Welcome back to the Ironist series. Today, we delve into the third ironist – the earth, humble but powerful. Having absorbed human ambitions with geological patience, it has witnessed empires crumble to dust, ideologies sink into nothingness and kingdoms pass like weather. The earth does not care who we are or what we want.
We call land ‘property’ as if we can actually own land. And the earth humors us, letting us build, bury, cultivate. And then when the time comes, it reclaims us. We come from the earth and return to it.
What kind of an Ironist are You?
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my all-time favorite reads. The Buendía family, the fictional town of Macondo and their intergenerational events are striking evidence of how the land remembers and acknowledges what people refuse to believe or accept. Be it José Arcadio being tied to a chestnut tree till he dies. Or the banana plantation massacre that is denied by official history. Or Aureliano’s forbidden relationship with Amaranta Úrsula. The soil knows. The irony of the earth is knowledge, remembrance, and exposure. What you try to hide, it will reveal.
Another book that strikes me with regards to the earth’s irony is The Dune series by Frank Herbert. It occupies a similar, if more hostile, place in my imagination because Arrakis is a harsh inhospitable desert planet bearing nothing but the spice ‘melange’ which dictates economics, religion, and fate. The Imperium treats Arrakis as a resource colony, interested only in extracting melange, and that’s where it errs. Harvesters are swallowed by sandworms and dust storms erase armies. On that planet, water discipline determines survival, an ecological vision that only the Fremen understand. Paul’s ascent to messiahhood comes from his alignment with the Fremen’s shared goals of storing water, preserving sandworms, and establishing ecological rituals. All that comes to show how land has thwarted all sorts of power enforcers since the start of time. History does repeat itself because the earth remembers even when we refuse to.
In Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, the land itself – the Meenachal River, the clay, the banana fields – becomes a tribunal as Velutha’s blood stains the laterite floor and Sophie Mol’s body is pulled from the water. The brutality of caste, desire, and lost childhood remains sedimented in every place the family touches. Ayemenem House decays alongside its moral failures. The family refuses to openly confront the love that breaks laws, the brutality sanctioned by society, and the childhood damaged beyond repair but the land records all without judgment. The irony of earth here is endurance. People deny, revise, and forget, but the soil keeps the account.
The earth returns us to scale; it outlasts our buildings, our names, our consequences, and our delusions of leadership. It tells us that we are temporary and so are our devastations.
Its irony is survival itself and that may be its final message:
Everything returns to the earth. Some things sooner.
