Exile and Pride

The environment and notions of environmental justice play a large role in Part 1 of Exile and Pride. Clare examines the impact of the timber and fishing industries on Port Orford, the town in which he grew up and which sits along the Siskiyous National Forest and the Elk River. In documenting the environmental destruction these industries perpetuate, Clare’s “clearcut” essays also show how the industry infiltrates communities like Port Orford, pushing propaganda that encourages people to view trees and fish as unlimited resources, encouraging overconsumption rather than environmental stewardship. 

This environmental degradation impacts marginalized communities intensely, in part because it stems from an imperialist worldview: “The ideas, policies, practices, and history that underlie environmental destruction in this country are European and European-American in origin, regardless of who espouses those ideas now” (67). Here, Clare directly ties the destruction of the environment to Eurocentric ideals, connecting the contemporary lumber and fishing industries to the imperialist theft and destruction of land belonging to Indigenous peoples. In the US, for example, many Indigenous tribes believed in collective stewardship of the land, whereas Western capitalism prioritizes private ownership and the exploitation of natural resources for profit. The negative environmental outcomes of that exploitation are thus inherently intertwined with racism, including the genocide of Indigenous Americans that enabled tribal lands to be resettled by white colonists. The same basic dynamic continues in the modern era, as corporations place profit above the health of the natural world and the safety of marginalized communities. Clare quotes Puck, editor of the Earth First Journal: “From Los Angeles to Detroit to Miami, people of color are always organizing against the corporations who dump and burn toxic wastes in their neighborhoods” (76). The quote further illustrates how the call for environmental justice is intrinsically linked to the call for racial justice. 

Class is also a key factor in environmentalism. Clare argues that poor and working-class communities suffer disproportionately from environmental destruction even when they themselves are forced to participate in the destruction to survive. Clare notes, “At the expense of the environment, loggers, and mill workers, Weyerhaeuser and the other big timber corporations have made billions of dollars of profit in the last decades” (62). Corporations driven to make as much money as possible do so off the backs of the workers who are paid little to fell trees and turn wood into beams and paper products. Part of Clare’s project in Exile and Pride is to reframe communities like Port Orford principally as victims of environmental devastation rather than as drivers of it; environmental reform, Clare argues, must consider how both the presence and absence of industries like logging and fishing impact under-resourced communities.

Each essay in Exile and Pride blends personal narrative, historical analysis, and societal critique. However, Clare’s use of personal narrative is especially significant, as Clare suggests that such storytelling has a unique role to play in activism.

For example, Clare writes about the trauma he endured to advocate for reform and even revolution. Rather than a “domestic” problem, Clare suggests that child abuse of the kind he experienced works to establish and reinforce problematic power structures. However, Clare acknowledges that sharing this experience is a difficult process for him, writing, “My personal history isn’t so easy to step through; the slivers tear my skin; the old familiar pain leaves me guarded and cautious” (111). This vulnerability about sharing his story is itself a kind of narrative, as it testifies to the pain he experienced and thus strengthens his argument about the importance of change. 

Clare’s use of personal narrative also allows for the messiness and ambiguity of human experience in a way that other genres of writing might not. Clare frequently uses rhetorical questions in the personal narrative portions of his essays to demonstrate the complexity not only of his experiences but also of the issues they relate to. When discussing his gender identity and childhood sexual abuse, he writes, “How did his gendered abuse—and in this culture vaginal rape is certainly gendered—reinforce my sense of not being a girl?” (147). He does not directly answer this question, except to rule out one possible response—that his gender identity stems directly and exclusively from that abuse. Otherwise, he leaves the question hanging, inviting further discussion about both child abuse and its relationship to misogyny. 

Ultimately, Clare’s use of personal narrative allows him to engage with the connections between the personal and political. Of his abuse, for example, he writes:

I get afraid that the homophobes are right, that maybe in truth I live as a transgender butch because he raped me, my mother neglected me. I lose the bigger picture, forget that woven through and around the private and intimate is always the public and political (149).

Just like Exile and Pride is a blend of personal narrative and political activism, so is Clare’s gender identity. It is personal to him, but it is also political and shaped by the world in which he lives. In this way, his writing mirrors the world around him, which he depicts and critiques on the page.