Root Identity–Relation Identity in Inga Simpson’s Understory: A Life with Trees

• Bárbara Arizti Martín ^[1]
  1. [1] Universidad de Zaragoza
• Localización: Moving beyond the pandemic: English and American studies in Spain / coord. por Francisco Gallardo del Puerto, María del Carmen Camus Camus, Jesús Ángel González López, 2022, ISBN 978-84-19024-15-2, págs. 126-131
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto Completo Libro (pdf)
• Resumen

  • Inga Simpson’s memoir Understory: A Life with Trees (2017) illustrates significant changes in contemporary life writing that align it with transmodern thought and its turn to the relational. I here argue that these changes become apparent when reading Understory alongside Édouard Glissant’s distinction between root identity and relation identity (Poetics of Relation). In generic terms, the memoir confirms the growing openness to different sets of conventions, in this case those of the botany treatise and the nature essay. Moreover, the work expands limits on a further thematic level by foregrounding Simpson’s affinity with trees and how it provides a true map of her story of living in a forest in Queensland for ten years. With this other-than-human perspective, Simpson reveals the interpenetration between the two types of identity theorised by Glissant, opting for a complex relational view that does not rule out roots and which makes especial sense in the context of post-Mabo developments in Australian writing.