Fragile ecologies

Covering texts from the 1980s to the present, the articles contained in this special issue of Middle Eastern Literatures, “Fragile Ecologies: Environmental Urgency in the Arts and Literatures of the Middle East,” speak to the entrenched twentieth-century discourse of what Stephanie LeMenager calls the “charisma of energy, as an American idea and a force” and of what Imre Szeman terms the “fiction of surplus” that has defined western literary responses to oil, based in the “ideas and ideals of personal freedom, independence and physical capacity” ultimately enabled by petroleum.¹ Dwelling in the broken-down and inefficient, and the ugliness and melancholy of extraction sites and strangely shifting climates, literary works from the MENA region, as these articles show, have long haunted the colorful, luminescent tales of energy-driven progress that have brought us to where we are today, as stark reminders that the burden of responsibility for anthropogenic climate change is unevenly spread, as are its consequences. Automobility conveys moments of intense narrative reflection and often anxiety, while petrochemical products, in the form of abrasive synthetic materials and piles of mismanaged rubbish, hover on the margins of literature and film, occasionally coming to the fore as active narrative agents. Science and technology are ambivalently caught between the wonder of neon lights, airport departure lounges, and agricultural and hydraulic machinery and infrastructure, and dismay in the slow violence that lurks on their margins. Dams, water pumps, and other high modernist land management schemes are accompanied by uneasy intimations of ecologies and climates that slowly or suddenly reject human control, of seasonal disruption, unprecedented heat and cold, and other strange—or now not so strange—warps and mutations. Identifying these powerful narratives and engaging them with critical reflections from the fields of ecocriticism and energy humanities is the driving force behind these collected articles.

The Middle East, across its diverse geographic terrains, has long been acquainted with climatic precarity and seasonal fluctuation, in the form of extreme heat and aridity, as well as flooding. Peoples have adapted to this precarity over the centuries, while political legitimacy has often been founded on the harnessing and control of scant resources.² In the twentieth century, however, ecologies have experienced an unprecedented unbalancing through the large-scale commodification and commercialization of resources and energies, specifically oil, though also water, soil, and minerals. This has had both immediate repercussions on lived ecologies, as well as longer-term consequences. Both are starkly portrayed in ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Munīf’s al-Tīh (1984; Cities of Salt, 1987), the first volume of his petrofiction epic, Mudun al-milḥ (Cities of Salt), through the dismantling of the desert oasis of Wādī al-ʿUyūn, alongside the heat which eerily rises across the novel, reaching its apex in the oil city of Ḥarrān’s stifling, unliveable summer seasons. Towards the novel’s end, the Amir of Ḥarrān listens to his new radio with an enraptured audience. The first of its kind in the city, gifted by a foreign trader, the radio prompts the same language of spectrality and terror that surrounds technological encounters and ecological disruption across the novel, prompted by an instinctively felt threat of encroaching, unsettling new energies. The content of the radio program is also of note, consisting of two tales from the ancient animal fables of Kalīla wa-Dimna, excerpted in full. The only such instance of direct intertextuality in al-Tīh, the combination of premodern narrative and modern technology exerts an immediate distancing effect, preventing comfortable immersion in the novel’s twists and turns. The stories, too, are cautionary. In the first, a pregnant tern urges her husband to move to higher ground, fearing the “Lord of the Sea will make the water rise to take our chicks.”³ When the husband refuses, and the water rises, she tells a second tale, in which a pond dries up, forcing two ducks and a tortoise to escape their arid home to disastrous consequences. The stories cannot but reflect upon Ḥarrān, built in the drying desert, by the sea, against all parameters of habitability, a microcosm of our globally warming world, in which all living beings are endangered, and a vision of the future at work in the present. The audience, however, are ironically distracted from the content by their wonder in the technological form. Mingled emotions of delight, anxiety, awe, and fear echo those that shape the quintet, circling around the underlying reality of worlds ending:

The emir was delighted and anxious at the same time. The men were perfectly silent as they listened, their tongues tied, awestruck. He found their rigid, silent aspect almost comic, but when the story went on and on and the stories intermingled, and he missed some of the words as he turned and watched them, he became afraid that the device was tired.⁴

The overwhelm of modern technological information and the complexity of its operations, which cannot but be tied, within the novel’s larger narrative logic, into the technological apparatus of the oil industry, combine with the looping flow of premodern narrative to obfuscate a simple warning of impending ecological danger. The men are frozen between “wonder” and “fear,” unable to think or act. In the process, Munīf creates a mise-en-abyme of the reader’s own navigation of al-Tīh’s intermingled stories of forced displacement, alienation, pollution, illness (both physical and psychological), and ecological ruin, prompting self-reflection on the emotions and responses they conjure, and dramatizing his stated desire to dismantle the “fourth wall” of literary creation.⁵ In al-Tīh, the tales from Kalīla wa-Dimna prompt comparison between our reading of the novel, the men’s listening to the radio, and the tern’s deafness to his wife, drawing us irrevocably closer to the immediacy of habitat destruction even as our attention swerves to different distractions. Through his intertextual usage, Munīf invites reflection on the telling and reception of stories, and how, through them, we translate and interpret our relationality to the larger-than-human-world.

Munīf’s al-Tīh represents one of many significant twentieth-century literary responses to ecological crisis from the MENA region. These literary works formulate visions of fragility through a vocabulary both strange and powerful that eerily predicts our predicament today and maps the processes that led us there. In al-Tīh, as in many of these works, a sense of End Times is prominent. End Times, however, are no future apocalypse at the culmination of humankind’s tragi-heroic ascent. Rather, they are multiple and operative in the here and now, visible in creeping signs, frequently rooted in what Anna Gade elsewhere identifies as Qurʾanic imagery of the “eerie” and “incremental,” underscoring Muslim environmentalisms:

the Qur’an […] contains rich, detailed, and unique imagery of the natural world under transformation to new environmental conditions: not only the sudden trumpet blast and chaos of the Last Day and “sun darkening,” “stars falling,” “mountains unmoored” (these images all come from Al-Takwir, Q.81:1–3) but the eerie, incremental changes that precede it to mark the start of the chain of inevitable events, such as pregnant camels left standing in the pasture, “beats gathering” (the meaning of this is said to be ambiguous in tradition), water in the seas catching on fire, and a buried infant coming to life and calling out to the living from within the earth.⁶

Gade’s words evoke some of the complex temporalities and unsettling spatial imagery brought together in “Fragile Ecologies.” As in Munīf’s al-Tīh, images of local ecological change are bound into global systems of energy production and consumption, and apocalypse is not set in the future, but active within lands which have known multiple, catastrophic “endings” (to draw on another of Munīf’s novels, al-Nihāyāt (1977; Endings, 1988)) across the last century. Worlds have ended, these texts tell us, and they continue to end.

Today, parts of the Persian Gulf are recording such extreme temperatures that scientists warn of uninhabitability within the next hundred years.⁷ Dwindling groundwater supplies and desertification across the MENA region are an ongoing source of concern. A reliance on petroleum, as source of revenue and fuel, continues to render economies and ecologies vulnerable. In September 2023, a powerful storm, seen in such ferocity only once every three hundred years, obliterated two dams in Derna, Libya, with the resulting deluge killing over ten thousand people.⁸ The catastrophe was likely a result of both global warming, rendering such superstorms increasingly likely, and human neglect of the dams resulting from Libya’s political disintegration over the last decade. Each of these cases suggests the dramatically different ways that climate change will affect local populations. In Libya, the country’s collapse into rival political factions rendered even an emergency response difficult, quite apart from the pre-emptive measures that would have been necessary to prevent the disaster in the first place. In the rich Gulf, air-conditioned mega cities and the desalination of seawater are envisioned as a way forward. But in Iraq, ongoing water shortages continue to drive people to cities, many of which have become barely habitable through pollution from the petroleum industry and political neglect.⁹

In the face of such immediate challenges, the contribution of literature can seem paltry. And yet literature has precisely the power to predict and conjecture, as well as to depict the complex emotions of anxiety, disorientation, powerlessness, guilt, and anger that have become part and parcel of confronting the effects of climate change as they unfurl. Through this conjectural power, literary texts can become sites of meditation, discussion, and debate, imagining possible future scenarios, and proposing ways of navigating them. The articles in this special issue showcase this power in varied ways. Themes that unite them include the dismantling of dominant temporalities of crisis that situate catastrophe and ending in the future, as well as the boundaries of what counts as a narrative and ecological agent. Human-algae hybrids, porous human-animal bodies, and waste itself become sites of protest and resistance, revealing the complex ways that our actions blossom into unpredictable and incalculable consequences, impinging on the lived environments of others, looping back to haunt us in turn, and impressing upon us the need to rethink accepted and well-trodden histories of the MENA region, as well as the importance of its literary voices in understanding the climate crisis today. Such, in different ways, is the thrust of our opening article by Maya Aghasi, “Garbage, corruption, and political protest in Lebanese literature and film,” and our concluding article by Ilyās Khūrī, “Literature in the Time of Contagion” (“al-Adab fī zaman al-wabāʾ,” 2020), translated by Sam Martin, and first written at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Aghasi’s work calls for a shift in emphasis from the sectarian violence and political corruption that have been overriding focuses of Lebanese history in the twentieth century to ecological disruption and the disastrous consequences of waste mismanagement, themselves the outcome of civil war. Taking the films of Mounia Akl (b. 1989)—Submarine (al-Ghawwāṣa, 2016) and Costa Brava, Lebanon (Kūstā brāfā, 2021)—as her focus, she draws on tropes of Lebanese Mountain Romanticism to explore how the films juxtapose these tropes to waste as an active narrative agent, which threatens “the safety and sanctity of the home and thereby of the nation,” and highlights “the lack of singular cause, effect, and responsibility” in tracing and dealing with its consequences. For Aghasi, resistance as presented in the films is an ambivalent and slippery subject, manifested in the ending of Costa Brava, Lebanon which may be read between hope and empowerment, and devastation and defeat. Turning from the “hyperobject” of anthropogenic waste—Timothy Morton’s generative term for processes and substances so large they transcend human thinking, objects “such as Styrofoam or plastic bags, or the sum of all the whirring machinery of capitalism” that reconfigure the local within an ungraspable whole—Khūrī shifts to pandemics.¹⁰ Evoking a forgotten history of contagious diseases that haunts, but is nowhere central, to the literary archive, Khūrī reminds us of our profound fragility as embodied creatures amidst an unbalanced world. Bringing together texts from the classical Arabic poetic tradition to the present day, Khūrī explores how the literary presence of pandemics serves as a reminder of our vulnerability, as well as how such experiences tend to migrate into abstracted and symbolic literary form, stripped of their initial, visceral reality. For Khūrī, the most powerful literary explorations of struggle amidst contagion are those that foreground the desperate battle between love and death amidst unfathomable suffering. Desperate love, then, becomes a marker of resistance against overwhelming forces beyond human control.

Khūrī’s love amidst suffering suggests one means through which literature has the potential to envision forms of relationality with larger-than-human wholes, whether as an ideal to be aspired to, allowing ways forward in our current predicaments, or as a necessity forced by habitat destruction, war, and exile. This is the theme explored across three of our articles: “Threading the racial capitalocene: on the poetics of affective porosity in Ibrahim al-Koni’s Bleeding of the Stone (Nazīf al-ḥajar) and Yoel Hoffmann’s Book of Joseph (Sefer Yosef)” by Rachel Green; “Counter Creaturely Communities in Emily Nasrallah’s Yawmīyyāt Hirr and Hoda Barakat’s Barīd al-Layl” by Yasmine Khayyat; and Merve Tabur’s “Once upon a time in the anthropocene: myths, legends, and futurity in Turkish climate fiction.” In her article, Green discusses the parallel character dramas of the titular novels whose protagonists confront the “extreme affective pressures” of commodity frontiers within the wider logic of the “racial Capitalocene.” Through bringing these novels together, Green opens comparative possibilities between Hebrew and Arabic, as well as urban and desert literature, through the framework of extractive regimes that encompasses both. “Affective porosity” proves a thought-provoking lens to analyze the novels’ openness to the “oikos” of larger-than-human ecologies.

Providing an important point of conversation to Green’s “affective porosity,” Khayyat looks through the lens of “counter creaturely communities” to novels that address the Lebanese Civil War and its aftermath, focussing on the inscription of animal voices with humanity and of human voices with nonhuman or inhuman qualities. In so doing, Khayyat explores the bare life of those subject to war and environmental displacement, and how narrative can “foster accountability of global inequality and galvanize movements for justice and livable futures.” Tabur, in turn, evokes a “feminist ethics of care” leading to “cofutures in the making,” drawing her analysis from two contemporary works of Turkish climate fiction: Ayşegül Yalvaç’s Bir İstanbul Efsanesi (2022; An Istanbul Legend) and Oya Baydar’s Köpekli Çocuklar Gecesi (2019; Night of the Children-with-Dogs). Unpacking the relationship between myth and legend in the novels, Tabur explores how they “address the multiscalar complexities of climate change and […] offer imaginaries of multispecies solidarity.” In their local focus, Tabur suggests, both works of speculative fiction push back against “universalizing, apocalyptical, and anthropocentric Anthropocene discourses.” In this sense, Tabur’s article emphasizes the need for taking account of multiple temporalities in understanding climate crisis, and giving room in thought and story for its multifarious and multifaceted consequences in the past, present, and future.

Like Tabur and her focus on “variegated, historicized, and complex visions of environmental futures,” speaking back to “grand narratives, apocalypticism, colonial epistemologies, and anthropocentrism,” Teresa Pepe’s “Climate change and the future of the city: Arabic science fiction as climate fiction in Egypt and Iraq” explores how local and global pasts, presents, and futures become entangled in two graphic novels from Egypt and two short stories from Iraq. Through Aḥmad Nājī’s Istikhdām al-Ḥayāt (2014; Using Life, 2017) and Ganzeer’s The Solar Grid (2016-2020), and “al-Mutakallim” (“The Worker”) by Ḍiyāʾ Jubaylī; and “Ḥadāʾīq Bābil” (“Gardens of Babylon”) by Ḥasan Blāsim, Pepe analyses imagined future apocalyptic urban scenarios, connecting the violence enacted over the last centuries by colonial forces and ruling elites to “the global reach of the climate catastrophe.” Parallels between these works become clear in their depiction of how crises are exploited by global corporations, the dangers of placing utopic hopes in high modernist solutions, and dialogues of recrimination, blame and responsibility across generations. While Pepe traces a “horizon for hope” in these literary texts, it is fragile and dissipated over decades, emphasizing the need for enduring voices of protest.

Each article in this special issue invites a particular strategy of reading that seeks the uncanny, but by no means absent, presence of fragile literary ecologies and the human and nonhuman agents that inhabit and haunt them, both in texts that long precede our current awareness of global warming, and in those that directly address it. As Wen-chin Ouyang powerfully conveys in her afterword, “Arabic Posthuman: Bee, Beehive and Beekeeper in a Reconceptualizing of the Human,” the stories we tell about nonhuman animals have long reflected both our imaginings of ourselves as well as the changing material conditions that structure, construct and deconstruct our humanity. For Ouyang, small creatures—ants, flies, cockroaches, and bees—are particularly revealing, hovering on the edge of our consciousness, speaking to our vision of ourselves and our habitats, and vital to the healthy interconnection of our ecosystems. These creatures represent the paramount importance of questioning entrenched anthropocentric discourses through turns to the posthuman that, in different ways, are showcased in each article of this special issue. All the articles gathered suggest the profound difficulties of dealing with our current crisis and giving it literary form, as well as reminding us that, through history, we have engaged in and given literary form to struggles with a larger-than-human whole and, above all, the fragility of the human. In the novels, stories, and films discussed, characters are caught in their vulnerable openness to human and nonhuman forces whose narrative operations overlap in complex ways, and face stark ethical decisions about how to relate to one another and their surroundings. Powerlessness, confusion, and mourning confront seemingly unperturbable systems of oppression—almost inhuman in their relentless growth from the ashes of ravaged ecologies and civilizations—and offer fragile yet bold forms of resistance.

Notes

1 LeMenager, Living Oil, 4; Szeman, “Conjectures on World Energy Literature,” 283.

2 Mikhail, “Introduction,” 1.

3 Munif, al-Tīh, 443–44; Cities, 445–46.

4 Munif, al-Tīh, 445; Cities, 447.

5 Meyer, The Experimental Arabic Novel, 71.

6 Gade, Muslim Environmentalisms, 82–83, 111.

7 Pal and Eltahir, “Future Temperature in Southwest Asia.”

8 Rowlatt, “Climate Change Played Major Role in Libya Floods.”

9 Travers and Zeyad, “‘How Would You Survive?’”

10 Morton, Hyperobjects, 2.