November 6, 2015 - 01:33
In Ruth Ozeki’s book “All Over Creation”, it is clear to see the identity and environment closely related to each other. The environment here means not only physical environment but also social environment and, which both help shaping people’s identity. The complexity of the relationship between people’s identity and environment is revealed in the book.
The identities of the characters in the book are affected by the social environment while the “environment” receive people’s care or influenced by them at the same time. The social environment here includes the people that have close relationship to the characters—genetically and physically. The main character, Yummy’s identity was shaped by the social environment especially her parents, who has genetic relationship with her. Her physical identity which is looks differently from the normal whites is shaped by her Japanese mother, and her characteristic was influenced by her father somehow. Her father was stubborn that he let her daughter run away and did not try to find her or contact with her. When someone asking about her daughter he answered without hesitant: “I have no daughter” (29). This straightforward characteristic definitely appeared on Yummy that she ran away from home and did not come back in twenty years and in the letters she wrote back to her parents, she said ruthlessly: “I hate you” (40). This identity is reflected on Yummy’s son Phoenix too. “The look in my son’s eye was cool and bitter. ‘That’s what you say about all of our fathers.’ He gave the dirt one last vicious kick” (232), which clearly shows the straightforward of Phoenix. This is how Yummy’s family environment influenced her identity and her identity continually affected her son.
For the physically social environment, Cassie, Yummy’s friend, was influenced by people Yummy’s son, Poo. They have no genetic relationship but Poo somehow refreshes Cassie’s identity. “When she had him along, the world looked different, and she liked the way she saw things she'd never seen before […] But she noticed other things, too -- the way she herself felt acutely visible with the baby in her arms, and the way some people's faces lit up when they saw a child. His warm weight was like living ballast, thrumming with energy, giving her substance. Folks were drawn to that” (130). Cassie found her identity started to change while she was holding a baby, especially a different race baby from herself. She feels the attention from others and feels the warmth brought by the child. At the same time, the child, as a social environment to Cassie, was looked after by Cassie and Cassie was taking care of him. This is a kind of reciprocal relationship between identity and environment.
An important character in this book, Momoko, shows us the intersection of identity and the ‘social’ and ‘natural’ environments. Momoko is from Japan, so she brought a lot of exotic seeds with her. She grew those seeds, which are risen well by her and spread them to other farmers, which is her identity influencing both the nature environment and the social environment. At the same time, this seeds are the nature environment that shaped her identity—she loves the plants and seem them as her children. She felt extremely sad when she forgot the names of the seeds; even it seems like forgetting the names of seeds is more serious than forgetting her daughter’s name. I think she was always trying to use the seeds as a reminder of her Japanese identity. Characters’ identities were shaped by the nature environment because people are always an apart of nature and they always live on nature; at the same time, nature is definitely influenced by human because human are trying to change it.
There is a paragraph in the book that spoken by Geek explains to us the relationship between people and nature. Geek is an activist of in the Seeds of Resistance—a group of people who tried to to persuade farmers to change methods of “training” the plants, and he explained how he understands “seeds” by comparing seeds as software:
“And all the other plants, too. Each one is a complex software program, and so are we. And the really wild part is, we're all interactive! We can all learn […] The pea trains the farmer, and the farmer trains the pea. The pea has learned to taste sweet, so that the farmer will plant more of it. Vegetables are like a genetic map, unfolding through time, tracing the paths that human appetites and desires have taken throughout our evolution." (124)
People in the country plant potatoes or produce other foods and they can be facing some problems such as pests and disease. That is how the plants “train” the farmers. When the farmers are using pesticides and other medicine to cut off the disease or try to produce more, they are “training” the plants. However, then, people found out the danger of using those medicine, and this is how plants “train” people again. When plants training the farmers, they are making people think and change people’s idea or even change their life; when farmers training plants, the growth of that specific plants can be transformed and even the larger environment can be changed. Thus, we can see the identity of people—including farmers and activists, are shaped or influenced by the nature.
It is interesting to see how the identity and environment interact each other in this book by Ruth Ozeki. The relationship among identity and social and physical environment is much more complicated than we can imagine.
Draft last week: /oneworld/changing-our-story-2015/interaction-between-identity-and-environment