Cancer Alley

Synopsis

Our newest collaboration with renowned poet Lucy English combines footage shot on location In Cancer Alley with images of nature, especially cypress groves, which are as fragile and as threatened as the Cancer Alley communities. The visuals are accompanied by a poem about what it is like to live in the small towns near the Mississippi River, between East Baton Rouge and New Orleans, which are now dominated by more than 200 chemical plants and oil refineries, sometimes literally located in residents’ back yards. The cypress trees can live for more than 1000 years, if they are not chopped down for cypress mulch or their habitat destroyed. Human lifespans are much shorter, but we may not survive as a species unless we stop living as if all that matters is today, and learn to think on the time scale of the trees.

Text of the poem by Lucy English:

CANCER ALLEY

When we came here in nineteen fifty two
we walked from the train. The plantation corn
swayed in the fields like on the road to paradise.
Our tin roof was rusty but we had a good meal each day.
The night air smelled of dry grass and sugar.
A sky of stars wheeled over my porch.

I miss the gravel roads and those quiet nights.
I don’t sit outside now. The chemicals fall
in yellow raindrops. I can’t hear the cicadas
over the hum of the machines.
The water tastes like oil. The air burns my throat.
Yesterday morning in my yard were three dead crows.

There’s thirty petrochemical plants outside St Gabriel.
One hundred and fifty between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
If we stay we get sick, if we move away, die.
My mother, sister, brother all died of cancer.
The chemical chloroprene makes fancy wetsuits,
but on bad days I put my head in the fridge to breathe.

The Great River Road’s built on the bodies of slaves.
This chemical corridor is now the new burden.
They promised us jobs but we never saw them.
The pollution’s in our eyes and the air smells plastic.
We have a right to clear water, and a standard of living.
My peach tree died and the leaves went black.

Everything that lives has its own rules.
The living forest is the world of dreams.
The natural world is only one half.
We understand the world through our living dreams.
We need to dream a different future.
We need to fight to dream a fairer life.

Technology tells us we are alive.
If we are aware why do we do nothing?
The past, the present and the future;
we have to align ourselves to all of these.
We are the forest. We are the future.
The living forest is the world of dreams.

The poem was written specifically for this film, and was inspired by a reel of images we sent Lucy after our first shooting trip to Cancer Alley, along with a shooting diary we wrote during and after.

Biography of Lucy English, poet and author

Lucy English was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in London. She studied English and American Literature at the University of East Anglia, and has an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Digital Writing from Bath Spa University. She has three novels published by Fourth Estate: Selfish People (1998), set in contemporary Bristol; Children of Light (1999); and Our Dancing Days (2000), set in a Suffolk commune in the 1970s. She is best known as a performance poet, first winning the Bristol Poetry Slam in 1996, and going on to tour worldwide, performing her poetry at many international festivals. Her first poetry collection Prayer to Imperfection was published by Burning Eye books in March 2014. She co-ordinated the International Conference in the writing and practice of performance poetry at Bath Spa University and since then ran the first performance poetry module at a UK university. In 2006 she was artistic director of Apples and Snakes Poetry Tour, Exposed. In 2007, she was a finalist in the first BBC Radio 4 Poetry Slam.

She has toured Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and Taiwan with the British Council, running workshops and performances. She has also run workshops for the Arvon Foundation. In 2010-11 she toured the UK with the acclaimed Arts Council sponsored multimedia poetry show Flash and in 2014-5 toured with Count Me In. She is one of the organisers of ‘MIX’, the conferences in digital writing. She is co-creator of the poetry film organisation Liberated Words, which curates and screens poetry films. She created the digital poetry film project, “The Book of Hours”, which was shortlisted for the New Media Writing Award, and twice long-listed for the Sabotage Awards. Two of the “Book of Hours” films won the first and second prize for the 2018 Atticus Review Videopoem Contest (https://atticusreview.org/winning-entries-of-the-2018-atticus-review-videopoem-contest/), first prize to Kathryn Darnell’s “Things I found in the Hedge” and second prize to “Que Es El Amor” by Eduardo Yague. Many of the https://bookofhours.org films have been selected by poetry film festivals, including O’Bheal, Rabbit Heart, Juteback, Zebra, and Athens. She is currently working two new novels.

Credits

Pamela Falkenberg, Director
Jack Cochran, Director
Lucy English, Writer
Pam Falkenberg, Producer
Jack Cochran, Editing and sound design
Pamela Falkenberg, Cinematography and production design