“Fire, Ice, and Flood” Preprint (American Anthropologist, March 2023)

Abstract:
Based in nine years of anthropological research on climate change, in this triptych of creative prose and ethnographic poetry, I reflect on writing and living during a pandemic, unfolding against the background of mass protest and environmental change. Part I, a piece of prose poetry, traces a series of resonances from my own position within the pandemic: the May 2020 protests surrounding the police murder of George Floyd; memories of the AAAs surrounded by flame; twentieth century interpretations of an African-American religious folksong. Part II centers a brief fieldwork moment, a shared quotidian experience on the subway connecting a near-past climate-related extreme weather event to the presence of climate change in daily life. Part III, a piece of ethnographic poetry, draws from fieldwork, the French humanities and climate science, unraveling past, present and future to produce an inundating series of scenes that plays with the themes of all three parts. Throughout, notions of place, age and time reverberate with experiences in-waiting under a global pandemic, drawing connections from a violent white supremacist near past, to ongoing violent histories of contemporary state and ecological systems, to the ambiguous loss and anticipatory grief of an avoidable near future of global climate catastrophe.

Fire, Ice and Flood

I.

“Every day I wake up and I do my little tasks and I keep on writing my little ethnography and I’m supposed to just ignore the vast horror of ongoing human suffering.”

Three months into this thing, the 3rd Police Precinct burned ecstatically down in the hometown of a Prince who had silently sent funds to Ferguson and who, Piano and A Microphone 1983, age 30, sang a folksong, “Mary Don’t You Weep,” without the line about the fire next time. Eleven years prior, a 29-year-old Aretha Franklin sang the same spiritual in a South Los Angeles Baptist church, without the line about the fire next time. As the stories tell it, Mick Jagger, 28, was in the front pew, hooting and clapping. Ten years earlier, James Baldwin was 38 when he wrote the two essays collectively named after, and ending with, the line: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!

On May 28th, the Minneapolis 3rd Police Precinct burned down after Minneapolis Police officers murdered George Floyd, age 46, and after so many similar extra-judicial executions by state agents wielding the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Elsewhere, we took to the streets—liquid antacid and water in a spray bottle—every single one of us in masks, passing out hand sanitizer and PPEs to anyone who, at first, was not. Standing at la Place des Arts with the thousands of others, before French accents chanting George Floyd’s name, before the celebration of life, there was a gentle quiet, a mourning, the two-meter spaces between us holding a nervous calm and a quiet grief, not having been around this many people for six full weeks. I wore the same N100 3M particulate respirator I wore in San Jose eighteen months prior, breathing in the dust of Paradise.[i]

There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.[ii] (Baldwin, back in New York after nine years in Paris, 1962).

One- and one-half years before Minneapolis, in San Jose, suspended between an endless smoky sky and almost 8000 feet of earth, I took photos on my phone showing dusky daytime sun and shafts of light and smoke piercing the air of the large, cubicled convention halls, like sunlight through stained glass cathedrals. I scrambled to thumb into my phone at the back of the room, N100 mask tucked away in the bag between my feet, to protect my lungs from the now-annual California wildfire season and the smoke outside of the Camp Fire in Paradise, California.

Baldwin, 1962: Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?[iii]

Those of us—white, middle-class, like me, maybe—who were privileged to maintain a distance spent a year inside, no dangers but the oldest one. Photos of a solar eclipse; black circles, surrounded by light.

The verdant Northwest turned blood red in the summer, then in winter it was Texas under ice, the jet stream a frozen oxbow.

II.

I’m on the rickety MTA subway train in New York, rocking back and forth in the noisy silence of the metal and plastic with the rest. The rhythmic progression of the train is just background noise, and no one is speaking. Hopping from Park Ave. and East 46th St. to another event uptown, I’m in the city briefly for fieldwork at a large climate summit. Suddenly, a women’s purse on her lap becomes an alarm—a persistent whan whan whan—that cuts through the silence. We all smile at her, in empathy and in teasing her in her embarrassment, of having broken the silent contract of that moment. The interaction just finishes before I feel a persistent, foreign buzzing in my pocket. Another alert goes off—whan—before the train fills with sound and swift putting-a-stop-to, heads down to read the message from the government: flooding.
Underground, on the subway then, I remember reading about basements in Red Hook, foundations forever lifted and moistly sunk; files soaked in boxes in Lower Manhattan—flooding, the ghost-trace of which lingers in the basements of finance giants and brownstones alike after Sandy came to New York and then never really left. (“There is grief here. And haunting.”)

I picture D, two weeks before, in San Francisco, forced to fly home early from another climate change Summit, back before another climate-supercharged hurricane was to dump two feet of water on his hometown.

I picture Asheville caught under two feet of rain, lab-coats in waders bilging government buildings.

I picture redlined Red Hook under the storm (still under ‘reconstruction’ today).

I picture the hurricanes and the flood, wildfires in a red sky.

I picture my subway train, water up to our knees.

Whan whan, then noisy silence again. (“I’m haunted by my object of study, and by the world in which it is embedded.”)[iv]

III.

One- and one-half decades before the flood, the big flood, before the Arctic finally melted,[v] sea ice turning to sea turning to a rapid acceleration, the city’s concert halls sat full of empty air, old posters hanging off telephone poles like fading flags, or gray hairs.

Two- and one-half years before that, you following me around watching me fulfill 44 little fieldwork prescriptions (a year’s worth of steroids and pills). The year I turned 29 on the day I turned 29, the 29th day, me driving across the border, picking you up from the Greyhound station at gray dusk.

One- and one-half months later, little interviews in the morning, Buenos Aires, Lagos, one wine-colored flower then a flood over wooden walls, Montréal: a carnival, magenta bird, a red balloon, popped. A carnival, magenta bird, a red balloon, popped.

–tiny men in red snow coats atop an endless blanket of endless white ice,–not endless, no longer. Sourds, étang,–Ecume, roule sur le pont et pardessus les bois;–draps noirs et orgues,–éclairs et tonnerre,–Montez et roulez;—[vi]

Seven months later, a wooden car. On the last day of the Summit, me taking the California Street Cable Car up the long, steep hill to the cathedral. The year I turned thirty, jerking all rickety and wooden-like, an old-fashioned rollercoaster, fewer tourists than I’d thought.

Après le deluge, Rimbaud wrote, years before Ethiopia, before New York, Paradise, Minneapolis (stop), Aussitôt que l’idée du Déluge se fut rassise, we went maskless into the streets, a carnival of microbes, magenta bird, a red balloon—

[i] “Breathing in the dust of Paradise” is borrowed from Donna Haraway’s comments as discussant on Jerry Zee’s paper on a panel honoring the contributions of Aihwa Ong to the discipline of anthropology at the 2018 meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Jose, California. Following the conference, other scholars, too, have made the connection between and come to reflect on the conditions of anthropological knowledge production and the conditions that have brought about ecological and social crises, notably Zoe Todd and, later, Ryan Cecil Jobson.

Todd, Zoe. 2019. “If Breathing in the Smoke of Burning Trees….” Tweet. https://twitter.com/ZoeSTodd/status/1063889272514609152. [Note this series of tweets has subsequently been deleted. See also: Todd, Zoe. 2019. “‘Reciprocal Responsibilities to People and Place in the Ongoing Climate Crisis.’” Video conference roundtable presentation, November 19. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/reimagining-the-annual-meeting-for-an-era-of-radical-climate-change.]

Jobson, Ryan Cecil. 2020. “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019.” American Anthropologist 122 (2): 259–71. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13398.

[ii] Baldwin, James. 1998. “The Fire Next Time.” In James Baldwin: Collected Essays, edited by Toni Morrison, 287–347. The Library of America 98. New York: Library of America, 337

[iii] Baldwin, James. 1998. “The Fire Next Time.” In James Baldwin: Collected Essays, edited by Toni Morrison, 287–347. The Library of America 98. New York: Library of America, 340.

[iv] Mariner, Kathryn A. 2020. “American Elegy: A Triptych.” Public Culture 32 (1): 5–23, 6-7. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-7816269.
My gratitude to the colleague who pointed me toward Mariner’s triptych, resonant in many ways with my own. Some of what it taught me about form and “ambiguous loss” appears here. In addition, like Mariner, who writes of both histories of enslavement and transracial adoption, I hesitantly note that I do not mean here to basely compare the inequitable impacts of climate change to the “ambiguous loss” of which she writes: “Please do not misconstrue the move I am making as one of comparison. I am pointing to inheritance and reverberation” (13).

[v] According to modeling published in late 2019, there is a “60% chance of an effectively ice-free summer Arctic in the 2030s.”

Berger, Michele W. 2020. “The Arctic Could Have Almost No Summer Sea Ice by 2040, Decades Sooner than Expected.” Penn Today. https://web.archive.org/web/20200426154523/https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/Arctic-could-have-almost-no-summer-sea-ice-decades-sooner-than-expected.

[vi] “Surge forth, pond,—Froth, stream across the bridge and over the woods;—black cloth and organs,—lightning and thunder,—rise up and roll across;—” and “After the flood” and “As soon as the idea of the Flood subsided” (translation mine). Rimbaud, Arthur. 2016. Arthur Rimbaud: Intégrale Des Oeuvres. Cork, BELGIUM: Grands Classiques, 127.

[Preprint submitted version. For published version, see: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.13813]