Opinion: Poetry and the Pits – Whose land is it anyway?

There may be no poetry in the pits but poetry can bring up what lies below: fear, greed, devastation

By Pramod K Nayar

One does not think of mines and quarries as the subject matter of poetry. But in the hands of poets from the formerly colonised nations, the mine and the subsurface become spaces that inscribe a history of racism and colonialism, and their continuing legacies.

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Whose land is it anyway? Hawaiian poet Mahealani Perez-Wendt writes:

Dug here, trenched there
tunneled here, siphoned there
————————————–
the sacred is harried in ungodly ways
ditches pipes channels
tunnels siphons flumes
aqueducts intakes funnels

The lines capture the transformation of a dug-up, wrenched out, siphoned land. What sticks out of the ground are apparatuses of extraction in Perez-Wendt’s description. These structures have their real interests below the surface: the oil. In the process, the sacrality of the land is lost due to the ‘ungodly ways’. The lines draw attention to very different world views: one view sees the land as providing resources, the other sees it as divine.

If Perez-Wendt suggests that the machines have taken over the land, Paul Lyngdoh speaks of alien control over it. Lyngdoh writing of the Khasi hills in ‘For Sale’ refers to the ‘lucre-laden earth’. In ‘Domiasiat’ (a place where uranium ore was discovered and now the site of major mining operations), Lyngdoh speaks of the ‘alien feet [that] scramble for a foothold’ on its ‘lucre-laden soil’.

The Native American poet Simon Ortiz points to an entirely different kind of takeover. In ‘Starting at the Bottom’, Ortiz talks of Native American men who seek jobs in the mines:

When Jackpile opened up
on Laguna land, some Laguna men got on alright,
at the bottom
…………………………………………………………………
The Acoma men went to the Ambrosia Lake mines
and always got stuck by the space
on the application forms
for previous mining experience

The Native Americans clearly had no experience of mining. To the natives, what lies below the surface is of no account: but it means the world to the white man. The lack of mining experience is Ortiz’s comment on the indigenous world view. But he is also pointing out that the land no longer belongs to the native: they have to fill up forms that have bureaucratised the land in favour of the white man. Ortiz does not stop here:

Almost thirty years later,
the Acoma men
were at the bottom
of the underground mines at Ambrosia Lake,
the Laguna men
were at the bottom of the open pit at Jackpile,
they were still training, gaining experience,
and working their way up.

The image of native people at the bottom points to both social injustice and environmental injustice.

Social and Environmental Injustice

Many poets make the point that while the natives knew their land, they did not delve into its depths to see what it could furnish. Ben Okri’s mining poems capture this dissonance in knowledge-making around the land.

Okri opens his ‘Convergence’ with an astounding image: ‘language from the mouths/screams from the earth’. Admittedly, this is anthropocentric, showing the earth as screaming with its mouth. But Okri merges the languages of the human and of the earth, and in the process the suffering of the non-living with that of the living. He proceeds to frighten us further: quarrying that has destroyed mountains and so the humans are ‘breathing in death’. ‘Mountains of gold’ have become ‘craters of dead stones’. Finally, Okri asks:

Have you seen the mountain
wastes of Tanzania where
they mine the earth
and fill it with dark fear?

Though one can see a mountain of wastes, one cannot see the fear inside the mines. Okri’s emphasis is on the mines and what is left behind – fear. Okri does not stop here. He writes:

The bauxite pulled from its earth
like golden teeth
could sprinkle paradise
from the red soil.
but the earth is burned
and mango trees lean out
from open mines

The ‘pulled’ from the earth, juxtaposed with ‘teeth’, conveys the violence of extraction. Materials are extracted from the earth with considerable effort, and what is extracted does not add to the place’s value: the red soil of the country is not beautified with the bauxite which is obviously sold elsewhere. The ‘open mines’ could very well be death traps, mouths awaiting prey/food, or exuding fear.

Capitalist exploitation of the land builds towering structures — fracking, drilling, mining machine that goes into the ground also reaches up into the sky, spewing polluting fumes

Violent imagery to describe the act of mining, which tears up/into the earth, is commonplace in this poetry. In Jeannette Armstrong’s ‘Rocks’, the speaker resets rocks in specific, ritual arrangements. She writes that she heard the ‘groan of earth’s rock changed / into tunnelings / shiftings and spewings’. What is inside the earth is pulled out, and what is on the outside is disturbed.

Up is Down, Down is Up

Capitalist exploitation of the land builds towering structures. Each fracking, drilling, mining machine that goes into the ground also reaches up into the sky, spewing polluting fumes if nothing else. In a poem in his collection Flood Song, Sherwin Bitsui writes:

A cloud became a skull and crashed to the earth above Black Mesa.
The cloud wanted to slip through the coal mines and unleash its horses.

Bitsui’s imagery transforms the cloud into a skull. But the cloud, says Bitsui, only wished to ‘slip through the coal mines’, that is, escape. It only wanted to rein in the ‘bulldozers’, a part, no doubt, of the mining operations, so that a ‘new birth cry’ would awaken the people.

Jennifer Elise Foerster’s ‘Leaving Tulsa’ speaks of a past when coyotes wandered about. She describes the various transformations in their lands: the bulldozing, the ‘flattening’ of the land into a parking lot, and the diminishing of the herd of buffalos.

She concludes the poem with the surface/depth, up/down tension like other poets. Three poignant images stand out: ‘Sunflowers stand in dense rows’ adjacent to the gravel pits, ‘telephone poles crook into the layered sky’, and the crow’s beak is broken by a windmill’s blade.

Now gravel pits are used to mine for aggregates such as gravel and sand, and the contrast between the pits and the sunflower is startling: the pit and the flower. The poles reach up to the sky, and the bird whose domain is the air, sustains an injury from a man-made object built to harness this air. The last lines of the poem return us to the surface: ‘when they see open land / they only know to take it’. The land is used to install structures such as the windmill that then affects the denizens of the air.

There may be no poetry in the pits but Ortiz, Bitsui and others show us that poetry can bring up what lies below: fear, greed, devastation.

(The author is Senior Professor of English and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and The English Association, UK)