The Nerves And Their Endings: essays on crisis and response is an insight into the slow doom of climate collapse
Written by Jessica Gaitán Johannesson
Review by Clare Rankine
A grave manifesto juxtaposed with poetic memory, Jessica Gaitán Johannesson’s The Nerves and Their Endings holds the reader with an urgent grip lest we struggle away, put down the book, and resolve to our inaction. With a powerful and responsive voice, she asks us: how long will we have?
Gaitán Johanneson transports the reader into different microcosms — Bogotá, Columbia, where all the birds have disappeared, an eating disorder ward where the patients are warned not to disappear, and a “small red house with blue windows” by a Swedish lake, the author's family home, where she and her siblings submerge themselves into black water. Gaitán Johanneson’s open and empathetic voice commands our presence. There are stunningly perfect passages that capture what it is to be inherently human, which those of us who’ve travelled alone will recognise: “Luggage-reclaim halls still make me giddy, even when there is no one waiting on the other side of the doors.” When she travels through “non-places” or transient spaces, airports, bus shelters, train stations, we feel like we sit beside her on her travels, looking out onto a ravaged world. The tar of the tarmac swells in the heat underneath us both, our forest felled, our water frozen. She connects us with what we all see and often try to ignore, the bodily effects of climate change.
In essence, this is a collection of essays about slow violence unto a life. The first is of bodily violence. Anorexia is only mentioned once in the first pages of the book and yet, those first pages consumed me. I found myself thinking that shrinking myself as she did at 21 would make me feel better about how I look in photographs. Or perhaps, in a world that feels seemingly beyond control in all aspects (bodily, environment, population) the thought that: “Every small decision dedicated by that illness and leading further into it… nothing and no one was influencing my not-eating… I was in charge. Isn’t that the most basic definition of self-destructive behaviour?”
Reading work about anorexia and eating disorders is to tip into a seductive, ugly world, all too easy to replicate. How many of us have had the thought: “I could just not eat for a while and be skinny and happy?” Even though I recognised the body horror unfurling on these pages isn’t healthy, I caught myself thinking this, not once, but three times during the period of reading this book. Perhaps it was due to starting a diet that week because, ridiculously, I had seen a picture of myself at 21 and I missed who I was. Gaitán Johannesson captures a familiar feeling: If I shrink myself, and am less of a burden, the world will be better. I will be better.
The second violence is a severance from place. Throughout the book, Gaitán Johannesson writes of her childhood growing up between Sweden, Columbia and Ecuador. Her imagery is rich with subtext, we can’t help but feel these were the happiest times of her life. Lake Verveln, Stockholm, the water, the cliffs, the strawberries of her childhood all sound like birds. A pair of llamas wearing pink ribbons prancing in the rain during a market in Plaza de Bolívar together with her aunts, cousins, father, sister, brother, and mother. A worldy innocence tinged pink through each scene.
At thirty, she becomes a British citizen. She sits, two metres away from her fellow inductees, under a pixelated poster of the Queen. The man sitting next to her is jubilant: “I suspected he was smiling before looking at him, then noticed that he wasn’t smiling at all, or that the smile, if it existed, wasn’t on his face. The excitement lived in his posture: the feeling that if I touched his jacket, I’d be jolted by silent, static electricity.” Inductees are allowed one photograph holding their certificate. She takes an extra photo for him as he receives his certificate. The whole room fizzles with excitement, tinged with uncertainty. These are people uprooting their lives, waiting years for approval, paying thousands of pounds to have their biometric data checked in a glass building in Cardiff, a process I can’t quite believe is real, never having uprooted my life to this extent. When they are “naturalised” or admitted into the country, they pledge their loyalty, then sing the national anthem and celebrate with cups of tea and cake.
Here, we never really glean how Gaitán Johannesson feels about the severance of her identity. She doesn’t want a picture of her certificate. And we know that feeling of real freedom, her chance to “sink (her) feet into the earth so that roots could take hold” is immediately locked away. Her ceremony is in March 2020, days before Britain and the rest of the world are plunged into the first lockdown. In a postscript, Gaitán Johannesson writes about new laws criminalising refugees entering Britain, and the cruel xenophobia following those who move for greater safety and wellbeing. I can’t quite help but feel she regrets her decision to become a British citizen, wanting to keep her roots floating, forever held above the ground.
The third violence is birth, and the choice to give it. Gaitán Johannesson champions the Birth Strike movement: a conscious decision to not bear children because of the growing economic and climate footprint. In the chapter Birth Strike: A Story In Arguments, she writes to her unborn child that may never be: “You are hungry, and way too hot. I blow my fevered breath on the space between your eyebrows. You learn to walk and there’s either a scorched earth or only water under your feet…our uncertain ground.” What starts as a small group of individuals quickly ripples outward, Birth Strike garners fevered media attention, and Gaitán Johannesson’s personal life is picked apart by online commenters. The Facebook page she creates causes her anxiety with every notification ping. After a while, the comments aren’t about climate change anymore, they’re about her particular choice and how, in turn, as the figurehead, she’s influencing their choice. Frustratingly, she admits she and her partner constantly backpedal on their decision.
Yet, it’s a testament to a strong writer to make a reader question their own choices. What would the future be for our children at fifty? Will their earth be ravaged, or whole? Always drawn to kinship, I wanted a big family. In my early twenties while talking with a friend, we spoke of dreams: career, place, love, children, and a future. My friend replied that she wasn’t having children — she didn’t want them. This shocked me. In my naivety, I never realised there could be a choice. I’ve always thought I would be a good mother. I come from a long line of sensible women who were always going to be mothers. Women who keep the buttons to shirts, who put worry dolls under the pillow, place cold hand towels across hot foreheads. It is pieces like The Nerves And Their Endings that open our eyes.
When I finish the book, I walk around my inner north neighborhood at sundown. It’s a hot start to the year and I pass people drinking balcony beers, kids running under the sprinkler twirl. Climate Action Now posters burn bright yellow on fences, “Doing Nothing Risks Everything” painted on corrugated tin. Eucalypt branches anoint my shoulders and the top of my head as I walk. I feel a cool change shift in the air. Even though it’s a peaceful night, the effects of The Nerves And Their Endings buzz in my brain. How long will I have here, in this neighbourhood that pledges harmony and recycling? And how long will those in power turn a blind eye, put down the book and turn away from the effects of climate change until the ground under their feet is uncertain?
It’s important to read work that makes you feel doom. The Nerves And Their Endings is a stand out in a new wave of work about our climate crisis, reminding us to look at the good in ourselves and our choices, and how we navigate the future. Gaitán Johannesson is searching for an answer that no one can give, yet the power of her rich, gorgeous and poetic memories is strong. This is the final message she leaves us with: in an uncertain future, memory and place are important. Protect what you have and what you can lose.
The Nerves and Their Endings: essays on crisis and response is published by Scribe. Purchase it at your local bookstore or on the website here.
Clare Rankine loves cry laughing at high octane comedy and her cat, Crumpet. She’s also a comedy writer, producer and performer with a sick website that has a sparkle emoji cursor you can find here.
We paid Clare $25 for this review.
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