Imagining the Unseen

By Matthew Brambley

In an age of accelerated ecological degradation and impending environmental catastrophe, how do we (as creative writers and students of literature) utilize the apparatus of language to give form to such formless threats? How do we effectively communicate the urgency of such global crises to an audience that, despite the best efforts of experts from a wide range of professional fields, remains largely indifferent? Our personal, linguistic, and academic vernacular have all too often proved inadequate in characterizing such monumental occurrences, yet important contributions have been made in the struggle to give form to our global predicament and to more effectively illustrate the role our species plays in it.

The term “Anthropocene” was first introduced in 2000 by Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen. Crutzen proposed the term “Anthropocene” as a way of distinguishing the current environmental conditions of the planet, conditions that have resulted from rapid and unprecedented environmental transformations brought about by the activities of the human species, from the harmony of the preceding Holocene. While the Anthropocene has not yet been adopted as the official geological epoch of the modern age, the term has proven highly influential (if not at times controversial) to a vast array of academic disciplines. Among these is the discipline of literary studies, as the burgeoning fields of ecocriticism and environmental humanities evince. One such literary critic, Rob Nixon, has advanced further concepts to assist in the way we think, speak, and write about the Anthropocene.

In his 2011 work Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Nixon introduces us to three new terms that demonstrate the challenges in imaginatively depicting events such as climate change and other occurrences unique to the Anthropocene, while also proposing some strategies for how to cope with these challenges. Included in these three key terms are the concepts of slow violence, the environmentalism of the poor, and the writer-activist.

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The first of Nixon’s three terms makes up one half of the title to his book: slow violence. “By slow violence,” Nixon writes, “I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”¹ The slow violence that Nixon discusses is difficult to perceive of precisely because it occurs at such a gradual, even inter-generational, pace. The immediacy of the repercussions of our actions are too often lost on us when we ourselves are not, and will not, be the ones to suffer the consequences. But if our actions result in the harm of others, inadvertent or not, what other name is there to call it but violence?

Nixon continues: “Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility.” To illustrate the immediacy associated with our common understanding of what amounts to a violent act Nixon relies on the example of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack that lead to the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in New York City: “The fiery spectacle of the collapsing towers was burned into the national psyche as the definitive image of violence, setting back by years attempts to rally public sentiment against climate change, a threat that is incremental, exponential, and far less sensationally visible.” With the modern news cycle dominated by images of this brand of explosive violence on a day-to-day basis, how is it then that we can shift public awareness to the devastation wrought by the global threats of incremental toxic buildup, unprecedented species loss, and accelerating green house gas emissions?

“We need,” Nixon argues, “to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales.” This is no easy task, however. As has already been established, the prevailing public impression of what constitutes a violent act involves a singular perpetrator responsible for creating chaos and upsetting the harmony of a given moment. The actions of someone who refuses to wear a mask to help mitigate the spread of a deadly infectious disease during a global pandemic may lead directly to the deaths of those who otherwise may have survived, but this story is not engrossing in the way that a gunman opening fire in a crowded public square is. “How,” Nixon asks, “can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant political intervention, these emergencies whose repercussions have given rise to some of the most critical challenges of our time?”

Speculative fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin has herself made it a priority to imagine story-telling modes alternative to the prevailing arch of what she calls “the Ascent of Man the Hero.”² In her theoretical essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Le Guin targets society’s fascination and literature’s preoccupation with the types of immediate violence Nixon discusses in his work. “We’ve heard it,” she writes, “we’ve all heard all about the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing being contained.” This macabre obsession with explosive and immediate violence, a distinctly male driven story that Le Guin traces back to the hunting excursions of the primitive human, has left the author with a sense of alienation not just from her trade as a writer of fiction, but from society as a whole and her role in it as a woman: “So long as culture was explained as originating from and elaborating upon the use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing, I never thought that I had, or wanted, any particular share in it.”

As an alternative to the tale of the Hero that has colonized much of popular fiction across mediums, including the mainstream national news cycle, Le Guin draws from past authors such as Virginia Woolf to develop her “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” Le Guin argues that rather than constructing narrative expectations around the Hero and his weapons of war, literature would be more suited to the gathering of ideas found in the more typical corners of our real-world lived experiences: “I would go as far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.” It is through this approach that literature is most capable of depicting and commenting on real world affairs of the utmost urgency. In relation to the topics of this essay, Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag” may be the best candidate in approaching how to imagine the temporal complexities presented by such existential threats as climate change and mass extinction.

Le Guin’s 1972 novella The Word for World is Forest serves as an apt example of her theory in practice. Set within her Hainish Cycle sequence of fictional works depicting an imagined future in which Earth is joined by several other human populated planets for the formation of an interplanetary confederation, The Word for World is Forest describes Earth’s attempt at colonizing the forest world of Athshe. In Le Guin’s imagined future, Earth (or Terra) has undergone radical environmental transformations due to unmitigated industrial logging that has led to the complete annihilation of the planet’s forestry. With the insistent necessity of timber unrelinquished on Earth, the planet has outsourced its logging expeditions byway of a highly militarized colonialism. But Athshe itself is not uninhabited. The planet is home to a species of green, furry humanoids that are short in stature and descendent of the same race of humans that make up the confederacy. Consequently, the Athsheans and their home world fall victim to the same colonialist practices that have ravaged so much of Earth throughout its own history.

By contrasting the aggressive occupation by the Terrans with the otherwise peaceful lifestyle of the Athsheans, Le Guin encapsulates the ways in which the rhetoric of violence and war infects the vernacular and consumes the narrative of not only our fiction, but our lived history as well. The Athsheans, being a peaceful people, are wholly unprepared for the arrival of the Terrans. When the men of Earth arrive to colonize and plunder, they are compelled to ease their burdens by enslaving the native Athsheans, putting them to work in designated camps where they are to assist in the Terrans’ logging excursions. With no way of defending themselves, the Athsheans have little choice but to forfeit their bodies and their planet to the invading force, for they have no understanding of combat or murder; the words for such concepts do not even exist in their language.

The Earth-men are lead in part by the maniacal Captain Davidson who, using the derogative slur “Creechies,” exemplifies his mindset of supremacy when describing the Athsheans: “Creechies didn’t fight, didn’t kill, didn’t have wars. They were intraspecies non-aggressive, that meant sitting ducks. They didn’t fight back.”³ Davidson finds it easy to dehumanize the Athsheans for their differences in custom and, most importantly, their differences in appearance. But these differences do not negate a sexual attraction to the distinct race of human the Athsheans represent. As a result of this innate attraction, the Athsheans are routinely made the victims of sexual assault, and when Davidson rapes and murders the wife of Selver, the Athshean leads a movement among his people to repel the invading Terrans, ultimately ushering in a fundamentally different way of life on his planet.

After suffering disfigurement and nearly dying by Davidson’s hands, Selver leads his people in rebellion against the Earthmen, wreaking havoc at the foreign logging campsites and forcing the retreat of the Terrans and the other members of the interplanetary confederation from Athshea. Le Guin’s novella concludes with the ominous premonition that the violence required of the Athsheans in gaining their liberation may not be the last of such violent conflicts to plague their planet. “Sometimes a god comes,” Selver explains. “He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done . . . What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.”

Throughout The Word for World is Forest, Le Guin weaves together such diverse themes as economic exploitation, environmental destruction, and racial and sexual supremacy to demonstrate the interconnectedness of such oppressive and exploitative practices. In doing so, Le Guin utilizes her imagined reality to reflect on the corrosive nature of such institutionalized behaviors as she sees them on present day Earth at the time of the novella’s writing. Choosing to abandon the story of the Hero, Le Guin instead affords us a different type of story, one that is centered on our shared human experience, albeit through the imaginative lens of SF. As she writes in her essay, “we’ve all let ourselves become a part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.”

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In our efforts to discover the proper form and vocabulary required in depicting the complicated processes by which slow violence occurs, it is imperative to recall that the stories being depicted are inherently true (that being that they are human stories concerned with human and planetary phenomenon), whether fictionalized or not. The devastation wrought upon the Athsheans is the same as has been and continues to be endured by peoples from across the globe and throughout history. Le Guin’s fictionalized alien race and the struggles they endure in order to regain their autonomy then may be indicative of Rob Nixon’s second term: the environmentalism of the poor. Nixon writes that, “it is those people lacking resources who are the principal casualties of slow violence. Their unseen poverty is compounded by the invisibility of slow violence that permeates so many of their lives.” Due to their lack of resources in defending themselves against the existential threats posed to them and their environment, the Athsheans are made victims to the machinery of the colonialist Terrans and their resource extracting apparatus. But to better illustrate the conditions of these unseen victims, it may be worthwhile to turn to more realistic works of fiction.

Helon Habila’s 2010 novel Oil on Water tracks the ordeal of two African journalists who have been sent to the Niger Delta to confirm the identity of the wife of a wealthy British oil executive who has been kidnapped by local resource rebels. As they risk their lives searching for the missing white woman, Rufus and Zaq bear witness to the ecological devastation the oil company has wrought upon the local environments. Along their way, the two journalists repeatedly discover abandoned villages with “the same empty squat dwellings, the same ripe and flagrant stench, the barrenness, the oil slick and the same indefinable sadness in the air, as if a community of ghosts were suspended above the punctured zinc roofs, unwilling to depart, yet powerless to return.”⁴ Many local villagers have relocated out of desperation for sustainable living conditions, while those who remain do so for religious or spiritual purposes. At night, the sky is alit with the flames of oil lamps burning in the distance like stars. The barrenness and decrepitude of the Niger Delta as Habila depicts it reflects a conflict between two competing approaches to geographical land distribution examined by Rob Nixon in Slow Violence.

In discussing the environmentalism of the poor Nixon differentiates between what he calls official and vernacular landscapes. A vernacular landscape is one that is “shaped by the affective, historically textured maps that communities have devised over generations, maps replete with names and routes, maps alive to significant ecological and surface geological features.” In other words, a vernacular landscape has been established by the peoples indigenous to the geographical area in question and whose environmental health and wellbeing is maintained through the customs and practices of those people. On the other hand, an official landscape is one that is imposed upon the vernacular by outside political, economic, corporate, or other organizational systems. An official landscape “writes the land in a bureaucratic, externalizing, and extraction-driven manner that is often pitilessly instrumental.” When this occurs, the land previously maintained through generational customs effectively becomes the property of the imposed force, and the native peoples to these lands are often left destitute. Such destitution may result in unique measures in a peoples’ quest for autonomy and environmental sustainability.

There are various degrees in response by locals faced with the loss of their native land when encroached upon by an imposing organizational force. Economic forces tend to be at play in these situations wherein the imposing force may attempt to purchase the land that they so desire. However, once the land has become occupied by such forces, the ecological destruction that results may prove to be too costly for those who call the land home, requiring an unwilling and untimely exit from the now despoiled ancestral lands. Habila writes of one such circumstance in which a village rejects the proposed offer in his novel: “This was their ancestral land, this was where their fathers and their fathers’ fathers were buried. They’d been born here, they’d grown up here, they were happy here, and though they may not be rich, the land had been good to them, they never lacked for anything. What kind of custodians of the land would they be if they sold it off?” Other, more radical, forms of resistance may result from such circumstances, as the rebels ransoming the oil executive’s wife suggest.

These rebels have gone to violent extremes in order to regain control of the land that has been surrendered (willingly or unwillingly) to the transnational oil company that has been the cause of so much dislocation and destruction. These are men that have chosen to stay and fight for their land and for control over its resources, and as such may be understood as embodying what Nixon refers to as “displacement without moving” or “refugees in place.” Nixon explains that “instead of referring solely to the movement of people from their places of belonging,” this notion of displacement “refers rather to the loss of the land and resources beneath them, a loss that leaves communities stranded in a place stripped of the very characteristics that made it inhabitable.” While the transnational oil company profits from the destruction of the land, the rebels that resist it attack pipelines, engage in armed conflict with authorities, participate in kidnappings, and steal the oil for their own use and sale. As one character in Habila’s novel puts it, “I don’t blame them for wanting to get some benefit out of the pipelines that brought nothing but suffering to their lives, leaking into the rivers and wells, killing the fish and poisoning the farmlands. And all they are told by the oil companies and the government is that the pipelines are there for their own good, that they hold great potential for their country, their future.”

In further considering the issues that face refugees, it is useful to turn to a separate novel; Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2005). Ghosh’s novel follows the exploits of Piya, a young American woman of Indian descent that has returned to her parents’ home country to study a rare species of dolphin that is thought to be native to the Sundarbans. On her expedition, she crosses paths with Kanai, a linguist from Delhi who has traveled to the Sundarbans after the death of his uncle. As the two navigate the region, made perilous by the presence of man-eating Bengal tigers, they are beset by the persistent struggle between a band of refugees, who have occupied one of the island territories along the archipelago, and the national forest service that would use force in order to remove the refugees so to preserve the land for the endangered Bengal tigers.

This conflict encapsulates Nixon’s observation of an anti-developmentalism that has proven harmful to the most vulnerable groups of people threatened by displacement. In this regard, Nixon prefers the term “conservation refugees.” He writes that, [t]oo often . . . conservation, driven by powerful transnational NGOs, combines an antidevelopmental rhetoric with the development of finite resources for the touristic few, thereby depleting vital resources for long-term residents.” Nixon alleges here that the efforts of influential non-governmental organizations (such as the Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund, and Conservation International) to forcibly impose Western-centric conservation agendas have proven detrimental to the relationships of indigenous peoples to their local ecologies. In the case of The Hungry Tide, it may not be a powerful transnational NGO that imperils the wellbeing of local residents in the name of conservation, rather it is a program sponsored by the national government itself, but the results are the same. This dilemma is given voice when the ideological differences between Piya and Kanai come to a head.

When the two travelers come across a small village whose occupants have trapped one of the ferocious Bengal tigers inside a small village hut, Piya is forced to watch in horror as the villagers violently execute the endangered creature, piercing it through the eye and burning it while still alive. In the aftermath of the event, Kanai attempts to console Piya by explaining to her the threat posed to the villagers by the carnivorous mammals: “It happens every week that people are killed by tigers. How about the horror of that? If there were killings on that scale anywhere else on earth it would be called a genocide, and yet here it goes almost unremarked.”⁵ While Piya remains resistant to the notion that the killing of endangered animals may be of necessity for certain groupings of the global population, Kanai continues to reason with her by inserting the economic implications of this negligence into his argument: “It’s not hard to ignore the people who’re dying – after all, they are the poorest of the poor. But just ask yourself whether this would be allowed to happen anywhere else.”

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At the conclusion of Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide Piya reflects on what she has learned during her time in the Sundarbans and how this has changed her outlook on the environmentalism of peoples from a wide range of differing ecologies spanning the globe. Reconciling her instinct to preserve the natural world around her with the needs of the displaced and vulnerable peoples who live in said world, Piya says to Kanai’s aunt, “I don’t want to do the kind of work that places the burden of conservation on those who can least afford it,” thereby bringing Ghosh’s illustration of the plight of conservation refugees full circle.

Ghosh’s awareness of and sensitivity in bringing such problematic practices to light in his work exemplifies the methods of what Nixon calls the writer-activist. “The writer-activists,” Nixon writes, “share a desire to give human definition to such outsourced suffering, a desire to lay bare the dissociational dynamics whereby, for example, a rich-country conservation ethic is uncoupled from environmental devastation, externalized abroad, in which it is implicated.” Nixon is specifically interested in those writers whose works have served either as the catalyst for activist movements or have become deeply associated with a movement’s messaging. We have seen that fiction can be used as a tool to shed light on problematic structural systems and the often unseen harm such institutionalized behaviors bring to those most vulnerable. “In a world permeated by insidious, yet unseen or imperceptible violence,” writes Nixon, “imaginative writing can help make the unapparent appear, making it accessible and tangible by humanizing drawn-out threats inaccessible to the immediate senses.”

Habila writes to show us the damage suffered by the Niger Delta at the cost of oil extraction, while Ghosh makes the suffering of Bengali refugees at the expense of anti-human environmentalism vividly apparent. Le Guin, on the other hand, takes us to a sci-fi world of forestry where she depicts for us the extreme costs of institutionalized ecological destruction on the people native to the lands being exploited. Each author can be seen as utilizing the written word for the purposes of challenging the existing power structures that put our environments at risk, which brings us back to our original question. How are we to approach depicting the slow moving and invisible threats of the Anthropocene?

“To confront slow violence requires,” Nixon tells us, “that we plot and give figurative shape to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across space and time. The representational challenges are acute, requiring creative ways of drawing public attention to catastrophic acts that are low in instant spectacle but high in long-term effects.” It is not simply what we choose to discuss when talking about such devastating realities, but how we talk about it, and it is the role of the writer-activist to help accomplish this. Nixon explains: “Writer-activists can help us apprehend threats imaginatively that remain imperceptible to the senses, either because they are geographically remote, too vast or too minute in scale, or are played out across a time span that exceeds the instance of observation or even the physiological life of the human observer.” Moving forward, then, it appears that confronting the temporal displacements presented us by the Anthropocene will require a paradigm shift in our imaginative capabilities, and it is the activists and the authors that will help us accomplish this.