“Dandora Landfill #3, Plastics Recycling, Nairobi, Kenya, 2016,” by Edward Burtynsky © The artist. Courtesy Sundaram Tagore Gallery and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York City
I can’t name the seven major types of plastic, but I’m pretty sure I’ve thrown them all away. Crumpled them up, peeled them off the bottom of my shoe, chucked them like basketballs after saying, “For three!” I’ve thrown away trash cans—a reliable mind-fuck. I’ve heaved bags into dumpsters and awaited the resounding thud that declares them someone else’s problem. And my garbage has always been, ultimately, someone else’s problem, or someone else’s solution. Alexander Clapp’s Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash (Little, Brown, $32) introduces us to many such someones, among them Steve Wong, a waste handler in California who, at his peak, bought and resold some 1,600 cargo containers of plastic trash every month. Disused lawn chairs, fishing nets, and air mattresses made their way through him to Hong Kong importers, who turned them into, for example, trimmings for knockoff purses. By 2010, Wong was, in Clapp’s words, “single-handedly responsible for almost 7 percent of all discarded plastic entering China.” For him, distinguishing between polyvinyl chloride and polyethylene terephthalate is child’s play. Wong brags that he can identify several thousand plastic variants “by feel, by weight, by flexibility.” How envious this made me, his mastery of a tactile language born of sheer stuff, a kind of chemical-industrial braille.
Clapp, a journalist based in Greece, aspires to fluency in this and other forms of trash talk. He wants to know how the West’s refuse came to fuel a shadow economy that generates billions of dollars in revenue as it makes its way on container ships to the Global South, where it’s recycled (inefficiently), incinerated (toxically), or simply dumped (illegally). Trash people aren’t in the business of public relations. They are beyond anonymous, Clapp writes, operating from P.O. boxes or
out of slapped-together warehouses in Port Klang or Dar es Salaam. They change names from one month to another. They don’t have websites. They have WhatsApp numbers, Google Translate, a cousin in Newark or Croydon.
This garbage economy operates on the periphery of legality. It was built on the literal ashes of the toxic-waste disposal industry, which proceeded on the imperialist assumption that poor, postcolonial nations would pay to take rich nations’ runoff. It had to be repackaged, obviously. Don’t say “biohazardous sludge,” say “fertilizer.” In the Seventies and Eighties, with shipping costs low and regulations full of loopholes, it wasn’t uncommon for local governments and corporations in the United States to off-load their most dangerous refuse to Africa or South America. California once tried to foist its waste, some of it radioactive, on the Marshall Islands. The manufacturers of the Dalkon Shield were more successful. They persuaded the American government to buy and ship hundreds of thousands of their “fine product,” as they called it, “into population control programs and family planning clinics throughout the Third World.” Their “fine product” was a contraceptive device responsible for several deadly infections in this country; it was soon banned. From 1986 to 1988, thousands of pounds of incinerated soot from Philadelphia circumnavigated the globe on a container ship in search of a buyer. “I would slash my wrists if I didn’t think there is enough greed and avarice in the world to find somebody willing to take Philadelphia’s trash,” the city’s streets commissioner said at the time. Haitian officials, believing the ash to be fertilizer, allowed some of it to be shoveled onto their beaches. Environmentalists later mailed packets of it to the head of the EPA.
But the march of progress won’t be halted, and “the highly lucrative world of post-industrial waste export gave way to the incomprehensibly lucrative world of post-consumer waste export,” Clapp writes, sounding a bit like a spoken-word poet:
The plastic forks you discarded after a single use were going to villages in Vietnam. The broken TV you put out on your curb was going to slums in Nigeria. Your worn-out automobile tires were going to the interior of India. Your unwanted clothes were going to deserts in Chile. Your spent batteries were going to Mexico.
In Ghana, Clapp visits Agbogbloshie, now a benighted repository of e-waste and a hot spot for photojournalists who exoticize its buttes of cell-phone batteries and microchips flambé. Like polluted sunsets and iridescent oil slicks, end-of-life electronics can be quite beautiful. Those of us who’ve rotted in cubicles may take a perverse pleasure in the towers of keyboards that refuse to rot. They stand as monuments to waste—and to time wasted. How many iterations of “I hope this email finds you well” were typed out between them? Not pictured are Agbogbloshie’s chickens, whose intake of chlorinated dioxins and other such toxins has made their eggs the most poisonous on earth, and the “spontaneous self-combustion of patches of earth” around its lagoon. This is the result of “an entirely lawful and incentivized process,” Clapp writes; governments in the Global South believe importing e-waste “to be worth the elusive promise of accelerated development.” He tours waste markets with a professional copper extractor, who shows him how to burn rats’ nests of HDMI cables and laptop chargers and strip the metal, which is then sold to foreign dealers. The fumes sometimes make him cough up blood, he explains, but when he visited a charity’s field clinic built expressly for workers like him, the nurses just gave him water. “They said there was nothing else they could do.”
Soon Clapp is off to an Anatolian shipbreaking yard where ocean liners are haphazardly dismantled by blowtorch to reclaim their steel. He finds the remains of the Carnival Inspiration, a whale-shaped cruise ship with multiple bars, a waterslide, a mini-golf course, and a casino; in the process of demolishing the vessel, two Turkish men were burned alive in its engine room. “A breakfast buffet hall on its tenth story sat exposed to gusts of toxic air and drags of bonfire smoke,” Clapp writes, and “the onetime RedFrog Rum Bar had been denuded of its red leather stools and bamboo ceiling fans.” His globe-trotting takes him finally to a Javanese “trash town,” where shredded packaging from French puppy chow and Australian deodorant are raked and rotated in the sun—a plastic harvest to be used as fuel, toxic additives and all, in the region’s tofu and cracker factories.
Little, Brown has given Waste Wars a bright cover, maybe to telegraph the abundant humor and humanity of Clapp’s prose. And yet. You can absorb only so much polychlorinated biphenyl and polybrominated diphenyl ether before you realize you’re being poisoned. As indictments of globalism go, the trash trade is almost too perfect: too stupefyingly myopic; too ceaseless, vast, and sad. The phrase “to throw away” is more viscerally expulsive than even our terms for bodily functions, with the possible exception of “to throw up”—which, in spite of or because of the generosity of Clapp’s reporting, is what I felt like doing.
“Our lives always come down to money and shit,” says the narrator of Michelle de Kretser’s novel Theory & Practice (Catapult, $25): an elegant summation of the trash economy, though the “our” in this case refers to women. She’s talking about maternity, which brings only “loss of income and pooey nappies.” Motherhood is one of this novel’s obsessions, though that’s too overheated a word for it, and “themes” too cold. Call it an entrancing preoccupation, along with language itself. De Kretser’s dedication is a tidy double entendre: “For the Maternal line.”
Her narrator—or avatar, as the book is largely a roman à clef—is a Sri Lankan immigrant in Melbourne pursuing an M.A. in English; her studies have thrown both her feminism and her sense of agency into turmoil. It’s the Eighties. Post-structuralist theory has leached like microplastics into every corner of the university. She and her friends debate the limitations of the “Maternal sentence”—“liquid and nonlinear, swooping and looping, multidirectional, whorled”—and even the man she’s seeing, an engineering student named Kit, says he’s in a “deconstructed relationship” with another woman. One can no longer simply write a thesis on Virginia Woolf, or “the Woolfmother,” as the narrator calls her. One must, like a torturer, “make the text confess.”
Afterbirth, by Shyama Golden © The artist
Oh, but the text wears its heart on its sleeve. The narrator keeps Woolf’s picture taped above her desk; she enjoyed imagining her “saying something encouraging as she watched me work.” But in a diary entry from October 1917, Woolf sneers at one of her visitors, a “mahogany-colored wretch” with a “likeness to a caged monkey.” The wretch was one E. W. Perera, a pivotal figure in the Ceylonese independence movement—and someone the narrator had celebrated growing up in Sri Lanka. The face looking down at her is now irretrievably compromised. Reeling under Woolf’s gaze, the narrator writes out the racist passage on an index card and tears it to shreds. “That type of appalling thinking was everywhere at the time, of course,” the narrator’s adviser tells her. “It’s important to keep that in mind.”
The narrator tries to keep it in mind. When she’s with Kit, she tries to keep his girlfriend, Olivia, in mind, too. And when her mother writes beseeching but bloodless notes (“I can send lozenges from here if they are not easily obtainable in Melbourne or expensive. I can send anything you need, even money”), she keeps her difficult past in mind. But some part of her yearns to be merciless—to make all these women confess. Shame, she writes, “could transform female solidarity into a scold’s bridle.” She fantasizes about breaking into Olivia’s flat or stealing something from her purse. She leaves bruises on Kit and finds him bruised elsewhere upon his return: “Olivia and I were exchanging messages about possession and power. Kit was only the paper on which we were writing to each other.” The novel is in some way her quest to find better paper, and a more capacious expression of her “dumb, mixed feelings.”
It all has something to do with running away and running into at the same time. Late in the book, we learn the narrator’s name: Cindy. It’s used only once, when her aunt speaks the name into a cell phone to a disinterested third party. They’re standing at her mother’s deathbed, where, “her contours annihilated by a heavy quilt, she’d attained the truthfulness of formless form.” This mirrors the wish of our narrator (it feels rude to call her Cindy), near the start of the book, to find a form for the novel “that allowed for formlessness and mess.”
Theory & Practice is both flinty and sinuous, and it accommodates many messes. It contains a digression on Aviv Kochavi, an Israeli military commander whose strategy of blasting passageways through Palestinian buildings, which destroyed homes and families and forced resistance fighters outdoors, was said to have been inspired by Situationist texts: “He called it ‘walking through walls’ and ‘adjusting’ the relevant urban space to his ‘needs.’ ” A second digression tells of Donald Friend, an Australian artist who moved to Ceylon and Bali in the mid-twentieth century to pursue a life of unchecked pedophilia—another form of postcolonial exploitation. De Kretser has ensured that departures like these fit almost discreetly into her novel. Like the napkin that her narrator watches Olivia use, its meanings and motives are tucked into it: “She folded and refolded the serviette into a strip, folded that in half, and slid it under her saucer.”
Much is slid under the saucer of Alice Coltrane’s Monument Eternal (Akashic Books, $19.95), which also pursues formlessness and maternal hardship, albeit from the cryptic climes of the astral plane. This is less a book than a pamphlet, written under “divine command” during the regenerative years before Coltrane recorded some of her most enduring albums. She devotes its few dozen pages to an account of the “spiritual suffering” that afflicted her after the death of her husband, John Coltrane, in 1967. (The book appeared ten years later.) He left her a widow a few weeks before her thirtieth birthday, with four children and a hole that her music, no matter how inspired, couldn’t fill.
Gotta Match, a mixed-media artwork (burned red-oak flooring, black soap, wax, spray enamel, vinyl, and shea butter) by Rashid Johnson, whose work is on view as part of the exhibition Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal, at the Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles © The artist. Collection of Hedy Fischer and Randy Shull. Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
The Coltranes had found their higher power by melding the teachings of black churches with Hindu mysticism, and after John’s death, Alice continued that work, traveling to India and studying under a swami. But much of her spiritual growth was involuntary and hard-won. She descended into “the profound ordeal of tapas, or austerity,” a yearslong fugue state in which she hardly ate or slept. Her weight fell to ninety-five pounds. She may have harmed herself—she alludes to “a series of examinations” involving “metals, glass, wood, chemicals, oils, plant fibers, and waste materials,” and writes that, “during an excruciating test to withstand heat, my right hand succumbed to a third-degree burn.” Her nails turned black. She began to feel her heart beating on the right side of her chest. “My body resembled the stigmata of a crucified person—blood issued from almost every part of it.”
Eventually she left her body altogether, preferring to practice the art of celestial navigation. These “transmigratory experiences” felt “like rehearsing for one’s own funeral,” but in a good way. Out there, she saw her mother’s face in “youthful loveliness”; “a rug that had once been a polar bear’s skin got up and walked away as an animal again.” She met Stravinsky. Her family worried, naturally. “It was almost impossible for me to dwell upon earthly matters,” she writes, but she enjoyed watching her relatives sleep—“their spirits vibrated like flags in the wind”—and the comings and goings of their dog. “Small fish-like creatures can be seen floating around inside its stomach.”
This is the founding document of a personal religion, and a rendering of grief hung among the stars. It often makes no sense, but put on Coltrane’s albums Journey in Satchidananda or Ptah, the El Daoud and it starts to come together: there’s a rough path from Monument Eternal up to the sky of her compositions, the divine zephyrs of her harp and piano chords. The works improve one another. After you’ve listened, it’s fun to consider this book alongside bloated memoirs by more prosaic recording artists. While they’re recounting lawsuits or brushes with alcoholism, Coltrane is writing about the “spiritual sun of the magellacosmos” and the “Divine Assayer.” That’s what you can do when your ghostwriter is God. I do believe she came away with something essential from these long years of winnowing. The Lord, she writes, “can produce sound from such non-musical entities as motors, electrical appliances, clocks, dishwashers, refrigerators, cars, airplane engines, windowpanes . . . ” I’ll buoy myself with this thought, of the music of the spheres made from our far-flung trash.
