(Not) Speaking for Animals and the Environment: Zoopoetics and Ecopoetics in Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear (original) (raw)

The thoughts of animals were written clearly on their faces as if spelled out with an alphabet. I found it difficult to understand that this language was illegible to other people. (Tawada, Memoirs 102) Giving Face In animal autobiographies, which I have conceptualized as "literary autozoographies" elsewhere (Middelhoff 2-3), animals are represented as narrators of their lives. Rhetorically, giving animals human voices is known as prosopopeia, i.e., the bestowing of "a face, the mask (prosopon-poiein) through which the dead, the absent, and collectives are supposed to have spoken" 1 (Menke 7; cf. also de Man 926-30). Surely, the extent to which human and nonhuman voices, discourses, and concerns in these texts coalesce and compete with each other depends on the form as well as the generic and historical contexts of a text performing "acts of speaking-for that cross the species boundary" (Herman 6). Literary autozoographies may import moral messages and satirize social phenomena; they may challenge a reader's perspective, produce sympathy for nonhuman beings, or argue on behalf of those considered "dumb" or "speechless." Similarly, in the history of environmentalism, "hypostasized Nature (with a capital n)" (Morton 162) or "the" environment (Moore) has been spoken for by various parties, individuals, and, of course, the authors of texts. Nature writing and ecopoetry have their non-literary counterparts in ecological agendas of politicians and banners of environmental activists. If humans are turned into proxies for oceans or "the" climate, prosopopoeia moves to the public platforms of political representation. Yet the question remains: 1 Prosopopeia gives "Toten, Abwesenden, Kollektiva, in der Fiktion ihrer Rede ein Gesicht, die Maske (prosopon-poiein), durch die sie gesprochen haben sollen" (Menke 7). All translations from the German are my own.