About the Fens (Or: Life as struggle between water and silt)
Graham Swift, Waterland
“For centuries the Fens were a network of swamps and brackish lagoons. The problem of the Fens has always been the drainage. What silt began, man continued. Land reclamation. Drainage. But you do not reclaim a land overnight. You do not reclaim a land without difficulty and without ceaseless effort and vigilance. The Fens are still being reclaimed even to this day. Strictly speaking, they are never reclaimed, only being reclaimed…So forget, indeed, your revolutions, your turning-points, your grand metamorphoses of history. Consider, instead, the slow and arduous process, the interminable and ambiguous process - the process of human siltation - of land reclamation. Is it desirable, in the first place, that land should be reclaimed? Not to those who exist by water; not to those who have no need of firm ground beneath their feet. Not to the fishermen, fowlers and reed-cutters who made their sodden homes in those stubborn swamps, took to stilts in times of flood and lived like water-rats. Not to the men who broke down the medieval enbankments and if caught were buried alive in the very breach they had made…” (Swift 1992:9-10)
reclaim (n)
2. a. The act of recalling, or state of being recalled, to right conduct.
2. b. Reclamation of land. 1799. J. ROBERTSON. Agric. Perth. 421. “While the country underwent the work of reclaim.”
reclaim (v)
2. a. To recall, bring back (a person or animal) from a wrong course of action, etc., to a proper state.
3. a. To reduce to obedience, tame, subdue (an animal, esp. a hawk, also rarely a person).
3. b. To keep the growth of (wood or trees) within bounds. Obs.
3. c. To remove (rude qualities) by means of instruction or culture; to bring (savage people) to a state of civilization.
3. d. To bring (waste land, or land formerly covered by water) under, or into a fit state for, cultivation.
Also: Lidia Vianu interviews Graham Swift
“If my narratives get complicated, it’s not wilful. I think life’s complicated. Too many people try to simplify it…I don’t feel at home with straight, sequential narrative. This partly because I think that moving around in time, having interruptions and delays, is more exciting and has more dramatic potential, but I also think it’s more truthful to the way our minds actually deal with time. Memory doesn’t work in sequence, it can leap to and fro and there’s no predicting what it might suddenly seize on. It doesn’t have a chronological plan. Nor does life, otherwise the most recent events would always be the most important.”
March 9th, 2006 at 7:50 pm
How bizarre. This post brought on a sense of deja vu. The story is not about silt, but muck, and the way it spreads across boundaries:
“Finding our way through the mud and mangroves of the Pacific Coast of Colombia, I become aware there is no border between land and sea. What exists is not a coast but a blur. The mangroves claw at the mud, like me -– matter falling through time with a strange comfort in a sucking motion where being coagulates in. a unity of sticky shadows. This morass is definitely the long-sought in-between of sludge rising and falling with the tide, home to all. manner of life-forms, the lunar zone of rot and decay in whose slow, eternal rhythms clouds of shrimp waft and crabs hide. The gold that was, and the co-caine now spreading, cause the same fermenting mix of composting life we choose to call corruption. Mangrove swamps offer comfort, here being na-ture’s corruption, where death and life sustain one another in extremis, and matter — formless matter — spreads its silver trail in the moonlight.”
Contrast that with the idea of reclamation, or the struggle between water and silt. This is Michael Taussig, in a photocopy I pulled from a stack of same yesterday afternoon. It’s a few pages from an unknown book. Not My Cocaine Museum, although it has similarities and focuses on the same place. He may refer to the coast as a blur, but his last sentence reflects a sense of co-constituent symbiosis. Graham Swift touches on that ever-so-lightly in the excerpt you’ve posted.
PS: while I was looking around, I came across this. It’s got some interesting stuff.
Apologies for the mess above. I needed to edit it a bit more.
March 11th, 2006 at 12:19 pm
Very nice quote - thanks e-tat! I envision Taussig’s coast in (his) terms of mimesis and alterity…and that makes me wonder about reclamation and syncretism…Hmm…
March 11th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
I appreciate the impact of reclamation but what a beautiful place it has created for us to live in some 350 years later?