I’m sure that you, like me, are happy to be nearing the end of 2020. The new year and the promise it holds between Joe Biden’s inauguration and several COVID-19 vaccines can’t come fast enough. The calendar flip always brings with it a chance to release the old and start again. Thinking about the possibilities and optimism of this moment has taken me to dg nanouk okpik’s poem “Warming,” and Marge Piercy’s utopian novel Woman on the Edge of Time. Along with that optimism also come words of caution – they present the future to us as hopeful but implore us to take heed of present instabilities and dangers.
Warming by dg nanouk okpik.
“Warming” was published in okpik’s 2012 book, Corpse Whale and is set in the far north of Alaska on glacial ice so it feels like apt reading for the beginning of winter. The poem is first and foremost about creation and change. This theme is specifically wrapped up with female/woman, and most lines begin with a creative act: making a bladder bag, chain stitching a skin, sewing badger hair, mapping the sky, constructing a hole. There is also the creation/conception of a child, “She/I eat/s club root and white clover to strengthen her/my silver body to bear a child.” The poem moves between different spheres of creation from the individual to the planet; in the last line the earth itself is creating and changing, “Because the earth is molding, burning, laughing, and purging its crust.”
In episode #83 of Close Talking, Jack and Connor spend some time talking about the poem through the lens of climate change despite it not being the poem’s main focus. As they both point out, we need to reckon with the damaging effect humans have wreaked upon the earth, but ultimately the earth “will shake off its crust of humanity” and spin on.
What I find amazing about this poem is how it embodies both the concrete and the metaphysical simultaneously. The poem is on one level specific and grounded describing the creative acts of the speaker many of which involve the earth itself: “She/I construct/s a hole on the surface of a glacier formed by melting particles”. This concreteness is folded in with the metaphysical; the way the poem moves outward from the surface of the glacier to the “earth’s axis on rotation”, then beyond earth, “to make the steps windward, toward the limits of woman.”
And then there is the subject of the poem, “She/I”, a linking of two individuals, or perhaps a nod to multiple spaces occupied by one individual. Either way, okpik fuses these two, in the same way a knit or purl stitch links to another and eventually becomes something bigger, the sum of many small connections.
In the episode, Connor notes okpik’s own words on her poetry from New Poets of Native Nations. She writes,
“It is as if there is a storyteller from 1,009,790 million years ago on the right side of me, and one on the left from 134 years in the future, and then me in the middle. Inupiaq storytellers have long histories and should be honored, revered, respected, and accounted for. Like I said these are not my poems to own; they are the multi-universes.”
Describing her position this way, she is one of many links among her people, along a timeline. ‘Multi-universe’ is infused with possibility, multiple ways of being and existing, as echoed in her She/I subject. This, the metaphysical aspects, and the female/woman focus can also be seen in Woman on the Edge of Time.
Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) by Marge Piercy.
The protagonist, Connie, living in 1970s Spanish Harlem in New York, exists on the edges of society, marginalized by her social and economic status as a poor Mexican-American woman, incarcerated in a mental hospital. Connie also exists on the edge of time as the title suggests; as a ‘receiver’, Connie’s mind is especially open to others, and she is able to communicate with Luciente, who is from the future, the year 2137. “Your mind is unusual. You’re what we call a catcher, a receptive” (p. 41). As with the poem, Connie is both concrete and metaphysical; she is physically tethered to her ward in New York, but can time travel to experience Luciente’s world and learn from it. It’s unclear if Luciente is a figment of Connie’s imagination; “We are in contact. You are not hallucinating. Whether anyone else can see me, I’m not sure” (p. 52). As characters they meld into Connie/Luciente, Luciente only appearing with Connie throughout the book, as an inseparable She/I.
Luciente is from Mattapoisett, transformed into a utopia, a world free from gender norms, where economic inequality has been eradicated, and life is ecologically and environmentally sound. Identity categories have been extirpated; people are referred to as ‘per’ rather than she/her/he/him, all sexualities are accepted, and embryos are deliberately engineered to prevent racism. Traditional gender roles have been upended and the burdens of work, protecting the village, and ‘mothering’ children are shared equally.
In our reality we’re in no way headed towards a utopia. The election of Biden has put us back on track for a healthier, more equitable, and environmentally sound future. Potential and progress feel within reach again but there is still a great deal of work to do.
Both texts alert us to those perils – in “Warming” it’s climate change, and in Woman on the Edge of Time it can been seen in a dystopian future Connie accidentally time travels to, one in which the social structures of the 1950s America have been extended to the extreme. In this future the ultra-rich live in the sky to escape polluted air, women are kept imprisoned in apartments for contract sex and organ harvesting, and everything is manufactured, fake, and artificial. At the end of the novel, finally believing in the vision of Mattapoisett, Connie stages her own act of defiance by poisoning the doctors and those who keep her from freedom, testing “the limits of woman.” With her exploit she honors those who came before her, and those who will come after her, “for you who will be born from my best hopes, to you I dedicate my act of war. At least once I fought and won” (p. 375).
Heading into this new year, we should all take up that resolution, to continue taking action together to encourage change. As okpik and Piercy’s work show us, our lives are inextricably bound up with one another, we have the power to influence our future, and where we stand right now, the possibilities are open to us.