A Trip Through a Wounded Landscape: On John Freeman’s "Tales of Two Planets"

ed. John Freeman | Tales of Two Planets | Penguin | 320 Pages | August 2020

Climate scholars like Naomi Oreskes bemoan that adorable mascots like polar bears distract focus away from gradual, insidious changes that lurk in the busy background of cacophonous industrialization. The immediate effects of a changing climate don’t necessarily grab headlines or make provocative photographs, but they are affecting lives already —  millions of them all around the world. The anthology Tales of Two Planets by John Freeman is an attempt to bring the focus back to real lives and communities.

With thirty-six pieces of short stories, poems, and personal essays, the anthology takes the reader from the Riachuelo river in Argentina to a valley in Palestine, and from Hawaii to Indonesia. Each story is written around a kernel of a personal or local tragedy — a lake in Guatemalan highlands where, not long ago, children used to learn swimming now bears a revolting stench of rotting fishes on its shores; the streets of Beirut are awash in fetid sewage following a storm; millions of flood victims in Pakistan wonder if they are being punished by God. Most stories in the collection are told with a voice of a first-person witness, making palpable the anxiety and agony of the narrator.

One common thread passing through the stories is a nostalgic yearning of the past. Yasmine El Rashidi from Egypt is on a mission to recreate a mango garden with all the trees and flowers her grandmother had in the late 1930s. She discovers, to her dismay, that the soil has now become too arid for indigenous plants and can only support palm trees. The landscape, objects and experiences from one’s childhood, form the sinews connecting a person to their past. The pollution and erosion of these symbols is akin to a whittling down of a person’s sense of self. Gaël Faye senses a bad omen in the sudden disappearance of fireflies from Burundi; Billy Kahora is saddened by how riverbanks in Nairobi have been taken over by concrete and his childhood playground by a slum.

For those already living in harsh and precarious conditions, the onset of climate problems is not only exacerbating the difficulties of their already tough lives, but also pushing them to the precipice of resignation. The indigenous Rarámuri people in Mexico have been deceived many times by mining and lumber companies that left them with scorched hills and forests, and, in each instance, the community has managed to endure by simply moving to a different place. Now they face a challenge they can’t retreat from: dwindling rain. The harvest of maize has suffered and there isn’t enough food to feed everyone. It is also not uncommon for people to see the recent environmental problems as just more manifestations of garden variety corruption and incompetence of governments. In Anuradha Roy’s story about water woes in India, a man accuses the government of taking a convenient refuge behind climate change. Sometimes, however, nature tries to break free from molds constructed to tame it. And that, on rare occasions, becomes a cause to celebrate. Arminatta Forna recalls fondly how a captive chimpanzee in Sierra Leone named Bruno escaped from a sanctuary, evading bounty hunters and soldiers looking for him. The whole country rejoiced for his newfound freedom in the wild.

It is only natural that the contamination and bleakness of the present also spills into our outlook of the future. In one story, Bangkok of the near future is engulfed in a blanket of poisonous smog, forcing apartment buildings to go higher and higher so wealthy residents can enjoy breathtaking sunsets overlooking the blur underneath. In another story, Sayaka Murata from Japan imagines a dystopian world where people are ranked by their odds of surviving till the age of sixty-five. Those who fail to maintain a decent rating withdraw from society and live as furry feral beasts.

An elegy on climate change is incomplete without an account of migration.  A writer from Eritrea, Sulaiman Addonia, can be seen trying to come in terms with the responsibility of migrants, who themselves are fighting for mere survival, to speak on behalf of the planet: “How long do refugees need to recover before they engage in a fight to save our planet?” he asks a Bedouin from Libya living in Brussels, who doesn’t have a satisfying answer either. 

While the developing world helplessly laments a changing climate, those in the privileged parts of the world are forced to reckon with their personal comfort and the culpability of Western privilege in ransacking cherished treasures from desperate communities abroad. Joy Williams launches into a seething tirade against wildlife poachers and hunters, which begins with an indictment: “Big game hunters are psychopaths.” Lauren Groff’s neurotic narrator, repulsed by the number of packages that get delivered to a young neighbor’s door, confronts the neighbor for her wasteful shopping habits. Elsewhere, Sjón, an Icelandic poet, is faced with a daunting task of using his writing to contribute to the saving of the world.

The title of the book, Tales of Two Planets, ought to not be taken literally. Some of the ‘tales’ included aren’t tales at all — interspersed between stories and personal anecdotes are poems, including one from Margaret Atwood. More importantly, there isn’t a clear split that divides the planet into two narratives. Instead, we have a myriad of narratives, each about a unique adversity. However, the point of the book seems to be that despite seemingly different appearances, environmental problems around the world can be traced to a common root—that of thoughtless pollution and relentless pillaging of precious resources.

John Freeman is no stranger to making anthologies out of fragmented stories. In 2015, he published an anthology Tales of Two Cities documenting the variegation in life in New York City. The montage of New York City was followed by Tales of Two Americas in which Freeman presents stories grappling with inequality in America. The new collection Tales of Two Planets is, in some ways, a natural extension to his oeuvre.  It is a formidable task indeed to put together a bricolage that is truly global. It is even harder to center it around climate change without being entangled in politics. Freeman is transparent in his introduction, “This is not a book about policy or about statistics.” It takes on a simpler assignment — to tell stories of how the climate crisis is being experienced across the globe. And it does that job well. Even with just 320 pages, the book manages to take the reader on an evocative stroll through a wounded and scarred landscape that wraps around the world.