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THE WORLDS WE LONG FOR
Have
you, like me, longed for a community where we live together in relative amity,
following laws we work out for ourselves and valuing each other for our contribution
to common good? I have yearned for those worlds my whole life long. It’s what
fires me up every morning to sit down and write my speculative fiction about
The Rookery and Dunlin, Cedar Haven and Fox’s Earth — ideal settlements
scattered around my invented Marshlands, where my characters are warmly valued
for their unique personalities and special skills.
Every utopia reminds us of opposite
worlds. For my environmental fiction I have invented plenty of dystopias like Breck
and Brent and the southern Delta, ruled by greed and
cruelty, military domination,
sexism, and enslavement. The novel I am
marketing for young readers, The Road to Beaver Mill, takes eleven year
old Bethany to contrasting communities —the hard-hearted, misogynistic
settlement of Western Fisher folk, who despise her as a half-breed and work her
cruelly; and the kinder and cheerful settlement of Eastern Fisher folk, where
she is welcomed and cherished. Later, she escapes from the starkly dystopian
city of Brent to Beaver Mill, utopian in contrast. In my fourth novel, The
Battle for the Black Fen, my characters set forth in small companies to
spread the news about the coming battle. The Delta Company undertakes a perilous
journey into southern lands, a world of deserts and oases and vast marshy areas.
Speculative worlds are never built out of new cloth but from bits and
pieces of worlds we already know. My plot is based the draining of the East
Anglian fens; for the Delta I needed a desert setting with new details for its
wetlands. I found just what I wanted
from news about the Ma’dan, self-sustaining marsh dwellers so despised for
their self-sufficiency by Saddam Hussein that he systematically drained their
fastnesses (Sound familiar?)
Not much good came out of the Iraq War, except America’s environmental priority
to restore the marshes. To begin this
task, long exiled Iraqi Azzam Alwash (picture below) gathered a “Nature Iraq”
team who brought back a portion of the Mesopotamian Marshlands. In 2013 this became Iraq’s first national park. *.
Thus, though the draining of the East Anglian Fens was fully accomplished by greedy merchants after more
than two hundred years of resistance by the Fen Tigers, environmental activism
has restored a portion of their historic fastnesses to the Marsh Arabs.
In researching the setting for my Deltan lands, I was able to glean the kinds of details I
needed I from two classic books about the Ma’dan.** Basically, everything is made out of the
enormously tall reeds that grow in the Arab Marshes, so I named my southern marshes the
Reedlands. Entire islands are fashioned out of reeds: woven into mats, they
form the floors of houses; lashed into columns, they become the arched walls of
meeting halls where councils are held and judgments arrived at among tribal
sheiks.
Karrady
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The
Arab marshes, which used to cover a vast area between the Tigris and Euphrates
Rivers, were the first place I ever located on a map. I was perhaps eight years old, sitting at my
desk in the geography room at school, with a huge oil cloth map of the middle
east hung over the blackboard and my own
map in front of me. After we located the
two rivers and colored them blue, our teacher asked us to take green crayons
and color “The fertile Crescent,” which, she told us, was not only the “Cradle
of Civilization” but was also thought to be the location of the original Garden
of Eden.
We children were well aware what had become of our residence in that garden; we also knew (it was 1945)
that evil could break forth at any moment to rupture our world. During my worst terrors about the Nazis my
mother reassured me that “Right will always triumph over Might,” but fear of evil
was never far from my heart and would alternate with fierce yearning for a
better world for the rest of my life.
Years later, researching the Arab marshes, it became clear that “the
Fertile Crescent” was no paradise either. I found plenty about warring tribes
and punitive sheiks to confirm the usual blend of utopian and dystopian
elements; the flora and fauna weren’t all that Edenic either. You could get
hopelessly lost navigating endless mazes of gigantic reeds; and ferocious wild boars inspired one of my most terrifying fictional
episodes. The heartening cacophony when thousands
of frogs of different species held forth at mating time had its dystopian
contrast when the Delta Company came upon frog corpses littering miles and
miles of mud after the ruthless drainage of their habitat.
When Berwyn, a boy who becomes the
Delta Company’s Reedland guide, finds “little splotches shimmering here and
there in the first rays of sun,” he bursts into a lament.
“Oh
bright green ones
Oh golden-eyed ones,
Oh leaping ones,
Oh speckled ones,
All, all, even the wise-eyed ones,
Berwyn cried bitterly, shaken with
sobs down to this little brown stomach.”
But
then his earthly Eden comes to life once again when the drainage area ends:
“A faint trilling grew louder, an
interwoven melody and fluting and chuckling, clacking and what sounded like the
twang of tambourines.
“Oh
bright green ones!
Oh golden-eyed ones!
Oh brown-striped ones!
You live, you yet live,
exulted Berwyn, capering wildly.”
And
so it goes in our sorry old world, paradise lost by greedy human beings and
paradise restored by those of us who love the earth and cannot bear to see the
evils we come up with destroy it entirely.
*Congratulations to 2013 Goldman Environmental Prize recipient Azzam Alwash and his team at Nature Iraq, who are celebrating a huge
victory this week, following the announcement that the Mesopotamian Marshlands
have been officially recognized as Iraq’s first National Park!
**Gavin Maxwell, A Reed Shaken By
the Wind. Longman’s, Green and Co
(1957)
Wilfred Thesiger, The Marsh Arabs. Longman’s, Green and Co (1964).
