Antonio Cuadrado-Fernadez
Creative-(ex)tensions: Indigenous eco-poetics as counter-hegemonic
discourse
Research Paper presented by Dr. Antonio Cuadrado-Fernandez at the 1st
International Symposium “Re-founding Democracy”. Barcelona, 21 - 23
May 2015.
Short abstract: In this paper I aim to use
a phenomenological approach to the Indigenous poetry of Hadaa Sendoo (Mongolia),
Humberto Ak’abal (Guatemala), and Walissu Youkan (Taiwan) in order to
propose an alternative notion of identity based on the writers’ shared
sense of interconnectedness to the environment. In this way, the embodied
experiences emerging from the poems can be articulated in a common empowering
counter-hegemonic discourse against the ontological and epistemological
foundations of global capitalism. Similarly, the paper proposes that the
poetry projected in this articulatory, empowering discourse from three
bioculturally diverse regions shows paths towards alternative ways of living
in the Anthropocene.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to present this
paper in this symposium.
I’d like to start with a quote by Francophone anti-colonial
writer from Martinique, Aime Cesaire, a quote that connects beautifully
with the spirit of my talk:
“I have a different idea of a universal. It is of a
universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars
there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all”.
Whatever happened to the anti-colonial, humanist spirit
emanating from the thoughts of Cesaire and also Sedar Senghor, Frantz Fanon
or Jean Paul Sartre, the truth is the postmodern theories that were supposed
to channel this spirit into concrete action have failed to persevere in
the enormous task of creating emancipatory horizons for an increasingly
violent neo-colonial world. Part of the problem might be attributed to
the tepidity of postcolonial theory when addressing postcolonial struggles
in terms of cultural difference and identity politics, which has advantages
and disadvantages.
Focusing on identity and cultural difference has been
helpful in giving visibility to the numerous spatial trajectories (nations)
and cultures emerging after the decolonisation process in mid-twentieth
century. Within the umbrella of cultural difference and identity, issues
of gender, ethnicity or class can be highlighted and receive an individualised
and highly localised treatment. In other words, criticism of postcolonial
literary texts focuses mainly on the writer’s biographic micro geographies.
However, there are reasons to believe that the mere celebration
of cultural difference known also as postmodernity might not be sufficient
to address the pressing realities of corporate globalisation, a point that
is amply referred to by Fredric Jameson when he rightly claims that “this
whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural
expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination
throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside
of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror.”
More specifically, the reason why the empowering message
of anti-colonial writers has been diluted is the incapacity of postcolonial
and other postmodern theories to transcend the subject-object dualism on
which modernity was solidly grounded.
Postcolonial theory “speaks” the language of poststructuralism
which deconstructs space conceived mainly in terms of binaries: subject
boundary object, self boundary world, mind boundary body. It is in this
scenario where the idea of culture has ended up fetishized as a commodity
in the service of the capitalist-neoliberal ideology from which cultures
were supposed to be liberated.
“[P]erhaps in the case of space, the scientific legitimacy
of atomistic imagination has been of critical importance in providing a
background to a cosmology of an essentially regionalised space, to claims
for the belongingness of people with its place, for the
necessity of boundaries against incursions from an essentially
foreign outside […]”
It is difficult to conceive of an articulating postcolonial
discourse if space is deployed in discrete, isolated entities, if the postcolonial
writer is represented as mere cultural distinctiveness, exclusively in
terms of its biographic relation to place, however important cultural distinctiveness
may be. It is clear the alternative to political stagnation is political
articulation. In this sense, the work of Argentinian sociologist Ernesto
Laclau opens a theoretical and practical path in that direction, when he
claims that:
“There is no way that a particular group living in
a wider community can live a monadic existence – on the contrary,
part of the definition of its own identity is the construction of a complex
and elaborated system of relations with other groups”. In other words,
the mere celebration of cultural difference is clearly not enough in a
world where the former colonial structures of domination have been expanded
and refined under the ideological umbrella of neoliberal capitalism, deeply
affecting the chances of survival of Indigenous (and non-indigenous) communities.
Indigenous poetry and the methodology
The previous analysis of the glory and pitfalls of multiculturalism
can also be applied to contemporary Indigenous poetry. Traditionally, Indigenous
poetry has been the vehicle through which Indigenous communities have expressed
their worldviews, protest and resistance against colonial and neo-colonial
forms of exploitation.
However, this poetry has mainly been analysed and approached
from the standpoint of its cultural distinctiveness, on the writer’s
biographic micro geographies, on what makes him/her distinctive from “other”
writers, as if poetry were the crystallisation of individual thought. But
this approach fails to acknowledge the potential cross-cultural connections
that pervade the poems and it fails to notice that the worldviews it projects
are sustained on place-based epistemologies, rooted in oral tradition,
which is an embodied and emplaced form of knowledge. In this sense, despite
the obvious cultural differences, the poetry of Hadaa Sendoo (Mongolia),
Humberto Ak’abal (Guatemala), and Walis Nokan (Taiwan) share a profound
cognitive and sensory engagement with the physical environment.
And despite the poets’ different modes of land occupancy
(Akabal ascribes himself to Mayan mostly agricultural form of life; Sendoo
to the nomadic lifesteyle of the Mongolian steppes and Walis Nokan to the
hunter-gatherer and fishing Indigenous tribes of Taiwan), their imagery
projects an image of land as a network of meaningful places, entities,
and experiences of transmission rather than a stage or a backdrop where
events simply occur. The environmental logics underpinning the imagery
in their poems can be read as multisensory, relational, open ended, dynamic
creative processes of engagement with the environment, challenging contemporary
mechanistic, commodifying and capitalist modes of production. What is needed
is a method of reading that articulates the reader to the writers’ embodied
perceptions, from what neurophenomenologists call empathy. From this perspective,
empathy and cooperation are built into the hardware of survival as we are
biologically social animals that learn by imitating, sharing, observing
and ‘placing ourselves in other personas.’
In this interaction of the reader with the writers’
Indigenous worldviews, the analysis aims to articulate bodily experience
to the writers’ environmental logics. Now, how is this type of phenomenological
reading possible? Inspired by neuroscience and phenomenology, new research
in cognitive linguistics and poetics reading, Cognitive poetics views the
language of literary texts as rooted in the body’s perceptual system.
In general terms, cognitive poetics explains what happens
in the mind when literary texts are read, focussing on conceptual and sensory
information emanating from the text as the reader progresses. In other
words, cognitive theories help us understand what happens in the mind as
readers cross the space of the text. Cognitive poetician Reuven Tsur defines
reading as a spatial orientation because the part of the brain that gets
activated when we read is the same that operates when we attempt to find
orientation in space. Particularly, Tsur argues that there are two types
of reading — rapid and delayed categorisation. With the latter, reading
is a linear, concept packing activity; we cross the text as we travel by
bus or train from place to place, point to point — the important is
the destination, the meaning of words. On the contrary, a delayed-categorisation
type of reading is slower and allows the mind to extract the rich sensory
information that emanates from the text. Once this space is opened
for ‘navigation’ the conceptual and sensory information is analysed
by readers as they enter and enact such information in the different geographical,
temporal and social mental spaces created by the writer.
Psychogeography of Indigenous poetry
A journey through the poetry of Humberto Akabal is a journey
through the cognitive and sensory dimension of his Qitz language, which
is the language he uses to write the poetry that he later translates into
Spanish. Akabal is one of the most internationally recognised Indigenous
poets, he has won numerous awards, and, above all, he fiercely defends
the Indigenous worldviews of his Mayan community, which pervade his poetry.
As we will observe in the other two Indigenous poets, Akabal’s relationship
with nature is reciprocal; it is a relationship between two living beings,
which in turn is an inherent part of the writer’s identity and of Indigenous
collective identity as well, because to Mayans, human’s ultimate humanity
resides precisely in their capacity for metamorphosis. This can be seen
in one of his beautiful poems, “Color of Water”, where he metamorphoses
with a tree, in an image of splendid simplicity: I search for my shadow
/ And I find it in the water. / I have branches / I have leaves/ I am a
tree… / And I look at the sky / As trees look at it:/ The color of water.
The poet doesn’t need sophisticated imagery to find
who he really is; he just needs to look at his reflection in the water
to find himself fused with elements of nature. If we adopt a delayed categorisation
type of reading we can reproduce in our mind the image of a man and a tree
as one; an image where the poet has inherited part of the attributes of
the tree, and the tree part of the attributes of the poet. From the perspective
of cognition, this is called conceptual blending, which is the capacity
developed by humans during the Palaeolithic to innovate, which gave them
the ability to invent new concepts and to assemble new and dynamic mental
patterns. The results of this change were awesome: human beings developed
art, science, religion, culture, refined tool use, and language. In this
respects, the proponents of conceptual blending suggest that human imagination
is the product of bodily interaction with the environment.
Particularly, conceptual blending is based on the idea
that the mind operates by eliciting associations that allow humans to operate
in and interact successfully with the world, in that sense, it is like
a metaphor, that is, the mind works like a metaphor. In the case of the
poem, the metamorphosis might be explained as the result of a complex perceptual
process of interaction with the environment in which the tree and the human
body are cognitively mapped initially to produce a new emergent entity.
Likewise, with a delayed categorisation type of reading,
it is possible for readers to elaborate the sensory information emanating
from this image, as if the writer were as robust and resilient as the bark,
as rooted in the land as the tree, as adaptable to change as the tree…Conversely,
the tree can be imagined as the flexibility and sensitivity of a human
body….
Hadaa Sendoo is a Mongolian poet and translator whose
poetry has been translated to more than 30 languages and he has been widely
published everywhere. The poetry of Hadaa Sendoo takes the reader to the
plains of Mongolia, to the smoke of the yurt, to wandering camels, to nights
filled with stars traversed by nomadic families. This is an ancient life-style
threatened by the prospect of the mining boom of Mongolia’s earthly fortunes.
Hendoo’s poetry is an elegant yet powerful vindication of his communal
worldviews rooted in nomadism and in his poem “The ruins and reflection”
he also recurs to metamorphosis to conceptualise the steppe as a human
body, which serves as a metaphor to project the resilient ecology of the
steppes : Have you died? You seem like a dry sea / But you are the fleshing
steppe / From your peaceful eyes / I know you have already forgot / Kublai
Khan’s sadness / And Togoontumur Khan’s shame / You are only but sunk
in sleep on the land / Your hair is bits of tiles / Your body is rocks
/ You are the troubled sea.
This poem is a good example of how humans perceive the
world through the body used as a reference, like much cognitive theory
suggests today, and that landscapes embody emotions and memories derived
from personal and interpersonal experience.
As cultural geographer Christopher Tilley suggests, “Knowledge
and metaphorical understanding of landscape is intimately bound up with
the experience of the human body in place, and in movement between places.
The significance of places in the landscapes is continually being woven
into the fabric of social life, and anchored to the topographies of the
landscape”.
Thus, if we read this blend as the interrelation of the
sensuous ingredients of both body and the geography of the steppes, the
perceived effect is one of pleasurable affinity between humans and land,
but also resilience and strength. The separation between body and environment
seems to disappear as the distinction between body and land is difficult
to discern. In other words, self and environment merge into a hybrid entity
where body and environment are cognitively and sensuously connected.
To sum up, if the earth is conceived as tissue-clothing,
the earth is seen as a potentially flexible entity to which the indigenous
body is fully adapted because both the body and the earth are perceived
as having the same shape. If readers know that a nomadic way of life requires
a perceptual attuning to the shapes of the physical world, it is easier
for them to understand the conceptualisation of earth as a body. But there
is also another interesting aspect in the poem, the auditory space that
readers enter through the interpellatory “Have you died”, which is
used to address the steppe as a humanised entity. As readers enter this
space, they may wish to elaborate its acousticity, the sonority of the
poet’s voice addressing the steppes in the open air, its resonance in
the sky as the wind blows….
This poetic technique asserts Indigenous land as a unique
entity replete with cultural meaning, against marketing and commodifying
criteria that strips off its centuries old significance. Finally, with
the Indigenous poetry of Walissu Youkan we travel to the hunter-gatherer
territories of the Atayal tribe in Taiwan. The poet is a well-known poet,
teacher and activist who has devoted his entire life to the protection
of the Taiwanese Aborigines' lifestyle against mass assimilation, racism,
environmental destruction and the commodification of their culture as object
of ethnic tourism.
About Atayal
1. Birth Prayer / The baby is about to be born / Come
quickly, come, my child / Come out and meet us / Grandpa has a little tribal
dagger ready / Waiting for the first animal of your hunt / Grandma gets
her weaving machine ready / Waiting to make the first fine clothes for
you / Here it comes, here is the baby / A pair of eagle's eyes, flashing
/ Limbs strong as leopard's / A bear's heart, the voice of a waterfall
/ Fine-grass-hair, a mountain body / A perfect baby / From the bottom of
the mother's soul / Formed an Atayal (841-43).
In this powerful, epic poem, the features of the new-born
babe are called into existence by images drawn from a hunter's habitat.
Similes align the baby with natural landscape and wild animals to which
its future is tied. As seen in the previous poems, conceptual blending
can help us understand the profound interrelation between Indigenous individuals,
community and environment as the new-born baby acquires and the natural
elements become one indissoluble entity: The distinct identity construction
works by image-identifications with objects in the wilds, including landscape,
plants, and animals. Language and biodiversity are thus tied as the conceptual
blend projects a particular way of occupying, engaging with and shaping
the natural environment which will nurture the baby’s cultural, physical
and spiritual life.
Cognitive Mapping V: Ecopoetics as counter-hegemony
The cognitive mapping opens up a potential space of shared
consciousness where readers access the writer’s sense of dislocation
through the poems’ conceptual and sensory information. This space is
crucial for the readers’ realisation of potentially shared concerns and
struggles, and opens the space of the political. In this sense, the common
empowering discourse must be based on the writers’ shared concern with
the loss of cultural and biological biodiversity underlying the poems’
sentient imagery.
The conceptual and sensory information of the poems can
be seen as a link between nature and culture as the metaphors are expressive
of worldviews that emerge from constant dialogue with the environment.
The importance of the cognitive mapping lies thus in the fact that the
biological and cultural diversity underpinning the sentient metaphors increase
the resilience of natural and cultural systems which operate like an autopoietic
feedback loop. It is thus crucial to articulate the poems’ imagery as
part of a larger network of resistance against the loss of cultural and
biological diversity. We could summarise Ernesto Laclau’s articulation
theory by representing the relation between local demand and global oppression
in a diagram where the oppressive form, whatever shape it takes, is separated
from the rest of society whereas the particular demands are represented
with a semi-circle that “makes their equivalential relation possible”
(Laclau, 2000: 304):
GC
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
D1
Ө ═ Ө
═ Ө ═ Ө ═
Ө ═ Ө ═ Ө
═ Ө ═ Ө
D1 D2
D3 D4
D5 D6
D7 D8
D9
In this diagram GC stands for the different manifestations
of global capitalism, separated from the rest of demands by a discontinuous
line as the interests of local demands and hegemonic power are not convergent
in a global-capitalist type of economy; however, the line is discontinuous
as local struggles are not immune to the effects of global capitalism.
The semi-circles D1…D9 for the particular demands, split between a bottom
semi-circle representing the particular Indigenous worldviews as seen in
the poems. The top semi-circle represents the common opposition to the
project of global capitalism. This leads to one of the particular demands
representing the whole chain as an empty signifier. For instance, the metaphors
of humanised nature seen in the three poems share an anti-system critique
against the commodification and exploitation of Indigenous land by corporate
capitalism.
Particularly, this anti-system critique appears as conceptual
and sensory information retrieved by readers during the reading process.
In other words, the readers’ journey through the textual
geographies enacts “dense interactions and emotional and affective
exchanges” that “are expressive of the continuing process of the formation
of collective identities” (Slater, 2004: 201) and contribute to the formation
of “[…] a counter -hegemonic globalisation from below that not only
challenges the neo-liberal doctrine of capitalist expansion and a resurgent
imperialism” (Slater, 2004: 221).
go back to Art
in
Society # 16 contents
|