From the Frying Pan… (1/2)

Drought. That was what they called it, what was happening. What was the true definition of a drought, though? How many days did an area have to go without rain for one to be proclaimed? 

Prolonged shortage of water supply, below-normal precipitation. Can last for days, months, years. That’s the list of the main features. Of course that’s the one associated with climate. There’s another drought, though. It’s the one that’s a metaphor for creative production, like art, literature, composing music. Writers seem to be most afflicted with periods of drought, but most pull out of the dry state sooner or later. (If they don’t self-destruct first.) These are all imagined conditions and can be cured.

She’d studied about meteorological droughts in school and in fact the topic had arisen in more than one course. It had to. The world was suffering then, although things are worse now, and so many more regions barely have access to water. Climate change is frying people and animals alive. Fires devastate heritage forests that will take another four or five centuries to repopulate. There are fewer and fewer yew trees on the planet now, and for this very reason: the lack of water.

Drought caused by deforestation and using vast areas of land to let animals graze. That’s especially bad in Spain, which is rapidly turning into a desert and where the grazing animals are often bulls that ironically are reared freely in order to be enclosed, then slaughtered in a ring. Everybody loses in situations like that.

Everything’s connected, and droughts are connected to human behavior such as when housing or commercial development destroys natural vegetation, creating concrete lawns and lots of erosion. Manufacturing anywhere creates pollution, which makes holes in the ozone layer… and why bother? Everybody has known all of these things, these dangers, for generations? Why worry about a little drought?

Because the drought is far than mild or short-lived and its consequences are worse now than the scientists are reporting in their research. Because many of the reasons for the drought are also connected to a way of thinking now being taught consistently in schools, on social media, with video games. Purchase, consume, save money buying cheaply, promote production of things, acquire things, inspire more smoke from manufacturing. Blow that ozone hole wide open.

This was the rational explanation and the attitude of the majority. However, she was done with being rational. She didn’t care about fitting in.She was done with the politicians and their promises to fix things while having their pockets lined by the very groups responsible for the droughts. They were deadly.

She felt sad that what she had learned in school had become a thing of the past. She felt even sadder that nobody cared about history any more, much less about literature. The planet’s vicious drought cycles were now faithfully reflected in the people who lived on it. Their minds had become deserts, devoid of the ability to protect, salvage, repurpose, create, grow the important parts of life. Attitudes or opinions regarding this? Zero. Anesthesia via screens and purchasing power. Daily injections.

There were other ways to describe the situation, none pleasant. To use an old metaphor, nowadays people just picked up guns and shot their way out of Dodge. Body over mind. Powers of testosterone or its equivalent in the other genders. 

She knew she was withering in the midst of the latest drought, which seemed even worse now that people were less distracted by the pandemic. A lot of survivors just wanted to breathe and be left alone. She felt as if she were going to shrivel up until she became a dry seed pod flipped about by a Saharan wind. She was panicking, her anxiety level through the roof.

She knew she was severely dehydrated. The lack of rain, sleet, and snow had ironically stiffened, perhaps frozen her skin, and there were now deep, ragged fissures covering her body. Her thoughts were trying to cross a mudflat that had once been a big pond, and her feet were becoming entangled in the muck. She felt faint, her heart bobbled and beat unevenly, and she knew she couldn’t last much longer. Water is life, as indigenous people try to tell the world, but the world was way too busy not drinking. Unless it happened to be cocktail hour. So she decided to make her move.

She didn’t know the correct procedure for doing a rain dance that would magically change the arid climate, but she could look for answers to the drought that was spreading, becoming more life-threatening, inside her, in her head. She was determined not to die of desert mind, and so she began the long, struggling walk back across the gelatinous muck that would soon become baked hard, like everything else, like her. She needed words. Ironic: words, passwords, lots of them.

Immediately the poem “Drought” by Gary Soto came to mind. The poem was about another place and was probably written in the 1970s. She could barely recall things she’d studied in American History as a subject of its own, and instead what she’d really learned about history had come from reading novels, poems, plays, and literary criticism. Films also had taught her a lot. Couldn’t forget films. And plays. Poetry readings. Artist’s books. Things like that.

She had had to recite the Soto poem for a school event once, maybe for one of the feel-good fiestas latinas high schools like to show proof of their policy of tolerance. (Tolerance? What about respect?) 

At the time she had memorized and recited the poem, she had not yet seen the film Vidas Sêcas [Barren Lives], from 1963, which was devastating in its portrayal of the drought in Brazil. The film would be based on a true climate situation because it in turn was based on the novel by Graciliano Ramos, published in 1938. She would see the film decades after it had been produced. These were things she did not yet know about when she recited the poem by Soto, which (she’d remembered now) she’d had as a reading assignment for a Literatura Latina course in her Cultural Studies program. It hadn’t been for some fiesta to celebrate the Cinco de Mayo or Día de los Muertos, which were more Tex-Mex if anything. Not everything Latino or Hispanic was about food or bright colors. Students could learn more from the hard, desiccated lives of farm workers than from a bowl of nachos in Spanish class.

She spoke the first three lines aloud, but carefully:

The Drought

The clouds shouldered a path up the mountains

East of Ocampo, and then descended,

Scraping their bellies gray on the cracked shingles of slate.

The poem ended with

And the young who left with a few seeds in each pocket,

Their belts tightened on the fifth notch of hunger—

Under the sky that deafened from listening for rain.

Since the experience with Soto’s poem, she’d found a few others and had copies of them all, printed or handwritten, in a blue folder. The color of water, sometimes. Or skies. Or states of mind.

There was a page copied from a book by South African Denys Lefebvre with her poem, “Drought:”

Heat, all-pervading, crinkles up the soil;

A deathly silence numbs the molten air;

On beds of rivers, islands scorched and bare,

Warm scavengers of wind heap up the spoil; 

A hopeless poem was not what she craved and had to put it aside. She also discarded T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” although only after rereading it just one more time, for that very reason. The process was quite the challenge, since the crop universally produced during a drought is the lack of hope.

There was Siegfried Sassoon, from Kent, even wrote of a dry period in Britain:

A time of drought had sucked the weedy pool 

And baked the channels; birds had done with song

Song of the Wheat by Australian bush writer Andrew Barton Paterson.

Even Chaucer had his doubts or droughts and wrote of them in his verses.

The notebook listed more writing on the topic.

The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. Every student had to read it. Maybe things had changed? Is that why people didn’t notice or care that the world was in dire straits? The Drought Year, by Judith Wright. Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse. Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sewer. Euclides da Cunha's Os Sertões [The Backlands]. Poor Brazil. It certainly had had its share of droughts over the centuries.)

A couple of essays had also been read along the way: Drought in World Literature, Art, Philosophy and Community, by R.L. Heathcote, 2013; 13 Important Children's Books About Drought (from Ronnie’s Awesome List). There were lots of literary criticism articles, too many to list, plus she just remembered the main ideas in them and went on to the next. 

She was parched. Only when her thirst for literature was quenched would she feel relief from the drought in her mind. She had been starved for thoughts. She would not allow herself to go hungry or thirsty ever again. Survival of the fittest.

She had been exhausted from traversing work after work about droughts and knew all she needed to know about them. Her mind pushed at her, reminded her of Soto and his poem about his drought, a drought that finally seemed to have won the battle. The ones he wrote about as flying off to other realms were birds who were taking their hope with them. 

Tragic. Preventable. She thought:

So Drought wins, just to stand wide, open, like a bully? To stand tall, erect, bloodless and burning over a desert without life and with countless bones of memories? 

She couldn’t accept this, couldn’t let it happen.

Because she was in a hurry, she had to forego the reading of endless books about rain and just limit her efforts to writing her own poems and offer them to literary groups, reading circles, published authors, libraries, bookstores, schools, everywhere one could access books. She wasn’t concerned about what people might say, because she believed in her cause and she believed she was onto something, she would succeed. 

In other words, she was going to write the rain and in so doing the drought would have to recede. It would surely rain. She would wield her (naturally, metaphorical) pen for the good of the drought-plagued regions of the world. She wouldn’t conjure up a flood like Noah’s, but she felt her literary skills might encourage other writers to fight (not literally; they were writers, after all) for rain. Justice for the land! 

And she called on Soto, because after all he might be able to help her do a rain dance:

Under the sky that deafened from listening for rain.

Venceremos! She almost prayed.