Embracing Comparative Ecocriticism Through Affect: Representations of Tropical Forest Ecologies in Indonesian and Nicaraguan Poetry

Resumo

Abstract

This article develops a comparative ecocritical approach to contemporary poetry concerning tree ecologies and forest conservation issues in Indonesia and Nicaragua. The poetry of Indonesian authors Taufik Ismail and Micky Hidayat evokes the richness as well as the vulnerability of tropical forest systems in Indonesia through diction disclosing varieties of environmental affect. Environmental affect encompasses the negative emotions associated with ecological loss—mourning, grief, melancholy, depression, malaise, anger, shock, disorientation, loss of hope and others—but also reasserts our ineluctable corporeal interdependencies with other-than-human life, particularly trees, herbs and other plants. Similarly, poet Pablo Antonio Cuandra narrativizes Nicaraguan forest bioculturalities in which the collective trees of the tropical landscape offer a potent biopolitics of resistance. Also writing on Nicaraguan trees and forests, Esthela Calderón forwards an ethnobotanical poetics predicated on environmental and, more specifically, arboreal affect. Her work underscores the human interrelations with trees that are disrupted when ecologies are under threat. The poetry of Ismail, Hidayat, Cuandra and Calderón embodies a shared concern for the biocultural wholeness of forests. Their poetry reveals the ways in which physical impacts on trees, forests and ecosystems through deforestation, pollution, vandalism and everyday disregard register on an affective level.