Year: 2017
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: in Baldwin A and Bettini G (eds) Moving Lives: critical reflections on climate change and migration.London: Roman and Littlefield "Jakob, try to be buried in a ground that will remember you" commends the Greek geologist Athos to the young Polish Jew who has lost his family, his people, his homeland to the Holocaust (Michaels 1997: 76).The ground that might come to serve the boy well is not a land where blood or filiation is rooted in soil, for it is such imaginings of an earth and a people that have shattered Jakob's world.What it might better be, if I have any handle on the story, is a place that is willing to take him in and give him support.Somewhere that will accept the child in his damaged and grievous state and not just because of what he has to offer or the solid citizen he might become.A place and a people, that is, that will nurture his stories and keep watch over his memories as well as providing the resources for a viable future.A story of trauma, refuge and recovery, Anne Michael's novel Fugitive Pieces (1997) might also be one of the first great literary expressions of the Anthropocene, though the book arrived just in advance of the concept.For the Fugitive Pieces of the title refers not only to the fracturing and rootlessness of diasporic lives but also to the disjuncture and mobility of the earth itself.It matters profoundly that the one who rescues Jakob and shelters him on the Ionian island of Zakynthos is a geologist.Athos becomes not only the boy's guardian but also his guide to another ground, another earth.In Jakob's voice: "Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a 2 second history .…I sat near him while he wrote at his desk, contemplating forces that turn seas to stone, stone to liquid" (Michaels 1997: 20).Athos's accounts of deep geological time and the transformations of the earth -"the great heaving terra mobilis" -help open the boy's drastically reduced horizons, offering imaginary resources to draw Jakob away from his lost past and precarious future (Michaels 1997: 21).This is not an earth that is expected to provide the stability that the social world has so fearfully failed to deliver.The lesson of Athos's geology is that the earth shudders and wrenches itself apart, time and time again, and yet it endures: "The landscape of the Peloponnesus had been injured and healed so many times, sorrow darkened the sunlit ground".(Michaels, 1997: 60).Rather than pandering to the illusion of solidity and untroubled belonging, this is a geological imagination that encourages us to see that upheaval, dislocation, starting over is the way of the world.As Jakob recounts: "I could temporarily shrug off my strangeness because, the way Athos saw the world, every human was a newcomer" (Michaels, 1997: 103).Today, we hardly need reminding, traumatised and uprooted people are again finding their way to Greek Islands and the surrounding littoral.Once more, as in Hannah Arendt's diagnosis of the interwar and wartime upheavals of Europe, the refugee appears as "the most symptomatic group in contemporary politics" (1973: 277).Like the boy, Jakob, the refugees Arendt spoke of were deprived of rights and exposed to persecution by the same logic through which states operated and legitimated themselves.And in this way, beyond the immediacy of their predicament or the immensity of their numbers, the very existence of exiled, stateless people revealed deep cracks in the continuum of nation-territory-state.But are today's refugees symptomatic in the same way?For those fleeing the Syrian conflict, a case has been made that long years of drought -partially attributable
Author: Nigel Clark
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Climate action
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2587704997