Recently I’ve been considering this principle more than ever before: the action of writing about place is always political. This truth perhaps feels like it has even greater and more tragic resonance in our current era, where landscapes are territories strongly contested by multiple forces, yet it has manifested in so many different ways throughout centuries of world literature.
Some writers already have an inherently politicised relationship with landscape because of their personal connection to a particular location – whether as a birthplace, or as “home turf”, somewhere that a person has rooted, or somewhere our ancestors were rooted.
Not all writers feel they have a readily personal link to physical landscapes that contain deeper, political resonances. Depending on where we live or have lived, we might feel like the physical settings we’re most connected to are too ordinary.
And yet, and yet…
It’s a surprising truth that what feels like ordinary territory to one person can be astonishing or revelatory to an outsider who isn’t familiar with that place. Our ordinary can be someone else’s extraordinary, because sometimes we overlook what’s notable about the everyday world that surrounds us. Sometimes, too, our families or communities connect us to landscapes in deeper, more entangled ways than we conceptualise when we’re simply going about our daily life.
And ultimately every landscape, whether rural or urban, is inscribed with both a natural and a human history that is fundamentally political – not just the history of animal and plant life that has flourished or waned there, but also the history of our human relationship with that land, and how we have interacted with it over time (through agricultural machinery, or buildings, patterns of mapping, or physical sculpting and reshaping, or sometimes merely in the act of walking through it). Landscape in this way becomes more than only a physical territory: it contains layers of history, politics (local, national, or international), and story.
Invitation #1: Here are some questions to get you exploring your own personal connection to landscape and place. I invite you to find a spare 30-40 minutes or so (this weekend or at another time), and write out some reflections in response. And then whatever themes emerge, be open to the possibility of new ideas percolating their way into your current writing projects:
- In what kinds of environments have you lived and worked? (In other words, the places where you have rooted, to a greater or lesser extent.)
- To what kinds of environments have you travelled?
- Do you consider yourself a rural or urban person, in your upbringing?
- Which type of environment – rural or urban – has the stronger or more positive associations for you now, and why?
- To what extent do you consider yourself rooted (or rootless)?
- What are the racial, ethnic or national identities that have shaped your experience of place, and in what ways?
- How have broader environmental issues (climate, food, wildlife, housing etc) affected your life, or the lives of people you know personally?
- How would you describe your relationship to the planet as a whole?
- What are the key incidents and influences from your life through which place or environment have had an impact upon your identity?
TIP: As well as containing story, a landscape will also inevitably carry layers of emotion. As Graham Mort has written, in his brilliant essay ‘Landscapes and Language’: “A landscape poem or descriptive prose passage is always more than pure description… Landscapes in this respect are psyche-scapes, metaphors representing the yearnings and aspirations, hope, betrayal, anger and bitterness that we see in them.” (from The Creative Writing Coursebook, Julia Bell & Paul Magrs (eds.), (London: Macmillan, 2001), p.180). So as you start making notes about landscapes you’re personally connected to, notice any feelings associated with them, as well as simply trying to witness their physical existence. (If you notice challenging feelings arising, you have the freedom to decide to keep writing through the feeling until it transforms or subsides, or otherwise pause and distract yourself with another activity, chat to someone, or go for a stroll / get your body moving.)
Invitation #2: As a second activity this weekend (or at a more convenient time for you), I invite you to go out into your local landscape with a notebook or smartphone and practise the following two-part exercise as an act of witnessing: (a) observing the physical reality of things closely, and (b) finding vivid and specific language for capturing/evoking those physical things on the page. Consider the following categories of noticing, if they’re helpful:
(1) details of nature (incl. any interaction between “natural” and “human”)
(2) architecture (incl. decorative vs. functional vs. culturally symbolic or meaningful; and manifestations of the passage of time within architecture)
(3) people – as individuals and people in groups (e.g. why this person with these people as a group? clothes as a statement/unconscious signal; what is the person carrying and why? what are the person’s emotions? what kind of activity are they participating in?)
(4) technology/equipment (its purpose, what materials is the technology using, how it might have been made, and by whom, and what effect does it have on its surroundings?)
Again, afterwards, be open to some of this observed material finding its way into your current writing projects…
Above all, have fun exploring the landscapes and locations you personally know. Consider them as if you were seeing the territory for the first time…
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