Milena Schwab-Graham evaluations Polly Atkin’s A few of Us Simply Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Higher (Hodder & Stoughton, 2023), a memoir which mixes feminist incapacity justice and nature writing.
Who will get to put in writing about ‘troublesome’ topics? How can individuals dwelling with incapacity, sickness and trauma write about their complicated relationship to nature, when that is formed by their experiences of marginalisation? Polly Atkin’s A few of Us Simply Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Higher (2023) provides solutions to those questions in varied methods. Deeply private, the e book states the novel, transformative potential of intersectional, feminist nature writing. It’s a name to motion, during which the pure landscapes of Britain are tied up with each hope and ache. The e book doesn’t comply with a standard narrative construction. There are not any redemptive narrative arcs; there are diagnoses, however no miraculous cures. As an alternative, there may be affirmation that ‘in continuation, there may be life’ (286).
There was a surge of writing about incapacity, sickness and nature within the current years throughout poetic, fiction, essay and significant varieties. Such writing has centred disabled and sick individuals’s encounters with the pure world, reframing nature writing away from the gaze of the determine infamously referred to by Kathleen Jamie because the ‘lone enraptured male’, whose able-bodied standing, very like his whiteness and cis heterosexuality, is implicit. For instance, Louise Kenward’s anthology Shifting Mountains: Writing Nature By Sickness and Incapacity (2023) collects works of poetry, prose and artistic non-fiction by writers dwelling with incapacity and sickness. Likewise, Katherine Norbury’s anthology Girls on Nature (2021) contains nature writing about incapacity and sickness by Kenward and Atkin, in addition to Dorothy Wordsworth and Virginia Woolf, whose personal experiences of dwelling with incapacity and continual sickness resurface all through Atkin’s poetry and scholarship (A lot With Physique, 2021; Recovering Dorothy, 2021).
Atkin’s e book engages with and builds upon influential work which transcends formal boundaries between sickness, surroundings and drugs (Ray and Sibara, 2017; Clare, 2017). She locations her concepts inside a community of pondering by, for and about disabled and sick writers who proceed to seek out stimulating and shocking encounters with nature, regardless of it usually being rendered inaccessible to those that are disabled or sick. A few of Us Simply Fall is, as Atkin stated throughout a literary occasion on the Brighton Competition in 2024, intrinsically involved with the interconnections of issues, very like the interlocking branches of bushes in a forest.
Atkin’s ‘sense of self is outlined by falling, by breaking’ (11). Her memoir charts the methods during which this accumulation of bodily and psychological fractures is exacerbated by the gaslighting and lack of know-how she is confronted with by medical professionals when looking for help for her Hypermobile Ehlers-Danos Syndrome and Haemochromatosis. Char Heather has spoken of the novel potential of illness tales, and Atkin suggests that ‘Sickness makes storytellers of us all’ (29). Certainly one of A few of Us Simply Fall’s many strengths is its naming of the boundaries to analysis and help encountered by ‘sufferers [who] know that [their] model of the story is mistrusted instinctively and as a matter in fact’ (29).
Atkin recounts her personal painful experiences of repeatedly being dismissed and discredited by the gatekeepers of the well being system, that are exacerbated by the actual fact of her being ‘judged [as] too feminine, too delicate – simply an over-clever woman over-thinking’ (121). Atkin rejects the essentialism of such assumptions, which don’t account for the complicated subjectivity of dwelling with sickness. ‘More often than not’, Atkin says, she ‘was grappling with what it’d even imply to really feel human’ (121). A few of Us Simply Fall makes such assertions while emphasizing that disabled and sick individuals who face additional marginalisation ‘due to their gender, […] sexuality, […] nationality, […] race, […] faith, […] ethnicity, […] skill, [or] […] background’ (39) are prone to expertise even larger obstacles to sharing their sickness tales and looking for help. Atkin acknowledges that she has benefitted from emotional and monetary backing which many marginalised disabled and sick persons are unable to entry. A few of Us Simply Fall requires intersectional feminist incapacity justice, which is attuned to the unequal distribution of privilege and assets.
The ‘Wilderness’ of the Sick: Towards the Infallible ‘Nature Remedy’
On the centre of Atkin’s memoir is a critique of ‘The Nature Remedy’, an idea popularised by Richard Mabey’s memoir Nature Remedy (2005), about how strolling in nature helped him along with his melancholy. Samantha Walton’s Everyone Wants Magnificence: In Search of the Nature Remedy (2021) and Shauna Walker’s article for The Polyphony on ‘inexperienced prescribing’ have begun to discover the moral obstacles and prospects for conceiving a ‘nature remedy’ which is appropriate with disabled and sick individuals’s lived actuality, and Atkin’s e book offers particularly lyrical kind to its interrogation of this idea. A few of Us Simply Fall reveals how the writer’s walks and wild swims in nature have had the capability to invigorate her chronically sick physique, however that is foregrounded by the troublesome realisation that any reduction offered by such exercise is contingent and fleeting. She recounts how her dwelling within the Cumbrian village of
Grasmere was my drugs. I believed in it […] When it started to fail me, […] I couldn’t perceive why it wasn’t working any extra, why I used to be getting sicker and sicker, regardless of the mountains, the water, the bushes. (205)
For Atkin, perception in ‘The Nature Remedy’ is fallacious. It ‘is distraction remedy with greenwash, trailing all the colors of the aurora borealis’ (210). Her prose is lucid and unflinching in its deconstruction of the concept the disabled physique might be readily ‘cured’ by encounters with nature: ‘The ideology of remedy makes a cultivated backyard of the physique […] It desires […] the soil enriched, the pests managed’ (206). A few of Us Simply Fall thus powerfully reconfigures the metaphorical panorama of the sick physique as a ‘wilderness’. Atkin re-examines Susan Sontag’s concept of ‘the dominion of the sick’, to affirm each the ‘place’ of her sick physique and the ‘place’ of illness itself: ‘After I go to the opposite place that’s the place of the sick, I’m going into my very own physique, into its unseen landscapes and undiscovered nations’ (70). There’s magnificence and defiance in her acknowledgement of the truth that the ‘wilderness’ of her sick physique shouldn’t be an indication of normative failure or condemnation. As an alternative, it’s a panorama by way of which she is aware of how you can navigate, because it provides up paths that are identified to her, and, crucially, she is ‘not alone’ (81).
The Disabled Physique as Panorama, the Panorama as Disabled Physique
In Atkin’s memoir the division between her self and the lakes and hills of the Lake District and Derbyshire is elided. There are numerous highly effective passages during which she meditates on this lack of boundary between self and different, the human and non-human, and the way her expertise as a chronically sick individual influences this eco-crip relationship.
The work of Stacy Alaimo, a outstanding scholar of feminist environmental humanities, is an extra touchstone. A few of Us Simply Fall provides luminous accounts of Atkin’s bodily actions by way of pure locations and wild areas, emphasizing how Alaimo’s idea of ‘trans-corporeality, during which […] the corporeal substance of the human is finally inseparable from the surroundings’ (2008: 238) takes on important significance when contemplating the embodiment and subjectivity of individuals dwelling with sickness and incapacity. For Atkin, the boundaries between ‘nature’ and ‘one’s personal pores and skin’ appear to dissolve, particularly when she undertakes wild swims within the our bodies of water close to her dwelling. She turns into ‘a part of one thing greater and wilder than myself […] a part of one physique, the physique of the lake, and lots of’ (2023: 216). Whereas swimming, Atkin strikes her physique with larger steadiness and ease than on land. She is conscious of the dangers, and, considerably, doesn’t regard her swims as a type of ‘remedy’. They’re, reasonably, a way of attaining some type of equilibrium inside her bodymind, which helps her to proceed current: ‘a way of upkeep […] [t]o maintain myself as degree as I can’ (216).
A few of Us Simply Fall persuasively requires incapacity justice by reiterating the political within the private. It invokes additional situations of environmental activism which conceive of panorama as a dwelling physique which is disabled by air pollution. Whereas Atkin’s ‘iron ranges rise stealthily’ resulting from her Haemochromatosis, she hears the Indigenous Secwepemc and Nuxalk activist Nuskmata (Water Protector) ‘give a lecture during which she talks in regards to the poisoning of Quesnel Lake in Canada by the Mount Polley mine’ (222), paralleling the air pollution of the ‘dwelling physique’ of the lake with that of Atkin’s internal panorama: ‘Because the earth rusts […] the valleys and lakes inside me develop in toxicity’ (220). She highlights how Nuskmata’s environmental activism is rooted within the Indigenous perception that Lake Quesnel is ‘an individual who’s an important member of the neighborhood’ (222), dissolving the boundaries between the human and non-human. Atkin describes how the ache of her Haemochromatosis ‘replicates itself like micro organism’, a poisonous algal bloom inside her system (220). This ‘disaster of the inner panorama’ (220) evocatively hyperlinks bodily to environmental collapse. Right here there might need been scope to discover the intersections between incapacity justice, environmental justice and racial justice additional, given the networked and wide-ranging concepts outlined on this e book. Fairly than this being a criticism, nonetheless, it highlights how Atkin’s testimony of her life with incapacity and sickness is inherently involved with the interconnections between, and immersion in, the surroundings.
A few of Us Simply Fall is a strong and shifting account of ‘not getting higher’ and the pure world’s relationship to continual sickness. Atkin provides an intricate, private response to the query posed by Sarah Jaquette Ray: ‘If getting near nature is about risking the physique within the wild, what sort of environmental ethic is out there to the disabled physique?’ (2017: 29). Atkin units out that her causes for scripting this e book are ‘To testify that my physique is actual, that my story is actual […] There are numerous of you. Of us. I imagine you’ (39). Recognition and solidarity are thus foundational to Atkin’s contribution to an intersectional environmental ethic which centres individuals dwelling with incapacity and sickness.
Concerning the Writer
Milena Schwab-Graham is a postdoctoral researcher who teaches on the College of Leeds and the Centre for Lifelong Studying on the College of York, UK. She holds a UKRI-funded PhD from the College of Leeds. Her pursuits are in feminism, have an effect on, embodiment, surroundings & well being in trendy and up to date literature. Her work has been revealed in Feminist Modernist Research, Modernist Cultures and elsewhere. She might be discovered on Twitter @mschwabgraham & Bluesky @milenaschwabgraham.
References
Alaimo, Stacy. 2008. “Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Moral Area of Nature.” In Materials Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 237-64. Bloomington: College of Indiana Press.
Atkin, Polly. 2021. A lot With Physique. Bridgend: Seren.
Atkin, Polly. 2021. Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Lifetime of Dorothy Wordsworth. Salford: Saraband.
Clare, Eli. 2017. Good Imperfection: Grappling With Remedy. Durham and London: Duke College Press.
Jamie, Kathleen. 2008. “A Lone Enraptured Male.” The London Assessment of Books. 30.5. 6 March 2008.
Kenward, Louise (ed). 2023. Shifting Mountains: Writing Nature By Sickness and Incapacity. London: Footnote.
Mabey, Richard. 2005. Nature Remedy. London: Chatto and Windus.
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack). 2022. “InTheFIeld: NUSKMATA (Jacinda Mack) on the Gold Rush That By no means Ended [ENCORE] /287.” For the wild. Final modified 18 Might 2022. https://forthewild.world/hear/inthefield-nuskmata-jacinda-mack-on-the-gold-rush-that-never-ended-encore-287.
Norbury, Katherine (ed). 2021. Girls on Nature: 100+ Voices on Place, Panorama, and the Pure World. London: Unbound.
Ray, Sarah Jaquette and Jay Sibara (eds). 2017. Incapacity Research and the Environmental Humanities: Towards an Eco-Crip Idea. Lincoln and London: College of Nebraska Press.
Sontag, Susan. 1978. Sickness as Metaphor.New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 3.
Walton, Samantha. 2021. Everyone Wants Magnificence: In Search of the Nature Remedy. London: Bloomsbury.
