This is an edited extract from the dissertation I wrote as part of my MA in authorial practice illustration at Falmouth. Although the thought of anyone reading my slightly clumsy academic writing makes me cringe, I have decided to share this — and the full dissertation (linked below) — because I am interested in connecting with people over the ideas and questions contained within it. If any part resonates with you, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!
Zoom out: a go at one of Aidan Koch’s environmental comics exercises
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, biologist, professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Her book Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) is a passionate, lyrical call for a restoration of Indigenous ecological knowledge; knowledge guided by the fundamental understanding that all life is connected in a web of kinship, sustained by a ‘moral covenant of reciprocity’. It stands in defiant contrast with the dominant human culture that, as Peruvian scholar Aníbal Quijano has argued, has been shaped by a colonial epistemology, which separates ‘Man’ (read: the white, male European elite) from ‘Nature’ (all other life) so that ‘Man’ may exploit ‘Nature’ at will (Quijano 1991/2007). Throughout Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer points to the role language plays in shaping human relationships with all other life. She notes that there is a fundamental difference between western languages — particularly English — and Indigenous languages: that the latter have a ‘grammar of animacy’. Grammar, Kimmerer states, is how we ‘chart relationships in language’, and the grammar of animacy reminds the speaker of their ‘kinship with all of the animate world’. Unlike English, which generally reserves personhood for humans, most Indigenous languages speak of all living beings as people, as family. This not only renders it impossible to perceive of other living beings as exploitable — they are kin, not “natural resources” — but reflects how all living beings have unique perspectives on the world, from which human beings might learn. This — maple, beaver, bear as teacher — is a core tenet of Indigenous ecological knowledge that Kimmerer gifts the reader with stories of throughout Braiding Sweetgrass.
Meanwhile, Aidan Koch is an artist based in Landers, California — the unceded ancestral land of the Serrano people. Koch’s practice is multifaceted — blurring the borders between fine art, illustration and literature — and comics run like a river throughout. A prominent facet of her work with comics is environmental comics, an ongoing project exploring the powers of comics to sensitise people to the interconnectedness of the living world, at a time when rife insensitivity to this is driving climate and ecological crises. Koch emphasises that comics are ‘activated by relationality’, with first the comic’s creator, and then the comic’s reader, asked to create meaningful relationships between multifarious elements. This, Koch suggests, means that comics have particular potential to draw out the ‘interconnectivity between objects, materials, time, and living beings’. So with environmental comics, Koch proposes a set of comics-generative starting points for consciously cultivating this sense of interconnectivity. There is great resonance between this and Kimmerer’s discussion of the grammar of animacy: if comics are intrinsically relational, and the grammar of animacy is an expression of the relationships between all living beings, then can comics evoke a grammar of animacy — in both verbal and visual language?
In the dissertation, I explore this question by discussing the significance of animacy in more detail — within Kimmerer’s writing, other Indigenous scholarship and linguistics, particularly Mel Y Chen’s Animacies (2012) — and reflecting on my experience of trying Aidan Koch’s environmental comics prompts, in dialogue with observations from comics theory about how the art form brings worlds to life.
Click the link to open a PDF of the dissertation: ‘The life that pulses through all things: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s ‘Grammar of Animacy’ and Aidan Koch’s Environmental Comics practice’