Abstract
Climate change is an epic process of daunting scale that an individual can neither understand nor meet alone. To make sense of it requires a creative collective experience that modernity lacks. We are part of vast collectivities but deny we belong to them. We are interdependent and deny that too. Our systemic, cultural denial has done terrible harm and now the world is transforming, with an invitation to come out of self-imposed exile from the rest of nature.
The task of repair, climate reparation, is much bigger than compensation. What wounds and breaches, thefts and injustices are being repaired is a question that ramifies as wide as the world. At its root: we are not going to get good laws, good process, or restorative justice for nature and its people without repairing our breach with the material world, the posture of domination and the estrangement that entails.
Form and process are crucial. By form I mean each of the shapes, channels and structures through which reparations are sought: decision-making processes, the shapes of institutions, structures of property, power and exchange. Pursuing reparations, redressers could adopt and use forms that shore up the bulwarks of a modern industrial system that denies it belongs in the world and relies on domination and exploitation for its maintenance. Or, they could use forms that break down these defences and regrow a creative and reciprocal world in the process of redress.
Art has been experimenting with form throughout the modern era. Its history of experimentation can be understood as a form-shifting response to the problems of modernity: problems of representation, problems of estrangement, of domination and selfhood.
Taking its cue from the sensual world, art plays outrageously with and propagates new forms. Art is nature expressing its creative excess through us. Like sculptured landscape and dancing birds, our poetry, painting and dance are continuous with a dynamic material and living world. Our politics, law and activism can be too. Art gives expression to what the Waanyi novelist Alexis Wright has called ‘the borderless possibilities continuously endowing the world with their radiance’. Let’s open climate law, activism and politics to that radiance.
Reparation must be collective to be transformative. A poem by the Borroloola poetry collective Diwurruwurru called ‘dance strong, dat country move en you’ is attributed to the collective authorship of a group of seven lower secondary students with Mista Phillip, (the convenor of the collective, Phillip Gijindarraji Hall). It describes a journey through country to a place where white ochre can be found. The collective personae make unseen gestures throughout, indicated by the words ‘like dis’. Reading the poem, you hear bodies enacting country and ceremony:
Travelling over country, gathering ochre and painting bodies are preparation for the dance which is country moving in you. The poem concludes with a creative act collectively enacted by the young poets, their country, the ochre, language and Elders:
In an interview with the Paris Review, the poet Jorie Graham said she wanted to recall people to their bodies through poetry. Poetry revives experience and connection through its close attention to the sounds of words and the representation of the dynamic world through syntax.
Like the Borroloola poem, Graham’s poem, ‘In Reality’ recreates the expressive gestures of artists as they undertake acts of co-creation with the world around them that are continued into poetry:
Represent me, says the day.
‘Representation’ is a practice common to politics, art, advocacy and the law. Each undertake it through different forms. To ask for representation requires selfhood, so in Graham’s poem the natural world is sovereign and self-realised. In the poem there is no breach between experience and representation. Since we are part of the day, it is self-representing through us in whatever field we’re working. Successful reparation, then, begins with acts of representation whose forms are aligned, as Dorion Sagan put it, ‘with the sensuous anarchies of the biosphere itself’. Experimenting with forms radiant and sensuous could allow us not only to repair, but to renew and regenerate.
Footnotes
Acknowledgment
For further reading about ‘dance strong, dat country move en you’, see ‘Poems from Borroloola Poetry Club: Diwurruwurru (Phillip Gijindarraji Hall)’, Verity LA Journal (8 July 2016). See also Jorie Graham, ‘In Reality’ (2023) 45(7) London Review of Books.