Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

I sometimes thought of this as the Madonna/whore theory of landscape: human contact was imagined as inevitably violating a vulnerable, passive nature that was inevitably degraded by us. White people were imagined as discoverers of a place that lay waiting, before history, before culture. Beyond this binary lay other ways of being human, other ways of being in the natural world. Being an environmentalist was coming to mean, at last, recognizing and respecting the first dwellers in these places and that human impact—hunting, harvesting, fire management techniques—had to be factored into assessments of what had constituted the ecosystems before Euro-American arrival. That is to say, these new frameworks and voices transformed nothing less than history, nature, and culture in far-reaching ways. For me there was tremendous hope in the reemergence of people grounded in something other than the Judeo-Christian and European worldviews, who had lived in places for millennia without, for the most part, devastating them.

There I sat in a straight chair spooling through the microfilm of the CIA—the Commission on Indian Affairs that preceded the Bureau of Indian Affairs—reading, printing out, and taking notes on the reports of field officers in Nevada in the 1860s and 1870s. The reels of microfilm were scored with long horizontal scratches, and the letters were all written in beautiful copperplate handwriting that was hard to decipher, but what they meant became increasingly clear. The neatness of the words unfurling in arcs and curves along hand-ruled pages suggested a kind of orderliness and propriety reaffirmed by the elaborate politeness in the salutations and the signoffs in these letters about genocide. About how to push the Native people out of the way as whites flooded west and subjugate them and let their resources be pillaged, how to contain them and give them some handouts as their homelands were so degraded that food sources vanished. We would like the people involved in monstrosity to be recognizably monstrous, but many of them are diligent, unquestioning, obedient adherents to the norms of their time, trained in what to feel and think and notice and what not to. The men who wrote these reports seemed like earnest bureaucrats, sometimes sympathetic to the plight of the people they were helping to exterminate, always convinced of their own decency. It is the innocence that constitutes the crime.

The struggle was never resolved, through difficulties, through conflicts within the tribe, through changing times, through the arrival of gold mines that scraped and developed and polluted their valley and pumped out its water and flooded the Dann family cemetery. I was sad about their stalemate and the government’s war of attrition and grateful for my time with them. But the larger shift taking place made me hopeful as never before. I saw the power of people on the margins to change foundational stories, saw something absolutely unforeseen emerge, saw how, as those changes spread, signs and school textbooks, monuments, place names, land management practices, and sometimes laws changed, how museums gave back the bones and the relics to the people whose ancestors and treasures they were, how gradually all these tangible things meant something more important and less tangible.

It did not mean that everything was fine, but it was a profound shift with practical consequences, including in the understanding and management of natural systems and places.

The rising visibility and power of Native nations in the Americas felt of a piece with the nonviolent revolutions that had toppled the totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union a few years later, which I’d followed closely, with exhilaration. That was my golden age, not because I had escaped the evils of this world but because I had found ways to think about them and sometimes do something about them, valiant companions in the efforts, places to fall in love with, and ideas that transformed me.

The other of the two books to emerge from Wanderlust was about technological change and the disembodiment that came with the transcendence of time and space that machines made possible, and it was centered on Eadweard Muybridge, the British photographer who laid the groundwork for what became motion pictures (and documented San Francisco, where he lived during much of his prime, when he murdered his wife’s lover, made some of the greatest landscape and panoramic photographs of the nineteenth century, and transformed, with high-speed sequential photography, what scientists and artists knew about humans in motion).

One day in the spring of 2003, my work was featured in a university colloquium with a man who launched an extended ad hominem attack on me, my motives, and my hopefulness. I’d arrived at that hopefulness in the course of pursuing a return project in Yosemite National Park. In 2001, with the artists Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe, I’d ventured in to rephotograph Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs there and understand what had changed since he made them in 1872. Our project grew into a broader survey of earlier photographers, modernist as well as Victorian, and of what had and had not changed since their times. The exploration gave me a magnificently complex sense of change as something that does not occur at a predictable rate but varies widely from place to place and entity to entity: some trees were still recognizable more than a century later, some arrangements of small boulders had not moved in all that time, but the Merced River had shifted its bed, forests had devoured meadows, and celebrated old landmarks had vanished.

Native people had gained some rights and a lot more representation in the park. Before whites had arrived, they had set fires as part of their land management techniques, and the Park Service had finally recognized fire as part of the place’s ecology after a century of fire suppression. And the park’s visitors were far more ethnically diverse; the sense of one cosmology having been pushed out by another was giving way, or so it seemed to me, to a sense of the coexistence of many worldviews and a big adjustment in the Eurocentric one to recognize—imperfectly, incompletely, but still—the rights and presence of indigenous Americans. California was on its way to becoming a nonwhite-majority state and some of the promise of that I had found in the park this time around. This was the hopeful vision I’d presented at the university, where the academic man had laid into my motives and my character for half an hour or so, in front of the students I’d brought from the writing class I was teaching at an art school.

“Thank you for sitting all the way through my, um, very interesting colloquium, and a special thanks to Maggie and Kristina for making supportive faces at me from across the room,” I wrote them. “For me, the ultimate subject is what kinds of histories can we imagine and can we tell.”

It was the first thing I published exclusively online, and it went viral as nothing I’d ever done before had, picked up by alternative weeklies, reprinted as a small booklet by a graphic designer, forwarded over and over by email in those days before social media. I argued that we had a lot of power, a history of forgotten and undervalued victories, that while some things were getting worse, the long view—especially if you were nonmale, or nonstraight, or nonwhite—showed some remarkable improvement in our rights and roles, and that the consequences of our acts were not knowable in advance. They were often not knowable soon afterward and sometimes ever after since great strategists, idealists, and movements sometimes prompt indirect repercussions in other times and places and struggles.

I’ve sometimes been taken to task by people as though I equate minor indignities with major crimes, people who don’t or prefer not to understand that we talk about a lot of things on a spectrum, and we can distinguish the different points on the spectrum, but the point is that it’s one spectrum. Making black people drink out of separate drinking fountains and lynching them are different in degree and kind, but they both emerge from the same effort to enforce segregation and inequality, and almost no one has trouble understanding that. Since the essay I wrote that morning was published, I’ve heard from lawyers, scientists, doctors, scholars in many fields, athletes and mountaineers, mechanics, builders, film technicians, and other women who’ve had their field of expertise explained to them by men who didn’t have any idea what they were talking about but thought the world was so ordered that knowledge was inherent in them as lack of it was in women, that listening was our natural state and obligation and holding forth their right, perhaps that it is her job to let his sense of self expand as hers shrivels.

Ok. I hear this

I am a woman who by the first years of my teens had to learn to squirm and worm and fade away when adult men pursued me because telling them to leave me alone was in that era of my youth inconceivable as something I had the right or even the safety to say and they had the obligation or even inclination to heed. I am a woman who during my youth thought it likely I would be raped and maybe also murdered and all my life have lived in a world where women were raped and murdered by strangers for being women and by men they knew for asserting their rights or just being women and where those rapes and murders were lasciviously lingered on in art. I am a woman who has been told at crucial times that I was not believable and that I was confused and that I was not competent to deal in facts. And in all that I am ordinary.

And I am a woman who became a writer and through it gained some standing while writing about other things from art to war, and sometimes tried to put that standing to work to try to open up space for others’ voices. I am a woman who one morning wrote an essay called “Men Explain Things to Me” that is about the way that the mild disparagement of having your subject of expertise explained to you by a fool who does not know that he does not know what he’s talking about or who he’s talking to is on a spectrum, and that the other end of the spectrum is full of violent death.

I had written about my own experiences and perceptions, and they had turned out to have a lot in common with other women’s experiences and perceptions. It went viral immediately and got millions of hits at the website Guernica over the years because the experiences and situations I described were so brutally common and so inadequately acknowledged. It has most likely had more impact than anything else I’ve done, this essay I wrote in one sitting that morning. As the title essay of a 2014 anthology of my feminist essays, it became a bestseller in South Korea and stayed that way for years in the United States, and it appeared in several other languages from Danish to Spanish to Farsi.

I have been thrilled and moved by the young women who came up to me to say that something I’ve written helped them locate their power and their value and reject their subjugation. You don’t really know what you do when you write, because it depends on how people read, and there are ways that knowing their appetites and interests can guide you down familiar paths and ways that not knowing can take you to appetites and interests you didn’t know existed and sometimes your readers didn’t either.

A writer’s voice is supposed to be hers alone. It’s what makes someone distinct and recognizable, and it’s not quite style and not just tone or subject; it’s something of the personality and the principles of the writer, where your humor and seriousness are located, what you believe in, why you write, who and what you write about, and who you write for. But the feminist themes that became a major part of my work after “Men Explain Things to Me” is for and about and often with the voices of other women talking about survival.