Presence: A Novel
By Brenda Iijima
The University of Georgia Press | 2024 | 402 pages
Remember the first time you took acid and you could sense the trees were talking to you and the rocks were somehow singing? Remember trying to explain that to others? “Oh wow, we’re all connected. We’re one with everything!”
That’s what it’s like to read the debut novel Presence by poet Brenda Iijima, only this time, it’s supported by science. And while there are “simultaneities of time, space, meaning, and presence” between multiple and interlocking points of view, I hesitate to label this ambitious work speculative fiction because no single genre could contain it. Without dropping a thread, Iijima weaves together gender theory, horticultural practices, synesthesia, biogeography, colonialism, geomicrobiology, cultural annihilation, and so much more with precise and lyrical language.
Presence takes place mostly on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, created in 1939 for a World’s Fair that was soon leveled for a WWII U.S. Navy base, since abandoned. In present time, performance artists arrive at this post-industrial landscape to connect with the Earth as part of a disaster tour. Dressed in white hazmat suits, the six performers use intuitive movement to sense the island and find the places of disturbance in the ecosystem. As Mia, one of the performers, says, “Hyperawareness allows for communication with life-forms other than human.” Embodiments with the Earth abound. Laura experiences being a tree as she feels “the weight and velocity of rain as it pinged my leaves.” The project aims to peel away layers of the past, unaware that the future is unnervingly close by. The performers’ intense concentration opens the portal between the centuries, and one by one they realize they are not alone. As one performer says, “I felt out-of-body, or to be more specific, in a body with others.” The “others” are humans in the future, who are as surprised as anyone. At first, they think the translucent presences of the performers are a stress response, but soon come to understand that “we are out of time but have somehow corresponded with their reality.”
This dwindling band of future humans live in a museum basement left over from the World’s Fair from “eras ago,” and spend their days salvaging debris from capitalism’s brief reign and living on amoeba smoothies. They have poor cognitive skills, so they keep a first-person plural ledger to serve as a collective memory. “Chronology is obsolete,” they write as they struggle to live only in the present, but they are aware of the climate catastrophes that have brought them to this state. Beginning with the ill-advised idea to burn fossil fuels, the tipping point came with the enormous amount of energy used for cloud-based computing. As the Earth’s temperature rose, profit-oriented climate solutions created their own problems, causing governments and infrastructure to collapse. Capitalistic hegemony was replaced with “a collaborative plan of coexisting with mutual aid,” but it was too late. In this depopulated future, babies are unformed, and genitalia is nonconforming due to toxins in the environment. Vocal folds are atrophied so everyone must speak in whispers, when they speak at all. Some have opted to become surgically conjoined with another for greater quality of life. The only remaining animals are spiders, and the plants are mostly mold. The humans produce oxygen for their living space by cultivating plankton, replicating the way it was first produced on the planet. The amazing thing is, “Joy had not been extinguished.” Even as they are touched by death, or “worlding” as they call it, their response is to elicit more joy with dancing and fondling.
Much of the last third of the book involves the real-life Anthropocene Working Group (AWG). To determine if there was a universal point in time when the planet started to radically change due to human influence, the organization sent scientists to various ecosystems around the world to collect core samples. Their mission was to find evidence of the same man-made particulates, radioactivity, pollutants, and toxins in all the core samples in the same geological layer, in order to call our era the Anthropocene. The controversial decision of the AWG was released soon after the book’s publication. Iijima does not track the real-life scientists but creates her own characters and sends them off to collect samples in bogs, caves, and frigid tundra. Most wear white hazmat suits like the performers, but instead of intuiting the damage to the Earth with their bodies, they use scientific instruments and data. And yet, their bodies have strong physical reactions as they unearth generational horrors; others experience ecstasy when they encounter Earth before humans. The intensity of their work mirrors the experiences of the performers. Two of the scientists go so far as to discuss how to include personal observations on pain and grief in their papers.
Subplots branch out like the roots of a tree throughout Presence as time and place continue to shift. One moment Iijima brings us to the original Eden of Jericho not long after the Ice Age, as humans transition from hunter-gatherers to agriculture, and the next we are back at Treasure Island on the heels of WWII. The future humans have detected overwhelming grief on the beach and find two gay Navy personnel near death after having escaped the military psychiatric institution where they were forced to undergo conversion therapy. The sailors were still reeling from the physical effects suffered after their warship had been used to test the effects of a nuclear blast. The future humans, dressed as flowers, encircle the two men and create healing energy through movement, repeating the same flower dance that the hunter-gatherers performed in Jericho.
A working knowledge of French feminist theory and paleoecology might add another layer to the experience of reading Presence, but it’s not necessary. For those who want to learn more about the science, history, and philosophy that Iijima draws on, there is an extensive bibliography in the back. The book can be challenging, but so is restoring the world before it is too late, a job that requires patience, presence, and determination.
As bleak as the future seems, Iijima suggests that there are multiple futures, and that we are not necessarily doomed to the one in Presence, where humans live in ruins. Despite the incriminating evidence, Iijima still believes in our species. “Not all futures arrive at their destination,” as someone writes in the ledger that the future humans keep. Transformation is possible: “Every effort of collective pushback is a sea change.”
So go ahead, swallow the book and expand your mind.
JoeAnn Hart is the author of Arroyo Circle, a novel of reclamation in a time of loss, forthcoming by Green Writers Press in October 2024. Her other work includes the fiction collection Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival and the memoir Stamford ’76. Her writing often explores the relationship between humans, their environments, and the more-than-human world.
Header image generated by AI, courtesy Adobe Photoshop.
