Corpse Whale

"okpik is an Inupiaq poet, from Alaska. Much of the story of our impact on the deep future is being written in the far north, through the extraction of fossil fuels and the warming of the Arctic. But for indigenous communities that future is their past. The indigenous scholar Kyle Powys Whyte says that indigenous populations “already inhabit what our ancestors would have understood as a dystopian future.” The Anthropocene is, after all, a legacy of colonialism. And it perpetuates colonialism too—what else could you call it, when lifestyles in developed nations depend on ravaging the Niger Delta and Alberta’s Tar Sands in search of cheap fuel, and exporting the greatest cost of burning it to Bangladesh and the Marshall Islands, for whom sea level rise is an existential threat? “The Anthropocene is, after all, a legacy of colonialism” For all this, the poems in Corpse Whale are full of the richness of Inupiaq culture and myth, and the rhythms of Arctic life. Perhaps most importantly of all, they challenge the worldview that sets humans apart from the rest of the world. okpik uses a form of split pronoun—“She/I dream/s in flight with falcon / She/I glide/s in an Inuit ice shelf”—which is disorienting at first, but gradually produces this shift in your attention, where the ‘I’ speaking becomes inextricable from the surrounding world. The notion of shared personhood is a core element in much indigenous thinking, including Inupiaq culture. ‘Inupiaq’ means “real people,” and at one point, okpik even observes that “oil is a people,” which transforms it from a simple resource to an entity we share the world with. The poems are also very dynamic, visually—full of breaks between phrases, and sudden changes in register and reference. They offer what the poet Lyn Hejinian calls an ‘open text,’ that is, “open to the world.” okpik’s is a cosmology that non-indigenous readers can’t just step into, but I think we can learn from it. To borrow a phrase from Robin Wall Kimmerer, her poems are “born of long intimacy and attentiveness to a homeland.” She’s immersed in ways of telling time that are the product of thousands of years of continuous culture in a hugely challenging landscape. ( Corpse Whale is arranged as a kind of calendar of the Inupiaq year.) In this way of looking at things, the temporalities of oil extraction or geopolitics seem deeply strange, a kind of temporal ostranenie (defamiliarisation). It’s good, I think, to learn that there are other ways of being in time."