Discursive Constructions of Waste and Slow Violence In Ann Pancake’s Strange as this Weather Has Been

Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 131-51 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.08 DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS OF WASTE AND SLOW VIOLENCE IN ANN PANCAKE’S STRANGE AS THIS WEATHER HAS BEEN 1 SARA VILLAMARÍN-FREIRE Universidade da Coruña [email protected] Received 21 July 2022 Accepted 20 November 2022 KEYWORDS hillbilly; mountaintop removal; storyworld; slow violence; econarratology; unimagined communities PALABRAS CLAVE montañero; minería de desplazamiento de cima; mundo narrativo; violencia lenta; econarratología; comunidades desimaginadas ABSTRACT This paper addresses the representation of environmental destruction in the Appalachian coalfields in the novel Strange as this Weather Has Been (Ann Pancake, 2007). Pancake’s book follows the disbandment of a family of six in southern West Virginia and presents us with the dilemmas they must confront, most notably whether they should leave or stay and organize against the coal company. I seek to analyze the ways in which the novel conveys each character’s embodied, material experience when facing environmental destruction; moreover, I examine the way in which slow violence is represented in the text. Focusing on Appalachia’s extractivist past (and present), I argue that Strange as this Weather Has Been ultimately helps to counter the existing prejudice against poor whites in the region by fostering reader empathy through the textual recreation of the bleak environmental condition in the novel’s storyworld. RESUMEN Este artículo aborda la representación de la destrucción medioambiental en las regiones mineras de los Apalaches en la novela Strange as this Weather Has Been (Ann Pancake, 2007). El libro de Pancake sigue la separación de una familia de seis miembros en la zona sur de West Virginia y nos presenta los dilemas que deben 1 The research for this article was funded by the project “Literature and Globalization 2: Communities of Waste” (PID2019-106798GBI00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033). 132 Sara Villamarín-Freire Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 131-51 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.08 enfrentar, en particular si deberían marcharse o bien quedarse y organizarse en oposición a la compañía energética. Busco analizar el modo en que la novela verbaliza la experiencia material y corporizada de cada personaje que se enfrenta a la destrucción medioambiental; asimismo, examino el modo en que la violencia lenta se representa en el texto. Centrándome en el pasado (y presente) extractivista de los Apalaches, propongo que Strange as this Weather Has Been contribuye a contrarrestar los prejuicios existentes en contra de la población blanca pobre en la región al promover la empatía del lector a través de las desalentadoras condiciones medioambientales reflejadas en el mundo narrativo de la novela. INTRODUCTION Modern American environmentalism crystallized around Rachel Carson’s passionate advocacy against toxic chemicals. Laurence Buell situates the origin of “contemporary toxic discourse” in Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), whose denunciation of toxicity and the threat it poses to communities epitomizes the “rhetoric of pastoral betrayal” (645; 649). However, not all communities have historically obtained the same treatment when faced with the threat of environmental degradation. Whereas some groups typify toxicity as an external force jeopardizing the lives of their members, in other cases that same toxicity is regarded—and hence discursively constructed—as indistinguishable from the group in question. Susan Signe Morrison posits that the way to “make wasted humans invisible is to make them cognate to waste” (97): “Once located there, anyone who touches the waste becomes, in turn, contaminated as refuse, to be thrown out socially, geographically, and morally” (99). One such group is the one formed by poor whites living in Appalachia. There seems to be a cyclic interest in tackling the “Appalachian problem.” In the 1960s, Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty attracted substantive public attention to the region’s predicament—an interest that was further reinforced by the publication of Harry M. Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1963) and Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1962). More recently, the publication of J.D. Vance’s controversial memoir Hillbilly Elegy (2016), as well as the media press coverage of the 2016 election in so-called “Trumpalachia,” has spawned a renewed interest in the Discursive Constructions of Waste and Slow Violence In Ann Pancake’s Strange as this Weather Has Been 133 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 131-51 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.08 area and its conditions. 2 The ongoing discussion has revitalized, to some extent, some “widely discredited ‘culture of poverty’ explanations for persistent inequities in the region” (Harkins and McCarroll 2). Meanwhile, the region’s environmental plight continues to go largely unnoticed by mainstream media. The presence of companies that enforce destructive environmental practices is often justified on the grounds that it promotes modernization in a region historically defined by its economic and social backwardness. Conversely, the status of Appalachia as a historically extractivist region fosters “preconceptions of Appalachian people as either passive victims or willing conspirators in the brutal exploitation of the land” (Robertson 117). These preconceptions, however, are denounced and countered in an evergrowing body of literature that lends a voice to these communities. This paper addresses the representation of environmental destruction in the Appalachian coalfields in the novel Strange as this Weather Has Been (Ann Pancake, 2007). Matthew Henry catalogs the book as an example of “extractive fiction” insofar as it deals with extractive capitalism and its social, economic, and environmental consequences (403). These fictions counter notions of progress and economic growth that are supposed to follow extractive policies, thereby challenging the ethos of (extractive) capitalism and giving a voice to those residing in “sacrifice zones” (405). Pancake’s novel follows the disbandment of a family of six in southern West Virginia and presents us with the dilemmas they must confront, most notably whether they should leave or stay and organize against the coal company. My analysis draws from econarratology, in particular the works of Erin James on storyworlds. A storyworld consists of a simulation of “autonomous textual domains that readers must temporarily inhabit mentally and emotionally while reading” (James, Storyworld 21). This “imaginative transportation” allows us to experience and understand the environment from the perspective of others (Storyworld 2), which we can model and mentally recreate thanks to textual cues. I seek to draw attention to the ways in which Strange as this Weather Has Been conveys each character’s embodied, material experience when facing environmental destruction; likewise, I am interested in examining the 2 The term “Trumpalachia” appeared in the media coverage of the 2016 presidential election campaign and its aftermath. The pun sought to capture the allegedly unwavering support that the republican candidate had received in the region of Appalachia. See Harkins and McCarroll. 134 Sara Villamarín-Freire Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 131-51 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.08 ways in which slow violence itself is represented in the text. Rob Nixon has defined the concept as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2). Focusing on Appalachia’s extractivist past (and present), I argue that the text ultimately helps to counter the existing prejudice against poor whites in the region by fostering reader empathy through the textual recreation of the bleak environmental condition in the novel’s storyworld. THE “APPALACHIAN PROBLEM”: CLASS AND ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION As Henry contends, extraction has long been central to Appalachia’s cultural imaginary (404). In spite of the prevailing images of miners working in the Appalachian coalfields that dominate the public imagination, extractivism in the area has substantially evolved and nowadays bears little resemblance to the stereotypical underground mine. In Shirley B. Burns’s words, “[t]he deep mines begat the strip mines, and the strip mines begat mountaintop removal coal mining. Each new process was introduced for one reason only: more money for the companies” (16-7). Mountaintop removal or MTR is “an aggressive form of strip mining that literally blows away mountains to gain easy access to the coal seams” (Burns 16) and uses “mammoth machinery and heavy explosives” (McNeil 49). In a period where most traditional mines have been exhausted, MTR allows companies to access coal seams that would be otherwise too insignificant to establish a full-scale mining operation—and to do so efficiently. Its profitability also stems from the fact that fewer workers are needed to run an MTR operation, which leads to more and more people being laid off in a region that has faced, and continues to face, staggering unemployment figures (Burns 20). Besides the socioeconomic damage that MTR poses to the region, its environmental impact is appalling. Many scholars and activists have drawn attention to the scale of environmental degradation caused by this practice. Whole communities are forced to grapple with “the direct impacts of blasting, deforestation, flooding, dust, and the loss of access to mountain lands,” among others (McNeil 49). The remains of blown-up mountains, or “overburden,” are “pushed into the valleys and streams below,” and more often than not water pollution ensues (Burns 17). David Orr describes valley fills as Discursive Constructions of Waste and Slow Violence In Ann Pancake’s Strange as this Weather Has Been 135 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 131-51 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.08 “mountains turned upside down: rock mining debris, trees illegally buried, along with what many locals believe to be more sinister objects brought in by unmarked trucks in the dead of night” (158). Coal dust rises “from the crushing, mixing, and transporting” the coal in processing plants and other facilities, putting people’s health at risk (Hendryx 147). The juxtaposition of socioeconomic and environmental issues has led to the consideration of Appalachian coal counties as both internal colonies and sacrifice zones, two concepts that often go hand in hand. “Internal colony” refers to the territories that “bear the burden of environmental degradation and unstable employment prospects” so that “wealthy urban centers” can reap benefits (Henry 409). In the case of Appalachia, those benefits include either direct profit (coal companies) or widespread national access to cheap energy. Meanwhile, the term “sacrifice zone” originated in the governmental designation of “areas dangerously contaminated as a result of the mining and processing of uranium into nuclear weapons” (Lerner 2). Nowadays, sacrifice zones are defined as places that, to their extractors, somehow don’t count and therefore can be poisoned, drained, or otherwise destroyed, for the supposed greater good of economic progress. This toxic idea has always been intimately tied to imperialism, with disposable peripheries being harnessed to feed a glittering center, and it is bound up too with notions of racial superiority, because in order to have sacrifice zones, you need to have people and cultures who count so little that they are considered deserving of sacrifice. (Klein 169-70) These communities “deserving of sacrifice” align with Rob Nixon’s notion of “unimagined communities.” Nixon claims that the modern nation-state is sustained by the production of imagined communities as well as unimagined communities, where the latter are driven out of sight (physically and metaphorically) in order to maintain discourses of national progress and development (150-1). Unimagined communities are, therefore, evacuated rhetorically and visually “from the idea of the developing nation-state,” that is, from their lands as well as from public awareness (151; 153). Even though Nixon uses examples from the Global South to illustrate his point, those living in Appalachian coal counties might as well be considered ghosted presences in their own territories. 136 Sara Villamarín-Freire Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 131-51 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.08 Even nowadays, Appalachia continues to be identified with backwardness, a sort of “forgotten America” where poverty, unemployment, and drug abuse run rampant. According to Elizabeth Catte, there is a longstanding pattern of presenting Appalachia as a monolithic “other America” that defies narratives of progress (19). From providing “a counterpoint to emerging definitions of progress at the turn of the twentieth century,” to being “deemed to be backward and underdeveloped” due to a lack of “statistical measures of progress, both material and cultural,” the region has provided a challenge to modern conceptions of the American dream for more than a century. Appalachia, Eller writes, has appeared as a place of cultural backwardness in a nation of progressive values, a region of poverty in an affluent society, and a rural landscape in an increasingly urban nation. We know Appalachia exists because we need it to exist in order to define what we are not. It is the “other America” because the very idea of Appalachia convinces us of the righteousness of our own lives. The notion of Appalachia as a separate place, a region set off from mainstream culture and history, has allowed us to distance ourselves from the uncomfortable dilemmas that the story of Appalachia raises about our own lives and about the larger society. (21; original emphasis) The coal industry has taken advantage of this imagery, “capitaliz[ing] on the ignorant hillbilly stereotype to justify the extraction of the natural resources, and, consequently, the exploitation of both people and environment” (Burriss 105-6). Indeed, the “regional affinity for extraction” is further complicated by “longstanding cultural stereotypes of Appalachia as a region predominantly populated by ‘hillbillies, white trash, and other poor whites’” (Henry 410). These stereotypes, in turn, “authorize rhetorical and ideological constructions of the region as culturally deviant” (Wise 332). The association between “social backwardness and moral abjection,” in Henry’s words (410), only contributes to make the general public feel more detached from the plight of these communities. The hillbilly type, according to Anthony Harkins, presents us with a white other who is “lazy, slovenly, degenerate,” endures “wrenching but always comic poverty” and possesses a “raw physicality and sexuality” (19). Although the stereotype has endured multiple transformations, at its core lies a constant tension between whiteness and the wasted lives of the working class. In the eyes of the upper classes, the fact that there were white people who lived in Discursive Constructions of Waste and Slow Violence In Ann Pancake’s Strange as this Weather Has Been 137 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 131-51 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.08 poverty could only mean that a fundamental deviation had taken place—be it of moral character, or a consequence of inbreeding. 3 However, in her monumental White Trash, Nancy Isenberg contends that, beginning in the seventeenth century, “[i]t was the stigma of landlessness” that determined rigid class hierarchies and “would leave its mark on white trash from this day forward” (14). This last remark leads us right back to the question of land exploitation. One of the driving points of contention in Pancake’s novel refers to people being driven away from their land as a consequence of MTR, with an array of reasons ranging from environmental damage, job losses, health issues, or a combination of any of these aspects. In this regard, physical displacement may be fueled by a metaphorical displacement previously felt by members of these communities. This is what happens to the main character Lace Ricker See and her daughter Bant. In the novel, some people choose to leave because they can no longer make ends meet (as in the case of Lace’s husband Jimmy Make), or because their health complicates their survival in the midst of environmental degradation (such as Mrs. Taylor, one of the family’s neighbors). The erosion of communal bonds makes it harder to confront the coal companies, as grassroots activist Charlie explains to Lace: They [coal companies] come into your community that they’ve already started destroying, then they start making little side deals with people. Brewing suspicion […], make it harder for people to stick together and fight […]. And that makes people even less want to stay, which brings the property prices down even lower. Not that a home under a mountaintop mine is worth much anyway. (Pancake 307) In addition to experiencing feelings of powerlessness in response to being driven away from their homeland, the characters in Strange… struggle to find a sense of belonging anew, a sentiment fueled by the tensions of class I have sketched above. Among all characters, Lace displays an acute awareness of such tensions. At the very beginning of the novel, she states that “[g]rowing up here, you get the message very early on that your place is more backwards than 3 A thorough discussion of the history and evolution of the white poor in the U.S. falls outside the scope of this article. For further information on the question of poverty, breeding, and morality, see Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash, chapters 6 (pp. 135-53) and 8 (pp. 174-205). For a thorough chronology of the hillbilly type and its origins, see Harkins, chapter 1 (pp. 13-45). 138 Sara Villamarín-Freire Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 131-51 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.08 anywhere in America and anybody worth much will get out soon as they can” (Pancake 3). Despite her desire to move out of the hollow and see the world, once she begins college in Morgantown she feels out of place among classmates and professors who consider her a hillbilly and thus look down on her. Later on, when the family moves to North Carolina in search for a job for Jimmy Make, this feeling of uprootedness emerges again: But it wasn’t just the lack of money that made us poorer in North Carolina. It was what you saw around you, what you had to compare yourself to, and I’d never understood about that before. And if that didn’t keep us in our place, then there was the way people looked at us, regardless of how much money they had. Somehow people knew we were different from them, even before we opened our mouths, although I couldn’t for the life of me see how we looked much different from anybody else. (Pancake 194) Underlying class tensions become apparent after an incident in which a grieving Lace loses sight of Tommy, her youngest child. Even though she quickly finds him, Lace is met with the patronizing gaze of one of her North Carolina neighbors: Then I saw the look she was giving back. Self-righteous. Smug. Redneck woman with so many kids she can’t even keep track of them all. And there crashed back onto me […] the nothingness that North Carolina made me. […] Because people outside of back home always thought they knew exactly who I was, when they had not the slightest idea. When they’d never see me because they didn’t know how to look, knew only to look for what they already thought they knew, so they always saw somebody else. (Pancake 197-8) Sieged by environmental degradation, the interference of companies, and others’ prejudice and misunderstanding, the characters in Strange… are cornered into choosing fight or flight. For Jimmy Make, leaving is the only answer—and so he moves out of the state again, in order to keep his children safe and fed. By contrast, Lace and Bant choose to stay even if that means becoming a target for the thugs hired by the coal company. As Lace puts it, “the best way to fight them is to refuse to leave. Stay in their way—that’s the only language they can hear. We are from here, it says. This is our place, it says. Listen here, it says. We exist” (Pancake 314). A similar sentiment is echoed by Mrs. Taylor: Discursive Constructions of Waste and Slow Violence In Ann Pancake’s Strange as this Weather Has Been 139 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 131-51 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.08 “That’s exactly what Lyon [the coal company] wants. […] Scare us to death and make everybody miserable to where we all just move out, then they can go on and do whatever they want. And you know what I say to that? […] This is my house!” She slams her palms on the kitchen table […]. “There have always been Ratliffs in this hollow! My father bought these two lots in 1928, and we worked for what we have!” (Pancake 49; original emphasis) This logic notwithstanding, the novel’s ending is far from optimistic. The effects of the slow violence perpetrated against the territory and its people will not go away any time soon. As Catte denounces, “the dominance of coal’s extractive logic has permanently ruined people and land in ways with which we must still contend” (14). In my view, the novel does not seek to show ways to reverse the consequences of MTR as much as it renders these people’s plight visible. Unlike the North Carolina woman who cannot really see what is in front of her, Pancake challenges us to look at the region for what it is. In what follows, I turn to analyze the construction of the novel’s storyworld, paying attention to the formal devices used to depict the impact of (slow) violence on the environment. I will argue that although the community portrayed here has become unimagined, as Nixon would have it, the novel attempts to reverse this process by means of representing the material conditions of its existence, thereby fostering reader empathy. REPRESENTING (SLOW) VIOLENCE The storyworld of Strange… is dominated by the impact of MTR in both the environment and those who live nearby. We ought to consider that MTR is an experience difficult to grasp even to those who have witnessed it, which makes it particularly complex to convey. Moreover, not every character in the novel shares the same viewpoint regarding mining—a circumstance that is used in the novel to illustrate the myriad viewpoints that can be held within the same community, hence undermining the perception of the Appalachian coalfields as a monolithic entity. Among the main characters, Lace, her eldest daughter Bant, and her uncle Mogey are clearly the most shaken by the effects of MTR due to their deep emotional (and arguably, almost physical) attachment to the land. By contrast, Jimmy Make is as apathetic regarding the mountains as he is wary of the 146 Sara Villamarín-Freire Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 131-51 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.08 Mrs. Taylor’s account corresponds to the type of violence that Nixon opposes to slow violence, the kind that is immediate, explosive, and spectacular: Now you know them pictures of the clouds in Japan when they dropped the bomb? […] That’s the kind of cloud that dam made when it caved in […]. When the dam broke, the water behind it shot out onto the gob pile. And when the water hit that smoking gob, it exploded up in the air like a volcano and threw this steaming mud all over their windshields. (Pancake 75–6) Conversely, Dane learns to tune his hearing to the menace of destruction that a new flood will inevitably bring. Against Mrs. Taylor’s tale of shocking violence, Dane listens to anything that may confirm the threat of violence erupting suddenly: “Rain too soft to hear on the roof. Sneaking. All we can do is listen for a big rumble, Mrs. Taylor talking” (Pancake 109). This corresponds to James’s observation that “we must now recognize plots that are so slow as to be imperceptible to human experience” (“Anthropocene” 194). Still, Dane’s efforts to tune his hearing to what is imperceptible to others fail to provide him with a sense of security. Ultimately, he finds himself unable to react when faced with an actual catastrophe—the death of his brother Corey. Dane’s inaction in spite of his knowledge of environmental destruction and its perils illustrates how living in a sacrifice zone takes a toll on the mental health of those affected by it. In the novel, symptoms of solastalgia are especially noticeable in characters who feel a deeper connection to their surroundings—that is, Lace, Bant, and Mogey—and whose sense of self, as individuals and members of a community, is also jeopardized by MTR. Here it is worth noting that “[a]ny context where place identity is challenged by pervasive change to the existing order has potential to deliver solastalgia” (Albretch 45). In this case, MTR alters the existing (natural) order as it leaves the landscape in a state of disarray, best exemplified by the unnatural amalgamation of organic and toxic elements present in the landfills. In turn, this attack on nature threatens the place identity of the Ricker-Sees, which is intimately connected to their extensive knowledge and “[f]amiliarity with […] plants and with the topography [that] define Appalachians environmentally” (Houser 98). In what can be read as an act of verbal resistance, Lace, Bant, and Mogey carefully list a plethora of autochthonous plant species, thereby offering a stark contrast to the Discursive Constructions of Waste and Slow Violence In Ann Pancake’s Strange as this Weather Has Been 147 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 131-51 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.08 chaotic, indistinguishable waste of the landfills: “Shawnee, poke, ramps, molly moochers in spring, blackberries in summer, mayapple and cohosh, then ginseng and nuts—hickory, black walnut, butternut, chinquapin, beech—in the fall. […] Sumac and sassafras […] holly and greenery” (Pancake 34–5). Besides providing “intimate insight into the characters’ thoughts, feelings, and actions” (Burriss 101), their firstperson narrations contribute to preserving the distinct character of the Appalachian flora. Moreover, the use of regional names (e.g., “molly moochers” instead of “morel mushrooms”) conveys the impression that mining is destroying the lands as well as the traditions associated to the lands, like foraging, that are seminal to the region’s dwellers’ identity. Their profound love for the woods leads Lace, Bant, and Mogey to suffer the most when faced with the resulting wreckage. In some cases, their descriptions evoke the combined materiality of their own bodies and of the land. For instance, Mogey suffers from headaches and nightmares, dreaming of “animals with metal for teeth” and “a plastic bag for a belly,” or “leaves falling as ash” (Pancake 178). These images of impossible hybrids give way to “a dream of sound” with “nothing but an alarm going on […] Mwaaa. Mwaaa. Mwaaa. Mwaaa” (178–79; original emphasis). The horn-like noise offers a stark contrast with the “hum,” an almost spiritual emanation that Mogey perceives as coming off “the still things, trees and ground and rock, although I only call it hum because I don’t got no other word for it” (169). Even though it is not “something caught by ear” (169), the hum captures the idea of a benign sound or vibration, as opposed to the overwhelming noise of MTR sites. As for Bant, she struggles with her growing alienation from the mountains, which worsens after the family moves to North Carolina. Prior to leaving, she had been able to sit quietly in the wild and feel “the space dropped away between [her] and the land […] it was like being inside some kind of body there” (Pancake 35). Later on, as word gets passed on that Yellowroot Mountain has been decimated, Bant feels “like [her] mind didn’t want to make a place for this here” (21). When she gets exposed to the destruction through photographs and talks with her mother, she is shaken: “it made a dry place in my mouth […] it was like dirty pictures I was seeing […] like looking at pictures of naked people. Like looking at pictures of dead bodies” (58). Only when Bant finally decides to climb the mountain and see the extent of the damage for herself does she fully comprehend it. It is there that she experiences “a hurt” that leaves her disoriented, a 148 Sara Villamarín-Freire Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 131-51 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.08 reaction akin to physical pain which enables comprehension at a deeper, more intimate level: “But then, finally, I did feel the hurt for myself. I understood” (Pancake 102–3). Here understanding is not depicted as a mental process on an abstract plane, but as a full-on bodily reaction that merges her body to the land, finally enabling her to feel for the mountain: “What I saw punched my chest. Knocked me back on my heels. […] Monster shovel clawed the dirt and you felt it in your arm, your leg, your belly” (165). The use of second person appeals to the audience represents an attempt to bridge the distance through an invocation to experientiality, inviting us to imagine how the shovel would feel like in our own flesh: [T]hrough the use of second person as well as direct reference to human organs, [Bant] creates an immediate, three-way, physical connection between the bodies of the mountain, character, and reader. […] Bant uses her own body—and the fact that our mirror neurons will fire when we read about another human’s bodily movements, feelings, and perceptions—to give readers a sense of what it feels like to behold the remnants of a violated mountain. (Weik Von Mossner 570) Bant’s assimilation of the hurt enables her to tap into a newfound deeper connection with the land. Through her body, she rediscovers what Mogey identifies with the “hum,” or the feeling of spiritual belonging and unity: “I could feel what was nearby, its size, its closeness, its give, beech, poplar, oak, holly hickory hemlock laurel, touching nothing, tripping nowhere, what Mogey always said about the hum” (Pancake 355). While his explanations are—in some aspects—bordering on the religious, Lace’s are more pragmatic: “[T]hrough all those hard, hard years, I understood now, as I’d lost my self, my dream, my dad, my mom—it was place crept in and filled the lack” (300). Place, then, is imbued with affectivity and in turn conveyed to us readers through textual cues. CONCLUSIONS This paper has attempted to shed light on the discursive mechanisms whereby a community becomes unimagined by means of its relation to waste, as well as the reversal of those same mechanisms in order to showcase the community’s environmental plight. Likewise, it has proven its point by showcasing the narrative techniques used in the novel that undo that waste-ification process. In particular, the text Discursive Constructions of Waste and Slow Violence In Ann Pancake’s Strange as this Weather Has Been 149 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 131-51 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.08 manages to foster reader empathy by appealing to the physical, even corporeal dimension as it describes the damage against the environment in terms of human bodily experiences. In addition, it succeeds in translating the sheer horror of living next to a MTR mining site through the deliberate use of aural cues, as well as through hints to the pervasive impact of slow violence applied to temporal and spatial representation. Furthermore, the novel lends a voice to the unimagined communities of the Appalachian coalfields that is in turn composed by diverse viewpoints and personal experiences that offer a glimpse into the complex interplay of extractive capitalism and internal colonization. The resulting narrative is decidedly heteroglossic insofar as the community, far from being reduced to a monolithic entity that either supports or rejects extractive policies, is allowed room for internal dissent. Pancake’s novel demonstrates that the effects of environmental degradation are not easily reversed, and that the peoples affected by slow violence do not have an easy way out of their often dire situation. 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