Surrendering Logic: On Using Magical Realism to Explore Climate Grief - Literary Hub

I wasn’t successful a large spot erstwhile I had the thought for my debut novel, Send Flowers. I was consigned to furniture with an autoimmune illness and surrounded by neglected houseplants—each dropped leafage seemed a symbol—pathetic fallacy, surely—of my ailing health.

Staring down the tube of months disconnected work, I had, for the archetypal clip successful my big life, an abundance of time. And it was successful this sickly limbo that I began to reflect.

Eight years earlier, my household had been struck by profound loss. It happened erstwhile I was location from assemblage for the summertime break. After six weeks of turmoil, I returned to my studies arsenic if the axis of my beingness had not been turned connected its head. It wasn’t until astir a decennary aboriginal that, struck down by illness, I had clip to face the experience.

And so, betwixt infirmary trips and marathon sessions playing Skyrim, I wondered however grief had changed maine and my family. I noticed the ways successful which it had altered our perception. Not astatine first. In the contiguous aftermath, we could deliberation of thing but the magnitudinous finality of death.

But later, I saw however we each sought retired messages from beyond the gravewhite feathers, robins, flickering candles. We are not a spiritual household and yet, erstwhile bereaved, we viewed coincidence arsenic grounds of an afterlife.

Magical realism has a agelong literate contented arsenic a means to research grief. From Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, it reflects however quality beings header with tragedy: our tendency for meaning, our conflict with impermanence, and the ways we cultivate anticipation aft loss. But I didn’t take to prosecute it from a spot of literate fluency.

It was intuitive. Because arsenic I laid successful bed, watching my houseplants dice and opening aged wounds, a communicative began to emerge. Or rather, a proposition. I wondered what it would beryllium similar to deliberation that a houseplant is the reincarnation of a deceased loved one.

In Send Flowers, Fiona Reid is simply a bereaved clime activistic who comes to judge conscionable that. At the opening of the novel, we find her overmuch successful the authorities I was erstwhile I had the idea—stuck successful her apartment, immobilized by nonaccomplishment and incapable to attraction for her houseplants, each of which person succumbed to a record-breaking London heatwave.

But erstwhile a histrion appears connected her doorstep, she feels a glimmer of hope—it’s her dormant boyfriend’s favorite. She sprinkles his ashes into the ungraded and wakes to find that the works has flowered. Not conscionable that—it tin talk.

I chose to acceptable the caller successful the adjacent future, erstwhile the clime situation has worsened successful the West, to broaden my exploration of grief from the idiosyncratic to the planetary. When I started Send Flowers, protestation rights had conscionable been (and proceed to be) eroded successful the U.K., with clime activism becoming progressively criminalized with each draught I completed.

I present spot the caller arsenic a magical realist allegory that mirrors some the gravity of the clime situation and the imaginative, mythic reasoning we request to look it. But it took maine a portion to get there.

When I signed with my publishers, they encouraged maine to thin deeper into the magical realist genre. But I recovered myself wrestling with however to bash that without taking distant from the constituent I was trying to marque astir clime change. Then Jenna Gordon, my exertion astatine Verve Books, said: “To lick clime change, we request each the magical reasoning we tin get.”

It was a infinitesimal of existent clarity. Because clime alteration isn’t conscionable a technological oregon governmental problem—it’s an emotional, existential situation that impacts however we subordinate to the satellite and each other. So if magical realism tin assistance america process grief, tin it besides springiness signifier to ecological nonaccomplishment and the intangible ways we acquisition biology collapse? And tin it someway supply answers, too?

That’s erstwhile I turned to mythology. Fiona, who is Scottish, archetypal felt the propulsion to support quality arsenic a child. By grounding reincarnation successful the myths of her upbringing, I hoped to deepen hers, and the readers, transportation to the landscape, and to the wider earthy world. Early Scots practiced Celtic Druidry, an past signifier of paganism that was defined by a reverence for nature—”druid” means to “know the oak tree.”

From the opening of the penning process, I’d struggled to onshore connected what taxon the houseplant should be. At archetypal it was a bid lily, past a godforsaken rose, but neither felt right. It wasn’t until I started researching Druid mythology that I discovered the cleanable fit: the yew tree.

In past times, yew trees were potent symbols of resurrection and considered portals to the ‘Otherworld’, wherever spirits could transverse backmost into the onshore of the living. I realized that, if Fiona’s fellow returned arsenic a yew tree, it would blend magical realism with this taste representation of myth, deepening her content successful reincarnation.

When you see that our erstwhile ineffable transportation with quality has been replaced by rampant consumerism and late-stage capitalism, it bears wondering what the satellite would beryllium similar if we hadn’t mislaid interaction with this reverence. Because it not lone distances america from nature’s suffering, it actively contributes to the ecological crises we present face.

In an absorbing parallel, galore clime campaigners are present turning to the wisdom of Indigenous Peoples, whose reverence for quality is cardinal to their content systems, and who person ever tried to unrecorded successful harmony with their environment. At the aforesaid time, they’re often connected the frontlines of the ecological crisis, whether that’s facing down loggers successful the Amazon oregon warring for their livelihoods successful the Arctic.

The Wajapi people, an Indigenous radical successful Brazil, believe that animals, trees, and astir plants person quality souls and are portion of an interconnected spiritual world. Their wellbeing is linked to the wellness of the forest—as each of ours is—but dissimilar humanity arsenic a whole, their spiritual transportation to quality makes them proactive guardians.

This custodial attack is shared by galore Indigenous Peoples, including the Sungai Utik assemblage of occidental Borneo, who believe, “The wood is our father, the onshore is our mother, the h2o is our blood.”

At the extremity of the novel, Fiona reflects that she has “long since surrendered logic” successful the look of nature’s mysteries. She has grown to recognize that, “The world is afloat of intrigue. It possesses inexplicable magic.” Magical realism becomes not conscionable a instrumentality for exploring her grief, but a span to reinvigorate Fiona’s determination to alteration the world, to “love beingness capable to ideate a aboriginal wherever we are escaped and the onshore is escaped and some are symbiotic.”

As clime alteration accelerates and the urgency grows, we are confronted with the request to reconnect with the earthy world, to instrumentality notes from Indigenous communities whose spirituality is cardinal to their defence of nature. I judge that to lick the ecological crisis, we indispensable surrender logic and our “modern sensibilities,” and clasp a consciousness of awe successful the wonders of the satellite again.

Perhaps then, we tin statesman to mend our breached transportation to satellite world and yet enactment successful its champion interest.

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Send Flowers by Emily Buchanan is disposable via Park Row Books.