On Ruination, Slavery, and the American Landscape in Conjure Women

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• On Ruination, Slavery, and the American Landscape in Conjure Women
• Madelyn Walsh (bio)

The rot remains with us, the men are gone.

Derek Walcott, “Ruins of a Great House”¹

In an ecogothic reading, Afia Atakora’s novel Conjure Women (2020) narrates the relationship between the American landscape as an ecological space and the horrors of transatlantic slavery for freed communities that continue to reside on the site of their enslavement.² In the transatlantic trade of enslaved African people, we can identify a socioecological catastrophe that altered the human relationship with the land through the use of unfree and dehumanized labor as part of agricultural practice. As Margo DeMello asserts, “a system of racial inequality emerged to justify a system of economic greed, and to reconcile the practice of inequality alongside of a philosophy of equality for all.”³ The American plantation landscape became a site of slavery the enslaved were bound to, creating a perverse intimacy between the enslaved community and the land. The devastating impact enslavement had on the African American relationship with nature is best explored by Kimberly K. Smith. She asserts that transatlantic slavery provides an ambivalent legacy for African Americans when they are negotiating a relationship with nature, because “the slave system forced slaves into an intimacy with the natural environment but also tended to alienate them from it.”⁴ Thus, a seemingly binding paradox emerges, whereby the African American relationship with the natural environment is defined by the slave system. The plantation setting acts as a microcosm through which to understand the ecological relationship between humans and nature as shaped by this system. This study therefore examines the socioecological relationship between the enslaved [End Page 209] community and the natural environment in the plantation landscape in Conjure by analyzing ruins in the novel. Through this examination, we might begin to conceive of what Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin describe as a “burgeoning alliance” between postcolonial studies and environmental studies by drawing together and analyzing the relationship between the enslaved and the land to which they were bound through an ecogothic lens.⁵ This is a notable move away from the stereotypical association of ecology and ecocriticism with “pastoral and romantic representations of certain kinds of nature: the distant, pristine, and revered pastures and forests, rather than the urban rivers, the farm factories, or the cityscapes.”⁶ It is at this point of division from classic ecocriticism that the ecogothic provides the lens needed to analyze this phenomenon.

The ecogothic offers a nuanced approach to the identification and analysis of ruins in Conjure because it proffers a tool that can be used to circumvent the boundaries of ecocriticism and the gothic. The ecogothic, as defined by Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils, occupies “the intersection of environmental writing and the gothic, and it typically presupposes some kind of ecocritical lens.”⁷ As Amanda Stuckey identifies, it also provides a means of overcoming the complications and boundaries of each critical framework. In their application of the ecogothic, Stuckey analyzes the ways in which gothic tropes “expose the material horrors of slavery as they played out on the surface of the Earth and of the human body.”⁸ Stuckey therefore sets a precedent for using the ecogothic to re-examine gothic tropes and to explore the relationship between the earth and the human body in relation to slavery. Indeed, the advantage of applying an ecogothic lens lies in the fact that it “illuminates the fear, anxiety, and dread that often pervade [the cultural relationships of humans to the nonhuman world]: it orients us, in short, to the more disturbing and unsettling aspects of our interactions with nonhuman ecologies.”⁹ I build on this development by using the ecogothic to identify the forms of ruins that remain on American plantations, including bodily ruins. I apply the ecogothic lens as a tool to resituate the gothic motif of ruins to include human bodies and the trauma they carry and inherit by living on geographical sites of slavery. This work therefore extends Stuckey’s by demonstrating how the ecogothic can be used not only to examine the intersections between ecocriticism and the gothic, but to overcome their respective...