An Important yet Undervalued Vernacular
SERIES
An Important yet Undervalued Vernacular: the Breath
by Kelechi Anucha
2 October 2025
What would it mean to measure the environmental crisis and its impacts not quantitatively, for example in the symbolic 1.5-degree limit on global warming, but qualitatively? By taking into account individual and collective experiences as ‘simple’ as breathing – is it easy or difficult to breathe?
Taking a literary studies approach, and looking at poetic expressions in particular, Kelechi Anucha argues that an engagement with artistic responses to racialisation and the environmental crisis have the power to draw attention to how lived experience of breathing and breathlessness might influence the management of the earth’s atmosphere.
What would it mean to engage with the impact of environmental violence on a scale more human and immediate? On 15 February 2013, Ella Roberta Adoo Kissi Debrah died of a fatal asthma attack at the age of only nine years old. Her premature death was initially framed at inquest in medical terms, registered as acute respiratory failure. A subsequent inquest, secured through the sustained campaigning efforts of Ella’s mother, Rosamund Adoo Kissi Debrah, recognised that “air pollution was a significant contributory factor to both the induction and exacerbations of her asthma”, given that nitrogen dioxide emissions circulating around her home in Lewisham exceeded both EU and national levels, and particulate matter levels above the World Health Organisation guidelines1. These conclusions resulted in a ruling in which air pollution was named for the first time in England as a cause of death by a coroner.
In this article, I argue that an engagement with literary responses to racialisation and environmental crisis highlights alternative formulations that can hold together disasters as events with both human and planetary significance. Poetry in particular opens a speculative, imaginative space and a shared emotional vernacular – a common language – in which multiple temporalities can co-exist.
I draw on insights from my research project Out of Time: Temporality, Form and Fugitive Care in Contemporary Literature and Culture which was part of a wider research project called Waiting Times. Situated in literary studies, the project examined the temporalities and formal conventions of dominant illness narratives such as cancer memoirs which often track a linear progression through diagnosis, treatment, towards a final outcome. The analysis highlighted the exclusionary histories and context of this genre; how poverty, race and gender shape which representations of death and dying gain cultural currency. I also turned towards differently structured, non-linear literary forms such as poetry and experimental auto-fiction which capture a wider range of subjective experience and expand beyond the scale of the individual life course to consider the generational and environmental impacts on disease and dying. Questions of scale are key; in many ways, Ella’s is a story of the failure of state discourses of environmentalism in the West that defer responsibility by focusing on ‘big picture’ and future-oriented analysis of the crisis, struggling to reconcile this focus with local and immediate impacts on health and ecosystems2. At a policy level, this crisis is measured quantitively, in, for example, the symbolic 1.5-degree limit on global warming calculated in relation to planetary history or deep time. But what would it mean to translate abstract measurements into qualitative experience – the ease or difficulty of drawing breath?
Ella’s premature death was a matter of time. Suggesting this is not to endorse an attitude of glib fatalism, but to emphasise how failures to act on the health implications of environmental pollution and toxicity – at a policy and socio-cultural level – are partially shaped by a failure to comprehend and engage with questions of competing temporal scales.
Her life might have unfolded differently if it had been possible to grasp the extended temporalities of dangerous levels of air pollution in London and other cities in the UK, and their intersecting impact on the timescales of both human and non-human life courses. The enduring legacies of colonialism, racialisation and poverty, further contribute to the uneven exposure to environmental harm within metropolitan Black British communities. To think about Ella’s death in the context of time is to recognise the accretion of these legacies and acknowledge the multiple, contesting temporalities compounded in both a life unnecessarily curtailed and a lastingly transformative history.
To shift into a slightly abstract register, part of the experience of living is to witness how time acts on all things as a structuring force. To live is also to experience and struggle against time-sense itself – that subjective experience of temporality, felt from the inside – which is unequal, uneven and highly variable. The living archive of language is marked with metaphors for the instability of subjective time-sense – time ripens, stands still, is borrowed or lost. The unevenness of time-sense becomes most visible and acute at moments of individual and collective crisis such as illness and environmental disaster – when body and landscape, the materials of being on which life depends, are exposed as vulnerable to harm.
Artistic formulations of environmental disasters play a significant role in shaping collective environmental imaginaries, intersecting with and even overriding what is possible to ‘know’ from the hard data of environmental sciences. They offer another analysis of human-made and natural disasters, one that can acknowledge the significance of dynamics of power. As Rosamund Adoo Kissi Debrah and others have struggled to bring policy-makers to account following Ella’s death through official channels, artistic interventions such as Breathe:2022 by Dryden Goodwin (2022) and Black Corporeal (Breathing by Numbers) by Julianknxx (2022) have drawn attention to how the management of the earth’s atmosphere might be influenced by lived experience of breathing and breathlessness3.
‘Chemical’ is a poem from Black British poet Jay Bernard’s arresting collection Surge, which gives a voice to the residents of Grenfell Tower, who died in the fire on 14 June 2017. Reflecting on ‘Chemical’, Lara Choksey, Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures in the UCL Department of English, observes the collapse of the linear time-sense which organises the worlds of capital and state and notes how the immaterialised bodies of the dead are “called into a plural time zone”4. Surge, like Breathe:2022 and Black Corporeal (Breathing by Numbers), is another kind of entry into the archive of premature deaths constituted by legacies of injustice, grappling as it does with the twin horrors of the New Cross (1981) and Grenfell Tower fires.
Choksey writes that “‘Chemical’ begins halfway through a sentence – ‘and all of their ghosts are burning’ – somewhere between the temporal realms of present and past continuous, in a happening (‘burning’) linked to previous happenings (‘some fires’) that continue to happen (‘burn’)”5. These overlapping images of death, separated from the context that caused them, further call attention to the abdication of state and corporate responsibility in the wake of the crisis, made more starkly visible in the failures highlighted by the recently published Grenfell Inquiry.
‘Chemical’ vividly visualises matter in the processes of state change: the dead, their clothes, the material of the floors and rooms they inhabited, become gas, glass windows become liquid, even as the status-quo remains the same. “Dragged out of hereafter back to tonight”, “towards / a darker past” that are the legacies of racial violence6, the silent chorus of ‘Chemical’ testifies to the difficulty of reconciling the temporality of profit and the temporality of injustice.
This struggle towards a shared and ethically engaged measure of time, speaks to the contradictory time-sense of an environmental crisis that is experienced by some as the disaster which has already arrived and others as one that is yet-to-come. The periodicity of the Anthropocene has ignored “how the end of this world has already happened for some subjects”7. This disparity might be differently articulated as various modes of waiting: “waiting for ecological disaster, waiting for governments to acknowledge climate change and act to counter it and finally waiting for a more popular awakening to the imminent dangers constituted by climate change”8. However, this waiting is always mediated by “the degree of power that each group has within the social and political structure”9. Clearly, crises of climate and environment are not only a question of incommensurate time-sense, but also a question of injustice and indifference.
How can this time of waiting in crisis be measured and reclaimed in a way that accounts for the accumulation of loss, pain and grief? Even as “I can’t breathe” serves as a rallying cry for racial justice movements such as Black Lives Matter, turning again to poetic form ratifies the breath as a variable unit of time sense. I use the phrase ‘turning towards’ here and elsewhere to capture the reflective and exploratory strand which emerges in the literary and critical tradition from which the thinking in this article emerges. Turning towards or away from established patterns of movement are deliberate actions and a means of exercising agency to resist prescribed and habituated ways of thinking10. The turn, in this article, towards a poetic and fragmentary register reflects the different orientation of the literary texts I examined in my research, which productively resist the linear, progress-oriented temporalities that often characterise dominant narratives and texts about illness and environmental crisis.
For example, in Claudia Rankine’s epic lyric Citizen, a poem which emerges in fragments, the breath is variably expressed as a “moan like a deer”, the sound of a prey animal in extremis or a “sigh…drawn / into existence to pull in, pull under”11. This “sigh is the pathway to breath”, a unit of time which is also a unit of “self-preservation” and an articulation of both survival and pain, of the will to survive12. The sigh in Rankine’s poem is one produced by a “memory which goes far back” in tension with a decree to forget13, when the subject of memory and forgetting are histories of racialised violence.
Such literary representations of the breath capture a reality which is both subjective and intimate, yet material and collective. Time felt through the breath still lacks a consistent logic or pattern of comparison, and yet “the scale of our breathing is planetary”14 and the emotional resonances of that breathing are collective. The “haa” of an exhale, as imagined in and beyond Rankine’s work, is a shared human and non-human vernacular with a common emotional resonance. It is an action readers can imagine and even feel. It has potential as an alternative and speculative unit of time which might bring people imaginatively together because breathing as a shared condition of living come before the prevaricating of political language which Rob Nixon describes as the “calm voice of global managerial reasoning”15 and which minimises and justifies racialised environmental violence. Breath inhabits an enduring time-space which came before the historical moment of Enlightenment rationalism that defined the human in ways that exclude people of colour, and Black people often specifically. Poetic images of breathing might take readers back to associations of vulnerability, creating impressions of the even rhythm of breathing in sleep. Breathing can signify rest and care, activities which are often feminised and devalued in wider capitalist systems that prioritise the dominant forward-thrust of progress and speed.
The literary studies approach I have explored here draws attention to what we might call a poetics of the disaster, pollution and climate crisis. Metered in the breath rather than the timescales of science, linear narrative or capital, this poetics of the disaster has long been working to make visible and bring into consciousness the experiences of racialised subjects and the ethics of care and vulnerability often occluded from dominant cultural discourses. In this sense the breath constitutes an important yet undervalued vernacular uniquely positioned to reconcile the multiple experiences and temporalities of environmental emergency.
KELECHI ANUCHA is a Lecturer in Literature and Environmental Justice at the University of Manchester. She has worked collaboratively in cross-institutional, interdisciplinary research teams and as part of creative projects centred on wellbeing, connection and equality. Her past and current work explores the impact of environmental crises on individual and planetary health, with a focus on how historic and ongoing forms of harm are distributed along racial lines. She is the convenor for Critical Ecologies, a core module which introduces students to key concepts from environmental humanities, anchoring their understanding of how the politics of climate crisis are registered across various geographical sites, archives and collections, cultural forms and critical-theoretical interventions.
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Edited by ABIGAIL BLEACH, CYDNEY PHILLIP and MARTHE LISSON
Proofread by NICHOLAS LACKENBY
Lead image (detail) by Karsten Winegeart
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