Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation is the starting point for a voice I hear echoed in the words of poet Evelyn Reilly and the novelist Margaret Atwood. These three women, in my opinion have found a powerful balance in their writing to transform something seemingly relatable (an object or an idea) to the public, into a holder of a wider environmental message. Why should it matter that they are women, well that’s a loaded question that can date back since the beginning of literature. So I’ll save that for another time.
The tone I see in these different narratives that I cannot help but admire is they are all uniquely sensitive yet loaded with an urgent undertone. The delivery of what these three women want to say is as profound as the social implications of the wrecking balls being slammed into much needed affordable housing in East London, in favour of high-rise unaffordable condos. A big deal may not be being made in the press, but once you look further, the issues cannot be ignored. It is this enlightenment that now turns me to Ozeki’s All Over Creation.
All Over Creation
Lloyd’s words in his newsletter’s FULLERS’ SEEDS provide a core guide to what the novel is delivering to the reader, Lloyd is a religious man and holds the creations of god as sacred, to be left unaltered and pure. This is where the activist group ‘the seeds’ find a kinship with Lloyd, they too strive for the purity of the land in a more environmental protest sense.
It is in this newsletter that I find Lloyd and The Seeds meet on moral intentions for the land and the legacy of the environment.
Finally, we believe anti-exoticism to be propaganda of the worst kind. I used to farm potato, and I have witnessed firsthand the demise of the American family farm. I have seen how large Corporations hold the American farmer in thrall, prisoners to their chemical tyranny and their buy-outs of politicians and judges. I have come to believe that anti-exotic agendas are being promoted by these same Agribusiness and Chemical Corporations as yet another means of peddling their weed killers.
“O Lord, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches” [Psalms 104:24-25]
‘Having eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, we should know the difference between good and evil, but we do not. We are not gods.‘
Man alone of all Nature’s children thinks of himself as the centre about which his world, little or large, revolves, but if he persists in this hallucination he is certain to receive a shock that will awaken him or else he will come to grief in the end.
– Luther Burbank The Harvest of the Years
Year of the Flood
When reading Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, there is a similar structure where a religious/movement undertone is taken at regular intervals to deliver an environmental message. The Gardeners’ group in this novel serve the same purpose as The Seeds and Lloyd did in All Over Creation, they take an authoritative tone and deliver a sermon through Adam One at the beginning of every part. They take on such titles as ‘Of God’s Mythology in Creating Man’, ‘Of Persecution’ and ‘Of God as the Alpha Predator’.
Adam One goes on to address his fellow Gardeners in the Edencliff Rooftop Garden saying, ‘I have enjoyed viewing the excellent Tree of Creatures created by our Children from the plastic objects they’ve gleaned – such a fine illustration of evil materials being put to good uses!’. Adam One becomes a reminder and a beacon in the darkness that surrounds them in a seemingly godless world where genetics and evolution has been taken over by humans.
Adam One speaks for the minority that refuse to cooperate in the destruction science is taken upon the natural world, he goes on in an accusing tone similar to Lloyd’s. ‘But we affirm, also, the Divine agency that has caused us to be created in the way that we were, and this has enraged those scientific fools who say in their hearts “There is no God.” These claim to prove the non-existence of God because they cannot put Him in a test tube and weigh and measure Him’. There is an ecological purity being championed in Adam One’s words and brings to mind the genetic monopoly that is being shown in modern matters such as choosing the gender of a baby, or owning the cure for cancer. These are real scientific issues in our society that threaten the natural order in similar ways to which Adam One feels threatened.
Adam One turns to hymn to validate the natural orders, and god’s Divine plan (a man after Lloyd’s heart) to warn of the impending doom of the Waterless Flood.
Oh let me not be proud, dear Lord,
Not rank myself above
The other primates, through whose genes
We grew into your love.
A million years, Your days,
Your methods past discerning,
Yet through Your blend of DNAs
Came passion, mind, and learning.
If you want to hear this from The God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook, a clever ‘you- tuber’ has made this delightful treat for you to picture how Adam One would have delivered his message of God and land over genetic modification.
Evelyn Reilly
Here, we reach my third female writer Evelyn Reilly who delivers her message with a more aggressive voice, yet using abstract ideas and imagery to match even Wallace Steven’s narrative for beautiful obscurity.
Children play in the contaminated river
Pluck a doll from the sediments
[…]
The doll dangles from the child’s wrist]Nature is a scene by Casper David Friedrich
It points to a place beyond peaks and pinnicles
And seems to redeem the general pillage
But children circle the garbage piles
And subject to cycles the world is volatile
The cycle of violence is a manner of speaking
Speaking is part of the energy circulating
The cycle of violence is a classical painting
Called Rape of the Sabines
– Extract from ‘Broken Waters’
Reilly explores language in a similar way to the modernist writers and artists, she focuses on language and bold imagery, the mixing of opposites to deliver her environmental message here. The poem ‘Broken Water’ goes further to address gender roles, ownership and land and biological experience all to combine towards a strong eco-poetry tone. Her language in regards to nature and social behaviour has the same immediacy as Lloyd in All over Creation and Adam One in The Year of the Flood, they all speak from passion for the sacred and urgency to stall unnatural modifications in our society.
The image I can relate to this culture that has spread so far and wide is a Japanese artist called Anti Nuke where he depicts a child being offered radioactive candy in a series of many unsettling images. Visually I think Nuke achieves what Reilly is trying to portray to us.
These three women writers all engage me to care about the everyday with their narratives and way they use language. Anything can hold a ecological thought for our lives, it has urged me to look deeper into areas of my life that I wouldn’t usually. It may sound petty, but a compost bin and biodegradable cat litter is now on my agenda, along with a commitment to sustainable shopping bags and a keen eye on genetics and particularly ownership of genetics for cures being tested worldwide. The farming community here in Britain too. Gone are the times where the cheapest supermarket will do, no I support local and hope that farmer’s get a fraction of what they deserve. Looking to Australia, here is a video I found informative on how they treat food, farmers and in turn their immediate community and economy. Please watch and feel the urge to ‘combat convenient culture’.
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