An Apocalyptic Riff in the Decolonizing Myth of Jonah: What Indigenous Savvy Can Teach About Liberation as the Planet Heats and Viruses Leap

By: James W. Perkinson

June 30th, 2020

We live in an apocalyptic hour.  COVID-19 would seem to be initiating an “end of the world” experience that will likely prove serial and recurrent.  It is a plague predictive of more to come—viral, bacterial, epochal.  And it is a cataclysm not alone affecting humans, not alone microbial and epidemic, but significant of upheaval across an entire planet, witnessing catastrophic change in virtually every major domain—atmospheric, hydrospheric, biospheric, and even lithospheric.  A cascading of endings with perhaps little respite in-between!  But for Christians, apocalypse is also quintessentially “unveiling.” A time of seeing what had been covered over.  Revelatory—when emerging as “talk-back” on the part of those under assault!  What is often missed in Christian uptake of this particular political premonition, however, is the question of the agent of the “dis-covering.”  As with so many other Christian conceits about things theological and ultimate, the presupposition is that God is both the Hand that is pulling the drape-string on the “veil” and the “Wizard behind the Curtain” who is being revealed.  But, Toto, “the Kansas we are not in” is also most assuredly not some u-topic or mysterious domain removed from earth.  Nor is it the hall of mirrors of a crafty conman, using mechanics as magic.  We indeed live in an apocalyptic hour.  But the agents of comeuppance are neither pre-immanently human (despite “Anthropocene” self-importance some scholars accord modern humans as a “Power” now supposedly writing itself into the geologic record) nor transcendentally Divine.  Biblical unveiling is both by and of the Wild—Nature in Her expansive refusal to be entirely colonized by either human technique or discourse, “revealing” the Other World as always simultaneously this world.  (The “wild” as a category has indeed emerged as a problematic perception of settler colonial imagination of pristine nature apart from human involvement—often in the set-asides of national parks—in utter disregard for long-standing indigenous presence and successful co-dwelling.  But it also points to the reality of the planet existing without human presence for billions of years before we arrived very late on the scene and will be used here in this latter sense of an interdependent agency of the natural world capable of acting quite apart from human design or intentionality.)  

Yes, indeed, planetary heating and climate upheaval are gathering force as a titanic dimension of natural rebuttal of modern human hubris in trying to re-make the Earth in our own image.  Perhaps the paramount sign of that hubris is the newly invented phenomenon that we call “garbage.”  What we do with a huge fraction of our own species—enslaved and/or disappeared under various terms of supposed “reduction” (as “savage,” “criminal,” “black,” “illegal,” “terrorist,” “queer,” “poor,” “refugee,” “whore,” etc.)—we likewise do with a thousand-fold greater disregard for the entire planet as merely “expendable thing” or “disposable resource.” Like Black or Native folk, the Earth herself is effectively abused, used up, “whited out,” and thrown away.  A Cherokee-Irish friend of my wife puts it thus: this Great Blue-Hued Beauty whose gifts we enjoy continuously as Bounty has long been intoning, underneath the louder (and necessary) media cries of our moment: “Me Too.”1 Or as another seer has recently underscored: in the beginning there was Water; “in the end there will be Plastic.”2

We act as if the Earth Herself can be sent back to the factory or discarded in a land fill! Or trundled with “packaging” and restraint to offer up as our “ram in the thicket” (like Abraham of Holy Writ) going bail for all the Isaacs “we” still wish to acknowledge as “sons” and kin (even as we continue to deport myriad Hagars and offspring back to the Global South as “out of place”).  But who is the “we” in this admittedly wanton diatribe?  A now globalized colonial system that invests ever-greater numbers of our species in its ravishments and elaboration. At the heart of this Juggernaut of Consumption rolling over the planet is a lifestyle halo-ed in technology. The competition mechanism of global capital gives us the market as mobile altar—putting up for sacrificial “production” or transubstantiation whatever “wild thing” might briefly succor and entertain elite fancy and fatuity of concern or grant the masses greater convenience and an imagined semblance of elite style and hauteur. And then “we” dispose of the same as refuse.  And as climate extremity now inflates and desperation grows, the resolve of this cabal of political class and corporate interest to colonize, control, dispossess, privatize, militarize, police, drone, incarcerate, and evacuate can only grow more intense—“consuming and discarding,” in the process, both peoples and the rest of the planet.  But there is an (un)holy secret about such discards: they too have an afterlife, even if seemingly out of sight and supposedly dead.  They resurrect in an elsewhere.  But they do not fly off to heaven; they remain earth-bound, recycling and regenerating.  They come back around where they have gone around—like plastic in oceans or particulates in air . . . or indigenous folk yet honoring kin. And the trick of apocalypse as recitation and act, with regard to this ever-proliferating ensemble of wild beauty diced into decimated discard, is to bring all of these “disappeared” back on stage in terms of both voice and agency.  

Biblical apocalyptic hints a troubling polemic for the eventuality today. In ancient text and contemporary reality, it is clearly natural forces and beings that are appearing as the signs of wild communication and agents of “divine” liberation. Their voice—in addition to their own messaging as flood, drought, fire, and virus—is the indigenous.  But the “liberation” they champion is emerging as omen and repudiation. And the bonds that are being loosed are “us.”  Far from some kind of hoped for vindication, Nature today would seem to be organizing to liberate Herself from modern humanity if we persist in our insistence that we, alone, matter.  Indeed, from a biblical point of view, climate upheaval could be comprehended as the slowly coalescing Moses-dictum delivered 3,000 years ago to the gathered tribes of Deuteronomy occupying opposing mountains: (paraphrased) “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live long” (Dt 30:19).  The witness of last resort in the case of Wild Nature against out-of-control humanity in biblical compass, is the victim/plaintiff Herself—Earth-Heaven as the ultimate Spirit-Incarnating-Flesh at stake in the aggression.  The soil, water, air, cloud, plant, and animal “Being” that is God’s body—assuming local shape and potency in bioregional interdependence, given axial orientation in water flows, linked in global weather and planet-wide geologic and hydrologic transference of matter—is now the Ultimate Prophet, when more human voices (think Tecumseh of late or Winona LaDuke today) have been written off as tendentious or irrelevant.  And this is a Face we dare not hide from, in a cleft of suburban, gated-community “rock” (whether First World- or Global-South-located in its secessionist bent) but must look squarely in the eye and “see” and respond to, with recognition.

Such a “facing” is trumpeted by the biblical text in varied genres—but perhaps most instructively for our contemporary dilemma in the mode of myth.  For instance: the parable of Jonah.  Against the background of James C. Scott’s recent work, Against the Grain--tracing the depth of our modern syndrome of flight from natural accountability, back to the Bronze Age Mesopotamian turn towards state-organization and coercion—this ancient Fish-Encounter supplies a wild trickster caution for speaking truth to power today.  Though not itself narrated in the genre of apocalyptic, the vocational task and terror of this short oracle’s major character was precisely one of being called to announce apocalypse to imperial Nineveh.  The recounted resistance Jonah exhibits to that prophetic calling speaks loud today.  The story that goes by his name riffs on his recalcitrance repeatedly—at every turn “unveiling” an “initiatory schooling” in Wild teaching and provision: a Spirit-Wind blowing off the Adriatic Coast that resists the prophet’s nautical flight, a Sea that swallows, a Fish that saves, imperially-domesticated Cattle who nonetheless “fast” and “mourn” once the prophet finally does speak, a Desert that hosts (after his prophetic task is completed), a Gourd-Plant that shades, a Worm-Serpent and East-Wind that attack, a Night that nourishes, and finally a God who is moved by both “enemies” and cattle, as the last word of divine concern (3:11) for the One who orchestrates the event.3 Each of these non-human actors will disclose unanticipated decolonizing potency in the traces of ancient indigenous (pre-state) flood-plain memory haunting their appearance in the Jonah-story, pointing toward indigenous savvy of our own time, as the myth-wisdom and political-will requisite in our day to engage the monstrosity of hubris and destruction the rest of our species has unleashed on the planet.  
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That indigenous witness is ubiquitous, if we bother to look, even in our late hour.  Whether Standing Rock insistence on water-protection rather than political protest in 2016, or Ojibwa “Water Walking” ritual circumnavigation of the Great Lakes Basin of late; Adivasi forest-commitment in central Indian mountains (as recounted in Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades), or Manobo tribal intelligence in living sustainably with the crocodile-spirited wetlands of Agusan Marsh in the Philippines (as my Filipina wife has experienced on a recent visit); small-farmer tree-planting across the Sahel in Africa seeking to halt growing desertification by locally initiated re-forestation, or Black-led efforts to recover plant-medicines native to the Strait called Détroit just outside my front door—what is being unveiled as “liberative” in this hour, I would argue, is an eco-symbiotics privileging indigenous recognition of the personhood and wisdom of the Wild as both “Mother” and “Teacher” of whatever future remains to our particular species.   Though such a small-scale focus, looking to non-human agents and ancestral-remnants of survival skill, might seem irrelevant to the orange-bellowing recrudescence of white supremacy in this country and far-right-turning neo-fascism abroad, bees and mosquitoes and bacteria and viruses belie the ready dismissal of “the little.”  Apocalypse as a counsel is not about despair, but vigilant attendance on what seems at first blush ridiculously small and inadequate (like a peasant resistance movement in the outback of Galilee long ago or a gathering of grandmothers and kin refusing to vacate their land in North Dakota more recently).  Apocalypse convenes a kaleidoscopic stage for the unveiling of the Caterwauling Forces that some cultural codes excoriate as colonial and Demonic.  But the stage itself is a Theater of the Wild, in the winsome wiles of older modes of story-ing the struggle.  And not atypically, the tease of the telling may well feature agents and events as unlikely as a Saving Fish or a Grieving Cow (or Shapeshifting Rabbit or Cavorting Raven closer to our Turtle Island context).  In our most immediate moment, it is a Black neck that protested a white knee and a half-living virus leaping from an upside-down hanging bat that have shaken a globalist economy and a supremacist state.  If we have eyes to see—these are not crypto-notes in the minutiae of history, but the very signs of the Divine, in the only coin in which they are ever traded: natural bodies deemed by the Powers too insignificant to celebrate or quote.  Bodies seemingly easily crushed and disappeared.  But whose insurgent afterlife haunts our history and is capable of returning with profound consequence.  The testament to such right now is living and real and summoning.  It is asking of us a different world.
 
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Notes:

1.  Four Arrows. 2018. “Four Arrows: An Indigenous Take on the #MeToo Movement,” OpEdNews, Podcast 2/21/2018 at 17:42:56, viewed 10/25/18. https://www.opednews.com/Podcast/Four-Arrows-An-Indigenous-by-Rob-Kall-metoo_Bottom-up_Bottom-up-Top-Down_Civilization-180221-674.html
2. John Davis. 2020. “Global Plastic,” OpEdNews, 2/7/20, viewed 6/29/20,  https://www.opednews.com/articles/Global-Plastic-by-John-Davis-Biomass_Blowback_Chemical_Consumer-200207-768.html.
3.  For a more extended exploration of these ideas, see my 2019 book, Political Spirituality for a Century of Water Wars: The Angel of the Jordan Meets the Trickster of Detroit. New York: Palgrave Macmillan Press.
   

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James Perkinson

James W. Perkinson has lived for 35 years as a settler on Three Fires land in inner city Detroit, currently teaching as Professor of Social Ethics at the Ecumenical Theological Seminary and lecturing in Intercultural Communication Studies at the University of Oakland (Michigan). He holds a Ph.D. in theology from the University of Chicago, is the author of five books including Political Spirituality for a Century of Water Wars: The Angel of the Jordan Meets the Trickster of Detroit; Shamanism, Racism, and Hip-Hop Culture: Essays on White Supremacy and Black Subversion; and White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity. He is an artist on the spoken-word poetry scene and an activist in the struggle against water shutoffs.  Preferred pronouns are he, him.