Paul Kingsnorth’s essay “The call of the wild” (Review, 23 July) laments the poverty of the notion of nature as a machine/“environment”/backdrop in contemporary fiction, asking where the writers are who explore the concept of nature as a “sentient” being. Wider investigation, in the literatures of post-colonial countries such as Aotearoa/New Zealand, may help to fill the gap – particularly the writings of Maori. To earlier and to many contemporary Maori, nature is just that: animate. Not only is the physical land and its spiritual significance inextricably interwoven, land is life itself. “I am my mountain, because my mountain is my ancestor, and by mountain I am identified,” writes contemporary Maori novelist Patricia Grace (Potiiki, Auckland, Penguin, 2004, 112). Crucial Maori concepts concerning land such as kaitiakitanga, or guardianship (as opposed to ownership and exploitation) have also become part of pakeha (European) New Zealand discourse with the term used, controversially for some, in government legislation in the Resource Management Act (1991) and the Foreshore and Seabed Act (2004).
Other Maori writers – Witi Ihimaera (The Whale Rider), the poet Hone Tuwhare (speaking directly to the rain, in Rain), or academic Te Maire Tau – evoke a living land or a land named after ancestors or body part which is rich and complex. And then there can be a bicultural take: art historian Rangihiroa Panoho’s recent book Maori Art marries western art historical methodologies with an approach that is iwi (tribe)- based, using the concept of the river as metaphor.
Elizabeth Eastmond
London
• A writer who is often overlooked in the context Paul Kingsnorth writes of is Jessie Kesson. Her evocations of the inner life of characters who are isolated or trapped by social circumstance, often in rural Scotland, are vivid almost because their sensibility is inseparable from an animate natural world. Many of her characters find their truest communication and most emotionally reliable place there. Arguably her living landscapes are far more than a backdrop. A walk through woods can be a communion in which “vetch shouted in masses along the bank”, and conversely there is Kesson’s own admission: “I carry climates within me.” She wrote several novels (including Another Time, Another Place which was made into a feature film) and many short stories. As well as being female and from humble origins, perhaps her work is less well remembered than it should be because so much of her medium was radio drama. October marks the centenary of her birth and a good time to celebrate and elevate her work for wider notice. Fortunately the Writers’ Centre at Moniack Mhor near Inverness, close to where Kesson spent a formative six months as a young woman, is one of the bodies organising activities to mark her centenary.
Linda Cracknell
Aberfeldy, Perth and Kinross
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