Sowing seeds, fruit and words to change the world: from H.D. Thoreau to Jean Giono and Wangari Maathai

Françoise Besson, Monday March 27th, 5-7pm CET, EOO2 lecture hall

zoom link: https://u-picardie-fr.zoom.us/j/94431266937

H.D. Thoreau evoking pigeons flying across the country and, while being killed, sowing a new forest with the seeds they had eaten, or N. Scott Momaday telling how Spanish pomegranates can be seen in Arizona because conquistadors came with “swords and seeds,” both speak about a world in which life is regenerated and transcends violence and death through tiny seeds. A Parana pine from Brazil crossing the ocean in a traveller and nature lover’s suitcase speaks about life while the tree growing from the travelling seed welcomes European birds. Planting fruit and sewing seeds tell us about a simple way of changing the world as Jean Giono’s tale The Man Who Planted Trees shows it. This fable shows readers how trees can make us aware of connections with the land, with all life. It demonstrates the weight of a simple gesture in the revival of an apparently hostile land. From the plantation of first one acorn, then many acorns, a forest grows again, water flows again, life comes back into villages. This is what Wangari Maathai, hundreds of Kenyan women and the Greenbelt Movement will translate into facts, showing the healing power of a gesture, healing for the land and healing for the sower having experienced the trauma of war and personal loss. Jean Giono, like Wangari Maathai, through their writings, encourage people to be the guardians of the earth by realizing the power of planting one tree to reconstitute a forest and to bring life and balance again to a land. Such seminal texts show how a simple physical gesture and texts telling about it can make a difference and change the world.

Françoise Besson is Emerita Professor of Literatures in English at the University of Toulouse 2-Jean Jaurès. Her research focuses on ecology and literature and on the relationship between landscape (especially mountain landscapes) and writing in English, Native American, Canadian and French literatures, particularly travel writing. She published and edited several books and many articles on mountains (especially the Pyrenees) and literature, on the memory of nature, and on animal studies. Among her most recent publications: Ecology and Literatures in English. Writing to Save the Planet (CSP, 2019 and 2020) and as a co-editor with Zelia Bora, Marianne Marroum and Scott Slovic, Reading Cats and Dogs. Companion Animals in World Literature (Lexington, 2020). She was the editor of Caliban. French journal of English Studies from 2011 to 2019 and President of the SELVA (Society of Studies in Travel Writing in English) from 2015 to 2019. She is also a translator and has recently translated Kev Reynolds’s A Walk in the Clouds, (Marcher dans les nuages, Monhélios, 2022) and Scott Slovic’s Going Away to Think (Voyager pour penser, forthcoming at Presses Universitaires du Midi, 2022). She has also served as a translator at the first Festival “Ecrire la nature” in Pau and Laruns (https://ecrirelanature.com/fr/actualites/arpenter-les-espaces-americains-c-est-savoir-regarder). She published several collections of poems and short stories and, with Madeleine Besson, her mother, several books on regional culture.

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