Ruin & Rebirth, or, What Do We Do With Our Waste?

Virginia Quarterly Review’s Spring 2011 issue is entitled “Ruin & Rebirth”; however, I wonder if that title is ultimately appropriate. Which is not to say that there isn’t a theme to the issue: it is, in fact, tightly thematically unified—images and ideas echo and build on each other, uniting the collection of essays, poems, and stories (mostly essays, however). Many essays are from contributing VQR editors and there is a palpable sense that the issue was put together by a team conscious both of VQR’s long history (the front of the issue invites you to check out the VQR vault) and of producing a coherent contemporary lit mag.

So what would I call the theme of Spring 2011? Uh, “Garbage & Glory”? “Eating Our Leftovers”? “What Do We Do With Our Waste”?

Okay, not so much. But my point is that only a few of the pieces truly deal with “ruin”—rather, more of the pieces deal with the problem of waste. For instance, the issue opens with a piece by contributing editor Elliott D. Woods on the Coptic Christian community in Cairo, who make a living by collecting, recycling, and selling plastic waste products. Although the community still faces numerous challenges, the piece is surprisingly optimistic: “the zabaleen [Coptic community] have gone from serfs to recycling entrepreneurs. Palaces have risen from the trash, bricks purchased bottle by bottle. There are real-life garbage kings in the village with informal business worth millions of dollars…” It’s also quite awe-inspiring how much recycling this results in: “they claim to turn 80 percent of everything they collect into post-waste, saleable materials.”

The piece that immediately follows this also provides a surprising perspective on a very different species of waste-collectors: Meera Subramanian’s “India’s Vanishing Vultures.” Vultures, as Subramanian points out, are notoriously difficult to love: “vultures are cross-culturally uncharismatic—with their featherless gray heads, their pronounced brows that make for permanent scowls…They vomit when threatened and reek of death.” However, the use of the veterinary painkiller diclofenac (which results in kidney failures in vultures) has decimated India’s once-ubiquitous vulture population; these vultures are now referred to as “functionally extinct.”

And, as disgusting as vultures seem, their function—the quick consumption of fleshy waste, both animal and human—is vital. Without them, feral dog populations are on the rise, sometimes attacking children who live near waste sites.  An entire population of Parsis in Mumbai has relied on vultures for hundreds of years for “sky burial”—the consumption of the dead by vultures. Without vultures, human remains simply sit in the “towers of silence,” rotting away.

Vultures have often been used as a metaphor for ruthless humans, those folks who feed on the mistakes of others. This idea is enthusiastically embraced by one Peter Zalewski, founder of a Miami business called “Condo Vultures,” profiled in Paul Reyes’ essay “Vultures Rising.”  In the wake of the Miami housing crisis—all those condos that were embarrassingly overpriced and now stand empty, a particularly ritzy type of waste—Zalewski, who carefully crunches all available data on the Miami housing market, has positioned himself as the ideal person to connect “vulture investors” with suffering condo developments. Zalewski’s proud embrace of the “vulture” term has earned him a great deal of media attention (he was featured in Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story) but Reyes’ essay suggests that for all Zalewski’s posturing, he might be mostly talk, with few really large deals to his credit.

And this is only a taste, if you will, of all the different kinds of waste and dangerous leftovers that are documented in this VQR. There is an incredible story by J. Malcolm Garcia called “Breathing In,” about the American military’s practice of burning plastic waste in “burn pits” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Garcia profiles two soldiers suffering from an array of mysterious, debilitating respiratory diseases that they believe (credibly) to be the result of exposure to the constant toxic smoke of the burn pits.  When one thinks of the Egyptians who have built an entire economy around reusing plastic bottles, this practice of simply burning plastic waste—and the cost to soldiers and civilians—is infuriating.

But there’s more! There’s a photo essay about Chinese workers recycling computer parts; there are two sets of poetry, inspired by locations that have recently been the nexus of tragedy or decline (Haiti and Detroit); and even more: all of these pieces deserve attention, but there simply isn’t room to do so here. And that perhaps is telling: the issue is long and packed-to-the-gills with literary documentations and reflections on Waste & Ruin. The result, certainly by the time one hits page 200, is ultimately a little overwhelming and depressing, despite the hints of “Rebirth” sprinkled throughout (a blues festival in Detroit; Fabrizio Meijia Madrid’s translated fiction about a first love affair, admittedly one set against the backdrop of economic decline).

I found myself zipping through the first half of the issue with intense interest and pleasure and then struggling through the second half, not because the quality of the material had declined (absolutely not) but because there was simply so much, and each succeeding piece was as dense, illuminating, and often sadder than the one preceding (it says something when one begins to look back on pieces about Garbage Cities and vanishing vultures as comparatively cheerful). I’m not advocating forced joviality, but I wonder if some of the truly excellent pieces here might have had more impact in a shorter, more streamlined issue. 

There’s also always the risk that the documentation of tragedy can result in a sort of fetishization, a kind of “poverty porn.” As Erika Meitner points out in her introduction to her poems about Detroit, “in addition to cars, Detroit’s biggest export is representations of the city itself…Detroit in ruins—but lush, colorful, gorgeous ruins dubbed “ruin porn” by many inside Detroit who feel that outsiders are exploiting the city.” For the most part, VQR avoids the “ruin porn” syndrome by its thoughtfully written reporting that often acknowledges the particular point of view of the reporter and addresses the small moments of human growth amid tragedy or waste. But still, page after page after page of beautifully photographed and described tragedy and waste can make one start to feel a little jaded.

This VQR gives the reader an acute sense of the sheer magnitude of problematic waste that the human race—especially in our plastic-and-digital world—produces. And that reminder is an incredibly valuable one. Yet I feel, in the case of the magazine itself, less might have been more.