Author(s): Zakeria Kamal, Nawazish Ali

Abstract: Ecocritical readings of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Questions of Travel” (1965) have recently shown how the formal accuracy of the poem captures a nonhuman world beyond human comprehension but have tended to regard its waterfalls, rain, mountains, and streams as objects of representation. We argue in this article that these elements are better understood as actants in Jane Bennett's sense, forces with trajectories, tempos and propensities of their own which condition, disrupt and reorient the traveller's perception. Reading the poem via Bennett’s notion of ‘thing-power’ reveals four kinds of elemental agency: the anticipatory interruption of the waterfall, the durational saturation of the rain, the withdrawal of the mountains, and the kinetic velocity of the streams. It demonstrates how the sequencing of these incommensurable registers in the poem enacts a critique of the traveller’s epistemological mastery. The article also claims that Bishop’s formal restraint, her proleptic conditionals, kinetic syntax, and refusal of totalising description do not merely illustrate new materialist claims but test and arbitrate them. The Brazilian setting of the poem is not a neutral backdrop in the analysis but a landscape located in history. The question of what it means to deploy a Euro-American theoretical lexicon to read a non-Euro-American place is woven throughout rather than added as a late qualification.

Keywords: Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel”, New Materialism, Nonhuman Agency, Postcolonial Ecocriticism

Article Info: Received: 24 May 2026; Received in revised form: 20 Jun 2026; Accepted: 23 Jun 2026; Available online: 26 Jun 2026

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.113.79