Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective

3. Wetlands, Swamps, and Bayous: Bodies of Resistance in Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou and Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby

Wetlands, Swamps, and Bayous Bodies of Resistance in Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou and Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby 3 • 85 Wetlands—bayous, swamps, bogs, and marshes—are liminal geographies shifting between land and water, complicating and defying, in their very beings, categories of identification, thus constructing a trope neither of terra firma nor of strict watercourse. William Mitsch and James Gosselink , in a definitive treatment on the ecosystem, admit that there is considerable difficulty in defining wetlands, but offer three main characteristics : “wetlands are distinguished by the presence of water, either at the surface or within the root zone; wetlands often have unique soil conditions that differ from adjacent uplands; they support vegetation adapted to the wet conditions (hydrophytes) and, conversely, are characterized by an absence of flooding-intolerant vegetation” (26). The authors, though, quickly problematize this definition based on the considerable variation in these conditions from wetland to wetland. What is most important for this analysis is that wetlands embody an intermediate zone where elemental distinction dissipates: “Wetlands are often located at the margins between deep water and terrestrial uplands and are influenced by both systems” (27), or, as Jyoti Parikh and Hermant Datye in their study of wetlands succinctly state, “Wetlands represent the interface between land and water” (21).1 That the two elements—land and water—coexist, layer, and overlap to the point of being indistinguishable from one another engenders a theory of reading geographies, bodies, and texts as resisting hegemonic labeling and classification. As a geographic borderland that morphs from one state toanother,wetlandsareaspaceofambiguity,wherethereis“constantand languid saturation” (Hurd 5). Bayous, watercourses rich with sediment, and swamps, land masses that are “always wet,” refuse to be contained. It is with this complex negotiation of geography in mind that wetlands, “resistant to colonization or agriculture” (Anthony Wilson xiv), are read • 86 • Water and African American Memory as environments of subversion and resistance. Indeed, Frantz Fanon argues that “colonization is a success when . . . indocile nature has finally been tamed” (250). This chapter considers wetlands and their denizens as untamed; specifically, bayous, swamps, enslaved mothers, and swamp dwellers are read as bodies of postcolonial resistance in Eve’s Bayou and Tar Baby. While bayous are found throughout the Deep South, they are predominant in Louisiana, a state with an overabundance of water. The bayou is not a monolithic body of water, for the size and scope of this watercourse vary considerably: “Some of these waterways are deep and powerful, have been described as rivers; others are narrow cuts, four or five feet of water or less. When two of them meet, the place may be so wide that from one bank it is hard to recognize a friend on the other; in other instances a man can almost touch the reeds of both banks as he glides through” (Kane 5). The source and flow of the bayou are also quixotic for, unlike streams, the bayou is not dependent on springs for its water supply: “its waters derive from other near-by bodies, or from the rain, or from the highly impregnated ground itself” (Kane 4). This notion of the bayou, in effect, absorbing water from land and air suggests that the bayou is a body of water that holds place. Taking in the spirit of the place in which it is situated, the bayou is a material carrier of memory in the South. And it holds a long memory, for while its waters may grow or recede, a bayou rarely disappears. Here, it should be noted that a rather stable feature of the bayou is its compositional makeup: “This liquid is thick, dark, stained. Earth-steeped, the color is frequently a heavy brown or purple, almost a black. Drop your hand a few inches below the surface, and it cannot be seen” (Kane 7). This stained rivulet is a reflection on the past, presenting a color palette that unmistakably evokes a blood-soaked, racialized history: “the wetland figured as ‘black water’ with all its incipient racist associations” (4). Rich with earth, redolent of soil, the bayous are not rushing, cleansing waters, but are waters of memory, “slow and serene” (Giblett 4). These sleeping waters, “silent” and “somber,” offer “material lessons for a meditation on death” (Bachelard 68). The flow of the bayou does not conform to a dominant current; rather, it can and does flow in multiple directions: “it may flow in two directions , depending...