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Professor Banting
ENGL 426
30 November 2022
Bearing Witness in Albatross and the World Beyond
In the modern, anthropocentric view of our Earth, the human being is often regarded as the principal subject of the world, being the only being on it with their own proper voice and an ability to “express” themselves; because society often views the flora and fauna inhabiting the world around them as lesser and lacking in intelligence, it, and by extension we, are often blind to the truth of the world, preferring to stay cooped up in our minds. Locking ourselves away from the rest of the world, we essentially create for ourselves personal prisons; we forget that we are the human animal, thinking ourselves a part of some arbitrary higher classification, and we lose our sense of interconnectedness and our ability to conceptualize our trans-corporeality. Even if we are the only lifeforms with our human conception of language, as sets of grammatical rules, syntax, and spelling, we are not the only ones who use a form of language, and we must not let ourselves remain so narrow-minded as to think that we are the only ones who can “speak”, as it were. Given how hard those ideas may be for some to conceptualize, it might be even harder for many of us to conceptualize how we might begin to re-embrace our forgotten natures — but the answer, if we are willing to acknowledge it, is clear, especially once we look past the veil of human exceptionalism we so often parade. We must be willing to bear witness. This is not the same kind of “witness” that one may read about on paper, as mere definition in some dictionary, as words on a page with an apparently-concrete definition; the truth of the world is far more complex than can ever be quantified despite what some may believe, and the act of physical sight alone is not enough to act as a true witness when it comes to a topic so complex. It is a full-bodied presence; it is the willingness and the ability to be present and in attendance in one’s life and the lives of other lifeforms, to connect with one’s subjects and to, in a way, achieve a “oneness” with them — to understand them, to know them deeply, even to grieve with them; to feel every complex emotion and bond that we so often pretend non-humans are incapable of feeling or knowing. In essence, it is to enter a sort of fellowship with one’s more-than-human (i.e. animal) others. One prime example of the power of paying attention comes in the form of the movie Albatross, wherein artist and filmmaker Chris Jordan documents the isolate lives of the albatrosses who inhabit the Midway Island in the Pacific Ocean. Jordan follows the birds from their births until the time of their “maiden voyage”, when they first depart for the sea at where they will stay for many years, never touching solid ground again until such a time comes that they return home to mate and carry on their legacies; many of their lives, however, are tragically cut short, some of them long before they even come close to making an attempt at their first flight — and far from being a result of “natural” causes, the culprit behind the deaths is something far more sinister. This culprit is one which at its roots is a result of lack of understanding and a refusal to reach out, make connection and establish understanding, and remedy. In this paper, I will aim to analyze the complex function of witnessing and of bearing witness both within the movie Albatross as well as beyond it, how that complex function manifests, and what exactly bearing witness means in the context of the film and for the field of multispecies studies — as well as what exactly it can do for the reparation of the bonds between humanity and the natural world from which we came.
The albatrosses in Albatross, as we immediately learn, are in crisis. The severing of the relationships between human society and nature have made many of us careless, particularly big industries and the culture of mass consumption they foster. As a result, nature is suffering. In this case, we see it manifest physically within the albatrosses; in various montage sequences over the course of the film, we are shown in vivid detail what exactly our impact on the albatrosses has been, and it is certainly not positive; dead and dying young albatrosses lay strewn about the island, in their nests or later on the beaches, killed by the buildup of plastics humanity has left behind in our efforts to separate ourselves from what is supposedly a primitive, “bestial” world. Chris Jordan is, in being bodily present with the albatrosses of Midway Island, taking the first step towards true witness-hood; but it is the connection he forms with the birds over the course of his study, the very real emotions he feels when he sees them and especially when he has to deal with the grief of losing them, that truly allow him to function as an effective witness, and in turn an effective messenger. Jordan’s film is largely taped on the same level as the birds, offering us an insight into their lives that centers their existences rather than the human perspective, showing us their mating rituals alongside their dead, their nests in droves along the cliffside juxtaposed with the emptiness left when they depart. In doing this he is “[c]entering the animal as a subject of witnessing”, which “allows us to see with particular clarity the importance of witnessing and the role of emotion in witnessing” (Gillespie 574) while taking great care to avoid the anthropocentrism that is so prevalent when we speak of or attempt to show the complexities of non-human life. This deep bond he forms with the albatrosses he is studying is an example of the multispecies intimacy that can only come into fruition through a willingness to pay attention, and it is a particular example of the more-than-human solidarity that can then translate into multispecies justice, Through his film, he brings the plight of the albatrosses to a human audience, translating their language and the language of their suffering that is all too often voiceless in human society into one that mankind can understand, making a solid effort at truly bringing about a form of multispecies justice.
When one truly deigns to make the effort, it is rather easy to become witness; that Jordan’s project began as a sort of detached photography project but spiralled into something far more meaningful is proof of that. The natural state of humanity, having arisen from it, is interconnectedness with our Earth; and it only makes sense that Jordan’s being present naturally led him to such a conclusion. While the big acts, like Albatross, are crucial to help open the collective public’s eyes, they are not the end-all-be-all of witness-bearing and certainly not the only thing one can do in order to effectively engage with our multispecies world. Sometimes, it is as simple as recognizing the lives of the animals who surround us, or even those who we surround ourselves with, like our companion animals; and given the bonds we so often form with them, doing so in any form becomes almost a necessity for us to properly understand ourselves. A paper published by Leslie Irvine and Laurent Cilia, two researchers at the University of Colorado, explains that the view of pets as members of the family is a recent one, at least in our contemporary culture. We hold a great deal of power over our pets, and oftentimes their individuality as lifeforms with their own forms of personhoods and thoughts are effectively erased as they are often seen as objects: “We have the power to decide the fate of our pets unlike any power we have over the human members of our families.” (2). The paper goes on to explain the preconceived essentialist idea of the family unit, also known as the “nuclear family”; If we were to adopt the approach of witness, we could start to foster better relationships with our companion animals, and by extension relationships with those other lifeforms who cohabitate this Earth alongside us, that are less about ownership and domination as has been taught by the colonial dogma and more about mutual trust and love. From there, we might even begin to recognize our interconnectedness on a wider scale, providing an inroad for us to begin to repair the broken relationship we currently have with our Earth, via shifting away from the idea of the human as the dominant and thus endlessly objectively correct point of view. We might even extend our sense of multispecies empathy to the “underbelly” of the world, towards the dark side of nature and more importantly the consequences we have wrought upon it. One such example of this dark side lies — often quite literally — in the streets of the very cities and towns we call home — roadkill. Roadkill is often dismissed as an unfortunate but necessary byproduct of human civilization, and grief or even mere acknowledgement of loss-of-life goes unacknowledged — as Josephine Taylor writes, "The corpse is perceived through peripheral vision within the confines of the automobile. The very nature of the term “roadkill” connotes natural inevitability, something and some life which is not considered worthy of grief." (Taylor 76). Her paper further explores humanity’s reaction to the sight of roadkill, specifically those responses of disgust, grief, and pain; and she goes on to argue that these reactions are “important modalities in the act of mourning the unmourned”, that they might serve to change the “perception of roadkill as merely collateral damage” (73) into an acknowledgement of the animal’s effective personhood. In this way, the “strictly-human” experience is decentered, and individual animals are capable of transforming, in the mind of the observer, from unliving objects in which "there is often an absence of recognition of a loss of life" (76) to deceased non-human people, with lives as complex and varied as our own.
In turn, this allows us to reach a higher understanding of the way the world functions, which is a synchronicity of all its parts rather than a leadership position. In Albatross, this sort of darker aspect (that is to say, the aspect of death and the effects it has on those left behind in these multispecies relationships) manifests in the intentional gathering of images and videos of the dead young albatrosses, and the assembly of them into a sort of memorial service that mimics those we see in our human society; the montages are intended to invoke a feeling in the audience that is similar to the one Taylor describes, one of affective solidarity — these collections of photos and clips are “pleas to bear witness to the violence and suffering endured by the non-human, inviting the question of “What about the pain of others? Or how am I affected by pain when I am faced with another’s pain?” (Taylor, pp. 85-86). The film crew, too, experiences this firsthand rather than second-hand, as we see their creation of a funeral mandala for a dead albatross chick, and thus how they grieve for the unfortunate loss of life at the hands of the fallout of human consumption — accumulation of plastics that the adult albatrosses mistake for food, and then both eat themselves and feed to their young. In grieving for those who are often ungrieved, through setting up and attending this sort of funerary rite, they make good on the unspoken promise of attentiveness they have tied themselves to through their presence on the atoll. Like the roadkill of Steve Baker’s photographs, through their employment of looking and “addressing and pausing one’s attentive capacities to these animal remains” (Taylor 85) the Albatross filmmakers “[render] visible a life and death on the precipice of disappearance.”. This sort of approach, of recognizing and paying active attention to the lives of non-human others in our daily existences, in places which might otherwise be considered banal and mundane and even in those aspects of life that aren’t so glamorous, is one that can lead to an increased recognition of interconnectedness (and trans-corporeality) and its importance. These sorts of witness-bonds come to resemble the trust shown between the albatrosses and Jordan as a dichotomy involved in a non-transactional but instead a mutual relationship of bearing witness — it is not a game of give and take, but instead a game of sharing, where both sides learn to accommodate one another and their respective lives; it is not always necessarily a friendship, in the strictest sense, but rather a mutual respect shared between two groups of lifeforms, who can truly recognize that both of them share a status as kin of the wild.
Of course, it is important to recognize that bearing witness/being a witness is, for how simple it is to start to put into motion, a complex topic, and that complexity is not to be downplayed. The act of being present in the lives of others, especially non-human others, is not always an inherently motivating or uplifting practice; as seen in Albatross, and mentioned at various points within this paper proper, the act of grief, although a form of love, is often one that is capable of bringing about feelings of intense despair in all its participants, rather than providing a source of motivation, especially when it comes to the aspect of climate justice. An interview with Chris Jordan published in the Honolulu magazine, in partnership with the Honolulu Museum of Art, too, offers some further insight into what exactly the filmmaker felt while working on the project — he describes his first few trips to Midway Atoll as “just dark experiences of death and horror and god-awful birds filled with plastic”, and it wasn’t until later on that he was able to look past the despair and horror and became able to see the beauty of the birds and their island, “as kind of the antidote to the horror.”. In the face of overwhelming odds, we must ensure we do not fall to despair, or if we do, we must find a way to see the beauty through the horror just as Jordan has through Albatross; we may grieve, as is our duty as witnesses, but focusing too much on single individuals is inconducive to properly tackling the issues at play. It is just as much our duty to grieve the fallen as it is to celebrate those who lived, and who continue to survive in a world where it seems the most vocal perspective has forgotten the ties that bind it to the rest of creation.
Works Cited
Fieuw, Walter, et al. “Towards a More-than-Human Approach to Smart and Sustainable Urban Development: Designing for Multispecies Justice.” Sustainability, vol. 14, no. 2, 2022, p. 948., https://doi.org/10.3390/su14020948.
Gillespie, Kathryn. “Witnessing Animal Others: Bearing Witness, Grief, and the Political Function of Emotion.” Hypatia, vol. 31, no. 3, 2016, pp. 572–588., https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12261.
Hancock, Travis. “How Albatrosses Taught Photographer Chris Jordan How to Grieve.” Honolulu Magazine, 13 Oct. 2020, https://www.honolulumagazine.com/how-albatrosses-taught-photographer-chris-jordan-how-to-grieve/.
Irvine, Leslie, and Laurent Cilia. “More‐than‐Human Families: Pets, People, and Practices in Multispecies Households.” Sociology Compass, vol. 11, no. 2, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12455.
Jordan, Chris, et al. Albatross, https://www.albatrossthefilm.com/.
Taylor, Josephine. “Roadkill Encounters and Affective Solidarity: Exploring Multispecies Fellowship through Disgust, Pain, and Mourning.” Sociální Studia / Social Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 2022, https://doi.org/10.5817/soc2022-29553
Tschakert, Petra. “More-than-Human Solidarity and Multispecies Justice in the Climate Crisis.” Environmental Politics, vol. 31, no. 2, 2020, pp. 277–296., https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2020.1853448