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Interview with Moira Marquis
An Interview With Moira Marquis
By Simoné Walt
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Does the future seem bleak according to the last sci-fi film you watched? Or perhaps even the last news article you read? It doesn’t necessarily have to be.
I sat down with Dr. Moira Marquis, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of English at the University of North Carolina atChapel Hill, for a video chat about her research interests at the intersection of colonialism and ecocriticism. We talked about the importance of examining colonial legacies of the past; alternative epistemologies and ways of being in the present; and art that lights the way for the future.
- Past -
Simoné Walt: Before we get to talking about the future, something I’ve been asking our contributing artists and authors for this issue is: what do you wish you knew in your early 20s? What would you tell your younger self, when you were just starting out?
Moira Marquis: If you think you’re a writer, you probably are. Don’t be scared or let yourself feel defeated if you’re not where you want to be yet. Writing is something you can do in old age. José Saramago won the Nobel when he was 76! You’ve got time and everything you do and experience will feed your writing.
S: Could you give us a rundown of your career so far?
M: I started teaching world history in secondary schools. I started in secondary school because I didn’t really know that you could get paid to get a graduate degree. As the first woman in my family to go to college I didn’t have a lot of mentorship, so I just went to work because I thought I had to. But world history is a very small field in the US, so I took a job teaching English. I felt underqualified so I started a Master’s in Humanities. I wound up focusing on philosophy and literature.
When I applied to graduate school I still didn’t think I knew what I really wanted to focus on. I felt like I was stumbling around a lot, but I recently moved and found a file of old folders containing lessons from my world history curriculum. They were all about myth, the environment, and diverse cultural ways of knowing! Although I feel like I’ve been learning and shifting focus from history to literature… apparently there’s been quite a consistency in my thought.
S: What drew you to studying literature?
M: History as a field is very narrow. You can only look at written documents and even oral histories are slightly suspect. I like literature because, as Derrida says, literature is privileged to talk about everything. As a literary scholar, there is nothing that is out of bounds and that works well for me because I’m interested in large questions.
S: And what drew you to your particular areas of research?
M: I grew up in New York and was ashamed of being Irish. The legacies of colonialism profoundly impacted my perception of what being Irish meant. After my mother died, I really moved away from being Irish at all. I claimed no culture, which was easy because people in the US mistake me for a lot of things: Jewish, Latina, Native American… It’s funny to me because, in Ireland, everyone assumes I’m Irish. When, I open my mouth to speak, they are usually shocked that I’m a Yank.
My attitude towards my own family’s history changed for me when, in the course of my PhD, I had to have a third language proficiency and a professor offered modern Irish. I took it because I needed the language credit, but I also felt inexplicably drawn to it at that time. Taking that course changed my understanding of who I am. Learning Irish helped me recover a part of myself that I didn’t consciously know was lost. It helped me understand my grandmother so much more and has given me a way to be Irish that fits with who I am.
While I had been working on decolonialism before that I can’t say that I fully embraced decolonialism in the way I do now. There’s something deeply healing about recovering respect for our families and our ancestral cultures.
S: In your article "The Alien Within: Divergent Futures in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon and Neill Blomkamp’s District 9” something that stood out to me was the interaction you highlighted between past and future in Lagoon--the past informing the present and the future, the need to look back in order to look forward. Can you tell us a bit more about why you think examining the legacies of colonialism is important for us today?
M: This is what Afrofuturism, decolonialism, and Okorafor’s Africanfuturism are all about, in my opinion. It’s not “the past” in the sense that we’re going back to uncover ways of knowing that no longer exist— that would be impossible. What is being revalued are the ways of knowing that are still with us, and were commonly accepted in our cultures prior to colonisation, but have been made to seem superstitious, illogical, “primitive” or ignorant by colonial culture. We all know these kinds of beliefs, whether it’s the ‘witch doctor’ or faeries, are the kinds that our grandmothers pass along to us and which colonial culture teaches us to be ashamed of.
Afrofuturism and other decolonial projects rightly see these ways of knowing the world as sophisticated narratives that create and maintain human and ecological wellbeing. They are being lost in favour of a system of meaning that came about concurrently with racialised enslavement, biological racism, Indigenous genocides and land dispossessions as well as cashcrop, plantation agriculture, the industrial revolution and mass deforestation.
The colonial system of meaning, what I call the Enlightenment Myth, is completely bound-up with these destructive ideas. People have tried valiantly to extend human rights equally, for example, but the Enlightenment Myth remains stubbornly rooted in the foundational exclusions it facilitated. That’s part of the failure of Afro-pessimism in my view. While Afro-pessimist critique excoriates this system and reveals why racism keeps happening despite these attempts, most Afro-pessimist critics think that white people want to maintain this system and therefore don’t theorise what alternatives could be. As a white person who is demoralised, depressed and traumatised by living in a racist society, I will do absolutely anything to have a different future.
For me, the alternative social models and ways of knowing we find in noncolonial cultures are empowering because I look at them and think: I would love to live like that! I want to be connected to other people and animals in bonds of kinship. I
“While Afropessimism o!ers incisive critiques of historic and contemporary racism, the future it imagines is either a repetition of the past or a violent revolution. Afrofuturism, in contrast, imagines a future that breaks from colonially inherited racism by emphasising traditional and indigenous African cultures.”
—Marquis, Moira. “The Alien Within: Divergent Futures in Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon and Neill Blomkamp's District 9.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 47, no. 3, 2020
want to foster ecological wellbeing. I’m so much happier when I see butterflies and bugs and critters and flowers. Interestingly, Okorafor’s Twitter account is full of pictures of insects, sea life and her cat. I think she shares my desire for connection with our world.
Some people say this is romanticising and unrealistic because we already have so much ruination and infrastructure. But, that’s why Afrofuturism is so great. These narratives combine technology and contemporary settings with these alternative ways of knowing. This makes it more difficult for people to dismiss alternative orders of knowledge as irretrievably past or a romantic or nostalgic longing. By showing other ways of knowing alongside landfills and cell phones we show how science and technology are not value-laden—they are indifferent to how they are used, and they can be used for ongoing destruction or the creation of new/old ways of knowing that cultivate degrowth, biodiversity and community. These narratives can enable looking at where we live and imagine how they could be shifted in pretty easy ways that would make a major difference. Of course, there are huge changes that need to be made, too. If we can’t imagine the small ones, though, we’ve got no hope for the larger ones.
S: What projects are you currently working on?
M: I’m working on so much writing… I’m editing a book with my husband on books for imprisoned people programs in the US. We’ve been involved with several prison books programs for many years, and it’s a fun project because I get to connect to old friends. I have several articles under review and a couple more in the draft stage.
The big project that I need to make time for is my book, Mythic Ecologies. I keep coming up with articles and it’s so much easier to focus on short-term projects, but I really want to make time for that in the coming months. The book argues for a shift in colloquial usage, where myth is understood as either ideology or foundational, sacred stories, as well as, in literary studies, as synonymous with archetypes. I argue that these characterisations are the result of the Enlightenment which sought to elevate itself above all competing orders of knowledge by classifying them as distortions and projecting itself as a disinterested and objective observation of Nature. The ramifications of this legacy mean that any alternative order of knowledge presented as a solution to contemporary issues is labelled as anachronistic, romanticising, pretend, or already known through the universal knowledge of colonially inherited Enlightenment culture. I hope this work will further validate the creative works by artists of all kinds who
present alternate orders of knowledge as viable ways of living now. It is very easy to lose hope, unfortunately. I see it all the time in the US, especially with young people. I am grateful for the artists who present pictures of what we can be. I want Mythic Ecologies to show that these works need to be taken seriously and not read as pretend.
S: I'm also really grateful for those works. In the face of something as dire as climate change or a global pandemic, literature and art can kind of seem like a luxury. But giving us hope for the future--that seems like a pretty essential thing! What are some of your favourite recent or current reads (or films that you've watched) that achieve this?
M: Wolfwalkers by the Cartoon Salon, an Irish animation studio is amazing. I love their films and Wolfwalkers is a great film for depicting how to build coalitions and decolonise. It’s also so essential because reintroducing predators to Ireland and throughout the world is a major ecological goal.
Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe is an amazing book as is Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall
Kimmerer. Both offer compelling and practical ways we can decolonise in Australia and North America, respectively, right now.
I also loved the series Lovecraft Country. It’s a fantastic Afrofuturist narrative of how African American people can reclaim their ancestral knowledge, despite having it stolen through enslavement.
For novel lovers, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is a tour de force. She’s brilliant and the novel is such a joy to read.
- Future -
S: You mentioned earlier that you felt like you were stumbling around a lot back when you were studying, but actually found a sort of golden thread in your thinking. With the benefit of hindsight, do you have any advice for students who are at a point where they have to make a big decision in their careers?
M: I think I just tend to gravitate towards things that feel right for me, and I don’t really overthink it. And honestly, I don’t think there’s ever really going to be a negative consequence to learning about something [laughs] And I think a lot of people just don’t know what’s going on (in academics).
S: For sure, I was like, what!? You can get paid to go to grad school in the US?
M: Yeah! The UK offers it as well. I see a lot of tweets about
funded PhD programs in Northern Europe, like Scandinavia. In Ireland, there are several throughout the country too. They’ll usually advertise them. They’re quite competitive, but it’s a great opportunity I think. I would not recommend going to grad school if you’re going to have to pay for it. There are funded Masters programs too, although I do think they’re fewer and farther between.
So, you know, take time. Life is long!
S: What projects do you hope to work on in the future? What are your hopes & dreams for the future?
A lot of PhD programs now are “terminal” PhD programs, so that means you can go in with an undergraduate degree. They do not give you a Master’s in and of itself. When you’re done you have the doctorate. There’s a lot of people who have a Master’s already when they go into PhD programs already, and I do think it helps because it gives you more time. They’re really fast! Like, you have to go in and know essentially what you’re doing right away and that’s challenging because I think there’s so much to think about and so much to figure out. I see a lot of people who go right from undergrad into PhD work get stuck conceptually.
I plan to keep working to shift the colonially inherited cultures we inhabit to better ones. My greatest hope is that enough people begin talking in these ways to others so that we can build a critical mass of understanding around decolonisation and recoup our cultural inheritances. It’s important that decolonisation becomes mainstream. We need people to be comfortable with decolonisation and believe that it’s realisable now.
Once there’s a critical mass of people in a place, then comes the fun part of decolonizing places. There are many things we can do: curate and teach real history, revitalise streams and rivers through restoration ecology, transitioning foodways to traditional ones, learn native languages and stories. All these acts will work to build a future other than the one colonialism wants.
S: And you also have an article under review in Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism on The Overstory by Richard Powers. I’m really curious to hear your thoughts on that novel!
M: So, people say the novel cultivates an appreciation for trees. But I think that’s a very minor kind of intervention and what people walk away from the novel feeling is a kind of sense of fatalism that, you know, people aren’t compatible with healthy environments and that human life is destined to die out if the
planet is going to survive—which is awful! [laughs] It’s also very colonial, and so in this article, I argue that Powers’ inability to represent a future that isn’t an awful post-apocalyptic future is because he is only relying on this colonial narrative, which the realist novel is integral in establishing and maintaining. He doesn’t think anything else is realistic. He doesn’t think it’s believable. And I don’t think he knows very much about native ways of knowing and being. In the US there are many, many native people that are still practising really amazing ways of knowing and being in the world that can inspire cultural change. So in the article, I’m saying that centring native knowledges can offer a way out of the anthropocentrism that often leads to fatalism in environmental narratives. We need to abandon this kind of narrative and stop celebrating what Powers is doing because it’s just really too negative.
S: It’s pretty depressing. And there’s kind of a glaring omission in the book--it has this huge cast of characters from all across the U.S., but there isn’t one Native American character.
M: Yeah, there’s no Native American characters except at the very, very end these native characters show up—they don’t have names, they hardly say anything, and they kind of silently help this white guy make an art installation in the woods. It’s like: what’s going on? [laughs] They’re depicted as “wise” but in this very abstract, kind of inaccessible way, right?
S: So it’s not a realistic option, according to Powers.
M: Yeah, but in the Native stories I detail in the article, trees are the central characters, not people!
S: It is easy to fall into that kind of fatalism or at the very least get overwhelmed by 'climate anxiety' and uncertainty about the future. What are some things that give you hope when it comes to the future of the planet? What would you say to young people who are feeling hopeless?
M: The amazing thing about our current predicament is that (some) people have created it. Climate change and species loss is not an act of God or a Law of Nature. It is not inevitable—in fact, most people in the history of the world have cultivated ecological wellbeing in their environments. Climate change and the sixth extinction is the unintentional result of one, humanly created way of knowing. That gives me hope. The situation is dire but, because people created this problem, it can be solved by people. In fact, we have many solutions in the form of millennia of inherited knowledge from our ancestors. Colonial culture has told us that knowledge is fantastical—not connected to reality—but, climate change and the sixth extinction reveal that it’s actually colonial culture that is disconnected from reality. It’s literally destroying the real in the pursuit of a fantasy of limitlessness. Traditional knowledge can help us see how we can do everything differently, by returning to ways of knowing that resonate as meaningful and enable people to live without destroying life. This is challenging for people with long, settler-colonial roots. However, those folks are also particularly great candidates for naturalising to place, as Robin Wall Kimmerer says.
If you happen to write that book about trees, you can let Moira know on Twitter @moira_marquis. You can find out more about her work on her website: moira.web.unc.edu
