XVIII. Review of… ‘Marsh-River-Raft-Feather’ by clarissa alvarez & petals
Written by: Ignatz Maria
Recently, scrolling along my twitter feed, I came across an article that grabbed my eye. Journalist Ed Yong tweeted;
I wrote about one of the wildest nature stories I've heard in years.
There's a community of giant sponges thriving on the peak of an underwater Arctic volcano, by devouring the ruins of an extinct ecosystem that died out 2000-3000 years ago.
In a usually desolate freezing ocean desert - one scientist said normally “maybe every 10 meters you find a worm, every 100 meters a sea cucumber, and every kilometer a sponge” - a teeming world of snails, crabs, worms, corals, clams, and starfish is thriving by feeding on the sponges. These sponges themselves flourish, living off the tubular systems created by worms to harvest volcanic chemicals while the volcano was still active. Though the volcano is long since inactive, the sponges can still feed off the tubes themselves.
Though I am fascinated by this lifeworld of relations between sponges and tubes and the motley of sea life that found a home there, some of Yong’s analogies are distinctly troubling. Describing the life of the sponges, for example, he writes;
They first settled on Karasik while the United States was still a British colony, and are older than both Baltimore and New Orleans.
The casualness of the term ‘settled’ here glosses over the violence behind the comparison, the colonisation of the ‘american’ continent and the ongoing mass death that describes. Yong cannot seem to resist this kind of easy comparison to a human history of the victors. Describing the concern that rising sea temperatures in the Arctic Ocean might be killing lifeworlds such as this faster than scientists can find them, he writes,
The climate is changing because humans have been burning fossil fuels, exploiting the dead remains of extinct ecosystems just like Karasik’s sponges are doing. And like the sponges, we cannot keep it up forever.
The comparison between the human oil industry and other forms of capitalist extractivism, and Karasik’s sponges, is undermined by the fact that one is contributing to killing the other. Yong seems only vaguely aware of the ‘irony’.
There is something very self-serious about these comparisons, something like an attempt to prove the ‘relevance’ of the sponges, the tube-cities, the dead volcanic world. Whilst part of the appeal of the sponges may be their relevance to economies of extraction and settler states, are they not also just, well, fun? In Marsh-River-Raft-Feather, clarissa alvarez and petals return to, if not the life of the Arctic sea, then waters and their worlds, to toy with desires that may not have productive ends.
relocation, not resolution which is to say, the marsh might move us beyond
all teleologic human subjective representation/volition
…
“forward” “backward” “sideways” “ahead” all become irrelevant positionings
river-reading is its own non position
words like waves sliver
all at once in all directions
…
the marsh requires rest s
“Interest” might simply be the intensity of resting
In-2
Ana Mendieta performing Tree of Life
The marsh, or ‘rivering’, for clari and petals, suggests a path away from instrumentalisations of ‘nature’ towards mere human ‘use’, but without falling into a similarly anthropocentric reification of ‘Nature’ as humanity’s other. An early page of the book features a sort of ‘subtitle’, in all caps, with a page to itself; THE ANCESTORS ARE NEITHER NATURE NOR EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY. The alternative to these pairings and shufflings between reifications of naturalised property are suggested by the forms of play undertaken by the book. There is a palpable lack of self-seriousness to the language;
O silica. O breccia.thank you .
O mica, thank you
of porcelainsilence. for
your icicle spark s of apricot pinks thanks copper, thanks pyrite partials thanks
salt . shukran glass; gracias, mil gracias . thank you . mwebale . thank
you all
for your scintillating clarity.
…
bubbles are
where water
dots heft
t-
hick
thin & tiny
dro-
p
adrizzle
Their invitation is that to take relation too seriously might make it another object, of study or of productive labour.
does the papyrus care to grasp the prying beetle
steep pickle?
no,
weighted, w/ stillness it relates
the mutuality of the marsh lets carry whatever wishes to be carried
A sense of playfulness pushes this beyond the place where relation itself might become reified as a theory or a statement of fact. The marsh is movement, informed by Black-indigenous ways of being-knowing, beyond analysis that might “desire to hold onto category”. These movements - bubblings, echos, murmurations, ripplings, shimmers - are clearly not reducible to language and its grammars, and Marsh-River-Raft-Feather delights in language as somewhere to play, rather than a communicative b/order. Play also informs the collaborative ethos that formed the work; this book is not the product of a self-authoritative, controlled authorial voice. Its disregard of uniformity in meter or length, in typeface or even in language, manifests a mischievousness to its poetics, more interested in multitudinous pleasures to be found (beaked, nibbled, crumbled, probed, crowed, crisped…) than the force of a compelling argument. The engagement with three different language especially visibilises a tendency manifest throughout the work, of what Edouard Glissant calls ‘opacity’, a refusal of unlimited availability that makes relation - not just extraction - possible.
Still from Stalker (1979), dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
In the brief preface to their collection, Not Vanishing, Chrystos wrote;
I am not the “Voice” of Native women, nor representative of Native women in general. I am not a “Spiritual Leader,” although many white women have tried to push me into that role. While I am deeply spiritual, to share this with strangers would be a violation. Our rituals, stories & religious practices have been stolen & abused, as has our land. I don’t publish work which would encourage this—so you will find no creation myths here.
The poems in Not Vanishing are beautiful and furious by turn, sometimes tender love letters, sometimes brutal accounts of homelessness and violence. But all are written under the pressure of a grasping knowledge that characterises colonialism, a surveillance and a demand for scrutability such that the world might be understood, and thus, controlled. Sylvia Wynter quotes Christopher Columbus; Totum navigabile - the whole thing is navigable. (p.28) Both Chrystos, and Marsh-River-Raft-Feather rest in pleasures outside, or bubbling beneath the surface, of this colonial navigation. It is no accident that this book contains some of the sexiest writing I have seen for a long time.
to enmarsh
might be
to rustle w/in
unbypassables
marsh rhythmi
ck propulsion
dint
bulge, bulb, b-
end
pend
consider clay’s synaptic hold
…
what happens collectively when we web, press, circle, dimple
& mesh into vacuo of each other?
& so, we could think of chirp erotics as uncontainable frequencies
or extensions of marsh flow -
marsh lingering assonance
a mutter of chording
like a polymutual/polyparallel vibraphonic mulling
to where music gathers itself
So much writing about sex is driven by a reactionary desirability, a spectacle dependent on a selective in/visibilisation of violence - the marsh provides an alternative to these spectacles. If, then, petals and clari do not write much about conventional sexual acts, their attention to reciprocity and sensation places them in a long history of writers resisting the self-identity of sexuality and genderism defined as a function of colonially imposed bodily dimorphisms. Theirs is a leisure without teleology and a kin without ethnography, gathering at the marsh.
I have never lived in a marsh, but I have spent a lot of time around water. I grew up in what was once a shrimping village by the Ribble estuary, literally named after the banks that held the river back from flooding the small cluster of houses and (now rapidly closing) shops, assembled around the local church. The rhythms between the river and the sea, if eroded by EU markets killing of local shrimping practice and the influx of commuter housing developments, are still remembered there. As a kid, I was told the story of Ralph’s Wife’s Lane, where on a clear night, you could supposedly see a lamp waiting where the lane faded into the shallow fields, the ghost of a woman who froze to death waiting for her (possibly drowned) husband to return from the sea. These are the ghosts of a life formed not only by the sea, its rhythms, its riverings, but also by its warnings, its threats. The embankment exists for a reason. But these dangers were part of forms of moving and living with the sea, not against it. This world is not being destroyed by flooding, but by capital. I wonder if the attention to leisure in Marsh-River-Raft-Feather might obscure other, more uneasy forms of relation and if, without this unease, the marsh might risk becoming another pure, innocent Nature.
But rivering, as clari and petals write it, is anything but exclusive, sealed off from other gatherings and relations. (“the marsh is an abundant porous modality beyond the civic / it bypasses & bursts thru all imbrications of the civic”.) Part of what is so compelling about Marsh-River-Raft-Feather is that it makes no stakes to its own positions, as if this were territory it were occupying, but offers the marsh as an invitation to play with, and to play in the sites in which you are already moving anyway. Reading and re-reading, I have found myself drifting, not just back to the Ribble Estuary, but to the many rivulets of the Mersey, running beneath and behind the streets of south Manchester, where I now live. The apprehension of my neighbourhood(s) appearing from these rivulets is not another map, but something else, a different kind of dance, not only up and down the long streets described by Engels two hundred years ago, linking owner to factory, but from street to street to scavenging fox, to soil to tree to bird - to the many people still making lives and loves between them and these.
expect only limitless river routes
infinite non-measurable ways to river dreams and desires
a rivering that clouds
a clouding that rivers
giving & giving & giving
Order your copy of Marsh-River-Raft-Feather here.
About the author:
Ignatz Maria is a trans writer and Communist lesbian.
She is currently working as a barista and a care worker
in the north of England, and at night, she dreams about
being a puppet.
