No 146 - Different shades of sorrow: i.m. Byron Santangelo

 My friend and fellow-ecocritic Byron Santangelo has died in the US, after a protracted struggle with a ferocious form of cancer. Byron was professor of literature at the University of Kansas, and we crossed paths at a couple of the conferences held in the US by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE). In return (I forget exactly in what order) he twice came out to South Africa, in particular to attend one of our Literature & Ecology colloquiums at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, and to engage with my own university students. He had a grand scheme to bring more American students out for an immersive ecocritical experience, to be based at Bulungula on the Wild Coast. An ambition destined not to be fulfilled.

            On his visits, apart from much discussion about the state and promotion of ecologically-sensitive literature and literary criticism on the African continent, we trundled around looking at elephants and giraffe, and puzzled over the phenomenon of Love. He was known then as Byron Caminero-Santangelo, but was in the throes of uncomfortable divorce, which he related sadly but without bitterness, along with adoring comments about his children. It was a tender time, privileged ruminations spilling as I drove him all the way to Cape Town, I guess to catch his plane home. We just had to go via Jeffreys Bay, as in his time he’d been an avid surfer and wanted to see this iconic venue – a bit disappointing as the day was dead calm and the sea as flat as a surgical table.

            At the time we first met, Byron was best known for a book on Joseph Conrad, the study of whom had spawned further thoughts about the legacy of colonial incursions, imperial rule and lately neocolonial globalisation on Africa’s environmental policies. His characteristic, endearingly chesty laugh disguised a forensic intelligence which eviscerated many unthinking (especially Western, and including some of my own) assumptions about Africa and African writers’ engagement with ecological realities. Unlike prevailing dichotomous and hierarchical approaches that severely divided humanity from ‘nature’, Byron pursued notions of justice that might incorporate both human-social and natural, biodiverse well-being. He sought also to (re)validate Africans’ autonomous attitudes towards ecology – a little tricky, given his own ‘outsider’ position, but sometimes it takes just such a person to rupture inherited and ossified attitudes.

            This he effectively did in two subsequent books, both of which remain essential reading in the realm of African ecocriticism. The first is a collection of essays that Byron co-edited with Garth Myers, entitled Environment at the Margins: Literary and environmental studies of Africa (Ohio University Press, 2011). Covering writers from Ngugi to Gordimer, Bessie Head to Mia Couto, the essayists were mostly non-African, though included ‘ex-pat’ Southern African fellow-pioneers in the field Rob Nixon, Anthony Vital and Amanda Hammar.  In a review I published at the time, I summed up: 

The [editors] studiously interrogate essentialisings of “Africa” as place and concept, promote “dialogue” as vital to the book’s purpose, and acknowledge its inevitable limitations. These features embody the crucial and specific contribution of literary studies to this interdisciplinary venture: unlike the social and developmental sciences, and indeed history, which tend to seek realisable solutions and definitive accounts, poems and novels open up questions and unpeel layers in ways deliberately unsettling to theory.  In the words of Caminero-Santangelo’s chapter – he is quoting Gordimer – there is “never a final solution”. This solid book nevertheless shows just how valuable this kind of investigation – essentially of the symbiosis of imageries, language and material conditions – is to our understanding of African realities. It will unquestionably be an essential touchstone in this embryonic, but vital field.

So it proved, being a useful stimulus to various then-budding, now well-established African ecocritics such as Philip Aghoghovwia, Syned Mthatiwa and Iheka Cajetan.

 Byron followed up with a more densely thought-through, cross-disciplinary monograph, Different Shades of Green: African literature, environmental justice, and political ecology (University of Virginia Press, 2014). Byron ranges across disciplines, several African countries and a slew of literary works, with four major goals: 

"First, to bring into question the assumption that Africa has produced little environmental writing; second, to explore how African literature can challenge dominant Western assumptions regarding African environments and environmentalism and how it can offer powerful counternarratives; third, to interrogate widely accepted definitions of of environmental writing and the underlying constructions pf nature and conservation embedded in them; and fourth, to explore tensions in global environmental justice, political ecology, and African environmentalist writing by putting literary texts in contrapuntal dialogue." 

Byron and I also engaged over the years in rather sporadic ‘contrapuntal dialogue’. Though attenuated by trans-Atlantic distances and time, as these relationships can get, I will miss it. We ecocritics will all miss this amiable, ethical and sturdy scholar.

****