Last Thursday (February 23rd), I had the pleasure of speaking at Boston University’s Humanities Forum and of being introduced by Ibram X. Kendi. I spoke about what science fiction author Octavia E. Butler calls “species insurance,” or ways of preserving humanity during times of crisis. I’m so grateful for the wonderful dialogue that followed with students, faculty, and staff members over two sessions. I’m sharing a slightly edited excerpt of the introduction to my talk here to continue the conversation with the community of Carrying Capacity.
(Harriet Tubman’s homelands. Eastern Shore, Chesapeake Bay, Maryland. Photo by and courtesy of Perri Meldon. Shown at the BU talk.)
I’m going to be sharing some new thinking, which is always a risk. I thank you in advance for listening. I’m sure that I’m not alone in this room when I say that I’ve been thinking much more about ecological issues and environmental threats over the past decade. Around the year 2010, soon after my third child was born, I began to think that my commitment to understanding the histories and struggles of Black and Indigenous people in what is now called the United States would be useless in the future if these populations – and all populations – lose the natural world that supports us. (And “lose” is too soft a way of saying this. A fuller, more accurate phrasing might be “damage” or “ruin” or “abandon” to the point that the earth and its creatures, including us, suffer irreparable harm.)
I thought then that I needed to expand my research and thinking into environmental history and environmental humanities, so I applied for a Mellon Foundation fellowship to “retrain,” went to Montana for a year to study with faculty and graduate students at Montana State University, and began to thread environmental questions and interpretations through my new work, starting with an urban history called The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits -- published in 2017 (which looked at the origins of the city as tied to geography, slavery, the fur trade in beaver skins, and the role of the river in structures of enslavement and resistance). The next book, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake – published in 2021 -- was about the history of enslaved Black women as a group and the precious sack passed down through a single female family line; it was also about environmental threats and how Black enslaved women of the past can offer us models for how to respond to present and future crises.
(Ashley’s Sack. Photo shown at the BU talk, courtesy of Middleton Place Foundation.)
Currently, I’m thinking about environmental storytelling – which I would define as the cultural project and writerly craft of interpreting and effectively narrativizing environmental histories, presents, and futures for public engagement and use. (See The Environmental Storytelling Studio at Brown – TESS, founded by Bathsheba Demuth, Kerri Arsenault, for more on this.)
One pathway into this environmental storytelling work for me has been tracing genealogies of Black women thinkers in the ecological space and conceptualizing and narrativizing their intellectual, creative, practical, and spiritual contributions toward survival. In other words, I want to unearth these lines of thought and bring them out into the light so that we can not only appreciate the breadth and depth of Black women’s and Afro-Native women’s intellectual histories, but also learn from the insights of populations that have faced the worst circumstances in U.S. history. My reasoning is that those who have confronted the worst on these lands may offer us the best sources of inspiration and sharpest tools for survival.
Along these lines, I have been thinking about how Black women have been nature writers for generations, going back to some of the earliest texts produced by formerly enslaved and free women in this country – like Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which interweaves nature as materiality and metaphor, and like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s poetry about Margaret Garner’s escape and recapture, which relies on natural symbolism (trees, wind, a frozen river) to translate the experience of a young enslaved woman running for her own life, and for the lives of her children. (For a recent article that touches on Harper’s representation of Garner, as well as on the Detroit River, see the academic Environmental History. My apologies for the paywall. Some readers will be able to access it through institutional library memberships.)
I have also been thinking about how Black women of the past have been dynamic actors within and in relation to the natural world. By this I mean they have been fully cognizant of the context and importance of nature and immersed in the study – even if self-taught – of human behavior as linked to non-human life, biological and chemical processes, physical laws, weather and climate, and so on -- such that we might call them ecologists and environmental activists of a particular kind – people acting with, in, and for their environments in line with their commitment to liberation struggles from race, gender, and caste-based oppression.
I am seeking to trace traditions of Black women’s ecological thought, speech, writing, and action as a means of harvesting hidden or little-noticed revelations that I hope can be fire and fodder for our urgent environmental thinking and resilience-building today.
I consider this environmental storytelling work to be a facet of, or a form of, "species insurance.” And I draw that phrase from a late, great Black environmental thinker and fantasy and science fiction writer, Octavia E. Butler. Butler was a visionary who knew decades ago that we need to tell gritty and gripping stories about the environment, our complex relationship with nature, and with one another as human beings to retain an orientation in reality (anchoring) and to chart out future directions (navigating). Women of color and Indigenous women, whose multiple structural vulnerabilities could make more visible the frailties of the larger society, should be central to these stories, Butler’s work suggests.
While in the midst of producing her Parable series of novels in the early 1990s about social and political collapse that now seem frighteningly prescient, Butler told Charlie Rose in an interview that the bold and bizarre actions and imaginings of her Black female characters were a form of “species insurance,” a mode of preserving humanity. In my use of Butler’s phrase, I want to extend its meaning to include not just humans, but all species on earth.
Today, our sense of environmental erosion, climate chaos, threats to societal life as we know it as well as to political gains (sometimes it feels like we’re rolling tape back to the 70s), and, really, just the overall bundled conundrum of our predicament -- can lead to feelings of anxiety, isolation, and paralysis. We are not wrong to react in this way. But we need to keep on going despite the uncertainty and fear – like Harriet Jacobs did; like Rose and Ashley, the mother and daughter who used this survival sack at the center of my book, All That She Carried, did; and like all captive women in history whose descendants carry their stories forward, have done. We need to keep on going not just for ourselves and our children and students, but also for generations into the future that we will never see.
To keep on going, we’ll have to ask difficult questions: Who will persevere? With which resilience ideas and tools? What will survive? Which Places? Whose memories and knowledge? What are the geographical locations, the spatial orientations, and the material realities most suited to supporting the relationships, communities, and networks that will endure? How will those relationships, communities and networks be built for change and resiliency? What risks will we need to take to protect life in the future – and if we are teachers or parents – what risks should we be preparing our students or children to imagine taking?
Applying this augmented notion of Butler’s “species insurance” – how visions, actions, and wild cultural formations can help to create buffers and safety nets amid turbulent change -- might be one way to begin addressing these questions at the heart of our shared dilemma.
Question 1 for you:
If you are open to it, I welcome your comments on a question that calls to you, personally, as you’re reading this. Which query happens to resonate with you, where you are, today?
Question 2 for you:
My inspirations for thinking through these questions are women like Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Octavia E. Butler. I invite you to share with us in the comments; who helps you to think about these questions?
Thanks for offering us these expansive questions, Tiya. My mind darted off in so many directions! It seems to have finally settled on Harriet Jacobs’ experience of hiding from her enslaver for seven long years. When I think of Harriet’s years of exile in her grandmother’s tiny attic, I imagine her as a kind of monk — someone who has disconnected from the world as they’ve known it and is imagining a new framework that doesn’t exist yet. Sometimes there’s strong spiritual power in this liminal state.
Her maternal grandmother and aunt make this refuge possible, supporting Harriet’s determination to maintain her identity as she choses and protect her children. While this isn’t freedom, it’s not slavery either. Even though it’s physically tough, she finds spiritual nourishment in her exile. Perhaps we can imagine Harriet’s hiding place as a sacred refuge?*
Harriet’s story presents us with essential questions. What physical comforts are we willing to give up to insure the survival of our true identity? (And those of our children?) How compelled are we to escape the human abuse of power in order to surrender to a life-affirming higher power?
I see this last question as connecting Harriet’s experiences back to the challenge of human-caused climate change. The same mental illness that propelled Harriet’s enslaver to stalk her so mercilessly for his own appetites is, at its root, the same mental illness that prays upon our society when we abuse our essential ecosystems. I wonder if the difference between Harriet’s experience and our own might be only a matter of scale?
*For more about this, see Francine L. Allen’s intriguing essay, “Examining the Theological Import of Hiding Places in Exodus and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”
Thank you so much for this, Tiya. Like you and so many other people, my activism and art projects have revolved a lot around ecology the past few years. As I was thinking about this post, I thought about a group I came across in my research called Diving With A Purpose. This is their About Us:
“We are dedicated to the conservation and protection of submerged heritage resources by providing education, training, certification and field experience to adults and youth in the fields of maritime archaeology and ocean conservation. Our special focus is the protection, documentation and interpretation of African slave trade shipwrecks and the maritime history and culture of African Americans.”
They’ve done extremely important (and athletically impressive!) historical work on shipwrecks in the Middle Passage, and they also provide education and training to young people, who share their stories in blog posts about what they’ve learned and projects they’ve worked on. One project that especially inspired me was a workshop in which the kids constructed beautiful coral trees and then planted them strategically underwater to preserve and encourage biodiversity. I love the hybrid nature of this work: aspects of traditional academic study and writing are incorporated into a collective, intergenerational, and multispecies process of literal and imaginative world-building.
I came to this blog post thinking of a new project of mine that is an attempt to bring my politics and my poetry closer together. Despite being an activist, I sometimes find the language of politics to be crude and stultifying, I strongly dislike a lot of what passes for political art, and for some reason—this can’t just be me, can it?—I often feel the need to filter my political thinking among certain intellectual types because I am worried it will make me sound unrefined. This bias led me to write poetry that was fun but that I think was too subjective and obscure for others to enjoy. These days, I want to find out how to reconcile my love of good writing with my commitment to participating materially in the creation of new worlds and the protection of beautiful ones that already exist—and also to write something that people actually want to read!
I’ve been seeking out writers who can show me the way, and the one who stands out among the rest is the Canadian poet Dionne Brand. I knew about her through Christina Sharpe’s work but hadn’t read her until I listened to an interview with her on a podcast by a friend of mine called Millennials Are Killing Capitalism. Her reading of an excerpt of her recent long poem about COVID was both devastating and a massive relief, because she found out how to say something I didn't know I had needed someone to say for three years. Also, I found it touching and refreshing that someone of her stature was willing to identify as a communist with overt revolutionary commitments. It seems to me that even many radical intellectuals stay away from that kind of talk, sometimes out of (often justified) fear of repression, but also, I think, because concepts like revolution and communism haven’t recovered from the “end of history” declared in the 90s, even on the left, and it remains a mark of maturity, at least in some circles, to discard positive and systematic postcapitalist imaginaries and to limit oneself to critique and reform.
While Butler may not have been as much as a capital-A activist as Brand, I love her stories because they carry elements of expansionary imagination precisely at a historical moment (the 80s and 90s) when, around the world, hope for revolutionary alternatives to capitalism was being violently and decisively foreclosed. Good political organizing does this, but so does good art, as do the countless improvisations and experiments in the daily lives of oppressed people, whether or not anyone ever thinks to dignify them with the (I think unnecessary) label of activist. I’ve been devouring a new collection of Brand’s poetry from Duke UP, which carries submerged hopes and histories of revolution and revolutionary art without making any apologies for it, sometimes in an overtly political register, which I appreciate, but also in ways that honor the lush infinity of impressions and encounters that, in making and remaking our world, necessarily exceed the bounds of the political. Like the people you write about, it illuminates a path for me that I didn’t know existed, and it is absolutely precious.