The Rumor of the Earth: Anti-nuclear Ecologies in Lam and Char’s Contre une maison sèche

Abstract

This essay considers the collaborative projects of Cuban artist Wifredo Lam and French poet René Char as thematizing an imbrication between two different ends of the world: the end of the colonial world through decolonization and the end of terrestrial life in nuclear war. This connection, I argue, is pursued by Lam and Char through a set of socio-ecological commitments in which the relation between humanity and the earth heralds an apocalyptic vision of planetary crisis. I proceed to my argument by reconstructing Char and Lam’s investments in a political aesthetics of inter-species and earthly habitation, beginning in the 1950s. By the mid-1960s, the threat of nuclear destruction transforms the meaning of the earth, especially in Char’s poetics. At the center of my analysis is their collaborative book, Contre une maison sèche, which I read in continuity with late 1960s anti-nuclear struggles. Finally, I suggest that we think formal decolonization and anti-nuclear ecology together as a point of historical reference for the current ecological crisis. What I call “the rumor of the Earth,” after Lam’s 1950 painting, names the possible but as-yet undiscovered forms of inhabiting the Earth and of making new relations at all levels of the general ecology.