Goddess of the Yangtze
Think: you are a young girl, twenty
million years old, carrying a white fin.
And you are a rebel, you refuse to be sold
at the local market, your evil father drowns you
in the river Yangtze, then you storm into a goddess.
Hear this: sacred and cursed are almost the same thing.
Think: you are a half-blind dolphin when two-legged
creatures come for you with noisy ship propellers,
electricity, and explosions. They hunt you until
you diminish drop by drop, until you are
finally erased from the face of water.
Listen: do not forgive us for this.
Baiji Dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer)
The word ‘river’ must also mean ‘time’ because rivers are the oldest storytellers, because they
carry everything: silt, myth, bodies of the drowned, glimmer of the fish, the memory of water.
But what happens when a river is forced to forget its own creatures? What remains in the
water when a species entirely disappears?
The Baiji dolphin, the white-finned dolphin of the Yangtze, swam in that river for twenty
million years. Compared to the human existence of roughly three hundred thousand years on
this planet, the Baiji was an ancient being living in the turbid waters of the Yangtze through
echolocation, reading the world entirely through sound. But we, Homo sapiens, filled its
world with noise by using dynamite, electricity, heavy industry, and with the constant
percussion of propellers. We silenced an animal that lived by listening.
For the Chinese, this beautiful being was carrying the innocent soul of a young girl drowned
in the river Yangtze by her father after refusing to be sold; then she turned into a sacred
dolphin-goddess, the guardian of fishermen. Until she was declared extinct in 2006, after an
extensive expedition that failed to find even a single individual. The river was completely
silent.
Within my Catapoetics framework, I define our century as the Catastrocene: the age of
intertwined catastrophes where ecological loss, industrial and technological violence,
extinction, and cultural erasure are inseparable filaments entangled into each other. The
catastrophe of the Baiji’s extinction cannot be seen apart from the rapid mechanisation that
ruined her echolocation, from the economic systems that sold her, and then ignored her
disappearance, or from the cruel zeitgeist that muted the mythological world of the river itself.
Following my poems Splendid Poison Frog and Beautiful Celia, I am proud to continue the
“Extinction Column” for the Oxford Climate Society blog to give voice to the beings that
have gone extinct in our own lifetime. So, I wrote this third extinction poem in the voice of a
goddess, or rather, in the double voice she always carried inside: the girl who refused, and the
dolphin who endured millions of years until we drowned her twice.
Thanks for reading.
Özge Lena
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