Wednesday June 6, 2007 The Guardian www.guardian.co.uk http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/scienceandnature/story/0,,2096391,00 .html?gusrc=rss&feed=10
Call of the wild Jay Griffiths has always been an adventurer - but her expeditions are not heroic conquests. She is on a mission to understand the last wildernesses left on the planet, she tells Stephen Moss Jay Griffiths lives in a shed on the edge of Epping forest in Essex. This is, of course, de rigueur for someone who has just written a book called Wild, an exploration of the world's threatened wildernesses and, more than that, a hymn to wildness. But as sheds go, it is quite luxurious. It has a piano for a start - before our interview she plays Debussy's Arabesque No 1 for me, quite beautifully - and a CD player, but no television. TV, she says, kills conversation. The shed, which even in late May is extremely cold, is part of an experiment in communality. Five people live at Dial House, this "artists' collective" near Epping. They share a kitchen and sitting room-cum-library in an old farmhouse, then retire to their private sheds to work, think, sleep, play Debussy. But as well as the five permanent members, there is a transient population of friends and occasional visitors. The founders' original vision of Dial House was twofold: it should exist to help artists, and it should give sanctuary to anyone who needed a roof over their head. The notion sounds unworkable, but to my surprise it appears to work. The gardens are gorgeous, the air of tranquillity palpable. The artists' collective, on the surface pretentious and doomed to fail, is in reality a lesson in alternative living. And something similar might be said of Griffiths' crazily ambitious book, for which she journeyed to the Amazon, the Arctic, the Australian desert, the mountains of West Papua and the islands of Indonesia. "I took seven years over this work," she explains in the introduction to the book, "spent all I had, my time, money and energy . . . I wanted nothing to do with the heroics of the 'solo expedition'. There was no mountain I wanted to 'conquer', no desert I wanted to be the 'first woman to cross'. I simply wanted to know something of the landscapes I visited, and wanted to do that by listening to what the knowers of those lands could tell me if I asked." She was tired of Euro-American writers discussing wildernesses as if, by definition, they were devoid of people. She wanted to commune with indigenous peoples for whom a wilderness is home, and to explain why a wilderness and a wasteland are opposites. Too often, western exploitation will take a wilderness and turn it into a wasteland. Griffiths' examination of wildness grew out of her earlier book, Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time, published in 1999, in which she argued that linear time was obsessive, restrictive and essentially masculine - a tool of enslavement. In that book, she ended with a lament for the loss of "wild time", and made a passing attack on the negative connotations of wilderness favoured by lexicographers; my dictionary gives "wild, uninhabited and uncultivated region", "desolate tract or area", "confused mass or collection". She would disagree on every point. Wild time led her to think about wild land, and to begin making her journeys. How does she define wilderness now? "The best definition is that it is a self-willed land," she says. "All definitions of wilderness that exclude people seem to me to be false. African 'wilderness' areas are racist because indigenous people are being cleared out of them so white people can go on holiday there. All of those definitions seem to me really, really wrong. The thing about self-willed land is that it's both a place and a whole way of being that has its own internal rules and habits." By self-willed she means "the capacity to make its own choices in all senses. Something where there is not the will of any one species or any one kind of mind. A wilderness place can have the will of people within it, but not in any hierarchy. It would also include the will of rivers to go where they want and animals to behave in the way that they want. It's not an imposed order." Griffiths was determined not to write a scientific tract, or a sermon on environmental destruction. Instead, she wanted a book that would encapsulate wildness. "I didn't want to do a guide to biospheres," she says. "I wanted sections on earth, air, fire, water and ice, and then to choose a good representation for each of those things." The Amazon stands for earth; the Canadian Arctic for ice; aboriginal Australia represents fiery desert; she visits sea gypsies off the coast of the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia for the chapter on water; and to write about air she travels to the mountains of West Papua. Only Griffiths would find Papua New Guinea too cosmopolitan, and opt for its dangerous, politically repressed neighbour instead. For 40 years, West Papua has been struggling to free itself from Indonesian control, and here in the mountain air she finds political airlessness. Her reasons for choosing West Papua - instead of, say, the clearer air of the Himalayas - are instructive. "I didn't just want to do something that encourages students to go off and have a good time in different parts of the world, but to say there are really profound things to do with wildness and freedom and land rights involved in this. Probably the most difficult place in the whole world that I could think of to go to in that regard was West Papua, because there's a genocide going on and nobody ever writes about it because it's too difficult to go there and it's very difficult to be there as a westerner. I don't want to sound pious, but it did feel like a kind of a duty. As a writer you have a duty to be a messenger." Griffiths takes that duty very seriously. It irritates the hell out of some people, who find her earnest and preachy, and her style overwrought. Male reviewers, used to coolness and rationalism in books, can react particularly badly. Witness the Sunday Times reviewer of Wild, who said her highly charged writing "reminds one ... of the lush parodic prose of Cold Comfort Farm". It's true: she does sometimes go over the top, but it's of a piece with her passion. She doesn't so much write her books as live them, in them and through them. Griffiths' commitment to her work is absolute and demands sacrifices, personal and pecuniary. She told her publisher Wild would take two years; it took seven. She received an advance of £30,000, fleshed out with a travel grant from a foundation for the study of indigenous peoples and a belated (but timely) US prize for her book on time. It soon becomes clear that she is not only living in a shed on an artists' collective because of the quality of the conversation. She writes slowly, deliberately; it is hopelessly uneconomic and a lesson to those who think books can be bashed out. Money is the last thing on her mind. She originally intended to write fiction and spent four years after studying English at Oxford trying to write a novel. "It was rubbish basically," she says. She then wrote short stories that were "better than rubbish", but realised that her stories were just vehicles for ideas that she wanted to put across, so switched to non-fiction. She dabbled in journalism, but always wanted to write books. She was active in the anti-road protest movement in the 1980s but was already feeling the call of the wild. A reductive reading would be that this is the inevitable result of growing up in East Molesey, Surrey. "From a really young age," she says, "I wanted to know what it was like if you went through the gate, what was it like on the far side of that particular horizon you can see." But she had no desire to travel without a purpose: Wild provided a sense of mission, gave a direction to her wanderings. Griffiths, who is 42, suffered from depression in her 20s. It recurred in her early 30s, and Wild begins with a journey to the Amazon to take a naturally occurring hallucinogenic drug called ayahuasca which she had been told was a treatment for depression. It works, and inevitably we feel it is the natural world curing her of the bleakness and desperation she feels in what she would see as the unnatural world. "It was so powerful and effective for me, and there is something incredible in knowing that if that happens again there is a place that I can go." Wild is a remarkably positive book. Griffiths is not bemoaning man's capacity to destroy the natural world, the west's subjugation of indigenous peoples, or the spurious triumph of "civilisation". These she takes to be truisms - too banal to bear repetition. Instead, she celebrates wildness, and believes in its survival, because wildness is part of what we are. "Language is wild - you can't fence it or tell it what to do - and it's the same with people. Even under the worst excesses of Stalinism or consumerism, the human spirit will still express itself." Indigenous peoples, Griffiths reckons, are fighting back and have rediscovered their sense of pride and strength, and many in the west are starting to realise that they have lost their ethical and psychological bearings, and that they can learn from the rootedness and rituals of traditional societies. Against all the odds, the long journey from East Molesey to West Papua has left her feeling that the world has been neither tamed nor wrecked. "Earth," she says in the gloriously OTT conclusion to her book, "self-created, born of self-will and stardust, made her self-willed way her own, the aboriginal I Am. Wilful and subversive planet that she is, grinning into the dark, roaring out her rebel yell, Earth is the rebel against the whole damn (solar) system ... the ultimate wild comedian." The man from the Sunday Times will hate it, but I find that a rather warming thought in the evening chill of an Essex shed. · Wild: An Elemental Journey is published by Hamish Hamilton, £20 ---- See also... www.freewestpapua.org ========= _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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