Interview with Tony Rath, writer of ‘We Leave Them This Hell’
By André Habet
When I read ‘We Leave Them This Hell’, I was terrified and elated. In this short story, Tony Rath imagines a near future Cayo devastated by climate change where the heat has become deadly and water a rarity and one man attempts to make it through another day. ‘We Leave Them This Hell’ is the first piece of climate fiction I’ve read by a Belizean, and it is a must-read for those becoming alert to the transformative impact that the climate crisis may have on our home.
I interviewed Rath about his short story via Zoom from his new home in London, England and mine in Belmopan, Cayo. We spoke about the climate crisis, the influence of his photography on his writing, and how his complex background made writing about the climate crisis a natural synthesis of all he’s been interested in so far in his life.
André Habet: Your story opens with a familiar place defamiliarized, the home. You do an amazing job of making a place typically associated with retreat and comfort feel absent of those sensations. Why did you decide to start your story about such a global phenomena in this intimate space?
Tony Rath: When I’m writing, André, I don’t think that far ahead as to why I’m doing something. I imagine myself in the kind of situation [depicted in the story] and instead of looking at a grander scale, I felt more comfortable verbalizing about a location that felt close. I don’t really think [when I’m writing] with an outline. I think about a single person’s POV, in this case, my point of view and use that as a starting point then seeing where it goes.
AH: The stakes of the story are survival. To quote your narrator, ‘Find food. Find water. Find relief from the blazing sun’ are the daily goals of the unnamed protagonist. How cognizant do you think Belizeans are about the threat to these essential things we’ll soon face thanks to climate change and biodiversity collapse?
TR: I don’t think Belizeans, in general, are aware of how good we have it. How wonderful, how spectacular Belize is. We have a wealth of natural resources, the most important ones being water and rich lands, and I believe from my conversations with a lot of young people, they haven’t been exposed to anything else. When you don’t have any experience of anything different, you take what’s in front of you as the norm and nothing special. From my life experience, I almost cry when I think about how lucky we are in Belize. Not only because of the freedom we have but just the freedom of our natural environment.
Over the years I’ve done my best to show people what Belize has. Mainly it’s because I’ve had the experience of other environments like deserts and snow and polluted, dead places. For instance, I’m in London right now and there’s no forest, no wilderness. People are proud of London as a ‘green city’, but you go to the parks and it’s mostly manicured lawns. I like where I live in England, but it’s a concrete environment. An ant colony of humans. Eight to ten million people living in a small area and it’s pretty insane, a fascinating insane. But Belizeans will look at it and think it’s beautiful. And I think to myself, ‘Aw, man. I just don’t understand how people can live like this.’
AH: It really struck me being in London right before the pandemic and thinking about all the stories about Caribbean people in London, how alluring it is the idea of the cosmopolitan city. But also I couldn’t get over the highly controlled green spaces and the lack of nature existing on its own terms.
TR: There’s a fair number of people here working to rewild. They’re trying to save voles, hedgehogs, and introducing beavers to rivers. London is a place that sucks natural resources. The people live in concrete structures above or near stores. It’s almost like they’re living in caves. They come out and go to the shop and head back to their caves. They take these transport routes to work in places for jobs that don’t enrich them, but enrich the already weathy.
I’ll give you an example. I’m very cognizant of the movements of the sun and moon from living in Belize. One night I knew the full moon would rise right behind downtown London and went to Waterloo Bridge at six in the evening to capture it. There were hundreds of people passing by me, and no one would look at this big beautiful moon. And occasionally a person would stop and ask what I was doing and I’d tell them “look at the moon”. They might snap a quick photo and rush on. Everybody’s on their phone and nobody is looking around. I don’t think humans evolved to live in this manner.
AH: A million fragmented realities and very few shared realities.
TR: And it’s so hard for people to meet others here too. I haven’t had a problem because I tend to engage anybody on the street but some I talk to say it is hard to meet anyone.
AH: I read that the Maldives spends about half its annual budget on climate adaptation projects. How seriously do you see politicians and the wealthy taking the threat of climate change in Belize? Have you noticed any changes in policy that give you hope or are things par for the course since you wrote this story?
TR: No, but you know living in London I’m getting my news from channels 5 and 7 and Love FM, so I’m not on the ground in Belize. I don’t see electric vehicles coming in or a switch to renewable energy. Maybe there is. I know for example Monkey River is disappearing, Dangriga is losing its shoreline. It’s only a matter of time before we lose our islands and shores to the rising seas. By 2050, we’ll probably have half the islands we do now.
AH: You’re known by many Belizeans as a photographer. How has your photography informed your understanding of the present and future environmental conditions of Belize? Has that work informed your writing?
TR: I’ve been shooting in Belize for about 35-40 years. I’ve moved around a lot and have gone to the same places multiple times. I’ve always written but never published or never let others see what I wrote. The current story is a very dark story, I understand. I actually wrote it when I first arrived in England while I was under quarantine. When I saw London, it was kind of dark to me. It was just sad. It didn’t make me sad but it was sad to see London as the pinnacle of mankind progress, what we’d come to. It had no meaning to me. . So during quarantine I started thinking ‘Where is all this going to end up?’ I asked ‘What is going to happen in Belize?’ And since I was stuck and I couldn’t photograph , I figured why not write this?
AH: You said the piece can be perceived as dark, and there is a lot of death and suffering in this story. But for me, as someone who studies climate change, your story gave me some relief and made me feel less alone in my thoughts for what might happen in the near future. I felt camaraderie with you as a writer in this piece.
TR: I hope that others will feel that way too, but I suspect that with you I’m probably preaching to the choir. I follow your podcast [Mada Fyah] and I may not always agree with you, but 90% of the time I do agree with what you’re saying about climate change. I almost feel like we’re on a sinking ship and instead of bailing everyone is just going on with what they normally do.
I don’t know what drives people. What are they trying to do? Are they after pleasure? Creating something? Basically, none of it matters if we lose our environment. That’s what makes Belize so special. That we still have a healthy environment.
I have the last five lines of Percy B. Shelley’s ‘Ozymandiaz’ taped to my computer and I see it every day. It guides and grounds me. It reminds me that nothing will remain if we destroy the natural environment.
When I take pictures, people remark on their beauty but many miss the point of what I’m doing, that those things actually exist. In most cases, comments on the photo are about me and not really what I’m taking a picture of. I try my hardest to not put my brand on it. I tell people anyone can take these pictures, but I happen to be lucky enough to go to these places. Maybe I have an aptitude for seeing light, but other than that it’s really about seeing and experiencing the beauty we have around us.
AH: You give us insights into the potential futures of Spanish Lookout, San Ignacio, and the Southern Maya communities. Why those and what other communities’ fates did you possibly consider including here?
TR: That was not hard at all. To me, the Mennonites are the major movers of deforestation. In my numerous conversation with them, the reason the Mennonites are a powerful force is that they all believe in the same thing: take the land and use it. t’s a very powerful when they all believe the same thing.
As far as the Mayans go, I’m a firm believer that the indigenous people of Belize care for the environment they have. They are caretakers of the soils, the forests, and their water supplies. They have a very close connection to nature. I’ve worked with them and I imagined that because they are relatively isolated they’d be able to develop sustainable energy and water as seen in the story.
AH: There are great descriptions here on the physiological toll climate change’s impacts on Belize will have on people. How did you go about the process of learning what might happen and then including those key descriptions in the narrative?
TR: I was trying to visualize what it’d be like to move through the world like this guy. I’ve had first-hand experience with making sure that I had water. I’ve had experience with managing heat stress. I’ve moved through different environments and learned about what’s required to survive in each. I amplified those experiences in the story.
AH: When did your understanding of the urgency of climate change first fully take form? How has it informed, if it has, the way you live?
I’ve led a very lucky life. I started out at the United States Airforce Academy as an electrical engineer. I wanted to be a test pilot. I was always interested in the way things work and the physics of it all. I’d stay home and read instead of party in high school. At the Air Force Academy, my eyesight worsened and they told me I couldn’t fly. So I changed to oceanography and marine biology. I’ve nearly graduated with a bachelor’s three different times, always interrupted by adventures. When the Smithsonian Institution asked me to come to Belize to run their research station on Carrie Bow Caye, I said yes. That is what first brought me to Belize in the late 1970s.
I think from a very young age, my dad instilled in me the importance of nature, of wilderness. That and all my background made it so plain to me, even outside of any scientific research, that you can’t just destroy nature and replace it with systems we build. I grew up with the idea of protecting wilderness and the importance of biodiversity. It wasn’t a scientific thing, it was a way of living. The scientific part came later. That’s what attracted me to Belize. The endless wilderness that we still have.
You can read Tony Rath’s short story ‘We Leave Them This Hell’ in Issue No. 1 of the Bent Pin Press Journal, now available at bentpinpress.com and various stores around Belize.
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