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Tag: nature

  • Someone else’s words in your mouth

    Daisy Johnson investigates how our nature is shaped by language.

     

    There are a few things I would like you to imagine. Are you ready? Let’s begin.

     

    You are a linguist working at a university. You are contacted by the US army and asked to come help them. When you arrive at the location you discover that aliens have landed and you are being tasked with finding a way to communicate with them. Slowly you begin deciphering their language, which appears as a series of intricate circles. You discover that the alien language changes the perception of time, enabling a person to see the future, that the more you learn the more you have this ability.[1]

     

    You are an actor named Amy Adams. You have been acting for a long time and played many roles. You begin to feel that the only words that belong to you are borrowed ones, written in scripts, handed to you by people expecting you to take the words on as your own. You worry that when you open your mouth at home or in a restaurant the words that come out are really stolen. You begin to feel as if the life you are living does not belong to you. The impostor syndrome is enormous, hard to ignore. One day you do not recognise your husband. You begin to believe that by being an actor you have fated yourself to a life of being someone you are not. You become easily annoyed, snap at your children, drive through red lights.

    You think of a character you once played: a linguist who discovered that our language determines our nature.

     

    You are a character called Gretel in a book called Everything Under. You live with your mother on a boat moored in a wild part of the river. There are only the two of you. You play scrabble, make up strange games, create odd rituals to fill your days. Your mother invents a language just for the both of you. It is a language made from the sound of the water on the banks and the noises you use to comfort yourself. You grow up with this language tangling around your aching limbs, filling your throat.

     

    You are an author named Daisy Johnson. Your novel, Everything Under, was published a few days ago, your second novel is out on submission. You are trying to think what to write next. You move furniture around, bake loaves of bread, fill the house with pots of cress that grow so fast you can almost see them moving. You read other people you think will help you and panic about money. You write notes all over the house. Sometimes you wake up at night and find you are wandering the rooms of your house, looking for something, looking for something. Looking for what? You become convinced that this lost searching in the midst of your dreams has come from being a writer for a long time. From being a writer since you were ten or eleven. Looking for words/ looking for good sentences/ looking for other writers who could tell you how to find the rest. You are never quite content/ always looking to the next thing/ always a little unsettled. This sleeping badly has been happening for nearly ten years. Once – in your parents’ house – you had tried to tear the window open in the night. To do what? To throw yourself out?

     

    You are a linguist named Daniel Everett. You travel to visit a tribe called the Pirahã in the Amazon. There is too much to say about them. Conversations can be whistled or hummed. They do not have the words for numbers in their language, only for amounts. Time works differently in their language. The tribe asks you to teach them how to count but, after a year, it becomes clear this will be difficult. It will be nearly impossible. They have never needed to count and so have neither the ability nor the language to do so. [2]

     

    You are a woman called Gretel who was once a girl who lived on the river with her mother. You are looking for your long-lost mother. You are a linguist and obsessed with words and language. You think about language more than twenty times a day. You remember when you were a child who realised that no one else knew the language your mother was teaching you. You wonder what she meant by doing this. You wonder if she understood the harm she was doing by teaching you a language that would ostracise you from the world. You’re a loner/ a recluse.

    You begin to believe that it is the language you grew up with that has made this your nature.

     

    In this imagining of yourself you speak English and it is 2018 and you identify as female. The world seems to be caving in around you, almost apocalyptic. You begin to notice words more than you have done before. You start to listen to the words you are called and that you and your friends call one another: slut, hussy, slag, bitch. You go to a friend’s house and walk home with your keys between your fingers, you are uncertain, constantly a little on edge. You feel how this language has grown with you/ around you/ tangled up with you. You sometimes imagine a place where the words for girl are: good/brave/strong. And the words for boy are: soft/kind/gentle. You do not know what we would look like in that world.

     

    You are reading an essay. The essay is about how the language we use and grow up with can change our very nature. Perhaps your family had a cat that brought in dead animals and you all said that it was the cat’s nature and perhaps you found yourself using the same terminology when it came to a philandering man or a selfish woman, an aggressive group of people. You think of the binaries you learnt when you were a child. Black/white, dark/light, good/evil, heaven/hell, male/female. You think of the competitiveness that is bone deep inside. You do better/be better/make more. You think of all the words you have read today. Are you a greedy reader? The advertisements on the bus/ the back of the cereal box/ the newspaper you found on a train/ the messages on your phone/ the emails/ the book you carry with you.

     

    You feel as if the essay is already decaying around you. The white spaces seem enormous, the words       spaced                         out. You are feeling unsure and a little nervous. What a time to live in.

     

    You are wearing someone else’s shoes.

     

    Their words burrow into your cheeks, fill your throat. You try to whistle the things you want to say. What do you want to say?

    What do you want to say today?

     

     

    [1] Arrival (2016), directed by Denis Villeneuve.

    [2] Don’t sleep, there are snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle by Daniel Everett (Profile Books, 2009)

    Daisy Johnson was born in 1990. Her debut short story collection, Fen, was published by Cape and in the US by Graywolf. Her novel, Everything Under (Jonathan Cape), was published earlier this year, and is longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She was the winner of the AM Heath Prize and the Harper’s Bazaar short story prize. She has been longlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Prize and the New Angle Prize.

    Photo credit: Pollyanna Johnson

  • Nature and control

    Jeremy Tiang on how nature – from gardens to sexuality, from supertrees to freedom of speech – is kept in check in Singapore.

    I should say at the outset that being a product of my surroundings, I am not particularly in tune with the natural world. I have always lived in extremely built-up cities where I can get everywhere on foot or by public transport, and I’m never more than ten minutes from someone who will sell me coffee. I grew up in Singapore, which is probably currently most familiar to non-Singaporeans as the backdrop for the Trump-Kim summit and the glitzily aspirational Crazy Rich Asians, as well as in images featuring the infinity pool at the top of Marina Bay Sands, the annual Grand Prix, and the science-fictiony supertrees  rising luridly against the sky.

    If you don’t already know what the supertrees look like, I’m not sure I can do them justice, but basically they’re concrete-and-steel vaguely tree-shaped structures with skeletal branches, up to fifty metres tall and often dramatically lit in photographs. These are part of Gardens by the Bay, a seven-year-old park that, according to its website, ‘presents the plant kingdom in a whole new way.’ The term ‘park’ may be misleading, because while there are some green spaces, the most eye-catching elements, apart from the supertrees (which look like they were designed by someone who found triffids insufficiently sinister), are two vast, domed conservatories, both filled with flora not native to Singapore. They literally took all the trees, and put them in a tree museum, and charged the people… well, a good deal more than a dollar and a half just to see ’em. Even the land the Gardens are built on is artificial, reclaimed from the sea with soil from neighbouring countries. (An Indonesian friend likes to joke, ‘My country used to have 13,400 islands, but now we only have 13,000 because Singapore bought the rest.’)

    This instinct to enclose and label the environment was formalised in 1963, when then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew planted a mempat tree with his own hands . (It lasted a decade before having to make way for roadworks.) The “Garden City” initiative was launched in 1967, and updated to “City in a Garden” in 1998 , umbrella titles for a plethora of programmes, including an annual tree-planting day (the first Sunday in November), and orchid-breeding—hybrids are named after VIPs on state visits, though regular folk can also buy naming rights for upward of $3,000, and have their very own flower alongside the likes of the Dendrobium Margaret Thatcher.

    When a new space opens up, the immediate impulse is enclosure.

    In 2016, when a 15-mile stretch of railway track from downtown Singapore to Malaysia was decommissioned, the Urban Renewal Authority announced plans to turn it into a ‘Green Corridor’, with features including ‘rock-climbing caves and urban farms’. Writer Yu-Mei Balasingamchow set out to walk the length of the tracks before the land was transformed, and found it delightful just as it is. Yet in a Singaporean context, this felt like a radical idea—that a space could be sufficient in itself, without needing to be processed and commodified; that so much of government planning, which ‘caters to the idea of an urban population that needs to be entertained and coddled’, stultifies the imagination and prevents us from appreciating our surroundings as they are.

    I don’t want to make Singapore sound like an urban hellscape—much of it is perfectly pleasant, and of course difficult decisions need to be made when land is scarce. Nor do I want to suggest that nature is completely disregarded—National Parks does some sterling work here, with programmes such as its biodiversity database. Besides, while the lived environment is generally manicured to within an inch of its lives, the island as a whole has a tendency to wildness—plants grow fast in a tropical climate. But, as Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing point out in Paramilitary Gardening, ‘[t]he landscapers are in charge, here. And in a very muscular way. This city-state has quite literally been hacked from voracious equatorial forest; its geo-body has been “reclaimed” from the sea.’

    In any case, this corralling of nature didn’t start with Independence. The British left a number of elegant green spaces, including the Botanic Gardens, which was run by Kew-trained botanists who meticulously turned it into a site ‘where the colonial authorities attempted to assert their power over nature itself,’ in the words of Joanne Leow.

    These authorities took much the same approach to their human subjects, imposing a legal code based on English common law.

    One item, a law prohibiting ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature’, is similar to the ones they left India, Jamaica, Myanmar, Bangladesh and other countries, down to the Section number: 377. Even after Section 377 was altered in Singapore, the specific prohibition against homosexuality, 377A, was retained. Gay sex is still technically illegal in Singapore, and while practitioners are no longer prosecuted, the law sanctions discrimination against them in a myriad of ways. This feels like part of the same impulse that drives much of Singapore’s urban planning: Nature is presented as sacrosanct (you will only couple as nature intended), but simultaneously as something to be rigorously managed (the state granting itself the ability to dictate whether your desires are ‘natural’ or otherwise).

    Human nature is, in general, kept strictly in check here.

    Protest is strictly policed, with public demonstrations only permitted in one location (a park, of course—and even then, only with a permit). Our Public Order Act defines ‘assembly’ to include ‘a demonstration by a person alone’, and ‘procession’ to include ‘a march by a person alone’, so even individuals are not free to express dissent in public except within narrow state-sanctioned parameters. Like our plant life, human beings must be strictly cultivated and kept within bounds, rather than allowed to flourish at will .

    There are obviously plenty of people happy with this state of affairs—the ruling party has won every election since Independence, and at the last one increased its vote share to a whisker short of 70%. And the trade-off is, perhaps, fair enough—rigid boundaries in return for growth and stability, the stifling but safe enclosure of a hothouse instead of the exuberance of wilderness. Still, I wish there were a little more breathing space. Many of the borders that contain us are somewhat nebulous, such as the so-called OB Markers (for ‘out-of-bounds’ – a golfing term) that prohibit certain topics from public discourse, the trouble being that these are not laid out clearly anywhere, and seem to frequently shift, so people are often left censoring themselves to be on the safe side. And this feels like the most sinister aspect of all this—that this control has become self-imposed.

    For the last ten years, an annual rally called Pink Dot has taken place at Hong Lim Park—the aforementioned sole designated site of protest—in support of LGBTQ rights. The theme this year was ‘We are ready’, a reference to the frequent declarations by government ministers that Singapore is ‘not ready’ for changes such as the abolition of 377A. Increasingly, it feels like there are cracks appearing in the surrounding walls, and we could let in a little wildness without losing ourselves.

     

    Jeremy Tiang is the author of State of Emergency (2017, finalist for the 2016 Epigram Books Fiction Prize, winner of the Singapore Literature Prize 2018) and It Never Rains on National Day (2015, shortlisted for the 2016 Singapore Literature Prize). He won the Golden Point Award for Fiction in 2009 for his story “Trondheim”. He also writes and translates plays, including A Dream of Red Pavilions, The Last Days of Limehouse, A Son Soon by Xu Nuo, and Floating Bones by Quah Sy Ren and Han Lao Da. Tiang has translated more than ten books from the Chinese—including novels by Chan Ho-Kei, Zhang Yueran, Yeng Pway Ngon and Su Wei-chen—and has received an NEA Literary Translation Fellowship, a PEN/Heim Translation Grant, and a People’s Literature Award Mao-Tai Cup. He currently lives in Brooklyn.

    Photo credit: Oliver Rockwell

  • Nature bubbling out: a conversation with Mahvash Sabet

    We spoke to poet Mahvash Sabet about her connection to nature, writing poetry while in prison, and why, after all, life is beautiful.

    Hello Again

    Last night, in the midst of unsettled darkness,
    I found myself at the axis of the earth for a moment,
    holding it taut between my outstretched arms.
    And as I struggled to keep those frozen poles apart,
    I saw I could prepare these icy limbs
    and melt them wondrously between my two hot palms.
    So there I stood on the summit of the loftiest peak:
    a simple woman, glowing with love again,
    ready to salute the world once more.

    – Mahvash Sabat

    Adapted from the Persian by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani. Based on translations by Violette and Ali Nakhjavani.

    You spent nearly ten year in prison in Iran for your faith and your work on behalf of the Bahá’í community, during which time you wrote remarkable poetry. While I understand that you had written some poems before I believe this was your first collection?

    I always loved poetry and literature from early childhood. Often my thoughts were actually poetic in nature, I would use poetry in my thoughts. But I never had time to actually sit down and write poetry.

    I want to say something that probably isn’t going to be very beneficial to me but I’ve always had an internal clash or struggle or fight with poetry. I always resisted poetry. My work was bureaucratic, in an office, so whenever I would write – my work involved writing a lot of letters – I would look at my written work and I would say, ‘Oh this looks like a piece of poetry’. I would just rip it apart, throw it away and think, ‘I need to work harder and write something more proper’. I would resist and fight poetry.

    One theme that really stands out for us in your poetry is nature and your love of nature. What I find very interesting is the contrast between the environment you were in, where you had no access to nature, and how your love of nature totally shines through in your poetry. Was this a conscious decision and a way of maintaining a connection with the outside world? Where did it come from?

    I never consciously make a decision about what to say in a poem: the poem itself says itself. So the poem happens. It doesn’t happen because I have decided that it should happen. It wasn’t a conscious decision to write about nature. The nature just bubbled out.

    I know that nature is always part and parcel of poetry. But I want to add that for our poets – the classical Persian poets – nature has almost been an external thing, almost to the point of being lifeless, ornamental, outside.

    For me this wasn’t the case. For me, nature was something that was completely transfused inside me. It wasn’t an external thing. It was part of my spiritual being.

    For me, life means beauty, life is a flower, life is meadows, beauty is meadows, life means steadfastness, steadfastness is like a moment.

    Bahiyyih Nakjhavani [who adapted Prison Poems into English] has described your poetry as ‘a way of re-imagining the natural world’. Does that speak to you? Is that the relationship you feel with your poetry?

    I see in my life the direct relationship between nature and the passage of life, the story of life. I wrote in one of my poems – even though I was not in nature, I was not in a place surrounded by nature – that when they imprisoned me, when they surrounded me with walls, I actually began to destroy these walls and break them down.

    You mentioned the tradition of classical Persian poetry and how nature in it is almost artificial. I was wondering if there are contemporary poets or more recent poets or writers who you feel have written about nature in a way that is alive, and that corresponds to what nature actually is?

    The one that comes to my mind is the famous poet Sohrab Sepehri. When Sohrab Sepehri talks about his inner life, his inner being he connects it not just with the nature but with the outside world and with the outer world. About the rest, I am not so sure.

    I want to give you an example of one of my poems. ‘I will build a house up high on the mountains of Alborz’. Alborz is a very famous mountain range in Iran. The prison that I was in was hidden underground, under this mountain, inside this mountain. In my poem I am expressing a wish, a yearning, a desire, to build a house on the summit of Alborz. I do not wish to be buried in the depths of the underground. I am describing what the house will look like. This house is beautiful, it’s on the mountain, it’s going to be filled with flowers and lilies. I am describing how this house is out there in nature, on this mountain.

    In the heart, the dead heart of this city, this dead city, [the prison], everybody is talking with words that are full of apathy and grief. There is a place in the poem where I say ‘I want to find another language. A language full of flowers, the blossoms of love’. That these words would have meanings that everyone would understand – like the deep understanding that comes from gazing into someone’s eyes.

    My meaning was to express that while in prison – in a very cold and desolate and dark place – the beauty of this world represented by nature was always boiling inside me.

    Have you continued to write poetry since your release?

    I’ve done a few very important things. I needed to actually gather together all the different bits and pieces [of my poetry], pull them together and collate them. I’m now working on pulling together the second volume that will soon be published in Persian. So that was an important thing that I was busy with.

    I think that as I pull them all together it will make up probably four other volumes. So I have a lot of work ahead. Because I wrote these poems in prison and I somehow found a way to get them out of prison, I never actually had the opportunity to review them, to look at them in any way, shape or form.

    Fellow poet and PEN Pinter winner Michael Longley chose to share the 2017 PEN Pinter Prize with you last year and in his acceptance speech described you as ‘a lyrical poet who sings the beauty of the world.’ In the world today which is – let’s be honest – a total mess, I think many of us really need reminding of the beauty of the world that Michael describes, and I wonder what role you think poetry can play in bringing those stories to life, in reminding us of that beauty, and to not take it for granted.

    In contrast with all this, I actually believe the world is still very beautiful. And this world will continue to be beautiful. And in my own way I’m trying to actually show the real beauty of this world. I think many of us need to do this because there are many people in the world that do not want to see the beauty of this world. They are the ones who most need to see it.

     

    Lights Out

    Weary but wakeful, feverish but still
    fixed on the evasive bulb that winks on the wall,
    thinking surely it’s time for lights out,
    longing for darkness, for the total black-out.

    Trapped in distress, caught in this bad dream,
    the dust under my feet untouchable as shame,
    flat on the cold ground, a span for a bed,
    lying side by side, with a blanket on my head.

    And the female guards shift, keeping vigil till dawn,
    eyes moving everywhere, watching everyone,
    sounds of the rosary, the round of muttered words,
    fish lips moving, the glance of a preying bird.

    Till another hour passes in friendly chat,
    in soft talk of secrets or a sudden spat,
    with some snoring, others wheezing
    some whispering, rustling, sneezing –
    filled the space with coughs and groans,
    suffocated sobs, incessant moans –
    You can’t see the sorrow after lights out.
    I long for the dark, total black-out.

    – Mahvash Sabat

    Adapted from the Persian by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani. Based on translations by Violette and Ali Nakhjavani.

     

    Teacher and poet Mahvash Sabet was one of a group of seven Bahá’í leaders known as the ‘Yaran-i-Iran’ – ‘Friends of Iran’ – detained in 2008 for their faith and activities related to running the affairs of the Bahá’í community in Iran. On 18 September 2017, Sabet was the first of the group to be released from prison, having served almost a decade in detention. Sabet began writing poetry in prison and a collection of her prison poems, adapted from Persian by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, was published in the UK in April 2013 (George Ronald Publisher). Sabet was named 2017 International Writer of Courage by poet Michael Longley at the PEN Pinter Prize ceremony at the British Library.

    We would like to thank Bahiyyih Nakhjavani for facilitating this interview.

    Interview by Cat Lucas and Theodora Danek.

  • Editorial: nature and its absence

    Editorial: nature and its absence

    What do you think about when you think about nature? Weeds? Mountains? The sea? Do you think about its absence, or perceived absence, in cities? Or do you ponder human nature, like Petrarch was moved to do when he climbed Mount Ventoux? In this issue of PEN Transmissions, we track some of those thoughts – though, alas, no Renaissance philosophers.

    We came to think about nature and its absence when we read Iranian poet Mahvash Sabet‘s extraordinary poetry, steeped in reflections on the natural world and written in prison, where she herself had no access to it. What is our relationship with nature? How can we live without it? You can find our conversation about poetry, beauty, prison and flowers here.

    Like Mahvash, Luljeta Lleshanaku is a poet with nature on her mind. Growing up in a small, ‘wild’ town in Albania, at that time a repressive Communist regime, the natural world was more reliable than many other things. After all, as Luljeta says, ‘bees don’t betray you. Nature never betrays you.’

    But nature is more than just trees, bees, snow and wind – especially when humans get involved. Jeremy Tiang reflects on Singapore and its impulse to control both human nature and the natural world, from supertrees to sexuality, and wonders if the country is ready to ‘let in a little wildness’.

    Finally, Daisy Johnson (whose novel Everything Under is longlisted for the Man Booker Prize) dives into how language shapes our nature, how we are changed by the words we use. Daisy wins a special Transmissions award by referring to a perfect film in her piece. Find out which one, here.

    I hope you enjoy this issue of PEN Transmissions. Let me end by quoting  from an Iris Murdoch novel that I often think about, where an Australian teenager visits England for the first time: He was depressed by the countryside which they all thought so pretty, and constantly exclaimed about instead of taking it for granted.

    – Theodora Danek, Writers in Translation Programme Manager, English PEN

  • Little voices

    Luljeta Lleshanaku remembers how growing up in a small town in Albania shaped her understanding of nature

    ‘Never mind what the TV says! The weather is getting worse, my bones don’t lie!’ That was one of the expressions I’d hear hundreds of times in my childhood. And it was true: technology left room for error, but not one’s bones. Thanks to a coexistence that dates back thousands of years, humans have developed an understanding for nature.

                I grew up in a small mountain town of epic winters with heavy snow, blinding lightning and strong winds, nearly mystical, blasting from the north. In the bedroom, you could hear the snap and crackle of beech wood burning in the stove — the perfect atmosphere for reading Dickens, Tolstoy, John Galsworthy or for listening illegally to news from the free world, such as the BBC, or the Voice of America. When the first snow would begin to fall, I remember pressing myself against the window panes, indifferent to the adults’ anxious conversations. I remember the yellow raincoat of the woodsman and the mules’ silken gaze, bringing winter’s firewood into the yard. I remember the worn out clothes hanging on the line to dry: dresses, shirts, sweaters, trousers — frozen in the cold. And just like that, frozen, they acquired a shape, personality, soul, which you had to treat carefully so they wouldn’t break in your hands.

    After a long and tiring winter, summer was no longer just another season, but a well-deserved reward. During the summer, people clustered in yards, under the shades of the trees, chatting, planting flowers, picking fruit, painting their thresholds and garden walls with lime wash — a hushed symbol of peace and survival. People’s yards were for weddings; large cauldrons to distill raki. I remember the shared rituals of picking white mulberry fruit, followed by the perfume of pekmez preparations — small gestures which brought people closer together than any other social event. But I also remember the gurgling of water from the taps; there is no other sound more exciting than that of water in those dry summers.

    I remember the tomato garden in the backyard; I used to hide there for hours on end, at times to meditate by myself, and other times with my girlfriends. Where else would the taboo conversations of pubescent girls take place except amidst the sweet, intriguing aroma of half-ripe tomatoes?

    I remember the swallow’s nest under the roof; we protected it as something precious during the whole year, because the swallows could cross the borders and go where we couldn’t. It was like we were trying to taste a bit of freedom through them.

    One of the reasons why I befriended my cousin Hamit, sixty years older than me, was his unusual yard, large, surrounded by high walls, covered in grass, with the two sheep he kept hidden there, breaking the Communist rules against private property. I can still smell the burnt sheep milk from the stove, still hear the chirping crickets in the backyard where the family graves lay, and will never forget the first English lessons I received from him, there under the pergola, near the well. He had suffered in a political prison camp for twenty years, and into his subsequent loneliness he allowed only a child and the two sheep – the only creatures he trusted. Years later I met another political prisoner, Musa, a beekeeper. ‘Bees saved my life! It’s easier to find a common language with bees than it is with people!’ he used to say.

    And of course, bees don’t surveil you, bees don’t betray you. Nature never betrays you.

    My grandfather had bought endless land, had built farms, but although he lost them all in a day because of communist reforms, his connection to nature, to the land, stayed the same. When he lost his land, he grew grapes against the wall. He considered his deal with nature an ‘honest challenge, without tricks and wangles; an affair of honor,’ as I’ve written in one of my poems.

    Certainly, it’s in our nature to mystify the past. I admit it, it’s impossible to read about my childhood memories stripped of nostalgia. But, on the other hand, it’s a fact that including images such as stars, birches, roses, mourning doves, brooks, or sheep in poetry today is like writing perfumed love letters: out of fashion. All those nature elements that once worked as aesthetic references now create a borrowed sentimentality, artificiality, since nature and our connection to it is no longer the same.

    Due to global warming, snow is now rare in my old town, but even when it snows, people prefer to turn their backs on it and watch a film on their screens instead. And why not? Today, virtually and within a few seconds, you can visit ski resorts in the Austrian Alps, travel to Africa or the Grand Canyon in the U. S. Virtual nature, virtual life. Any one of us may write a whole novel about a world we’ve never known or stepped foot in, guided by a Google search. But I wonder how those little towns Joyce Carol Oates describes in her novels would appear to us if she hadn’t touched them, hadn’t sucked in their sadness. Doesn’t the vitality of her descriptions depend precisely on the manner in which people and nature become witnesses to one another’s existence?

    An intense relationship with the environment, nature, as either resistance or adoption to it, defines our motifs, our choices, and especially who we are. In this context, perhaps the most interesting definition of nature’s impact on man comes to us from Frank Wild, the hero of five expeditions to the South Pole (and the protagonist of the poem ‘Homo Antarcticus’ in my book, Negative Space) who says: ‘Once wedded to Nature there is no divorce – separate her you may and hide yourself amongst the flesh-pots of London, but the wild will keep calling and calling forever in your ears. You cannot escape the “little voices”.’

    When you learn to understand nature in its complexity, to feel each of its vibrations, perhaps you gain a different perspective, a tenderness, a different approach to human beings themselves.

     

    Luljeta Lleshanaku is an Albanian poet. She was a fellow of the IWP in Iowa and then graduated with an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She has worked as a journalist, television author, university lecturer, and researcher. She is the author of eight poetry collections published in her language and twelve books published in other countries. She has received numerous awards. Her latest collection Negative Space, translated by Ani Gjika, was published by Bloodaxe in the UK and New Directions in the US.