Listening to Trees: The Overstory’s Dendrography and Sugar Maple Speaks

ABSTRACT

Although Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory has received acclaim for depicting trees as intimately entangled with human lives, the novel denies trees a voice in the narrative. This paper argues that without being given a voice, trees are rendered objects and not moral subjects. While the novel has received acclaim as a political intervention, maintaining the object status for trees does not demand contemporary societies halt deforestation. In order to have a narrative that truly values trees, a completely different kind of novel would need to be written: one where trees can speak. I turn to two Anishinaabeg narratives to illustrate what such a narrative can look like.

KEYWORDS:

• Realist novel
• indigenous epistemology
• colonialism
• narrative
• deforestation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Here I am referencing the contemporary inheritances of this lineage as Louis Dupre discusses in his work, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture, Yale University Press, (2008) as well as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s location of the deanimation of nature in Enlightenment thought in her work, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton University Press, (2015).

2. Although the novel alludes that at least two other characters hear trees speak, it never makes that commitment outright and several moments can be read as disavowals that this is really happening. These characters are also depicted as mentally unhinged.

3. One of the most widely read and influential of such appeals was ironically made by the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty in his (2009) article ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses.’ Chakrabarty is noted for his rigorous demonstration of the provincial nature of colonial culture’s claims of meaning, which it imposed through violence on much of the world in his work Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. 2000. Princeton University Press.

4. Annishinabeg is a general term for several Indigenous nations of the eastern and now central Unites States and Canada who are divided into more local nations, each with their own language but sharing common narratives. Kimmerer is part of the three tribes loosely organised as the Three Fires Confederacy, made-up of the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi, of which she is a citizen.

5. Luce Irigaray makes the claim that trees teach silence in the article, ‘What the Vegetal World Says to Us’ in The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature. U of Minnesota Press, (2017), edited by Monica Gagliano, et al.

6. For a list of other relational names for trees see Hall (2011), pgs. 115–117.

7. Most works advocating for the agency of plants are non-fiction works. Some examples include: Michael Marder (2013), Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. Columbia University Press; Monica Gagliano et al. (2017), The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature. U of Minnesota Press. Eduardo Kohn (2013) How Forests Think: Towards an Anthropology Beyond the Human, University of California Press.

8. See Laura Bohannan’s article ‘A Genealogical Charter’ (1952) in Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 22 (4): 301–315 as an example of how the Tiv shifted their genealogical narrative in response to colonial authorities trying to codify Tiv history.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Moira Marquis

Moira Marquis is an Assistant Professor of English at Claflin University. Her article, ‘Human to Humus: Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille and Eco-linguistics as a Decolonialist Strategy’, offers an eco-linguistic analysis of that modernist Irish novel and is forthcoming in Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities. Her article, ‘The Alien Within: Divergent Futures in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon and Niell Blomkamp’s District 9’, published in Science Fiction Studies, argues Indigenous and traditional African myths can offer ways out of the colonial ontology of Blackness. Her current book project, ‘Mythic Ecologies’ traces the genealogy of ‘myth’, noting how classifying non-colonial cultures’ knowledges as myth served to create a hierarchy which privileges colonially inherited ways of knowing. Representations of Indigenous and traditional myths in contemporary cultures from around the world, in contrast, furnish sophisticated mechanisms for maintaining ecologically balanced societies and their valuation can manifest anti-racist and ecological social change.