RE-INHABITING THE ISLANDS - The University of North Carolina at ...

To gain a sense of Snyder‘s situation, I cross the continent to analyze the racially
hybrid poetry of the Sargasso Sea‘s Derek Walcott. Snyder‘s subject position of white
American masculinity significantly influences, and potentially interferes, with his
ecofeminist performance. Walcott‘s work affects an ambivalent stance toward history and
the lingering effects of colonialism, while Snyder more readily develops a syncretic
vision of primitive and modern traditions. The path of colonial reconciliation from the
position of the colonized is fraught with resentment and bitterness. Rob Nixon calls on
authors to seek a middle way, as does theorist of New World poetics, George Handley,
between the hybrid experiences of postcolonial and globalized selves and the
unadulterated, ideally pristine, experience of the ecocritical wilderness. Discussing the
postcolonial-ecocritical tension from the perspective of Ramachandra Guha‘s critique of
deep ecology in ―Radical Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation,‖ Cara Cilano
and Elizabeth DeLoughrey confirm how problematic history can be for the experience of
being at home. Since Snyder begins where he does in San Francisco, his Regarding Wave
and Turtle Island are quiet about this problem of history, but Omeros answers directly,
thematizing the problem in the metaphor of a wound. The ability to let go of the
contingent and anthropocentric situation is a privileged ability. Cilano and DeLoughrey
describe this tension as follows: ―the ecocritcal turn to originary nature can naturalize
diasporic Europeans in the landscape, often resulting in a powerful ontological claim that
erases white complicity in the expansion of empire, not to mention ongoing indigenous
presence‖ (73). Oppressed people, living in urban jungles, on dusty, unwanted tracts of
reservation land, or worse, view deep ecology as an elitist movement because its
proponents effectively ask them to give up the material benefits of the developed world
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