Nightboat Books | 2021 | 352 pages
Plastic is a material with a short past and a never-ending future. Poet and essayist Allison Cobb learned this when a polyethylene car part appeared in a corner of her yard and she could find no way to reuse or recycle it. It became an allegorical albatross around her neck and also the motivation to write about the global glut of plastic, as she explains in her 2021 book, Plastic: An Autobiography, from Nightboat Books.
Tracing the history of plastic production is the work of the book’s first section, and origin stories abound here. Examining the broken car part, Cobb offers the root of the word fender, which referred originally to a piece of rope that kept the hull of a ship safe from crashing into a wharf. Before we learn of the often deadly plastic shards that line the digestive tracks of albatross chicks, there appears the etymology for specimen, from the Latin verb specere, to look at. There are etymologies for prophet and poet, hope and mercy, loss, resonance, fugue, decay. As a collector of fragments and parser of entwined histories, Cobb seeks to unravel the roots of how plastics first came to be. She also wants to understand how they extend to everything else and how they will last into the future. The world, as Cobb writes, is “kaleidoscopically interwoven, not one world, many, threaded through one another….” Elsewhere, she acknowledges, “The plastic will outlast the bones, the sand, this writing.”
Some of the stories Cobb presents may not seem connected to plastics at first. One story concerns 19th-century teenage chemist William Perkin, who associated his accidental discovery of a synthetic dye with a classical past by naming the color Tyrian purple for a city in ancient Phoenicia. Later, however, Perkin changed his product’s name. Cobb explains that chemists of the time were giving their synthetic creations “political titles to link them to the moment and make them popular: Magenta for the recent French victory at that town, and Bismarck brown, which came in a variety of shades based on macho Prussian moods….” Lab-produced Tyrian purple became mauve to associate it with the high fashion of French Empress Eugénie. Cobb concludes that, “Perkin had found the first product with global demand to be made from coal tar. His discovery opened the way for drugs, fertilizers, and plastics―nearly every product now created for the global economy.”
Moving from industrial chemistry to nuclear physics to plastics themselves, Cobb brings together a wide and sometimes surprising set of historical figures whose work led, eventually, to an endless supply of new products. Fed by insatiable demand for novelty, convenience, and supposedly easy disposability, plastic became ubiquitous.
With dismay, Cobb recognizes herself as part of this larger system. About her day job as a wordsmith for an environmental organization, she reckons, “The hope I give is exact: That privileged people can stem the tide of damage, waste, and plunder embedded in our global economy without changing the terms of the system that benefits them, and me also.” Having acknowledged her complicity, she returns to the fender. “Me and this car part, its dirty carapace curled around me. There is no gap between us, no other ‘out there’ to access, by microscope or imaginative vision. Here we are. Together. And the industrial chemicals we share, the resonating molecules of our bodies.”
Turning from material realities to ethics, Cobb offers a further realization. “I’d been reading technical and historical texts: histories of plastic, of the atomic and thermonuclear bombs, World War II airplanes, European canonical writings. White men dominated these accounts. The histories entangled other lives, of course, but they disappeared in the texts, erased. I had repeated that erasure.” What follows is an attempt at counter-narrative by way of a lexicon of connection. Throughout this second section, Cobb breaks down the meanings of the words complicit, concern, care, haunt and hauntology, and authority. She quotes physicist Karen Barad. “The basic unit of existence is not the individual, but the relationship…. All that exists is merging and overlapping phenomena.”
Reoriented and equipped with new vocabulary, Cobb begins the final part of the book, which is quite distinct, almost like a book in and of itself. Its methodologies recall Elizabeth Rush’s 2018 book Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore as Cobb offers up voices from the marginalized communities that have benefited the least and suffered the most from the manufacture of plastics along the Gulf of Mexico and from nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands. Drawing on the thinking of her friend, artist and third-generation survivor of the atomic bomb Yukiyo Kawano, as well as Samuel Oliner, a sociologist and Holocaust survivor, Cobb asserts that, “Apology is a long-term commitment, an ongoing relationship.” An apology, she concludes, “requires a lifetime commitment.”
Ultimately, Cobb is left doubting herself. She notes Unangax̂ scholar Eve Tuck’s impassioned call to end “damage-centered inquiry” and to highlight, instead, what communities experiencing the brunt of environmental destruction and lasting health effects want for themselves. Cobb worries that perhaps she’s been too intent on histories and resulting inequities. “I fear that I have repeated the damage, bearing witness to the pain of these communities. I have not stepped out of grief and caught up to joy.” She pushes back against her own despair, though, by considering the way this book has opened up a research and writing practice grounded in love, hope, friendship, and action on behalf of a polluted and unjust world.
In the end, Plastic: An Autobiography is both admirably searching and aptly overwhelming as Cobb maps the far reaches of our entanglements to plastics. The book’s wide historical and geographic scope encompasses the sweeping damage plastic has done and is doing to our planet, its ecosystems, and its creatures. It is only together, Cobb asserts, with new ways of relating to our environment and to each other, that we can imagine a different kind of future. Those transformations, she suggests throughout, need to begin at the roots.
Elissa Favero teaches at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle and writes about art, architecture, landscape, and books. She is currently studying creative nonfiction at the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program.
Header photo by Eak K, courtesy Pixabay.
