No Earth Left Unturned: On the Maiming and Modifying of Body-Lands
Hawks Nest Tunnel, Courtesy of Elkem Metals Collection, West Virginia State Archives
dec 10, 2024
this experimental work marks a site of exploration through the visual traces of imperialism and attendant excavation of the earth’s surfaces, plumbing of its depths, and the interior-exterior spaces of colonized bodies.
my hope throughout this was to begin thinking about the visuality of imperialism—of bodily harm, resource extraction, physical labor, intoxicated perspective, race, and aesthetic markers—and see what attention to those properties might help me think through in terms of the ways that these processes take place in material, temporal, and psychological zones. i think that part of this attempt at articulating has ended up following a narrative direction more than I had planned for—and because of that, does not dwell for long enough on these topics. it keeps flowing, with the expectation that you might take from it whatever you can grab. i want to practice living with ideas for longer, but that was beyond the scope of this project. somewhat inspired, then, by the fast pace of industrialization, expansion, and colonial appetite. even as i try to talk about resistant methods, i am still embedded in this particular colonial project and its logics.
“Words
are ripped
from the belly
of her throat
before they can be born.
Before they can flutter
in this space / between us—
an unturned layer of earth I
can no longer cultivate.”
Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, “On the Couch with Būbū Neien”
The dust is getting everywhere. Splayed across the white walls, strewn across the floor; in his hair, on their clothes, on her cheeks and on her hands and in her mouth and in their eyes. Remnants of coal combustion flavor their food and coat their tongues, not washing down with water. This is vandalization in Black [1]. The pages of their books are written in soot—the footnotes are in blood. But there’s no time to wipe away these traces of imperialism. Spit what you can from your mouth, but your arms keep swinging, keep picking up, keep on pulling your weight. Step into Rebecca Harding Davis’s (1861) “Life in the Iron-Mills”:
Masses of men, with dull, besotted faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes; stooping all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness for soul and body. (Davis, 1; emphasis added)
From the outset, this is a scene of darkened affect, turned downward; this hazy place and the weight of its emotions dull, but with muscles sharp with tension and localized pain. Roiling with heat and sweat, what sticks to your skin? In your throat, the air clings and suffocates, your back bent over to cough with the weight of heaping and hauling already reshaping your spine. This particular imagery resonates with Fanon’s conceptions of muscularity where, “In the colonial world, the emotional sensitivity of the native is kept on the surface of his skin like an open sore which flinches form the caustic agent; the psyche shrinks back, obliterates itself and finds outlet in muscular demonstrations…,” (The Wretched of the Earth, 56). While those subjects mobilized towards imperial productivity are not always indigenous—also settler and arrivant—the carnalities of indiscriminatory colonial domination are physically palpable in both of these passages. Here, too, Fanon is speaking about the peripheral qualities of that emotional weight, which is both dull and heavy in Davis’s scene, this surface quality and emotional attention even more visible later:
He griped the filthy red shirt that clung, stiff with soot, about him, and tore it savagely from his arm. The flesh beneath was muddy with grease and ashes,—and the heart beneath that! And the soul? God knows. (Davis, 15; emphasis added)
Here the trace of emotional weight is layered, towards interiority [2], but shifting our attention to the epidermal effects and postures of imperialism might also prove to be a generative site for thinking about the toxicity of urban construction, and about raciality as it relates bodily alterations and the vectors of life and death.
“These roads will take you into your own country,” begins Muriel Rukeyser’s “Book of the Dead,” its recapitulation in the closing poem continuing: “Seasons and maps coming where this road comes / into a landscape mirrored in these men,” (Rukeyser, 106). Here in the sparkling reflexivity of asphalt marks one of the clearest examples of physical and affectual similarities of conceptions and treatments of bodies and landscapes. Tracing the destination-oriented paths we have paved only leads back to ourselves. The maps are outdated and the GPS can’t locate us: but we’ve paved one another in petroleum and rock, so we follow ourselves. This particular passage introduces the concept of the mirror to work with, but pulling on the poetic cables and fibers that weave Rukeyser’s collection together might offer an even more significant image of this reflexivity between the modification of the land and those who work it. Trace the image of affectual opening in these two images:
There, where the men crawl, landscaping the grounds / at the power-plant, he saw the blasts explode / the mouth of the tunnel that opened wider / when precious in the rock the white glass showed. (“The Face of the Dam: Vivian Jones,” Rukeyser, 78; emphasis added)
The youngest boy did not get to go down there with me, / he lay and said, ‘Mother, when I die, / I want you to have them open me up and / see if that dust killed me. (“Absalom,” Rukeyser, 84; emphasis added)
Although there are different intentions each with different emotional weights in both of these passages, what is shockingly similar in terms of physicality is that sense of opening—the mountain blasted open with explosives, and the future of the young boy opened with surgical instruments. Again with alternative intentions set for this fissure of body-lands, both images strain with the sharpness of hunger for silica and its afterlives. And even with this mirroring of motion and appetite in mind, we might shift focus toward the causal relationship of these actions. It might be possible, then, to say that the blasting open of the tunnel resulted in the postmortem opening of the young boy. But we might also keep in mind Jasbir K. Puar’s attention to formulations where, “Debilitation is therefore not just an unfortunate by-product of the exploitative workings of capitalism; it is required for and constitutive of the expansion of profit,” (The Right to Maim, 81; emphasis added). As a necessary precondition, the young boy’s body must be sacrificed to dust in order for the widening of the tunnel and the expansion of future profits. The death of laboring in toxic sites, then, is an investment towards accumulating wealth. Puar expands the stakes of this claim, too, by positioning not necessarily death, but debilitation as being used, “to achieve the tactical aims of settler colonialism,” (Puar, 144). Those subjected to labor here are not killed spectacularly by growling machines or resonant explosions, limbs flying or crushed in freak accidents—they are debilitated, still capacitated enough to work, with death showing up only when the job is done [3].
Down the hill, the river turns through valleys; arteries carrying the lifeforce of the city: steel, lumber, water, money, and floating bodies; “...dragging itself sluggishly along, tired of the weight of boats and coal barges,” (Davis, 1) [4]. “Sloping as gracefully as thighs, the foothills,” “the overhead conveyor / slides on its cable to the feet of chimneys,” “here the severe flame speaks from the brick throat,” “the roaring flowers of the chimney-stacks / less poison, at their lips in fire, than this,” (“Alloy,” Rukeyser, 95-96; emphasis added). Even in these sites of capture and heaviness (which is everywhere), the human body has become a primary tool for capturing the beauty and sublimity of nature’s grandiose wonder. The indigenous folks of Turtle Island [5] have shown us how understanding the land as our Mother [6] is required for land stewardship, reciprocal interspecies relationships, and the sustaining of life and memory, and yet—we as settlers continue to demonstrate over and over again how insidiously patriarchy and white supremacy radiate in our interaction with our mothers and their mothers and their mothers who are our mothers. The seeming fertility and innocent vacancy of the land, from the hungry colonial gaze, is exactly that of misogynistic yearning for the subjection of our mothers and their daughters and our Mother/s. In thinking of this pillaging of mothering bodies alongside Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s uncultivable “unturned earth,” (“On the Couch with Būbū Neien”) [7], we might turn to June Jordan, who says in her (1980) “Poem About My Rights,” that,
they fucked me over because I was wrong I was
wrong again to be me being me where I was
wrong
to be who I am
which is exactly like South Africa
penetrating into Namibia penetrating into
Angola and does that mean I mean how do you know if
Pretoria ejaculates what will the evidence look like the
proof of the monster jackboot ejaculation on Blackland
and if
after Namibia and if after Angola and if after Zimbabwe
and if after all of my kinsmen and women resist even to
self-immolation of the villages and if after that
we lose nevertheless what will the big boys say will they
claim my consent: (Jordan, 2)
The repetitive strokes of frustration and anxiety structure the relentless rhythm of this passage, riffing on the erotic force of colonial penetration, from the past (“I was”) into the present (“is like”) and further into the future (“and if,” “and if,” “and if”). Still thinking with Puar, the severing of mind—the psychological warfare of “wrongness” and overkill of the potential for life even into the far reaches of time—is itself one of the “tactical aims of settler colonialism,” (Puar, 144). But not one that Jordan will consent to: her “resistance / [her] simple and daily and nightly self-determination / may very well cost you your life,” (Jordan, 4). This precise declaration of everyday resistance, then, becomes the articulation of one site of settler colonial combustion [8]. Every accumulating force of imperial domination, the archive of blood and limbs and tongues and dignities and hearts, are unleashed in a self-immolating, cannibalizing fit catalyzed by Black livingness [9]. The “brutal hegemonic violence [that] casts its arteries of murder and profit over every corner of the earth,” (Khadija Haynes, 2024) is woven into a carnal web that ensnares the pulse of settler colonial life. And, for some, that web is woven from bodily sacrifice; following Jetn̄il-Kijiner in narrative once more:
VII. / There is an old Chamorro legend / that the women of Guåhan saved their island / from a giant coral eating fish / by hacking off their / long and black as the night sky hair // They wove their locks / into a massive magical net // They caught the monster fish // and they saved their islands (Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Fishbone Hair)
While Jordan’s is necessarily not a spectacular revival but rather the resistance of mundanity, what emerges from sympathetic resonance with Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s narrative poetics is that livingness in the plural has the potential to intercept the manifestation of settler colonial logics. You will have to sacrifice something. Imperialism’s hunger will not stop at scrapes and light bloodletting, will not be satisfied with single limbs or the air from your lungs or—
traces left on your skin
in oil or blood or dirt / soot // charcoal smudge
(scar, break, sever)
whiteness might be
ephemeral
might be
clear as glass,
might be just as fragile
will soon shatter
into one-hundred-and-eighty-six million [10] tiny fragments
will soon revert to grains of sand
“impeccable white shores
gleaming
like the cross burned
into our open
scarred palms,” [11]
sparkling, iridescent, incandescent
shaved ice, falling snow
that will melt into
the salt of the ocean
filtered through gills and lungs
finally combining with bone fragments
that never survived the trip
and you:
who survived differently
will haunt,
steam and salt-spray mist
from crashing waves;
mining the white rock
into smaller pieces
no longer able to hunger
dehydrated with salty thirst
or
thrown into evaporating clouds
burned off by sun
or
frozen, cracked, chiseled
sent flying freely
swallowed, not whole but in mouthfuls
multiple breaths
mixed in spoonfuls
of cough syrup
pressed tightly into
decongestants and suppressants
((( light headed vertigo,, swirling // drifting , , , , in off-kilter ellipses )))
colonial nausea
whiteness blinded
can no longer stand
two feet planted
must: sit at the mouth of the tunnel
and bear the blast;
“sensory imprints” [12] of
“radioactive energy and megatons of tnt,” [13]
two-thousand-pound bombs falling
one-hundred-and-eighty-six thousand times over.
Notes:
1/ Following twentieth century descriptions of industrial aesthetics, David Stradling notes, “Soot could stick to exposed skin, collect in nostrils, lungs, eyes, and stomachs. It clung to buildings, walls, books, and dishes, and could not be simply brushed away. Soot found its way into cupboards and closets, attics and cellars, and it colored the cheeks of the city’s children as they played in the dusty streets,” (Stradling, 1999; 25). Thinking poetically about these aesthetic markers—often not welcome, or seen as invasions to white purity—this covering of the town’s surfaces might be described as vandalization, not in often-observed sprays of color, but entirely in black.
2/ What is interesting about this parsing through the layers of subjecthood is its contrasting directionality to that of much of the language that surrounds body modification, where becoming and self-realization is a process of moving aspects of interiority to the surface of the skin. The weight of this laboring is so heavy that it pierces not just to the beating heart but to the soul.
3/ Jill Gatlin’s analysis of Hubert Skidmore’s novel Hawks Nest emphasizes this maintenance of laboring capacity observing that, “Even after the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel disaster, corporate lawyers argued that ‘workers were healthy whether or not they had fibrosis [of the lungs] if their work was not impaired.’ They defined disease not by body-environment relationships but by terms of production—in this case, workers’ productive capacity,” (Gatlin, 2008; 163, emphasis in original).
4/ I include this poetic description from Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron-Mills keeping in mind that the river in her description shares affectual similarity to the endurance of enslaved folks’ forced labor, or in her words: “When I was a child I used to fancy a look of weary, dumb appeal upon the face of the negro-like river slavishly bearing its burden day after day,” (Davis, 1). In my inclusion and continuance here, the river—if it takes on that weight of enslavement and imperial domination—might be observed as another body-land exploited by racial capitalism.
5/ One beautiful narration of the lineage of this indigenous name for the land of so-called “North America” can be found in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass.”
6/ I am continually learning from indigequeer Peruvian artist Galle (@gallermic/@vivir_sabrosa) about the sovereignty of Mother Earth and her multiplicities: “Water is our first home, our origin, and we couldn’t survive without Her. She is medicine, and it makes perfect sense to start any sustainability project, like a farm from sacred aquaculture,” (posted on Instagram on Nov 28, 2024); “under the releasing energy of the Full Moon, we asked Mother Fire D34th to the system,” (posted on Instagram on Nov 21, 2024).
7/ Without dwelling here too long, my inclusion of Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s “unturned earth,” further contextualized in the epigraph to this paper, is emphasized by its inability to be cultivated, and thus its literal representation of the ravaging of colonial imperialism not as a generative site of production but rather as an accumulating pile of artifactual death.
8/ I want to note here that the resistance of mundanity, of Black livingness, is explosive for white supremacy and powerful for that property, but is itself not strong enough to decolonize especially at the imperial core where the liberal inclusion of others fuels the colonial project. I’m thinking with Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s article “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” and continuing to think with Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, where each of these authors emphasize the need for realizing the materiality (rather than abstraction) of decolonization through methods such as armed resistance.
9/ The term “Black livingness” comes from Katherine McKittrick’s Dear Science and Other Stories, Duke University Press, 2021.
10/ An estimated 186,000 Palestinians have been murdered in so-called “Israel” as of July 2024—a number recorded by the journal Lancet, without the inclusion of those left under rubble, and not accounting for the thousands more killed as of the time of this writing.
11/ The quoted lines come from Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s poem “History Project.”
12/ This term comes from Jessica A. Schwartz’s analysis of the impacts of the United States thermonuclear weapon (“Castle Bravo”) as felt in Rongelap Atoll, including Ailingnae and Utrik Atolls: “Yostimi Compaj, born in 1942 in the midst of World War II, retains sensory imprints of the bomb as well: ‘First, there was a great light that came to the island [Utrik]. It was beautiful, with shades of pink like the early-morning light.’ The stunning visual display was caused by Bravo’s radioactive mushroom cloud, which rose into the stratosphere to an altitude of more than 115,000 feet and spread 70 to 100 miles in diameter in under ten minutes,” (Schwartz, 2021; 1).
13/ The quoted lines come from Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s poem “History Project.”
Bibliography
Davis, Rebecca Harding. Life in the Iron-Mills. The Atlantic Monthly, 1861.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 2021.
Gatlin, Jill. “An Epistemology of the Everyday: Occupational Health and Environmental Justice in Hubert Skidmore’s Hawk’s Nest” in Literature and Medicine 27 No. 2 Fall 2008. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
Haynes, Khadija. A Fetus on the Dirt Road: Against Imperial Feminisms, Claims of Mass Rape, and Exploring the Theory of Sepulcherality. Published by Hood Communist, November 2024, (https://hoodcommunist.org/2024/11/28/imperial-feminisms-claims-of-mass-rape/).
Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Kathy. lep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter. University of Arizona Press, 2017.
McKittrick, Katherine. Dear Science and Other Stories. Duke University Press, 2021.
Puar, Jasbir K. The Right To Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Duke University Press, 2017.
Rukeyser, Muriel. “Alloy” in The Book of the Dead. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014.
Schwartz, Jessica A. Radiation Sounds: Marshallese Music and Nuclear Silences. Duke University Press, 2021.
Stradling, David. Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
