“Troubled Waters”: Mary Annaïse Heglar’s Hope to Heal https://ift.tt/PD23ow8
Some learn about the climate crisis and continue life as usual, but not Corinne, the lead character of Mary Annaïse Heglar’s debut novel, Troubled Waters. Heglar takes readers back to 2014, when the term “climate change” was a taboo, far-off possibility that Corinne recognizes as the dire, pressing catastrophe happening around her.
Corinne and her only living family (her grandmother, Cora, and her Uncle Harold) have each adopted different methods of healing in the year following the death of Corinne’s brother — differences that are tearing them apart. When Corinne is compelled to stage a protest that will honor her brother’s memory and condemn Big Oil for the evils it inflicts upon the environment and humanity, her family must face the intergenerational trauma that threatens to hand them the greatest loss of all.
Infused with wisdom, emotion and humor, Troubled Waters is a story of healing, of redemption and of hope, of doing the next best thing to shift the tides of change.
Mary Annaïse Heglar began writing about the climate crisis in 2018 as a way to process her own climate grief. She is the author of Troubled Waters (Harper Muse, 2024) and The World is Ours to Cherish (Random House Kids, 2024). Her work has appeared in New York Magazine, Vox and Rolling Stone, among others, and has also been featured in collections like All We Can Save, The World As We Knew It and The Black Agenda. She has taught at Columbia and Tulane. In 2020, she received a SEAL Environmental Journalism award. She is based in New Orleans.
We spoke via video chat in May. This interview has been edited for length.
I’m interested in how this story looks backward, set in the timeframe of when you personally became invested in this movement and showing the roots of the climate struggle (whereas many books focus on the forthcoming doom). I’m curious if there are ways Corinne’s road to activism mirrors your own?
I would say there’s ways in which it does, but the main way in which it doesn’t is Corinne is braver than I have ever been in my entire life. She’s very willful and very stubborn, and I am those things but I’m not brave. There were scenes I was writing for her that were giving me anxiety – one of those is when she’s standing in the Mississippi River, and I wanted to yell, “Girl, there’s snakes, get out of there!” It doesn’t mirror my own story in that I was not radicalized in college. It was a really different road for me. I came to climate when I was 30 years old. She’s coming to climate when she’s 20.
I think 2014 is a really interesting year because it’s still the Obama years. Donald Trump hasn’t announced his run. It seems like what we now call the “alt-right” . . . those people were considered trolls. So I wanted to revisit some of that. It’s a time when climate change is still whispered, and if you mention it, you might be called a conspiracy theorist. Corinne sees the writing on the wall, and so do some of the other people in her life, particularly at Oberlin, particularly in terms of the Black Lives Matter. Ferguson has not yet erupted. Eric Garner has just been killed. You would have to be pretty prescient to see these issues, and Corinne does.
Why was it important to set it in Mississippi?
Mississippi is the love of my life. I’m half from Birmingham and Mississippi. Birmingham is my soul, Mississippi is my heart. I wanted to talk about the beauty of Mississippi. It’s such a beautiful place, and it demands description. I wanted to show how important this place is to protect, show how deeply Mississippians feel about this gorgeous wonderland of ours. That’s why it was important to me. And also see how it’s being exploited in real time. The deep history – not all of it – has the scars of apartheid for sure, but it also has a deep history of resistance that I wanted to talk about.
There can’t be a valid discussion on the climate crisis without bringing in other egregious elements of societal institutions and systems: racism, colonialism, late-stage capitalism and many others. For Corinne, her heart burns for the environment, but racism in particular wraps her in a fireproof blanket that attempts to snuff out her passion.
There’s been insensitivities about this in the climate movement, in particular. Certain white-dominate climate activism organizations have been like, “Yeah, we’ll do the thing. You can do yoga in jail,” and Black folks are like, “What now?” I wanted to bring that element in, but also Corinne is at this point where she’s like “I’ll risk jail, I’ll risk prison, because the other option is the end of everything. The other option is they get to take my brother, and I can’t do nothing.”
It’s like fighting a bully. At some point, you have to fight them, even if you’re going to lose. There’s no other way out of that. Corinne feels very pushed up against the corner. She doesn’t have a flight response in that space. She also feels like she doesn’t have anywhere to fly to. There is just fight for her, so that’s what she’s going to do.
There’s a specific paradox between Cora and Corinne – the grandmother who lived through the civil rights movement and was forced to endure horrors, and a granddaughter who’s willingly stepping into advocacy. They struggle to understand where the other is coming from, especially Cora as she reconciles that her great loss and pain wasn’t enough to prevent future suffering. And, it’s Corinne’s sacrifice that leads to Cora’s healing. It shows the cost of courage, it seems.
Some folks say that nothing’s changed, but the daily humiliations aren’t the same. I haven’t had to drink from a Black-only water fountain, get on the back of the bus, call a white girl my age “ma’am.” I’ve never even had a white doll. So that’s what my grandfather did for me. In that way, no, not everything is fixed, but there are some monumental changes in that I was able to grow up in Alabama and Mississsippi and be the person I am. I don’t think anyone who was active in the Civil Rights Movement looks at 2014 and feels like we did it all, but also not that they did nothing at all.
Cora is still caught up in the trauma of it. I think, for Cora, she was in the position where she didn’t have a choice, and probably wouldn’t have made that choice – the only thing making it okay is that one day someone would not have to do this, so feeling and having to process it in both cases, it feels like the weight of the world on your shoulders. Whether it’s Jim Crow or climate change, it’s a deadly threat. Witnessing her granddaughter having to pick up the weight of the world on her shoulders, Cora feels like a failure – the trauma she experienced as a child at the white folks’ school, the way they speak to her, that’s how it manifests in her life.
Corinne is trying to grieve alone, and she doesn’t realize it. She’s doing to Cora what Cameron did to her when their mother died. You don’t grieve alone, and you don’t heal alone. Cora is desperately trying to connect to Corinne, and Corinne wants to grieve alone because she’s also grieving the climate. They’re trying to protect each other by healing these things alone, but the truth is neither of them can heal alone. Cora thinks she’s hiding her pain, but she’s hiding her legacy.
When Harold and Corinne discuss Cora’s breakdown at Corinne’s well-intentioned gift that caused deep pain, he tells his niece, “Accept that she’s been through something you can’t understand.” It seems like this line is the key to a life of progress and the starting line from which all these oppressive systems can be dismantled.
I was thinking about the generational gap between Cora and Corinne, and sometimes there are things you’re never going to understand all the way. Even Cora saying she wants to tell Corinne everything, but Cora has spent a lot of time forgetting, and some things are just going to be lost to time and Corinne is just never going to understand everything.
I was really mourning that I never got to talk to my grandfather about his experience during the Civil Rights Movement. I knew Grandaddy, but when I was a child, you didn’t question your grandfather. He was a very respectable man. It was not my place to question him. I once asked – in the wrong way – if anyone had shot at the house, and he got irate because I had touched a nerve, and I now realize that question to him was emasculating. A lot of Black men in the desegregation movement felt that way. We like to think desegregation was nonviolent, but it was very violent. The idea that he would have let someone shoot at the house was insulting to him.
We reclaim the legacies that we can reclaim, but we’re never going to know all of it. Even if I had known all the facts on paper, I’m never going to know exactly how it went or exactly how it felt, because even to them, they didn’t know how it felt.
“Big Oil” gets a particular spotlight. It’s essentially too big to fail, so powerful that life becomes worthless in comparison to sustaining it. “[The oil company] paid [her brother] well, of course, because they were paying him off. But the thing about money, Corinne thought, is that it burns.” It exposes this legalized evolution of slavery, powerful entities restricting opportunities — in essence, employment becomes a forced choice.
I was thinking more about sharecropping than slavery, and how sometimes sharecropping tricked young Black boys into their plantation. Before you know it, you’re indebted and someone has to find you and rescue you. And that’s essentially what these oil boats were doing, and are doing. You’ll make a lot of money, but it’s very dangerous, and it’s not uncommon for people to die, come back maimed or get cancer. We need to take seriously what people on the front lines say. We need to look out from the ivory towers and not say that maybe those folks aren’t being dramatic. When they’re not real people to you, it’s very easy to dismiss their experiences.
So many people do nothing because they think they can’t make a difference; the problem feels too big, there are too many institutions and systems to fight against. In All We Can Save, you write, “I don’t need a guarantee of success before I risk everything to save the things, the people, the places that I love.” How are you hoping Troubled Waters will inspire this same belief in readers?
Do what you’re good at and do your best. It’s not about being perfect. I think that the beauty of it is there’s no one thing you can do. There are many things you can do, which means you don’t have to do it all or perfectly you can move toward it. If we think of climate change as this systemic problem, then we can accept that no one thing is going to fix it. Be critical of your own choices, but don’t take your eyes off the ball. Do as much as you can on your own, but recognize you aren’t going to be able to do it all on your own.
I think the main thing about Troubled Waters is it’s a story about healing, and healing to be a whole person. I don’t think broken people fix things. That is the story I wanted to tell, particularly for Black people, the importance of healing, and the importance of intergenerational healing. We talk so much about intergenerational trauma, but not about intergenerational healing. I don’t know that it has so much of a message to inspire people to get active, but I hope it inspires people to heal.
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