Is the Anthropocene Conniving with Capital?

Abstract

This essay examines the representation of water in Karen Jayes’ debut novel For the Mercy of Water. It focuses on the alternative ontologies imagined as a means of engaging the commons when an essential resource of the commons, water, becomes scarce, privatized and commodified. The essay draws on Sarah Nuttall’s idea of “Pluvial Time”, a moment of intense rain, as a temporal marker, to plot the emergence of the dispensation in which capital extends its doctrine of privatization to water in Jayes’ text. Further, it discusses how this regime of water privatization results in a confounding war that manifests in a variety of ways: the degraded body and the eroded community. The essay concludes by considering ways in which the commons might be reconstituted in response to commodified water.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropocene novel
• commodified water
• commons
• community

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Isabel Hofmeyr, Sarah Nuttall and Charne Lavery, editors of this special issue “Reading for Water”, for their insightful comments and for their patience throughout. The attentive reading and thoughtful suggestions of the two anonymous reviewers are much appreciated. Thanks also to Helene Strauss, colleague and occasional writing companion, for her stimulating presence during the writing of this essay.

Notes

1 For an extensive definition of the term “Anthropocene novel”, see Trexler (2015).

2 The accounts of this entanglement and the shocking violence that ensued are captured in the documentary film Miners Shot Down (dir. Desai 2014).

3 By place, I mean the interaction that a landscape shares with the lifeworld that inhabits it, consisting of objects, entities, people, plants, animals, and natural resources. Place is not just a space from which certain provincial or local identities coalesce and assert against perceived infractions; it is also an ecology marked by habitability; its capacity to inhabit life, all forms of life.

4 In South Africa, citizens/individuals pay their utilities’ rates and taxes to the municipal government, which in turn pays to the utilities companies that deliver these essential services.

5 Pundits have suggested that the next major conflicts of the twenty-first century will be water wars. In South Africa this cynical projection already looms large, as evidenced by the recent droughts of near-apocalyptic proportions in the Western Cape, Eastern Cape, and the Free State, brought about by the El Niño that swept across the country from 2014 to 2019. The water crisis, which hit the Western Cape the hardest, threw-up hitherto unresolved issues pertaining to the place of the commons, the resource common of water, in democratic South Africa.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa [grant number RA181115392297], the Research Office and the Transformation of the Professoriate Programme (2020–22) of the University of the Free State.