reviewed by Kent Chadwick
In Her I Am
by Chrystos
Press Gang Publishers, 1993
88 pages. $10.95
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Chrystos' third volume of poetry, In Her I Am, is a frank, challenging and erotic celebration of lesbian sexuality, written as a gift to other lesbians and to the young woman she was at seventeen, who had needed such a book but never found it. Chrystos finds herself living "on a razor" as a lesbian and a First Nations woman-her father was Menominee, a Great Lakes tribe-fiercely devoted to two communities that often ignore or misunderstand each other while being marginalized by the rest of American society. At 48, Chrystos has lived struggles within struggles: from her childhood in San Francisco scarred by years of sexual abuse, to her coming out "into the working-class bar world" in the Haight district circa 1965, through the times she was on the street or institutionalized, to her flowering as a writer and activist who, nevertheless, continued to earn her living cleaning homes of the rich on Bainbridge Island where she's lived for over fifteen years. Chrystos' books are an impassioned chronicle of her journey.
"Everywhere the roads crumple
as green our mother takes herself back fine dust is all
that's left of these prisons & pain
I am dreaming on this
Dream on with me"
- from Urban Indian
in the book Dream On
Chrystos writes in anger, in compassion and in sensuality. Each pitch is present from her initial book, Not Vanishing (1988), to her newest. She has regularly employed an effective technique of using the title of a poem as a strong first line, pulling the reader immediately into the experience, as in this excellent piece:
KUAN YIN GODDESS OF MERCY writes
to Francis of Assisi explains the meaning of light water understanding
Many birds are in her words She says she misses him Asks when she may
visit again & how are his Chinese conversation studies progressing ...
Dream On, published in 1991, was Chrystos' second book of poems and its wide-ranging issues, its honesty and its energy helped her win a prestigious Lannan Foundation Literary Award for poetry. In Dream On Chrystos wrote perfect-pitch satires of white Okeydoekey culture, a beautiful lyric to Sappho entitled Clear Sphinx, and a meditation for the imprisoned activist Leonard Peltier that had the poignancy of ancient Chinese epistle poetry:
WEEDING
my garden in Autumn I want to send you this wind
dancing through Madronas
Alder trees going gold
Sun piercing fog as the buoy sings her bells
But more often than not, Chrystos' many shining lines are joined to duller, unpolished ones and that creates an unevenness in her work. The first poem of In Her I Am, You Ask Me for a Love Name, has this golden description: "I swallow you staining my mouth sweet / with your blackberry nipples," but also this leaden one: "I name you darkness which heals / moving over my weariness in stars." The last description contains important meaning of course, but the image is opaque and the rhythm rough; it says what Chrystos needed and wanted to say, but not in a way that satisfies the poem, at least to my ear.
Though Chrystos considers Henry Miller an enemy, someone who reduced women to receptacles in his writing, her book In Her I Am accomplishes a task he had set for himself: to roar and whisper, brag and sing about sex in all its viscous joy. She traces the spectrum of lovemaking between women-the dances, the seductions, the calls to passion- "...Heavy with longing to stir ourselves / from ember to embrace..." She shows how skin remembers a lover's fingers "inside me pulsing / as I vacuum look at books wash dishes cook." Her poetry announces, "I intend to redefine those 4-letter words, Miss Love & Miss Fuck, with my own body."
Chrystos is not announcing this to me; in fact she laments that women can't write and speak privately to themselves alone and that "We have no control over who reads our work...." Chrystos is addressing the lesbian community, praising its body electric and asking it to confront the divisions within itself. I'm an interloper at the covers of this book, no matter how good a tonic it is to attend to poems in which men are irrelevant.
Yet I can't stop myself from pointing both men and women towards a perfect poem in this collection, for all lovers of all persuasions for all time:
A Soft Indentation
in my body where yours slept around me
like the gold grass hollow
deer leave in the morning meadow
or the curve of a whale rib
beached on the rocks ...
Kent Chadwick's Northwest Books is a regular column about writers and books from the states and provinces of the Northwest. Kent, a fiction writer and journalist, lives in Union, WA.
"Wise Use" Means Waging War on Environmentalists
reviewed by Jeff Jacobson
The War Against the Greens:
The "Wise Use" Movement,
the New Right and
Anti-Environmental Violence
by David Helvarg
Press Gang Publishers, 1993
Sierra Club Books, 1994
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Anti-environmentalism is no longer the exclusive terrain of resource industry lobbyists seeking to protect their federal subsidies or cranky developers unhappy with land-use regulations. Under the rubric of "Wise-Use" and the "Property Rights Movement" anti-environmentalism has grown in the last few years into a multi- faceted backlash movement whose aim is, among other things, unregulated access to timber, minerals, oil, gas, and range lands on public land, and the dismantling of the nation's key environmental and land-use regulations.
Two trends appear to be driving anti-environmentalism. First, traditional resource-based industries of the American West (mining, logging, ranching, plastic and petro-chemical processing) have been tightly squeezed by competitive global economic forces, putting a premium on maintaining massive federal subsidies of cheap resources on public lands. Second, long-term demographic shifts to the suburbs - and their suburbs, the exurbs - pit growing public demands for recreation and wilderness on public lands against unfettered resource exploitation. Private landowners too have felt the pinch as local governments seek to restrict development on the urban fringe.
How can the hopelessly backward 19th century policy views promulgated by Wise-Use and the Property Rights Movement be taken seriously in an age when public opinion polls consistently show that 80-85% of the population identify themselves as environmentalists? David Helvarg's new book seeks to shed some light on this perplexing question.
The core of Helvarg's analysis is that anti-environmentalism is an elite-driven political movement financed by resource industries and a wide range of special interests that stand to profit from continued exploitation of public and private lands. Major contributors to Wise-Use and the Property Rights Movement include the American Mining Congress, American and Canadian timber companies, ORV manufacturers, the Unification Church, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the NRA, and the Cattlemen's Association.
In the past, resource dependent industries rallied under the straightforward "pro-industry" banner. Under the leadership of Wise-Use, their demands are now portrayed as the product of a spontaneous grass-roots political rebellion. Central to this strategy is the fabrication of pseudo grass-roots organizations with well-meaning names like People for the West! (organized by mining companies specifically to fight reform of the 1872 Mining Law), The National Wetlands Coalition (organized by real estate, oil and gas companies to weaken restrictions on wetlands), and The American Forest Resource Alliance (which represents 350 timber and logging companies that have organized to fight federal protection of old growth forests).
Thus the "backlash", Helvarg argues, is little more than an elaborate public relations crusade geared toward distortion of fact and the creation of a climate of fear. "Preservationists," the movement snidely proclaims, care more about rocks and ferns than your community, your livelihood, or your God given property rights! Fear polarizes. Rational discussion of alternatives to environmental protection and sustainable development are anathema to the brand of extreme, end-of-the world cultural warfare preached by Wise-Use.
Most of the credit for orchestrating this backlash belongs to the renegade leadership behind the Wise-Use/Property Rights Movement. Steeped in the political methods of the New Right - phone banks, fax networks, television and talk radio, computerized bulletin boards, and direct mail - this group of "rearview visionaries" have forged financial and organizational ties linking traditional resource industries, special interest lobbies, right-wing think tanks, and "public interest" legal foundations in common cause.
Such collaboration is key to the multi-level attack waged on environmentalism. Wise-Use/Property Rights activists have cultivated sympathetic voices in the mass media, from talk radio to the New York Times; produced and disseminated claims from the "counter-science" fringe; and launched an assault on the legal basis of land-use and environmental regulations through the sponsorship of property rights litigation in the courts.
Perhaps most disturbing is the growing number of cases of outright intimidation and violence that Helvarg documents - death threats, bombings, arson, rape, and even murder - directed against environmental activists. These are not simply isolated accounts involving drunken rednecks or even displaced workers; more ominously, they are also the handiwork of "professional security" agencies (like the infamous Wackenhut Special Investigations Division) hired by threatened industries to deal with "trouble-makers".
Without doubt, Helvarg's recent book is the most in-depth treatment of Wise-Use and the Property Rights Movement yet available. The great strength of Helvarg's analysis is his exposition of the techniques through which a relatively limited set of interests have generated a potent "grass-roots" political movement. This is corporate power of a new and insidious sort.
Where Helvarg's analysis is misleading, I believe, is in his underestimation of the popular resonance of "property rights" rhetoric. Consider the following: 40 state legislatures have deliberated upon - and 10 have passed - laws requiring regulators to consider the effects of regulations on property owners, and an estimated 450-500 county governments throughout the country have passed "Catron County" ordinances (named for their first adoption in that county in New Mexico in 1990) which usually threaten state and federal officials with a one year jail sentence and $10,000 in fines if they violate property rights through regulatory action. In Washington State alone well over half the counties have adopted "Catron County" style ordinances, county separatist movements and their supporters have helped change the balance of political forces on county councils in Whatcom and Snohomish counties, and a "property rights" measure (Initiative 164) has gained enough signatures to make it on the November ballot.
In short, the Wise-Use/Property Rights movement has tapped into something significantly more dangerous to environmentalism than Helvarg seems willing to admit. Beyond punching holes through the gallery of smoke and mirrors constructed by the New Right, environmentalists need to face the real challenge: getting their message out on the ground, especially in rural areas where issues of local control simmer just beneath the surface; talking with the folks who have legitimate grievances; and taking the power of framing the debate over the meaning of environmentalism away from the extremists.
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