Part memoir, part manifesto, part poetry and entirely beautiful, Julian Aguon explores the climate crisis with a focus on Guam, his home country
Review by Elizabeth Wainright
In 2021, Julian Aguon’s essay ‘To Hell with Drowning’ was published in the Atlantic. Rooted in Guam, his home, the essay is a cry against despair in the face of the climate crisis and a call to hope and change instead. It was later shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize.
In No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies, Aguon continues to explore the essay’s theme. The slim book is uncategorisable – part memoir, part manifesto, part poetry and entirely beautiful.
Aguon is an Indigenous human rights lawyer working at the intersection of Indigenous rights and environmental justice. In the book’s title essay, he outlines the work he has been doing to oppose the US Department of Defence’s increased militarisation of Guam. Aguon witnesses the destruction of coast, reef and forest to make way for a military complex, which goes ahead despite objections from island residents. ‘If only superpowers were concerned with the stuff of lowercase earth – like forests and freshwater. If only they were moved by beauty.’ But ‘no military on Earth is sensitive enough to perceive something as soft as the whisper of another worldview’.
Aguon recognises but doesn’t dwell on destruction: ‘Indignation is not nearly enough to build a bridge.’ He says that we need to get ‘a hell of a lot more serious about articulating alternatives if we hope to withstand the forces of predatory global capitalism and ultimately replace its ethos of extraction with one of our own. In the case of my own people, an ethos of reciprocity.’
The rest of this luminous book – poems, personal anecdotes, ancestral stories, political commentary – explores these alternatives. Often, they are quiet alternatives: love, imagination, language (Aguon quotes Arundhati Roy when he says that we are living in a time when our words have been butchered and bled of meaning), but Aguon wields these tools persuasively.
After all, ‘…all of us, without exception, are qualified to participate in the rescue of the world. But this is a quiet truth, and quiet truths are hard to hear when the cynics are outside howling.’ This is a book of passion and possibility, and unlike anything else I’ve read on our shared world and future.
