An Anthropocene Poem

Reframing Heart of Darkness via The Word for World is Forest and Anna Tsing’s Unruly Edges

Only in the tumble of diversity is adaptation possible.^[1] 

Where there’s diversity, there’s life.^[2] 

The earth for us is a place to live in,

where we must put up with sights, with sounds,

with smells too, by Jove!--breathe dead hippo, so to speak,

and not be contaminated.^[3]

Attention to diversity can be the beginning

of an appreciation of interspecies being.^[4] 

After four years of it he was completely

at home under the trees.^[5] 

We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth,

on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet.^[6] 

Companion species live symbiotically.

Plants gain sustenance from fungi but a Mycorrhizal

fungus is not selfish in its eating.^[7] 

It was a kind of partnership. He steered for me—I had to look after him,

I worried about his deficiencies, and thus a subtle bond had been created.^[8]

Fungi are not always benign in their interspecies associations.

Some are ferocious pathogens.^[9]

Those heads on stakes.^[10] 

They may try to kill us. To kill us all, all men.^[11] 

Exterminate all the brutes!^[12] 

Some are irritating parasites.^[13]

The deer would be hunted

because that’s what they were there for.^[14]

He raided the country.^[15] 

To breed like insects in the carcass of the world.^[16] 

What if we imagined human nature

as an interspecies relationship?^[17]

I don’t know what human nature is.^[18] 

Human exceptionalism blinds us.^[19] 

His nerves went wrong.^[20] 

Eager fatalism.^[21] A touch of fantastic vanity.^[22] 

I had immense plans.^[23] For humans to take over.^[24]

Humans changed the very nature of species being.^[25] 

Maybe leaving descriptions of what we wipe out

is part of human nature.^[26] 

I forgot the heartache which makes up the rest of the price.^[27]

Domestication is ordinarily understood as human

control over other species, imagined as a hard line.

Human or wild.^[28] 

Bundles of acute angles sat with their legs drawn up.

One, with his chin propped on his knees, stared

at nothing, in an intolerable and appalling manner.^[29] 

The freak reaction, the flinching away from what is human

but does not quite look so.^[30] 

The species others.^[31] 

The little bastards.^[32]Children, savages.^[33] 

They’re not human beings in my frame of reference!^[34] 

They’ve got more primitive nerves than humans do.^[35]

White women became agents of racial hygiene^[36] 

Batch of breeding females. Sound and clean,

121 head of prime human stock.^[37] 

Weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways.^[38] 

Racial divisions were produced and reproduced.^[39] 

The half-caste. That scoundrel.^[40] 

I hate the savages!^[41] 

Cultivation through coercion.

Extreme order and control.

Slavery and forced labor.^[42] 

I tried starving the sulky ones.^[43] 

Punish the lazy by castrating them in public.^[44] 

Negative correlation exists between diversity

and the intensity of capital investment and state control.^[45] 

I don’t know if the native human culture will survive.

We have done great damage.^[46] 

A desert of cement.^[47]

I’ve never seen anything so unreal in my life.

And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding

this cleared speck on the earth

struck me as something great and invincible,

like evil or truth waiting patiently

for the passing away of this fantastic invasion^[48].

My Journey Through the Anthropocene

While reflecting on our reading from the quarter and the concept of the Anthropocene, I was struck by the way the authors’ ability to highlight the reader’s complicity in the stories. I wanted my project to express my position as storyteller equal to my positionality in the Anthropocene. I took three pieces of writing and made them something new I created, in doing so I wrote myself into the larger picture, accepting my position as witness and contributor.

During the course of the quarter, the most impactful readings were by Conrad, Le Guin, and Tsing. I appreciate the lyricism and poetry of Conrad’s classic. He has a control of the language that brings us along into the heart of darkness like we’re watching over the shoulder of Marlowe. Le Guin seemed to be expanding on the Heart of Darkness story by telling us, “Yes, but let’s explore it further…” She shifted the setting on another planet to explore concepts of human nature, colonialism, capitalism, racism, and environmental science. She showed us perspects from another species’ point of view and made us question what being a human means. Tsing’s Unruly Edges brings the conflicts and themes into our present world. She relates humans to fungi to convey her theory in a straightforward, optimistic way that still manages to highlight the dire situation of the Anthropocene as well as leave room for hope. This article is an intersection of Marxist, feminist, and environmental science theory that connects the two novels by giving us factual, historical explanations for the real-world issues that were explored in the fictional pieces.

My aim for this project was to create not only a poem, which this turned into, but a  condensed physical Anthropocene artifact. Borrowing techniques from erasure poetry, I used Anna Tsing’s article as a framing device to focus on themes from both Heart of Darkness and The Word for World is Forest as an alternate route into the theory of, and an argument for, interspecies diversity.

There were moments that were incredibly stark in the readings and I wanted the tone to emphasize this and highlight how bleak the concept of the Anthropocene is. I Layered lines from Heart of Darkness alongside Unruly Edges and The Word for World is Forest in specific ways to achieve this. Instead of using The Heart of Darkness as a starting off point, I wanted to edit it and use the other pieces to fill in gaps Conrad left, such as the point of view of the ‘Other,’ far-reaching consequences of colonialism and capitalism, and a theoretical solution: interspecies diversity. I chose to end with Conrad though because his work captures the beauty in the “horror.”

Rearranging the structure of Tsing’s paper was important because the end leaves us with a feeling of hope. I wanted to start off with this and end on a darker note. I don’t feel hopeful after this journey through the Anthropocene and I wanted my project to make that clear. I used only the text from the article and both novels, Frankensteining the three to make an amalgamative short story. I thought formatting it without quotation marks or in-text citations, would give the impression of a singular narrative/poem. I wanted readers to experience the texts in the associative way I did.. With each reading, a new thread appeared, like a vine from a venomous tree, to weave together into a pulsing frame around the portrait of the Anthropocene.  

Photos