A Critical Anarcho-primitivist Perspective
The bacciferous adventure of a boy and his bear in Jamberry may seem frivolous, fruity, and fun—a harmless enjoyment for young chilluns. It is anything but. Jamberry is a cautionary tale, a chilling warning of what happens when society transitions from sustenance, hunter-gatherer collectivism to a materialistic, capitalistic hellhole.
In the beginning, all seems well. One berry, two berry, pick me a blueberry! The story opens. By chance, a boy meets a furry, lovable bear. The reader feels a sense of nostalgia; she is reminded of her own bucolic childhood. Berries; canoes; friendly wildlife. Hatberry, shoeberry, in my canoeberry! All is good in the world! All is fun, and natural, and free!
But it is not.
Under the bridge, and over the dam, looking for berries, berries for jam. The fall from the dam represents the heroes’ fall from grace. Berries for jam shows that their intentions are innocent—they merely seek sustenance! But this will not save them from their brush with technology.
Finger and pawberry; my berry, your berry. Uh oh. The notion of ownership, of mine and not yours, has been introduced. The community is no longer a concern.
The real tragedy begins soon enough. Quickberry, quackberry, pick me a blackberry! implores the scathing, commanding goose, an obvious stand-in for an SS officer with his military-style cap. In the illustration, the bear cowers in a submissive pose, a hand on his head. No longer are the boy and bear free to pick for their own sustenance and enjoyment—no, now they must pick for the goose! What he represents becomes all too clear in the coming pages. Trainberry trackberry, clickety clackberry. The creeping specter of industrialization, oh my! Rumble and ramble in blackberry bramble, billions of berries for blackberry jamble. Billions! What could a boy and a bear do with billions of berries? With such excess, the only plausible purpose could be profit. The rabbit who receives this train of berries is uncanny in his resemblance to the ‘robber barons’ of the 1800s, replete in a buttoned vest coat, potbellied, arms spread out in a celebration of the plunder he has acquired; the lives he will ruin, the animals he will press into the roles of subservient worker-slave.
By now, any astute reader will feel a sense of unease, that may or may not be allayed by the next plot twist: a musical agricultural celebration! Razzberry, Jazzberry, Razamatazzberry, Berryband, Merryband, Jamming in Berryland! No longer can a day’s work of seeking food be its own reward. A natural romp in the woods has been replaced with a facsimile. So much raspberry jam has been made that it is no longer produced to be eaten; it’s consumed in the most wasteful incarnation: a skating rink!
Not a single plant or berry is in sight in the illustration; but a plaque bearing the inscription “BERRYLAND” is prominent: an obvious, ironic statement about how industrial society pretends to celebrate the very things it destroys. In contrast with the naturalistic, spontaneous, and free strawberry celebration of only a few pages ago, the celebratory participants are dressed in stiff clothing, performing a pre-orchestrated synthetic performance rather than spontaneously rejoicing in life and nature.
Will our human and ursine heroes break free of this new normal? This twisted reality in which beings exist only to harvest berries? In which the berry-industrial complex reigns supreme, so much that one’s individual identity ceases to be anything beyond “berry picker”?
Moonberry, starberry, cloudberry sky! Intones Degen, showing us how far this new paradigm extends: to the moon; to the skies; beyond. Boomberry, zoomberry, rockets shoot by! The heroes haven’t been in the system long enough to become complacent: they long to escape; not just to conquer it but to obliterate it; to break the wheel of profits and capitalism. We see an image of them escaping on a giant hot air berry-balloon, but whether this is real or merely a fantasy remains tantalisingly unclear. Do our heroes escape to their “garden of Eden”? Or do they remain bound to the berry-industrial complex, slaves who can merely fantasize about leaving?
Mountains and fountains, rain down on me. Berried in berries, what a Jam Jamboree. So ends this tale, as the boy and the bear emerge in a blank, empty space, as massive quantities of berries fall upon their heads.
The ending is superbly ironic. “What a jam jamboree” indeed: although the boy and bear have physically escaped the confines of agricultural slavery, they cannot reset their minds and see nature and their surroundings for what they are. Instead, all they see is more berries than they can ever eat, stripped of their natural and wholesome context. Their bucolic existence can never be recaptured. Every drupe, every haw, every pome, can no longer exist alone, whole and real: it is now a characterless, unidimensional unit that exists only as a function of its financial worth.