2020/136: Surfacing -- Kathleen Jamie

‘How long have you people been here?’ ‘’Bout ten thousand years. In winter we come up here on snow machines...' [p. 80]

A collection of essays, ranging from conversations between the author and her elderly father, to memories of a long-ago stay in Tibet, to archaeology in the Arctic and the Orkneys. I found the archaeology chapters most fascinating, especially Jamie's account of her stay in a Yup'ik community in Alaska. There, the permafrost is melting and exposing objects dating back hundreds of years, from a time before settlers and missionaries and oil pipelines. Jamie splendidly conveys the sense of continuity felt, and clung to, by the Yup'ik. Though the temptations of 'modern' life are encroaching on the village, the villagers still live in ways that their ancestors would have recognised: they are attentive to their environment, to the minute changes and signs of life that might indicate good hunting, a change in the weather, a bear roaming down from the empty tundra. This is life on the front line of the climate emergency, and the Yup'ik are well aware that change is coming and that they may need to revert to older ways of life if the planes stop coming.

Kathleen Jamie, an acclaimed poet, is fascinated by the deep past: there's a marvellous account of her reflections on a cave in the Scottish Highlands, where bear bones from the Ice Age have been discovered. 'The skull was in the cave and what was in the skull? Bear mind, bear memory – when autumn came and the nights began to freeze, he remembered where the cave-mouth was, so he padded across the glacier.' [p. 3] And she's equally engaged with the distant past that is uncovered by ferocious storms that sweep away the sand dunes in Orkney. She evokes a sense of place and of presence, a sense that there were people who lived there on the coast, intimately aware of and interacting with the world around them.

All the essays in this volume display an intellectual response to the world that incorporates a subjective, emotional response without triteness or sentimentality. The essays about the changing, damaged world have an immediacy that I found very affecting and effective. Lucid and beautiful prose, too.

Read for the 'about the environment' rubric of the Reading Women Challenge 2020.