October 4, 2014 - 09:23
The first time I heard the term “reclamation”, I was sitting in my Environmental Science class, learning it in the context of mining. Under the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, mining companies were required to restore the post-mine lands back to a naturally or economically usable purpose. My teacher, while optimistic about the results, ultimately lamented the notion that the land would never truly be restored to its original, pre-mined landscape. The land was scarred, he told us, and consequences of mining were irreversible. The idea has stuck with me since then, this thought that once something has undergone some change—whether negative or not—it remains impossible to convert it back to its first state.
In the Oxford English Dictionary, the oldest use of “reclamation” was in the last 14th century; it was a term used in falconry, wherein people would “recall or bring back a hawk”. By the mid 15th century, this definition became more generally as “the recalling or bringing back of a person”. Much later on, in the 20th century, it describes the “reassertion of a relationship or connection with something; a re-evaluation of a term, concept, etc., in a more positive or suitable way” (Oxford English Dictionary). It was used then to discuss reclaiming the domestic heritage of women in 1981.
Across the board, marginalized people have taken slurs and transformed them into their own insider lexicon. This process of adapting a word to subvert pejorative connotations is widely understood as reclamation. The prefix re- in the word suggests a going back to something, yet before slurs were used as derogatory insults, they were often used to describe wholly different things. Cripple, for instance, comes from a word meaning “one who creeps”; are disabled people trying to claim that definition for themselves? I don’t think so.
There’s another way to think about this new meaning of reclamation. For example, there’s a river in Spain called the Rio Tinto—the name, translating to “Red River”, is derived from the river’s vibrantly red hues. Near this site, the land was mined for various precious metals, and since the 18th century, acid mine drainage inevitably caused the whole river to turn deep red. As another result, the entire river is toxic; at a pH of 2, the river is acidic enough to burn through boots and cause real damage.
The entire landscape along the river is virtually impossible to reclaim, according to strict definition. However, this toxic dump provides a home for specimens that would otherwise have no place to live. Acid splashes onto the edges, conglomerating together to create new types of rock. Bacteria line the bottom of the river, realizing that this extremely acidic condition is the only type of environment in which they can thrive. This seems more analogous to the so-called reclamation of slurs: both are changed from a toxic setting and, while not reverting back to start, are instead evolved into spaces of community. Community for bacteria, community for queers and crips.
In Eli Clare’s memoir, Exile & Pride, however, he describes the reclamation of words, identities, and “brash stories about reclaiming our bodies and changing the world” (Clare 160). The memoir traces through his life as an abused girl, a welcomed dyke, and a genderqueer trans man with cerebral palsy. Clare’s home is what is gone, but in reclaiming it, he must also reclaim the abused and tortured girl. In leaving his hometown of Port Orford, Clare was “able to shake [his] perpetrators’ power away” with distance and support (Clare 36). Original reclamation—taking back that lost aspect of oneself and going back to who one is originally—would be becoming that assaulted girl again. Instead, he kept that child in him and grew—not from her, per se, but with her there inside him, letting it help transform him into the person he became. And what of his cerebral palsy? There is no way to go back to a time before his CP, because there never was one. There is no “original Eli” without it, and therefore cannot technically, literally reclaim that aspect of himself.
Clare goes instead with the evolved 20th century definition. As a dyke he is queer, but as time goes by, even that label fails to suit him. He later rethinks the queerness in regards to his already present queerness, and reasserts himself as a genderqueer man, in a positive light. He establishes good relations with his CP.
These all point to the notion that one cannot return back to an original state, for there is no static original state in the first place. Otherwise, one denies the dynamic nature of the world. Eli Clare describes that “a break becomes healed, [becomes] a bone once fractured, now whole, but different from the bone never broken” (Clare 153). Ironically, this backwards motion is actually a means of evolution, of taking ugly things and making something new and welcoming out of them. Reclamation may be the action of moving back, but under this guise it moves forward.