The Mountain Valley Pipeline has been in service nearly a year, transporting natural gas from West Virginia to Virginia. A new graphic memoir tells the stories of some of the people who organized to try to block the pipeline, called “Holler, a graphic memoir of rural resistance.”
“Holler” follows six people in Virginia and West Virginia who played a role in resisting the Mountain Valley Pipeline, including a teacher, a nurse and a single mom.
“But the through line is that they’re all ordinary people,” said Denali Sai Nalamalapu, the author and illustrator of the graphic memoir.
“They were just living their lives and then they heard the mountain valley pipeline was coming through,” Nalamalapu said.
Like the characters in the book, Nalamalapu played a role in the resistance for years, working as a climate activist for a grassroots nonprofit based in Southwest Virginia, called Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights.
Nalamalapu, said they wanted to highlight some of the lesser-known people who organized against the MVP. Characters like Paula Mann, a photographer in Monroe County, West Virginia.
“And they used the skills that they already had, like photography, nursing background, being a student organizer, to fight the pipeline,” Nalamalapu said.
“Holler” tells their stories through illustrations and simple sentences. Some pages have no words at all. As a young child, Nalamalapu’s mother gave them a book about cartooning. But, as they grew older, teachers didn’t always take cartooning seriously as a legitimate art. So Nalamalapu spent years focusing on other types of art, like pottery and in college, they studied writing.
“And those two paths ultimately led me back to comics and cartooning because I think that comics are a really brilliant way of conveying hard topics,” Nalamalapu said. “In part because the images can be very emotive in ways that the writing might not be able to hold emotion.”
The stories in “Holler” are about the ups and downs of fighting for something one feels about strongly—the disappointments, and the successes of organizing with others in the community.
“My singular hope with this book is that people pick it up, connect to one or more of the stories, and then think about the skills they already have that they could use to protect what they love,” Nalamalapu said.
Nalamalapu said activists are sometimes stereotyped as radical trouble makers. They wanted to offer a more nuanced, and authentic, view of activism in Appalachia.
“The stereotypes around activism are very purposefully put there by people who would rather see division among us than see us resist massive projects like the MVP,” Nalamalapu said. “Because this pipeline did not expect to have the level of resistance that it had. But part of why it did have that level of resistance is because activism looks many different ways. Particularly in Appalachia which is a region that has been targeted by extraction for over a century now.”
Nalamalapu pointed to the history of similar movements of people coming together to resist extractive industries in Appalachia.
“And people who look very different, talk very different, think very different, joining together and resisting parts of what is harming their community or changing their community in ways they don’t agree with,” Nalamalapu said.
But these stories aren’t all successes, and like the fight against MVP, many times, the companies succeed. The publication of this book comes nearly a year after the Mountain Valley Pipeline went into service, and many people in the book, including Nalamalapu, worked over a decade in the opposition against the pipeline.
“A lot of people are very devastated by the huge loss of seeing this massive pipeline go into service,” Nalamalapu said.
“I think as a career climate organizer, it’s important to me that people know that winning the fight to address climate change doesn’t look like a utopic, clean ecstatic version of the future. Or a dystopia that’s all greys and browns and devastation and death. But likely it’s somewhere in the middle,” Nalamalapu said.
“And that’s what the Mountain Valley Pipeline taught me is that winning looks a lot of different ways and the bulk of winning is connecting to the community around you and to the land and living world that you love.”
Even if, ultimately, organizers didn’t stop the pipeline, Nalamalapu said the story of this resistance movement isn’t about losing, but about the community of people that joined together and fought the MVP for over a decade.
“I definitely go through bouts of feeling helpless or despairing, which I talk about in the book,” Nalamalapu said. “There are many different ways to grapple with despair. What feels most important to me is that people have community to talk about that despair with, because I think despair festers in loneliness.”
“And I’m very stubborn, so being stubborn is important,” Nalamalapu added.
RadioIQ asked Nalamalapu, “If someone is feeling that despair, why would they want to read this book about something that like seemingly might be kind of depressing?”
“It’s a great question. And it’s actually the reason why I wrote this book,” Nalamalapu said. “My hope is that people will find this book, in some ways easy to read, or simple to read. But also not delusional, in that, it’s not denying the hardship that people endured. And that through these stories of six real people and myself walking through their journeys with them, they’ll be able to connect to what’s important to them.”
This Saturday, May 24, Blacksburg books is hosting an event to celebrate the launch of Holler. Nalamalapu will be there to talk about the book, and so will one of the activists featured in it, Desiree Shelley Flores. Her ancestors from the Monacan indigenous tribe were some of the first human inhabitants of Virginia. She connects that history to the work of activism today.
