Poets for the Planet

Santiago Acosta is a scholar and poet working at the intersections of literature, visual culture, and political ecology. His poetry collection El próximo desierto won the III José Emilio Pacheco Literature Prize “Ciudad y Naturaleza,” awarded by the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL) and the Museum of Environmental Sciences of Guadalajara University. He has also received the support of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. In Caracas, he was a founding editor of the poetry journal El Salmón (National Book Award, 2010). He is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Old Westbury.

Did you have a moment when you became intensely aware of climate change?

In December 1999, when I was 17 years old, there was a series of mudslides that killed thousands of people in the Vargas state, in the north-central coast of Venezuela. About a year’s worth of rain fell in just three days, completely wiping out entire towns and small cities along the coast. This later came to be known as the “Vargas Tragedy,” and it still haunts my country’s collective memory. I remember that, back then, only a few specialists mentioned the links between these events and climate change. In general, the press called it a “natural” disaster, part of cyclical rain patterns that supposedly occurred every half a century or so. Today, however, more researchers have clarified that climate disruptions, as well as deforestation and uncontrolled urbanization in the coastal mountain range, were an important part of what made the mudslides so lethal. Like everyone who remembers that year, I was deeply affected by the stories and images that inundated the media, as well as by first-hand accounts from survivors. Recently, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the events, I published a book in collaboration with photographer Efraín Vivas, who had an impressive collection of photographs taken shortly after the tragedy.

What can poems do in this struggle for understanding and action?

I think this is an important question, but the problem is that it is frequently framed in terms of whether poems can induce direct action, as if they could really get people to go out to the streets to protest for change. And we could come up with examples where poetry or art have in fact elicited collective and effective action. However, they will always seem to be difficult to replicate. This is why I would focus more on the “understanding” part of your question. We as activists are sometimes too focused on acting now, urgently, and without time to think too much. Of course, we need urgent climate action immediately, but maybe poetry is more effective in a different realm, where it can help us to see that maybe we should stop and think for a moment, we should pause and immerse ourselves in the present, trying to confront the dread and melancholia of the moment but also the possibilities that are still there. And that’s where I think that poetry can be really effective, because it is essentially a space with a different temporality and a different language, a different sense of reality that helps us to stop for a moment and think, feel, and listen, and then act in a more conscious and sensible way.

Do you write your poems in English and Spanish? How does that work?

I write all my poetry in Spanish. Then I make a rough English version and work with different translators until we get it right. I have worked with an exceptional group of scholars and writers in the Women in Translation Project (WIT) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We are currently in the process of collectively translating my book El próximo desierto (The coming desert). My wife Mayte López, who is an amazing novelist and a translator, also plays a very important role in the process.

You live in New York, but are you still very connected to Venezuela in terms of the climate and poems?

Absolutely. I’m always working between New York and that deterritorialized space that we now call “Venezuela.” I’m referring to the fact that around six million Venezuelans have migrated in the last ten years escaping economic and political crisis, which is why we can now speak of a Venezuelan ‘diaspora.’ This means that every time I collaborate with ‘Venezuela,’ I’m in fact hooked to a global network of people in the US, Europe, Latin America. For example, I’m part of a collective book project edited by Berlin-based Venezuelan artist Ana Alenso, titled What the Mine Gives, the Mine Takes (forthcoming in Bom Dia Books). The book includes work by ten Venezuelan scientists and artists (living in Venezuela and many other countries) about the Orinoco Mining Arch, a state-led mega-mining project in the Venezuelan Amazon that is severely impacting indigenous populations and the region’s biodiversity.

Tell me about some of your own climate change poems? How did they evolve?

My book El próximo desierto (The coming desert) was written about a long period of reflection about the problem of how to write about climate change. In the process, I discovered that I would have to experiment with different forms at the frontier of ‘poetry’ as a genre. As a result, I ended up blending poetry and a more narrative/journalistic language to create a hybrid form that made it much easier to write about this subject. The book imagines several scenarios in the future, but I didn’t do this in any systematic way; the poems are about many different things, and they all tell little stories, but in the background there is always some type of dystopian setting. In general, I prefer to write about these subjects in more indirect ways, as a background that influences and determines human subjectivity. So, in a few of those poems I write about a world after hydrocarbons are no longer used as a form of energy, but I develop a scenario in which this fact doesn’t fundamentally change anything. For example, there is a poem where I say something like ‘We thought that, after oil, society would become more equal, the air would be cleaner, etc., but this never happened, instead the state has become more repressive and violent,’ which is actually what has happened in Venezuela in synchrony with the collapse of the oil industry. I was thinking about how the country could in fact be entering a post-petroleum era. However, the government is looking to expand mining and extraction activities into the Amazon and the Orinoco River basin, which of course is making everything much worse. My thinking here was that it’s not enough to think about a future that supersedes the need for abundant fossil energy in the Global North. That’s an important issue, but oil, as I see it, is just one more part of nature that is commodified, extracted, and sold in the international market. And therefore, it is part of a much larger structure and a much longer history of unequal relations in capitalism that also needs to be addressed. By creating these types of scenarios in my poems, I was attempting to suggest all these meanings, not in any direct way, but simply as a small change in the context that completely defamiliarizes the world.

What do you hope for? And what gives you hope in the world at the moment?

I’m troubled by the idea of hope, because in some cases it might obstruct the real work that needs to be done when fighting for a better future. A simplified notion of ‘hope’ often functions more like a sort of tranquilizer sprinkled at the end of devastating news. I think Greta Thunberg is onto something very important and real when she says, ‘I want you to panic.’ She is not talking only to world leaders or decision-makers; she is addressing all of us. We must face the hopelessness of the present and work through that melancholia. Fredric Jameson wrote a phrase that I chose as an epigraph for my book: ‘We need to develop an anxiety about losing the future.’ And Julie Sze once said that anyone who is really committed to climate justice needs to ‘imagine the worst and still fight for the best.’ Also, we should remember that the billionaires who are profiting from climate change also have very high hopes for the future, it’s only that those hopes probably include leaving the rest of us stranded on a dead planet. So, what should we hope for? With whom do we hope? And against whom? China Miéville wrote ‘We must learn to hope with teeth,’ and I completely agree with the spirit of that phrase. This is not the ‘hope’ that things will work out in the end, but the hope that we can prepare for the worst and not be taken off guard. The fact that climate activism is becoming aware of this reality gives me hope that that will be the case.

Interview by Rose Rouse @rosejanerouse