Jessica Gaitán Johannesson

The Nerves and Their Endings: Essays on crisis and response

The climate crisis is nerve-racking. How can we possibly hold – in our bodies, relationships and politics – the loss of what might count as a conceivable future, the prospect of unrelenting waves of disaster, the disappearance of so many ecological niches? And how to respond?

Jessica Gaitán Johannesson’s collection of essays offers an expansive constellation of responses. Its scope includes the dilemmas of international travel for migrants with family in the global south; how her experience of an eating disorder illuminates the complexity of agency; and intimate and public moments of racism and failed empathy.

“Birth Strike: A Story in Arguments” outlines how a movement intended to encourage urgent government action and to open a space for those too afraid to become parents due to environmental collapse, is derailed by assumptions that obscure inequality and reinforce judgements around fertility. In “Freak Aguacero”, she returns to her birth country of Colombia and discusses the changing climate with her extended family. Here, and elsewhere in the book, she demolishes the myth that “we are all in it together”. Under colonialism and capitalism, crisis is also distributed unequally.

What these essays have in common is a sense of the “body as a measuring tool for planetary harm”, though this is not at all a clinical or individualistic approach. Bodies, she reminds us, reach beyond their apparent limits. “It is the job of nerve endings to pick up harm in the periphery”, which leads her to the critical question: “In such a knotted system / what counts as a periphery?” And if we can feel something happening outside our own bodies, “What is to say there is no end / To what can possibly be felt?”

Gaitán Johannesson has described these essays as “attempts at asking new questions”. Her writing resists empty answers, striving instead for ethical rigour and nuance. This is a poetic, bodily thinking. Short, fragmented lyric poems appear between each essay, intensifying and expanding the connections. She also refuses to let herself – and, by implication, us – off the hook. It’s the kind of writing that is as bracing as it is sobering.

In the book’s final prose essay, “On whether or not to throw in whose towel: a personal encyclopedia of hope”, Gaitán Johannesson writes, “whenever I am tempted to say that it’s too late to respond, I force myself to be specific... Too late for what?”. Both extremes, “denial and nihilism”, are “easy, and neither hold the uncertainty of survival, of life”.

Scribe Publications, 192pp, $24.99