A(Way) from the Forest. The Empire of Uprooting
by Ioana Cosma

(She is a writer from Romania who has published four volumes of poetry and a play. She is also a university lecturer in her home country.)

The word “away” informs this book in several manners. First of all, the word “move” comes from the root “meue-“, which means “to push away”. Secondly, the text’s writer, Mankh, calls himself “a traveler”; “travel” replaced the Old English “faran”, which meant “distant”, “remote”, “away”. Away is also a way and Mankh’s Moving Through The Empty Gate Forest is primarily a way of understanding and coping with our distancing from the earth and the ancient ways, while at the same time, offering solutions away from the Western Canon. Drawing on several traditions – Asian, Buddhist, Native, Moving Through The Empty Gate Forest is a way of educating – in a non-linear, mindful and poetic way – to a way of perceiving the Earth that has been obscured to the Western man by the tradition of the book, imperialism and national-socialism (aka fascism).

Thus, there are two discernible gestures, or pathways that the author proposes in his book (published with respect towards nature): deconstructing the common myths of the grandeur of Western civilization, on the one hand, and bringing back to life a way of understanding the world and our relation to it stemming from the ancient traditions, which were displaced and hijacked by the West, on the other. In the first case, the author reminds us, among other things, of the occupation of Native Peoples by the Western man, the Gutenberg press moment, which defined the print culture (linear, canonical, narcissistic and uni-directional), the rise and dominion of National-Socialism and imperialism. All these events led to the stifling of a whole poetics and philosophy of life that held the relation to the forest and trees in high regard. This ancient tradition, which can be found in the East, but also in Native Peoples’ understanding of the world, is a way of redeeming the magical and healing force of our planet, our minds and ourselves as non-egotistic beings. Therefore, it is “a way” away (outside the box, the building block, colonization and uprooting).

The text is written in a non-linear, non-consecutive, non-standard fashion, allowing for a poeticity of form which suits well its messages of peace, healing and coming to realization. As the author himself affirms, the text is a bit of all of these at once: as “poetic nonfiction, zen, history etymology, workbook, spirituality, nonconformist, self-help/ help-others.” When true scholarship and poetry combine together with an intention to educate and enlighten, what results is a most valuable text for the contemporary age, whose reading is a joy in itself, both a political (in the etymological) sense and a poetic act/performance. Moving Through The Empty Gate Forest is a momentous book, in a time when ecological problems are imbricated with our long tradition of ignoring and forsaking nature.

Whether we “share our granola with birds in the parking lot” or, like the author, take a stance and create in the true spirit of this world and man(kind), this book cannot leave us indifferent to how we are to change our distorted perceptions, uprooted as they are from their original (con)texts.

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