Navigating the Precarious Anthropocene with Nina Mingya Powles

Professor Timothy Clark’s ‘Derangements of scale’ (2012) articulates a problem of the ‘Anthropocene’ (a term Clark describes as a ‘catchphrase’ in the humanities for the ‘novel situation’ of contemporary human environmental impact).¹ The problem is that the scale for mapping climate change ‘includes the whole earth but when it comes to relating the threat to daily questions […] the map is often almost mockingly useless’.² The convoluted nature of human influence on the planet means, incredibly, that what appears ‘self-evident or rational at once scale may well be destructive or unjust at another’ (p. 3). ‘Scale’ comes from the Latin scala: step or stair. Clark’s phrase ‘derangements of scale’ reframes daily life in the Anthropocene as walking a deranged staircase of cause and effect. If the impact of one’s action is manifold, unpredictable, and contradictory across scales, then effective adaptation (while urgent) is precarious. Although Clark voices scepticism about the capacity of the humanities to recognize the derangement of scales, this piece will propose that Nina Mingya Powles’ Small Bodies of Water (2022) recognizes and navigates the vertiginous terrain of scale derangement.³

Powles comes of age in a world starting to reckon with climate change. Her memoir charts a relationship with instability, politically and environmentally. Being a white and Malaysian Chinese woman from Aotearoa/New Zealand who grew up in New York, Shanghai, and London, Small Bodies dwells thematically on identity disorientation: ‘Is it that I’ve anchored myself in too many places at once, or nowhere at all?’.⁴ Powles is intimately, albeit fragmentally, connected to several places and cultures, so it is not uncommon in Small Bodies for multiple scales to ‘derangedly’ coincide. A touchstone in the text is a kōwhai tree growing in London. This tree is a symbol of home and displacement. It is implicated with large-scale forces like British colonialism and climate change, e.g., ‘February is not yet over, but the tall kōwhai down the road is already in bloom’ (p. 50). Such ‘deranged’ objects help Powles explore her own intersectionality with these scales: ‘The tree is where I begin and end. I hold parts of the tree in my hand’ (p. 53). Another touchstone is Powles’ Wellington home, which stands inside the tsunami risk zone. The way its precarious position impacts her life, even as she lives elsewhere, exposes Powles’ psychoemotional enmeshment with geologic and tectonic scales: ‘My thoughts often feel like a web of connected fault lines, each small rupture causing another, bigger rupture. I can’t control their spread. I feel an intense pressure in the centre of my chest’ (p. 30). Powles contends with destabilizing geopolitical forces whose large scales permeate the realm of personal agenthood. Small Bodies recognizes the vertigo that Clark identifies.

Scale derangement makes it challenging to conceptualize ‘a politics of climate change’ because one must ‘think “everything at once”’.⁵  Small Bodies manoeuvres such derangement by collecting ‘scraps and pieces’, such as root words, song lyrics, and ingredients: ‘What do I know but pieces, all at once?’ (pp. 75-78). Powles locates ‘home’ as a ‘collection of things that have fallen or been left behind: dried agapanthus pods, the exoskeletons of cicadas’ (p. 7). The motif of ‘pieces’ is strikingly Anthropocenic, evocative of plastic waste, habitat fragmentation, and extreme weather debris. It also recalls Ursula K. Le Guin’s theory of narrative as a ‘carrier bag’ or ‘medicine bundle’, the primordial human tool: ‘To put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag […] if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all’.³ If Small Bodies is a carrier bag, its contents include egg-boiling instructions, the lunisolar calendar, Mandarin root characters, and pieces of racist dialogue that Powles encounters. In Small Bodies, narratively ‘carrying’ pieces appears tactical and grounding: ‘As if by naming my reality I might feel less adrift’ (p. 170).

Clark raises the issue of intellectual ‘derangement’, but Small Bodies and its ‘scraps and pieces’ do not discernably pursue order or re-arrangement. One essay contests an 1814 geologist’s atomistic standardization of colour. Powles’ bent is deconstructionist. Small Bodies parses terms from English and Mandarin and ingredients from various cuisines for usage in her immediate contexts. Powles wields the forward slash punctuation mark in ‘an attempt to punctuate myself into existing in two places at once’ (p. 66) – an explicit rejection of formal writing conventions and formal identity (including spatiotemporal) demarcation. Clark has argued that the Anthropocene blurs ‘the lines between culture and nature, fact and value, and between the human and the geological’, and so ‘scrambles some crucial categories by which people have made sense of the world and their lives’ (p. 9). By drawing attention to pieces, Small Bodies’ carrier-bag approach spotlights – perhaps even embraces – just this sort of destabilization (de-arrangement) of core intellectual categories.

Clark’s concern that the humanities are blind or ill-equipped to handle scale effects remains to be tested. Small Bodies might constitute a counterexample. The 2022 memoir speaks directly to the challenges of locating selfhood when it cannot be extricated from other points in space. What Clark discusses as predominantly conceptual uncertainties Powles grounds in embodied grief, anxiety, and vigilance. Powles’ general adherence to an ethic of minimal sufficiency and the memoir's ‘medicine bundle’ approach suggest that there are tactics both in and outside of narrative form for navigating large-scale forces that disorient and destabilize. To Clark's concern, Small Bodies responds by introducing ‘carrier bag’ writing as a technique for articulating scale effects that defy planetary linearity and underscore inter-relationality. While Clark’s essay invites readers to the challenge of conceptualizing a politics of climate change, the scrappiness, vulnerability, and pragmatism of Small Bodies asks us to consider, personally, ‘what it takes’ to orient to collapse in the climate change era.⁶

Footnotes