Some Versions of Antipastoral

In 1983, Adrienne Rich suggested that that due to her “experience of outsiderhood, closely—though not exclusively—linked with the essential outsiderhood of a lesbian identity,” Bishop’s “outsider’s eye enables [her] to perceive other kinds of outsiders and to identify, or try to identify, with them.”¹⁴ There is some truth in the statement; Bishop’s writing is politically aware, and she does seek to identify with those who are subject to different kinds of hegemonic violence. Forty years later, however, we are less likely to formulate these relations as an analogy between outsiders, in part because analogies obscure connections among movements and obstruct intersectional thinking. Miranda Joseph, for example, asserts they produce an “isolation of the objects in their own domains.”¹⁵ Conversely, this structure also does not recognize the possibility of conflict among “outsiders,” those supposedly analogous terms, nor does it account for the many ways in which one might be at once an outsider and an insider. Thus queerness can never uncritically assume an allegiance with other forms of dispossession. And indeed, the opening lines of “Brazil, January 1, 1502” announce the speaker’s implication in the position of the Portuguese colonizers who appear later in the poem: “Januaries, Nature greets our eyes / exactly as she must have greeted theirs” (91).¹⁶ Against this complicity in settler colonialism the poem sets an ironic anti-pastoralism, attuned to what Buell calls the “internal contradictions” inherent in the pastoral, the “crosscurrents that keep any example from seeming pure.”¹⁷ The meticulously observed pastoral landscape is, by the end of the poem, radically de-idealized by the fact of European invasion. The opening stanza depicts the visual profusion of a verdant landscape:

monster ferns

in silver-grey relief,

and flowers, too, like giant water lilies

up in the air—up, rather, in the leaves— (91)

This is pastoral as blason, enumerating the elements of scenic beauty. However, the poem has ironized its own project from the start. In the first line, the capital N of “Nature greets” signals that the landscape is already personified, already freighted with metaphor. “Nature” can never be trusted, for there is no “Nature” that precedes “our eyes.” Indeed, the opposition of nature to culture is itself unnatural. Walter Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh call this “the invention of nature and the degradation of life” through the imposition of a distinction foreign to Indigenous people.¹⁸ And that binarism inevitably informs Bishop’s speaker’s attempt to forge an identification with what the poem presents as the natural world of the Indigene.

The poem’s second line, “Exactly as it must have greeted theirs” achieves irony through hyperbole. “Exactly” is patently false unless it’s meant non-literally—that is, inexactly or ironically—since the precise coincidence of two gazes is impossible. (It is later grimly ironic that the conquistadors undertake their mission of sexual assault “Directly after Mass” [92].) That ironic attitude toward the colonial gaze leads to a possibility of identification with the Indigenous women. Bishop’s last stanza literalizes the trope of conquest as rape, as the Portuguese

… ripped away into the hanging fabric,

each out to catch an Indian for himself—

those maddening little women who kept calling,

calling to each other (or had the birds waked up?)

and retreating, always retreating, behind it. (92)

In these lines, the two-dimensional visual field of the jungle as tapestry gains a third dimension, making nature an actor in the narrative of conquest—obstructing, suffering injury, surviving. In doing so it divides the men from the women, invaders from Indigenes. For the speaker the question becomes: whose side are you on? The operations of analogy set nature and the Indigenous women against the culture and technology of the Christians “in creaking armor” as two potential points of identification for the speaker (92).¹⁹ We can understand the speaker’s relation to the former as queer because “Brazil” recognizes sexual violence as fundamental to both settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy, and the ideology of imperialism as inextricable from, while never identical to, that of heterosexism. For women, the refusal of heteronormative demands is always understood as queer, much as Indigenous sexualities and kinship bonds, especially those that refuse domination and assimilation, have often been depicted as deviant.²⁰ This is not to say that the women “are” lesbians any more than the speaker “is” homosexual (or even gendered); rather, as in “Crusoe,” queerness is relational, inherent in a fantasy of female survival beyond the specter of heteronormative and colonial coercion.

In “Brazil,” the basis of this latent identification is song: in addition to the speaker, the poem offers two voices, each figured as musical. The Portuguese are “humming perhaps / L’Homme armé or some such tune,” while the women are “calling, / calling to each other” in voices that recall birdsong: “or had the birds waked up?” (92).²¹ Although the men omit the words, we are meant to recall the verse: “fear the armed man.”²² The meaning of the women’s song remains inaccessible, yet as birdlike “calling,” their voices offer Bishop a very different model for her own lyric. If poetry is always a kind of song, here the speaker finds the possibility of a better voice than that of “L’Homme armé” (92). Yet this attempt at identification with the Indigenous women, enabled by the shift from a register of sight to hearing, is compromised by the ways in which identification itself involves appropriation and incorporation. At best, Bishop is subject to what Saidiya Hartman calls the white observer’s “precariousness of empathy,” and at worst, “the violence of identification.”²³ Indeed, as Diana Fuss explains, “read psychoanalytically, every identification involves a degree of symbolic violence,” and with it, “a certain element of colonization.”²⁴ The pastoral mode comes with its own history of appropriation, clear in the shepherds and maidens who inhabit its most traditional landscape. As Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin note, the pastoral tradition of “speaking through” a rural figure constitutes a kind of ventriloquism.²⁵ The calls of the Indigenous women may represent the utterance of real subjects, but their meaning is obscured; similarly, in Bishop’s “Crusoe” Friday is entirely silent. To Gayatri Spivak’s famous question “can the subaltern speak?” pastoral conventions would answer: no.²⁶

If “Brazil” deploys the ironies of pastoral against itself, “Crusoe” introduces an antipastoral dystopia whose nature is as grotesque as it was resplendent in “Brazil.” An endless rain falls on “miserable, small volcanoes . . . dead as ash-heaps,” looking “naked and leaden, with their heads blown off” (163). The fauna are no better: the island reeks of “goat and guano” and the “questioning shrieks, the equivocal replies” of the gulls torment Crusoe (164). This is a world of “nightmares” in which the eyes of a goat, confronted, “expressed nothing, or a little malice” (165). Either nature has no “design,” as Robert Frost wrote, or its design is sinister.²⁷ But nature is nonetheless a central concern of the poem, again a character in its own right. Bishop signals her engagement with the pastoral tradition when her pointed reference to Wordsworth (“They flash upon that inward eye,” 164) places “Crusoe” in conversation with the Romantics. As Bonnie Costello observes, she casts Crusoe as the iconic pastoral shepherd, complete with goats and Pan-pipe, despite the island’s “distinctly antipastoral” setting.²⁸ In this regard, it’s worth comparing Bishop’s Crusoe to Defoe’s. While Robinson Crusoe is by no means dystopian, it is also far from an idyll, invested instead in the protagonist’s systemization of industry and extraction of resources from “his” island. Bishop’s “Crusoe” represents a substantial revision of a text whose distasteful aspects she at least partly recognized. In a 1977 interview, she said “I reread the book and discovered how really awful Robinson Crusoe was, which I hadn’t realized . . . I had forgotten it was so moral. All that Christianity. So I think I wanted to re-see it with all that left out.”²⁹ Her Crusoe, accordingly, is godless, absent-minded, and sporadic about his “island industries” (164), but he cannot “leave out” his paratexual origin. Defoe’s Crusoe is shipwrecked on the way to purchase enslaved Africans for Brazilian plantations; he was recruited by other plantation owners, he says, “to manage the Trading Part upon the Coast of Guinea . . . And they offer’d me that I should have my equal Share of the Negroes.” ³⁰ We may not care to class Bishop’s whimsical, depressive Crusoe with the “hard,” predatory Christians in “Brazil,” who consider Indigenous people available for subjection and exploitation, but that is distinctly the Crusoe of Defoe’s novel.³¹

As she reimagines his character, Bishop does channel the queer affective register of Defoe’s fiction. Speaking of Friday, the original Crusoe recalls that “the three Years we liv’d there together [were] perfectly and compleatly [sic] happy”; he records the loss of his wife in a pallid clause (“my wife dying”) but suffers “inexpressible grief” when Friday is killed in the novel’s sequel.³² True, Bishop’s Crusoe remains a colonizer in his attachment to Friday. His affectionate language is patronizing (his “poor boy” recalls Defoe’s “I began really to love the Creature”) but his lament on Friday’s death is also the poem’s most moving statement of same-sex love: “Friday, my dear Friday.”³³ In the closing lines we understand that colonization killed Friday–worse, the love of the colonizer killed him when it transported him to a land of biological perils.³⁴ Without him, Crusoe finds England barren: we realize only in retrospect—as Crusoe himself does—that his sojourn on the island was more vital than it seemed. With his arrival, nature suddenly becomes benign: “He’d pet the baby goats sometimes, / and race with them, or carry one around. / —Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body” (166). It is telling that of the mere eight lines devoted to Friday on the island, two are about the goats, for which Crusoe formerly had no kind words, and another three address another kind of fecundity: “If only he had been a woman! / I wanted to propagate my kind, / and so did he, I think” (165). It’s a joke, of course, that they cannot procreate like the goats, but it also signals for Crusoe a new acquiescence to the processes of the “natural” world.

This sounds like a familiar mythology: the Native has a special intimacy with the land, which he extends to the colonial newcomer. Given Crusoe’s unreliable narration, however, we might also consider his halting account of Friday not only as reconstructed but also to some degree fantasmatic. His real love constructs the entire world around Friday as unreal, not merely in the moment but most keenly in retrospect. Only this can explain how, by the end of the poem, Crusoe can wax nostalgic for a place he considered intolerable. This is more than the unavoidable falsification of memory, for his longing fixates on his island artifacts— knife, flute, umbrella. They surely represent the island metonymically, but the psychic work they perform is different. Crusoe complains that the knife, which once “lived,” has lost its “living soul” and “won’t look at me at all”; of the various objects, he asks “How can anyone want such things?” (166). As most of these things went unmentioned earlier in the poem—we never saw their magical properties or meaning—Crusoe’s cathexis on them must be a displacement of his love for Friday. It is not that the knife really ever “looked at him,” but that its inability to do so signals the inadequacy of what remains compared to the enormity of what was lost. These lines ostensibly not “about” Friday convey the almost literally unspeakable joy Friday afforded. They inform Crusoe‘s ability to recall the island as a dystopian world of wrecked nature and, at the same time, the site of authentic life.

The Postlapsarian Pastoral

“Brazil” and “Crusoe” are further complicated by their recapitulation of a key pastoral form, the postlapsarian. Pastoral is commonly associated with nostalgia for bygone places and times; Nicole Seymour says that it “idealizes a long-gone, pristine nature.”³⁵ We know that Eden is a key trope for nature at its most idealized. The story of Genesis is the first pastoral in the Judeo-Christian tradition; William Empson’s landmark 1935 book on the pastoral includes a chapter on Paradise Lost.³⁶ Indeed, Jessie Herrada Nance describes the typical pastoral as “a golden world or Eden that humanity loses access to after a fall from grace.”³⁷ In this regard, it’s significant that both “Brazil” and “Crusoe” allude to the Genesis narrative. As the first lines of the former indicate, there is no unspoiled nature, only acculturated Nature.³⁸ Within that space we find a moral judgement on the serpent in the garden: “five sooty dragons” designating “Sin,” “hell-green flames” of moss (91), and sex, figured by the female lizard, “her wicked tail straight up and over / red as a red-hot wire” (92)—all interpretations overlain on the natural world by the invading Christians. “Crusoe” presents its speaker as a parodic Adam, unsure about the work of naming and terrified by dreams of more islands which task him with “registering their flora, / their fauna, their geography” (165). And surely Crusoe’s loneliness evokes Adam: “the same odd sun / rose from the sea, / and there was one of it and one of me” (163). Genesis 2:18 reads, “And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him [a] help meet.” Each poem elaborates the notion of a fall, an expulsion from the garden, in their orientation toward the past. Of course “Crusoe,” as an elegy, is about the loss of a person, but also about the loss of a place and what that place afforded—enjoyment, vitality, “meaning” (166). Only through its postlapsarian close do we know that, even in this dystopian anti-pastoral, a lost paradise once existed. For its part, “Brazil” addresses a historic event with a postlapsarian attitude, unable to imagine Brazil before the conquest but recognizing that historic rupture as a trauma from which there is no return. We have only the retroactive construction of a thing (a queer intimacy, a call like a song, a dear companion, an island, a tapestried landscape) that is defined by its loss. In the postlapsarian narrative it is always already too late.

This narrative has troubling implications in the colonial context because a postlapsarian approach to secular history confers an appearance of inevitability. For settler colonialism this can mean representation, by the non-Native subject, of Indigenous peoples and cultures as lost when they in fact survive, and of that loss as fatefully ordained, not intentionally orchestrated and contingent, avoidable. In a critique of heteronormative historiography, Jonathan Goldberg notes the way in which the “epidemic narrative”—like the death of Bishop’s Friday and innumerable other Native people of the Americas from European diseases—effaces power and “removes moral explanation entirely, replacing it with a supposedly neutral, natural—indeed, biological—explanation.”³⁹ What is natural can then be understood as both blameless and ineluctable. Consider William Cullen Bryant’s 1832 poem “The Prairies.” He portrays a pastoral landscape devoid of human life, in which divine will has determined the disappearance first of the mound builders and after them, of the “red man,” who has “sought a wilder hunting-ground” in the West.⁴⁰

Thus change the forms of being. Thus arise

Races of living things, glorious in strength,

And perish, as the quickening breath of God

Fills them, or is withdrawn . . .

The verdant prairies await the arrival of white settlers, to whom they will yield their riches: “Thus change the forms of being,” as one “race” organically replaces another. There can then be no question of responsibility for these colonists, for the erasure of Native people has already occurred and was divinely ordained. Yet Bryant is writing just two years after President Andrew Jackson signed the 1830 Indian Removal Act, which began the process in which the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Muscogee, Seminole, and Choctaw people were forcibly moved from the southeast to what would become Oklahoma, with many deaths along the Trail of Tears.

The myth of the “vanishing Indian,” exemplified by “The Prairies,” takes on special resonance in the postlapsarian pastoral. Tracing this trope, which she terms the “extinction theme,” Jean M. O’Brien enumerates the psychic work it performed for non-Native Americans: “they needed to have Indians disappear in order to justify colonialism, absolve themselves of wrongdoing and guilt, and place Indians firmly and safely in the past.”⁴¹ The ideology of temporal afterwardness obviates the continuing process of settler colonialism. Building on Patrick Wolfe’s understanding of settler colonialism as a “structure not an event,” J. Kēhaulani Kauanui explains that “understanding settler colonialism as a structure exposes the fact that colonialism cannot be relegated to the past.”⁴² On this matter both “Brazil” and “Crusoe” have a temporal problem: their postlapsarianism further enables the narrative that consigns Indigenous people to the past. In travel writing, including Bishop’s, Jeffrey Gray argues that “origins appear at the moment of their obliteration, that is at the moment one discovers they are lost. Pastoral is the generic example of this cultural irony: it marks the loss of what it celebrates.”⁴³ In the context of settler colonialism, the postlapsarian pastoral can enable retrospective tropes like the extinction theme. What, after all, is the “vanishing Indian” myth but a narrative that “marks the loss of what it celebrates,” pivoting on an ephemeral moment in which the present becomes the past? Both Friday and the Indigenous women of Brazil are lost by the end of “Brazil” and “Crusoe,” but in a sense they are also never really present—or rather, their presence is predicated on their incipient, ongoing, and obligatory disappearance. This is clear in “Brazil,” where not only do we hear voices that may or may not be voices, but we are also conjured to see women whom we cannot see (they are hidden from us, as from the Portuguese, by the jungle’s “hanging fabric”) at the instant of their vanishing. Caught in the temporal paradox of the postlapsarian pastoral, “Brazil” and “Crusoe” are documents of a fateful afterwardness. The Indigene is always gone; the landscape is always colonized. These are “postcolonial” poems in that the false historicity of the “post” displaces the reality of the ongoing present. Their speakers’ direct admission of complicity is abrogated by a backward-facing temporality that absolves colonial subjects of responsibility in the future.

If in “Brazil” and “Crusoe” Bishop can articulate the value of Indigeneity and nature only under erasure, what of queerness? What of the tenuous possibility of queer identification or desire within but against colonial complicity? Since both poems attempt to equate nature, Indigeneity, and queerness, when Indigenous figures are subsumed by the postlapsarian inevitability of the extinction myth, is queerness is subsumed as well? Since queerness in these poems is relational, not identitarian, the answer is yes. And this is the final turn of the complicity-resistance complex, the reason for the poems’ quite different affective registers. Neither resembles Byrant’s “The Prairies,” whose speaker looks hopefully toward a bright future for white settlers. Instead, “Brazil” holds an ironic distance, even from its horrific conclusion. “Crusoe in England,” however, merges the extinction theme with the affective register of the postlapsarian—elegy, nostalgia, regret. Terry Gifford locates in colonial pastorals “the masking and displacing of environmental pillage and political conquest by nostalgic valuations of the very spaces and biosystems that are being destroyed.”⁴⁴ Nostalgia, that is, can be the accomplice of aggression. Brian W. Dippie observes that in the United States, “the Indian in the act of vanishing before civilized progress elicited a full range of emotional responses—sympathy, regret, sadness, despair.”⁴⁵ These emotional responses, many typical of the pastoral literary tradition and more keenly of the postlapsarian pastoral, do not have to be false to be complicit in the colonial project. The speaker of “Crusoe” expresses the real pain of queer bereavement; the poem can be a profoundly moving elegy. But the pathos of the colonizer, even when genuine, is itself a form of complicity.⁴⁶

This is why, as Puar argues, we cannot assume that queerness always means transgression or opposes the dispossession of other “outsiders.” Morgensen argues that for queers, no less than everyone else, “Settler colonialism is naturalized whenever conquest or displacement of Native peoples is ignored or appears necessary or complete.”⁴⁷ And resisting that naturalization of colonial subjection, even when prioritized in a queer world view, may yet fail. Reading Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville, Mark Rifkin considers the possibility and limitations of “something like a queer solidarity with Indigenous self-determination.” He proposes that rather than solely deeming these white authors oppressors, we should acknowledge that “their forms of opposition depend on taking for granted the conceptions of place, politics, and personhood normalized in the settler-state’s engagement with indigenous peoples.”⁴⁸ It is tempting to think that “opposition” and “solidarity” can exist in spite of such “conceptions.” Reading Bishop shows how important it is not to overstate that possibility.⁴⁹ How can anyone resist colonialism from within colonial ideology—from within settler homonationalism? But is there any place outside it from which a non-Native queer author might try to speak? Complicity and resistance are co-extensive, and like the pastoral form, their dialogue with one another mythologizes and ironizes by turns. We might recall the “scaling-ladder vines” in Bishop’s “Brazil” whose alternating leaves signal “one leaf yes and one leaf no” (91); thinking through queer complicity requires just such a theory of precarious ambivalence.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.