Truer, Stranger Names: Rediscovering Language for Nature and Kinship
By Smile Ximai Jiang
In the two-part miniseries “Words in Motion,” Smile Ximai Jiang examines the relationship between language and identity through the works of writers Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ross Gay, and Kenji Yoshino. These essays—featuring a flower in the crack in the sidewalk, a misnomer for bumblebees, and the experience of “covering,” among other things—attempt to articulate the notions of naming and creative authenticity. Here, Jiang hopes to pinpoint how and why how we say what we say matters.
Names hold power. Names communicate, address, connect. Names hold. Names are often the very marker of our distinct identities as humans, a collection of words with which we address one another—which have, somehow, become markers of distinctly human identities. How, then, do we repair this damaged relationship with nature, and with ourselves, as we are all so intrinsically intertwined? Where does this work begin? For writers Robin Wall Kimmerer and Ross Gay, this work can begin anywhere and everywhere—in a cemetery, in a garden, from a crack in the street. Kimmerer and Gay concern themselves with using and changing language to reshape our words, our world, so that we could better understand and honor the beings that we are naming.
In her essay “Speaking of Nature,” Robin Wall Kimmerer illuminates the English language’s complicated legacy of linguistic imperialism and invites readers to reexamine and repair our language for, and relationship with, nature. She emphasizes the necessity of confronting the colonialist intent underlying the collective impulse to redefine—even if this desire entails forcibly “obliterat[ing] history and the visibility of the people who were displaced along with their language” (Kimmerer 5). Instead of proposing a different worldview to native peoples and pre-existing communities both human and nonhuman—a harmful yet permanent distinction which engendered further oppression, particularly the subhuman—European colonizers imposed an entirely new law of being that, among other violences, reduces the very land we depend on to “a warehouse of natural resources.” A distinctly human compulsion for possession and productivity loomed above all else, as native peoples’ “language of animacy [was replaced with] one of objectification of nature” (5). The evidence of such phenomena, for Kimmerer, lies in the logic behind pronouns—a “special grammar for personhood” (3)—that regulates and therefore monopolizes the assignation of respect. But how do we begin to articulate the human experience in ways that also celebrate the life and legitimacy of the nonhuman living world at large? Without claiming to uproot and undo the implicit hierarchies within English grammar, Kimmerer suggests starting with modifying language for elements of nature. Instead of applying the numbing “it” to everything in nature, she draws on Potawatomi wisdom and proposes using the word “ki...to signify a being of the living earth” (11). This act of renaming is more than possible, as the English language itself already contains a similar word, kin—which also marks the “beginning of justice,” of truly seeing our kin in nature for who they are (18).
In an essay detailing his observations of an amaranth plant, Ross Gay practices Kimmerer’s theory of expanding the recognition of personhood, adjusting the way he addresses elements of nature in order to better describe and honor them. Gay, upon encountering this plant in “thumb-thick cracks in the asphalt,” spends much of the passage describing how the lush foliage “bow their heads” and “seem to whisper...in the breeze” (Gay 64). Their intricate silhouettes and stirrings would be imperceptible if not for how closely and willingly Gay pays attention. One could almost picture him pausing, crouching down, inching ever so closer to that source of infinite wonder. As he traces the particular motions of bees moving across the amaranth, Gay ascribes language to this moment of attention: “Is the name because they bumble?” Yet the question itself feels far from rhetorical. Instead of settling for an indulgent affirmation of whatever he had intended to say, Gay chooses to consider the possibility of the term “bumblebee” being a misnomer. He chooses his words not according to how he has been told to do so—because of the prescriptive, rigid mandates of a language propagated by its burying of other languages—but according to how he believes would best reflect the reality of the bees’ movement, how they “crawl elegantly on the flower clusters” (64). In other words, Gay adjusts the vocabulary with which he addresses the bumblebees—now “ballerina bees”—so that he could better honor the miraculous “impossibility” of their existence, and of our coexistence alongside them.
“That Gay recognizes his privilege of bearing witness to nature invariably reminds us that the seemingly quotidian act of noticing often transcends looking and requires considerable effort to feel, to attend. This attention also lends itself to the way we approach our relationships as it nurtures a sense of kinship and connection, scaffolded upon mutual trust.”
This intentional, habitual exercise of renaming informs a sense of community and enables Gay himself to voice his irrepressible gratitude for loved ones. As he watches them dance across the amaranth, Gay almost immediately connects the ballerina bees to the memory of “a baby’s hand wrapping around [his] finger” (64), as well as his father. Moments of delight seem to always enhance other moments of delight, which often stem from even more moments of connection. That Gay recognizes his privilege of bearing witness to nature invariably reminds us that the seemingly quotidian act of noticing often transcends looking and requires considerable effort to feel, to attend. This attention also lends itself to the way we approach our relationships as it nurtures a sense of kinship and connection, scaffolded upon mutual trust.
Our relationship with nature has always run deeper than symbiosis. The sky gives life in tiny droplets and reaps its bounty under the generous sun. The shooting grass breathes in the pale afternoon and a butterfly brings a shade upon it. This is how the universe thrives on the cliché of giving, and taking, and only the free things are those that cannot be named—just like how we have yet to find a name to christen this feeling. But we shall try. We—like Kimmerer, Gay, and so many others—are trying. After all, what is writing, if not the persistent, roundabout attempt to call the very fact of our lives by truer, stranger names?
Smile Ximai Jiang is a poet from Shenzhen, China who resides in Massachusetts. She serves as an editor for Polyphony Lit and The Lumiere Review. Smile is a 2023 poetry mentee of The Adroit Journal’s Summer Mentorship Program. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Peach Mag, Palette Poetry, Kissing Dynamite, Surging Tide, Rust & Moth, and diode poetry journal. Smile loves sumo oranges and her cat. She tweets at @smiii_jiang.