It Matters What Stories Tell Stories; It Matters Whose Stories Tell Stories

Abstract

Aiming to craft symstories and symbiographies, this essay proposes several short instances of compost writing. First, retelling another’s personal and family stories foregrounds the question of who owns stories, who has access to whose stories, who is safe enough to tell their stories, and who lives and dies as a result. Second, represented by the Crochet Coral Reef, earth stories propose reconfiguring organisms as holobionts to foreground collective becoming-with. Third, an Iñupiak computer game shows the complexity of collaborations for telling decolonial geostories in continuing times of rapid destruction and extinction. Finally, the author’s science fiction [SF] story proposes speculative fiction to strengthen the difficult search for multispecies reproductive justice.

Notes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For a short video describing Hall’s Wake project and a taste of the graphics, see https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/694426471/wake-the-hidden-history-of-women-led-slave-revolts.

2 Having seen Madagascar, Cecilia and her daughters were fascinated by Madagascar and its animals. At that time, I was writing about Alison Jolly’s collaborative life stories of young Malagasy lemurs in the beautiful illustrated books of the Ako Project, written to teach natural history, love of nature, and the importance of taking care of the land and its critters to Malagasy children in rural schools that did not have books. The books that Alison sent me are bilingual, in English and Malagasy. My student’s daughters were fascinated by the Malagasy language and by the lemur youngsters. For a few months, my student read nightly stories in English from my Ako books, with the Malagasy language on the adjoining pages luring the girls who knows where in years to come. See Lemur Conservation Foundation.

3 Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber, “Symbiotic View of Life.”

4 Wertheim and Wertheim, Crochet Coral Reef; Roosth, “Evolutionary Yarns”; Haraway, “Sympoiesis,” in Staying with the Trouble, 58–98.

5 Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna), http://neveralonegame.com/. Thanks to Marco Harding for teaching me how to play the game; he is better at it than I am. The game won prestigious prizes and was widely reviewed.

6 Contemporary Arctic peoples have well-developed accounts of climate alterations and of the changes in their environments, and the relevant idiom is not the Anthropocene. For example, see Kunuk and Mauro’s ISUMA film Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change. This documentary, the world’s first Inuktitut-language film on the topic, takes the point of view of Inuit culture and expertise regarding environmental change and indigenous adaptations.

7 For extracts from an interview with Amy Fredeen of the Cook Inlet Tribal Council and Sean Vesce of E-Line Media for National Public Radio, see Demby, “Updating Centuries-Old Folktales.”

8 See “Never Alone Cultural Insights—Sila Has a Soul,” in which Fannie Kuutuuq and others discuss Sila. Sila is about connectedness to everything, about situated relationality and interdependence. For all the cultural insights of Never Alone, see “Never Alone—Cultural Insights (All 24 Pieces).” Thanks to Susan Harding and also Marco Harding, who participated in the Bush School in Pangnirtung in the summer of 2015, for all the research, conversations, references, and thinking about diverse Inuit worlds and people, especially about Sila, hunting, and relational human and nonhuman personhood through living on the land. Our thinking together is another subject-making sympoiesis.

9 The Camille Stories began in a “narration spéculative” workshop at the Gestes Spéculatifs colloquium organized at Cerisy by Isabelle Stengers in the summer of 2013. My writing group included me, Vinciane Despret, and Fabrizio Terranova. The first published story is by Lucienne Strivay, Fabrizio Terranova, and Benedikte Zoutini, “Les enfants du compost.” Fabrizio subsequently made the narrative film portrait Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival, released for exhibits and institutional rentals in 2017 and now available for streaming on Amazon Prime as well as at https://earthlysurvival.org/. My fullest written version of Camille is in “The Camille Stories,” in Staying with the Trouble, 134–168, 215–228.

10 Personal communication, July 24, 2018. See http://kiramagrann.tumblr.com/ (accessed October 5, 2018).

11 Personal communication, September 11, 2018. See http://www.alexwand.com/ (accessed October 5, 2018).

12 Personal communication, September 29, 2018. See http://institutuzkosti.cz/events/7-10-2018-making-oddkin?src=cz and http://kappatosgallery.com/index.php/projects/curators/nadja-argyropoulou/ (accessed October 5, 2018).

13 This report is from R. S. in a letter to the editor, Psytimes, May 21, 1987 (fictional date). To follow the stories, begin with the entries in the Psychic High School website on “The Compost Kids” from May 8, 2018 and after. See http://www.psyhigh.com/story.php?area=The+Compost+Kids&sort=1 (accessed October 3, 2018). Dean Hammer, personal communications, June 14, 20, 22, 26, and August 13, 2018. See https://deanhammer.withknown.com/profile/deanhammer (accessed October 5, 2018).