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TOMORROW: Thinking with Water Book Launch
Librairie Formats, Montreal
7-9 PM
To mark World Water Day (Saturday, March 22), please join us tomorrow for the Montreal launch of Thinking with Water, edited by Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod and Astrida Neimanis.
Engage your sense of water on a semi-guided tour of river rapids, urban water infrastructures, and post-industrial transformation at the afternoon Water Walkshop from 4:30-6:30 pm. (View map)
We’re delighted to have Cecilia Chen and Astrida Neimanis as today’s guest bloggers.
Astrida Neimanis
In “Forgiveness” Canadian poet Karen Houle decides that “The work that the sea is, is not the work of fixing what is broken.” Instead, she suggests,
The work that the sea is
is to make what’s hopelessly broke—
by clumsy or whimsy or plain lost your mind—
into something else entirely:
milk-blue, tear-sized, gather-up, keepsake, pocketchime.
In this poem, Karen is talking about the impossible mend of wrecked relations and their sometimes beautiful remainders, but she is also talking about the ocean. Any visit to my parents’ house on Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy is incomplete without searching for washed up treasures at Pettes Cove—the sea reluctantly tossing out the once-sharp glass shards she’d been rubbing between thumb and forefinger for months, maybe years. The sea’s transformative labours, and pockets full of pocketchimes.
What else is the work of water? Our human bodies know these well. The “two-thirds” or “70%” waters of which we are all made are now almost cliché, but our corporeal waters are multiple, as are their efforts: pleural fluid coats our lungs to enable oxygen’s barter with the atmosphere; endolymph fills the ear’s membranous labyrinth to stop us from falling over; the gelatinous vitreous humour takes up space between our eyes’ retinal lining and lens so that our eyeballs don’t pop out. Also: the smooth turn of a wrist; an emotional response to an onion; a thermostat control in an amniotic bath. Safety padding. Plumbing.
Water is archivist, alchemist, and sometimes reluctant communicator. In the benthos of the Gotland deep, somewhere between Scandinavia and the Baltic States in Northern Europe, the shallows of that sea keep mustard gas—dumped there in massive quantities by allied forces after the Second World War—just cool enough to prevent the viscous poisons from too aggressively pushing through the corroding cannisters’ cracks. The seawater keeps most of these secrets, for now, but various marine animals, fishers, and bathers are already receiving wayward messages. In Northern Alberta, where the effluence of the Tar Sands megaproject irreversibly contaminates the local watershed, such toxic communications are better documented, if still insufficiently recognized. Here (like Walkerton, like Kashechewan), the work of water is to be the beleaguered bearer of bad news.
Perhaps it’s not unreasonable to spend a day thinking with the work of water. And while we recognize this World Water Day on March 22, perhaps we might also note that it rubs shoulders with World Day Against Racism on March 21. We might not only acknowledge with gratitude all of the work that water does to keep us moving, thinking, loving, living, but we might also consider the ways in which the work of water has been appropriated for the work of ongoing coloniality and environmental injustice in Canada. For water’s labours, like all of the world’s work, are really co-labourings, collaborations. Water is always water-with and water-as. To think about the work of water, then, is also to ask about our own labours, with and as waters. To what use are we putting ourselves as bodies of water, and how are we, as water, directing other flows, and to the benefit and detriment of what, or whom?
“Forgiveness” by Karen Houle is published in During (Gaspereau Press, 2008).
Cecilia Chen
As my Mom may have said to me on more than one Mother’s Day, “You should celebrate your Mom everyday!” Our mothers, our waters… Everyday. Yes.
Nonetheless, when the proliferation of issues that demand our thoughtfulness can create a wake of distraction and forgetfulness, it can be a powerful thing to focus – for at least a day – the thoughts of many on the world’s waters. Given the slow but dramatic changes in the waters of this world, our concerns for water, whatever shape they take, will never be misplaced. Yet, as we argue in our book, to focus on water, to think with water requires context: place, time and political and eco-cultural perspectives.
What I write below may therefore make more sense to you if you know that I write from a rich and complicated place that is wealthy in its waters – from the Montreal archipelago or Tiohtià:ke, on the ancestral lands of the Kanien’kehake, by the big river that has been called Kaniatarowá:nen, Lada8anna, Kitcikami Sipi, St. Lawrence and Saint-Laurent, and from the Québecois nation that is not yet separate from Canada…
My particular concerns are with urban and peri-urban waters. Globally, with the majority of humans living in cities, suburbs, villages and informal agglomerations like refugee camps and slums, relations to water in these complex and potentially risky densities of inhabitation require much thought – and often quite a bit of infrastructure. The collective and systematized management of drinking water and wastewaters are what permits the ongoing viability of built-up human settlements. Without good waters, and without adequate water infrastructures, densely inhabited centres can become unlivable Petri dishes of potential water-borne disease. We always share waters, even when we may not want to.
With the successful construction of good or even just adequate water infrastructures, another problem arises: one of the increasing abstraction of water – this visceral and manifold matter that allows us to live. In many cities, water is delivered by pipe and tap. Its local “flavour” has mostly been filtered out. It has been sanitized, chlorinated, and sometimes fluoridated. Even so, the particular combination of trace minerals and other residual materials may still be discernable to sensitive palates. The taste of the river, the lake, the underground aquifer that supplies your city or village may have somehow survived despite municipal filtration treatments. (What fish, algae, rocks and clays have these waters caressed? What do diluted agricultural pesticides, industrial wastes and persistent pharmaceuticals taste like?) Or the unique taste detected may be the particular creation of your local filtration plant.
Our connection via taps and pipes to local waters is tenuous at best. It becomes very easy to forget the source of the waters that flow within and through us; and it is convenient to forget that each of us also contributes regularly to the quality of local waters. It requires an effort – or perhaps new habits – to remember waters in an urban context.
It is possible to think through what and who is upstream from where we live: even as what is upstream is carried to us by complex weather systems, ocean or river currents. Similarly, it is possible to consider who and what is downstream: most municipal wastewater filtration plants remove only a part of what a city has added to local hydrographies. Industrial spills are frequently unmitigated accidents that depend heavily upon dilution and settlement rather than a full cleanup. Should we not feel responsibility for those downstream from us both geographically and in time? For this day, each day, it is worthwhile to remember and to meditate on the waters that we need, that we share with so many others (human and more than human) and that we inevitably share with past and future generations.
Click here for a Thinking with Water excerpt
To learn more about Thinking with Water, or to order online, click here.
For media inquiries, contact MQUP publicist Jacqui Davis.
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