Nature Becomes Her

Of all the assigned works, I found Cathy Tagnak Rexford's Black Ice to be the most compelling and poignant with regards to the topic of nature and place. Not only is Rexford describing the myriad features of the place such as ice and snow, the tundra, permafrost, dark mountains and the sea, but she also gives a glimpse of what the people need from their surroundings in order to survive. You cannot go far without a reference to the importance of whaling or of using sealskin to craft garments that protect against the cold. Thus, place is not merely the characteristics that make up the physical location, but the characteristics, wants, desires and needs of the people who live there. The inhabitants of Rexfords poems are as much a physical part of the place as the flora and fauna that live there and the landscapes that she describes. In "Baleen Corset" for example, mankind is not making this item of clothing from the environment, but the environment is clothing mankind. The poem describes the whale as an active participant in the making of the corset. The whale itself becomes the corset: " His whitened flukes/ extend into arms, he wraps them/ around her waist; fastens eyelets of a/ baleen corset; cracks rotted ice/ from her shoulder blades, ribs, hips." In this scenario, the whale has crawled from the ice in order to fuse the two-- mankind and nature-- into one. The painful verbs, "cracks," "rotted" and "blades" show that this act of blending is not a pleasant one for either of the parties and seems to take the domination from either party from the idea of mankinds "colonization" of nature. In this piece, as with all the Rexford work we read, both parties do what they do out of necessity, not out of a desire for power. The whale is more than just "bone strips" that give the corset shape, but those bone strips contain his voice. Rather than being overtaken by mankind, represented by the girl in the corset, the whale and nature become a part of mankind, both symbiotic and strained.

Rexford's use of mask imagery also seems indicative of the Inupiaq's desire to mesh with their surroundings. In each case, the mask the characters put on is a mask that appears as a thing in nature: the loon, the caribou, the cedar. In the making of each of these masks, the thread of sinew that binds the item together are the most important part. These threads are comprised from the items found in nature and are described as being long lasting, or as Rexford states in "Uncle Foot," "proof/ that a stitch endures." The economy and subsistence-focused living of the Inupiaq seems to chide the American economy for its ideals of excess, and with good reason. All of the items in "Uncle Foot" are built to last and are a part of the culture of the people Rexford is describing. The "sealskin boot/ unspoiled for/ one thousand years" along with other words such as "shorefast", "entombed", and "resin" gives the reader a feeling of endurance that parallels nature with the items man has made from nature. Although Rexford does not mention America or other capitalistic societies directly, it is because they are missing that the impeachment occurs. Rexford paints a world in which the capitalistic concerns of the consumer nations do not even play a part. You might get the impression that there are capitalistic concerns when Rexford talks about the whaling industry and the oilrigs, but they are usually mentioned in the singular, making them appear as less of a threat. 

There is, however, a tinge of sadness and change when the author writes, "Migration," and the reader sees that the way of life described in Rexford's poems likely cannot continue. The narrator describes herself as "a cedar mask, devouring my own tongue," and all of the following allusions are to those items of lore we place in museums so that we can remember and feel a nostalgia for past times. This poem shows the human being morphing into newer surroundings: the busy street, the radio static, the "concrete nightmares." Like "The Negative" things become other things, "sweat absorbs into the mud," and "the blackest shade [is] giving birth to copper." 

--H.K. Rainey