A South-Asian Eco Vision: On the Climate

Change Anthology, Open Your Eyes

A review by Kiran Bhat

 

Vinita Agrawal, editor, Open Your Eyes: An Anthology on Climate Change
Hawakal Publishers, 2020
206 pages, softcover, $12.00

 

All decisions have consequences, and all actions too have costs. Our disregard for the environment and each other have resulted in what will ultimately become the great collective hurdle of the century: climate change. The aftermath of carbon emissions created by excess fossil fuel use, the eroding of our landscape, the shrinking of our icecaps, the extinctions of our species—all of this is happening at a rapid rate. And we do not know how it will affect us. We only see the world in front of us, and we grow unsure about what to do.

In a mix of poetry, story, and essay, Open Your Eyes speaks in one singular voice: to tell you why fighting climate change is a must.

While most humans are too busy trying to survive in the moment, there is a group of activists, social leaders, and yes, artists, who are attempting to fight this environmental degradation. And so we pause on this particular anthology of ecopoetry, a sample of voices from all edges of the planet compiled by one poet in Mumbai. Vinita Agarwal states in her preface to Open Your Eyes: “In the course of our existence, there is something grievously wrong with our way of life.”

The anthology’s inclusions tend to follow certain thematic similarities. There are the poems which mourn the loss of landscape and species, such as in the chapter “Koalas,” which imagines the species dying out in Australian bushfire, or “The Lost Mango Trees,” in which the narrator recounts of the difficulty of growing mangos in the soil—once as easy as throwing mangos into the backyard. Poems like “Paper Moon” or “Throw Me in the Landfill” reflect on environmental degradation from a narrative standpoint, whereas poems like “Binsar Barahmasa” or “Reading at One Remove” take local Indian literary traditions and spin them around the axis of climate change.

There are the poems which read like rants at a generation which failed to take action (“Ode to the Deniers,” “ice caps”). There are the poems which tour a location and harp on about how humans have wrought environmental change themselves (“Amazon,” “The Big House at Mambalam”).

Variety is a source of diversity and, while the disparate voices of Open Your Eyes have not been ordered in a smooth or cohesive manner, their individuality stands out. In stories like “Saturnalia,” bees are given the ability to speak, just as in a poem like “Arid,” the land with parched mouth beckons the dryness, all the while begging for water. In “Annihilation,” Anju Makhija turns a feminine voice into a supernova of feeling and thought in response to the air pollution around the Gateway of India. Makhija writes:

I’ll sail away,
heal the wounds,
bury memories,
unfog my thoughts.

But no matter what, human will is powerless to change the perversion of the clouds, and as Makhija says, “the island drifts into extinction.”

Jayanta Mahapatra employs a similar reduction of time and essence in “I am Today.” An unknown voice reminisces about the animals that riveted him once but will no longer be known to the next generation. Species of birds that he knew in his childhood have become reduced to names “in a child’s picture book.” Mahapatra writes about a memory of having a dead sparrow:

how it made me human
as I held on to the little sorrow.

There is a collectivity and connectivity to the images he imagines. He hearkens to “the love of frog riding frog in the rain,” which drums up not only a loving image of a frog on top of a frog, but of a unity and togetherness that is being lost. Yet, on the other side is the smell of “blood and paint, petrol and cement, lipstick and factory waste, and the death murmur of trees.” What was once all of the animal kingdom living in the harmony of the natural world has become a graveyard for those who subsist in urban jungle alone. Mahapatra continues in “I am Today”:

Cry, children
cry the silence of the earth
as you drift down without echo
the silk-stockinged sleepless city.

What is it that we as humans can do in the face of climate change? When one reads Open Your Eyes one gets the sense that there isn’t much to be done at all. The degradation has reduced cities and villages into living trash dumps, and the bats and the bees drop around us, dying in flight.

And still, despite that hopelessness in the inevitable, Open Your Eyes offers redemption in its poetics. Through the power of imagery and wordplay, the poets of Open Your Eyes have taken the common occurrences of the outside world and have lent them a certain gravitas. By having authors from all corners of the world with an Indian connection speak out against the changes that we are witnessing on a global scale, there is a chance that, with further awareness, engagement, and action, the world can sheen and careen and thrill with verdancy once more.

 

Kiran Bhat is an Indian-American author, traveler, and polyglot. He is known as the author of we of the forsaken world…, and has published books in five different languages, and has his writing published in journals such as The Kenyon Review, The Southern Humanities Review, 3:AM Magazine, The Chakkar, and many other places. You can follow him at WeltgeistKiran.