Sarah Dimick, Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures (Ohio: Columbia UP, 2024) 328 pp. £30 Pb. ISBN: 9780231209250
Sarah Dimick has coined the term ‘climate arrhythmias’ to describe that feeling the seasons are not working as they should be or as they usually have done in the past (p. 2). These arrhythmias can be experienced even by those relatively untouched by the effects of climate change as they witness disruption in the timing and ways that their gardens come into bloom annually. Dimick’s writing is as rhymical as the seasonal patterns for which she writes this elegy. As an example, ‘Rhythm may be an aesthetic force, a compelling and beautiful pulse, but it is also a condition of continuance — a steady heartbeat and the regular surge of sap sustain myriad lives’ (p. 2). As she notes, we live our lives with routine and rhythm and when something is off or out of kilter, this makes us feel uncomfortable and uneasy. But more than this, as Dimick notes, for those already suffering climate injustice, ‘Arrhythmias threaten survival’ (p. 3). It is an arresting start to the book Unseasonable, convincing in its pathos and elegant prose.
Literature is central to Dimick’s case and her book begins with Zadie Smith, who notes that the idea of a ‘white Christmas’ in England is now pretty much solely mythical while Derek Walcott points out that the daffodils of the literary imagination live more on the page than in real life (pp. 3-4). I learned from Unseasonable that the scientific field that tracks the patterns of the seasons is called phenology. Signs of the seasons include ‘bird nestings, bud openings, animal migrations, insect hatchings, and hibernations’ among many other kinds of events and activities (p. 6). As Dimick puts it, it is ‘the study of environmental pulses and temporal patternings’ (p. 6). She is convinced though that ‘The arts and humanities have so much to offer during temporal uncertainty’ to phenology even while she warns that writing and art are not simply to be thought of as ‘warehouses of data’ (p. 8). This book shows how ‘literary phenology’ can help, particularly with issues of climate injustice in mind, but it is also a model for how to demonstrate to scientists that literature needs to be carefully attended to for all of its richness and depth.
Dimick considers environmental observation and literary craft to be ‘entwined practices’ (p. 10) and of course rhythm is an important device in literary form. Dimick has a broad concept of the formal elements of rhythm and thus they can be witnessed in a range of literary texts. The book and its methods are innovative and unusual as befit the strangeness of our times. Dimick is also very impressively well read with a huge range of critical and creative texts to offer support for points made. Her book is a valiant attempt to revivify topics that are often seen as staid and desiccated, such as prosody and the seasons.
Unseasonable has a broad sense of ‘global literatures’, as the subtitle calls the book’s focus, and the chapters discuss a real range of artistic productions. Chapters cover cases of scientific records, photographs, poetry, and other kinds of media. The first chapter looks at phenological records including records and charts kept by Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and Sara Elizabeth Jones. Many of the artists discussed in Unseasonable were unknown to me and Dimick’s highlighting of creators like Jones, described as a ‘frequently overlooked ecologist’ (p. 25) are laudable; Dimick is attempting to ‘write Sara Elizabeth Jones back into phenology’s literary history’ (p. 33). Her research involved personal contact with Jones’s daughter and the rediscovery of letters and other writings that had lain neglected for seven decades. Jones is not a one-off though as other chapters introduced me to authors and artists that I had not heard of previously but whom I was extremely glad to find out about.
Chapter two analyses the photographic practice of both artists and scientists as witnessed in repeat photography (taking photographs of the same scene as time passes), time-lapse film (where frames are captured more slowly but when played at normal speed, time seems to move more quickly), and long-exposure shots (taken with a camera using a slower shutter speed). The people whose work is considered in this chapter include Christina Seely, Isla Myers-Smith, Alison Beamish, and Mary Caswell Stoddard. Of particular interest were the photographs of the arctic fox taken between 2010 and 2011 by Seely, part of Dimick’s efforts to bring contemporary female photographers into view. Historical photographs taken by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the U. S. Navy form part of the chapter’s focus on the ways that colonialism has been linked to militarism.
The third chapter explores prose from India, opening with phenological observations, moves to discuss Tamil poetry, and then to Amitav Ghosh’s pronouncements on how realist literature fails our climatically-altered world. The chapter then focuses on the way that Jagadisa Thyagarajan’s (known by his nom de plume Ashokamitran) novella Water teaches readers to identify climate arrhythmias within their ordinary lives. The novella portrays the 1969 drought in Madras (renamed Chennai in 1998) and the struggles of the population to obtain the water they needed. Dimick is not only concerned with the content of the prose but also with the ‘patterning of scenes and narrative structure’ (p. 103).
In chapter four, Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book is read in the light of the bush fire in Australia in 2019-20. This chapter offers an account and definition of climate fiction: ‘as geophysical and historical precedents go up in flames, literature becomes the baseline by which expectations are set’ (p. 26). Later Dimick writes that ‘Literature is the guidepost that remains’ (p. 133).
The range of genres discussed is impressive. Chapter five continues to examine ever new types of artistic production, including the spoken word poets from the Pacific Islands, Southeast Asia, and their diasporas who performed at the United Nations Climate Summit in 2015. As this and the brief descriptions of previous chapters make clear, the book’s subjects are often very recent, as perhaps is necessary for a book on the subject of the effects of climate change. This chapter reads the ‘stresses’ of the poetic performances — ‘their deliberate crescendos, intensities, and volume — in relation to environmental stress’ (p. 27). Dimick thus argues that this is one way we can ‘track ‘how intensified storm seasons impact prosody’ (p. 27). She also uses these examples to argue that ‘At this occasion, poetry was performed as both art and advocacy’ (p. 167).
The final chapter examines a variety of kinds of texts that consider the seasonal practice of maple sugaring: collecting the sap from maple trees, boiling it down to make maple syrup and other products such as sugar and candy. The texts explored here include Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s ‘Plight’, Amanda Strong’s film Biidaaban, Callum Angus’s A Natural History of Transition, and news reports of Detroit police action against a sugarbush in 2022, bringing the book bang up to date.
Unseasonable is a lovely read, very accessible, and enjoyable in spite of the sadness of tone that pervades it. It is difficult not to read it as an elegy for a world lost but possible to see also the importance of global literature in all of its forms for us now.
Sharon Ruston, Lancaster University
