The wild(er)ness of our own making: humanity's relation with nature in ‘H’ is for hawk by Helen MacDonald

As public fears concerning environmental issues rise, such topics gain currency in the literary field, including the development of ‘new nature writing’, ‘eco-disaster novels’ and so on [Bavidge]. Contemporary Western eco-literature reinterprets the problem of the humannature relationship, questioning the long-established construct of the natural world ‘as an abstract space’ or ‘abstract spatiality’, originating in the eighteenth century [Smethurst 2012: 198]. According to contemporary eco-scholars, the understanding of nature as something timeless and static, existing separately from the human world, is destructive since, instead of ‘openness and recognition towards nonhumans’, it promotes injustice, with nature being treated ‘as a sphere of inferior and replaceable “others”’ [Plumwood 2004: 285]. On the other hand, such perspective also leads to fetishization of nature as a place of escape in popular imagination and to production of the ‘postmodern simulacra’ of nature such as nature parks and tourist sites [Smethurst 2012: 198]. Contemporary nature prose such as Helen Macdonald’s book that I am going to discuss further deconstructs the human-nature dichotomy, offering a more open and inclusive view of the world, in which human and non-human forms of life are equally treated as unique and valuable.

‘H is for Hawk (2014) is an original blend of memoir, biography, historical essay and nature writing. At the core of the book is the autobiographical account of a woman who grieves over her father’s death and who struggles to rebuild her life while trying to tame (or, in fal-

conry terms, to ‘man’) a female hawk whom she names Mabel. The narrative hinges upon this relationship, which sometimes borders on confrontation, and the tension between the human and the bird, their ups and downs, pushes forward the plot, which is emotion- rather than action-driven. This book has to be ‘experienced’ rather than simply read. It is the very ‘rawness’ of the emotions described, the sensuality and physicality of the narrative, the unmistakable feel of ‘here and now’ it gives to the reader that makes Macdonald’s story so gripping.

Along with the main, autobiographical narrative there is another, parallel one – that of a failed attempt of T.H. White (a twentiethcentury British author famous for his Arthurian novels) to train a goshawk. In the way much similar to White, for Macdonald, hawk training is a deeply personal, intimate experience. Both White and Macdonald at times desire to get rid of the pain caused by their human nature, riddled with weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Both of them feel as if they are ‘broken’ or inherently ‘flawed’ and they see their hawks as embodiments of something they are both longing to have: ‘the hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life’ [Macdonald 2014: 120]; ‘there could be no regret or mourning in her. No past or future. She lived in the present only, and that was my refuge. My flight from death was on her barred and beating wings’ [Macdonald 2014: 221]. However, unlike White, in the process of training, Macdonald gradually becomes aware of how this relationship is increasingly affected by her projected desires and emotions and manages to draw the line, realizing that it is largely herself that she is fighting against, not her hawk. Another significant difference between White and Macdonald is the great compassion and love she feels towards her hawk: she resents turning the bird into a hostage of her own pain and fear. Thus, while for White, training a hawk was a kind of a ‘war’ and a ‘rite of passage’ and his failure to tame the bird, a sign of personal defeat (‘the hawk had become death to him because it could not be beaten’ [Macdonald 2014: 222]; ‘he had lost the war with Gos, and it had killed the man he was’ [Macdonald 2014: 334]), Macdonald’s success signifies that she has lived through her bereavement and has managed to move on to the next stage in her journey of healing and growth.

The relationship between a hawk and a human is unique because, unlike pets or other domesticated animals, as the text repeatedly makes clear, a hawk can never be fully domesticated and no austring- er, regardless of how experienced or skilled they are, can be entirely certain that the hawk will not fly away one day. While people think of their relationship with a hawk in human terms, such as ‘loyalty’ and ‘love’, for a hawk, staying with or leaving the austringer might be just a matter of its flying weight, which can be ‘right’ or not quite ‘right’ [Macdonald 2014: 318]. The end result of training is the union of equals, in which the austringer and the bird become ‘hunting partners’.

Hawks do not adapt to humans, instead austringers have to adapt their behaviour in order to be able to fly a hawk:

…what the poet Keats called your chameleon quality, the ability ‘to tolerate a loss of self and a loss of rationality by trusting in the capacity to recreate oneself in another character or another environment’ [Macdonald 2014: 121].

Such self-effacement for the austringer means ‘losing’ some part of their humanity: ‘I had put myself in the hawk’s wild mind to tame her, and as the days passed in the darkened room my humanity was burning away’ [Macdonald 2014: 122]; ‘as the hawk became tamer I was growing wilder’ [Macdonald 2014: 153]. Remarkably, the crucial moment in the initial stage of ‘manning’ the hawk is for the austringer to become completely ‘invisible’ for the bird so that it could forget about the existence of the human and learn to feel comfortable in his or her presence. The final stage is, however, not becoming one with the bird (losing human nature entirely), but, on the contrary, achieving a perfect balance or a perfect ‘distance’:

Falconry was a balancing act between wild and tame – not just in the hawk, but inside the heart and mind of the fal-coner…I am starting to see the balance is righting, now, and the distance between Mabel and me increasing. I see, too, that her world and my world are not the same, and some part of me is amazed that I ever thought they were [Macdonald 2014: 317 ].

In other words, at the end of training, provided it was successful, the austringer learns to marvel at the difference between him- or herself and the bird and celebrate it. The bird does not lose its ‘otherness’ but the human instead learns to embrace it, accepting their difference and abandoning attempts to ‘humanize’ the bird.

The descriptions of hawks are those parts of the text when MacDonald is at her most eloquent. Among the many tropes she uses, the one that stands out is the ‘reptilian’ and ‘prehistoric’ quality of hawks: ‘…a dinosaur pulled from the Forest of Dean. There was a distinct, prehistoric scent to her feathers; it caught in my nose, peppery, rusty as storm-rain’ [Macdonald 2014: 31]; ‘a creature shaped by a million years of evolution for a life she’s not yet lived’ [Macdonald 2014: 117]; ‘so wild and spooky and reptilian’ [Macdonald 2014: 31]; ‘her head snaking, reptilian, eyes glowing’ [Macdonald 2014: 237]. The ancient origin of these raptor birds, whose ancestors had appeared before the humanity, explains why they inspire awe in the direct meaning of this word – the feeling of reverential respect, dread, and wonder. The narrative dwells at length on the perfection of hawks – the pinnacle in the long evolution of their species – by pointing out their beauty and magnitude. At close range these birds seem grandiose to the human eye, which is used to seeing them only as silhouettes in the sky: ‘the man pulls an enormous, enormous hawk out of the box’ [Macdonald 2014: 77]; ‘a bloody great hawk murdering a pigeon, or a blackbird or a magpie, and it looks the hugest, most impressive piece of wildness you’ve ever seen’ [Macdonald 2014: 11]. Theirs is magnificent and luminous beauty:

…a huge old female goshawk. Old because her feet were gnarled and dusty, her eyes a deep, fiery orange, and she was beautiful. Beautiful like a granite cliff or a thundercloud. She completely filled the room. She had a massive back of sun-bleached grey feathers, was as muscled as pit bull, and intimidating as hell…So wild and spooky and reptilian [Macdonald 2014: 30‒31].

The ‘luminous’ quality of hawks is another recurring motif in the story as they are compared to fire, gold or sun: ‘everything is brilliance and fury’ [Macdonald 2014: 77]; ‘something bright and distant, like gold falling through water [Ibid.: 77], ‘the hawk was a fire that burned my hurts away’ [Macdonald 2014: 221]; ‘her wild eyes were the colour of sun on white paper’ [Macdonald 2014: 78]. Speaking of hawks, the narrator also often invokes the names of angels or deities such as

‘ancient Egyptian falcon-headed god Horus’ [Ibid.: 42], whom she wanted to worship in her childhood. Mabel is described as ‘a fallen angel’ [Macdonald 2014: 77], as a ‘protecting spirit’ and ‘little household god’ [Ibid.: 378], while the struggle of White with his hawk as the struggle of Jacob with the angel [Macdonald 2014: 222].

The portrayal of Mabel occupies a large part of the story. In this, the qualities attributed to goshawks as species by people throughout their long history of hunting together (‘murderous, difficult to tame, sulky, fractious and foreign’, ‘blood-thirsty’, ‘vile’ [Macdonald 2014: 36]; ‘proud and wild and beautiful’ [Macdonald 2014: 157]; ‘stately and brave’, ‘shye and fearfull’ [Macdonald 2014: 158]) are juxtaposed with Mabel’s characteristics as a unique being in its own right, depicted in all its physicality and spontaneity, having its own needs and motivations, independent and intelligent, capable of play and humour. Thus, Macdonald reveals a stark contrast between all the meanings people imbue hawks with and the actual reality of their life: ‘I look at Mabel. She looks at me. So much of what she means is made of people’ [Macdonald 2014: 159]; ‘I think of my chastened surprise when Mabel played with a paper telescope. She is real. She can resist the meanings humans give her’ [Macdonald 2014: 246]. Hawks have existed in human imagination as concepts and symbols for so long that now people stop dead in their tracks, incredulous and lost for words, when they actually get to see a real hawk (this happens when Macdonald takes Mabel out for a walk in the street). The static representations of hawks (‘civilizations rise and fall, but the hawks stay the same’ [Macdonald 2014: 163]) in the story go hand in hand with highly dynamic descriptions of the process of ‘manning’ the hawk and the ever-changing, fluid relationship between the narrator and the bird.

The key aspect in the relationship between humans and hawks that MacDonald carefully explores is the ‘wildness’ that hawks are often seen to be a symbol of (‘a powerful symbol of wildness in myriad cultures’ [Macdonald 2014: 159]). Being a part of ‘wild nature’, they are considered to be standing in opposition to modern urban life. The ambivalent, sometimes contradictory feelings people have towards ‘wild’ and ‘wildness’ inevitably affect the way they perceive these raptor birds. On the one hand, the ‘wild’ can be a place one is trying to escape to (‘I shared, too, his desire to escape to the wild’ [Macdonald 2014: 57], ‘I’d thought that to heal my great hurt, I should flee to the wild. It was what people did’ [Macdonald 2014: 296]), so interacting with a ‘wild’ bird could be a means of avoiding the pressures of human society, getting back what is suppressed in the course of human upbringing. In this respect, hawks and children have something in common: attempts to educate a child are similar to attempts to tame a hawk – ‘in both, a wild and unruly subject was shaped and moulded, made civilized; was taught good manners and obedience’ [Macdonald 2014: 109]. On the other hand, ‘wild’ can be used as a synonym of violence and rage and, therefore, hawks are commonly associated with bloodthirstiness and cruelty. Macdonald is skeptical of both concepts, showing that nowadays ‘the wild’ can be as much a result of human effort as of natural forces:

…the fact of these British goshawks makes me happy. Their existence gives the lie to the thought that the wild is always something untouched by human hearts and hands. The wild can be human work [Macdonald 2014: 17 – 18].

In fact, even her own wild hawk was hatched in an incubator and raised by a man. The landscape that feels the ‘wildest’ in England to her is also a human creation, the result of ‘a history of industry, forestry, disaster, commerce and work’ [Ibid.:16]. Moreover, she calls the idea of escaping to the wild ‘a beguiling and dangerous lie’: ‘the wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing’ [Macdonald 2014: 296].

Macdonald is also suspicious of the way hawks are exploited as symbols of aggressive, uncompromising power as it, for example, was the case in Nazi Germany:

Hawks themselves were a natural elite, the perfect naturalization of Nazi ideology: living paragons of power and blood and violence that preyed guiltlessly on things weaker than themselves [Macdonald 2014: 274].

At the same time, she does not try to spare her readers’ sensitivities (which apparently did put off some of them, according to some of the book’s reviews on Goodreads): from the very beginning, the narrative lays bare Mabel’s predatory instincts even though she is just a ‘baby’. Particularly illustrative in this respect is the episode when she hears a child’s cry from the street:

At just past six o’clock a small, unhappy wail came from a pram outside the window. Straight away the hawk drove her talons into my glove, ratcheting up the pressure in savage, stabbing spasms. Kill. The baby cries. Kill kill kill [Macdonald 2014: 118].

This is supplemented with vivid, at time gruesome scenes of actual killing being done and the facts about goshawks being violent even in their intraspecies relationships (‘…there’s a very fine line between goshawk sexual excitement and terrible, mortal vio-lence…More often than not the female will kill her mate’ [Macdonald 2014: 73-74]). The natural instincts of hawks, which they depend on for their survival, should not be mistaken for arrogance or used as a hypocritical excuse for suppression or violence. Hawks are free from malice and they don’t know violence for violence’s sake. In other words, the human perspective and morality, the choices people make are by no means connected with what is a normal behaviour for a wild bird:

I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it. Goshawks are things of death and blood and gore, but they are not excuses for atrocities. Their inhumanity is to be treasured because what they do has nothing to do with us at all [Macdonald 2014: 373‒374].

Texts like Macdonald’s ‘H’ is for Hawk give us back the feeling of ‘reality’ of nature. Nature is not idealized in this narrative as something idyllic and far-away, on the contrary, it is shown that the two worlds – human and natural – do not exist separately from each other, especially at the current stage, at the age of Anthropocene, when much of what is seen as ‘wilderness’ is actually the result of human activity. Her narrative dismantles the most common stereotypes and myths about goshawks, showing the misapprehensions and bad judgements that occur when ‘human’ measures are applied to non-human creatures and when these creatures are turned into signs denoting (yet again) some other human concepts. By losing their connection with nature, people are robbing their world of its wealth and diversity:

I think of what wild animals are in our imaginations. And how they are disappearing – not just from the wild, but from people’s everyday lives, replaced by images of themselves in print and on screen. The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of. The condor is an icon of extinction. There’s little else to it now but being the last of its kind. And in this lies the diminution of the world [Macdonald 2014: 245].