Criticism

Let me start here. Threa Almontaser’s The Wild Fox of Yemen, the 2020 Academy of American Poets First Book Award winner, ripped my first-book cynicism right out of my throat and left me open-mouthed, agog with awe. I’m a little skeptical of poets’ first books. Given the state of contemporary academic poetry, first books are improbable objects, plucked from obscurity often by an ever-changing army of poetry judges selected to judge the several dozen poetry contests run each year. These judges are more often than not offered only a selection of manuscripts by contest screeners. Poetry contests receive hundreds of manuscripts year after year. Only a fraction of these gets read by the judges themselves.

There’s just too much that can go wrong in the process. Take the Walt Whitman Award, for which Threa Almontaser was the 2020 selection and winner. First there’s the poet’s ability to afford entry into the contest itself, which costs $35 (though new guidelines at the Academy of American Poets make it possible for poets for whom the contest fee is a barrier to entry to write to the organization, I assume, to waive the entry fee—a much welcome development). Then, there’s the improbability of leaving the slush pile and making it to the judge’s table to begin with. Paid interns read these manuscripts (in my youth, the interns included some of my cohort studying poetry at Columbia’s School of the Arts). These pre-screeners often incorporate their own biases of what the judge will and won’t like when deciding whether to pass manuscripts to the judge. Yes, I’ve heard of judges who read the manuscripts they have been given and then ask to see more, but this is the exception, not the rule. The few manuscripts selected to be read must then somehow impress the judge, appeal to his or her aesthetic, and contain some spark the judge deems worthy of publication. The winners of these contests arrive in our hands as survivors of a process not unlike The Hunger Games. That so many first books arrive at publication sounding much like every other poetry book published in the last five years is not shocking in the least. Most first books of poetry are boring.

Selection by committee, as so many first poetry book contests are, seldom produces work that inspires, work that transcends. And yet, Threa Almontaser’s The Wild Fox of Yemen inspires and transcends. Its opening poem, “Hunting Girliness” is a transcendent and transgressive feminist yawp that left me utterly speechless. Let this be my letter of gratitude to Harryette Mullen, who shows a hawk-like editorial eye in plucking this book out of obscurity. The Wild Fox of Yemen is not a perfect book, but it brings forth a singular voice.

I’ll start with the first poem, which embodies everything marvelous about this collection. Like a series of dominoes, Almontaser topples every stereotype of Muslim femininity and cliché about femininity in general. She writes about beating up boys at the park, making “one my wife / in a white dress when we play marriage.” And this: “Tell me, / when I can stop barbing my headscarves” and “I learn to love / my body by playing dead.” The speaker’s mother tells her to “Stop being reckless” and her response is: “Truth is,/ I quit being cautious in third grade / when the towers fell &, later, wore / the city’s hatred as hijab.” And the poem continues, a feminist roar: “Loop training bras to ceiling fans. / Stay hairy. She pulls out her prayer mat, / enlists God to drag a sharp nail across / my jaw as I sleep, shaving my girl beard off.” Holy fucking shit, girl.

In another poem, Almontaser describes her youthful henna tattoos. She will “flaunt the henna hand” to the “ancestors” while she explains she wants the “kids / at school to see me tatted. I draw gang signs on arms / at lunch.”

We are perhaps entering a Muslim cultural renaissance in America, where the children of 9/11 are old enough to comment on the atrocity of growing up in a world fashioned by a national security administration based on racial and religious profiling. Almontaser’s book of poetry reminds me of other thrilling works of art by young Muslim millennials. For example, in the stunning television series “Ramy” we are given a glimpse into the life of Muslim youth in New Jersey in the wake of 9/11. Ramy, the title character, and his male friends, negotiate and code-switch between urban New Jersey’s masculinity, and Muslim identity which eschews the holy trinity of millennial masculinity: sex, alcohol, and atheism. When Ramy travels to Egypt, he imagines he’ll be able to encounter a more authentic Muslim youth. Instead, he attends parties where the kids are more American than the Muslims in America, less devout, and more interested in learning about Jersey than in showing Ramy around the Nile. In America, Ramy struggles with what it means to Muslim. His Egyptian counterparts wonder what it’s like to be American. Ramy’s sister, the female perspective in all this, predictably gets buried in the show, her perspective glimpsed only from time to time—but always depicted in terms of the double-standards she must endure. Ramy can leave the house at all hours, but her parents need to know where she is at every moment. Almontaser’s The Wild Fox of Yemen gives us a depiction of female Muslim identity, a thrilling and profound testament, and an important cultural artifact of American life.

I will have to sit and ponder Almontaser’s The Wild Fox of Yemen for some time, marveling at the many faceted jewels in this collection. This is not a book that can be read in a single sitting. It’s too complex, too multi-faceted, too stunning. I know there is much I missed in my first read-through.

The act of writing oneself involves hardening oneself into a kind of definition, to surrender a bit of one’s own anonymity and ambiguity. To be Muslim in America is also to be marked, to lose a bit of one’s anonymity and ambiguity by the forces of national security and by cultural bias. Almontaser understands that her poetry will define her, but she subverts easy definition. Almontaser is hyper-aware of the ways a body can be read (the hijab is a legible metaphor worn on the body). She is hyper-aware of the ways her poetry will redefine her and also fix her in its new parameters. She plays with these expectations and subverts them.

She writes about her hair, “Ode to my Gordian knots.” But her hair is not for viewing. One of the best poems in the book is “When White Boys Ask to See My Hair.” In another poem, Almontaser explains: “I believed in Shaytan before I believed in the Power Rangers.” But she also knows where the real devil lives in modern America: “It would be three stalls back     in a woman’s highway restroom / where anything unspeakable can go down without a peep.” Later she saw “Shaytan at a red light in Apex, North Carolina:” a man pointing a gun at her through the car window in the Bible Belt.

Goodness, these poems are so good. Why did it take me 36 years to finally read a few good poems about female masturbation?

And yes, like any first book of poetry, there are poems that I’d probably edit, shorten, poems that splutter out in the end, unable to live up to the pure fury of their openings. “Muslim with Dog” could have ended just fine on the first page. The overtly political poems are among the weakest in the book. The careful tenebrism and polysemous explosions of meaning that Almontaser is capable of producing narrow to a fixed point in the more political pieces that ring a single, louder note. I don’t think the book is weaker for these political pieces, though. Almontaser earns them.

There are burst of light within some of them, like “The Ghaltan who pressed the launch button wishes / he were a blade of grass a beast eats / so that he is not accountable for anything.”

Almontaser is the winner of the Walt Whitman Award and like Walt Whitman, these poems are long-winded. Sometimes the length serves them. Sometimes not. I found myself often distracted mid-poem, much the way I found myself distracted while reading Whitman. Perhaps that’s the thrill: in their expansiveness, the poems draw the reader within and without their parameters.

This is a luminous and excellent first book of poetry, one of the best I’ve read this year.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Don Mee Choi is the National Book award winner for poetry for DMZ Colony, a hybrid text more reminiscent of the hybrid non-fiction, journalism, and poetry found in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, than traditional lyric poetry, but the book is also quite distinct from Rankine and Sebald in important ways. The opening sections of the book are told in spare, almost brutally minimalistic prose that situates Choi historically and culturally. She’s from South Korea. She’s a translator. She spends time at various demilitarized zones, both real and imaginary, and both imaginary real—what is the difference, after all? While Choi is always in some way referring to the Korean Demilitarized Zone, the two-and-a-half mile wide “empty” zone at the 38^th parallel that divides North and South Korea, she also physically inhabits other DMZs translated across time and space.

After studying art in the United States, she returns home, to South Korea, a stranger in a strange land. She interviews political prisoners and translates what she learns into notes.

The first political prisoner she interviews is Mr. Ahn. She publishes what appear to be her notes from the interview verbatim. The section that follows is disarming. The rawness of the transcribed notes is undeniable. Choi refuses to transform the man’s suffering into art, and in doing so creates something that I wouldn’t call poetry, but is something almost as good, a commentary on war poetry itself. Choi’s implicit question is this: What happens when a poet elevates the pain of war into art? What happens when suffering is rendered beautifully? Choi will not beautify Mr. Ahn’s suffering. In fact, she will not transform it into anything at all, neither narrative, nor poetry. 

But it is important to note that transformation nevertheless occurs. Choi translates the notes into English. Translation is a literary transformation that always involves some degree of choice. (Later Choi will play upon this in her own translations, as a critic for the Chicago Review of Books notes; Choi’s translations from Korean to English are far from perfect or precise.) And in that transformation we are forced to reckon with the ambiguity of translation, the words themselves presented to us as potential translations trotted out for the reader to make sense, to disambiguate.

The early sections of DMZ Colony are strong pieces precisely because of Choi’s refusal to be artful, her refusal to be poetic. Writers often turn to their artistry to describe setting, using rhetorical devices like metaphor and simile to weave together a sense of place. Choi refuses these niceties, instead using locational data to situate the reader “…the river connects to the Imjin River, flowing north to south…” Choi will not render beauty. “I’ll leave it to your imagination…whether the acacia tree was in bloom or not.”

Later Choi meets Ahn-Kim-Jeong-Ae, “a feminist scholar and activist.” Here Choi offers some narration, and then reproduces Ahn-Kim’s notes direct (in her own notes, Choi says they are traced). Choi flies back to the United States to Texas where she comments on the separation of migrant children from their parents at the border.

Thus far, the book is stoic to the point of almost cruelty, but the barrenness of the prose is a pitch perfect mirror of the barrenness of political atrocity, the barrenness of war, the barrenness of murder. I read the opening sections in awe. Choi’s control of her form was perfect.

But then, the book falters.

It is fascinating to me that the poems that are arguably the best “poems” as “poems” in the book are the very poems that contradict the book’s internal logic.

Choi “translates” the stories of eight girls who survived the Sancheong-Hamyang massacre. While the stories appear as translations, they are in fact retellings. Here, Choi breaks the contract she has made earlier in the book, the contract that she will not beautify atrocity.  

This is not to say that these sections are among the most striking in the entire book. They are the most beautifully horrifying poetry in the whole book, surreal and medieval. They do not belong in this book precisely because they are beautiful. And yet they are essential. This paradox is fascinating and disarming.

The stories are imagined accounts of the children’s experience, pieced together from Choi’s conversations with Ahn-Kim-Jeong. Choi explains in her notes that she wrote the stories in Korean and then translated them into English. So much care has been taken to not transform suffering into art thus far in the book. When I learned that the stories were imagined accounts, based on real accounts, I was disappointed. Translation is always a political act. Telling another person’s story is a delicate balance of service and exploitation. By capturing the stories in DMZ Colony, Choi takes the accounts for her own use. There is the feeling of a triple violation. The violation of the massacre itself and the violation of the translation and the violation of the publication of the stories as fictionalized accounts. The “translations” are surrealistically poetic. Choi writes: “I may be the only one who thinks this but representation can be magical. Cruelty and beauty—how do they coexist.” The blurring of the line between fiction and poetry and non-fiction undermines the stoicism of the opening sections. Ahn-Kim explained that the state continued to deny the massacre through falsifying, through concealment. Choi’s poetry is at once an account that contradicts the state’s narrative, but it is also a form of falsification as well. The reader is left to inhabit that discomfort, and perhaps that is precisely the point.

DMZ Colony is at its weakest when it slips into literary theory and criticism. Too many books become infected with the disease of academic literary criticism, as if they are trying to anticipate their own critique, and suffer for these contortions.

But the book is saved by the last section, which attains a poetic “truth” outside mere transcription, outside criticism, outside fictionalization. The end is Choi’s poetic translation of all that has come before. It is the poetry woven from the threads of history that she has made her own. These are not necessarily the strongest poems in the book—as I mentioned, the strongest poems are Choi’s transformations of the children’s stories, but the poetry serves the strong purpose of helping the book come full circle. At the end, DMZ Colony is a book that inhabits poetry and fiction and translation’s many potentialities–and risks. Choi walks a delicate tightrope in commenting upon these risks. Can I blame her for stumbling from time to time? No. I can only celebrate and stand in awe of these risks. DMZ Colony is an excellent book, one that carries a record that may otherwise have been erased. 

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

In her breathtaking book of essays, Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer introduces the idea of the “Honorable Harvest,” a set of sustainability actions that embrace the complexity of lived life. To eat anything is to take from the earth and it often involves the killing of plant or animal beings (I know no one who eats, clothes, and shelters themselves on fruit alone). To live compassionately and mindfully upon this earth requires this acknowledgement. We kill to eat. We kill to clothe ourselves. Consumption itself is the act of killing, or at the very least involves some kind of destruction, some kind of taking. How do we reckon with this? Not easily. Kimmerer herself notes that the laws of the Honorable Harvest “are not written down or consistently spoken of as a whole—they are reinforced in small acts of daily life.” I moved to Hawai’i in large part because I wanted to participate in the Honorable Harvest and participate in daily sustainability actions. I wanted to be closer to the ocean and I wanted to live more sustainably on the planet. Living in Hawai’i doesn’t make sustainable action easier—and in many ways, living in Hawai’i makes it far more difficult. When most of your food is shipped in from the continent, expelling carbon in the process, living lightly upon the earth isn’t easy. Yet, difficult or easy, each of us who cares about the planet eventually comes to terms with the idea of the Honorable Harvest in our daily lives—especially those of us who want to live greener lives. The Honorable Harvest is more than just buying organic food. It is a way of living more lightly and responsibly on the earth, and not outsourcing that responsibility.

First, what is the Honorable Harvest exactly? What are sustainable actions we can take? Kimmerer doesn’t offer strict rules, but she writes that the laws of the Honorable Harvest “might look something like this:”

• “Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.”
• “Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life.”
• “Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.”
• “Never take the first. Never take the last.”
• “Take only what you need.”
• “Never take more than half. Leave some for others.”
• “Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.”
• “Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken.”
• “Share.”
• “Give thanks for what you have been given.”
• “Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.”
• “Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.”

I’ve had to think long and hard about how these principles work in my current life. How is one to live in accordance with the Honorable Harvest in a world where so much of the food we eat is harvested out of sight by other hands? How are we to use and consume responsibly, when so few things are made by hand, when so much is made by machines? Everything from our clothes to our shelter involves some kind of mechanized process, involving invisible hands to whom we cannot always give thanks—or apologize to.

Kimmerer wrestles with these questions in Braiding Sweetgrass, a book I have taken my time reading (I have to admit I started in months ago, and find myself working slowly through each essay, treasuring it like a jewel). It is a book I return to time and time again. Kimmerer struggles with the reality that the instruments she uses for writing (her pens, her paper) come from mechanized processes, origins unknown. The very tools of her trade may cause unknown damage on the planet. She acknowledges that it is impossible to harvest honorably or sustainably in all aspects of her life.

Regarding the question of how to live lightly upon this earth, Kimmerer writes, “I think my elders would counsel that there is no one path, that each of us must find our own way. In my wandering with this question, I’ve found dead ends and clear openings.”

And so I realize I can only speak about my own path and hope it is of some use. I can only speak of my own struggles, and hope there will be recognition there.

If I had to create my own list of sustainability actions for my own “Honorable Harvest” my working draft would involve these points:

• Eat what would otherwise be wasted and don’t waste.
• Learn about where your food comes from, and when possible, partake of the honorable harvest with your own two hands.
• Consume less. Buy clothes and household goods from the thrift store when possible. Before COVID-19, my partner and I went to the Goodwill Surplus Store once a week.   
• Learn about conservation projects in your community and lend them your talents, your time, your work, your donations, and your other gifts.
• Never underestimate the power of gratitude, community, and ceremony.

Coming to know the ways of those who take care of me has involved spending more time out at sea, with the fish of O’ahu, understanding their habitats and habits. Over the years, I have watched the coral go from rainbow to bleached white. I have wanted to learn spearfishing, but I realize that I won’t be able to fish in a sea I don’t understand, so I am taking the time to understand the ocean near my home, free-diving when I can. I am getting to know the turtles, stingrays, and fish. I am letting the ocean teach me its lessons. When I am ready, I will learn to spearfish, so that I can become accountable as “the one who comes asking for life.” For now, I come with an open heart, willing to learn.

Coming to know the ways of those who take care of me has put me on a journey where I go foraging in the forest, learning more about the natural ecosystems of Hawai’i, and about the way food grows wild. I am fascinated by the ways these mountains and hills grow food on their own, without human intervention.  Caring for the “ones who take care” of me, on some days, is as simple as cleaning plastic out of the ocean when I see it there. It means picking up trash on the trails. On other days, it means walking in the woods, searching for avocados and breadfruit and foraging for other wild food in season. I am slowly learning the ways of wild plants, and learning to look more closely when I hike. And on some days, it means reading about ecology, about farming, and about the ways we can better protect the natural world. It has led me on a path that has put me in the way of restoration projects in my own community, in the path of work that sustains me soul, body, and mind. It has changed the trajectory of my career.

Someday, I’d like to join the local community gardens here in Honolulu, and get my hands dirty, but the waiting lists are long, so for now, I spend my days learning, and contemplating the possibility of planting a few rogue breadfruit trees. In the meantime, my boyfriend, Sergio and I buy food from the Chinatown markets that would otherwise get thrown away and end up in a landfill. He is a master at letting nothing go to waste. I am still learning.

Taking only what I need takes on many forms. When foraging, it means Sergio and I leave some fruit on the trees for the animals and for others who pass. When it comes to buying household items and clothes, we try to shop at the thrift store, finding items that would otherwise end up in a landfill. It means that we often have to be more patient when we want something, waiting for it to make its way to us, but we save money and save the planet from needless waste and manufacturing. I find that with patience, what we need comes.

Asking permission is something I have found myself having trouble with. Growing up where I grew up, if you asked permission, the answer was likely to be “no.” But I have learned that when you ask permission in nature with an open heart, the answer is often “yes,” and if it is “no,” it’s more a “try again later, no,” or a “no, try harder” or a “no, but learn more and come back.”

Giving thanks, and giving in reciprocity for what has been given is also a challenge. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that ceremony can go a long way to creating a habit and ritual of giving thanks and giving back. She writes, “ceremonies should be reciprocal cocreations, organic in nature, in which the community creates ceremony and the ceremony creates community. They should not be cultural appropriations from Native peoples. But generating new ceremony in today’s world is hard to do.”  

Giving thanks as a community can be far more powerful than giving thanks alone. Giving back to those who have sustained you with others can be more powerful than trying to go alone. Kimmerer explains: “Ceremony focuses attention so that attention becomes intention. If you stand together and profess a thing before your community, it holds you accountable.” I have struggled with this loneliness. In a world where everyone is connected to their phones, it’s hard to build real-life connection, difficult to build real-life community.

But I still think there are ways.

In the face of planetary degradation, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and hopeless, or to not even know where to start. I’ve read several books that embody this lost sense we all have (Anne Lamott’s Dusk Night Dawn is a recent book that comes to mind). Kimmerer writes: “Despair is paralysis. It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth.” What is the solution? Kimmerer writes: “Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into a positive, creative relationship with the more-than-human world, meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual.”

Kimmerer and others who have a relationship with the land say that it doesn’t have to be difficult. They say it can start small. Just do something. Pick up the trash on the hike. Find the empty lot and start a rogue garden to feed your hungry neighbors. Don’t waste food. Buy things from the thrift store. Find restoration projects in your area, and find ways you can help. Know your gifts and put them to use.

Gratitude for one’s gifts creates a kind of accountability. I think of all I have been given: this beautiful island of O’ahu, the fresh fish I eat thanks to those who harvest, the vegetables grown in the ground, farmers, the ocean, the waves, my friends, and family and loved ones. My writing. My calling.

And so, I’ve come to see this writing as a kind of ceremony. Every day, like a ritual, at the start or end of my day, I come to the blank page and ask what I can give back or add to what has been given to me. And if I listen closely, I hear the answer, and I write. This is my offering.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Kawai Strong Washburn, in his luminous debut, Sharks in the Time of Saviors, isn’t set in the stereotypical Hawai’i marketed by the tourism industry. It is set on the Hāmākua coast of the island of Hawai’i, or the “Big Island,” on land scarred by abandoned sugar cane plantations. It ventures into the sacred gulches where no roads go, where Hawaii’s power, or mana, exists in the land and legends known by the locals and by the land itself. It is a story told in the style of magical realism, but the meaning of magical realism in Kawai Strong Washburn’s Sharks in the Time of Saviors is worth noting because it serves as a kind of critique of magical realism as it is commonly employed and deployed. Traditional magical realism depicts its characters and the natural world as embodying magical qualities. Washburn’s magical realism does this, but offers a strong critique and a warning.

Washburn eventually takes us into the Honolulu of Kalihi, Hawai’i’s version of the “inner city.” The family cannot live in rural Hawai’i because all the jobs are gone. So, like many inner city kids, Dean, the eldest son of the Flores family wants to be a basketball star, and almost makes it. But, like so many men of color who live in the inner city, he eventually find himself in the prison industrial complex pipeline to nowhere. Kaui, the daughter of the family, studies hard and aspires to be an engineer, but even after leaving home for the mainland where she attends college, the gravitational force of the islands pull her back. And then there’s Nainoa, or Noa, the magical chosen son, who was rescued from the sea by sharks, who has the seemingly supernatural ability to heal people. He’s worshipped by his mother and father, to the detriment of his siblings…

Washburn’s Sharks in the Time of Saviors is told in luminous magical realist prose, a language as poetic and rich as the prose of Gabriel García Márquez and Toni Morrison. But Washburn’s magical realism isn’t the naïve or innocent magical realism of Márquez or Morrison, who seamlessly interweave the supernatural into their tales and whose characters’ faith in the unknown spirit world often propels the story forward. Washburn gives us a skeptical magical realism, his characters themselves skeptical of the mystical, almost unable to touch it themselves, as disconnected from its power as the reader is.

To understand Washburn’s magical realism is to understand a little of the cultural history of Hawai’i, a land whose language and culture were almost entirely lost, only recently revived in the 1970s during the Hawaiian Renaissance. See the oldest of the oldest men and women walking down the street in Kalihi? If their roots go deep here, their grandparents were alive during a time when the Hawaiian monarchy was strong, when Iolani Palace was home to the actual monarchy, when newspapers were still published in Hawaiian, and where many local people still maintained a close connection to the land—to the food it could produce, to the fish in the sea, the water that poured down from the cloud forests where the gods resided.

To understand Washburn’s magical realism, you need to understand the cultural history of Hawai’i. It is a land whose rich pantheon of gods were supplanted by the one and only god of the missionaries, whose ancient songs and poems were erased when local Hawaiians were no longer permitted to learn their own language in school, let alone speak it. The children of Hawai’i are at once so close to the old ways—just a few generations removed—and are also as divided from the old ways as the children of refugees who have been forced to learn a new language and assimilate to a new culture in a faraway land. Today’s Hawai’i is imbued with American capitalism where private land ownership shapes the story of wealth as it unfolds. The process that led to the fall of the Hawaiian monarchy left many native Hawaiians and locals dispossessed of land and in poverty. Washburn writes about the aftermath: “It became like a prayer at our house, Our Father who art in debt collection, hallowed be thy pay.”

The subtle question that runs under the story is the question of who exactly capitalism serves. In old Hawai’i, before colonization, there was “no use for paper printed with the silhouette of some faraway haole man. It gave nothing. What was needed was food from the earth, housing from the earth, medicine from the earth, a sense of one’s place in the system.” The story of the Flores family is a story of the ongoing toll of free-market unchecked capitalism on Hawai’i and its children. But the story is the same across the United States, too. Across our nation, poor and middle class children leave home, cut roots with their communities, and go into immense debt in the search of education and better jobs. The promise of that premise is seldom kept. The debt lingers, the jobs do not. Washburn’s Sharks in the Time of Saviors is the story that follows.

And so, Washburn’s magical realism is a late magical realism. It doesn’t have the innocence of Márquez or Morrison, who seamlessly interweave the supernatural into their tales and who find salvation in the supernatural. Washburn’s own characters are skeptical of the magic, as they must be. After all, Hawai’i is a land whose magic and mysticism has been commodified. The Flores children are at once aware of a time in the past when their culture was connected to the land and its mysteries, but are also dubious of its power. Dean is pragmatic; he understands that in a modern Hawai’i money is the only higher force that will save his family. Noa, the magical son with healing powers, is alone in his abilities, trying to convince his siblings that they have power, or mana, too. And so each child is isolated.

Children are the hope for the future, but some children become more than that in the eyes of their parents. For example, Malia, Noa’s mother, believes in her son to the point of fanatasism: “you would be a new legend, enough to change all the things that hurt in Hawai’i. The asphalt crushing kalo underfoot, the warships belching filth into the sea, the venomous run of haole money, California Texas Utah New York, until between the traffic jams and the beach-tent homeless camps and big-box chain stores nothing was the way it should have been. I believed that you could defeat this.” This is too much to put on a single person, especially a son.

Magical realism has had its own consequences on the White psyche. In Social Psychological and Personality Science, researchers published an article with the provocative title: “A Superhuminazation Bias in Whites’ Perceptions of Blacks.” Prejudice takes on many forms, and some of its forms are not always “negative.” The authors note that “superhuminazation…contributes to prejudice towards Blacks despite appearing positive.” Superhumanization, in short, describes the conscious or unconscious belief that people of color have superpowers, are in touch with higher powers to which we do not have access, or are otherwise somehow “magical.”

Superhumanization, while the polar opposite of dehumanization, is just as problematic, as the authors argue that it can often be invoked by police when using excessive force, or by the culture as a whole that views Brown people as magical, which leads to Whites being less likely to empathize with people of color because they may believe that they have a greater capacity to withstand pain.

The superhumanization of Brown and Black people involves the “representation of others as possessing mental and physical qualities that are supernatural (transcending the laws of nature), extrasensory (transcending the bounds of normal human perception), and magical (influencing or manipulating the natural world through symbolic or ritualistic means).” Cultural depictions of people of color as somehow possessing magical qualities can contribute to these ongoing damaging stereotypes. Magical realism, as a form of literature, often contributes to these stereotypes. Noa is depicted in this manner.

And while Washburn’s magical realism could be subject to this critique for its treatment of Noa, Washburn’s magical realism is in fact a critique of these stereotypes. Noa, the “chosen” son, is not as all-powerful as his own family believes, and as we are initially led to assume. In fact, he proves to be the most vulnerable of the three children. The daughter scales cliffs, while Noa falls off one. Early on Kaui makes a plea for attention that foreshadows what is to come: “So yeah: Nainoa was becoming and Dean was becoming, and I was invisible besides. But I was still becoming, too. I was…there were all sorts of things inside me… and I felt more and more I could do whatever I wanted. If I wanted it bad enough.” Kaui’s commentary is a critique of magical realism itself. She reminds us that her family’s story is important because her story is there, too, not because it is Noa’s mystical story. Washburn critiques Kaui’s invisibility in the early part of the book by elevating her importance by the story’s end. Most important of all, Kaui doesn’t have to be magical to be important.

Researchers in Social Psychology and Personality Science found that White people were more likely to associate people of color with words like “ghost” and “spirit.” While readers are tempted to be dazzled by the supernatural magical realism that surrounds Nainoa, a boy who can commune with animals in their final moments (in prose so beautiful Washburn brought me to tears), we lose track of the ordinary heroes of Hawai’i, the Kaui’s and the Deans, fighting just as hard to hold onto something even though the tide is against them.

Though Nainoa is viewed as the family’s “savior” because of his ability to heal, the three children represent three strong threads of Hawaiian culture. There’s Dean, who embodies the physical power of a warrior, but who becomes a basketball player. There’s Noa, who is a healer, carrying forth the ancient traditions of the lāʻau lapaʻau, a form of Hawaiian knowledge that weaves mysticism with a practical knowledge of plants and family systems. And then there’s Kaui, a practitioner of hula, who studies engineering and ultimately learns to work the earth itself.

This comes from the “voice” of Dean: “Way I figure, before the first Hawaiians became Hawaiians, it was them back in Fiji or Tonga or wherever, and they had too many wars with too many kings and some of the strongest looked at the stars and saw a map to a future they could take for themselves… That’s me that first night in Spokane. For real I felt all the kings that came before me in a heavy way, like they was right inside my heart, like they was chanting through my blood… I was launching across the big gap of sky between Hawai’i and the mainland, seen the big grids of mainland city lights from the plane window, skyscrapers and highways that just kept going and going, all gold and white. For me they was just like those navigating stars for the original Hawaiians, pointing the direction to what’s mine.”

In the end, it is Dean who keeps his family afloat financially, by doing whatever it takes—a story so often repeated in black and brown communities where jobs and opportunities are scarce.

And Kaui’s ordinary realism has something much more powerful in it than Nainoa’s magical realism. Nainoa’s tragedy is the misapprehension of his own gifts. Kaui’s ordinary power resides in something real, but no less extraordinary—the power of poetry, the hula (“Listen, listen, listen. It’s not just a dance,”), and the power of her hands in the earth, a humble heroine of the meek and ordinary world, nevertheless healing Hawai’i in the only real way she knows how, from the ground up.

Kawai Strong Washburn’s Sharks in the Time of Saviors will probably be the last authentic piece of magical realism that can be written, at least in our time. It should be required reading for anyone thinking of visiting Hawai’i. It should be required reading for anyone, period.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

When I was in middle school algebra, I sat next to a row of five computers that the school had acquired as part of what was clearly a push on the part of the school system to get us to join the “digital age.” These ancient Apple computers were constantly turned on, even though they were never used. Most of the teachers basically had no idea how to use them. I was never very interested in algebra, and I often found my gaze wandering to the screen savers, which displayed various geometrical sequences perpetually unfolding into various shapes and colors. Had I been told that these sequences were mathematical visualizations, I might have become more interested in mathematics. But as our teacher droned on about the FOIL method, which seemed to have no logical connection to anything in the tangible world, I gazed into a tunnel of triangles expanding infinitely toward what appeared to be a kind of event horizon. This exact screen saver came to mind as I watched Apple TV’s newest series, Calls. Calls isn’t really a television show in the traditional sense—it’s more like a podcast or radio show, with minimalistic visuals that recall old Apple computer screensavers. It feels a little like the War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938 that proved so realistic its listeners actually believed the world was being invaded by aliens. Calls is at once alien and familiar in that way.  

It therefore takes a little acclimation. I was skeptical through most of the first episode, not sure about the minimalistic visuals, and not entirely sold on the plot. The panic in the disembodied voices sometimes skewed towards melodrama. It doesn’t help that the opening episode puts us square in the middle of a love triangle, only adding to the “soap opera” effect. But, my skepticism soon dissolved into interest, then rapt attention, followed by that kind of eerie uncanny feeling you get when you’re so scared tears come to your eyes. The visuals unfold elegantly, orienting the listener in the story, while not giving away too much.

By the end of the first episode, I was hooked. Calls is horror at its purest and at its best. I’m a fan of horror movies that choose not to reveal their monsters. After all, the imagination is capable of producing the most horrifying things on its own, and it only needs a little priming to get the gears working. The best horror movies, like The Ring, and Dark Skies, don’t reveal their monsters (at least until the end), and are better for it. It’s always the anticipation of the terror, the imagined dread, that is more powerful than the awful revealed. And this is why Calls is so good. We hear the characters encountering something unspeakable, inexplicable, and terrifying. The world is changing around them, and the fact that we cannot see those changes firsthand is chilling.

Calls works because it melds the mysterious with the almost-cliché. The eerie space formed between these two poles, creates a fascinating tension, that is at once refreshing and also terrifying. We encounter characters at inflection points in their lives. A man tries to tell his long-distance girlfriend he’s having an affair, but then terrible and strange things begin to happen, including people ending up in beds where they absolutely don’t belong. A man drives through the desert to get away from his girlfriend who just told him she’s pregnant, and time begins to warp. A hypochondriacal woman and her jealous sister have a phone conversation that changes them forever. There’s a little bit of Twilight Zone and a little bit of soap opera in each of these stories, but the personal is woven so intricately into the warped universe in which these characters reside that I couldn’t turn away.

Each episode in itself could be a study in how to write a short story. We encounter our characters at moments where their lives are about to change, or are changing, irrevocably.

Ultimately, each episode is a study on the theme of regret.

I believe we all have moments in our lives we regret, things in our lives we wish we could go back and change. The characters in Calls find themselves empowered to make a different decision. They are able to call forth a different outcome, even as their stories unfold. The uncannyness of the narrative in Calls is the stange lurch we feel as we watch one reality play out even as the alternative presents itself.

It’s a seductive premise—this idea of being able to tell your past self what you know now, and asking her to change. Reality doesn’t work that way, of course. There’s regret and then there’s living in the past. There’s no going back. There is only life changed as a result.

Transformative regret is the real story beneath the story in Calls. The metaphor of the quantum change exhibited in Calls is really a metaphor about the way regret transforms lives, the world, and the universe. The stories unfold like regret’s repetitive force of what if, called forth over and over.

Calls is a commentary on the things we can and cannot change, and it is ultimately it is an allegory about the destructive force of regret–because regret literally warps time, literally entraps us in a past we constantly try to revise. The lesson of Calls is that we can never revise the past, and any attempt to do so only leads to self-destruction, and often to the destruction of others around us. We are forced to come face to face with the brute fact of time itself, and the brute fact that we cannot change the past, lest we destroy ourselves in trying to relive and revise it.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Pierre Alex Jeanty’s, HER joins a long tradition of male poets attempting to define the female mind and body, and like the long tradition before him, Jeanty falls short. Reductionistic descriptions of women and the destructive idealization of femininity is as old as poetry itself, but we don’t need to go far back to find examples of this reductionistic idealization of women.

For example, in “She Walks in Beauty Like the Night,” (George Gordon) Lord Byron writes about a woman who joined “all that’s best of dark and bright” in her eyes, behind which lie “pure” thoughts—because forbid she have an impure one! Byron’s woman is “a heart whose love is innocent,” and Jeanty’s woman is the modern version of this–pure by distinction. He writes: “You’re love blooming; / an exceptional woman growing roots / in a field of women who aspire to be / bad girls and heartless savages.” Ouch. I’m curious about how Jeanty’s “bad girls” act. Actually, I’d like to meet some of them. Even better, I wish they’d start writing poetry.

We get a pretty clear picture of who Jeanty’s “Her” really is. She’s been hurt, but open to love. She’s discerning in her selection of men. She’s a good girl who doesn’t forgive easily. She has a big heart, unlike those other women with “small hearts” who “do not leave room for love / once they’ve faced enough trial.” How much is “enough trial”? In a world where women are battered and emotionally abused, in a world where women are deemed unlikable for exhibiting human qualities like anger, what is Jeanty getting at exactly? And don’t you dare mistake her for aggressive! “She’s everything buy crazy. / They’ve mistaken her passion / for aggressiveness.” Let’s remember always that aggression painted differently can be called “assertive.” And assertive women aren’t liked. Oh yes, Jeanty’s woman also loves God.

Jeanty’s woman wants to be liked. Or at least, Jeanty wants to like his woman. I’m not sure which is true because Jeanty fails to lend his muse a psyche of her own, distinct from his. Roxane Gay writes that “in literature, as in life, the rules are all too often different for girls.” We tolerate unlikable men, but unlikeable women are exorcised. Gay makes the argument that unlikeable women are basically human, and Jeanty’s “Her” comes across as anything but human. “Her” is a caricature at best.

Jeanty can be incredibly patronizing, to the point of denigrating. About “Her” he writes: “She can be difficult. / There are times her words / will be heavy with stubbornness, / her tongue will be sharper than a new / sword, and her attitude like that of a two-year old.” Being called a two year old isn’t praise. It’s insulting. This is not a new theme in poetry. William Shakespeare reminded us that his “mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.” Jeanty is a little more literal. His woman is “a poetry book. / You must read every letter / and digest every word.” Jeanty is at his most harmless in comparing his “Her” to a bad poetry book. To his credit, Jeanty returns to Shakespeare a few times, but misses the mark, going quite literal with, “The sunset cannot compare, dear.”

Roxane Gay wrote beautifully about our need for literary women to be “likeable” in her stunning essay “Not Here to Make Friends” from her book Bad Feminist. About her own supposed “unlikability” she writes: “I was being honest (admittedly, without tact), and I was being human. It is either a blessing or a curse that those are rarely likeable qualities in women.”

What’s fascinating about Jeanty’s HER is that we see a male mind working through our culture’s misogyny, and it isn’t always pretty. He writes about waiting for a woman’s forgiveness: “To demand that she acts like (sic) / it didn’t hurt / and put it easily in the past, / is to ask her to be a robot, / rather than a human who feels.” To quote Gay, “an unlikable woman embodies any number of unpleasing but entirely human characteristics.” I wish Jeanty’s Her would be read by teenage boys if only to hammer in the line that women are not robots, that the female body isn’t a place where they can project their desires whenever they wish. Sadly, I fear that Jeanty’s main audience is women.

Jeanty’s “Her” wants a man to make her his world. In Jeanty’s poetic world, a single woman is just waiting “until someone / comes to fulfill that position.” He cautions women against “treating boyfriends as princes” encouraging them to wait for a “husband.” After all, Jeanty reminds his woman that most men won’t want “your heart, / they are merely auditioning for other parts of you.” Forget sexual liberation or owning one’s own sexuality. Jeanty’s “Her” isn’t allowed to open her body without opening her heart, lest she be classed as another “heartless savage.” Let’s be clear, women’s bodies are their own and they can open up whatever they damn well please–heart or otherwise.

The problem with this kind of poetry is that it is so prescriptive as to be outright destructive. Though I have to admit I laughed out loud at this stanza: “She isn’t meant / to be handled / with caution, / but to be loved hard.” Perhaps Jeanty’s “Her” isn’t above some light BDSM? I don’t think he meant that line to be read metaphorically. This is problematic given that this is supposed to be a poetry book. When metaphors do arrive, they are cliché. Here’s a gem: “She is / the same as wine; / without patience, / you will never / see how much better / she gets with time.”

But then again, some of the best poetry thrives in paradox, and Jeanty has a few. Take this one: “She shouldn’t have to/ change to be a recipient/ of your love. / Only ask her to be yours, and / be by her side as she changes.” These moments come across as fumbles, not intentionally complex.

The best couplet in the whole book is this one: “She stays in shape because she is in love / with being a well-rounded person.” I’m a sucker for good puns, even in a bad book.

The gender roles presented in HER are problematic because they assume that the highest aim of a good woman is to be loved by a man. If this is the poetry that resonates most with women, then our culture still has a lot of work to do. If you’re looking for a good poem written by a man trying to write about a woman, and getting it wrong, but still killing, try Dante’s Divine Comedy or the Vita Nuova instead. A poet needs to do some hard introspection before trying to characterize anyone else. Dante surely does. Jeanty’s HER is missing that introspective spark, and therefore destructively falls flat.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

I moved to Hawai’i from New York in large part because I wanted to be closer to the food I ate. Living in O’ahu, I imagined I’d be able to buy fresh local vegetables from farmers directly, or at least through farmer’s markets. Instead, I visited farmer’s markets that mainly sold prepared food, as well as chocolate bars and lemonade priced in the double digits, alongside stalls where struggling farmers sold avocados for more than three dollars a-piece—this, on an island where avocados literally grow on trees by the hundreds up in the mountains. When I first moved here, I went to a Whole Foods and spent almost $10 for a single local mango. Again, this is on an island where you can take a stroll through most neighborhoods and see mangos growing on trees. After reading Mark Bittman’s Animal, Vegetable, Junk, I realize that Hawai’i’s problems are like problems everywhere, the utopia I imagined doesn’t exist. Everywhere you travel, you’ll see the impact that large-scale industrial agriculture has had on smaller farmers, communities, and the world. Capitalism’s tentacles stretch everywhere—from the surfing lineup at Queens Beach to Times Square New York. Bittman’s Animal, Vegetable, Junk, which was released in early February, should be required reading for everyone who eats food, largely because Bittman’s storytelling abilities are stunning. His ability to tie together disparate threads like war, social injustice, and famine, and connect them back to the story of food is marvelous. Bittman sets a high bar, and his narrative exceeds expectations. The book is marvel of research and storytelling.

Bittman opens with strong words. He writes: “…if terrorists stole or poisoned a large share of our land, water, and other natural resources, underfed as much as a quarter of the population and seeded disease among half, threatened our ability to feed ourselves in the future, deceived, lied to, and poisoned our children, tortured our animals, and ruthlessly exploited many of our citizens—we’d consider that a threat to national security and respond accordingly. Contemporary agriculture, food production, and marketing have done all of that, with government support and without penalty.”

COVID-19 has forced us all to consider where our food comes from—especially as supply chains have neared collapse. But many Americans still don’t have a “daily relationship to soil” as Bittman describes it. In Hawai’i, as COVID-19 shut down the world, and as I watched the shelves of my local supermarkets go empty, my partner and I took to foraging in the forests above Honolulu. Bittman argues that we all need to establish, or re-establish our relationship with the soil, and with the earth; it will be key to changing the systems in place—systems which degrade the environment, poison the ground and water, and cause immense animal and human suffering.

Bittman’s Animal, Vegetable, Junk argues that the major issues of our time: racial injustice, the fight for indigenous rights, including land and water rights, economic injustice, the fight for a fair living wage, chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease, healthcare, gender equality, and climate change can all be tied back to problems in our food systems. His argument is sprawling, and its sweeping scope is breathtaking in its execution.

Factory farming, big food, and industrialized agriculture play a major role in climate change. Mark Bittman argues that food production alone may be responsible for as much as 50% of the world’s total carbon footprint. In Animal, Vegetable, Junk, Bittman tells the story of how agriculture grew from small-scale local farming that was largely a community affair (he calls it peasant farming) into the global conglomerate and political force it is today. America’s style of large-scale monocropping is responsible for slavery and the removal of indigenous people from their lands. After the Civil War, subsidies that favored white men, locked people of color and women out of growing food. For a while now, I have suspected that the solution to climate change will lie in how we eat and how we change our eating habits. I didn’t realize how connected our food system is to the problem.

Bittman traces the rise of civilization itself to the development of agriculture. After all, if you suddenly find yourself spending a lot of time raising potatoes or corn, you’ll also need to spend some time building a wall to protect your potatoes or corn, and maybe even eventually, the community might need a soldier or two to keep out wandering invaders. Agriculture gave people the leisure time to create art, but it also created a host of unintended consequences, like slavery and war and poverty and patriarchy. Human hunter-gatherer diets went from being “supremely varied” to being comprised of more limited diets based on the few crops a farmer could grow. And today, industrial agriculture has us relying on fewer crops still that provide us with fewer nutrients. Bittman argues that white wheat and white bread is nutritionally useless, basically a cake that delivers a vitamin supplement, that most cereals and granolas contain the sugar equivalent to servings of candy, and that the ubiquity of ultra-processed foods makes it difficult for people to make healthy choices. I have struggled with this myself, choosing the easy processed canned soup over the elbow-work of chopping up kale.

Bittman writes: “You can’t talk about agriculture without talking about the environment, about clean sources of energy, and about the water supply. You can’t talk about animal welfare without talking about the welfare of food workers, and you can’t talk about food workers without talking about income inequality, racism, and immigration.” When I first read this opening argument, I didn’t believe Bittman would be able to pull it off—that is, show me how it all connects together. But Bittman does pull it off. He pulls it off beautifully.

There are many fascinating discoveries to be found in Bittman’s Animal, Vegetable, Junk. For example, did you know that we can thank the Black Panthers for school breakfast programs? The group started a free breakfast program that fed thousands of children in Chicago, and then expanded to other cities as well.

Food has always been political. Bittman argues that famine is the result of inequality and politics, and not natural disaster or crop failure. After all, if a country like Britain gets a colony to produce only one product like sugar cane, destroying small sustenance farming in the process, and then, when it is no longer profitable, leaves the colony, people left behind won’t be able to feed themselves and they won’t know how to grow food anymore, either. Incidentally, Hawai’i was a producer of sugar cane before it no longer became profitable.

Bittman explains how industrialized agriculture created the U.S. superpower that dominated the global economy through two World Wars. He writes about how blockades of Germany’s food supply gave the Allies an immense advantage. As industrial agriculture became ever more subsidized by the government, the need for more land left indigenous people dispossessed of their homes, and racist policies in the south during the New Deal locked out Black farmers from accessing the loans and government assistance that industrial farmers increasingly required to succeed.

Bittman writes eloquently about the rise of factory farms, the dangers of monoculture, the industrialization of pesticides, patented seeds, and the rise of fast food and processed food. In today’s economy, farming is tied up with debt, banking, and big special interests. His story about the sugar industry’s attempt to cover-up the dangers of sugar reads like an expose about Big Tobacco. 

I’ll admit the Animal, Vegetable, Junk can, at times be a pretty depressing and distressing read. His section on the abuses animals face in factory farming is heartbreaking. The book is also a stunning critique of large-scale capitalism through the lens of agriculture. Capitalism assumes that growth can continue unchecked, but we have only limited resources of water, land, and soil. Bittman explains that in a purely capitalist system, war means profit, cutting down the Amazon means more jobs and production, and the healthcare consequences of unhealthy food and pesticides increase healthcare costs, which all adds up to more money spent. Capitalistic use of resources is not moral, we need policy and people to do otherwise.

Ecological thought holds that everything is connected and waste must go somewhere (there is no “garbage” that just disappears in a landfill without having an impact). These premises are exactly antithetical to capitalism, which holds that money is the only thing that connects people and things together (forget about the food web!), that we don’t need to worry about waste, only profit, and that nature’s services (in the form of things like the water cycle, for example) are free and don’t have to be accounted for. Ecology’s principles go directly in opposition to the principles of late-Capitalism. The thing is this: nature will win. We have seen this with COVID-19, already. We can live in denial, but eventually the limits of nature will check us; they are already starting to do so.

I have argued that people, once they form a large enough society, have no collective frontal lobe—the part of the brain that checks us, that stops us from doing stupid things. Humans when grouped into large-scale societies, don’t have a way to check their own folly. Capitalism’s free hand doesn’t see that it’s slowly wrapping a cord around its own neck.

There’s a story that keeps repeating itself in Bittman’s Animal, Vegetable, Junk. It’s a story about how unchecked depletion of natural resources eventually leads to the downfall of civilizations. The problem is that we now live in a global economy, with globalized monoculture and factory farming. Nature will always check us. I only hope we come to our senses before it’s too late.  

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

The recent NFT art craze brings to mind a particular moment in Martin Scorsese’s documentary “Pretend It’s a City” about Fran Lebowitz and starred by Fran Lebowitz. There’s something absolutely captivating in watching a mind so prolific, so quick, and so damn funny perform its acrobatics on the fly. It’s impossible to look away. There are many moments where Lebowitz displays her brilliance, but the moment in the film I keep thinking about right now is this one: Lebowitz talks about art auctions—the big ones, the Christie’s and the Sotheby’s. She explains that the art is unveiled in total silence and the crowd only claps when the final price is set and the auction is over. Lebowitz goes on to explain that this moment sums up the art world. It’s the not the art that’s being applauded, but the price. Commerce has replaced the critic. The recent NFT craze can be summed up in a similar way. It’s the obvious next iteration in an art world that has become more like the stock market and less like the keeper of our culture’s greatest creative treasures. When art becomes a commodity to be preserved in a storage unit, what’s the difference between buying art for your “collection” and a stock portfolio? And now, with NFT’s, you don’t need a storage unit at all. NFT’s (the acronym for non-fungible token) are basically new forms of cryptocurrency. What’s being purchased is not the trademark, nor the rights to the digital art, but the unique key and right to claim ownership to the art; Esquire has a really good article about just how NFTs work if you care to dig deeper). NFTs aren’t “art” any more than cryptocurrency is art. NFTs make the buying of the work an art itself. And perhaps that’s the point. In a culture where performative consumption is seen as the highest good, it’s no wonder that the exchange would be removed from the equation entirely, leaving the buyer with nothing more than “bragging rights.”

Questions of ownership always have philosophical implications (to the indigenous Americans for example, land was not something that could be bought or sold). I really do believe that some pieces of art are so central to a cultural psyche that they should be owned by the culture, not by an individual, but nowhere are the philosophical implications of ownership so front-and-center than in the case of the NFT, where ownership is the sole right being “purchased” and where the purchase itself has become newsworthy. Anyone can still upload the image online and display it on a computer screen, for free, but ostensibly, a piece can only be “minted” onto the blockchain once (or as a limited edition) by the artist as an NFT. Only one person can claim ownership of a given NFT. The Internet has truly become the new frontier, and now everything is up for sale, open to claim, or outright steal.

NFTs made national news when the New York Times put out this headline: “Why an Animated Flying Cat With a Pop-Tart Body Sold for Almost $600,000.” The short story is that Chris Torres, the illustrator of the flying cat with rainbows coming out of its butt, recently sold a one-of-a-kind NFT of his “Nyan Cat” and it sold for $580,000. I don’t think Chris Torres would have been called an “artist” before he made these headlines, and he himself seemed shocked by the price his piece fetched. He was more an animator, an illustrator, a meme creator. I certainly wouldn’t have called him an “artist.” But now, he’s being mentioned in the hallowed halls of Art Forum. Grimes is too. And Christie’s has joined the bandwagon, as Art Forum also reports Beeple’s JPEG “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS” being sold for $69 million in auction.

Never mind the atrocities contained in this JPEG. Jerry Saltz, the great Pulitzer-prize winning art critic commented on his Instagram account about some of the “sickenly sexist, racist, xenophobic bullshit images included in the fake artist Beeple’s 69,000,000 NFT.” The image collection includes illustrations of Black men drawn in a stereotypically racist manner, with the words “it’s fun to draw black people!” below. In another image, an Asian-American man is depicted with a pejorative label below. Misogynist art is also on offer in Beeple’s JPEG, with statements encouraging the Dalai Lama to perform sexual assault. Maybe Christie’s will be selling art by the Proud Boys next?

Saltz’s commentary is to-the-point: “For now, this is crapola… Producing one piece of frictionless cryptocurrency value transfer token equals the carbon burned for 1,500 hours of jet flying… Right now this is just the market being so stupid that it only buys what other people in the market have already bought. A dog eating its own shit—coprophagia.”

While some claim that the NFT phenomenon creates opportunities for online creators who otherwise wouldn’t be able to make money from their work, the NFT craze is also open to fraud. While the authenticity of an NFT is traced to the blockchain, much like cryptocurrency, and therefore has a secure provenance once the NFT has been uploaded and validated, there is still room for manipulation and fraud. Who is to stop someone from stealing someone’s online digital art, claiming ownership, “minting” it online, and then selling it as an NFT? How are the online art marketplaces validating all this uploaded art?

While NFTs may seem like a means for lower income artists to sell their work, uploading NFTs comes at a price. Time reports that it starting-up can cost anywhere from $40 to $200, and other venues require an application. There’s the real risk that people with money to spare might take advantage of lesser-capitalized artists. Esquire already reports that there are accounts taking artists’ social media art, minting it on these platforms, and selling it as their own. Without clear guidelines, Esquire also notes that vulnerable emerging artists may be at risk of losing their rights to more powerful and moneyed interests. I wouldn’t put my art out as an NFT as a young artist–if only to protect my rights and make clear that any of my art on the NFT markets isn’t authentic. (Actually, let me be clear, any art on this website will never become an NFT–there.)

But there’s yet another reason why artists and buyers should think twice before joining the NFT craze—and that’s the sheer ecological cost of minting, mining, and validating a single NFT on the blockchain. The computing power required to keep track of all these blockchain transactions is immense. In a world where our planet is warming daily, I’m wary of any system that adds to environmental destruction, especially a system built on such unchecked greed. Icebergs are melting as we speak, leading to rising sea levels. While there are things I do daily that have an ecological impact, making and buying NFTs is entirely avoidable.

Finally, the NFT phenomenon is yet another instance where commerce and capitalism are replacing the work of the critic. The value of the work replaces critical appraisal. We hear about the $69 million JPEG sold, not the blatantly racist and misogynistic art within it, until after it’s fetched such an obscene price. I’ve written elsewhere about the dangers of confusing what is popular for what is “good,” the dangers of mistaking the easily liked for the important or lasting, the risk of conflating depth with mass appeal. This isn’t to say that there isn’t value in something like “Cyan Cat” or that there isn’t something culturally important in its existence that may be worth commenting upon—enough to inspire someone to want to be the sole owner of the work. I actually think the NFT craze has brought to light the importance of recording some of the most significant breakthroughs in internet culture, a culture which is largely intangible. Blockchain creates the illusion of tangibility in a medium that is so ephemeral. If we were committing to only using blockchain to preserve the most significant or best, and if the cost of preservation matched the true environmental cost, I’d be more for it. If the art preserved was the art owned by the culture because it shaped the culture, I’d also be all for it. But what we see now is an open eBay of thousands of people all rushing to mint everything from Tweets to cherubs, expending massive amounts of energy and carbon in the process, all in the hopes of making a buck from the bubble before it pops.

Perhaps the art market isn’t so different from the stock market after all? Stocks rise to stratospheric new heights, while the average person and small business goes under. NFTs do the same, while the emerging artist and the non-capitalized artist continues to struggle. Money never reflects value—look at what we pay teachers compared to what we pay most other “high value” positions in society. The NFT craze is another metaphor for capitalism’s invisible hand showing how sane it truly is.

Meanwhile, in my backyard, on the island of O’ahu, where food costs more than twice what it does everywhere else because industrialized agriculture destroyed every food-growing farm (so we have to ship all our food from halfway across the earth in container ships, guzzling oil and releasing carbon in the process), when I go diving, the corals are still bleaching, whales are still crying their songs as they give birth, and every living creature in the sea has less food to eat. The computers keep on humming and consuming kilowatt hours, but it’s all good, someone’s making millions selling NFTs, just no artists I know here in Hawai’i, where the only thing I see going up is the sea level on the North Shore.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.