There is a famous saying which goes as “Do as you would be done by”. If read deeply, we can realize that this sentence is replete with meaning and entirely related to the issues that have long clouded our sense of due judgments, leading some of us to feel superior to others and make others suffer. The very term “superiority” serves as the backbone of humiliating attitudes towards the minority group, i-e. Women, black nation, and non-human animals and serves as the dartboard against which the pointed darts of Eco feminism and Feminism tend to land in an effort to dismantle the male-biased tendencies and their disparaging views with regards to women and Nature. In line with the above-mentioned points, some selected poems of Maya Angelou, as the emblem of black woman’s struggle against oppression, and Mary Oliver will be discussed in this paper to reach the point that in a suppressive situation, as in the case of Angelou in particular and Oliver in general, writing Nature poetry could help the voices of such victims of male-centered societies be heard all around the globe.
Debates over gender and women’s position in the world on one side and man’s biased treatment of Nature on the other side paved the way for manifestation of such issues through Eco feminism around the 1970s. Since the advent of Eco feminism we have witnessed “major policy shifts in the fields of gender (in)equality and environmental sustainability” (Buckingham 1). In most cases the beliefs in Man’s rationality and reason have been the primary cause for maltreatment of Nature at the hands of Man. Views related to the “classical Greek humanism, the Judeo-Christian notion of creation as a ‘Great Chain of Being,’ and the Cartesian mind/body dualism” all cast light on Man’s supremacy as the crux of their argument (Bazregarzadeh 17-18). Furthermore, Plum wood traces the “human/nature relation as a dualism” to the “west’s treatment of nature which underlie the environmental crisis” today and argues that “the logic of dualism yields a common conceptual framework which structures otherwise different categories of oppression” (2-3).
While postmodernism rose in reaction to modernism to include “a complex of anti-modernist strategies” (Bertens 3), it also separated the reader, the writer and the text. This gap, as a result, brought about Man’s getting farther from natural surroundings. In contrast to postmodernism’s tendency toward “self-reflexive investigation of the nature, the limits, and the possibilities of the discourse of art” (Hutcheon 22), Ecocriticism focuses on the afore-mentioned separation to bridge this gap and thereby create an inner link between Man and Nature. As Sue Ellen Campbell states in “The Land and Language of Desire” (1989), the break between human being and Nature originates from the incapability of “culture” to “teach us that we are plain citizens of the earth,” because when “we live apart from the natural world and deny our intimacy with it,” we end up in the loss of “the sense of unity [with Nature]” (qtd. in Glotfelty 128). That’s why in The Environmental Imagination (1995), Lawrence Buell poses the following question, “Must literature always lead us away from the physical world, never back to it?” (qtd. in A. Campbell 15). What these critics try to bring forth is the notion of “biocentrism” that S. Campbell defines as, “the conviction that humans are neither better nor worse than other creatures … but simply equal to everything else in the natural world” (qtd. in Glotfelty 128).
Taking S. Campbell’s remark into consideration and extending it further to the principles of Ecofeminism, the main objective of this short study stands out. Though this study could be conducted using other critical approaches, the researcher has chosen Ecofeminism mainly because it “has evolved from various fields of feminist inquiry and activism” and its “basic premise is that the ideology which authorizes oppressions such as those based on race, class, gender, sexuality, physical abilities, and species is the same ideology which sanctions the oppression of nature” (Gaard 1). Gaard’s highlighting such concepts as race, gender, class, etc. justify the interconnection between women and Nature as the targets of tyranny.
As Sturgeon claims, Ecofeminism is “a movement that makes connections between environmentalists and feminisms” (qtd. in Shehab 2) in the hope of pulling apart the “domination of women and domination of nature” (Prathibha V. 13). Examined in this manner we then can approve of Warren’s concentrating on the slogan of Ecofeminism as “Nature is a feminist issue” regarding the fact that in this critical approach “there are important connections between the unjustified dominations of women, people of color, children and the poor and the unjustified dominating of nature” (1).
Warren’s reference to “people of color” above opens our eyes to the sense of humiliation felt by those who were viewed as inferiors in societies where “sexism, racism, militarism, colonialism, and the destruction of ecological systems” were the core elements of oppressive systems (Kirk 2). In case of black women the oppression has always been twofold: because they were not white and they were not men. And this is true about Maya Angelou who was both a woman and black. Being black made her suffer double time the white women in the American white society of the time whose leaders looked down on African-American people and made them go through harsh, unjust treatments. Were it not with the help of writing, especially poetry, figures such as Angelou and Oliver could not put up with those mistreatments. Thus, the main issue that puzzles our minds here is their drawing on Nature and natural scenes quite often in their poems. According to Crawford, “Their nature poems about gender, however, include more than celebrations of womanhood; there are pivotal poems that critique the imagined naturalness of gender” (127).
As a multi-layered figure Maya Angelou (1928-2014) was known for her work in different fields including, poetry, novel, drama, filmmaking, history, dance, etc.; but part of her fame originates from her being known as the civil rights activist and “the most widely recognized poet in contemporary U.S. culture” (Burr 54). Her poems serve as windows to the American male-dominated societies where black women were tyrannized by their oppressors. As such, many believe that her poems are autobiographical sketches in that they deal with her experiences as an African-American woman.
Women’s affinity with Nature, one may say, is a path to a life of liberty, which is why Sandilands claims, “Women would find, or perhaps create, their true identity in spaces carefully separated from the distorting influences of patriarchy” (10) and to Oliver that space is truly the open bosom of Nature. To reach that end, “Oliver builds her stanzas so they interlock, one into another, and the reader is pulled through a series of perceptions into the poet’s insight” (“Mary Oliver” 2793).
What absorbs our attention in the afore-discussed poems more than any other thing, in conclusion, is the point that all the natural elements in the chosen poems of Angelou and Oliver act as facilitators between human being and Nature to serve the task of “ecological criticism,” that Pinkney summarizes as “a call to responsibility” (qtd. in Wu 413) on the part of all humans and non-humans as members of an intricate ecosystem. In the same manner, their poems are good examples of ecopoetry which relies on “an ecological and biocentric perspective recognizing the interdependent nature of the world; a deep humility with regard to our relationships with human and nonhuman nature” (Bryson 18). Accordingly, their poems can stand against the “Oppression and repression” that “are sustained by individuals and institutions that are also most often sexist and heterosexist, racist and classist, as well as exploitative of the natural world” (Gaard 93) by teaching us how to team up with Nature in a one-to-one relationship so as to gain ground in this interdependent tie.
Works Cited
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