Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a wonderful novel by Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. In 2018, Tokarczuk was awarded the International Man Booker Prize for Flights and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead has been widely celebrated as a story which transcends any definable genre of fiction. The Guardian claims it ‘functions perfectly as a crime noir’, while simultaneously situating itself within a ‘politics of vegetarianism, a dark feminist comedy, an existentialist fable and a paean to William Blake’.

So much is true: Tokarczuk’s story is narrated from the point of view of an elderly woman, Janina Duszejko (who actively abhors her own birth name), as she grapples with the loss of her dogs and deplores the savagery of local hunters in her small village near the Polish-Czech border. To some dimension, the novel imitates a murder mystery; one by one, four men gruesomely meet their fate, and the reader tries to string together the clues.

Mrs Duszejko’s neighbour, Big Foot, chokes on a deer bone. The Commandment’s mangled body is found in the well. Innerd the fur farmer is ensnared and found moulding on the forest floor. The President is discovered in the woods, carpeted in beetles. Father Rustle dies in a fire in his presbytery.

As the villagers are left seeking answers, Mrs Duszejko is convinced that it is the animals who are taking revenge on humans for hunting them. No one believes her. Ultimately, we learn that she herself committed these four murders (Big Foot’s death was an accident). Why did she murder these men? She tells us herself:

The Deer we saw outside the house had told me. They chose me from among the others […] to continue to act in their Name […] to have me become the punitive hand of justice, in secret. Not just for the Deer, but for the other Animals too. For they have no voice in parliament.

Mrs Duszejko had been mourning the loss of her Little Girls, her two dogs, and had suspicions they had been shot by hunters. It was in Big Foot’s kitchen drawer that she came across ‘the proof of [the] Crime’ – a photograph of the above men proudly posing with the fruits of their hunt:

There stood the men in uniform, in a row, and on the grass in front of them lay the neatly arranged corpses of Animals […] as of those Animals’ bodies were a sentence written to me, and the Birds formed a long ellipsis to say ‘this will go on and on’.

But what I saw in the corner of the picture almost called me to faint, and everything went dark before my eyes […] three dead dogs, neatly laid out, like trophies. There were my two Little Girls.

Read from a geographer’s perspective, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a narrative situated at the intersection of feminism, non-human philosophies, and environmental justice. Many facets of Tokarczuk’s writing entertains non-human and more-than-human ontologies, those dissatisfied with Western hierarchies of human exceptionalism, where nature and culture are dichotomised. Instead, Mrs Duszejko understands ‘humans’ and ‘nature’ as not only equal but equally entangled within larger networks of being and universal fate, sentiments echoed in her practising belief in Astronomy and the ungraded interconnectedness of all beings within time and space.

For example, Mrs Duszejko uses a non-normative capitalisation of animals and other objects not typically understood as proper nouns in the Polish (and English) language. It is not just ‘the Deer’, ‘the Dog’, ‘the Mouse’, but ‘the Night’, ‘Utensils’, ‘Prison’ – through language, she reorganises supposed hierarchies of creatures and things.

The names of Insects should be given to children. So should the names of Birds and other Animals.

Mrs Duszejko rejects that only humans have souls and are capable of reason; she rejects Descartes’ human-nature dualism – that I think therefore I am – because she understands the supposed inanimate as being.

To my mind, the word ‘priority’ is just as ugly as ‘cadaver’ or ‘cohabitee’.

It was the events of the President’s death that foregrounded the concepts of human-nature entanglement for me. Mrs Duszejko cunningly assassinates this man involved in the killing of her Little Girls by encouraging him to drink a dose of pheromones while he is intoxicated.

Introduced to her by a friendly entomologist – Borys Snajder – these chemical agents attract female insects to lay their eggs. The insects in question, Cucujus Haemotodes, are a species of saproxylic beetle that breed and thrive in the forest wood and are integral to the ecosystem’s equilibrium. Their habitat was being destroyed as timber was felled, burnt, and produced for human use, and the beetles were experiencing ‘unjustly inflicted death’. Worse, one that ‘nobody noticed’.

Knocked on the head and beetle-attracting pheromones tricking through down his throat and into his gut, the Cucujus Haematodes were offered a new breeding ground. Forced to Thus the President perished, on the forest floor, reduced to a piece of timber.

He was covered in those Insects, they’d gone into his mouth, his lungs, his stomach, his ears […] he was crawling with Beetles […] Cucujus Haematodes everywhere.

Recent attention to the microbiome in geography foregrounds more-than-human ontologies. With around ten trillion microbes in our gut, our ‘humanness’ is not a delineated entity but functions only with other living beings. Humans are superorganisms – assemblages of heterogeneous beings. The President’s death offers ‘life’ in the own ‘ruin’ that he contributed to (Tsing, 2015).

Moreover, non-human geographers draw attention to how practices of eating entangle us with animals and landscapes through material transfers and cycles of life, nutrients, and decay; as such, we are never human entities alone but embedded within the natural networks into which we are endlessly reproduced. Our gut microbes make us innately linked to all animals, plants, and landscape. Tokarczuk references eating throughout Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead:

I found the strawberries completely tasteless. I wondered whether it was because they fertilised them with some muck…

‘In my view it all proves that the body was found at the stage of butyric fermentation’.

We were eating pasta with blue cheese and sauce.

While humans, hunters, and farmers intervene with life, growth, and decay, they disrupt equilibriums.; Tokarczuk touches on ethico-political questions over the control of humanity over nature, and nature over humanity. A local forester angers Mrs Duszejko in his defence of felling and hunting:

‘There’s nothing natural about nature any more […] It’s too late. The natural processes have gone wrong, and now we must keep it all in control to make sure there’s no catastrophe’.

Mrs Duszejko’s murders bring a small justice to the system of life in their reiteration of the human-nature entanglement. They remind us that human exceptionalism is a flawed ontology. Notably, Mrs Duszejko murders the President on their way home from the village’s mushroom pickers’ ball. What do mushrooms symbolise? Decay and regrowth: and the cycle of natural life. Not dissimilarly, Innerd‘s dead body is found ‘all white with mould’. As he decays and new life grows from him, a natural symbiosis is fractionally restored.

References:

Perry, S. 2018. Review: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk – the entire cosmic catastrophe. The Guardian [online].

Tsing, A.L., 2015. The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton.