The White Deer

Take a scrap of abandoned land, but one that reshaped American capitalism. It’s a spit of land in Buffalo, NY that pioneered the futures market. It housed grain elevators, in the city that once had more grain elevators than anywhere else in the world. It also inspired modernists like Gropius and Corbusier, who loved the forms of the grain elevators but didn’t understand the functions. The land too was stolen from the Haudenosaunee who have recently reclaimed a small sliver of it, tearing down a grain elevator to build a casino. This is the journey of my essay “The White Deer.” It also takes us into larger questions of American democracy, which was a poor copy of the Haudenosaunee’s....

The essay is published as part of artist Marlene McCarty’s “Into the Weeds,” mural-sized drawings weaving together the mess of this moment: toxic capitalism and modernism, patriarchy and the white Western canon with plants and growths, tumors and decay. The drawings are claustrophobic and enthralling. On the site of the grain elevators and this stolen land, Marlene is building a permanent toxic garden of the plant species in her work...

Here’s the essay’s start:

The deer stares at me desultory and bored. It’s framed by two bulldozers running to rust, and the animal is stark white – like a ghost, like a vision. It is neither ghost nor vision but a genetic mutation. The buck’s eyes are black and direct, and it looks at me as if I do not matter, as if the bulldozers do not matter, as if it is not of this place, this moment, this time.

We stand in a canyon of concrete. It is late in the day. Hulking grain elevators rise around us and cast tall shadows on the grass and scrub. White deer are inbred. They occur on islands. And, this place is an island of sorts, a bend in a river cut off by fences and rail lines and a six-lane highway. Snow is on the ground, though it is summer and all is green, and the snow is not snow. It is the seeds of cottonwood trees blowing in drifts.

This place, this island that is not an island with the snow that is not the snow with the deer that stares as if it is not of this place asks questions of similes, of language. Of what I see and what has been.

The grain elevators with their concrete cylinders make me think of fortresses and castles. To write about these buildings is inevitably to enter a land of simile, of “akin.” But, “akin” is not kinship. Akin is to say they are like something but not actually that thing. It is to open a gap in meaning.