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ABSTRACT
This article examines the possibilities as well as the limits of creaturely solidarity in Lebanese novelist Emily Nasrallah's (d. 2018) young adult novel Yawmīyyāt Hirr (A Cat's Diary), first published in Arabic in 1997 and translated by Denys Johnson-Davies under the title What Happened to Zeeko in 2001, and Hoda Barakat's (b. 1952) Barīd al-Layl (The Night Mail), first published in Arabic in 2018 and translated by Marilyn Booth under the title Voices of the Lost in 2021. I show how the ‘creaturely’ in both novels becomes a trope for inhumanity, dehumanization, and animalization. In other words, the creaturely denotes not only animals and nonhuman ecologies, but humans who have been stripped of their political humanity and thereby rendered ungrievable less-than-human beings. I argue that both writers foster a feeling of creaturely solidarity through poignant instances of shared pain, which are construed within the context of war and ecological calamity.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Kindle ed., loc. 148.
2 Ibid., Kindle ed., loc. 159.
3 Ibid., Kindle ed., loc. 230.
4 Varghese, “Lebanese Author Hoda Barakat Wins International Prize for Arabic Fiction.”
5 Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” 164.
6 Nasrallah, Yawmiyyāt Hirr, 4.
7 My translation.
8 Herman, Narratology beyond the Human, 36.
9 Nasrallah, What Happened to Zeeko, Kindle ed., loc. 55.
10 Ibid., 55.
11 Barakat, Voices of the Lost, 66.
12 Nasrallah, Yawmiyyāt Hirr, 19.
13 Nasrallah, What Happened to Zeeko, Kindle ed., loc. 140.
14 Ibid., Kindle ed., loc. 18.
15 Le Guin, She Unnames Them: Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, 194.
16 Haraway, When Species Meet, 5.
17 Quoted in Williams, The Necessity of Young Adult Fiction, Kindle ed., loc. 75.
18 Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” 164.
19 Nasrallah, What Happened to Zeeko, Kindle ed., loc. 117.
20 Williams, The Necessity of Young Adult Fiction, Kindle ed., loc. 172.
21 Coetzee, Disgrace, 11.
22 Nasrallah, What Happened to Zeeko, Kindle ed., loc. 201.
23 Ibid., Kindle ed., loc 320.
24 Ibid., Kindle ed., loc. 326.
25 Ibid., Kindle ed., loc. 333.
26 Nasrallah, Yawmiyyāt Hirr, 62.
27 Nasrallah, What Happened to Zeeko, Kindle ed., loc. 469.
28 Ibid., Kindle ed., loc. 515.
29 Ibid., Kindle ed., loc. 389.
30 Ibid., Kindle ed., loc. 439.
31 Ibid., Kindle ed., loc. 356.
32 Ibid., Kindle ed., loc. 430.
33 Nasrallah, What Happened to Zeeko, Kindle ed., loc. 463.
34 Ibid., Kindle ed., loc. 614.
35 Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film, 118-119.
36 Estock, “Painful Material Realities, Tragedy, Ecophobia,” 133-4.
37 Nasrallah, What Happened to Zeeko, Kindle ed., loc. 656.
38 Ibid., Kindle ed., loc. 754.
39 Ibid., Kindle ed., loc. 758.
40 Michael Marder, The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium, 66.
41 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 38.
42 Barakat, Voices of the Lost, 4.
43 Ibid., 4.
44 Ibid., 21.
45 Ibid., 21.
46 Ticktin, Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France.
47 Barakat, Voices of the Lost, 22.
48 Ibid., 179.
49 Olszok, The Libyan Novel: Humans, Animals and the Poetics of Vulnerability, 5.
50 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 293.
51 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2.
52 Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Kindle ed., loc. 3979.
53 Ibid., Kindle ed., loc. 3968.
54 Ibid., Kindle ed., loc. 3968.
55 Ibid., Kindle ed., loc. 156.
56 Barakat, Voices of the Lost, 5.
57 Gupta, “The Future in Ruins: Thoughts on the Temporality of Infrastructure,” 3.
58 Ibid., 3.
59 Davis and Burke III, Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa, 267.
60 Gupta, “The Future in Ruins: Thoughts on the Temporality of Infrastructure,” 5.
61 Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 3.
62 Ibid., 4 (emphasis mine).
63 Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 17.
64 Barakat, Voices of the Lost, 12-13.
65 Ibid., 13.
66 Ibid., 37.
67 Ibid., 13.
68 Ibid., 13.
69 Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Kindle ed., loc. 231.
70 Barakat, Voices of the Lost, 12-13.
71 Ibid., 28.
72 Ibid., 28.
73 Barakat, Barīd al-Layl, 11.
74 Barakat, Voices of the Lost, 7.
75 Ibid., 8.
76 Ibid., 10.
77 Ibid., 28.
78 Barakat, Voices of the Lost, 53-54.
79 Quoted in Williams, The Necessity of Young Adult Fiction, Kindle ed., loc. 96.
80 El-Ariss, “Return of the Beast: From Pre-Islamic Ode to Contemporary Novel,” 66.
81 El-Ariss, ed., “w-ḥ-sh” [Beast].
82 Barakat, Voices of the Lost, 47.
83 Ibid., 48.
84 Ibid., 89.
85 Ibid., 60.
86 Barakat, Voices of the Lost, 63.
87 Barakat, Barīd al-Layl, 23.
88 Braidotti, “A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities,” 34.
89 Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film, 6.
90 Barakat, Voices of the Lost, 143.
91 Ibid., 151.
92 Ibid., 140-1.
93 Ibid., 89.
94 Ibid., 176.
95 Barakat, “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness – For Tarek El-Ariss.”
96 Ibid.
97 Ibid.
98 Ibid.
99 Barakat, Voices of the Lost, 181.
100 Ibid., 191.
101 Pick, Creaturely Poetics, 184.
102 Barakat, Barīd al-Layl, 125.
103 Barakat, Voices of the Lost, 194.
104 Ibid., 195.
105 Ibid., 197.
106 Braidotti, Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti, 322.
107 Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Kindle ed., loc. 5515.