Ecopoetics Postcard: “The "Outside Us": Woman as Landscape” by Addie Tsai

Yeats once wrote that for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us. Yet, what happens when man is raised with a kind of entitled position to state that women are part of the “outside us”? In other words, the crisis of eco-feminism, for me, is that women are often, unspokenly, implicitly, considered a part of the landscape. Whether through exploitation, subjectification, degradation, throughout many cultures, women exist as thing to be defined by man. And as a woman born of an American mother and a Chinese father, also as exploited through the exoticism of the half-breed, the hybrid, the born of both lands but neither native, neither claimed as one’s own. And additionally, as a woman born a twin, also exploited through the subject-object crisis of that thing, those things, which are twinned: twin beds, twin engines, twin jets, duplicate images, Doublemint Gum, the Bopsey Twins, carbon copies, a pair of any two objects that are, in every detail, the same.

In general terms, I am most interested in composing (and reading) a poetics that merges the object with the subject without any clear distinction. In my own consciousness as both person being perceived and perceiver, I have found the boundaries between the two blurred and merging. I could spend years knowing a person as an individual, outside of my racial lines, outside of my gender-specific distinctions, outside of my twinning. Yet, the moment any of those elements were introduced alongside me, suddenly there I changed from [she] to [it], from self-contained to open for discussion and comparison. In my work, I attempt to force that merging of the natural/physical world and the emotional interior of the speaker—that seems to be an honest portrayal of eco-poetics as it relates to the human condition.


This postcard forms part of the forthcoming feature on Ecopoetics in the next issue of HOW2.