Listening to the Ancestral Wisdom of Diatomite Cliffs

Abstract

This article focuses on green politics in Denmark, highlighting how mainstream political rhetorics with cruel optimism promote the country as a green world leader, while turning a blind eye to the eco-cides that have formed its landscapes. The primary aim is to critically consider how the terraforming of farmland through ecocidal approaches has been naturalized and normalized as part of national identity-building. A second aim is, affirmatively, to explore whether affected and affecting creative writing and speculative story-telling can be used to counter-act the cruelly optimistic indifference and insensitivity towards the more-than-human world, cultivated through normalization and naturalization. The article uses a vignette methodology. Two vignettes focus on human-human power relations, reflecting on the formation of Danish national identity during modernity. The third vignette shifts the perspective through a writing experiment, telling a speculative-spectrally fictionalized version of Danish history from a more-than-human perspective. A cliff, made by the micro-algae, diatoms, 55 million years ago, performs as the protagonist of a folktale-inspired story about the coming into being of Denmark through series of ecocides. The conclusion reflects on the defamiliarizing effects of the posthuman poetics used in the third vignette’s writing experiment, and compares notes with posthumanist and decolonial scholarship.

Keywords

• Danish History
• cruel optimism
• green politics
• ecocidal approaches
• speculative story-telling
• defamiliarizing