In class, Professor Kersh posed an interesting question relating to the topics about exile, Eli Clare, and missing home. The obvious question is how does Eli Clare combine these topics into such a profound way. Clare in the beginning of his memoir, writes pages upon pages of descriptions of salmon, logging, the woods to the point I was thinking I was reading the wrong story. The purpose of this was to show Clare’s real home, not just the people and the buildings he that he was exiled from but the physical nature of it. He is unable to live in the place he wants and in the fashion he wants because of human-caused norms that create a hostile environment. Clare mourns this, because he is forced to leave a go to a place that is more “forgiving” and has more community, but it is not HOME. Clare made it clear with every word on those pages, that nature is where is heart is and if the world were different, he would be right back there.
2 thoughts on “Eli Clare: A thought on environment”
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Looking at Eli Clare’s book through this frame of nature and the theoretical purity of the natural world when uncorrupted by humanity is incredibly interesting. I agree that Eli Clare mourns the loss of his childhood natural environment especially that which he thought was not polluted by humanity. With this in mind, it’s entirely possible that Clare misses the idea of the forrest and the river as he saw it when he was a child. Unclouded by the knowledge that his town was running off of depleting resources and contributing to environmental damage.
I loved reading about Clare’s descriptions of the environment, feeling his homesickness, and then feeling empathy as he described how different practices had damaged his home. In your response, you say that Clare is unable to stay in his home because of the “human-caused norms that create a hostile environment.” I think this is true in terms of the physical environment, but also in a social sense for queer people in rural communities. The social norms of sexuality and gender can create hostile environments anywhere for people that do not conform to what is expected.