest. The nonhuman animal was the one who gave up her wild behaviour for a while to create the bond between the man and the cubs. She first created a transient bond between herself and him to save those little bears, which she could no longer take care of. The little animals' education by the man they adopted—as the first chapter is entitled "Adopted by the bears, "thus reversing the apparent situation—brings merry pages where the games and childish behaviours of the three little ones are described in such a way as to lead the readers themselves to become virtually attached to the young animals. Leslie gave them names as is always the case when a human being wants to create a bond between himself and a nonhuman creature. His book is the moving story of a complicity established between a man and three cubs, Rusty, Dusty and Scratch, and at the same time it reveals the life of Canadian nature, the drought threatening it because of global warming, and the limits existing between that reciprocal friendship and the violence of reality since two of the bears will be killed. The moving story of the bond created by an old she-bear between a man and three little bears is also the opportunity to show the fight that is led by Indians to preserve the area from exploitation and to create a park land where animals might be protected. Unfortunately, the fight led by Leslie's Indian friend Larch will be lost and hunters kill any kinds of animals including two of the young bears. To protect the third one from hunters, Leslie will let him free in nature in a poignant scene where the man, desperate but convinced that he is saving the young animal's life by rendering him to nature, which was the only solution for the young bear to live on, rows on the lake while the bear, still more desperate as he cannot understand, tries to catch him up and climb onto the boat. The conclusion of the book is filled with the author's sadness and his thinking like the young bear and thus being aware of the feeling of treason he must have: Tears streaming on my cheeks, I was forced to leave the thought of betrayal in the mind of the third bear. With the switch I struck him again and again across the bridge of the nose—the nose that had so often nudged

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me with affection and admiration. At length he turned, disbelieving, and slowly swam to Mark, who helped him aboard the launch. I heard my friend gun his engine as he turned the prow north. I paddled south with every fiber of my body. Had I ever looked back, I would never have left the northland. (Lesley, 198)

The author-narrator's sadness does not only come from the separation from his nonhuman companion. It mainly comes from the awareness that the young animal could not understand why the man who had saved him, raised him, played with him, and loved him, could abandon him. The poignancy of the scene comes from the fact that one of the two companions cannot understand the situation and thinks he is abandoned. The young bear can understand many things from his companion's behaviour, voice or gazes. But here he cannot understand because there is nothing that can be explained by instinct. There is nothing explicable for one who cannot understand the articulate language that could explain everything. If the man can think like the animal because he can regain the instinct he had in a remote time and can listen to the instinctive creature facing him, the animal cannot think like a man because he cannot include calculations in his analysis of the man's behaviour. The animal is guided by instinct and by that unfailing bond uniting him to his human companion. A scene like the one the young bear has to face, after sharing so many moments of complicity with his human companion, can only be regarded by him as a breaking of the bond uniting them. It is the bear's feelings that provoke Leslie's deep sadness. He knows that he will never see the young bear again but he could bear that because he knows that this can save the animal's life. But he cannot bear the the young animal’s feeling of treason. He cannot bear the fact that his companion could mistake the scene for a breaking of the bond. One adjective is enough to convey the animal's feeling: "disbelieving." How could he believe that his companion could be violent and strike his nose? How could he believe that he could abandon him? Leslie's style expresses the strength of the bear's feelings, conveyed by the superimposition of the narrator's gestures of violence on the bear's nose and the bear's past gestures of affection with this same nose. The bond created by companionship between a human being and wild animals, is founded on trust, absolute trust, which explains the despair of the young bear who considers his return to free wildlife as abandonment— it is not his choice—and cannot understand the blows he receives from the companion for whom he had absolute trust, exactly as Mij had not been able to understand why he had been imprisoned in a cage, far from his human companion, even for a short while. Leslie's final dramatic scene

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reveals the limits of human communication with animals as such a reasonable decision cannot be understood by an animal whose life is guided by instinct and who has learnt to trust the man who had saved him and eventually cannot understand a gesture he can only see in that moment as violence and abandonment, and not as a gift rendering the animal his original and true life in the wilderness and leading him far from the hunters who would have killed him. It shows that the limits of communication between humans and nonhumans are not on the animal’s side but on the human’s side. It is because the human companion is unable to explain something based on calculation that the animal cannot understand. The bond was created from the common empathy and feelings between the man, the old she-bear and the three cubs. The she-bear had recognized in that particular man someone who had the capacity to care, which he did. But when gestures and behaviours contradict the feeling of empathy, that cannot be understood by the animal. Leslie clearly explains the evolution from an environmental approach consisting of rendering wild orphan animals to their natural habitat, to a bond of "mutual friendship" (Leslie, 197): The original bargain with my conscience to raise the bears and then return them to their native habitat when they were equipped to earn their own, normal way had not reckoned sufficiently with the element of animal devotion. With an almost British lack of sentimentality, I had felt sorry for three cute little teddy-bear orphans, offered them temporary food and protection, trained them to meet their own responsibilities. Then, out of the finest kind of obedience, respect, trust, compatibility, and affection, there had grown a depth of mutual friendship far beyond anything I could have believed possible at the time the cubs arrived. (197)

The aim of such a book, which was translated into several languages and adapted for the cinema in a film by Bernard McEveety in 1974—which shows the success of such stories linking man and animal—is to show an experience of life in, and with nature, which the author felt like sharing with the rest of the world. Through that act of sharing an experience thanks to a book, he shows how an autobiographical story can guide people to the simple moral conscience and intellectual awareness of a bond uniting them with the nonhuman, through the simple notion of a mutual feeling of trust, complicity and friendship. It is no slight humour if the title of the first chapter is "[a]dopted by bears;" this shows that the apparent temporary adoption of the bears by a man results from the animals’ choice and that the story that is going to follow tells about a mutual acceptance of the other, the awareness that humans and nonhumans

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belong to the same family. An internet surfer wrote about the book: "I've read the book several more times, just to be there again, with that enduring family of author, bears and robins."14 "Just to be there again…" The reader's experience is an experience of sharing something, sharing a family belonging. We are there, with Leslie and the young bears, thanks to his book. The bond is the bond uniting Leslie and the bears. But the reader, as is suggested by the internet surfer, realizes the family link uniting him/her with the nonhuman world, from the small and fragile robins to the big and apparently strong bears. The family of robins visiting Leslie's cabin every year, with a faithful memory, and the orphan bears adopted by Leslie, are evoked in family terms, because they do constitute a family. Biologically speaking, the bears and the man are mammals and plantigrads. But chiefly, affectively, bears, robins and man are united forever. The man knows it, the last living bear perhaps eventually understood, from the bottom of his instinctive love, what the terrible scene he had lived meant: that it was a way of saving him a second time. But at the moment when it happened, communication was broken and the bond seemed to be torn; only violence appeared to the young animal's eyes and heart. And yet Leslie gave the bear the greatest proof of friendship or love. The bear could not understand, as an animal cannot understand men's calculations, particularly when they appear in the guise of violence. Instinct is too far from our thoughts. We are too far from our original animal instinct. What would have happened if Leslie had trusted the bear's capacity of silent communication in spite of his own suffering, and, before the moment of separation, had explained to him, his eyes plunged into the bear's eye, as Robert Hood could see a wolf in Greenstockings' eyes even if he could not understand her language?15 Here the man, loving his animal companion more than himself, trusting him affectively, did not trust his own capacity to communicate outside language, or at least his suffering was too deep to let him think about the power of mutual silent communication at the moment when communication between the two was to be broken by the facts. I often experienced silent communication with companion animals. I often felt a sense of wonder when realizing that the animal had perfectly understood what I wanted to tell him/her and only transmitted through my eyes or my thoughts. To "project" our thoughts—as a friend of mine, a mountaineer and environmental critic said one day—, into the animal's mind so that he/she could figure it out, so that he/she could understand: this is the condition to maintain the bond outside articulate language, and 14https://www.amazon.ca/Bears-I-Robert-Franklin-Leslie/product-

reviews/0330243950, accessed March 12, 2018. 15 Rudy Wiebe, A Discovery of Strangers, 173. See the beginning of this chapter.

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even outside physical presence. Exactly as the affective bond is never broken, the physical and mental connection can be maintained thus. To project one's mind into the animal's is close to what Aldo Leopold said: to think like the animal. Animals do understand our thoughts if we explain, not through our articulate language, or at least not only through it, but through a more remote language, coming from the depth of our hearts, a silent language, which has something to do with our original instinct and the sense of a bond linking us with other animals.16 The only possibility for the bear to understand one day, when living free in his forest, was to make the link between the terrible scene of separation and the new peaceful life he could live far from hunters. To make the link and try to project himself into his former human companion's mind and heart. His human companion had not explained things to him before the separation. So perhaps, the bear could project his questions into his companion's mind and perhaps, long after this dramatic scene, he might have understood the depth of Leslie's love in the harshness of the separation. The bond uniting humans and nonhuman animals is conveyed by their affective memory, leading them to welcome those who took care of them one day with great tenderness, like the gorillas welcoming young Tanzy Aspinall17 among many other scenes revealing that kind of affective bond remaining beyond the return to wild life. The stories of Mij and Gavin Maxwell in Scotland or of the three bears and Robert Franklin Leslie in Canada, both show the same animal trust, the same mutual complicity, friendship, and love, which are absolute feelings in animals. Wild animals can accept companionship and enjoy it from the moment when they feel a reciprocal feeling. The trouble with man is that he hesitates between reasonable, logical, environmentally responsible behaviour and his/her own feelings; that he hesitates between his articulate thought and his instinctive language, still present deep in his heart; the trouble is that he often opposes them instead of using them as complementary languages. The nonhuman animal does not hesitate. He/she makes his/her choice. If he/she chooses companionship, he/she keeps his/her wild characteristics but companionship prevails if the man choosing the wild animal as a companion for whatever reason, is able to think, not as the human being he is, but like the animal. To understand animal language, man has to use his remote memory and his imagination. To think like animals is to remember we are still animals and to imagine the language we had when we were closer to the animal world. Unlike human beings, nonhuman animals—in 16 17

About nonverbal language and verbalization, see further on, p. 399-404. See p. 289--291 of this book.

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Leslie's case, the she-bear—do not need to imagine anything. Their instinctive knowledge lets them understand, not an articulate language, but the messages conveyed by human bodies, voices, intonations, eyes and feelings. It is because the old she-bear perceived the capacity of empathy and the capacity to care in Leslie, that she consigned the three bear cubs to him. The Iraqi otter living most of his life in Scotland and the Canadian bears give humans the sense of a bond: not something that "restrains" but something that "unites" through a particular force.18 How is it that while such strong bonds can be created between some men or women and nonhuman animals, other animals are martyred for people's entertainment? Is it a human mystery or an environmental fault?

Poets' voices against bullfigthing Of all animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it. Mark Twain

The reasons why some intelligent, humane people claim that they are not opposed to bullfights remain a great mystery for those who see in a bullfight what it is: a show based on torture to enable some people to earn money. Another paradox is that in India, where animals are sacred, there were violent demonstrations in 2017 against a ban of bullfighting and a festival was recently organized in spite of the ban.19 Those who say it is in the name of popular traditions must not forget that in France it was imported by an emperor's wife since it is Eugénie de Montijo who wanted that Spanish circus game to appear in France. Albert Jacquart said: "S'élever contre les corridas, c'est défendre notre part d'humanité, une part

18

See some definitions of the bond in the Merriam-Webster dictionary: "something that binds or restrains, fetters: prisoners freed from their bonds, the bonds of oppression // a binding agreement: covenant: united in the bonds of holy matrimony. My word is my bond. […] a uniting or binding element or force, tie: the bonds of friendship" 19 "In India, the bullfight might go on as officials vow to defy a ban on controversial sport", Los Angeles Time, April 6, 2017, http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-92377808/, accessed April 6, 2017.

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qui dans notre société est en grave danger."20 French philosopher Michel Onfray writes: Toute la civilisation est effort d'arrachement de la barbarie pour aller vers la culture: disons-le moins prosaïquement, pour aller du talion à la loi, du viol à sa condamnation, de l'exploitation des enfants à leur éducation – de la corrida à son abolition. Il cohabite en chacun de nous un cerveau de l'intelligence et un cerveau de serpent : on doit au premier les artistes, les écrivains, les bâtisseurs, les philosophes, les musiciens, les inventeurs, les pacifistes, les instituteurs ; au second, les tortionnaires, les tueurs, les guerriers, les inquisiteurs, les guillotineurs, et autres gens qui font couler le sang dont les toreros. […] Notre époque sent le sang. Quelques-uns s'honorent en ne communiant pas dans cette barbarie défendue par son ancienneté : mais il est dans l'ordre des choses que toute barbarie s'enracine dans la tradition et l'ancienneté. L'argument de la tradition devrait être définitivement dirimant. Depuis les temps les plus anciens, le mâle viole la femelle, le fort égorge le faible, le loup dévore l'agneau : est-ce un argument pour que les choses continuent toujours ainsi ? Il y a plus d'humanité dans le regard de mes chats que dans celui d'un être qui hurle de joie quand le taureau vacille et s'effondre, l'œil rempli de larmes et bientôt de néant.21

When the philosopher places bullfighters on the side of all those who spill blood, torturers and killers, he wants to strike people through that 20

“To speak out against bullfights is to defend our part of humanity, a part that, in our society, is at serious risk,” (translation mine) https://citations.ouest-france.fr/citation-albert-jacquard/elever-contre-corridasdefendre-notre-112728.html, accessed October 1st, 2020. 21 "Every civilization is a force trying to tear itself away from barbarity to go towards culture: let's say it less prosaically, to go from lex talionis to law, from rape to its condemnation, from the exploitation of children to their education—from bullfight to its abolition. In every man, an intelligent brain and a snake's brain live together: to the former we owe artists, writers, builders, philosophers, musicians, inventors, pacifists and primary school teachers; to the latter we owe torturers, killers, warriors, inquisitors, guillotine executioners, and other people spilling blood, among whom bullfighters. […] Our time smells blood. Some people pride themselves on not communing in that barbarity defended by its ancientness: but the rooting of any barbarity in tradition and ancientness is in the natural order of things. The argument of tradition should be definitively nullifying. Since the remotest times, males have raped females, the strong have cut the throats of the weak, wolves have devoured lambs: is it an argument to let things go on that way? There is more humanity in my cats' eyes than in the eyes of a being yelling out of joy when the bull vacillates and collapses, his eyes filled with tears, and soon nothingness" (translation mine). Michel Onfray. "Le cerveau reptilien de l'aficionado, " October 2012, http://www.alliance anticorrida.fr/img/img-soutiens/onfray.pdf, accessed May 31, 2018/

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association between all those who spill blood. He could add those whom he quotes further on taking pleasure in the sight of torture and suffering. The bullfighter takes a risk and has chosen this activity very often to get out of a spiral of poverty. There is nothing similar in the public who just waits for an unequal fight between a man armed with banderillas weakening the animal until he could kill the animal who is already bleeding to death. The naturalist and writer Théodore Monod added war to the oldest traditions, saying that it is not a reason why we should go on making war. A song can be added to those condemnations of the bullfight by philosophers and writers; it is a song by the French singer and poet Francis Cabrel, who shows a bullfight from the bull's point of view in a poignant way.22 At the beginning, we cannot know who is speaking. The speaker might be a man under sentence of death, as the mention of the corridor suggests, but the reference to songs and dances moves us away from this interpretation as nobody sings after an execution and yet, this is the case. The following stanza reveals the absence of a possible escape: Dans les premiers moments j'ai cru Qu'il fallait seulement se défendre Mais cette place est sans issue Je commence à comprendre Ils ont refermé derrière moi (ibid..)23

It is when Andalusia is mentioned with "the meadows bordered with cactuses," that we understand that it is not a man but a bull who speaks and comments upon his last moments. Je les entends rire comme je râle Je les vois danser comme je succombe Je pensais pas qu'on puisse autant S'amuser autour d'une tombe Est-ce que ce monde est sérieux? Est-ce que ce monde est sérieux? (Ibid.)24

22

Francis Cabrel. "La corrida." https://www.paroles-musique.com/parolesFrancis_Cabrel-La_Corrida-lyrics,p4836, accessed May 31, 2018. 23 "In the first instants, I thought / That I had only to defend myself / But that place is a dead end / I start realizing / They shut the door again behind me" (translation mine). 24 "I can hear them laugh as I groan / I can see them dance as I am dying. / I didn't think that people could have so much fun / Around a grave / Is this world serious ? / Is this world serious?" (translation mine).

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The bull's impossibility to understand the facts becomes a philosophical question recurring again and again since it is the burden: "Is this world serious?" Is it serious to laugh and dance in front of extreme suffering, torture and blood? Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath went to Spain in 1956 for their honeymoon and attended a bullfight. Ted Hughes wrote to his mother about his disgust: "I'd imagined that the matador danced around with the dangerous bull, then killed him instantly. Not so… The killing isn't even neat, and with all the chances against it, we felt disgusted and sickened by such brutality."25 Both of them wrote poems about this experience. Sylvia Plath's starts with a bullring coloured with the bulls' blood: "Arena dust rusted by four bulls' blood to a dull redness," ("The Goring," ibid.)

The poem is about a goring, the wound of the matador hurt by the bull's horn. But there is so much blood in the first line that the reader sees the gore of the word "goring" invade the poem. And the first blood spilled is from one of the four bulls killed before that fight. The sounds of the line, the alliteration in [d] along with the assonance in [š]—"dust"/"dull"—, the consonance [st]—"dust"/"rusted"— and the alliteration in [b]—"bulls' blood"—echo the disgust felt by the young woman even before she speaks about the matador's wound. The last line provides the poem with a frame of blood: Blood faultlessly broached redeemed the sullied air, the earth's grossness.

Blood becomes the blood of redemption in a world where, instead of the Spanish sun, the air is said to be "sullied" and the earth gross. Ted Hughes also wrote a poem entitled "You Hated Spain," and the bullfight is central to it: So we sat as tourists at the bullfight Watching bewildered bulls awkwardly butchered, ("You Hated Spain")

Both poets express their disgust in front of such a sight that led to some hatred of Spain.

25 https://thelastarena.wordpress.com/2015/02/25/ted-hughes-and-sylvia-plath-onbullfighting/ accessed April 6, 2017.

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A British poet of Jamaican origins Benjamin Zephaniah, opposing the argument of bullfighting as culture to true Spanish culture and bullfighting cruelty, writes: Animal cruelty can never be culture, it's just cruelty. It breaks my heart seeing horses and bulls terrified and hurt in the bullring. I feel ashamed as a human being that we still treat animals in this way, laughing and cheering as they are tortured and killed for our amusement. When bullfighting has stopped in Spain, even more people will come from all over the world for the music, the arts, the conversations, the scenery, and the climate. What's more, people will forget the barbarity and acknowledge the compassion. Spain can be even greater. 26

Using the same opposition between the lexical field of joy and laughter on the one hand and that of cruelty on the other hand, as Francis Cabrel in his song, he dismantles the cultural argument disappearing behind such words as "cruelty" repeated twice, "terrified," "hurt," "tortured," and "killed," the word "ashamed" being at the centre of this painting of suffering and cruelty. South African Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee used strong words when he wrote to the Cultural Committee of Spain that had supported bullfighting: Bullfighting is an archaic form of entertainment. It is a violent, bloody spectacle––a throwback to a time when people took no heed of the feelings of animals and the bull was an object of torment for boys who wanted to impress their fellows. Bullfighting has had a long history in Spain, but times and sensibilities have now changed. Today, we see clearly that it is not fair to pit a skilled, practised, sword-wielding matador against an unwilling, confused, maimed, psychologically tormented and physically debilitated animal. Tormenting and butchering bulls for entertainment belongs in the Dark Ages––not in 21st century Spain.27

The Lebanese poet Malak El Halabi associates the claps in front of the blood spilled during a bullfight with all the blood spillings in the human world:

26 http://www.hsi.org/world/united_kingdom/news/news/2013/08/bullfight_ campaign_support_082313.html, accessed April 6, 2017. 27 http://www.peta.org.uk/blog/jm-coetzee-bullfighting-is-a-disgrace/ accessed April 6, 2017.

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Chapter Fifteen Starting a game with only one side having decided fully to engage in while making sure all the odds will be in the favor of him being a predetermined winner. It was this moment precisely that made me feel part of something immoral. The unfair rules of the game. The indifferent bull being begged to react, being pushed to the edge of fury. The bull, tired and peaceful. The bull, being teased relentlessly. The bull being pushed to a game he isn't interested in. And the matador getting credits for an unfair game he set. As I left the arena, people looked at me with mocking eyes. Yes, I went to watch a bull fight and yes the play of colours is marvelous. The matador's costume is breathtaking and to be sitting in an arena fills your lungs with the sands of time. But to see the amount of claps the spill of blood is getting was beyond what I can endure. To hear the amount of claps injustice brings is astonishing. You understand a lot about human nature, about the wars taking place every day, about poverty and starvation. You understand a lot about racial discrimination and abuse (verbal and physical), sex trafficking, and everything that stirs the wounds of this world wide open. You understand a lot about humans' thirst for injustice and violence as a way to empower hidden insecurities. Replace the bull and replace the matador. And the arena will still be there. And you'll hear the claps. You've been hearing them ever since you opened your eyes. (Malak El Halabi)28

In Spain, more and more people are opposed to bullfighting and in September 2016, thousands of opponents demonstrated against bullfighting at Puerta del Sol in Madrid.29 In South America, where bullfighting was imported by the conquistadores and thus often appears as a violent reminder of Spanish colonization, Paul McCartney helped Colombian musician Chucho Merchán in his campaign to abolish bullfights in Colombia. Poets and singers refuse the cruelty of bullfights and if law was respected, bullfights should be forbidden as cruelty to animals is punishable by law. Catherine and Raphael Larrère remind us that Jeremy Bentham had "asserted that it is not reason but sensitivity that marks the frontier of the moral community." He said: "La question n'est pas: peuvent-ils raisonner? Ni peuvent-ils parler? Mais bien peuvent-ils

28

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/bullfighting, accessed April 6, 2017. Merrit Kennedy. "Momentum Grows Against Bullfighting In Spain, As Thousands Rally", NPR, http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/11/4934 92351/momentum-grows-against-bullfighting-in-spain-as-thousands-rally, accessed May 31, 2018. 29

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souffrir?"30 This question opened onto laws and Catherine and Raphael Larrère add: Il a fallu attendre Peter Singer pour que les conséquences de cet élargissement de la communauté morale à tous les êtres sensibles soient systématiquement tirées, quant à l'obligation de se préoccuper de la souffrance animale, sans distinction d'espèce. (ibid.)31

So, which good reason can be given for various states and cities to allow such shows as bullfights, which are based on animal suffering? People are attracted to blood as they were attracted to men's and women's executions in the past, and perhaps the fact of taking pleasure in suffering and death is a sort of catharsis, a way of evacuating the violence sleeping in each of us. Even if it is the case, it does not justify that state illegality for the sake of money. Some men and women try to make things progress by their actions and texts or photographs witnessing the horror of the scenes they attended. Thus, Jo-Ann McArthur, a Canadian photographer, who launched the We Animals project and "attempts to further animal rights by collaborating with various animal organizations, such as Zoocheck and the Janet Goodall Institute" (Hunter, 175), takes photographs of bullfights in Spain to lead people who do not know what happens really to realize the cruelty of that activity. The solitude she feels when attending that kind of show while hearing people laugh and express joy makes her say: "in those moments of cheering crowds and celebration, I'm an island."32 She feels such a stranger to the human world that she becomes nonhuman, a geographical place, an island of compassion in the middle of a human sea of indifference to suffering. She ends her testimony with those words: On my final day of this feria, I'm at my wit's end. As the last bull is dragged off to the matadero, paralysed by a severed spine but still alive, I take photos of the party that is underway around him. The partygoers descend the stairwells en masse and fill the streets for a night of festivities 30 Catherine et Raphael Larrère. "Ethique environnementale et éthique animale," in Jean-Paul Engélibert and al. La question animale, 93-94. "The question is not: can they reason? Nor can they speak? But it is: can they suffer?" (translation mine). 31 "It was not before Peter Singer that the consequences of that widening of the moral community to all sensitive creatures were systematically drawn, about the obligation to concern oneself with animal suffering, irrespective of species" (translation mine). 32 Jo-Anne McArthur. "Through the Lens of Compassion: Capturing an End to Bullfighting", in Hunter 172.

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Chapter Fifteen while the bull takes its last breath. That familiar solitude and loneliness has set itself in my bones, but my solace is that the photos of these horrific events will be seen, published, examined, discussed, and shared. The images I've captured ask the viewer a question. My job is done if the images are evocative and compassionate enough to make people provide the answers. Only then can there be understanding, accountability and change. (McArthur in Hunter, 175)

Texts and pictures are the actions that can change the world…

The animal point of view, the animal language and the animal voice The animal point of view appearing in Kipling's Jungle Book or in Francis Cabrel's song "La corrida" is also present in novels. Jack London's Call of the Wild starts with the dog Buck. It is the dog that brings the reader "[i]nto the Primitive" from the first chapter. Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego. Because men, groping in the Arctic darkness, had found a yellow metal, and because steamship and transportation companies were booming the find, thousands of men were rushing into the Northland. These men wanted dogs, and the dogs they wanted were heavy dogs, with strong muscles by which to toil, and furry coats to protect them from the frost.33

It is the dog that indirectly introduces the reader to the gold rush—"had found a yellow metal"—, the invasion of the Arctic landscape by "steamship and transportation companies" and "thousands of men." The opposition between this unique dog whose name opens the novel and the multitude of men and companies leads the reader towards the exploitation of nature by men. Buck, the unique dog named from the start, can be opposed by the multitude of dogs meant to accompany the gold diggers: "These men wanted dogs, and the dogs they wanted were heavy dogs" (ibid.). The animal point of view can also be a way of speaking about minorities as in the Hungarian film by Kornél MundrukzÓ, White God, which was awarded the Prize Un Certain Regard at the 2014 Cannes Film

33 Jack London, The Call of the Wild, chapter 1, "Into the Primitive", http://www.gutenberg.org/files/215/215-h/215-h.htm

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Festival, while two dogs in the film were awarded the Palm Dog Award.34 It was also awarded the Octopus d'Or at the Strasbourg European Fantastic Film Festival for the Best International Feature Film. The awards of the film at the prestigious Cannes Festival show that a film founded on animals and the animal point of view can reach its goal. The story mingles the plot staging particular individuals, a girl and the father abandoning the little girl's dog; the Hungarian society where the government imposes fines on mongrels as they only accept pedigree dogs; and a metaphorical reading of the story concerning the rejection of minorities. When a journalist asked him how he had the idea of the film, Kornél MundrukzÓ said that he wrote the screenplay after seeing a dog in a cage. He said: I went to a dog shelter in Budapest years ago, and at the time I was working in theatre. I felt so ashamed of not being aware of the situation inside those shelters and how dire it was. I just saw it within the dogs' eyes, and I felt compelled to make a movie about it. I sat down almost immediately and started to write the script.35

The director's aim was double: on the one hand he wanted to denounce ill treatment towards animals and on the other hand, to denounce all forms of segregation towards minorities since the dogs are the symbol of all minorities as he explains: […] with dogs, I can create a fairy tale. They symbolize the minority in the movie, but in real life they are also man's best friend and considered part of the family. You can see the dogs in a movie as if they were human. It's like a metaphor, and this movie is really a critique of my society and the majority, told through the story of a dog. (ibid.)

The director was also inspired by the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, in his novel Disgrace (1999). Coetzee defends the idea that all humans and nonhuman creatures must have the same rights. This is the sense of his novella, The Lives of Animals (1999), a metafictional book evoking animal rights. Coetzee initially gave a lecture at Princeton 34 The dogs were trained by Teresa Ann Miller, also famous for having trained the dogs playing the role of Rex, the police dog, in the Austrian then Italian TV series Inspector Rex (Kommissar Rex) created by Peter Hajek and Peter Moser, broadcast in fifty-two countries, with eighten seasons from 1994 to 2015. Teresa Ann Miller trained the dogs in the first ten seasons. The success of the series shows how audiences like stories staging animals as heroes and perhaps even more, like stories showing the link of friendship between a dog and a man, probably more than the detective story itself. 35 http://thewildmagazine.com/blog/white-god-movie/, accessed May 18, 2017.

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University in 1997, telling the story of a female novelist, Elizabeth Costello, giving a lecture on animal rights. The use of metafiction and of the mise en abyme of novel writing and lecture giving, is a way of having the animal voice heard as if in an infinite echo mixing orality and writing, which will be prolonged by visual arts through the Hungarian film. In Rudy Wiebe's A Discovery of Strangers, the first chapter is entirely devoted to the animal point of view. At the very beginning, the caribou are seen in union with the Arctic landscape: The animals simply moved away into their necessary silence, travelling where they pleased, as they always had inside that clenched fist of the long darkness, their powerful feathered, furred bodies as light as flecks of ice sifting over snow, as light and quick. But throughout the dark weight of midwinter, with moss and lichens always harder to smell and paw from under the crusted snow, all the caribou knew that the sun would certainly return again. And eventually it did; its rim grew slowly day by day up out of darkness into red brilliance, until finally the cows and calves recognized themselves together as they always were, in the whole giant ball of it shimmering through the fog, round and complete again on the distant edge of the sky. The cows lay in their hollows of snow on a drifted lake, the calves from the previous spring sheltered against their backs out of the wind. (Wiebe 1995, 1)

Nature is linked with silence and with a deep listening to all its elements. The animals travel "into their necessary silence," a vital silence meant for survival without being caught by men or other predators. The contrasts between the "strange" men's racket and the silence of nature reveal the violence brought by those non-identified men, a violence opposed to the peaceful landscape of the picture where no human presence appears and where even the material is animal. The animals mix with the landscape: "their powerful feathered, furred bodies as light as flecks of ice sifting over snow, as light and quick." They are mixed up with ice, there is a fusion between them and ice which, thanks to them, is no longer a space of death but a space standing for life ("as light and quick as breathing"). The ambivalence of that world is underlined through the animals' perception of things: "their nostrils opened to the burning air: it was sharp as ice, gentle with all the smells they recognized." The air is both "sharp" and "gentle." They stand for softness ("feathered, "furred", "furry") as opposed to the sharpness of ice. And it is that ambivalent nature that starts writing the story. Nature offers the cows hollows of snow to shelter the calves from the wind. They use the shapes of Nature to live in communion with it. Even the invisible air carries messages in the "smells they recognized." They have an instinctive knowledge since "they were reassured that when

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that blazing sun stands three times its height over the glazed levels of this lake, they will feel the restlessness of their young grow heavier within them." The sun speaks to them a (literally) luminous language in which they perceive time. Their knowledge (the verb "to know" is used repeatedly) is that of instinct, it is also a knowledge passed on from generation to generation. The narrator insists on the shapes (of the movements, of the sun, of the animals' positions—"angles"—in terms of geometry. A rational language is used to speak about instinctive knowledge through which the animals can understand the land and live on. Rudy Wiebe is one of those Nature writers who do not only write about Nature, like another Canadian writer, Thomas Wharton, who, in Icefields, changes the ice of the Canadian mountains into a page, the ice containing its own history. Those writers see a form of writing in the landscape. The animal point of view previously evoked is a first sign of that Nature writing. The "clenched fist of the long darkness" into which the animals travel prolongs the first clause of the text and of the novel—"The land is so long"—thus associating, through the simple adjective "long", the land and darkness. The land has the colour of the night, which corresponds to reality during a great part of the year; of course symbolically, it bears the colour of death and of the unknown. The "clenched fist" suggests the notion of fight; it is a fight between the animals and darkness. And with the very simple clause "The land is so long", we can already understand what the land is; the alliteration in [l], the consonance in [n], the monosyllables lengthen the sounds as if reproducing the endless length of that land qualified at the end of the paragraph as "inexorable." The first paragraph is encircled by the word "land," the first word and the last word of the paragraph, which suggests a land imprisoning those who live on it. The land initiates the novel that becomes its core and, as is first seen through the animals' silent voice, it clearly illustrates ecological writing in its strict sense: writing speaking about the relationship of animals and men with their environment. In A Discovery of Strangers, animal language first suggests that there is some understanding of the nonverbal and that nature gives a philosophical message. The nonverbal thus reveals the verb and thought.36 36

See my article on the subject: "L'Ecriture écologique à la source de la poésie ou l'émergence d'un langage poétique dans l'acceptation du non verbal : l'exemple de A Discovery of Strangers de Rudy Wiebe et Icefields de Thomas Wharton", in Stéphane Héritier, Michèle Kaltemback, Claire Omhovère and Marcienne Rocard éds., Perspectives environnementales au Canada: l’écologie dans tous ses états / Environmental Issues in Canada: the Ins and Outs of Ecology, Toulouse: Editions Universitaires du Sud, 2009, 223-234. Some parts of this chapter are adaptated

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The opening of A Discovery of Strangers appears as a verbalization, through writing, of the nonverbal language between a caribou and a wolf. A nonverbal language becomes a message thanks to the filter of interpretation. By relying on natural sciences, on a book dealing with animal behaviours, the artist, far from destroying language, uses it to translate a nonverbal language and thus go very deep into natural speech. At a conference that took place in Toulouse, Marcienne Rocard and Michèle Kaltemback had asked the question whether "Ecological writing would be some sort of fundamentalism inevitably leading to a crisis of verbalization, to the death of language?"37 Rudy Wiebe's novel is the illustration that it is the contrary. His writing conveys the "absence of appropriation of the Other," of the one who is different, the Indian, but also all the world surrounding him, animals, plants, stones, the whole landscape. Far from being "some sort of fundamentalism," ecological writing does not lead to "a crisis of verbalization, to the death of language" but to a recovered original language. The poetry of Wiebe's novel is founded in the essence of the nonverbal (animals' language, gestures, and gazes). We can wonder if a crisis of language is not necessary to allow the re-emergence of a true language. Gestures (that is body language), images, sounds, the music of animal cries and songs, appear as the source of any kind of language, if we understand language as an instrument of communication. The phonetic signs that were at the origin of words, of languages, made the link between the people of the same community easier and they also alienated people from one another by creating verbal differences. At the same time, those signs were at the origin of the awareness of people's identities. So the question of whether the return to a language excluding the verbal should mean a loss of one's identity could be raised. In fact it does not mean a loss of one's identity. It is even the contrary. The will to communicate at any price outside the verbal, leads to the learning of other people's languages. Far from standardizing language, it allows a return to the acceptance and understanding of differences. Animal shouts are all different and yet all of them include the nonverbal codes of those who do not belong to the same species. Communication through the nonverbal, which is taught first of all by the animal world (as animals use the voice, gestures and images for courtship rituals for example) reveals the weight of words and makes from the article. 37 Conference "L'Ecologie dans tous ses états au Canada," March 28, 2008, Université Toulouse-Le Mirail, GREC (Toulouse Groupe de Recherche en Etudes Canadiennes). Presentation by Marcienne Rocard and Michèle Kaltemback.

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every language a geographical map and a forgery-proof identity card. Poets listen to the sounds of the world and follow this animal sense of communication. You can recognize Native American poetry in the English language whereas no word is pronounced in the original language. A simple face to face between a man and a woman (Robert Hood and Greenstockings in Wiebe's A Discovery of Strangers) reveals the meaning of the silent exchange. When Momaday says that it is not necessary to understand everything, that the music of the word is more important than the word itself,38 he underlines the role of the nonverbal within the verbal. At the beginning of A Discovery of Strangers, the narrator says: "With each moment she knew her name, if she had one, was becoming Dàmbé? Elchànile; but when her travel in her present direction ended it might very well be Elyàske again" (A Discovery of Strangers, 10). No translation of the Indian words appears and yet the reader is supposed to understand the hidden meaning in the sound of the word, in Indianness made through a verbal element that he/she does not understand but that he/she can hear, as the caribou in his mother's womb can hear the wolf's howling and knows, even before arriving in this world, that that voice is the voice that will chase him and perhaps will kill him: the voice of death at the very moment of life in the making between two nonhuman creatures who do not know what the verbal might be. Only the voice is meaningful. The voice translated into words by poetic writing suggests some thought that is beyond the power of description, a kind of spiritual thought about life and death, death in birth or birth and life in death, the absence of a frontier between life and death. And it is that entering into animal voices and animal thought that makes us enter the world of the people that the explorers are going to discover in the novel—as they have discovered them in the reality of history. It is the perception of that animal voice that reveals a different form of spirituality through nonhuman creatures, for whom spirituality does not exist. The nonverbal allows a gradual penetration into otherness, some acceptance of that otherness through the acknowledgement of a fact presented as objective since it has its origin in a scientific book about animal behaviours.39 Wiebe's writing translates that nonverbal into words and without the original animal language, his own words would not exist. The poetic writing of his text only exists through the poetry he reads in the landscape and in animal voices. The strength of his words only reproduces the strength of a nature in which the coded, verbal language figures. The climactic point of the love story between the 38

In a lecture given at Université Toulouse-Le Mirail, December 15, 2000. The book mentioned in the novel is Caribou and the Barren-Land by George Calef. 39

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explorer Robert Hood and the Indian woman Greenstockings is a nonverbal exchange between them and it is animal language that will reveal their understanding beyond words. The exchange between a man and a woman reveals the acceptance of otherness through the nonverbal when the verbal cannot allow communication. The difficulty in understanding each other for those who speak different languages becomes a sign of fusion: Robert Hood laughs to see her laugh, to make her laugh again, to lengthen the sound of her singing voice. Not understanding a syllable of any word she has ever spoken. And not wanting to, nor thinking about that because her obsidian eyes flame firelight at him (157).

The refusal to understand what she feels through words conveys a will to understand an essential nonverbal and stronger language: "he does not want to understand any word she ever speaks—None" (158). The absence of understanding becomes a will to understand otherwise than through language. The whole body becomes language and replaces verbalization: "So he speaks softly as he sees she is listening to his happiness, trying to encourage again the rhythm of her voice, beyond his words that she in her turn will never understand either" (159). They understand each other beyond words. What matters is that not-understood language, a voice and a gaze that make the verbal useless to bring communication, thus reflecting the caribou's understanding of the wolf's voice. The absence of verbalization even becomes a healing element, a way of rejecting all the evils surrounding man and nature, whose harmony has been broken by the irruption of men speaking another language. In this culture where everything comes from the story told, where Native people evoke their Creation myths, where oral tradition is vital, the refusal of verbalizing the irruption of talkative explorers into the Arctic ("as if by not speaking into the story, it never can happen again," 150), reveals another perception of the world. Explorers' words are harmful and it is the non-verbalization that can become a healing source. It may be illusory, but that illusion goes far beyond the grammatical structure ("as if by not speaking into the story, it never can happen again"). It is the sign of a vision of the world where danger dwells in the verbal when it does not have its origins in the mythical or natural world, which are united. The verbal linked to the reality of history generates chaos whereas it is in the nonverbal that dwells the healing power. It is silence, the absence of language, that can both heal people and prevent violence. If history is evoked, it is so in terms of nature, and more particularly in animal life, since Keskarrah speaks about the wolf's prints: nature's writing overtakes men's language to unveil the

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meaning of things. The old Tetsot'ine says: "Perhaps this story is becoming like the wolf's track often is, it goes farther ahead into where it will happen, on and on, until it leads into beyond, and only then can it circle back to us" (152). The only story leading somewhere is the one that is compared to the silent image of nature, that living writing that is animal prints. It is when language is exclusively perceived as a series of sounds, when it reflects animal language, that it can be understood: "Birdseye murmurs sounds neither she nor Greenstockings fully comprehend. Though they both hear them into existence syllable by deadly syllable" (164). Sounds exist "syllable by syllable," which suggests the construction of words, through a listening transforming language into music to reconstruct it into a dissected language. It is in the "deverbalization" of language that its understanding is revealed and it is in that communication that ignores human language as such that the poetry of the Other is revealed. The animal chapter opening the novel is a key to understanding a language deprived of its human structures and words. It is a key to show us the way to listening to nature, which contains a language that everybody, whatever their human language, can understand, as all animals can understand one another. In the scene between the explorer and the Indian woman,40 the unrecognized verbal reveals the music that becomes the language of people's deep nature. Greenstockings tells Hood wolf stories, saying that wolves "have always been [their] brothers and sisters," that they "never kill them" (173). Even if Hood does not understand the young woman's words, while she is saying her people do not kill wolves, Hood sees in her eyes the picture of the wolf he killed in his dream. The death language of his dream is replaced by a living language making the image of the living wolf appear in Greenstockings' eyes while she is speaking about Indians' respect for the wolf. The reflection of the fire in the young woman's eyes may create the image of the wolf ("a trick of her fire perhaps," 173) but the text rather suggests that a visual language making the wolf present in Greenstockings' words enters her eyes to reach Hood's heart. Their way of looking at the deep language of nature makes the memory of the wolf a language that is the only perceptible one. The verbal is not refused or destroyed. It is revealing. Wiebe's connected story of animal life and perception in the Arctic and of a meeting between a Native community and explorers shows the limited

40

See p. 365-366 of this book.

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quality of verbal language and the depth of animal nonverbal language, which guides us on a way to listening to nature's language. As David Abram writes in his book Becoming Animal. An Earthly Cosmology, we only become "fully human" if we are aware of our connection with the nonhuman world and with the Earth: "Becoming earth. Becoming animal. Becoming, in this manner, fully human" (Abram 2011, 3).

PART 5 LITERATURE AS RESISTANCE

CHAPTER SIXTEEN MODERN THEATRE TO GIVE NATURE A NEW VOICE

"The stage is a magic circle where only the most real things happen, a neutral territory outside the jurisdiction of Fate where stars may be crossed with impunity. A truer and more real place does not exist in all the universe." P. S. Baber, Cassie Draws the Universe

"The stage is a magic circle," as P. S. Baber says and among "the most real things [that] happen" there, nature and fights to preserve the natural world appear in the form of plays or puppet shows that allow nature to speak through a theatrical magic relaying the true magic of nature. Shakespeare's use of botany was first and foremost symbolical, but an ecological dimension already appeared in his plays, as we saw earlier, in the sense that the awareness of man's relationship with the world and of the destruction of some natural habitats like forests was present in his theatre. We can also see a direct connection between theatre and ecology,1 as Baz Kershaw claims: "[…] theatre/performance and ecology may work to the same principles that make lightning and fulgurites interdependent and mutually illuminating" (Kershaw, 9). His book "explores how ephemeral human events—just like lightning-flashes, waves lapping against a beach, trees swaying in a storm—can have lasting effects because they always leave more or less durable traces that frequently are fundamentally paradoxical" (Kershaw, 9). This may be linked with the butterfly effect, a phrase coined by Edward Lorenz to designate the influence that a tiny natural fact might have on the world, as a butterfly’s flutter might provoke a tornado at the other end of the world: "In 1972, the meteorologist Edward Lorenz gave a talk at the 139th meeting of the 1 A conference was held at the University of Warwick on July 1st, 2017. Its title was "Theatrical Ecologies and Environments in the Nineteenth Century" (https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/theatre_s/staff/jim_davis/theatrical-ecologies-andenvironments/, accessed March 14, 2018).

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American Association for the Advancement of Science entitled "Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?" (Ghys, "The Butterfly Effect").2 Before the scientist Edward Lorenz, it was a writer, the author of Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift, that French philosopher Michel Serres evokes to speak about the influence the individual may have on the global. In Le contrat naturel, he writes that "[…] the individual or the being-there has as much effect on the global as the butterfly about which Swift writes that a flutter in an Australian desert will be heard in the meadows of green Erin, perhaps tomorrow or perhaps in two centuries […]."3 Kershaw's connections follow the same logic and his comparison between the theatre and ecology starts from both nature observation and his reflexion about performance and the planet’s condition. He started his book on "Theatre Ecology" on a thunder clap: "As I sat down at my desk in front of a window that overlooks the urban back gardens, pitching to write this first sentence of Theatre Ecology, there was a loud thunderclap and rain poured suddenly down" (Kershaw, 3). Kershaw stages his writing and from the start establishes a close connection between writing—his writing of the book we are reading—and natural life—a storm—, which becomes here a natural performance. The window is the frame opening onto the stage of nature and the three knocks are a thunderclap. His book starts with the project coming from David Harvey's idea that "if all socio-economic projects are ecological projects, then some conception of ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ is omnipresent in everything we do" (Harvey, 174, quoted by Kershaw, 7). Kershaw adds that "both Eden and Biosphere II4 influenced every aspect of Green Shade" (Kershaw, 7). Nowadays, as destructions grow all over the world and combine with it, growing awareness makes people react against all the damage caused on the planet because of the race for profit; modern theatre relays the Elizabethan bard to denounce more explicitly the damage to nature and to the people living in destroyed natural places. It is the case with a Canadian 2

http://perso.ens-lyon.fr/ghys/articles/butterflyeffect.pdf, accessed April 12, 2017. "[…] l'individu ou l'être-là obtient autant d'effet sur le monde global que le papillon dont Swift écrit qu'un battement d'aile en un désert d'Australie retentira sur les prairies de la verte Erin, peut-être demain ou dans deux siècles […], Michel Serres, Le Contrat Naturel, 38. 4 Here is the definition given on the site: " The Biosphere 2 Project—A Laboratory for Global Ecology Oracle, AZ—On March 6, 1994, seven researchers—five men and two women—were sealed inside the closed ecological system and research facility in the Santa Catalina Mountain foothills north of Tucson," http://www.biospherics.org/biosphere2/results/ accessed April 12, 2017. 3

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play, which is a reworking of Shakespeare's Hamlet, Hamlet-le-Malécite, showing the damage to rivers and then Native communities, because of the construction of dams by the company Hydro-Quebec.5 But the theatre can also warn spectators about environmental devastation in different ways. Nature can let us hear its voice by becoming the real scenery of the play; or it can enter the stage indirectly through the presence of scientists becoming performers for a few evenings, to warn people. Their books might be reserved for academics or for a small community. So, with artists, they make the texts of their books become an oral voice reaching more people.

Agronomics on the stage In February 2017, an original performance was given by the Compagnie Nanaqui on the stage of a theatre in Toulouse, Théâtre Daniel Sorano.6 The concept is simple: each performance is centred on a particular word and the show is divided into three parts: first an artistic perception of the word, secondly a lecture by specialists of the question and finally a discussion between the audience, the artist and the scientists. On that day, the performance was centred on the word "technique." The artist, Marcellino Martin-Vallente, a French artist with Spanish origins who founded a dance company in Norway, centred his performance on the combination of theatrical techniques (microphone, lightings, off-voices and recordings, a screen at the end of the stage, moves on the stage, and the passing of the fourth wall) and on a meditation on the technique of the black colour starting from a real fact: a patent for the vantablack, used in the military field to hide planes among other things. This triggered a meditation on absence with the comedian appearing on the stage and disappearing into the wings, being in the light or in the shadow, to end with a white screen in the dark hall and a text reading about a student who invented another black colour but made it free for everybody in the world. Two conceptions are opposed around the colour of absence. After this interesting performance on a philosophical and poetic text, Catherine and Raphael Larrère, the former being a philosopher and the latter an agronomist and sociologist, entered the theatrical field by giving their combined lecture around a table. Surrounded by the director organizing 5

See part 3, chapter 10 of this book, "Streams of Consciousness. World Water and Literary Warnings." 6 I would like to thank Christiane Fioupou who made me discover that performance opening many perspectives.

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the lectures and the performer, the authors of Penser et agir avec la nature and Du bon usage de la nature. Pour une philosophie de l'environnement were literally immersed in the theatrical world to explain their point of view on the relationship between technique and nature. The displacement of intellectual thought on a theatrical stage where a philosopher and an agronomist and sociologist entered into dialogue, gives thought a new life and helps to transmit some awareness concerning the link between nature and man's technique. The image used by Raphael Larrère of the ground as "a black box" was particularly significant. In the ground, each of us can try to find some codes explaining to us what happened to the world. The black box, used in case of plane crashes, also suggests that considering the ground as a black box makes us suppose that the world has crashed. The dialogue between the scientist, the philosopher, the artist and the audience allowed agronomics to take a new form of reality by appearing on the illusory space of a theatrical stage. Perhaps this is what may make the thought about the relationship between man and nature progress. The stage is one of the possible spaces allowing the dialogue between science and the public through living art. And perhaps the first audience who must be informed and will be more easily connected with the nonhuman world, is a public of children.

Puppet shows and children's plays Shows for children and particularly puppet shows may be another way of making young spectators aware of our connection with nature and of our origins at the same time. This is what some puppet companies do when they stage Native American myths. The poetry and theatricality of those myths are spread to stages all over the world since a puppet show stages them. Khasukuda (that is to say "night land") staged the Native American myths of the forest in a theatre of Kourou in Guiana; and in France, Les Maracas cosmiques (Cosmic Maracas), by the company "4 Cats," speak to children about the creation of the world through South American Indians. To evoke creation myths is to speak about nature and man's relationship with nature, as in all those myths, men are said to have been created thanks to animals or plants. The boy who crosses that mythical world on the stage, crosses water and forests revealing to him both primeval myths and collective memory and the strength of his own link with nature. Primeval myths can be read in the shapes of the landscape and peoples' history can be heard in its voice. It is in that collective memory that the close link between man and nature can be read as well and the condition of his

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existence appears in nature's preservation and in the listening to the other, to the one who does not look like you. With Puppets Saving the Environment,7 the simplicity of hands working puppets against a very simple background of a child's drawing alternately representing trees and houses, gives spectators the way to the preservation of the planet. In Northern America, Mariah Newborne proposes to book puppet shows and her performances take place in Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey and Canada. Shows for children or for students include environmental shows to develop young people's environmental awareness. Thus, Mariah's Amazing Puppets proposes some environmental shows. The Selfish Littlebug Giant leads students to the awareness of the damage caused by the abundance of litter and speaks about the necessity of recycling things, while The Giving Tree evokes the beauty of Nature and the gift that it is. No More Litter in Oz is a reworking of The Wizard of Oz. In this version, Dorothy is not a little girl but a litterbug who, after landing in Oz, has to face "a wicked litterbug witch who is trashing the kingdom."8 Dorothy and her friends the Tin Man, Scare Crow and Lion all work together to save Oz from litter. In the end she learns to care about the Earth and goes home to Kansas never to litter again.9 The web, thanks to YouTube or Dailymotion, links those performing children to all children in the world, and allows technology to reflect the mythical webs present in all creation myths. This is the case in India with plays performed by Indian schoolboys and girls, like Hope for the Earth, a play acted by children telling a story speaking about flowers while the city noises of traffic can be heard. Disguised as trees, flowers or animals, the children must face the man who chops down a tree. Wonderman arrives and the flowers and animals ask Wonderman to save the Earth but he says it is too late before adding that they can promise to preserve trees and nature. Such an environmental performance also appears with Save Earth Go Green performed by pupils from Grade 2C.10 D. M. Larson proposes Save the Earth Plays as Free Drama:11 Mother Earth, a monologue, The Owl, the Bull and the Forest, a short children's play with two actors, Replenish the Earth, a one-act play, which can be downloaded freely on the internet and provide a huge audience with 7

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1DOUftv7vo, accessed March 22, 2017. http://www.amazingpuppetshows.com/environmentalpuppetshows.html, accessed March 13, 2018. 9 http://www.amazingpuppetshows.com/environmentalpuppetshows.html, accessed March 22, 2017. 10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObXJ8R8r0-I, accessed March 22, 2017. 11 http://www.freedrama.net/earth.html, accessed March 22, 2017. 8

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theatrical versions of environmental commitment. As for the Romanian Uranium Mystery, it is presented as an "interactive audience participation mystery." Using the detective genre to evoke environmental problems but transposing them to the theatre, D. M. Larson starts from the disappearance of a Romanian count, who is the third victim of a scam linked with the will to possess a uranium mine in New Mexico, a plot that meets Tony Hillerman's novel People of Darkness. We can also think about the play Running Wild by Michael Morpurgo, inspired by the true story of a young elephant who saved a little English girl during the tsunami in Thailand. The play was "originally produced by Regent's Park Theatre and Chichester Festival Theatre." The presentation says that "this epic production, complete with spectacular life-size puppets, tells an emotional and moving story of love, loss and loyalty and of living for the moment."12 The mingling of young actors and life-size animal puppets allows the young spectator to identify with the little girl facing orangutans and elephants in a natural world where she must learn to survive. Adapted from a novel by Samuel Adamson and inspired by the real story of a little English girl saved by an elephant, the play leads the young spectator into a world of discovery mingling enchantment and danger. The little girl's adventures are for the child the opportunity to discover all the dangers threatening, not the child in the forest, but the forest itself and all its inhabitants. Tim Auld thus sums up the richness of the play: "It mashes up The Jungle Book with a David Attenborough-esque plea for the preservation of endangered ecosystems and a rather clunky lesson about the evils of palm oil."13 The theatrical form makes the children/animal relationship still more living and sows seeds into children's minds. Puppet shows, plays performed by children in schools from India or plays shown on YouTube or available freely on the internet are many ways of fighting for the planet and leading people to awareness through education: schools, the first place of education, propose environmental plays to make children aware of the necessity of preserving the planet and of fighting against any form of waste; and in turn those young actors educate all the spectators, children, teenagers or adults, who watch their shows on the internet. Shakespeare's Globe Theatre takes another form, an 12

https://www.michaelmorpurgo.com/on-tour-michael-morpurgos-running-wild/, accessed March 12, 2018. 13 Tim Auld, " Running Wild: is Michael Morpurgo's latest a match for War Horse? – review," The Telegraph, May 20, 2016. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/is-michael-morpurgos-latest-stage-showas-good-as-war-horse---re/, accessed March 12, 2018.

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electronic one allowing a sort of globalization of conscience, necessary for all local people to stay alive.

Green Shade, "an ecological durational performance"14 In his book Theatre Ecology, Baz Kershaw evokes Green Shade, "an eco-installation and durational performance [they] were devising for the Wickham Theatre in Bristol" (Kershaw, 6). The website introduces it thus: A unique theatrical event exploring life after global meltdown: an ecological durational performance. […] Imagine a world where temperatures have risen and fallen, rivers have frozen and icebergs have melted. Rain is toxic, air often lethal. Humans survive in safe zones. Memories of life as we know it are blurred and confused.15

The theatrical space of The Wickham Theatre was changed into the wasteland that our planet may become with global warming. The strength of such a performance comes from the fact that it associates the reality of ecological dramas with visual scenes meant to strike spectators. Showing life after global warming is meant to be a shock for spectators who can change their behaviours after that. The imprisonment of young girls behind a net, the presence of huge pipes produce an impression of uneasiness that is supposed to make us aware and to lead us to make things change. To shock spectators into awareness, some authors rather use theatrical fables, in which the animal world warns people about our endangered planet and endangered species.

An animal show to warn people about endangered species In 2003, Jean-Christophe Bailly created, with Gilberte Tsaï, a spectacle entitled Sur le vif, fable mélancolique sur le déclin des espèces sauvages.16 As soon as 2002, five comedians had spread a rumour saying that a brown bear was wandering in the Montreuil streets. The inhabitants of the city of Montreuil in France followed the wanderings of the brown bear and of a white she-bear, which ended with their marriage in Montreuil town hall. Those events were accompanied with comedians' interventions in several 14

http://www.moveintolife.com/green-shade.html, accessed March 5, 2017. http://www.moveintolife.com/green-shade.html, accessed April 5, 2017. 16 See Jean-Christophe Bailly, "Sur le vif," in Le parti pris des animaux, 115-131; "Les animaux sont des maîtres siencieux", 81 and 134. 15

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places (the hospital, the conservatoire, supermarkets, cinemas, and schools). This was a sort of preparation for the Melancholy Fable on the Decline of Wild Species. It was a way of educating people about the presence of animals that might soon become absent from the surface of the Earth. Theatrical imagination was used to educate people while entertaining them and making them think about the situation of wild species. Jean-Christophe Bailly said that the performance ended with "a mourning, a farewell" (83): Nous avions arrangé cela par des masques—qu'il y ait sur scène pour le final un ours, un âne, un renard, un grand duc et un magot: membres d'une sorte de comité ils venaient, comme des représentants en mission, nous dire adieu, nous saluer une dernière fois, ayant décidé de quitter la Terre, de partir ailleurs […]. (Bailly, 83)17

Jean-Christophe Bailly insists on the fact that it is a fable and as such it is "a reversal." The animals left but Bailly says that "they had never been there." Both men and masks, they are not animals, even if they represent them. They are absent animals on a stage representing real living animals that may be absent forever in a future reality. Bailly says that "the game of the fable is to make animals speak" (82), and it is precisely that imaginary capacity to speak that makes them something other than animals: "derrière les masques et les images et parce que tout d'abord ils parlaient, ce n'était pas à des animaux que l'on avait eu affaire" (83).18 The animals who are "nearly the allegories of the human comedy or fabula" (84) are very far from natural reality and yet as he says: "il y a bien un moment chez La Fontaine où le renard est renard, le loup, loup et le rat, rat" (84).19 Why is it that La Fontaine's imaginary animals become animals in our imagination whereas the animals as masks on the stage are not? Perhaps because the stage gives too much presence to their absence, because the masks, by hiding human faces, make that underlying mankind lurk behind the mask; and this may appear as a paradoxical threat in the denunciation. The performance offered the audience an opportunity to become aware but the

17

"We had arranged that with masks—so that there should be on stage, for the final, a bear, a donkey, a fox, an eagle-owl, a Barbary ape: members of a sort of committee, they came, like representatives on a mission, to say goodbye to us, to greet us a last time, as they had decided to leave the Earth, to go elsewhere […]" (translation mine). 18 "behind the masks and the images and because first of all they were speaking, it was not animals that we had faced " (translation mine). 19 "there is a moment with La Fontaine, when the fox is a fox, the wolf, a wolf and the rat, a rat" (translation mine).

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show did not work, perhaps because the masks hid reality with too much strength. The text of the performance was partially published in the philosopher's book Le parti pris des animaux.20 It is interesting to note the itinerary of the idea, which started as a theatrical performance, then became a lecture given in several American universities in 2011 before becoming a written text ending the book Le parti pris des animaux (2013). From orality to writing and from the theatre to academic lectures, JeanChristophe Bailly stages endangered wild species. The show was not a success, which made Jean-Christophe Bailly quite sad and he explains that feeling of sadness as something revealing a deep sadness linked to the fact that those who made that show had the feeling that they cried in the wilderness. He writes: […] à cette tristessee, d'une certaine façon, les animaux étaient mêlés, […] elle ressemblait, finalement, c'est ainsi que je m'en souviens, à ce que l'on ressent à la perte d'un animal familier.21

The philosopher's likening of the failure of the show on endangered species to the loss of an animal we have loved, shows that for him, the audience's reception and perception explain people's sense of connection with the animal world or the absence of connection. The failure of the show demonstrated that people did not understand the message or that they did not listen to it. Perhaps they expected a classical show. Was a committed environmental defence of animals in a theatrical performance far from their preoccupations or was it rather that they were not ready to see such a topic theatrically treated, with masks, like Greek or Japanese classical dramas on human tragedies? The philosopher's comparison is very strong and makes the show itself a living creature standing for all those it defends. The paradox is that the philosopher had that feeling of 20 I would like to thank Nathalie Cochoy who offered us the wonderful opportunity to listen to Jean-Christophe Bailly one afternoon in Toulouse, and to allow students to meet him at the Université Tououse-Le Mirail. After listening to him, we had the impression that we could hope for a reconciliation between men and nonhuman animals, we had the impression of feeling the family link between us and other animals in the philosopher's voice. "L"immédiatement vicant, suivre les voies du monde animal / Jean-Christophe Bailly," https://www.canalu.tv/video/universite_toulouse_ii_le_mirail/l_immediatement_vivant_suivre_les_voies_du _monde_animal_jean_christophe_bailly.13199, accessed June 1st, 2018. 21 "[…] In a certain way, animals were mingled with that sadness, […] finally it looked— it's the way I remember it—like what you feel when you lose a pet," Jean-Christophe Bailly, "Les animaux sont des maîtres silencieux", 82 (translation mine).

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loss whereas the show defended life, but is it a paradox? It is as if people were deaf to the defence of life, as if they could not perceive life as reflected on the stage, or perhaps they were disturbed by the reality that was shown by theatrical animals: […] l'hypothèse de ce spectacle, comme tel assez nettement antihumaniste, c'était que toute mort est grave, que tout effacement d'existence expose à la gravité de la mort, exactement comme toute éclosion d'existence expose à la gravité (au mystère) du vivant. (Bailly, 82)22

The performance showed endangered species by using a very ancient theatrical technique: masks. The show had to speak to an audience who were perhaps expecting something else. The union of the theatre and of a reconstituted nature is supposed to make people aware of ecological problems. And whereas the public are often sensitive to ecological problems and animal life, in that case, they did not seem to be in connection with that particular spectacle. Was it because it was too committed? Too philosophical? Or simply because they were blind to the reality directly presented by the animals threatened? Yet in spite of the apparent failure, perhaps the performance let a few seeds germinate in the spectators' minds. If only a small number of them thought about the message after the performance, it was useful. Jean-Christophe Bailly created another kind of theatrical event with a long poem written to be read during a performance by Gloria Friedmann at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris on June 19, 2003. It was then published in his book Le visible et le caché (2009) and in Le parti pris des animaux (2013). In that poem he also speaks about endangered species: […] de toutes ces bêtes, de tous ces singes puisqu'il s'agit désormais pour eux de destruction massive, de territoires menacés ou détruits; d'assassinats purs et simples ou de traffics puisque avec eux nous ne pouvons plus compter par grandes masses ou par grandes disséminations

22 "[…] the hypothesis of the show, rather clearly anti-humanist as such, was that any death is serious, that any existence erased exposes people to the seriousness of death, exactly as any blooming existence exposes people to the seriousness (the mystery) of the living" (translation mine).

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The plural of masses of animals reduced to units, the mass destruction tragically echoing the animal masses, and the list of destroying acts (mass destruction, threatened or destroyed territories, murders, and traffickings) present listeners or spectators with a reality, the harshness of which is paradoxically expressed by the poetic form transposed onto a performance. The association of Bailly's text with Gloria Friedmann's committed art often using stuffed animals to evoke the "conflictual relationship of nature—either animals, organic nature or landscapes—with the political and economic power and the ecological contradictions stemming from it,"24 is meant to shake people's consciences by showing animal death through living art. Bailly explains it in the conclusion of his poem; Ni dieux ni bêtes disent d'eux aujourd'hui, tout contents, les hommes, alors qu'il faudrait plutôt les plaindre d'avoir su perdre aussi facilement le dieu dans la bête et la bête dans le dieu et en eux l'un et l'autre sur les lieux de l'art qui sont les lieux où l'on se souvient de cette perte et où l'on essaie d'en faire quelque chose quelque chose de bien accueillir d'une manière ou d'une autre les singes c'est, par-delà l'acte écologique muet, tenter de faire bouger la frontière, de l'effacer en suivant les singes sur la piste incertaine où ils avancent, comme des objets philosophiques complets et peut-être aussi comme des philosophes c'est-à-dire comme des insondables (Bailly, "Singes", 23-24)25 23 Jean-Christophe Bailly, "Singes", in Le parti pris des animaux, 21. "[…] of all those animals, of all those monkeys / since from now on it is a matter of mass destruction, of threatened or destroyed territories; / of mere murders or of traffickings / since with them we can no longer count in great masses or in great disseminations / but nearly in units" (translation mine). 24 Gloria Friedmann's biography, http://www.moreeuw.com/histoire-art/biographie-gloriafriedmann.htm, accessed March 14, 2018, translation mine. 25 "Neither gods nor beasts: this is / what men, quite happy, / say of themselves today, / whereas we should rather pity them for having been able to lose so easily the god in the beast and the beast in the god / and in them either of them // on the places of art which are the places where people remember that loss / and where one tries to do something / something good with it /to welcome, in a way or another, the monkeys / it is, beyond the mute ecological act, / to try to make the frontier move, to erase it / by following the monkeys on the uncertain track / where they move forward / like complete philosophical

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Where is the "mute ecological act?" In the welcoming of the monkeys or in the oral act of poetry performed in connection with stuffed animals finding a new life in a theatrical, poetic, philosophical performance? JeanChristophe Bailly's philosophy on animals and men's relationship with animals takes life, takes flesh in poetic lines speaking about those animal philosophers, unfathomable like thought, unfathomable like the universe, unfathomable like an animal gaze telling about life.

Nature as a stage In 2011, Canadian director Robert Lepage decided to give the first performance of his new staging of Shakespeare's The Tempest at Wendake, in Quebec's suburb. Wendake is the Huron-Wendat reservation in Quebec. By choosing that place for the performance, Lepage suggested the link between Caliban and the First Nations, when he insisted on the notion of dispossession. Moreover, the play was performed outside, in Wendake’s outside amphitheatre. So, the lighting and staging used elements from nature. The Theatre is a living art and the impressions of one of the interpreters of the play, Kathia Rock, the Innu interpreter of Ariel, suggests the relationship of man and nature by evoking this original performance where Caliban is Huron and where in Quebec French, she speaks about Shakespeare's play by quoting a Renaissance European alchemist: L'air était bon, le vent soufflait juste, les esprits de la forêt flottaient en symbiose avec celui d'Ariel, le jeune lutin obéissant du duc Prospero… La Lune, presque pleine, éclairait des nuages pas tout à fait fin prêts de crever leurs eaux ; des feuilles, du vent, le bruit de la chute Kabir Kouba,26 l'eau, la vie… Des preuves qu'ICI, avant nous, vécurent des gens doués de visions, un peuple rempli de courges, de maïs et de fèves, fruits et grains de la sagamité27 à la portée de nos bouches affamées en ce soir d'immortalité. Et cette essence d'INVOCATION,28 créé par Aigle Bleu, aura objects / and also perhaps like philosophers / that is to say like unfathomable creatures" (translation mine). 26 This is the name given in Montagnais language to the river called by French people "Rivière Saint Charles." Kabir Kouba means in montagnais: "the river with a thousand bends." Rachel Bouvet, "Kabir Kouba - La rivière aux mille détours," Novembre 8, 2012. latraversee.uqam.ca/.../kabir-kouba-la-rivi-re-aux-mille-d-tours. Accessed May 13, 2014. 27 It is a Native dish thus designated by the Abenaqui, and it is composed of maize, meat, fish or various berries. 28 Invocation by Blue Eagle is a reference to a business of aromatherapy situated in Wendake. Blue Eagle, introduces himself on his website as a Canadian man with

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The Native artist underlines the link between the play, the performance and nature and also what she feels as a spectator of the future play she is going to perform, of that communion with nature. The place reveals the man/nature relationship in the play. Wendake's Caliban is not monstrous and his imprisonment is situated in the chains he carries with him. He is not different but he is other and he is forever linked with the nature of which he has been dispossessed. J. Kelly Nestruck writes: [...] The "monster" Caliban is more complicated—here, just one enslaved Huron among many whose matriarchal culture has been overthrown by the sometimes cruel, sometimes benevolent Prospero. Marco Poulin's richly human performance is no "noble savage" cliché, though, and his relationship with his magical master is complex. Lepage's biggest brainstorm here is to have Prospero deliver his final speech not to the audience, but to the newly freed Caliban, now clutching the axe that Ferdinand had used to chop down his island's tree. 30

Caliban now freed from his chains symbolically seizes the axe of the man who felled the tree of his island, this object symbolizing settlers' exploitation, deforestation for profit on First Nations' lands. The First Nations' dispossession and the destruction of the natural environment are Algonquian, Abenaqui, Pawnee and French ancestry, who has "an academic training in music," then studied "healing arts and Native American spiritual sciences with elders belonging to different First Nations in Canada and the United States." www.savoirancestral.com/a-propos-d-aigle-bleu, accessed May 23, 2014. 29 "The air was fine, the wind was hardly blowing, the forest spirits were floating in symbiosis with Ariel's, the young obeying imp of duke Prospero… The moon, nearly full, was lighting clouds that were not completely ready to burst and let their waters free; leaves, wind, the sound of Kabir Kouba waterfall, water, life… Proofs that HERE before us, lived visionary men and women, a people filled with gourds, maize and broad beans, fruit and sagamité seeds close to our hungry mouths on that evening of immortality. And that essence of INVOCATION, created by Blue Eagle, will have probably contributed to beautify ancestral space in which I found myself on that 14th of July night …" "Nature does not follow man, it is man who must follow it," Paracelsus. "La Tempête à Wendake : la tempête des siècles." Kathia Rock Quand le jour se lève envapements.blogspot.com/.../la-tempete-wendake-la-tempete-des.html. Accessed May 13, 2014. 30 J. Kelly Nestruck, "Robert Lepage's 'Tempest' takes full advantage of natural setting," The Globe and Mail, Published Friday, July 08, 2011, accessed May 12, 2014.

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associated in a simple object, this object destroying the wonderful island to which the colours of the light and the natural sound of the waterfall as well as the sounds of nature in the night give still more beauty. Depending on the scene, the trees glow blue or pink or green and crickets or birds are heard, creating a truly enchanting environment. Just behind a circle of tree trunks around the stage that conjure both ship's masts and totem poles, there is also a second platform where certain silent scenes take place. (Nestruck)

Wendake's spectators, taken by the magic of the natural setting (the trees behind the stage and the sound of the waterfall) and of the many-coloured lights, see the axe changing hands as a return to the natural island whose trees tell a double story; the story told by Shakespeare at the Renaissance and the story of the First Nations in Canada now. When he takes the axe, Caliban recovers his freedom and the freedom of his people but he also saves this nature threatened by the blows of the white settlers' blind axe. With Wendake meaning "Wendats' place" and Wendats meaning "the inhabitants of the island," Wendake really became Caliban's island and the place of the liberation of all Native peoples whose lands were taken by settlers. The use of nature for theatrical performances can be different. In the 1990s, Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream was performed in Gavarnie, the famous Pyrenean cirque, in a meadow situated in the mountain around twenty minutes' walk from the village. The play used the natural scenery and the spectators moved with the actors, sitting in the meadow or walking across a stream. The association of the theatre, of Shakespeare's text and of the sounds of the mountain, of the artificial lighting and of the natural sunset, added another dimension to the play. On the one hand, one could think, as some mountain lovers thought, that nature was altered by the theatrical world, by its props and artefacts. On the other hand, as other mountain lovers thought, Nature gave the fairy part of the play a new dimension and Titania and Oberon seemed all the more magical creatures as they were in a natural world. On the one hand the presence of the stage where the play within the play was performed, of hundreds of spectators and of the actors, troubled the peace of nature as animals could not behave as they usually did since their territory was occupied by the theatrical world. On the other hand, some people who went there to watch the play because it was performed in the mountains, went to the mountains, which they would have never known otherwise. Many would have never known Shakespeare's play either. A Midsummer Night's Dream in Gavarnie was more than a play in a natural theatre. It

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was a play using nature in its text projected onto real nature, in an infinite intermingling between nature and theatre, between theatrical voices and the voices of nature. Mountains are not supposed to become theatrical stages but such scenery as the Cirque of Gavarnie brought magic to the play. Yet there was a paradox: whereas it led people into nature and allowed them to admire the beauty of the mountains while listening to Shakespeare's text, whereas it made them aware of the beauty of nature, which is one condition of ecological awareness, it indisputably troubled the wildlife and was thus an offence to ecological integrity as some people claimed. Those who attended the play kept the beauty of the mountains in their memory and found it exacerbated by the theatre. A fortnight later, wild animals could live again in the peace of the mountains. It is up to anyone to see where ecology dwells in that particular case: in the discovery of mountains thanks to Shakespeare's theatre or in the preservation of the wilderness through the clear separation of the natural amphitheatre of Gavarnie and of a theatrical play. Both opinions may be defended but what is sure is that when the natural scenery is respected as it was then, nature and theatre can interact to bring about the awareness of beauty. The voices of poets, philosophers and dramatists, the gestures of the performers and theatrical props coexist with the voices of nature that they want us to hear. Monkeys' silent voices represented by masks or by a poem, a river heard behind Shakespeare's text either in Canada or in the Pyrenees or anywhere in the world, puppets conveying animal voices, all those theatrical forms are ways of leading us to hear the true voice of nature.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN NATIVE LANGUAGES AS A MEANS OF RESISTANCE

"Imperialism and the struggle for decolonization occupy a linguistic, discursive space in which language becomes a political grammar of social oppression and social resistance." Benjamin Graves1

Languages are closely linked with the land where they are spoken and Native languages, which are first oral languages, reveal the speakers' connection with their land and the nonhuman world living on it. David Abram explains it: While every human language intercedes between the human animal and the animate earth, writing greatly densifies the verbal medium, rendering it more opaque to the many non-human shapes that dwell out beyond all our worlds. Non-written, oral languages are far more transparent, allowing the things and beings of the world to shine through the skein of terms and to touch us more directly. (Abram 2011, 265)

The transparency of languages evoked by Abram makes words the reflection of the world they designate. In everyday languages, words can appear as a philosophy of space. Pierre-Etienne Du Ponceau, a French 18th-century linguist, made a comparative study of several Native American vocabularies. Also referring to several linguists' analyses, he showed how those languages revealed the Natives' mode of thought, in which words describe things. Du Ponceau's demonstration gives examples showing words appearing as scientific descriptions and landscape paintings at the same time. To take an example, in Lenape—the language of the Delawares, who lived in Ontario and, in the United States, in Wisconsin and Oklahoma—, gishgook designates a sort of snake living under the ground and going out during the night. The name comes from 1

Benjamin Graves, "Language and Resistance," http://www.postcolonialweb.org/sa/gordimer/july5.html, accessed March 29, 2017.

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words meaning "day," "light" and "snake." So, the name gives the main characteristics of the animal since it is a snake that fears daylight. The complexity of words conveys a rich thought and a perception of the world deeply linked with nature. Du Ponceau notes that several Algonquian mathematical terms seem to contain two ideas: the mathematical idea itself and a notion concerning some aspect of the universe to which this notion is linked. Language speaks about the world, its shapes and its meaning. Native American languages are much more concrete than European languages and use the shapes of the landscape, organic time, and elements from the natural world to express abstract notions. This linguistic vision reveals a mode of thought placing the natural world at the centre of everything, including language. And their relationship with language, perhaps because the white community has often tried to erase their languages, perhaps because history has erased many of them and their visible presence in the Northern American landscape is very deep and takes a political dimension. As Michel Serres said in a conference, "a living language is a power."2 And he adds: "Language is not. It can. […] Totipotence. It can everything" (ibid). This meets what Yahveh, the Creator talking with Urset, the original bear, says in a theatrical play written by N. Scott Momaday: "So you have discovered that words have power."3 Language is political in a double sense, as the fact of speaking one's Native language is a way of resisting the dominating power, and it is also political insofar as it leads people to see connections between our languages and the non-articulate languages of nature. David Abram speaks about it beautifully: To the animistic, oral sensibility, a cedar tree's hushed and whispered phrasings may be as eloquent as a spider's fine-spun patternings, or the collective polyphony of a pack of wolves. Such elemental, oral languages are rapidly vanishing today, along with the diverse ecosystems that once held them. (Abram 2011, 265)

Abram underlines the close relationship existing between languages created from an observation of nature and thus reflecting it and the ecosystems linked to it. The fate of those languages seemed to be connected to the land. Abram adds: 2

Michel Serres, "Les sciences et les langues", Ve Rencontres Sciences et Humanisme, Ajaccio, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV8E5w3nClk, accessed July 30, 2017. 3 N. Scott Momaday, "The Spiritual Mountain", in Mountains Figured and Disfigued in the English-Speaking World, 57.

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While linguists estimate that around 6,000 oral languages are currently in use around the world, fully half of them are no longer being taught to children. Which is to say that 3,000 such languages are already effectively lost. Of roughly 175 native languages currently spoken in the United States, 55 are today spoken by fewer than ten people, and only twenty are still being spoken by mothers to their young children. It is hardly a coincidence that so many native languages are unravelling at the very same historical moment when innumerable local ecosystems on every continent are fragmenting and falling apart. The conjunction makes evident how deeply the internal coherence of an oral language is entwined with the vitality and coherence of the land itself. (Abram 2011, 265-66, emphasis mine)

Michel Serres also links a language to water or air as it can slide everywhere. It is probably the close connection of those languages to nature that links them with the fate of lands. "The oral languages spoken by such peoples held them close to the speaking earth" (Abram, 266). Devoting a chapter to "the speech of things," evoking "the dialects of trees" (171) as he evokes the "phrasings" of a cedar tree and "the collective polyphony of a pack of wolves" (265), Abram not only reminds us that nature is filled with voices, but also that those voices are connected with our human languages, which only the peoples who are aware of the connections existing between the land and all its inhabitants, human beings among others, can hear and recognize as a language. The connection between the land and a native language may be clearly used as a means of resistance, as was the case in France in 1970, when the Occitan words "No passaran" were the symbols of the resistance of the peasants from the Larzac plateau that was threatened by the army as they had been the Republicans' Catalan words of resistance to dictatorship during the Spanish war. By using the langue d' Oc4 that had been overcome by the French language in history, the peasants from Larzac resisted the official central power and at the same time, as this language was still spoken by 4 The langue d'Oc (now called Occitan) was the language spoken in Southern France whereas the langue d'Oil was spoken in Northern France, Oc and Oil meaning "yes" in the two respective languages. When Paris became the seat of the French monarchy and thus the capital of France, the language of Oil became the official language of France, that is French. Like young Native Americans punished at school when they spoke their Native languages in Mexico for example, young pupils from Southern France were punished until the first quarter of the twentieth century when they spoke Occitan. The fact of making one central language compulsory has always been an element of power for colonizing people and the fact of speaking one's Native language has always been a means of resistance to central power. Now Occitan is taught at school, and in some schools, all teachings are in Occitan. .

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them and other peasants in Southern France, its words became the language of the land and of the resistance of those who defended it.5 It was the same phrase that was used by those who were opposed to the construction of a tunnel around Somport pass in the Pyrenees, because it was right in the middle of the habitat of the last Pyrenean bears. Many writers who are fighting for their lands and for the preservation of their environment use their native languages as a form of reappropriation of the land through words coming from their roots. Thus Ken Saro-Wiwa, in his diary, writes: […] I did write poems for my late son, Tedum, which I somehow lost, and the single anthem for Ogoni which appeared first in my Khana mothertongue: Yoor Zaansin Ogoni Bari a dem Ogoni Le buen ka le sor Fo efeloo le ereloo Doo kor zian aa I le yee Ne I o suannu le ekpo E ema ba pya baa. Bari a dem Ogoni Le buen ka le sor Ne I o leelee denden son Kwa dee ne pya Gokana Khana, Eleme, Tai le Babbe Doo lo Ogoni lu ka (Saro-Wiwa, A Month and a Day, 207)

He translates into English this anthem ending with the list of all the peoples living on Ogoni land: Creator of Ogoni Land of glory and wealth Grant us thy peace and lasting love Plant justice over our land Give us thy wisdom and the strength To shame our enemies Creator of Ogoni Land of glory and wealth Grant everlasting blessings Lord 5

See the film Tous au Larzac by Christian Rouaud, documentary, 2011.

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To people of Gokana Khana, Eleme, Tai and Babbe Glorious Ogoni land. (ibid.)

Not only does the Khana language enter the English text of the diary but it also enters the English translation of the anthem through the enumeration of the peoples living on the Ogoni land and through the very name of the land. The identity of those peoples enters the English text by making their language transform the English of the expression into a deeper language in which English does not erase Khana but uses it to change the common language into a fighting language. The Ogoni identity is inscribed both spiritually and physically (through the metaphor of plantation to evoke justice) in their land. About the strength of African literature, Ken SaroWiwa says that it is "oratory in the tongue" (Saro-Wiwa, A Month and a Day, 81). He adds that "the word is power and more powerful is it when expressed in common currency" (ibid). The power of the word in a native language is often used and there are many other examples of writers inserting words in an indigenous language into their works written in a European language. Wole Soyinka inserts words or phrases in Yoruba into his plays and novels to let the Yoruba resurface and allow the reader to hear Yoruba while reading English. Thus in The Lion and the Jewel, when he stages deforestation, he introduces Yoruba into the stage direction: "[…] The two performers are also the song leaders and the others fill the chorus. ‘N'ijo itoro', ‘Amuda el'ebe l'aiya', ‘Gbe je on'ipa,' etc.]" (The Lion and the Jewel, 24) Niyi Osundare also inserts some Yoruba phrases or words into his poems. In his choreopoem "Hole in the sky," he inserts untranslated Yoruba words: "Koko gbakokodi / Koko didikokodi."6 In "Forest Echoes," he uses the Yoruba word "agbegilo" instead of the English word, which introduces a clash between the music of the Yoruba language and the sharpness of the "greedy edges of […] matchet" that the Yoruba word cuts into two parts. Hawad, a Tuareg poet and painter, mingles human shapes with writing and his writing is much more than a series of signs meant to communicate. If he uses tifinagh in his graphical works as well as in his poems, it is because the very use of that Tuareg writing (Tifinagh) is an act of resistance. The letter is resistance. In an article published in No Passaran, the author writes: "Hawad refuses to get rid of it. He rebels against the fact 6 Niyi Osundare, “Hole in the Sky”, Choreo-poem, World Literature Today, May-August 2014, http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2014/may-august/two-poems-niyi-osundare

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that Tuaregs should be dispossessed of it by being obliged to use the Latin or Arab alphabets."7 His writing is his fight so that the Tuareg voice might be heard, from his ancestors' voices to those who are deprived of their voice nowadays. In the same way, Native American writers introduce words from their Native languages into the English of their works. N. Scott Momaday starts his novel House Made of Dawn with the Navajo word Dypaloh and ends it with the Navajo word Qtsedaba, which are the words opening and ending a Navajo oral story. In so doing he makes his novel an oral tale in the Navajo tradition and the English written form allows him to let the Native voice be heard all around the world. When the Wendat playwright Yves Sioui Durand, and his co-author Jean-Frédéric Messier wrote Hamlet-leMalécite, a rewriting of Shakespeare's Hamlet, revealing all the evils that the Native populations in Quebec undergo, they introduced the Attikamek language in an original way since the two property men—called "rats" in reference to the mythical muskrat who found the first handful of mud allowing the earth to be created—, recite Hamlet in Attikamek.8 This is no mere claim for one's Native identity even if it is also that. The choice of the Attikamek language is very significant as the Attikamek resisted and lived on in spite of all the evils transmitted to them by the settlers: they received destructive diseases from them and had to bear the consequences of the construction of dams near their territories. Floods and poisonings of water with mercury provoked by the discharge from electric plants contaminating their stocks of water, greatly affected Attikameks' lives. Yet in spite of all those attacks against their lives, in spite of all the evils imported by settlers' modern world, they kept their culture and language. So even if the Attikamek language is not read in the text, it is heard in the theatrical performances and the stage direction in the text takes on a great importance as the reader of the play has to imagine this language. Those two secondary characters reciting Shakespeare's text in Attikamek, are the reflection of the resistance of a people to any central power. The very language can be the reflection of nature as in the Navajo language, in which a lot of words start or end with the sound [ts]. This sound recalls crickets' song and also the name of Pueblos' creating spider, Ts'its'tsinako, which has the same sonority. The languages are different but this sound [ts] that appears in several Native American languages, allows those peoples to see in their languages some proximity with the song of nature, and conversely, to hear their languages in the voice of nature. 7 8

"Hawad, la pensée nomade", No Passaran, n° 88, June 2001. See part 3 chapter 10 of his book, p. 218.

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The Cree poet and novelist Tomson Highway, who published some of his works in Cree, spoke about the power of the Cree language in a lecture he gave in Rio, Brazil: Basically I write in Cree in my head and my heart because the characters I write, like for instance I write a lot about my parents, and my brothers and sisters and my family, my aunts and my uncles, who didn't speak any English at all. All their communication was in Cree and so I write in Cree in my head and in my heart, and frequently on the pages as well, but I go through processes of simultaneous translation, which is a very difficult process, it drives me crazy every day. It's a daily challenge, but what comes on the computer screen is in English and frequently when I run out of language, I will express the term, whatever term, in Cree.9

His evocation of all the Canadian place-names in Cree is not purely informative. He said: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, you know like Ottawa, Chicoutimi, Quebec, Ottawa, Canada, that's all Cree. Winnipeg means muddy water, Saskatchewan means where the water flows fast, Chicoutimi means where the water is deep. That's the rhythm of the Cree language you know, Winnipeg, Manitoba. Winnipeg, where the water is dirty, Manitoba, where the great spirit lives. Saskatchewan, Saskatoon is the berries, Saskatchewan means where the river runs fast cause when you see in Saskatchewan, the river runs quickly at that point, that part of it and so on and so forth, but that's the rhythm of it. (ibid.)

The list of Cree place-names with their translation into English shows the non-Cree-speaking audience the close link existing between the Cree language and the natural world. Tomson Highway reinforces the idea by comparing the wisdom contained in language to the wisdom contained in a plant: it's a powerful language, extraordinarily beautiful language, and a magical language. And I think that it really has important things to say. It has some important, like every language in the world has wisdom contained in it you know? Like every plant on earth, there's wisdom contained in that plant. Like in secrets that have, that can, that yield information as to how to heal certain diseases you know? They say that every plant has a medicinal purpose. So does every language on earth. (ibid.) 9

http://www.redskyperformance.com/video-tomson-highway-cree-language, accessed March 1st, 2017. The interview can be heard on https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xa6cg0, accessed March 18, 2018.

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Associating his language with nature through Canadian place-names or through the comparison with the vegetable world, Tomson Highway reveals the healing power of the Cree language. "The land has always been alive with names for all places of any significance to Inuit who have called this environment home for centuries."10 This is what is said to open the site of the Inuit Heritage Trust. This might be said of all First Nations. The names chosen by Native populations to designate places are the reflection of the landscapes of those areas. But in mere everyday language, words may appear as landscape paintings and a philosophy of space.11 Pierre-Etienne Du Ponceau tells about Sequoyah, a Cherokee chief, whose experience revealed the means of translating any oral language into a written one through precise codes. Du Ponceau wrote: Sequoyah ne savait d'autre langue que la sienne, mais il était un homme de génie. Etant un jour chez les missionnaires qui avaient réussi à convertir à la religion chrétienne une grande partie de ce peuple, quelques livres anglais frappèrent sa vue. Il se fit expliquer le système de notre alphabet. Il apprit que les lettres qu'il voyait répétées représentaient les sons de la langue et les rappelaient à la mémoire. Cette idée produisit une vive impression sur son esprit. Il s'occupa aussitôt à analyser les signes de sa langue indienne. Après un long et pénible travail dont il est inutile ici de donner les détails, il découvrit que les sons de son idiome se réduisaient à quatre-vingt cinq syllabes, toutes finissant par une voyelle. Il n'y a dans cette langue que deux consonnes successives, tl et ts, consonnes liquides et qui, dans la prononciation, se fondent aisément l'une dans l'autre et paraissent n'en faire qu'une. Dès lors son problème fut résolu. Il inventa quatre-vingt-cinq caractères, dont il appliqua un à chaque syllabe de sa langue, et son syllabaire fut complet.12 10

Inuit Heritage Trust, http://ihti.ca/eng/place-names/pn-index.html, accessed on December 5, 2014. 11 As we have seen above, p. 152. 12 "Sequoyah knew no language but his own, but he was a man of genius. As he was one day at the mission of the missionaries who had succeeded in converting a great part of that people to Christian religion, some English books struck his sight. He wanted the system of our alphabet to be explained to him. He learnt that the letters that he saw repeatedly represented the sounds of the language and recalled them to memory. That idea produced a great impression on his mind. He immediately undertook to analyse the signs of his Indian language. After a long hard work, the details of which are useless, he discovered that the sounds of his language were reduced to eighty-five syllables, all ending with a vowel. In that language, there are only two sucessive consonants, tl and ts, liquid consonants which, in the pronunciation, easily merge into eachother and seem to be one. From then on, his problem was solved. He invented eighty-five characters, applied one to

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Sequoyah's action in the spreading of his own language from orality to writing is so important that it even gave birth to a children's book written by James Rumford and translated into Cherokee by Anna Sixkiller Huckaby since the book is bilingual, both in English and Cherokee. The title is: Sequoyah: the Cherokee Man who Gave his People Writing. Sequoyah's sense of observation and curiosity led him to the invention of a linguistic system for his own language, which allowed his nation to read and write and to spread their culture. As they observed nature and all its tiniest elements, Natives observed languages and, better than European linguists, one of them could set a linguistic system. All those examples show that languages are closely connected with the land that engendered them and the use of indigenous languages within texts in English is a way for writers to insert a part of their land within the language that had colonized them. Using indigenous languages within an English text is a way of resisting imperialism and at the same time it shows that a fight for one's language is a fight for one's land.

every syllable of his language, and his syllabary was complete […]" (translation mine). Pierre-Etienne Du Ponceau, Mémoire sur le système grammatical des langues de quelques nations indiennes de l'Amérique du Nord, 1838, 45-46.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN LITERATURE TO ANSWER THE VIOLENCE TO LANDS AND MEN

"Does a leopard make war?" Pablo Neruda

Poetry is the literary genre that is most often used to fight against wars and violence all over the world, which is summed up by the American writer Forrest Gander and the Australian poet John Kinsella: For me, writing of "nature," especially in poetry, should be about the carnage to which its production necessarily contributes. Such awareness helps us use the poem as a means of resistance, a nonviolent confrontation with the limitation of self in dealing with the crisis so many of us have constituted…? (Gander and Kinsella, x).

Many poets and writers use poetic language to warn the world about all the violence done to men, women and nature. Forrest Ganter uses the vegetable metaphor to define a poem "expressing an ecological concern:" A poem expressing a concern for ecology might be structured as compost, it might be developed rhizomatically, it might be described as a nest, a collectivity. Its structure might be cyclical, indeterminate, or strictly patterned. (Gander, 13)

The mixed metaphors qualifying the ecological poem with words linked with the vegetable world ("compost", "rhizomatically") and also animal nature ("nest") make the poem itself the mirror of nature. It is often a personal experience, the combination of a place and a moment that urges the writer to a deep commitment through his/her writing. Gary Snyder decided to fight for the preservation of the world when, coming down from Mt. St Helen and admiring the beauty of Nature, he heard of the destruction of Hiroshima by American bombs. His own experience unveils the web uniting the beauty of the nonhuman world and the violence of men; and in the middle, there is a man, a mountaineer making the

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connection between his awareness of beauty and his rage against man's madness. Linking his mountaineering experience of the day and the terrible information in the newspaper, he started another climb that was to lead him to write to make people aware of the necessity of seeing beauty and thus preserving life. It was on August 13, 1945 (Danger on Peaks, 9).

Tuareg poetry to answer violence against the desert The very form of writing, calligraphy and alphabets, can appear as a way of resistance. Tuareg poet Hawad uses poetry and calligraphy to convey Tuaregs' predicament.1 Je considère l'écriture non seulement comme une arme mais aussi comme un ancrage que nous traînons, un sillage noir qui donne du poids et de la consistance à la marche de la résistance qui poursuit sa cible. Bref, l'écriture est une mémoire, mais qui n'est pas cantonnée dans le passé: c'est une longe que l'on dévide de l'abîme, un acte nourricier, semblable à l'effort de l'animal d'exhaure qui tire l'eau du puits pour irriguer les inconnus désertiques assoiffés. C'est un geste qui ramène les marges au centre de la trame du monde.2

Poetry becomes the blending of the desert and of the letters singing its life. It is that combination of the desert and letters that makes us hear the voice of the desert. To speak about writing, Hawad uses a double metaphor comparing writing to the draught animal and to a nourishing act: "it is a tether that is unreeled from the abyss, a nourishing act, similar to the effort of the mine animal which draws the water from the well to irrigate the thirsty desert’s unknown places. It is a gesture bringing back the margins to the centre of the world's web." Writing is compared to the draught animal, that is to say the animal that is going to give man his energy and strength to offer the desert the water that he goes to fetch from the depth of 1 Hawad, www.editions-amara.info/ Also see: Furigraphier le vide. Art et poésie touareg pour le IIIe millénaire, a film by Hélène Claudot-Hawad and Nathalie Michaud: 55 minutes, DVD Co-production: Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail / Portique Nomade (www.canalu.fr) 2 "I consider writing not only as a weapon but also as an anchorage that we drag, a black wake giving weight and consistency to the progress of resistance pursuing its aim. In a nutshell, writing is a memory, but it is not confined to the past: it is a tether that is unreeled from the abyss, a nourishing act, similar to the effort of the mine animal which draws the water from the well to irrigate the thirsty unknown places in the desert. It is a gesture bringing back the margins to the centre of the world's web." (Buveurs de braises—Ember drinkers—MEET, 1995: an interview with Bernard Bretonnière, translation mine).

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the Earth. It is also a "gesture bringing back the margins to the centre of the world's web." It is a gesture revealing the belonging of the most minor thread to the great "world's web." It is a gesture making the margin a centre to show every man and woman the place of all people, like sand grains, which are apparently nothing as individual grains, but together they create the desert where the Tuareg people find their roots in the moving roots of nomadism. Hélène Claudot-Hawad explains how Hawad's poetry is resistance to the interventions of western countries bringing about a more rapid destruction of the desert and of the Tuareg people: La danse funèbre du soleil (1992) anticipe douloureusement les massacres des civils touaregs perpétrés dans les années 1990 au Niger et au Mali et la naissance d'une rebellion armée. Yasida (1991) à son tour soulève le problème de la résistance que les minoritaires, les pauvres, les exclus du monde moderne, doivent mener contre l'anéantissement qui les guette.3

Every international intervention threatens the desert and its inhabitants and Hawad's poetry is both a way of showing us the close relationship existing between his people and the desert and of denouncing the incidence of western countries' policies on the destruction of the desert, for example when, in Sahara-Visions atomiques (2003), he denounces the chaos left by colonization, the western exploitation of uranium, French nuclear tests, and wars.4 He answers real chaos by some poetic chaos as Hélène Claudot-Hawad underlines: "Pour sortir de la confusion et de la folie, les hallucinations du chaos sont administrées au chaos lui-même" (Hélène Claudot-Hawad, ibid., 15).5 Sahara-Visions atomiques lets us hear the word resistance again and again, and his resistance is constantly shown in the close relationship with Tuareg people's life and with the desert. Hawad's people's fight is placed between agricultural life making the link between the soil and man's gesture, ploughing, and death: 3

Hélène Claudot-Hawad, "Hawad, furigrapheur d'horizons", in Hawad, Furigraphie. Poésies 1985-2015, 13, italics in the original. "La danse funèbre du soleil (1992) painfully anticipates the massacres of Tuareg civilians perpetrated in the 1990s in Niger and in Mali, and the birth of an armed rebellion. Yasida (1991) in turn raises the problem of resistance in which the members of minorities, poor people, the socially excluded from the modern world, have to engage against the annihilation hanging over them" (translation mine). 4 About Hawad's poetry, particularly concerning the exploitation of uranium, also see part 3 chapter 10 of this book and for graphical writing as an act of resistance, see part 5 chapter 17. 5 "To go out of confusion and folly, the hallucinations of chaos are given to chaos itself"

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Les combattants vont partir; ils vont labourer, combattre, mourir pour à nouveau bourgeonner et naître de la crue de leurs insurrections, ils germeront des insurrections, […]6

The revolts and insurrections appear as a blooming world as is shown by the vegetal metaphor. Men themselves are resistance—"eux la résistance"7 (138). Their fight is in their deep union with the desert: "Ils partent épouser le desert blanc"8 (136). Their children and the guns of their fight are all their possessions, their life and their responsibility: "Les combattants portent / les fusils et les enfants"9 (136); "Sur les épaules, ils portent / les fusils et les enfants"10 (137). There is no separation between their life and their fight. Both are seeds that will grow in the desert that they defend. The furious return of the word "resistance" speaks about that everyday resistance in everyday gestures and in guns, in the children carried on their shoulders and in the exile, in the walking and walking again in the desert they have married. Their resistance is in their life. They are resistance. Hélène Claudot-Hawad defines the Resistance fighters depicted by Hawad: Les portraits de résistants que Hawad dessine ne correspondent pas au stéréotype des héros romanesques. Ils n'incarnent ni la force, ni la gloire, ni l'autorité. La solitude les cerne. Ils ont la maigreur et le visage émacié des pauvres, leurs rides et leurs barbes ressemblent aux branches et aux mousses des maquis qui les abritent […]. (Hélène Claudot-Hawad, 16)11

Resistance fighters in Hawad's poetry are one with nature, they are the living reflection of the thin and apparently fragile plants growing in the desert, apparently frail and yet so strong. The young goatherd compared to 6

Sahara-Visions atomiques (2003) in Furigraphies, 137. "The fighters are going to leave; / they are going to plough, to fight, to die / to bud again /and to be born out of the flood of their insurrections, / they will sprout from insurrections, […]" (translation mine). 7 "They, resistance" (translation mine). 8 "They leave and marry the white desert" (translation mine). 9 "The fighters carry the guns and the children" (translation mine). 10 "On their shoulders they carry the guns and the children" (translation mine). 11 "The portraits of Resistance fighters that Hawad draws do not correspond to the stereotype of romantic heroes. They embody neither strength nor glory nor authority. Loneliness surrounds them. They have the thinness and the emaciated faces of poor people, their wrinkles and their beards look like the branches and mosses of the shrubs providing shelter for them" (translation mine).

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"a fennec / going out of its hole at twilight" (Caravane de la soif—1985 in Furigraphie, 30, translation mine), who braids a mat out of palm leaves "for her husband who led the caravan out of the borders, kneeling because of prison chains or torture fire" "or "for her brother in exile" (ibid., translation mine) is a figure of resistance insofar as her simple gesture—as she makes an object with a part of nature to bring comfort to the men of her family who are far from her—is more than an everyday gesture. The man-made object revives collective memory since it "mends the weaving of myths" (30)—"Natte trame / qui racommode le tissage des mythes"12—; it is hope; it is a healing gesture: "Soigne les ailes brisées du souffle en vol” (30).13 Everything is resistance in Hawad's poetry in which the Tuareg man has the thinness of the shrubs in the desert, their apparent fragility and real strength. Homme dressé Petit grain Dans les vagues de sable.14 (Caravane de la soif––1983, in Furigraphie, 32)

The Tuareg man is a standing man forever linked with the small grain of sand in the desert, the desert that can also be the living page of a poet's resistance to dictatorship.

Poetry on the Atacama desert to respond to totalitarianism Denouncing war and violence, poetry also denounces the wounds inflicted on the Earth and becomes a strong ecological weapon. Poetry is a way of resisting all evils inflicted on man and nature. When Raul Zurita wrote a huge poem in the desert of Atacama, it was to resist Pinochet's dictatorship.15 "We are all the streams of a same water," he wrote,16 thus

12

"The mat is a weft / That mends the weaving of myths" (translation mine). "Heals the broken wings of the flying breath" (translation mine). 14 "Standing man / Small grain / In the waves of sand" (translation mine). 15 I am grateful to Scott Slovic, who made me discover Raul Zurita's poetry written on the Atacama desert, while walking between ponds and trees and speaking about environmental literature near the confluence of two rivers flowing from the Pyrenean mountains to the city of Toulouse, thus suggesting that everything is connected. 13

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evoking the fact that we humans are all linked as we are linked with the nonhuman world. Zurita materialized the union between poetry and nature as a fight for liberty, by writing the biggest poem in the world, a poem that was to be seen from the sky and that was just a short phrase: "Ni Pena ni mieda" (No shame nor fear). Four words spread on the sand for two miles in order to be seen from the sky and from planes flying above the desert, since the poet could no longer express himself on the Earth. Or rather he could, as he asked the Earth to express the fight that a dictator thought he had forbidden. He made that work in 1982, during Pinochet's dictatorship. It is at that moment that he had the idea of writing poems "on hills, in the desert and in the sky." Nature offered unlimited pages that Pinochet's dictatorial regime could not tear. He used the landscape not to make a work of art but to express freedom against repression. When he wrote in the sand so that his text might be seen from the sky, he made the desert the page of his fight and of poetry the pacific weapon against totalitarianism as if to give life to Paul Eluard's poem "Liberté,"17 written to resist Nazism: thanks to Raul Zurita, liberty is written virtually "on the jungle and the desert" as Eluard wrote.

Poetic olive trees to answer the violence against Palestine The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwich denounced violence against Palestinians in his poems and to do so, he often used olive trees. Olive trees symbolize Mediterranean lands and have covered them for thousands of years; they are fraught with symbolism in the whole world. A symbol of peace in Jewish and Christian traditions, they are associated with light and the olive tree is the axis of the world in Islam (Chevalier and Gheerbrant, 699). Devoted to Athena in Greece, they were nearly deified in the plain of Eleusis. In countries torn apart by war, olive trees recur to speak about a land of peace,18 particularly in the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwich's work. One of his first collections of poems, published in 1964, is even entitled Awraq Al-Zaytun, which means Leaves of Olives. In his poem "I come from there," he wrote: 16

"Un requiem de la plus belle eau" about Patricio Guzman documentary, "El Boton e nacar." https://www.letemps.ch/culture/2015/09/29/un-requiem-plus-belleeau, accessed March 22, 2018. 17 https://www.poetica.fr/poeme-279/liberte-paul-eluard/, accessed June 2, 2018. 18 I am grateful to Rami Kimchi who guided me towards olive trees in Palestinian poetry and Israeli art through two films, among which his own film, Galia's Wedding (1986), presented at the 9th ATINER conference on the 22nd of March 2016 in Athens—and through a talk on Aegina Island.

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Chapter Eighteen Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words, And the bounty of birds, And the immortal olive tree. I walked this land before the Swords Turned its living body into a laden table. I come from there.19

The olive tree is associated with immortality, preceding the mention of violence through destroying swords metamorphosing this land of life (birds, olive tree and "living body") into "a laden table," that is only food to be consumed. The eye rhyme "words"/"Swords" changes the beauty and peace of nature represented by words into violence but the words of the poem we are reading resurface to replace the swords. In "The Earth is Closing on Us," the olive tree is "planted" by Palestinian blood. The death of Palestinians as a people ("We will die") is changed into the immortality of the olive tree: We will die here, here in the last passage. Here and here our blood will plant its olive tree.20

In "Victim," the "olive grove" is turned into "a red pool" suggesting that the olive grove is bleeding with "the blood of fifty victims": The olive grove was always green; It was, my beloved. But tonight The blood of fifty victims Has turned it into a red pool. Please don't blame me If I can't come; They've murdered me, too.21

In Mahmoud Darwich's poetry, the olive tree is constantly associated with the Palestinian people's wounds and death. It becomes the metaphor of the Palestinian land and the people living on it like those eternal trees growing on the same land. 19

Mahmoud Darwich, "I come from there" http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/persecution_palestinians.html, accessed March 25, 2016. 20 "The Earth is Closing on Us," https://ghazala.wordpress.com/2008/08/22/yourblood-will-plant-its-olive-tree-and-your-people-shall-live-in-its-shade…/, accessed March 25, 2016. 21https://ghazala.wordpress.com/2008/08/22/your-blood-will-plant-its-olive-treeand-your-people-shall-live-in-its-shade…/, accessed March 25, 2016.

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Even non-Palestinian poets associate the olive tree with Palestinian tragedy, like Brinda Runghsawmee, a poet from Mauritius, who opposes the olive trees of Palestine to war and violence: The Hamas militant Aims his foreign missile Against Israel's border town Full of olive trees Swinging music in the gun-fire sky Which cannot hide the blueness of lofty joy Where arms do not exist.22

The olive trees isolated in one line separate the stanza into two parts: one devoted to the violence of war and the other to "music," "joy," the blue colour of a Mediterranean sky, a world "where arms do not exist." It is as if the olive trees were the warrants of an eternal joy that no war could delete. They are the living element of safety as two lines suggest further on: "He leaves his post / Behind the safety of olive groves." A poet from afar echoes Palestinian poetry through the central role of olive trees. All those who fight for freedom recognize their own fight in Palestinian poets' representation of their land through the eternity of olive trees. It is not by chance if it is an anti-apartheid Afrikaner poet, Breyten Breytenbach, who poetically sums up the strength of Darwich's poetry when he comments upon the Palestinian poet's last reading: The sun was setting, there was a soundless wind in the trees and from the neighbouring streets we could hear the voices of children playing. And for hours we sat on the ancient stone seats, spellbound by the depth and the beauty of this poetry. Was it about Palestine? Was it about his people dying, the darkening sky, the intimate relationships with those on the other side of the wall, “soldier” and “guest”, exile and love, the return to what is no longer there, the memory of orchards, the dreams of freedom? Yes— like a deep stream all of these themes were there, of course they so constantly informed his verses; but it was also about olives and figs and a horse against the skyline and the feel of cloth and the mystery of the colour of a flower and the eyes of a beloved and the imagination of a child and the hands of a grandfather. And of death.23

22 Brinda Runghsawmee, "The Love Birds," http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/ persecution_palestinians.html, accessed March 25, 2016. 23 https://ghazala.wordpress.com/2008/08/22/your-blood-will-plant-its-olive-treeand-your-people-shall-live-in-its-shade…/, accessed March 25, 2016.

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Palestinian life as heard in Darwich's reading mixes the sounds of life and death but also of "olives and figs and a horse against the skyline and the feel of cloth and the mystery of the colour of a flower." The nonhuman world surrounding the poet's voice shows the link between life and death, the intermingling of dying Palestinians and olives and figs, all informing a poetry in which destroying violence has never the upper hand as the olive trees remain, like an eternally protecting presence. The poetry expressed in texts is sometimes echoed by paintings as in the works by the Canadian Jewish painter Linda Spaner Dayan Frimer.

Linda Spaner Dayan Frimer's mingled landscapes of Israel and Canada to remember the Shoah and make nature the voice of peace Linda Spaner Dayan Frimer's work is filled with colours and yet some of her works evoke such tragedies as the Shoah, the history of which she had heard when she was a child, and which she projected into landscapes she loved, as a healing reconstruction. She paints the wonders of nature,24 not to forget the evils of history but to remember them and to heal human wounds. Mingling the beauty of nature and the wounds of mankind, her paintings reveal her vision of the union of nature and human history. As she grew, she found she was able to release both the cultural stories and the wonder of the forest, by painting them. Linda came, by being creative, to understand that humankind and nature rise inseparable on earth. She has spent her life working to express the innate unity in all of life's forms and has become, in the process, a champion of environmental and health issues, a cultural and community facilitator for the release of trauma through creativity.25

The colourful poetry of her landscape paintings and captions partly explaining them mingle text with the picture to metamorphose the weight of the worst trauma into beauty. To explain her painting, she says: "The solace and inspiration I found in the wilderness, mediated the stories told within our small home, of cultural suffering and war in Europe" (ibid.). In

24 She says: "I have spent my life attempting to express the wonder that I absorbed in the landscape of western Canada, by painting it," http://lindafrimer.ca/about/, accessed May 21, 2018. 25 http://lindafrimer.ca/about/, accessed May 21, 2018.

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her painting "Epitaph,"26 the artist's comment explains the painting. The caption reads: "I sit atop a precipice of rock in British Columbia which is woven into a prayer shawl-shrouded Mount Sinai" (ibid.). The author tells the story of her people by mingling two landscapes: the mountains of British Columbia and Mount Sinai formed by a prayer shawl seen as a shroud. The Shoah is transformed into a mythical and real landscape, Mount Sinai, projected into the mountains of Canada and formed by a prayer shawl, suggesting that nature prays for the six million Jews killed by the Nazis. The association of the prayer shawl and of the word "shrouded" suggests that Mount Sinai prays and weeps for the Jewish people born below its slopes, whose suffering is carried by their community living beyond the ocean. Mountain landscapes appear as healing nature. They tell a story that can be read in a reimagined wilderness where local places no longer exist as such but merge into a world landscape speaking about unity and peace. The superimposition of Mount Sinai on the Canadian mountains tells the depth of the weight of the Shoah in the artist’s mind. Instead of carrying this suffering as a burden, she transcends it by taking a mythical landscape from Israel to insert it into the Canadian mountains where she lives. Flying in the middle of those mountains that tell a story of suffering, memory and resilience, there is a white dove speaking about peace. The dove is an important symbol for the artist; she says: "it is hope in the future—as it was the dove that returned with an olive branch in her beak after the biblical flood. I draw the dove every day in my journal."27 The book in which the painting "Epitaph" is inserted, In Honour of our Grandmother, and also containing Native Canadian paintings, suggests the strength of ancestry in a common suffering represented by different North American communities. All those paintings use natural space to claim peoples' identities through their memory and the suffering they underwent in history. This is also what appears in Sherko Bekas’ poetry of nature.

Sherko Bekas' poetry of nature giving life to murdered Kurdistan Sherko Bekas (ùêrko Bêkes in Kurdish) was a Kurdish poet, the son of a poet, Fayaq Bekas, who had published his first book when he was 17. He 26 Linda Spaner Dayan Frimer, In Honour of our Grandmother, 47. The painting can be seen on the artist's internet site: lindafrimer.ca/, visited November 19, 2014. Also see Linda Spaner Dayan Frimer and Paul George, Wilderness journey. 27 http://lindafrimer.ca/about/, accessed May 21, 2018.

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was born in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1940 and died in 2013 in Sweden where he had lived in exile from 1987 to 1992 when he returned to Iraqi Kurdistan. He had joined the Kurdish Liberation Movement in 1965 and worked in the radio station of this movement, "The Voice of Kurdistan." His poetry is quite innovative as it introduces a break from traditional poetry, using blank verse. He introduced several new elements into Kurdish poetry: the "Rûwange" that is the vision element; also the "poster poem," a poetic genre, the name of which is borrowed from sculpture and painting.28 The poster poem is supposed to have been invented by Christopher Logue in 2011: The first, an antinuclear poem called "To My Fellow Artists," he made with the designer Germano Facetti in 1958; the pair hung their prints in cafés and bookstore windows around the city, leaving a stack of them in the lobby of the Royal Court Theatre. Their reasoning was simple: big words on posters tend to be more widely read than small words on bound pages. To put a poem on a poster is to guarantee it a certain almost involuntary readership—especially valuable if, like Logue's, your poems aim to provoke, amuse, or annoy. "Posters call you," Logue writes in Manifesto. "So do poems … A poem unable to live on a posterௗ/ௗIs no poem." 29

In fact, what Sherko Bekas called poster poems were short poems about unimportant topics conveying great mysteries.30 His poems use the natural world to express the suffering of the Kurdish people. The suffering of men and women is inseparable from the land's suffering, which is often the case, as we saw with Hawad's poetry uniting Tuaregs' suffering and the destruction of the desert. With Sherko Bekas, the connection between men's suffering and the land's suffering appears in the poem entitled "Soil": With my hand, I reached for the branch The branch recoiled from excruciating pain when as I reached for the branch The stem of the tree cried out in pain 28

https://kurdistantribune.com/on-poetry-sherko-bekas/. Accessed June 2, 2018. Dan Piepenbring, "Christopher Logue's Poster Poems" in The Paris Review, October 12, 2015. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/10/12/christopherlogues-poster-poems/ accessed March 30, 2017. 30 http://autarmota.blogspot.fr/2016/10/kurdish-poet-sherko-bekas-was-tallest.html, accessed March 30, 2017. Reading of his poems by Sherko Bekas on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cv0e-Z21CA, accessed March 30, 2017 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtMelzHzVkk, accessed June 2, 2018. 29

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when I embraced the trunk of the tree The earth under my feet shook Rocks moaned (Ibid.)

More than a series of pathetic fallacies, the suffering and pain attributed to the nonhuman world convey human suffering: "The branch recoiled from excruciating pain," "the stem of the tree cried out in pain," "the earth […] shook," "Rocks moaned." It is the suffering of nature that conveys the suffering of the whole land. The poet's relationship to nature conveys his deep communion with Kurdistan: when I bent down and picked up a handful of the soil The entire Kurdistan Let out a wail. (Ibid.)

It is the association of the poet's gesture, his bending towards the soil, as if he tried to be as close as possible to the soil, the soil he holds within his hand and of the land's wailing, that expresses the deep bond between the poet and his land, Kurdistan. Could that be another interpretation of the definition of ecology as "the relationship of creatures with their environment?" This very simple poem, this very simple gesture, reveal the relationship between the Kurdish poet and his land. In "Counting," it is the victims of the terrible conflict tearing Kurdistan for years, who are associated to elements of nature. The cold language of mathematics, with the four occurrences of the verb "count," and the use of numbers framing each stanza, from "one by one" in the first one to "millions" in the second one, speaks about death, about the millions of dead people killed by war. Instead of painting the horror of the war, Sherko Bekas uses the language of nature: leaves in a garden, a "flowing river," and "migratory birds" are the elements of living nature showing the innumerable victims in Kurdistan, on a first level of reading. But on a second level, the poet chooses to give more room to the life of nature, which makes the shock of the last lines still greater: "I would also promise to count / one by one / All the victims of this beloved land of Kurdistan!" If you could one by one count all the leaves in this garden If you could count all the fish Little and big In the flowing river in your front of you If you could one by one count The migratory birds

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Chapter Eighteen during their migration season From the north to south and from the south to north, I would also promise to count one by one All the victims of this beloved land of Kurdistan! ("Counting", February 1987)31

In "Seeds," the recurrence of numbers, the language of mathematics—"We were millions," framing the poem, "thousands," "first," "second," "third,"—soon gives way to the language of nature and the tree, old and young, allows the shifting from crude counting to vegetable life and profusion. Men are assimilated to seeds: "We were millions / An old tree / A young tree / We were seeds." The blood of war and murder contaminates the organic time—"The bloody night"— and men's fate is expressed in terms of "uprooting," which means that they are assimilated to the trees recurring in the poem. We were millions An old tree A young tree We were seeds The helmet of Ankara In a bloody night came To uproot us They did, They took us away long away! On the way many old trees bent In the cold many young trees died They froze Many seeds were trampled They were lost and forgotten Like a river in the summer we had little water Like birds in the autumn, we became fewer We ended up in thousands of homes There were still seeds among us, the wind took them The wind returned them They reached the thirsty mountains They hid among the rocks The first rain The second rain 31

http://www.rudaw.net/english/opinion/12092013 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skhCqFgRbCQ (Kurdish Poems read by Sherki Bekas), accessed March 22nd, 2018.

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The third rain They grew again We are now a forest again We are millions. ("Seeds")32

Men from Kurdistan are assimilated to every element of the Kurdish landscape: "On the way many old trees bent / In the cold many young trees died / They froze / Many seeds were trampled / They were lost and forgotten / Like a river in the summer we had little water / Like birds in the autumn, we became fewer." By metamorphosing the suffering and death of Kurdish soldiers into the suffering and death of the land, its trees, water and birds, the poet shows with real strength that Kurdish people are indissociable from their land, as Palestinian people are indissociable from Palestine, Native Americans are indissociable from their land, Tuaregs are indissociable from the Sahara and Ogoni people are indissociable from Ogoniland.

Ken Saro-Wiwa's poetry and autobiography to answer the violence against Ogoniland In Nigeria, Ken Saro-Wiwa and his companions tried to prevent the oil company Shell from devastating the Ogoni land. This territory is a 1000kilometre kingdom in the Niger Delta, where Ogoni people, mostly farmers and fisherpeople, lived. Shell exploited oil over there from 1958 to 1993. According to the United Nations Environmental Programme, the treating and cleaning up of the environmental damage in Ogoniland should take between twenty-five to thirty years. Ken Saro-Wiva who fought for the rights of the Ogoni with the MOSOP—Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People—was executed with his eight companions: The group argued that oil production had devastated the region's environment, while bringing no benefit to its 500,000 people. Saro-Wiwa said that Shell had turned what was once an area of unspoilt natural beauty into a grubby black moonscape. Oil from dilapidated pipelines and pumping stations seeped into the soil and destroyed it. For local residents, Nigeria's oil reserves hadn't brought affluence, just poverty and disease. The Ogoni took up the peaceful fight against Shell and the military regime of Nigeria. In 1993, Shell abandoned Ogoniland and has not been back since. This triumph turned Ken Saro-Wiwa and his acolytes into a real menace for General Sani Abacha's military dictatorship. He had the writer arrested in 1994, allegedly for being responsible for the death of four 32

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/seeds-18/ accessed March 31, 2017.

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Chapter Eighteen Ogoni tribal leaders. Saro-Wiwa was hanged on November 10, 1995. He became a symbol for environmental protection and the human rights.33

In A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary, he mixed the autobiographical diary with a committed tone and poetry: A bit of research and thinking of my childhood days showed me how conscious of their environment the Ogoni have always been and how far they went in an effort to protect it. I had shown that consciousness myself all along. In my pamphlet The Ogoni Nationality Today and Tomorrow, published during the Nigerian civil war in 1968, I had pointedly stated inter alia: “We refuse to accept that the only responsibility which Shell-BP owes our nation is the spoliation of our lands…” And I had written the poetic lines: The flares of Shell are flames of hell We bake beneath their light Nought for us save the blight Of cursed neglect and cursèd Shell. I had also played a major role in attempting to get Shell to pay reparation to the Ogoni landlords after the blow-out on Shell's Bomu Oilwell 11 in 1971. (Ken Saro-Wiwa, A Month and a Day, 79-80)

The blending of autobiographical and poetic styles, of action and poetry multiplies Ken Saro-Wiwa's fighting strength. We know when reading this text that he was executed the following year, and yet it is his living voice that we can hear when reading those lines, still as efficient as ever to defend the Ogoni land. His own blending of research and personal memories, of the mention of a pamphlet and the inclusion of poetic lines, shows his own conviction of the weight of words to change things. The poem is particularly important in its short density and its musical significance. Together with the inner rhyme associating the oil company Shell with "hell," there are so many echoes in those few lines that the reader can hear a chant of protest through them. The alliterative associations—"flare"/"flame," "bake"/"beneath"/"blight"—, the rhymes— "Shell"/"hell," "light"/"blight"—, the assonances—"flare"/"their," "flame"/"bake"/"save," "we"/"beneath"—and distorted echoes— "cursed"/"cursèd"—convey a constructing rage and a fight changed into poetry. The music of words associates a dazzling light ("flare") with the flames of hell, while this same "light," instead of being a radiant positive light, brings destruction ("baked," "blight"). The final line, with the 33

http://www.dw.com/en/why-nigerian-activist-ken-saro-wiwa-was-executed/ a-18837442, accessed February 15, 2017.

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replacing of the initial word "cursed" by the poetic form of the same word "cursèd" lays emphasis on the rejection of the oil company that, through "neglect," brought about nothingness on the Ogoni land ("Nought"). The poem is the ultimate form of fight for Saro-Wiwa, a form that will last beyond his own existence. By associating action ("I also played a major role") and writing, he puts into practice his philosophy concerning the active role of writers: […] literature must serve society by steeping itself in politics, by intervention, and writers must not merely write to amuse or to take a bemused, critical look at society. They must play an interventionist role. My experience has been that African governments can ignore writers, taking comfort in the fact that only few can read and write, and that those who read find little time for the luxury of literary consumption beyond the need to pass examinations based on set texts. Therefore the writer must be l'homme engagé: the intellectual man of action. (Ken Saro-Wiwa, A Month and a Day, 81)

The choice of the French phrase, "l'homme engagé," defined by the French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier and used in an intellectual journal, Esprit, after World War II, is another way of fighting through words, French being the language of the country that made the Revolution in 1789, the country that always fought against any form of totalitarianism. Ken SaroWiwa uses all the resources of language, from autobiography to poetry, from pamphlet to journalism, from official speeches to quotations from other poets or from the Bible, all those texts facing Shell briefing notes; he uses English to reach as many readers as possible, French to suggest a fight against any form of dispossession, and his Khana mother-tongue to root his fight in his Ogoni land, through poetry once again (Saro-Wiwa, A Month and a Day, 206-207). Saro-Wiwa insists on the fact that "the best Nigerian writers have involved themselves actively in 'politics.' Wole Soyinka, Nigeria's Nobel Laureate, is an outstanding example. Even the normally placid Chinua Achebe was forced to work within one of the political parties to buttress his call on all Nigerians to 'proselytize for civilized values'. Chris Okigbo fighting on the side of the Biafran secessionists; and Festus Iyayi has been involved in labour unions and recently in the Campaign for Democracy organization. Which only goes to prove what I have said elsewhere, that in a situation as critical as Nigeria's, it is idle merely to sit by and watch or record goons and bumpkins run the nation aground and dehumanize the people" (Saro-Wiwa, A Month and a Day, 82). Writing and action are indissociable to make governments and people aware.

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In the diary he insists on the deliberate misunderstanding of the company and his only aim, which is the preservation of the ecosystem of the Niger Delta: I should stress that Shell either completely and deliberately misunderstands my intentions, or puts a wrong construction on them for its own mischievous purposes. Let me state here, for the avoidance of all doubt, that my overall concern is for the fragile ecosystem of the Niger Delta–one of the richest areas on earth. I am appalled that this rich company, with the abundance of knowledge and material resources available to it, should treat the area with such callous indifference. I consider the loss of the Niger Delta a loss to all mankind and therefore regard Shell's despoliation of the area as a crime to all humanity. (Saro-Wiwa, A Month and a Day, 168)

Repeatedly in the diary he insists on the contamination of the Ogoni land by the oil companies for the profit of those who exploit Africa, thus reenacting what happened in the nineteenth century with the ivory trade, which was denounced by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness: Over the past thirty-two years Ogoni has offered Nigeria an estimated US thirty billion dollars and received NOTHING in return, except a blighted countryside, and an atmosphere full of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons; a land in which wildlife is unknown; a land of polluted streams and creeks, of rivers without fish, a land which is, in every sense of the term, an ecological disaster. (Saro-Wiwa, A Month and a Day, 74)

The enormous financial sum of "thirty billion dollars" is opposed by the hugeness of nothingness expressed through capital letters ("NOTHING") and the list of all the chemicals left in the Ogoni soil. He repeats that in a speech reproduced further on in the diary (95). The inclusion of different texts and different genres to hammer the huge "ecological disaster" reinforces the weight of the fight through the repetition of facts meant to make people aware. Ken Saro-Wiwa's poem "The True Prison" about the violence of dictators and those "executing callous calamitous orders," written after his imprisonment for his defending the Ogoni land against the Shell oil company, was read thirty years later as the text accompanying all the violence done against environmental activists trying to protect the Arctic against those who want to exploit it. The poet's physical life stopped on 10 November 1995, but his voice goes on denouncing all those who devastate the planet and ruin those who live on it. Poetry is stronger than death. Ken Wiwa, Ken Saro-Wiwa's son, says in an article in The

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Guardian: "Finally it seems as if Ken Saro-Wiwa, my father, may not have died in vain."34 In 2006, however, the Nigerian government invited the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to assess the environment and the public health impacts of oil contamination in Ogoniland and the Niger delta. Among its sobering findings was the conclusion that restoring Ogoniland may take 25-30 years. Although the report was not comprehensive, it represents the most detailed and evidence-based analysis of the situation in Ogoni. In one community, researchers reported that surface water contained 900 times the acceptable levels of cancercausing benzene. UNEP even recommends that Nigeria establish a community cancer registry (ibid.). Ken Wiwa adds: In the past 10 years the Ogoni have registered landmark victories in court cases against Shell in New York and London. I am sure my father will be looking down and chuckling that activists who cut their teeth on the Ogoni case were part of the coalition that last week pushed President Obama to reject the controversial Canada-to-Texas Keystone XL pipeline. At the same time Exxon is facing the possibility of legal action over claims that it lied about climate change risks, which Exxon denies. We may finally be arriving at a tipping point in the carbon economy, and perhaps one day my father's story will be more than a footnote in that history. (ibid.)

Ken Saro-Wiwa's action through his acts and texts, not only goes on defending his Ogoni land. It contributes to protecting lands everywhere in the world against the devastation caused by the action of oil companies, as Ken Saro-Wiwa's son underlines. If the construction of a pipeline that can only destroy huge parts of American and Canadian lands was rejected by President Obama, it is due to the combined fight of Ken Saro-Wiwa and his companions, organizations and a government's political awareness. But those fights are never definitively won and after President Obama's decision, the following president made steps backwards as far as the world's environment is concerned. It is an everyday fight all over the planet, which is never won but whenever a voice like Ken Saro-Wiwa's rises, the planet can hope for a better future if everybody can hear that fighting voice. Nothing is possible if the power of money prevails over awareness. But the power of money is transient like governments. Ken Saro-Wiwa and his companions were executed after years of fight but his texts endlessly prolong the action of the MOSOP, which he founded in

34

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/10/ken-saro-wiwafather-nigeria-ogoniland-oil-pollution, accessed February 15, 2017.

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1993 and that "gave voice to the voiceless" (Saro-Wiwa, A Month and a Day, 166) and his fight was a success since Shell had to pay $83 million: Settling out of court in January 2015, Shell’s $83 million settlement will be distributed to 15,600 people in Bodo affected by the spills. The majority of the settlement will go to individuals, with the community-at-large also receiving part of the settlement. British banks will distribute funds to bank accounts set up for each affected individual in Bodo. Shell has stated they are happy with the Bodo settlement, and are committed to the clean-up process […]35

This cannot make people forget all the devastation that occurred in Ogoniland for years, nor the executions of those who defended their land and people. Yet more than twenty years after Ken Saro-Wiwa's execution, this proves that his action goes on and that his texts go on protecting the Ogoniland and all the lands threatened by the exploitation of resources everywhere in the world. "I'll tell you this. I may be dead but my ideas will not die." Ken Saro-Wiwa, 1995

Anita Desai's Fire on the Mountain: Murdered women and forests in India Anita Desai's Fire on the Mountain does not speak directly about endangered forests or the protection of the environment but about the fates of three women. Yet the importance given to nature in this novel gives it an ecological dimension; this ecological aspect lies in the background of Indian women's predicament. In fact, the burning forest is associated with women's condition in India and particularly with the violence against women. The novel is divided into three chapters, which are in a way three portraits of women. The beautiful Indian mountainous landscape pervading the novel with all the colours of Indian nature burns at the end of the novel, destroyed by Raka, the wild girl loving solitary walks in nature, at the very moment when the poor Indian woman, Ila Das, who had visited Raka's great-grandmother and fought against the marriages of young Indian girls with older men, is raped and murdered. The weaving of the three fates with the central character, Nanda Kaul, the solitary woman 35

Elena Keates, "After Decades of Death and Destruction, Shell Pays Just $83 Million for Recent Oil Spills", The Guardian, January 11, 2015, http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/shell-oil-settlement-ogoniland/ visited March 1st, 2017.

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making the link with the other two, simply wanting her tranquillity, refusing commitment or even to keep her friend for the night, makes a symbolical connection between women's predicament and forests' fragility. Both are at the mercy of the act of one individual, a violent and insensitive man on the one hand and a child loving nature but becoming mad, on the other hand. From the beginning of the novel, the central character is closely linked with trees to such an extent that she would like to be in fusion with trees: "[…] she fancied she could merge with the pine trees and be mistaken for one. To be a tree, no more and no less, was all she was prepared to undertake" (Desai, 4). From a fusion ("merge") appearing as mere camouflage ("mistaken for one"), she contemplates the idea of becoming a tree ("To be a tree"). This initial wished-for assimilation of the woman with a tree foreshadows the final simultaneous dramas: the murder of her friend and the burning of the forest fired by her great-granddaughter. The very presentation of nature at the beginning of the novel foreshadows the drama to come. Beauty is mingled with dysphoric elements suggesting violence. The beautiful landscape of the beginning presents us with apricot trees in the foreground and in the distance, "the blue waves of the Himalayas flowing out and up to the line of ice and snow sketched upon the sky" (4). The dream-like quality of those blue mountains—often appearing as a symbol of a dream while corresponding to the physical reality of the telescoping of the material rock and immaterial air—, is counterbalanced by the fate of an apricot, which has been "squashed by its fall," "flung away" by Nanda Kaul and after that, "a bright hoopoe, seeing its flight and flash, struck down at it and tore at its bright flesh, then flew off with a lump in its beak" (4). The violence of the verb "tore" associated with the term "flesh" that can apply to a body as well as a fruit, the alliteration in [fl] simulating the rapidity and violence of the bird's action and the flutter of its wings, foreshadow the rape and murder of Ila Ras who will end "crushed back, crushed down into the earth" (143). Yet the first impression we have when reading the description of nature in and around Nanda Kaul's veranda is one of beauty: The veranda lay deep in shade. The tiles of its uneven floor were cool. Along the stone steps were pots of geraniums and fuchsias that bloomed unimpaired by the sun as they stood in the shade cast by the low, leafy apricot trees. Here was her old cane chair and she sat down in it, putting the letter down in her lap and gazing instead at the ripening apricots and the pair of bul-buls that quarrelled over them till they fell in a flurry of feathers to the ground, stirred up a small frenzy of dust, then shot off in opposite directions, scolding and abusing till a twist of worm distracted

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The synesthetic description mingling the sight of flowers and fruit, the sound of the cicadas and the scent of pine-needles, widens to make the scent audible and leads the reader from shade to sunlight and from the closed space of the veranda to the whole globe. This description saturated with the nonhuman (stones, flowers, trees, bul-buls, cicadas and worms) might suggest perfect beauty and peace. Yet the very writing contains signs of hardship within beauty. The uneven stones give way to the even sound of the cicadas, and the material hardship of the "stone steps" underlined by the alliteration in [st] is replaced by the "insubstantial" sound of the cicadas. The shade gives way to the "spinning sunlight," whose movement is once again underlined by the music of words and the alliteration in [s] suggesting that the cicadas' song is part of the sunlight, seen in a double movement: the polysemy of the word "spinning" associates the sunlight with the spinning movement suggesting energy and the spinner's gesture evoking a web including everything in and out of the veranda, the transparency of which opens onto the exterior world entering through its sounds and scents. The cicadas' sound "so insubstantial that it seemed to emerge from the earth itself" appears as a deep element coming from the earth's womb and opposed to the artificial transparency of the veranda. The dysphoric elements of this description—the birds' quarrel and their "[fall] in a flurry of feathers," the words reproducing the sound, the "frenzy of dust" and the "twist of a worm" seem to foreshadow darker moments. This is still more marked in the following chapter where the red colour gradually enters the landscape, to be finally associated with blood: "She gazed down the gorge with its gashes of red earth, its rocks and gullies and sharply spiked agaves, to the Punjab plains—a silver haze in the summer heat" (Desai, 17); and this is still clearer when one page further, Nanda Kaul's will for quietness is asserted in terms of nature with the emergence of some metaphorical blood qualifying the colour of the gorge, of this Indian nature where her friend will be murdered at the end of the novel. The landscape is part of the fate of those women and the final drama closes the circle. At the beginning, the sound of the cicadas seemed "to emerge from the earth" (13) and at the moment of the murder, Ila Das is "crushed back, crushed down into the earth, she lay raped, broken, still and finished. Now it was dark" (143). Her story finishes with the erasing of the colours and of daytime and her own night in death corresponds with organic night.

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Nesha Sabar, in an article dealing with an ecocritical reading of the novel, says that in the novel, "ecocriticism […] draws a meaningful link between animate and inanimate relationships" (Sabar, 230). And she quotes a passage in which Nanda Kaul tells Raka that when a child, she "kept animals," dogs, cats and monkeys. The description of the little monkey "kept chained to the veranda rails" (99) is once again a way of associating human predicament and the nonhuman world. Raka will see a great proximity between this little animal prisoner and the need for freedom that she feels deep within herself. As we have seen, animals are also associated with death through the evocation of the institute placing the modern world of men in a dominating position among the mountainous landscape.36 The extended metaphor of fire and burning present in the novel is particularly important here, where metaphorical burning and real burning are present: "Pine trees with charred trunks and contorted branches, striking melodramatic attitudes as on stage" (41). The theatrical metaphor doubly takes nature out of its natural landscape; first destroyed by the fire, it becomes a stage and changes the burnt trees into suffering humans, but suffering humans in a theatrical performance. When Raka questions herself about the concrete building that she takes for a factory, she walks "as the newly caged, the newly tamed wild ones do" (40-41). She sees herself as a caged animal, like the chained monkey that her greatgrandmother kept in her youth. This feeling, appearing at the moment when she met the charred trees seen in "melodramatic attitudes," unites them. And her final desire to provoke something dramatic is linked with this feeling of paradoxical imprisonment in the Indian forest. When she looks for Ram Lal, the extended metaphor of fire and burning foreshadows the final drama: "[…] the place was empty, a blackened, fire-blasted cave in which one fiery, inflamed eye glowed and smouldered by itself" (42). The lexical field of fire and burning reveals a sort of predestined place that can only be inhabited by death and fire. At the end, before the murder of Ila Das, an eagle that "lit up like a torch" is compared to "a scrap of burnt paper." And just before being aggressed, Ila Das climbs "over the charred, twisted tree trunks that lay across the path" (141). It is as if all life in this Indian nature contained its fate. The denouement of the novel, after Nanda Kaul has learnt about the murder of her friend, is presented with a simplicity suggesting that things could only turn that way. Raka says to her great-grandmother: "Look, Nani, I have set the forest on fire. Look, Nani—look, the forest is on fire" (145). This novel, which tells the story of three solitary female characters—two of them shunning company whereas 36

See part 1, chapter 5, p. 99-100.

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the third one, working for other people, is murdered—, looks quite pessimistic. It ends on the mountain on fire, the last three lines of the novel giving its title: "Down in the ravine, the flames spat and crackled around the dry wood and through the dry grass, and black smoke spiralled up over the mountain" (146). The initial "spinning sunlight" is replaced by the black spirals of smoke taking the place of the initial blue waves of the Himalayas. All the lies told by Nanda Kaul disappear in front of the hard reality of the murder of her friend and the fire on the mountain set by the child. Throughout the novel the fates of the human characters are closely linked with the nonhuman world; and when Nanda Kaul is burnt from the inside by the pain of the murder of her friend that she could have avoided if she had been less selfish and had kept her for the night, and by the pain of the consciousness of all her lies to Raka who looked for a living theatre by firing the mountain, the whole mountain burns. The aesthetics of this novel speaks about the deep relationship existing between the human and nonhuman worlds. The three women are woven in the landscape. The aesthetic quality of the writing appears in a metatextual way in the reference to painting and the symbolical echo or frame of the novel. At the beginning, the description of the Himalayas in the distance is seen like a sketch: "the blue waves of the Himalayas flowing out and up to the line of ice and snow sketched upon the sky" (4); in the end, at the moment of the rape and the murder of Ila Das, the latter enters a Chinese landscapepainting: "The day gone, the light gone, the warmth of life gone, it was like wandering lost in a Chinese landscape—an austere pen and ink scroll, of rocks and pines and mountain peaks, all muted by mist, by darkness" (140-141). The repetition of the word "gone" gradually leads Ila Das to a world of death, but instead of entering a macabre world, she enters a Chinese landscape in a double transposition from reality to art and from Indian mountains to Chinese mountains. The Chinese landscape comes back a little further on, associated with an animal metaphor: "There was no sign of life, no sound. Only little Ila Das scuttling through the Chinese landscape, a little frightened spider in this vast, chilly web" (147). Before being raped and murdered, Ila Das has already left the world of reality and the world of humans. She is compared to a spider except that the web is not her work. Yet the spider is a positive symbol in India. In ancient Indian tradition, Brahma, who is the creator of all things, was called the spider, weaving the web of the world.37 Hence the spider is a saviour, a symbol of freedom in the Upanishad in India. But it is also a symbol of cruelty. So 37

"The Brahmins assert that the world arose from an infinite spider […]", in Archibald Edward Gough, The Philosophy of the Upanishads and Ancient Indian Metaphysics [1891]. London: Routledge, 2000.

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by being associated to the spider, Ila Das is both a prisoner of the web and the spider that may foreshadow the cruelty she is going to be the victim of; but she can also have the possibility of escaping through one of its threads, which can be the thread of her imagination that she uses to enter the Chinese landscape. In its second occurrence, the Chinese landscape no longer appears in a comparison: the word "like" has disappeared. She is "scuttling through the Chinese landscape." The choice is not anodyne as Chinese landscapes were philosophical representations as much as aesthetic paintings. In those paintings spirituality was generated by aesthetics. In the shapes of nature, more than a representation of visible shapes for their sake, Chinese landscape painters read the invisible as linked with one's interior space. This is why Ila Das enters a Chinese landscape, thus entering the deepest part of herself just before the moment when she is going to face death. At the moment when "there was no sign of life" in the real landscape, she tries to find a breath of life in this Chinese landscape, since breath was one of the elements seen by those artists in painting. Jing Hao, " the greatest Chinese painter of the beginning of the Five Dynasties" (Jacques Gies, Montagnes célestes, 81) sees several fundamental elements in painting: Breath, Resonance, Panorama and the Wonderful. He writes in his notes that "through resemblance, we can get similar shapes, but the breath (that animates them) is missing. In truth, the breath and substance (zhi) are together at their plenitude" (Text n° 3, Montagnes célestes, 82, translation mine). Ila Das tries to find both her inner breath and truth in the Chinese landscape that she enters while being in the reality of the Indian landscape where she is going to be killed. At the moment when fear introduces disorder into her, she tries to be in connection with the order of the world, which she cannot find in the Indian mountainous landscape becoming invisible but which she finds in the Chinese landscape she enters. As Pénélope Riboud says, the landscape has been designated since the Vth century B.C. as a "visible expression of the order of the world and thus as a favourite agent of creative experience, either poetic or pictorial" (Montagnes célestes, 3, translation mine). When Ila Das is nearly home, a description reflecting her stream of consciousness enumerates all the life contained in and around the hamlet. When the text has several times alluded to darkness and mist, thus suggesting the invisibility of the landscape, it makes it visible again, full of life and colours with its blond wheat, its frogs whose song is imitated by the text, its "pomegranate trees with their little tight scarlet pom-poms of bloom," its cows and its "handsome red dog" (142), this dog that is the last creature that she hopes will hear her when she tries to shout after being attacked. When she is finally "crushed into the earth,"

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it is both a disappearance and a final entering into the natural world. It is the same with the final burning of the mountain. Fire in India is an element of purification and dead people are burnt on funeral pyres. The flames burning the mountain in the last lines of the novel destroy it and at the same time, perhaps Raka, who learned that the concrete Institute was discharging contaminated dead animals into the ravine, thus polluting the whole mountain, and who saw this institute as a "dragon," decided, in her mad perception of things, to purify a mountain she saw as dead. Whatever the interpretation, the novel constantly shows the interconnection between women and landscapes, women and nature. And by ending on the violence done to a woman and the violence done to nature, she definitely unites them.38

Pedro Casaldaliga's poems to resist South American Natives' and peasants' dispossession of their land Pedro Casaldaliga was the bishop of Sao Felix de Araguaia from 1971 to 2005. He spent his life in Brazil defending the communities of Native Americans and landless peasants attacked by landowners. Risking his life to defend them he also fought for them through poetry. His Nicaraguan journal, containing poems, was translated from Spanish into English in 1987, and some of his texts and poems were translated into French under the title Les coqs de l'Araguaia. Those cocks appear in the first poem of the collection, "Ils te répondent, ces coqs si peu cléments"39 (Casaldaliga 1989, 35). His journal is interspersed with poems, like Ken Saro-Wiwa's journal, as if poetry alone could express an escape from violence. In his Nicaraguan journal, he opposes the damage done by men on the land and the river to the simple presence of white herons: The San Juan has been the river most lusted after in Central America, due to its strategic location as an easy route between two oceans. Conquistadors and pirates, their masts straining, and then landholders and tourists, have gone up and down this San Juan river as they pleased. Mark 38

I would like to thank Zelia Bora, Professor at the Universidade Federal da Paraiba, Brazil, who gave me the opportunity to think about the theme of loss in India and Brazil. See her 2019 collective book, Losing Nature: Narratives Of Forests and Water Environmental Challenges in Brazil and India, Zelia Bora, and Murali Sivaramakrishnan (ed.). Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019. 39 "They answer you, those cocks that have so little leniency answer you" (translation mine).

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Twain could plumb many depths of scoundrel behaviour and battered humanity in these treasured waters. The river is about 220 kilometers long, with green all along its banks, and with large farms and ranches here and there among its smooth hills and intermittent valleys. White herons—the same white herons I see in Araguaia—dot the river with stylised dreams of peace. Along the River San Juan The herons take off, the herons land. But by the verdant shores, Like peace—will it come?—they stand. (Casaldaliga, Prophets in Combat, 46)

The presentation of the river follows a strategic construction, from a history making it the core of human movements starting with the violence of conquistadors and pirates to go on with the apparently peaceful landowners and tourists. They are only apparently peaceful, as they bring about another war, the war on the land and nature and on all those who defend it, small peasants and Natives. The prose text of the journal gradually brings us towards literature through the reference to Mark Twain; the reference is both historical—his job on the Mississippi river— and literary as the reference to his plumbing of the river depths is not a plumbing of the natural waters but of symbolical waters containing the memory of human violence, a plumbing "of scoundrel behaviour and battered humanity." The text then glides to nature and its beauty, with the green shores and the white herons, those nonhuman creatures linking the situation here and now with the Araguaia where Pedro Casaldaliga lives and fights for more justice for the peasants and Natives deprived of their land. The beauty and life of the natural landscape of "smooth hills and intermittent valleys," of the river with its green banks, yet containing human traces with the presence of "large farms and ranches"—the mere adjective "large" appearing as a break in the quietness of the landscape as it refers to the great estates destroying lands, forests, and peasants' small farms—, are enhanced by the quiet presence of those birds, appearing for him as a symbol of peace. Only the poetic form can express his vision of things in a quatrain starting with a perfect balance, with the initial reference to the river, the binary rhythm evoking the herons' movements, and ending on a different tone. The last two lines are introduced by the conjunction "but," marking the opposition whereas he only opposes the movements of the herons—"take off," "land"—to a static scene—"they stand." This is explained by the last line where the harmony of the previous lines is broken by a question between dashes, a question about the peace conjured up by the image of the herons by the river. Peace is

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only a construction of the mind, a comparison—"like peace"—and the poet doubts, as the question suggests. This strange inclusion of the conjunction "but" opening the last two lines does oppose the movements of the herons and their standing: not in the reality of a beautiful landscape but in a symbolical way, in the "stylised dreams of peace." The motionless herons evoke the beauty of a peaceful world, but a dreamt world, whereas nothing changes, like their position by the river. This short extract mingling prose autobiography and a poem reminds us of the weight of words as Pedro Casaldaliga, who fought all his life for the poorest people, for women in Brazil and Nicaragua, women whose babies died because of the contamination of water by factories, who chose the theology of liberation40 as it offered more justice for the poorest, who used action all his life to bring more justice into the countries where he lived, simply chose a poem evoking herons along a river to express something echoing Martin Luther King's words: "I have a dream…"

War animals to speak about the necessity of peace: Timothy Findley's The Wars Animals are sometimes images of peace when observed in their natural environment like Pedro Casaldaliga's herons, but they can also be the real victims of men's wars telling about absurd violence. Animals' tragic fates in wartime are evoked by the Canadian novelist Timothy Findley. All those sacrificed animals whose death is depicted in literary words are there to speak about the necessity of peace in a novel entitled The Wars. In Timothy Findley's The Wars, animals are omnipresent to speak about the violence of war. As Liliane Louvel puts it: La violence perpétrée par la guerre est redoublée par la violence ordinaire des êtres humains entre eux, qu'ils soient en guerre ou pas, ainsi que la violence perpétrée contre les animaux. Ces derniers, en particulier les chevaux, mais aussi les lapins, les chiens, les chats, les oiseaux, tous entraînés dans cet enfer incompréhensible, figurent de manière répétée dans le roman et jouent le rôle de points et de contrepoints aux souffrances des hommes.

40

The birth of this new theology was linked both to South American catholic and protestant individuals and groups wanting to improve the population's life in their countries and the second Vatican Council bringing a wind of freedom to Christianity.

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Non seulement les animaux participent aux principaux événements du roman, mais encore ils apparaissent dans les images décrites, que ce soit des dessins ou des photographies.41

As noted by Liliane Louvel, animals play a great role in the denunciation of violence as presented in the novel. The novel first introduces Robert through his relationships with his sister Rowena and animals, in photographs in the archives first: "Robert and Rowena—rabbits and wheelchairs—children, dogs and horses" (Findley, 3). In a hectic rhythm suggesting breathlessness, the main character, who is going to enlist in World War I after the death of his sister Rowena who died after falling from her wheelchair, this elliptic sentence in the form of a list mingles the two young people, animals and the object meaning illness and death. That small verb-less sentence reveals all that was important for Robert and the association of rabbits and wheelchairs unites them in a tragic connection. Later on, the text lets us see the picture of Rowena holding "a large white rabbit" (7). Those photographs relayed by the text introduce a peaceful world where animals are signs of love for the young paralysed girl. Rowena's death is introduced in a very sober way: "It had happened in the stable, where she had gone with Stuart to play with her rabbits and feed them" (16). Her relationship with the rabbits is one of life and yet after her death, the adults say that "the rabbits must be killed" and when Robert asks why, the answer is: "Because they were hers." Robert's answer is "that can't possibly make any sense" (17). For Robert, the sense of the rabbits' life is totally opposed. For those who do not understand the sense of connection uniting the small animals with Rowena and Robert, they are like objects that must be thrown away after the death of the person who owned them. For Robert, they are the living link uniting him with his sister beyond death. The short dialogue emphasized by the italics and preceding the dialogue about the killing of the rabbits shows the discrepancy between these words speaking about love and eternity and the radical act of killing the rabbits:

41

Liliane Louvel, ""I can't ! I can't ! I can't !" : un cri, un coup de feu," in Caliban n°53, Toulouse: PUM, 2015, 40. "The violence committed by the war is doubled by the ordinary violence of human beings between one another, be they at war or not, as well as the violence committed against animals. The latter, particularly horses, but also rabbits, dogs, cats, birds, all driven into that incomprehensible hell, repeatedly appear in the novel and play the role of points and counterpoints to men's sufferings. Not only do animals participate in the main events of the novel, but they also appear in pictures that are described, either drawings or photographs" (translation mine).

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'Robert?' 'Yes, Rowena?' 'Will you stay with me forever?' 'Yes, Rowena.' 'Can the rabbits stay forever, too?' 'Yes, Rowena.' This was forever. Now the rabbits had to be killed. (17)

The economy of words in that simple dialogue, appearing as a very strong memory for Robert after Rowena's death, is followed by two short, dry sentences, displacing the meaning of the adverb "forever" from an eternal love connection between the brother and sister and also with animals, to the eternity of death bringing about the violence against the soft animals that had brought softness and love to the paralysed girl. The simplicity of the introduction opposing, from the start, the sense of communion between a brother and a sister and between her and animals, and the violence of death foreshadows the violence of war, which will also be depicted through a common violence perpetrated against men and animals. Animals are there to denounce human violence. Once he has been admitted to the army, Robert will still be linked with animals, which always seem to be the carriers of humanity: "One night, he ran with a coyote" (25). This conveys a sense of communion prolonged by the peaceful vision of the coyote drinking "at the brink of a bright sheet of water" (27). When, later on, a "horse had fallen," the description of his gaze while he vainly tries to rise is poignant. Robert Ross has to shoot the wounded horse and he connects the animal's death with his sister's death: He fired. A chair fell over in his mind. (68)

The very short sentences separated by a line skipped have the dryness of the shot. Ross equates his killing of the horse with Rowena's death when she fell from her wheelchair. The animal and the girl are one in their fall, they are one in death, they are one in Ross's suffering in front of their deaths. The association between the female human being and the animal appears from the start since the story begins with a feminine pronoun: "She was standing in the middle of the railroad tracks" (1). And it is only in the second sentence that "her right front hoof [that] was raised" lets us know that the novel starts with a mare. "Behind her, a warehouse filled with medical supplies had just caught fire. Lying beside her there was a dog with its head between its paws and its ears erect and listening" (1). There is a sort of freeze frame to introduce the scene, to introduce the

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story, to introduce the war. An animal picture and fire as a background. The animals are the quiet creatures, prisoners of the hell created by men. Robert Ross only appears in the second paragraph, as the spectator of the scene. This is the gist of the story telling about the absurdity of war judging and condemning a man because he has saved horses42 from the hell of fire. Throughout the novel, animals are the link to life in a world dominated by violence and death. When he is in Northern France and tries to find his way in the fog, a smell lets the soldiers suspect there is a gas attack: "Chlorine and phosgene were currently both in use. Mustard gas was still to come" (79). In that world where death is hidden invisibly in the fog in the guise of a gas, a fairy-tale comparison opposes the imaginary dragon of this real hell to real birds bringing about life. "The smell was unnerving—as if some presence was lurking in the fog like a dragon in a story" (79). In that disquieting foggy atmosphere where human figures are indistinct and where indefinite sounds can be heard, a word changes things: "Birds." They cannot know exactly what it is and even Ross says that he would "be surprised if any birds [had] survived in this place" (80). And yet "more and more of whatever it was flew up after it. A whole flock of something" (80). The fog erases shapes and yet the presence is there, indefinite: "whatever it was," "of something." "Birds" appear in the text but as a question. And yet this indefinite, invisible moving animal presence has filled the world around the soldiers for a short instant, so much so that when they have flown away, they feel a deep emptiness: "The birds being gone had taken some mysterious presence with them. There was an awful sense of void—as if the world had emptied" (81). In the hell of war, the unseen, unidentified flock of birds brought life into the nothingness figured by the fog. And the birds come back: "The fog was full of light. Robert heard wings above them and around them. The birds were coming back" (81). With them, other sounds of life can be heard, the sound of the rain, "the sound of lapping […] and the sound reminded Robert of the early morning slap-slap-slap from the diving raft at Jackson's Point" (81). The sound of rain in that "cold," in that "chilly breeze" carrying "the smells of smoke and ashes—bitter and acrid," brings about memories from peacetime. In this world of mud, cold, fog and acrid smells, birds appear as a mystery, an element of life to which they can cling. Birds are able to silence war. French ornithologist Jacques Delamain, during the same war, listened to an oriole, thus making life and beauty silence the hell of war: "Alors que la campagne se colorait, le 10 42

On war horses, a children's novel by Michael Morpurgo, War Horse, was published in 1982. It was adapted for the theatre in an award-winning play in 2007, and for the cinema in a film by Stephen Spielberg in 2011.

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septembre 1918, J. Delamain écouta en lisière de forêt 'le rire bref d'un loriot'."43 Birds come back in the text, at regular intervals, like a living punctuation mark in the text, just "Birds." In the hell of war, Ross will have a friend, another soldier who respects animals and cares for them. Animals are the link connecting the soldiers with life. At the end of the novel, the absurdity of war will appear in the fact that Ross’ attempts to save the horses closed up in the barn while shells start landing in the barnyard, will be condemned: "It cannot be called disobedience to save these animals when they'll be needed," he says (202), and he frees them and saves them. But the captain's reaction is: "Traitor! Traitor! You'll be shot for this" (202). The scene is a scene of hell on earth where the screams of the men trapped in the ruins while more and more shells hit the place are united with the horses and mules that "were either dead or were dying" (203). Men and animals mingle again when Robert thinks "If an animal had done this—we would call it mad and shoot it" before killing the captain rising to his feet "at that precise moment" (203). The novel shows men's madness destroying everything while peace, softness, companionship, love, and humanity are on the animal side: the coyote running with Robert, the birds bringing life into a world of death, the rabbits suggesting the happy period of family life and love of his sister, the horses condemned to a horrid death like all the soldiers sacrificed. The horses are the animal counterpart of all the soldiers of this war sacrificed in a butchery destroying all life because of some mad officers like Captain Leather. Robert will free more than a hundred horses from a train and flee with them and a black mare and a dog, those who open the novel near the railroads. Caught in a barn with the horses, soldiers set the barn on fire and all the animals die while Robert, severely burnt, is saved. Robert Ross re-enacts the same scene of animal rescue and fails each time as he has failed to save his human companions from death. Animals in the novel take on a symbolical dimension as they stand for all the soldiers killed because of absurd wars. This absurdity is underlined by the scenes where it is the man who saves the animals who is condemned while the officer who is supposed to represent military law is the one who kills the soldier who helped Robert to free the horses, he is the one who creates a scene of hell and changes a scene of liberation into a scene of slaughter. The animal presence throughout the novel is

43 Hervé Rougier quotes observations noted by Jacques Delamain between 1915 and 1918 in his Journal de guerre d’un ornithologue : "While the countryside coloured itself, on the 10th of September 1918, J. Delamain listened, on the edge of the forest, to 'the brief laughter of an oriol'," Hervé Rougier, Le Chant du loriot, Estadens: PyréGraph, 2004, 22 (translation mine).

Literature to Answer the Violence to Lands and Men

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symbolical but it also corresponds to the reality of all the animals sacrificed in wartime. Animals have been used in warfare since ancient Greece and Egypt but it is in modern times that they paid men the heaviest tribute. Horses, mules, dogs, and pigeons are among the animal victims we know best but there are also less known and unexpected victims. For example, the U.S. Navy used bats to drop bombs on Japanese cities.44 A novel for children written by the Canadian novelist Kenneth Opel, Sunwing, telling the story of a little bat, evokes this fact.45 Bats carrying bombs, mine-hunting dolphins, defensive sea-lions, pigeons guiding missiles, cat spies that were to be used by the CIA to spy on Russia with microphones implanted in their ear canals, and elephants used to carry heavy weapons paid the price of human wars. In Russia, antitank dogs were sent to destroy German tanks with bombs strapped on their backs, which were activated when they arrived under the tank. This terrible programme did not stop until 1996. Already in Antiquity animals were used, like the pigs that were sent during the siege of Megara in 266 BC, with combustible pitch, crude oil or resin, which was set alight while the pigs were driven towards the elephants of the enemy.46 Men's imagination is limitless when they plan to use animals in their human wars and generally to use them as mere things. Such a novel as Timothy Findley's The Wars, gives animals their real existence again by presenting readers with a poignant image of reality. Animal suffering is shown in the middle of human suffering. Literature shows the reality of things and answers violence by words and poetry.

44

See bat bombs in Eglan 13. Sunwing is part of the Silverwing trilogy. 46 See Jeremy Bender and Alex Lockie, "Nine Unbelievable Instances of Animals in the Military," December 11, 2015, http://www.businessinsider.fr/us/unbelievable-instances-of-animals-in-military-2015-12/, accessed February 4, 2018. 45

CONCLUSION LITERARY HUMAN VOICES AS THE TRANSLATORS OF NONHUMAN VOICES

"The lasting pleasures of contact with the natural world are not reserved for scientists but are available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of earth, sea and sky and their amazing life." Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder, 106

Writers evince all the ways of resistance to systems that apparently crush the living. "Ecology" is the science of the habitat, of the home. The very word reminds us that we all live in the same house, which is the Earth. Native languages are a means of resistance. Poetry is a way of resistance. Even colours are a way of resisting. As Michel Serres writes, "we must decide to make peace between one another to safeguard the world and to make peace with the world to safeguard ourselves" (Serres, Le contrat naturel, 47, translation mine). Reconciliation between man and the Earth is the keyword indeed. This is what is said by Ousseini, the main character of a fable by Pierre Rabhi, Parole de terre. Pierre Rabhi chooses the genre of the fable to make us aware of the necessity of changing our ways of living to save the Earth and its inhabitants. Starting his book with a tribute to orality—"C'est au vaste monde de l'oralité que je dédie le récit qui suit" (Rabhi, Parole de terre, 9)1—, he ends it with a letter, left by an imaginary character, leaving this written message found after his death: Lorsque vous m'aurez installé dans ma maison éternelle et que je serai redevenu foetus, répandez sur mon corps un peu de la matière noire. Je quitte ce monde sans avoir compris tout ce que cette nourriture signifie. Je sais qu'elle est une clé, une des voies de la réconciliation des hommes avec la terre mère. D'autres voies existent, mais celle-là les ouvre toutes. (Rabhi 233, italics in the text)2 1

"It is to the vast world of orality that I dedicate this narrative" (translation mine). "When you have settled me in my eternal house and I have become a fœtus again, spread on my body some of the black matter. I leave this world without having realized what that food means. I know that it is a key, one of the ways to the reconciliation between men and Mother Earth. Other ways exist, but that one opens all of them " (translation mine).

2

Literary Human Voices as the Translators of Nonhuman Voices

463

Showing, throughout a fable, all the wounds and tortures inflicted on the Earth by men, the little handful of "black matter" that dying Ousseimi wants people to spread on his body, as if it could be the food allowing life to go on forever, is in a way sent to us as a magic powder that should throw light into our minds and make us aware of the weight of the Earth as a matter before its being defended as a planet. Ecology is another way of speaking about the necessity of a reorganization of the world leading to the end of conflicts. This is what poets and writers unceasingly say. When William Blake spoke about a robin in a cage at a time when Europe was torn by inequalities and violence, when Mahmoud Darwich evokes a canary in a cage, abandoned and singing to snipers, when Maya Angelou writes about a "caged bird" that "sings of freedom," when Timothy Findley speaks about all the animals sacrificed during the First World War, they all speak about the absurdity of violence and wars. The preservation of the animal world is a way of speaking about the necessity of listening to the other. Everything is linked. If famine destroyed thousands of people in the sixties it was because of the war called the Biafra war. If history repeats itself in Africa where starvation strikes populations again it is because of all the conflicts destroying those countries. Everything is linked and the pollution of waters, deforestation, and animals' wild hunting are responsible for populations' destruction. Victor Hugo and Francis Thompson, in one line, spoke about the link between the cutting of a flower and the cosmos. Poets and writers try to transmit to their fellow creatures the messages given by the nonhuman world. Blake's robin, Coleridge's albatross, Darwich's canary, Momaday's dying goose, Timothy Findley's horses and Linda Hogan's whales all say the same thing: whenever a creature is killed, the balance of the world is disturbed. Balance… Everything could and should be solved by balance, the balance between all life, human and nonhuman, animal, vegetable and mineral, earthly and cosmic, tiny and huge. Everything starts or should start with our understanding of the word biotope, one of the definitions of which is "a geographical area corresponding to a group of living creatures submitted to conditions whose kinds of dominance are homogeneous."3 The authors of the handbook Nouveau manuel de bionomie benthique de la Mer Méditerranée add that "the notion of biocenosis is inseparable from that of biotope." Biocenosis etymologically comes from the Greek words bios (meaning “life”) and koinos 3

"Aire géographique correspondant à un groupement d'êtres vivants soumis à des conditions dont les dominantes sont homogènes", J.M. Peres and J. Picard, Nouveau manuel de bionomie benthique de la Mer Méditerranée, new edition. Extracted from Recueil des Travaux de la Station Marine d'Endoume, Bulletin n° 31, fasc. n° 45, 1964, 9. http://www.mio.univamu.fr/~boudouresque/Master_Oceanographie_Biologie_Ecologie_Marine/Publication_P eres_et_Picard_1964_Manuel_Bionomie_Benthique.pdf, translation mine.

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(meaning "common"). Thus it designates a balanced vegetal and animal association. Peres and Picard define it as "a grouping of living creatures corresponding, by its composition, by the number of species and individuals, to some average conditions of the environment, a grouping of creatures linked by a reciprocal dependence and persisting by reproducing in some place in a permanent way."4 The biotope being the place where all creatures live together, ecological balance and thus peace should be attained if the biotope became biocenosis everywhere, that is if balance was obtained in any kind of area. The scientific biotope and biocenosis lead to the philosophical biogée (Michel Serres). Ecology is the science of the environment and also its defence and the defence of all the creatures, human and nonhuman, living in it. Could we consider a book as a biotope, etymologically a place of life? The book, originally a beech, is a tree or a group of trees chopped down for the text to exist. Alice Munro initiated a way of preserving trees from their transformation into books by using straw to make paper. In any case, the book as an object weaves the world of nature and the world of literature since the text as a word is borrowed from the tree texture or the straw texture and it is also a metamorphosis of the tree or the straw. Izak Dinesen founded her short story "The Blank Page" on this idea, reworking Andersen's tale, Flax, revealing all the stages of the life of a plant, from the blooming of the blue flower to the cloth, then the shirts and then the paper on which a story will be written and will become a book. The transformation of nature into a blank page that is going to be covered with words to create a story makes the written page a biotope and Jacques Prévert's decomposition of all that composes a classroom in the musing pupil's perception is a poetic way of reconstituting the original biotope once the imaginary lyrebird has interrupted the real multiplication table: et les murs de la classe s'écroulent tranquillement. Et les vitres redeviennent sable l'encre redevient eau les pupitres redeviennent arbres la craie redevient falaise le porte-plume redevient oiseau.5

4

"La biocénose est 'un groupement d'êtres vivants correspondant par sa composition, par le nombre des espèces et des individus, à certaines conditions moyennes du milieu, groupements d'êtres qui sont liés par une dépendance réciproque et se maintenant en se reproduisant dans un certain endroit de façon permanente'" (ibid. translation mine). 5 "And the walls of the classroom quietly collapse, / And the panes become sand again / The ink becomes water again / The desks are trees again / The chalk becomes a cliff again,

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The initial ecosystem is reconstituted through the pupil's musing and in this hymn to imagination, the usual destruction of nature allowing us to have the simplest objects like those necessary in a classroom, is annihilated; and the child, through the poet's voice, gives back its life to nature. Instead of a dead feather used as a penholder to write, there is a living bird and all its environment: water, sand, trees and cliffs. Prévert makes imagination an impulse of life reconstituting reified nature. In the reality of facts, the book written and published means the death of hundreds of trees and thus participates in deforestation. This is the paradox of writing: to denounce deforestation, it participates in the destruction of forests, except for all the writers and publishers, more and more numerous, who, following in the wake of Alice Munro and the organization Canopy, use sustainable paper. Biotope. The book is a biotope. Etymologically, it is. It is a place of life, the life of a thought reflecting the river, through the stream of words and through the ink made from water metamorphosed into letters. By the way, the signs of writing come from the shapes of the world. Either pictographs, hieroglyphics or mere alphabets are inspired by the shapes of nature. The Celtic alphabet was also called the alphabet of trees. Our modern writing speaks about the use of nature and not only its reflection. Books are modern inscriptions. Libraries are our caves. But unlike our ancestors' prehistoric caves, our inscriptions are transient and easily destroyed, like our biotopes. The fragility of books seems to reflect the modern world where destruction prevails in the guise of construction. We build towers everywhere. Nearly all natural biotopes are covered with buildings and roads erasing nature, whereas our ancestors used the shapes of the landscape. Their houses were caves in mountains; their books were the walls of those caves. They killed animals only to eat or to defend themselves. Money did not exist. Money changed biotopes into gigantic Lego games. Writers, poets, environmentalists, academics and animals try to warn the rest of the world about the dangers threatening the planet and all its inhabitants. Men's writings are the new hunting songs. The material book may destroy a tree; writing is a peaceful weapon trying to capture or to stop the golden monster. Writers' voices try to give voiceless creatures a voice. Poets revealing the voice of the landscape like N. Scott Momaday letting us hear the story told by Devil's Tower or Niyi Osundare evoking the Earth asking him to tell its story, Rudy Wiebe making us hear Arctic animals' interior voices or Alan Moore's Parliament of Trees revealing to Swamp Thing an essential wisdom, poets and writers show us how to listen to the voices of the world to be able to preserve its protean life. Keats' line "And no birds sing," recurring like a disquieting burden from Rachel Carson's Silent Spring to poems and even detective novels, must / The penholder becomes a bird again." Jacques Prévert, "Page d'écriture," Paroles (translation mine).

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remain a beautiful romantic line and no longer some reality everywhere in the world. Those four small poetic words must remain a warning in our minds to let us remember that behind Keats, behind Rachel Carson, Dian Fossey and all the anonymous people devoting their lives to protect the world, we have a role to allow birds to go on singing everywhere, which means that the earth on which they sing and all those who live on it are healthy and alive. Writers, poets, artists, helped by the nonhuman world, show us the way to our sense of responsibility and action. They reveal that what might look like a derisory tiny gesture, which some might think useless, proves to be essential. Each gesture is a drop of water that, added to many other gestures, may become the glass of water that can save a life. On the website entitled “The Arithmetic of Compassion” that Paul Slovic created with some colleagues, he tells Loren Eiseley’s “starfish story”: While wandering a deserted beach at dawn. . . I saw a man in the distance bending and throwing as he walked the endless stretch toward me. As he came near, I could see that he was throwing starfish, abandoned on the sand by the tide, back into the sea. When he was close enough I asked him why he was working so hard at this strange task. He said that the sun would dry the starfish and they would die. I said to him that I thought he was foolish. There were thousands of starfish on miles and miles of beach. One man alone could never make a difference. He smiled as he picked up the next starfish. Hurling it far into the sea he said, “It makes a difference for this one.” I abandoned my writing and spent the morning throwing starfish.6

And Paul Slovic concludes saying: “What we learn from science is that we should not be discouraged from doing whatever we can, even when we cannot fill the entire need. As in the starfish story, even partial solutions can save whole lives.” Books are letters sent to the world to echo the nonhuman world and place their fellow humans in front of the world they are destroying by dint of the desire for comfort and leisure, when the best leisure leading to awareness might be what all poets suggest: the observation of a flower or of a rock, of a butterfly or a bird, of a mountain, a river, the wind or the sea, and the listening to the silent murmur of their flights or the beautiful music of their voices.

6

Loren Eiseley in Paul Slovic’s “text of a talk delivered at Temple Beth Israel in Eugene, Oregon in September 2018.” http://www.arithmeticofcompassion.org/stories/, accessed November 18, 2018.

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PAUL, Miranda. One Plastic Bag. Isatou Ceesay and the Recycling Women of the Gambia, Illustrations by Elizabeth ZUNON. Minneapolis: Millbrook Press, 2015. PETRUCCI, Mario. Heavy Water. A Poem for Chernobyl, London: Enitharmon Press, 2004. PING, Wang, Life of Miracles Along the Yangtze and Mississippi, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018. —. "Things We Carry in the Sea," https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/things-we-carry-sea POTTER, Beatrix. The Tale of Peter Rabbit, London: FrederickWarne and Co., 1902. And Guemberg Project: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14838/14838-h/14838-h.htm REYNOLDS, Kev. Abode of the Gods. Tales of Trekking in Nepal, Cumbria: Cicerone, 2015. —. A Walk in the Clouds. Fifty Years Among the Mountains, Cumbria: Cicerone, 2013. —. Alpine Points of View, Cumbria: Cicerone, 2004. —. "Making the Connection", Caliban n° 59, Les Rencontres de l’humain et du non-humain dans la littérature de voyage et d'exploration anglophone / Travel and Mountain Writing: Meetings between the Human and Non-Human Irina Kantarbaeva-Bill ed., Toulouse: PUM, 2018. RICHARDSON, Sir John. Arctic Searching Expedition: A Journal of a Boat-Voyage Through Rupert's Land and the Arctic Sea [1851], Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ROBERTS, Jane. Two Years at Sea: Being The Narrative of a Voyage to the Swan River and Van Dieman's Land, During the Years 1829, 30, 31, London, 1834. ROGERS, Patiann. The Dream of the Marsh Wren: Reciprocal Creation, in Scott Slovic (ed.). The Dream of the Marsh Wren: Writing as Reciprocal Creation, Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, Credo collection, 1999. ROWLEY, Mary-Lou. Cosmosonnets, Saskatoon: Jack Pine Press, 2007. RUSKIN, John. Modern Painters, a volume of selections, London, Edinburgh, Dublin and New York: Thomas Nelson and sons, no date, (1843-1860). RUSSELL, Henry. Souvenirs d’un montagnard (1858-1888), Pau: imp. Vignancour, 1888. —. Pyrenaica, Pau: Vignancour, 1902. —. Seize mille lieues à travers l’Asie et l’Océanie, Paris: Hachette, 1864.

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Filmography ANNAUD, Jean-Jacques. Le dernier loup, 2015, China Film Group Corpration, Edko Films and Repérage. —. L'Ours, 1988. TriStar Pictures. APTED, Michael. Gorilla in the Mist, 1987. Universal Pictures, Warner Bros Pictures. ARTUS-BERTRAND, Yann. Human, 2015. France Télévision Distribution. —. Home, 2009. EuropaCorp. —. La terre vue du ciel, 2004. Editions Montparnasse. BOORMAN, John. The Emerald Forest, 1985. Chrystel Films and Embassy Pictures Corporation BROCK, Richard and John SPARKS. Life on Earth, BBC Natural History Unit, Warner Bros, 1979. BROCK, Richard. The Living Planet. BBC Natural History Unit, Warner Bros, 1984. CALESTRÉMÉ, Natacha and Gilles LUNEAU. Disparition des abeilles. La fin d'un mystère, Mona Lisa Peoduction pour France 5, 2009. CAMERON, James. Avatar, 2009. 20th Century Fox, Dune Entertainment, Giant Studios, Light Storm Entertainment, Ingenious Film Partners. CLAUDOT-HAWAD, Hélène and Nathalie MICHAUD. Furigraphier le vide. Art et poésie touareg pour le IIIe millénaire, DVD Co-production: Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail / Portique Nomade (www.canalu.fr) EMMERICH, Roland, The Day After Tomorrow, 2009, Cntropolis Entertainment; Lions Gate Films, Mark Gordon Company. FERRER, Oriol, Pieds nus sur le sol rouge, 2014. Ancine, Institut Català de les Empreses Culturals (ICEC), Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes, Audiovisuales (ICAA), Minoria Absoluta, Raíz Produções Cinematográficas, TV Brasil, Televisió de Catalunya (TV3), Televisión Española (TVE). FLEISHER, Richard. Soylent Green, 1972. Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer. GRABOWSKA, John. Remembered Earth: New Mexico's High Desert, Idaho Public Television, 2005. GUGGENHEIM, Davi. An Unconvenient Truth / Une vérité qui dérange. 2006. Paramount Classic. GUILLET, Domiique et Ananda. Le Titanic apicole. La terreur pesticide, Kokopelli, 2008. HEALEY, John J. The Practice of the Wild, 2010. Whole Earth Films, San Simeon Films.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A book is the result of meetings and friendships, of the sharing of common interests, of discussions and trust. Thank you to all of you who make me think that we can change the world. I would like to thank the Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, which granted me research leave in the second term of the academic year 20162017 and thus allowed me to deepen my research and write this book. I would also like to thank the English Department and its heads, Pascale Sempéré and Daniel Huber, and all of the colleagues whose kindness and generosity allowed me to work in the best conditions. My thankfulness also goes to the GREC (Group of Research in Canadian Studies in Toulouse) and the organization "Connaître le Canada," which participated in beautiful conferences thanks to Michèle Kaltemback and Marcienne Rocard. I would also like to thank the Académie des Sciences, Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in Toulouse. My thankfulness goes to all its members and more particularly to George Soubeille, who introduced me to this fascinating institution, Michel Sicard, who immediately trusted me, Marcel Delpoux—who prolongs my parents' botanical teaching and shows us the beauty of the natural world—, Jacques Tournet, Gérard Laurans, Louis Albertini, Abdoul Aziz Sy and Yves Le Pestipon, all generous allies. I do not forget George Larouy's deep vision of the world and fighting spirit nor Anne-Catherine Welté's attention to the human memory drawn on caves. All of them and many others point to the links between the discreet flower and the cave painting, the star in the sky and the mathematical number, a fable and the reality of our world. With many other colleagues, they show us connections and make the link between scientists from past centuries and young researchers. Their trust and help allowed us to organize a conference on the relationships between the human and the nonhuman in exploration and travel literature, and another one on "land's furrows and sorrows." And many thanks to the SELVA (Society of Travel Literature in Anglophone Countries) and to its members, particularly its founder Jean Viviès, and also Sandhya Patel, Stéphanie Gourdon, Nathalie Vanfasse, Ruth Menzies, Catherine Delmas, Emmanuelle Peraldo and Anne-Florence Quaireau, and all its members, who made travel literature a recognized research field in France.

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I would like to thank the organizers of different conferences; thanks to their work I could follow more tracks, particularly Bénédicte Meillon and all the organizers of the wonderful International Conference on Ecopoetics, "Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth," which took place in Perpignan in June 2016; Sjoerd Kluiving and all the organizers of the LAC2016 conference in Uppsala (Sweden) in August 2016; Irina Kantarbaeva-Bill and the University of Kayseri in Turkey, and all the students of her travel writing class, whose questions and dialogue enriched my reflexion; Héliane Ventura, whose conferences on transatlantic studies and on Alice Munro's work, particularly in connection with the animal question, opened many new ways; Wendy Harding and Claire Cazajous-Augé for their seminar on companion species; Helen Goethals and Isabelle Keller-Privat for their beautiful Mediterranean conference and for years of research companionship, and many others. My thankfulness also goes to the editors of journals and books that welcomed some of my contributions that made my reflexion progress. This book owes a lot to previous discussions or writings. Thank you to all the editors for allowing me to quote or adapt passages from some of my articles. They are precisely thanked in footnotes whenever I refer to some of my writings published either in journals or collective books but I wanted to thank them here. I would particularly like to thank Michel Baridon, who, with his beautiful journal Interfaces, was one of the first to trust me. My thanks also go to Laurent Barthélémy, Zelia Bora, Paul Carmignani, Catherine Delmas, Carmen Flys Junquera, Christian Feest, Aurélie Guillain, Wendy Harding, Michèle Kaltemback, Claire Omhovère, Oriana Palusci, Bernadette Rigal-Cellard, Karin Schwerdtner, Michel Tailland, Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Marcienne Rocard, Scott Slovic, Héliane Ventura, Jean Viviès, Tim Youngs and the journals Anglistica, Babel, Bulletin de la société de stylistique anglaise, Caliban, Ecozon@, E-Rea, Interfaces, Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ASLE, Brazil), Mythes, croyances et religions dans le monde anglo-saxon, Otrante, Représentations, Studies in Travel Writing, and World Literature Today. Thank you to all of them. I would like to thank more particularly all the authors, editors and heads of the journal Caliban (previously Anglophonia/Caliban) for their contributions and help, particularly Philippe Birgy and Jean-Louis Breteau and all the members of the reading committee, among them Jean-Paul Débax, for his attentive look at the journal. My gratefulness also goes to my colleagues in Toulouse who allowed ecopoetics to become a topic of paramount importance in our university, particularly Wendy Harding, Aurélie Guillain and Nathalie Cochoy, whose

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conferences and seminars were particularly inspiring. Thank you to the PHD students and young doctors, Céline Rolland Nabuco, Qian-Qian Cheng and Claire Cazajous-Augé, whose research makes things progress. I would also like to thank the European Review of Native American Studies. Thank you to its founder and editor, Christian F. Feest, and to my friend Bernadette Rigal-Cellard; both of them made me hear Native American voices and thanks to them I was lucky to meet N. Scott Momaday. It is thanks to their trust that I first met N. Scott and Barbara Momaday in Toulouse. I owe them a friendship that connects SaintBertand-de-Comminges and Walatowa forever. I am very grateful to my colleagues of the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès (formerly Toulouse-Le Mirail), who always supported me whenever I needed some help and particularly my friends Meg Ducassé, Elizabeth de Cacqueray, Nathalie Dessens, Ellen Lévy, Karen Meschia, Sue Payne, Colette Selles and last but not least, Françoise and Albert Poyet. I shall certainly forget some names but even if they do not appear on these pages, they are in my heart. Thank you to my professors and colleagues of the English Department at the University Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, who placed so many cairns on my path and always trusted me, particularly Roland Bouyssou, who guided me on my first steps in research and still accompanies me on the ways to poetry and bee caring; thank you to him, too, for giving me permission to take a photograph of the beautiful lime tree in his garden at Lamagistère, and to use it as a cover illustration of the first edition of this book; thank you to Maurice Lévy who guided me from Pyrenean landscapes to gothic paths; Françoise and Albert Poyet, university and mountain friends, always present, Marcienne Rocard and Michèle Kaltemback, who led me towards Canadian literary spaces, Héliane Ventura, who showed me the beautiful complexity of Alice Munro's texts. All my thanks to Pierre Paillé, a generous link between places and times, and to the "Consulat honoraire du Canada." Thank you to Catherine Lanone, who has accompanied me from the Arctic to mountain literary spaces for so many years and who, with Simone and Jean, is forever linked with Scott and Barbara Momaday from the caves of Gargas to Martin Guerre's Artigat. Thank you to all of you, my friends. I would like to thank the laboratory of Anglo-Saxon cultures of the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès (CAS) and its heads, Jean-Louis Breteau, Christiane Fioupou, Catherine Lanone, Wendy Harding, Philippe Birgy, Nathalie Cochoy and Anne Stéphanie; Benoît Colas for his inspiring graphic creations and last but not least Hanane Serjaouan without whom nothing would be possible in our research team. Thank you to Jean Jimenez, Nathalie Michaud and the whole team of the audio-visual

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and multimedia Centre (SPCAM: Service de Production et de Conception Audiovisuelle et Multimédia), for their talent and faithfulness. I would also like to thank the IRPALL (Institute of Pluridisciplinary Research in Arts, Letters and Languages), Michel Lehman and Christine Calvet for their help. And many thanks to the Presses Universitaires du Midi (formerly Presses Univesitaires du Mirail), which published several issues of Caliban that were steps on my journey to ecocritics and to the relationship between literature and ecology. Thank you to the whole team for their efficiency and kindness. My thankfulness also goes to the colleagues and heads of the secondary schools where I taught, in Saint-Girons, Onet-le-Château and Rouvroy. I am particularly thankful to the head of Collège Paul Langevin in Rouvroy, Michel Debruyne, who is now beyond the Northern plain he loved so much, and who gave me his trust when I decided to create a small journal written with the pupils about the sharing of the Earth, who trusted me as much when I decided to organize a concert for the liberation of children in South Africa, on the initiative of the organization "Frères des Hommes" and in connection with the campaign "A thousand concerts for freedom," as when I arrived in his office with a wounded blackbird that had to be saved. His trust in my trust that everything is possible when you want it, allowed us, with the help of his so humane colleague Jane Dzielicki, to lead many teenagers to awareness. Thank you to all those pupils and students who, in thirty-seven years' teaching, confirmed to me that the key to the success of any undertaking, job, mission, or simply to human relationships, is trust. Thank you to them all who gave me hope. My gratefulness goes to all the students who gave me food for thought during the different classes or theses and Phds, and particularly Cyril Camus and Irina Kantarbaeva-Bill, faithful and gifted researchers. Cyril made me discover the universe of Vertigo and DC comics and if I could enter the strange world of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing or Neil Gaiman's Black Orchid, it is because Cyril introduced me to them. Many thanks to Irina who led me on the virtual paths of Central Asia behind British travellers, who accompanied me with patience and efficiency in the organization of several conferences and the editing of journals, and thanks to whom I discovered Cappadoccia and the interest of students from the whole world, who reminded me that our job might be of some use. A Turkish coffee nearly 3,000 metres above sea level is a great memory. I would also like to thank Florent Hébert for his inspiring study of “degrowth” in fantasy literature and Suzanne Voogd, who made me

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discover so many children’s books, while guiding us towards the truth of life. This book would not have been possible without the trust of Cambridge Scholars Publishing and I would like to thank their team, more particularly Adam Rummens for his patience and his help on the editing of this volume, as well as Sophie Edminson for her patience and kindness. I would aso like to thank Sue Morecroft for her careful proofreading. Last but not least, I would like to thank Catherine Lanone, Christiane Fioupou and Marie-Christine Noailles-Pizzolato, my "sisters," who are always by my side, whatever the circumstances: to Catherine, who led us from a virtual Chamonix to a real Gavarnie and to the caves of Gargas; Catherine, my Indian connection; to Marie-Christine, who has supported me from our university years as students to Mediterranean slopes and to a Pyrenean "orri" in the wind and snow; to Christiane, whose constant support, from the origin of my projects around the Earth to their achievement, is always a comforting merry help. Her wonderful African conference inspired me. If the spirit of the mountain and then of the Earth was felt in our university or in the Hôtel d'Assézat, it is because, a few years before, the spirit of Africa had transformed our vision of a conference. Thank you to her, whom I can call at any time in the night to ask for the reading of an urgent paper, who virtually led me to Africa through her passion for African cultures and poetry. Many thanks to all my friends, who always support me in all circumstances, and among them, I give special thanks to Marie-Hélène and Jean-Michel Ristorcelli, so present. Many thanks to all those who weave links and show us connections allowing us to listen to the world and to others with more attention. I would like to thank Michel Arteil, who is one of the first who showed me healing connections. I cannot end this book without giving special thanks to the wonderful writers and/or scholars whom I was lucky to meet and who guided me on the way to the understanding of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman: to René Dumont first, who, like Scott Slovic many years later, asked me to "fight the good fight" and so doing, gave me the energy to do it; to N. Scott and Barbara Momaday, to Rudy Wiebe, Thomas Wharton, Rick Bass, Linda Hogan, Niyi Osundare, Kev Reynolds and Scott Slovic. Thank you for your tireless peaceful fight to make us aware of the beauty of the world and of the absolute necessity to protect it. Thank you for those moments of friendship spent in Gavarnie, Toulouse or Perpignan, near the Lac d'Oo in the rain or on the Seven Sisters in the sunshine, on the banks of the lake of Besibéry or in the caves of Gargas. Thank you for the gift of your friendship or of five minutes' dialogue.

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My deep thanks to Kev Reynolds; I thank him for his generosity and friendship, for his luminous way of showing us the sense of connections while leading us in the hills of Kent or in the Pyrenees. Thanks to him and to Min, whose discreet presence is strength for all those who meet her, thanks to Chitra and Alan, my friends. I would like to thank Scott Slovic who initiated me to ecocriticism as a magic form of thought, showing texts as action and giving us hope in every man or woman's capacity to defend the world, if not to save it. His lectures and his way of looking at the world had a deep influence on my research, on our research in Toulouse. Thank you to all those ecocritical friends and/or nature lovers who made me discover so many connections: Athane Adrahane—she alone could find such a beautiful present offered at the same time by the earth and by Etrange, her dog, alive in her eyes and gesture—, Pascale Amiot, whose luminous vision of the world seems to make the Pyrenees appear as if by magic in the sunrise—, Zelia Bora, my Brazilian friend, whose friendship was sent to me like a mysterious, unexpected gift, Claire Cazajous-Augé, Nathalie Cochoy, Yves-Charles Grandjeat, Wendy Harding, Marianne Marroum, Bénédicte Meillon, and many others, who showed me the sense of connection. Thank you to Michel Fabbro, my long-life friend and mountain companion, who could speak to birds and had the mountains as friends. My reflection on nature and on our relationship to the natural world and the necessity of its protection is constantly fed by what my parents and grandparents made me discover. I will always be thankful to them. They showed me that the distance was not that far between the glow-worm I could see in a garden when I was two, and the star in the sky, which I simply saw as two dots of wonder. Thank you to my father and my mother for guiding me on mountain paths and for introducing me to flowers and trees; to my mother for teaching me to read books, to my father for teaching me to read nature and for making me aware of the wonderful importance of an insect; thank you to my grandparents for introducing me to our river Garonne, linking our Valley of Aran and Toulouse. From the very first day of my life, they showed me the enchanted world of life. They showed me that nature guides us and shows us its wonderful beauty and the sense of connection. Thank you to nature that gives me so many presents, nature that feeds us and accompanies us in our discovery of life. Thank you to all the animals I have met, the wild ones I hardly perceived in the mountain and the companions. Thank you to the hen that made me discover the animal world in a merry way from the first day of my life with the participation of my father; thank you to the dog and the gander that were my first friends. Thank you to all the dogs, cats, birds,

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horses, donkeys, bears, hens, geese, cows and bulls, lizards, hedgehogs, spiders, butterflies and other insects, who have crossed my path since the first day of my life. Thank you to the cat companion who acompanied me during the writing of this book, who healed me and consoled me until the last days of her life and who is still and will always be a loving guiding spirit. Thank you to the trees that give me their fruit and shade, thank you to the mountains that keep our invisible steps, thank you to the fragile flower showing us the direction of the sun, to the grass where we can rest, to the river that gives us its water to drink and teaches us the philosophy of its transparency, to the air that makes us breathe and shows us the living power of its invisibility. Thank you to all the human and the nonhuman world for teaching me what life is. Thank you to all of you who made me see life as a gift, a wonder and a fight.

INDEX

Aborigines, xxviii, 103, 192, 193, 240, 244 Abram, David, xix, xx, xxiv, 210, 211, 283, 284, 404, 421, 422, 423 Abrams, M.-H., 169, 170, 177 Ackerman, Gerald, 18 Adams, Tony, 184 Adamson, George, 292, 297 Adamson, Samuel, 411 Aesop, 261 Ahlstrand, Chris, 224 Alford, Violet, 153 Allen, Chadwick, xix Allen, S.E.S, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147 Al Malik, Abd, 86 Ambroggi, Robert, 228 Anand, Madhur, 50, 55 Anders, Bill, 166 Andersen, Hans Christian, 464 Angelou, Maya, 463 Artaud, Antonin, 248, 253 Artus-Bertrand, Yann, 139, 166, 365 Asimov, Isaac, 234 Aspinall, Damian, 289, 290, 291 Aspinall, John, 289, 291 Aspinall Foundation 289-290 Attenborough, David, 411 Attikamek, 218, 426 Atwood, Margaret, xi Aubert, Michel, 304 Audubon, John James, 126, 270 Auerbach, Margaret, 335 Auld, Tim, 411 Auster, Paul, 248 Australia, xxvii, 10, 26-32, 103-104, 132, 184, 193, 239, 240, 244,

245, 286, 303, 326, 356, 357, 360, 407, 430 Baber, P.S., 406 Bachelard, Gaston, 115 Bachelet, Pierre, 86 Baez, Joan, 81 Bailly, Jean-Christophe, xxviii, 256, 258, 259, 412-417 Balassi, William, xix Bangladesh, 81 Banks, Joseph, 9 Banting, Pamela, 14, 50 Baridon, Michel, 9, 12 Barr, Peter, 127 Barrie, James, 332, 335-336 Peter Pan, 332, 335-336 Barrientos Fernandez, Fernando, 163 Bass, Rick, 211-212 Bates, H.W., 124 Beaufoy, Simon, 334 Beck, John, 144 Becker, Annette, 191 Beckett, Samuel, 257 Beineke, Colin, 173 Bekas, Sherko, 439-443 Benabar, 86 Bender, Jeremy, 461 Bentham, George, 116 Bentham, Jeremy, 394 Berger, Karen, 170, 176 Bernadac, Christian, 324 Bernard de Clairvaux, 183 Berry, Wendell, 15 Besson, Jean, xvii, 143 Bible, The, xiv, 9, 11, 24, 123, 188, 236, 256, 257, 261, 439, 445 Bitsch, Charles L., xi Blackburne, Henry, 115

514 Black Feet, 249 Blake, William, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 79, 463 Blixen, Karen (Isak Dinesen), 214, 215, 246, 357, 464 Bora, Zelia, 454 Bornert, Gilles, 267 Bowen, James, xii, 285-288 Bradbury, Ray, x Bramwell, D., 9 Brandt, Di, 39-50 Brassens, George, 86 Brayton, Dann, 3 Brazil, xxiii-xxiv, 10, 54, 132, 137138, 139, 172, 173, 178-180, 194-195, 200-207, 212, 215, 226, 227, 229, 230, 261, 276, 282, 329, 357, 407, 427, 454456 Bretonnière, Bernard, 431 Breytenbach, Breyten, 437 Bridges, Roy, 133 Britz, Neels (Baba Africa), 334 Brooke, Victor, 127, 128 Brosse, Jacques, xxiii-xxiv Bruckner, Lynne, 3 Bruant, Jim, 126 Brun, Christian, 324 Brusatin, Manlio, 157, 158, 159, Buckley, Arabella, 314 Buell, Carl Dennis, 359 Buell, Lawrence, xv, xxiv, xxv, 14, 51, 94, 137, 141, 144, 153, 357 Buffon, George, 375 Burke, James Lee, 2, 66, 89 Burningham, John, 329-331 Cabrel, Francis, 84, 86, 391, 396 Calder, Alison, 55-57 Calef, George, 401 Calvet, Florence, 267, 268 Calvino, Italo, xxii Cameroon, 299 Camus, Cyril, 170, 173, 174 Canada, xv, xxii, xxvii, xxx, 39-50, 50-55, 55-57, 117, 125-127,

Index 133-134, 134-141, 143, 144, 146-147, 148-151, 167-168, 191-192, 193, 208, 210, 211213, 218-222, 234-238, 284, 340-344, 347-356, 359, 365367, 381-389, 398-403, 408, 417-420, 438-439, 447, 456-461 Carrie, Arnold, 106, 107 Carrigan, Anthony, 77 Carroll, Lewis, 315 Carson, Rachel, xiii, 21, 55, 60, 88, 216, 301-303, 318, 462, 465, 466 Casaldaliga, Pedro, 227, 229, 454456 Cavendish, Margaret, 14, 15 Cawelti, John G. 90 Cazajous-Augé, Claire, 266 Ceesay, Issatou, 358-359 Cervantes, Miguel de, 304 Chaplin, Charles, 6, 191 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 156, 157 Chausenque, Vincent de, 192 Chauveau, Loïc, 33 Chauvin, Rémy, 305 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 157, 158 Cherokee, 60, 243, 334, 381, 428, 429 Chevalier, Jean, 158, 435 Chile, xv China, x, 10, 25, 28, 45, 67, 125, 156, 170, 178, 183, 194, 210, 231, 264, 273, 274, 288, 452, 453 Christen, Yves, 282, 283 Christie, Agatha, 303, 304 Churchill, John, 150 Clare, John, xv, 24 Clark, Karl Adolf, 134 Claudot-Hawad, Hélène, 230, 431, 432 Clegg, Johnny, 84 Clifton-Paris, Thomas, 128, 129 Clute, John, 173 Cobham, Catherin 19 Coetzee, J.M., 393, 397

Ecology and Literatures in English: Writing to Save the Planet Colard III, Sneed B., 359 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 4, 5 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, xxvi, 16, 17, 20, 21, 23, 26, 216, 311, 463 “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, xxvi, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 26 Collis, Rhonda, 50-55 Colombia, 178, 394 Comanches, 249 Conan Doyle, Arthur, xxii, 88, 209 Congo, 131, 132, 198, 299 Comerford, Jonathan, 334 Conrad, Joseph, 131, 132, 135, 136, 204, 207 Heart of Darkness, 131, 135, 207 Cooper, James Fenimore, 270 Cordova-Rios, Manuel, 210, 211 Costanus, John, 176 Costello, Elizabeth, 398 Couffer, Jack, 372 Crawford, John, xix Cree, 149, 150, 168, 218, 220, 221, 222, 284, 347-353, 366, 367, 427, 428, 446 Crocombe, Angela, 356 Crumbo, Woodrow W., 249 Crutzen, Paul Josef, xv Cullertton Johnson, Jen, 358 Cummings, e.e., 172 Curwood, James Oliver, 383 Cyprus, 123 Cyrulnik, Boris, 283, 284, 338, 339 Daniels, Allison, 339 Damberger, Francis, 210 Darwin, Charles, xxvi, 122, 211, 270 Darwich, Mahmoud, 19, 24, 435438, 463 Davis, Wade, 166 Dean, A., 44 Debruyne, Michel, xvii, 197 Dehra Dun, 513 Delamain, Jacques, 459-460

515

Delpech, Michel, 84 Delpoux, Marcel, xviii De Mille, James, xxii, 210 Demonchaux, Jean-Paul, 267 Dennett, D., 282, 283 Derrida, Jacques, Desai, Anita, 99-100, 226, 227, 448454 Dewey, John, 144 DeZuniga Tony, 170 Dickens, Charles, 43, 204 Dickinson, Adam, 50, 51, 55 Dickinson, Emily, xiv, 24 Digit, 279, 295-297 Digit Fund, 297 Di Liddo, Annalisa, 174 Dinesen, Isak (see Karen Blixen) Disney, Walt, 166 Doyle, Peter, 188 Doré, Gustave, 115 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 64, 379 Douglas, James, 9 Duché, Jean, 266-267 Dumont, René, 77, 78, 228 Du Ponceau, Pierre-Etienne, 150, 421, 422, 428, 429 Durrell, Laurence, 122, 123 Dusich, K., 44 Dussol, Vincent, 65, 67 Dutheil, Yves, 86 Dyer, S., 234 Dylan, Bob, 81, 84 Dzielicki, Jane, 197 Eastman, Bryan, 88 Eastwood, Alice, 6 Egan, Gabriel, xxiv, 5 Egypt, 11, 45, 122, 123, 132, 243, 261, 461 Einstein, Albert, 304, 305 Eiseley, Loren, 18, 57-60, 466 Elefence International, 272 El Halabi, Malak, 393-394 Ellacomb, Henry N., 3 Ellman, Richard, 156 Elmallah, Ahmed M. 33

516 Eluard, Paul, 435 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 18 England, x, xxii, xxiv, xxxi, 6-8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15-23, 88, 154, 162, 184, 190, 204, 209, 260, 264, 280-281, 285-288, 332, 360 Epictetus, 259 Equatorial Guinea, 299 Erdrich, Louise, 250 Everett, Percival, 222, 224-226 Eysturoy, Annie O., xix Facetti, Germano, 440 Fanren, Zeng, 25 FAO, 194 Faulkner, William, 262 Felstiner, John, xv, xvi, 24 FENAMAD, 238 Ferrat, Jean, 86 Ferris, Jerri, 359 Finch, Ann, 14 Findley, Timothy, 267, 456-461, 463 Fioupou, Christiane, 75, 76, 239, 408 Fitzgerald, F.S., 40, 41, 105 Flanagan, Richard, 103, 193 Fleisher, Richard, 233 Fontenay, Eliabeth de, 256, 304 Fossey, Dian, xiii, xxvii, 164-165, 258, 279, 289-298, 304, 324, 424, 466 France, xiii, xvii, xxii, xxx, 4, 27, 84-86, 115, 116, 119, 129, 130, 132, 143, 153, 184, 190, 192, 195-198, 209, 228, 248, 253, 259, 261, 263-264, 267, 271, 289, 324, 367, 368, 389, 408, 409, 412, 419-420, 423-424, 459 Francis of Assisi, 173, 256, 272 Franklin, John, 125, 134, 151 Franklin Leslie, Robert, 372, 381389 Frères des Hommes, xvii, 195, 196 Friedman, Gloria, 416

Index Frost, Alan, 9 Fugain, Michel, 86 Fullalove, John (Nikolaas, de Kat), 334 Gabon, 290, 299 Gaiman, Neil, xvi, xxvii, 40, 169172 Gainsbourg, Serge, 86 Galdikas, Biruté, 292, 297 Gambia, 358 Gander, Forrest, 24, 26-32, 49, 430 Gandhi, Mahatma, 305, 372 Garcia Lorca, Federico, xv Gatty, Margaret, S., 315 Genevoix, Maurice, 84 Gerbeau, Roland, 86 Germany, xx, xxiv, 132, 194, 360 George, Paul, 439 Ghana, 299 Gheerbrant, Alain, 158, 435 Ghys, Etienne, 407 Gibson, Kaherine, 340, 344 Giès, Jacques, 453 Gilbert, Lyn, 334 Gilfillan, Merrill, x, 65-68 Gilmore, Mikal, xvi Ginsberg, Alan, 30, 31, 32 Giono, Jean, xi, xxvii, 188, 214, 318, 319, 321 L’homme qui plantait des arbres / The Man Who Planted Trees, 214, 318 Glenn, Barbara, 65 Glowczewski, Barbara, 244 Goethals, Helen, 10 Goldfinger, 84 Goodall, Jane, xxvii, 258, 276, 292, 297, 298-301 Gore, Al, 292 Gough, Archibald Edward, 453 Gould, John, 126 Grabowska, John, 239, 241 Grandjeat, Yves-Charles, xxv Grant, J., 234 Grattan, Thomas, 128

Ecology and Literatures in English: Writing to Save the Planet Graves, Benjamin, 421 Graves, Robert, 373, 374 Gray, John Edward, 126 Greece, 122, 123, 144, 258, 461 Greek, Ray, 98 Green Shade, 412 Gregory, Derek, 203 Greenpeace, 158, 448 Grobler, Dick, 334 Grobler, Piet, 334 Grossman, Karl, 33 Guiana, 409 Guillain, Aurélie, 358 Guinea, 299 Gunther, Erna, 308 Guzman, Patricio, 435 Hackenberg, David, 304 Haeckel, Ernst, xxiv Hall, W., 44 Hall Witherell, Elizabeth, 114 Halström, Lasse, 332, 334 Hampaté Bâ, Aladou, xvii Hao, Jing, 453 Haraway, Donna, 256, 257, 271, 272 Harding, Wendy, 358 Harjo, Joy, 68-70 Harrison, Jim, 84, 88 Harrison, Ted, 340-344 A Northern Alphabet, 340-344 Hart, George, xvi Harvey, David, 407 Harvey, Jo, 334 Haskins, Lola, 64 Hastings, Chris, 324 Hattingh, Marna, 334 Hatzenberger, Antoine, 374 Hauser, Marc, 283 Hawad, 230, 231, 424, 425, 426, 431-434, 440 Hawthorne Deming Alison, xxii, 245-246 Hay, John, 62 Heather, P.J., 156 Hedge Coke, Allison, xix

517

Helbig, Louis, 134-140, 238 Hemingway, Ernest, 315 Herbert, Frank, 234 Herbert, George, 14 Héritier, Stéphane, 399 Highway, Tomson, xxviii, 347-353, 427 Caribou Song, 347-348 Dragonfly Kites, 348-351 Fox on the Ice, 351-353 Hillerman, Tony, 2, 89, 90-111, 160, 161, 161, 411 Hines, Barry, 332 The Knave with a Kestrel, 332 Hichens, Robrt, 334 Hinrichsen, Natalie, 334 Hinrichsen, Tamsin, 334 Hogan, Linda, xiii, 61, 62, 173-174 239, 240, 306-313, 463 People of the Whale, 306-313 Holling, Holling C., 353-356 Paddle-to-the-Sea, 353-356 Homer, 84, 304 Hood, Robert, 125, 126, 127, 148, 149, 150, 154, 167, 168, 365, 366, 387, 401- 403 Hope for the Earth, 410 Hopkins, Gerald Manley, 24, 65 Houston, Dick, 272-279, 280, 286 Hovde, Carl F., 114 Howard, Jane, 261 Howart, William L., 114 Hughes, Ted, 315, 392 Hugo, Victor, xviii, 17, 463 Hulme, Peter, 133 Hungary, 396-397 Hunter, Emily, 395-396 Huot, M., 234 Hurons-Wendats, 242, 243, 417, 418 Hurst Thomas, David, 249, 250 Imrey, H., 44 India, 99-100, 226-228, 239, 448454 Indonesia, 199

518 Ingham, Bruce, 47 Inuit, 220, 284, 340-343, 348, 428 Iraq, 380, 389, 440-443 Ireland, 30, 128 Iroquois, 242, 243 Israel, 435, 437, 438-439, 466 Italy, 129-130, 131, 264 Ivory Coast, 299, 334 Jackson, Michael, 82-83 Jacquart, Albert, 389-390 Japan, 32, 118, 243, 259, 264-265, 273, 274, 360, 430, 461 Jensen, Jens, 6 Jonas, Hans, 31 Jonson, Benjamin (Ben), 27, 28 Joyce, James, 120, 216 Kafka, Frantz, 283 Kallab, Fifi, 188 Kaltemback, Michèle, 399, 400 Kamkwamba, William, 361-364 Kantarbaeva-Bill, Irina, xxix, 58, 65, 114, 147 Kappler, Charles, 224 Karvonen, Ava, 210 Keats, John, xiii, xiv, 21, 24, 89, 301, 318, 319, 465, 466 Keates, Elena, 448 Kelen, Jacqueline, xvii, 258, 259 Keller-Privat, Isabelle, 161 Kelsey Mac Colley, Diane, xxvi, 14, 15 Kennedy, John, 71 Kennedy, Lisa, 357 Kennedy, Merrit, 394 Kennedy, Robert, 71 Kenya, xi, xxvii, 115, 123, 133, 145, 146, 150, 151, 198, 207, 214215, 292, 358, 360 Kerr, Jessica, 12 Kershaw, Baz, 406-407, 412 Khasukuda, 409 Khermouch, Flora, 5 Kimchi, Rami, 435 Kinsella, John, 26-32, 57, 258, 430

Index Kiowa, xix, xx, xxvii, 71-74, 210, 239, 243, 245, 249, 350 Kipling, Rudyard, xxviii, 315, 322328, 396 The Jungle Book, xxviii, 315, 322-328, 396, 411 Kish, Morris or Maurice, 203 Kittredge, William, 322 Klein, Todd, xvi Kobayashi, Issa, 259, 264-265 Kunitz, Stanley, 13 Kurdistan, 439-443 Lafleche Picotte, Jeanne, 359 La Fontaine, Jean de, 261 Lalanne, Francis, 86 Lamand, Régis, 267 Lamb, Bruce, 211 Lamb, Tom, 125 Lanone, Catherine, 289 Larrère Catherie, 4, 5, 394, 395, 408-409 Larrère, Raphael, 4, 5, 394, 395, 408-409 Larrey, Frederic, 130 Larson, D.M., 410-411 Lavilliers, Bernard, 86 Lauwers, Margot, 271 Leakey, Louis, 292 Lebanon, 188-189, 393-394 Le Clézio, J.M., 248 Le Forestier, Maxime, 86 Lemphers, N., 234 Leopold, Aldo, 5, 37, 38, 42, 114, 211, 266, 267-270, 282, 312313, 333, 388 Lepage, Robert, 5, 417-419 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 199, 200 Lewis, J. Patrick, 344-347 Liberia, 299 Linnaeus, Carl Von, xvii, 89 Lister-Kaye, John, 372, 381 Lithuania, 292 Lockie, Alex, 461 Logue, Christopher, 440 Lojkine, Séphane, xvi

Ecology and Literatures in English: Writing to Save the Planet London, Jack, 396 Lopez, Barry, 120, 121, 147, 167 Lorenz, Edward N., x, 406, 407 Lorenz, Konrad, 283 Lott, Joshua, 106 Louis VII, 11 Louis-Marie, Father, 119 Louvel, Liliane, 456-457 Lowenstein, Tom, 244 Luther King Jr., Martin, 71, 456 Lynes, Jeannette, 55-57 Maathai, Wangari, xi, xii, xiii, xxiv, xxvii, 69, 198, 207, 208, 210, 214, 215, 358 Macé, Marielle, 266 MacDonald George, 335-336 MacKenzie, Alexander, 133, 134, 150 Mackinder, H.J., 115, 123, 124, 145, 146, 147, 148, 151 Mae, Christophe, 86 Magritte, René, 182 Malawi, 361-364 Malaysia, 121, 160-162, 199, 320 Mali, 139, 432 Mandela, Nelson, 242, 334-335 Mangano, Joseph, 33 Manser, Bruno, 199, 200, 292 Mansfield, Katherine, 260, 264 Maracas Cosmiques (Les), 409 Mariah’s Amazing Puppets, 410 Maritz, Nocolaas, 334 Marroum, Marianne, 188, 189 Martin, Randal, 3, 4 Martin-Vallente, Marcellino, 408 Marvell, Andrew, 14, 15 Masai, 151 Matignon, Karine Lou, 284, 337, 338, 339 Matthiessen, Peter, xiii, xix, xx, 130, 131, 207, 208, 274-277, 300, 301 The Snow Leopard, 129 The Tree Where Man Was Born, 207-208

519

Maxwell, Gavin, 372-381 Mayer, Sheldon, 170, 172 McArthur, Jo-Ann, 395-396 McCartney, Paul, 81, 82, 394 McCarthy, Cormac, 314 McColley, Kelsey, 15 McCrary Sullivan, Ann, 60-64, 65 McKean, Dave, xvi, 171 McLuhan, Teresa Carolyn, 244 McRobb, Rachel, 273 Mealer, Bryan, 361 Meillon, Bénédicte, 271, 308 Melville, Herman, 305-306 Moby Dick, 305-306 Mendes, Chico, 199, 200, 292, 329, 357, 363 Menzano, Arianna, 129 Menzies, Archibald, 9 Merchán, Chucho, 394 Mery, Fernand, 283 Messiaen, Olivier, 65 Messier, Jean-Frédéric, 218, 220, 426 Mexico, 178, 248, 249, 360, 423 Michaud, Nathalie, 431 Michaux, Henri, 248 Miles, Graeme, 4 Miller, Frederic P., 9 Miller, Lisa, 210 Miller, Teresa Ann, 397 Milton, John, 14, 15, 16, 24 Molière, 304 Molina, Mario J., xv Momaday, N. Scott, xiii, xiv, xix, xx xxvii, 1, 15, 20, 21, 70-75, 84, 92, 151, 152, 153, 154, 158, 165, 166, 167, 210, 239, 240, 241, 245, 246, 248-252, 283, 311, 314, 336-340, 350, 401, 422, 426, 463, 465 Circle of Wonder, 336-340 Monet, Claude, 330 Mongolia, 145 Monod, Théodore, 61, 121-122, 391 Montale, Eugenio, 30 Moorcroft, William, 147, 151

520 Moore, Alan, xxvii, 169, 170, 173185, 188, 257, 465 Moore, Roberta, 154 Morgan, Adrian, 361 Morgan, Sally, 361 Morison, Scot, 210 Morpurgo, Michael, 315, 382, 411, 459 MOSOP (Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People), 443 Mouré, Erin, 51 Moustaki, Georges, 86 Mowat, Farley, 164-165, 279, 289298, 318, 366, 367 Muir, John, xvi, 15, 116, 117, 118, 133, 134, 141, 142, 169, 270 Mundrukzó, Kornél, 396-397 Munro, Alice, 212, 213, 464, 465 Murdock, Cecil, 249 Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm, xi Müss, xviii Nabokov, Vladimir, 260, 261 Nash, Paul, 191 National Council of Rubber Tappers, 199, 358 Navajo, 15, 47, 89-111, 151, 152, 158, 161, 242, 253, 426 N’Diaye, Gora, xix Nef, J.U, 4 Nelson, Richard, 212 Neruda, Pablo, 430 Nestruck, J. Kelly, 418, 419 Newborne, Maria, 410 Newton-John, Olivia, 84 New Zealand, 360 Nicaragua, 178, 454, 456 Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Michael, 191 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xi Niger, 230-231, 432, 443 Nigeria, xviii, xxviii, 75-80, 189, 199, 213, 217, 242, 324, 443448 Nillungiaq, 284 Noah, Yannick, 85

Index Norway, 408 Ogoni, 424, 425, 443-448 Omahas, 249, 359 O'Meara, Padraic, 334 Omhovère, Claire, 64, 283, 315, 399 Onfray, Michel, 149, 390 Opel, Kenneth, 461 Ormesson, Jean d’, 17 Orsenna, Erik, 259, 262-264 Orwell, George, xi, 54, 131, 332 Osundare, Niyi, 75-80, 189, 213, 425, 465 Otterburn, 127 Owens, Louis, xix, xx Oxenbury, Helen, 329 Pakistan, 217 Palestine, 10, 19, 217, 435-438, 443 Palusci, Oriana, 75, 133, 134, 189, 212, 213, 238 Pamuk, Orhan, 248 Paquet, Charlotte, 77 Paradise Valley, 13 Pasternak, Judy, 106 Pastoureau, Michel, 157 Pavese, Cesare, 264 Peacock, Doug, xx Pearce, Fred, 216-217, 227, 228, 229 Pelt, Jean-Marie, 124, 125, 261, 262, 302 Penone, Giuseppe, 374 Peres, J.M., 463, 464 Perkins Marsh, George, 192 Perret, Pierre, 86 Peru, 200, 210, 238 Peterson, Dale, 298-301 Petrucci, Mario, 32-39 42, 49 Pey, Serge, 248, 253 Picard, J., 463, 464 Pignon Ernest, Ernest, 191 Pinchot, Gifford, 5 Ping, Wang, 231 Plantu, xvii, 195, Plath, Sylvia, 392

Ecology and Literatures in English: Writing to Save the Planet Pliny the Elder, 190 Poe, Edgar Allan, 17, 182 Ponca, 249 Pond, Peter, 133 Potter, Beatrix, 328-329 Peter Rabbit, 328-329 Poulin, Marco, 418 Presley, Elvis, 81 Prévert, Jacques, 66, 464-465 Prince, 83 Pueblos, 242, 426 Pyrenees, xxx, 115, 116, 127, 128, 129, 130, 143, 145, 164, 184, 192, 241, 267, 271, 324, 420, 424 Pythagoras, 258 Quattrocchi, Umberto, 146 Rabhi, Pierre, 462 Racka, Nasem, 106 Raglan, Lady, 185 Raine, Kathleen, 372, 380 Rasmussen, Knud, 284 Randall, Tom, 175 Reclus, Elisée, 192, 193 Redmond, Ian, 295 Reeves, Hubert, 118, 119 Reinhart, Django, 261 Renaud, 85 Renker, Ann M., 308 Reverdy, Maurice, 86 Reynolds, Kev, xxix, xxx, 57, 58, 154, 162-164 Rhodan, Maya, 363 Rhodesia, 276 Riboud, Pénélope, 453 Rice, Tony, 125 Richards, Jennie, 258 Richardson, Boyce, 218, 220-222, 223 Richardson, Gillian, 357-358 Richardson, John, 134 Richardson, S., 33 Rigal-Cellard, Bernadette, 242, 249, 250, 251

521

Rigaud, Antonin, 144 Rilke, Rainer Maria, xiii, xix, xx Rimbaud, Arthur, 158 Rocard, Marcienne, 399, 400 Rock, Kathia, 417, 418 Rogers, Pattiann, 119, 120, 121, 246-247 Rolland Nabuco Céline, xxi Rouaud, Christian, 424 Rougier, Hervé, 460 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 116, 117 Rowland, F. Sherwood, xv, xvi Rowley, Marie-Lou, 50-55 Rowling, J.K., 191 Rudd, Gillia, 156, 157 Rueckert, William, xxiv Rumford, James, 429 Runghsawmee, Brinda, 437 Ruppertshoffen, Heinz, 302 Russell-Killough, Henry, 145, 150 Russia, 34, 203, 324-325, 461 Rwanda, 164, 274, 289-298 Saddler, Sonia Lynn, 358 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 338, 339, 353, 364 The Little Prince, 338, 339, 353, 364 Salgado, Juliano Ribeiro, 166 Salgado, Leila Wanisk, 138 Salgado, Sebastião, 136, 137-140, 141, 166 Sami, 241 Samivel, 158 Saro-Wiwa, Ken, xv, xviii, xx, xxvi, 424, 425, 443-448, 454 Saudi Arabia, 360 Sauvy, Alfred, 202 Savuka, 84 Schama, Simon, Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 200-207, 215, 226, 227, 229, 230 Schichtel, Bret A., 103 Schmidt, Eric-Emmanuel, 367 Schubnell, Matthias, xix, 92 Schumacher, Michael, 30

522 Schweitzer, Albert, 257, 258, 259 Schwerdtner, Karin, 161 Scotland, 360, 372-381, 389 Seeger, Pete, 81 Selles, Colette, 103, 104, 193, 244, 259 Senegal, xvii Sequoyah (ou George Guess, Guest ou Gist), 428, 429 Serres, Michel, xviii, 15, 190, 319, 407, 422, 423, 462, 464 Serrurier, Karyl, xvii Seuss, Dr (Theodor Seuss Geisel), 319-322 Shakespeare, William, xxvi, 3-13, 14, 16, 17, 24, 123, 157, 219, 260, 298-301, 304, 406, 408, 411, 417-420, 426 Coriolanus, 10 Hamlet, 12, 218, 408, 426 Henry V, 11 Henry VIII, 7 Love’s Labour Lost, 7 Midsummer Night’s Dream (A), 7, 419-420 Othello, 7, 11, 158 Tempest (The), 7, 298-301, 417419 Timon of Athens, 3, 7, 8 Twelfth Night, 10 Venus and Adonis, 11 Winter’s Tale (The), 7, 11, 12 Shelley, Mary, xii, 22 Frankenstein, 22 Sierra Club, 118, 142 Sigaudo, Davide, 129 Sigurdson, E., 44 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 15, 88, 107, 108, 110, 250, 252 Sinclair, A., 123 Singer, Peter, 257, 395 Sioui-Durand, Yves, 218-220, 425 Hamlet-le-Malécite, 218-220, 408, 426 Sioux, 1 Sivell, Paul, 185

Index Sivaramakrishnan, Murali, 454 Sixkiller Huckaby, Anna Sloane, Hans, 126 Slobodov, Arlen, 210 Slovic, Paul, 466 Slovic, Scott, xvi, xvii, xxix, xxx, 107, 108, 154, 245, 246, 247, 434 Smith, Kimberley, 102, 107 Snyder, Gary, 24, 30, 215, 430, 431 Solnit, Rebecca, xxix Souchon, Alain, 86 South Africa, 84, 242, 334-335, 393, 397 Southwick, Edmond Bronk, 5 Soyinka, Wole, 189, 198, 207, 213, 425 Spain, 153, 162, 163, 199, 228, 360, 394, 423 Spaner Dayan Frimer, Linda, 438439 Spender, Harold, 162, 163 Staines, John D, 14 Steffan, Franck, 261, 302 Stegner, Wallace, 154 Steinbeck, John, 209 Travels with Charley, 209 Steingraber, Sandra, 107, 111 Stendhal, 233 Stenseth, N.C., 104 Stevens, Samuel, 121 Stoeckel, Hugues, 232, 233, 234 Stover, Charles, 5 Strauss, Rochelle, 316 Stuart Houston, C., 125, 126, 150 Sturrock, June, 15 Sturtevant, William C., 308 Sullivan, Robert, xix Supervielle, Jules, xxi Suttles, Wayne, 308 Survival International, 238 Sweden, xvii Swift, Jonathan, 260, 407 Swinburne, Henry, 192 Sylvestre, Anne, 86

Ecology and Literatures in English: Writing to Save the Planet Tadjo, Véronique, 334 Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence, 247, 314 Tanzania, 276 Tardieu, Vincent, 303-304 Tarrier, Michel, 195 Tassin, Jacquse, 84 Tatanya Mani, 244 Tecumseh, 41, 42 Temple, Stanley, 269-270 Tennant, Alan, xxi Tetsot’ine (or T’atsot’ine or Yellowknives), 403 Thailand, 315, 411 Thompson, Francis, x, xix, 17, 18, 463 Thompson, Margot, 316 Thompson Seton, Ernest, 375 Thoreau, Henry David, 8, 9, 60, 61, 62, 114, 179, 210 Walden, 210 Thurber, James, 317-319, 321 Tibet, 130-131 Todorov, Tzvetan, 236 Tolan, Anna, 272 Tolan, Steve, 272 Tolkien, J.R.R., 191 Toppah, Herman, 249 Torday, Paul, 332 Torday, Piers, 303, 331, 332-334 Traherne, Thomas, 14, 15 Tsaï, Gilberte, 412 Tsen-Tainte, 72 Tsoai-tale (N. Scott Momaday), 72, 245 Tuareg, xxviii, 230, 231, 425, 426, 431-434, 440, 443 Turner, J.M.W., 16, 330, 331 Turpin, Tom, 260 Twain, Mark, 216, 227, 229, 389, 454-455 Uganda, 276, 299 Ukraine, xiii, 35 United Arab Emirates, 190

523

United Nations Environment Programme, 199 United States of America, The, xviii, 5, 6, 8, 13, 28, 32, 57-60, 60-64, 65-68, 68-70, 70-75, 8284, 88, 89, 104, 116, 117, 118, 119-121, 141-142, 144, 149, 152, 154, 158, 160, 161, 165167, 179, 192, 201, 203-204, 208-209, 210, 211-212, 222226, 231, 234-238, 241-248, 249, 250, 251, 262, 263, 267271, 294, 295, 302, 304, 305313, 333, 355, 360, 418, 421, 423, 430 Valeur, Bernard, 157 Van Cauvelaert, Didier, 305 Vancouver, George, 9 Vandervlist, Harry, 353, 354 Vandre, Geraldo, 201, 202 Vaughan, Henry, 14, 15 Vaughan, Richard, 126 Ventura, Héliane, 75, 189, 191, 213, 283, 315 Verne, Jules, xxiii, 209 Vietnam, 311-312 Vincendeau, Jean-Louis, 374 Vitebsky, Piers, 244 Von Frisch, Karl, 183, 305 Von Mossner, Alexia, 224, 226 Voulzy, Laurent, 85 Wals, 184 Wallace, Alfred, 9, 121, 122, 124, 159-162 Walton, Geoffrey, 334 Wandin Murphy, Aunty Joy, 356 Wasserman, Harvey, 33 Waterman, Jason, 107 Watts, David, 293 Webb, Betty, 89 Wei, Qingqi, 25 Weideman, George, 335 Weik Von Mossner, Alexia, 224, 226

524 Weld, Charles Richard, 192 Wells, H.G., 238, 261 Wells, Rachel, 280-282, 285, 286 Wenders, Wim, 166 Weninock, 244 Werber, Bernard, 282 West, Wallace G., xi Wharton, Thomas, 117, 399 Whitman, Walt, 31, 32 Wiebe, Rudy, 110, 151, 193, 208, 232, 234-238, 365, 367, 387, 398-403, 465 Wilde, Oscar, 156 Wing, D., 33 Williams, William Carlos, xv, 24, 144 Williams, Teresa, 334 Wilson, Graham, 184 Winnebago, 249, 359 Wisconsin Society for Ornithology, 268 Wiwa, Ken, 446-447 Wizard of Oz (The), 410

Index Woch, Stan, 175 Wolfe, Art, 166 Woodard, Charles, 166 Woodborne, Judy, 334 Woolf, Virginia, 3, 216 Wordsworth, William, 16 World Wildlife Fund (WWF), 194 Wright, Alexis, 104 Xenophon, 15 Yablokov, Alexei V., 34 Yokuts, xiv Yoruba, 75-80, 213, 425 Youngs, Tim, 133 Yuechuan, Wang, 25 Zaire, 299 Zambia, 272-274, 276, 277-279 Zephaniah, Benjamin, 393 Zimmerman, Larry, 60, 243 Zuckerman, Jocelyn C., 199 Zurita, Raul, xvi, 434-435