![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
This essay draws on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses” to test the capacity of memoir to bear witness to the Anthropocene. The essay focuses on three texts that feature memoirs of childhood on the wheat frontiers in Canada and Australia—Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow (1962), Barbara York Main’s Twice Trodden Ground (1971), and Dorothy Hewett’s Wild Card (1990). As an instrument of colonization and Indigenous dispossession, the impact of wheat was catastrophic, and these memoirs engage with the particular sites and circumstances that shape acts of remembering “wheaten childhoods.”
Keywords:
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Morton, reflecting on the incessant data of climate change and ecological crisis, puts it this way: “Right now it’s as if we are waiting for just the right kind of data, then we can start living in accord with it. But this data will never arrive, because its delivery mode is designed to prevent the appropriate reaction—we find ourselves in the midst of horribly confusing, traumatic events such as global warming and mass extinction, and we don’t have much an idea of how to live that.” Morton, Being Ecological, 15. In a similar vein, Latour writes, “It doesn’t stop; every morning it begins again. One day, it’s rising water levels; the next, it’s soil erosion; by evening, it’s glaciers melting faster and faster; on the 8 p.m. news, between two reports on war crimes, we learn that thousands of species are about to disappear before they have even been properly identified.” Latour, Facing Gaia, 7.
2 Lynch, “Eco-Memoir”; White, “Eco-Memoir.” Parts of this essay draw on the paper “Wolf Willow and Wild Card” that I delivered at the 2017 Western Literature Association in Minneapolis. Short sections of this essay also derive directly from passages of my book Like Nothing on This Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt and an earlier essay, “Islands of Yesterday: The Ecological Writing of Barbara York Main.”
3 Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 206.
4 Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 197.
5 Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 208.
6 Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 197.
7 Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 218.
8 Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 219–220.
9 Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 220; emphasis added.
10 Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 221; emphasis added.
11 Couser, Memoir, 21.
12 Driscoll and Gilmore, Witnessing Girlhood.
13 Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History.”
14 Huff, “After Auto, after Bio,” 280.
15 Fedak, “Marquis Wheat.”
16 Wrigley, “Farrer, William James.”
17 Belich, Replenishing the Earth.
18 Indeed, York Main does not recall meeting a single Aboriginal person in her years growing up near Tammin.
19 York Main, Twice Trodden Ground, 1.
20 York Main, Twice Trodden Ground, 2.
21 York Main, Twice Trodden Ground, 1.
22 York Main, Twice Trodden Ground, 2.
23 Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 222.
24 Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 222.
25 Hewett, Wild Card, 11.
26 In reading Hewett’s memoir now, one must note that there are traumatic events that in turn inflect the home which she created with Merv Lilley and their daughters Rozanna and Kate. In 2018, revelations regarding Hewett’s and Lilley’s awareness, and even approval, of the sexual abuse of their teenage daughters were made public. Rozanna Lilley’s Do Oysters Get Bored?, for example, explores the generation—and generations—of abuse on both their home and the nation more generally. Although Wild Card does not cover the years of her daughters’ abuse, it was written in their wake, and the Lilley daughters’ writing, emboldened by the #MeToo movement (Jervis-Read, “‘With Complexity’”), speaks back to the self-fashioning of their mother, creating a series of life writings that track trauma. In the wake of these revelations, Hewett’s determination to create a mythological “self” in her writing—for example, this ten-year-old child, precociously aware of the sexual desire she evokes—is center stage in readings of Wild Card. See Sutherland, “In Rozanna Lilley’s Memoir.”
27 Stegner, Wolf Willow, 19.
28 Stegner, Wolf Willow, xvii.
29 Hewett, Wild Card, 11.
30 Thacker, The Great Prairie, 190.
31 Stegner, Wolf Willow, 8.
32 Stegner, Wolf Willow, 9.
33 See Albrecht, “‘Solastalgia.’”
34 Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 218.
35 Being able to identify (empathize) with someone or something is often now treated as an independent faculty that one either possesses by endowment or acquires through cultivation in much the same way that “sensibility” was thought to work for the romantics.
36 Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative,” 1–8.
37 For a discussion of the different “I”’s of autobiography, see Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography.
38 Hewett, Wild Card, 271.
39 York Main, Twice Trodden Ground, 2.
40 York Main, Twice Trodden Ground, 37.
41 York Main, Twice Trodden Ground, 42.
42 The idea of the narrating “I” is discussed in Smith and Watson.
43 York Main, Twice Trodden Ground, 42.
44 “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.” Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” 594.
45 A brilliant example of a history which tracks the structuring effect of an agricultural commodity is Beckert’s Empire of Cotton.
46 Žižek’s critique of Chakrabarty was made in his book Living in the End Times, 332–334. Chakrabarty has since responded in “Climate and Capital.”