Comparison Of Southern Swamps And The Last Of The Ofos

In the panel “Southern Swamps as Spaces of Alterity” Kristin L. Squint discusses the destruction of Florida’s swamps as a result of the melaleuca tree and the threats to the Louisiana wetlands because of development and hurricanes. She asserts that Swamplandia! highlights the situation in Florida, while The Last of the Ofos covers the conditions in Louisiana. While analyzing these two novels Squint seeks to answer two questions: “How is the destruction of Gulf Coast wetlands comparable to the loss of Indigenous lifeways? And, what kinds of practices are sustainable to maintain these ecological and cultural resources?” (Squint 3). I would argue that the interaction between Bird Man and Ava parallels the Army Corps of Engineers planting the melaleuca

trees leading to the invasion of the swamp, and their interaction serves to further illuminate the issue of the fading swamps.
Bird Man is the Army Corps that plant the melaleuca tree, while Ava is the swamp.

Squint asserts that there are “warnings . . . throughout Russell’s novel, that Florida’s wetlands are as vulnerable as now – extinct dinosaurs” (Squirt 3). When the Bird Man arrives in Ava’s life she is in an extremely vulnerable state. Her father has left for business in the mainland, Kiwi has runaway and Osceola has deserted her on the island alone. There are warnings of the Bird Man’s evilness; although Ava says he was not what she expected she describes a Bird Man’s visit as being “like a dark Christmas” (Russell 169). The Bird Man, his coat with “a layered ruff of black feathers,” also looks like the buzzards that kill Louis Thanksgiving (Russell 185). Bird Man has further similarities to the melaleuca

tree.
Much like the melaleuca tree invades the swamps, “appearing like ‘mildew on bread’”, Bird Man invades Ava’s life (Squint 3). After Ava allows him to spend the night in the Bigtree home she wakes the next morning to discover him in the kitchen making breakfast and even using the real china; he comments “Well, I guess I sure made myself at home” (Russell 184). When they begin to set out to retrieve Osceola, Ava notices that the Birdman has acquired more than she originally thought. She notices that he “raided our fridge and our museum” (Russell 199). The use of the word “raided” implies a forceful sudden attack the same way the melaleuca attacks the swamps. The Bird Man’s rape of Ava parallels the destruction of the swamp.
Early in Swamplandia!

Ava describes the Army Corps of Engineers, the organization who planted the melaleuca trees. She says:

The Army Corps of Engineers has planted thousands of melaleuca trees in the 1940s as part of their Drainage Project, back when the government thought it was possible to turn tree islands into a pleated yellowland of crops. I was raised to be suspicious of the Army Corps of Engineers, with good reason. The dikes and levees that the Army Corps had recommended for flood control had turned the last virgin mahogany stands into dust bowls; in other places, wildfire burned the peat beads down to witchy fingers of lime. (Russell 96)

Ava was raised to be suspicious of the Army Corps of Engineers, she was similarly raised to be suspicious of the Bird Man profession. According to her a Bird Man was commonly thought to be “redneck exterminators, mangrove gypsies, backwoods ornithologist, black magicians, feathered druids, scam artists” (Russell 167). The Bird Man also defiles a virgin Ava, like the Army Corps “turned the last virgin mahogany stands into dust bowls” (Russell

96).
I think that the Bird Man and Ava can definitely be likened to the Army Corps and the swamp. The Bird Man is an outsider to Ava’s world. He swiftly invades her life like the melaleucas that “swallowed fifty acres a day” (Russell). By the conclusion of the novel the Bird Man has physically invaded Ava and has defiled her as well.