Revising “The Waste Land”: Black Antipastoral and the End of the World
Kea Tawana, The Ark
In what I am calling the weather, anti-blackness is pervasive as climate. The weather necessitates changeability and improvisation; it is the atmospheric condition of time and place; it produces new ecologies. —Christina Sharpe, The Weather
and
as I watch your arm/your brown arm
just before it moves
I know
all things are dear
that disappear
all things are dear
that disappear
—June Jordan, “On a New Year’s Eve”
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As of yet, there is no general consensus regarding the finer details of Kea Tawana’s biography. According to an obituary published in the Times Herald-Record immediately following her death on August 4, 2016, she was “born on a … reservation [and] ran away from home at the age of 12.” But by Tawana’s own account of things, the artist was born in Japan in 1935, moved to the United States with her father and two brothers when she was twelve years old (her mother and sister, Tawana claimed, were killed by an air raid during World War II), and eventually settled in Newark, New Jersey. It was there, almost five decades later, that Kea Tawana would assemble her Ark.
By all accounts, the Ark project was a wonder to behold in person. The vessel stood over three stories high, spanned eighty-six feet in length, and was constructed from the ground up with wood and scrap metal Tawana gathered, without assistance, from various abandoned locales throughout the city. In his 1987 profile of Tawana’s Ark, Chip Brown of the Chicago Tribune writes:
The ark is an elegy to the lost communities of the Central Ward. Everything but tar paper and nails has been scavenged from the ruins of her environment. She has reused the lumber of demolished homes and bars, columns of churches, pieces of orphanages and synagogues … She figured an at-sea food storage
