Rosenthal’s futuristic novel is comparable to other speculative South African texts such as Jenny Robson’s Savannah 2116 AD in the sense that ecological disaster is used as a means of exploring human relationships, and particularly what it means to be different. Such emphasis on humanistic concerns through the lens of the popular SF trope of ecological crisis is not uncommon in South African speculative fiction. Because of the country’s violent legacy of human rights violations, South African literature continues to be concerned with questions of alterity and belonging. That the effects of global warming and other ecological crises serve mainly as the backdrop for the human drama in Rosenthal’s Souvenir does not detract from the ecological message of the novel, which both offers a dire warning regarding the ecological fragility of our planet and speaks specifically to the impact that environmental decay will have on a South African future.
FAMILIAR ANIMALS: NEILL BLOMKAMP’S DISTRICT 9
Like Rosenthal’s Souvenir, Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 not only highlights the myriad forms of otherness through the introduction of an altered body or trickster figure, but also turns the gaze inward, exploring moments of self-awareness of alterity.19 D9 explores productive imaginings of hybridity in the form of human/animal couplings that serve to destabilize hierarchized binary oppositions, challenging of the kind of anthropocentricism that serves as justification for the human population’s continued dominion over our animal others.
Blomkamp uses conventional SF tropes to express anxieties regarding social, political, and economic uncertainty within a specifically South African context. South African audiences in particular (perhaps expecting the sterile glamour of a typical Hollywood production) may initially be struck by the gritty realism of the film’s depiction of the bustling, dirty streets and shantytowns of Johannesburg, the commentary by unpolished local “actors,” and the authenticity of the various South African accents and languages. The film maintains a playful attempt at verisimilitude, presenting its “findings” and interviews in documentary style, juggling between polished, edited scenes and unsteady handheld footage, and even featuring a mock television news report in which real-life SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation) news anchor Mahendra Raghunath delivers an update on alien/human conflict. Only after the camera pans out to reveal a colossal spacecraft hovering over the familiar skyline of Johannesburg, and the audience is given its first glimpse of the ship’s bizarre alien “prawns” (presumably named after the Parktown prawn, a cricketlike insect common to the Johannesburg area),20 is the very fantastic nature of the narrative is revealed.
For anyone familiar with the SF genre, and particularly the Hollywood-style “alien” film, such suspension of disbelief is not difficult. However, this acceptance of the alien presence takes on a different level of significance in District 9. Here, the alien is accepted not only as a terrifying, unnatural presence that threatens the lives of the heroic human characters, but as a protagonist with whom the audience gradually begins to sympathize. The audience’s growing empathy with the plight of the “prawn” is due to the development of a relationship between the “trickster” protagonist, Wikus van der Merwe, and an alien individual known as Christopher Johnson. While heading up an Multi-National United operation to vacate the alien population from District 9, Wikus is accidentally infected by an alien fluid (carefully collected by Christopher from discarded alien devices in order to power the abandoned prawn spacecraft), which causes him to gradually transform into a prawn. Driven by the promise of a reversal of this metamorphosis, Wikus undertakes to help Christopher regain the fluid from MNU headquarters.
It is at this juncture in the film, when Wikus and Christopher storm MNU headquarters with guns blazing and stumble across a torture chamber used to do medical experiments on alien individuals, that Andries Du Toit notes a radical shift in the way both Wikus and the audience respond to the prawn Christopher. He writes:
By now we are used to anthropomorphising “Christopher,” and we can see the horror and the pity—and the rage—that we imagine flowing through him as he looks at the ravaged body of his murdered kin. We can see that he would be entirely within his rights to smear Wikus then and there, and go his own way. But he runs across the passage to join him, and together they crouch behind a bulkhead, the room filling with smoke and the thunder of gunshots, firing madly round corners, covering each other as they dash down the passage. And suddenly we are watching a buddy movie…. There are many movies in which the aliens are good guys—but never aliens that look like this. Wikus has crossed over to the other side. And so have we.21
Du Toit’s suggestion that we can “imagine” the outrage Christopher Johnson experiences when he discovers MNU’s gruesome laboratory implies that we can imagine Christopher’s revulsion at the sight of such slaughter, because we can think ourselves into the situation. It is the same revulsion we experience when visiting similar sites of torture and captivity at Dachau or Auschwitz or, closer to home, Robben Island and Vorster Square. Despite the strangeness, the complete alienness of the prawns, the audience is called on to develop a sympathetic imagination, to empathize with the suffering of the extraterrestrial other.
Wikus van der Merwe’s Kafkaesque metamorphosis, his process of becoming prawn, allows for some critical reflection on the ways in which the film’s human characters, and particularly MNU employees, have treated nonhuman others. Wikus occupies a precarious interstitial position between being human and being prawn, thus taking on the role of the “trickster” and destabilizing distinctions between lawful and unlawful behavior and self and other. In the instant—for “a just decision is always required immediately”22—that Wikus decides to take up arms and fight alongside Christopher, he is responding to the call of the wholly other. This decision to act is made from a position of “undecidability,” which Jacques Derrida considers to be the condition for ethical responsibility and hospitality. Thus, Wikus’s actions can be considered absolutely just and responsible.
Wikus’s unique hybridity and his journey to reclaim his former life, set against the backdrop of a bizarre fictional landscape, also becomes the vehicle for Blomkamp’s commentary on contemporary South Africa and its many social and political problems. The film also invokes the country’s violent past, while simultaneously succeeding in situating South Africa in relation to a global future.
The title of the film clearly references District Six, a former residential area of Cape Town from which the apartheid government forcibly removed tens of thousands of citizens in the 1970s, immediately suggesting that District 9 can be read as a response to South Africa’s policy of institutionalized racism (apartheid) prior to 1994. Casting the alien refugees as representative of the millions of disadvantaged black South Africans who were oppressed by the tyrannical system of apartheid is not by any means a stretch of the imagination: these aliens live in an informal settlement on the outskirts of Johannesburg under the threat of forcible removal, speak a San-like “click” language, and are derogatorily referred to as “prawns” in the same way that offensive, racist terms were used to describe black South Africans in the past and, in some cases, even today.
If District 9 is a reflection on South Africa’s traumatic history of epistemic violence and oppression, it also allows for the imaginative rethinking of present-day concerns, particularly the issues of continued racialized discrimination and xenophobia in South Africa (the film was coincidentally released in the wake of a series of violent xenophobic attacks that spread across the country in 2008). District 9’s precursor, Alive in Joburg, a 2005 science fiction short film directed by Blomkamp, likewise addresses the issue of xenophobia, with many of the “interviews” about the aliens now living in Johannesburg taken from authentic interviews with South African citizens about their feelings toward Zimbabwean refugees.
District 9’s seemingly insensitive treatment of Nigerian nationals is of particular interest in this regard. Blomkamp’s depiction of Nigerians as ruthless criminals who exploit the aliens
’ weakness for tinned cat food in order to amass prawn weapons and technology has been dismissed as discriminatory and offensive by some, including Dora Akunyili, Nigeria’s information minister, who requested that the film be banned from cinemas in Abuja. However, the film appears to be lampooning the Nigerian-as-violent-criminal stereotype rather than reinforcing it—suggesting a certain level of self-awareness and ironic distance. The notion of trading cat food for advanced alien weaponry is clearly an exercise in reductio ad absurdum and can thus be seen as a critique of such negative stereotyping. In this regard, the film’s position as Hollywood blockbuster must also be considered. It appears that Blomkamp is at once lampooning and buying into Hollywood’s need for “recognizable” villains (mostly Russian, German, South African, or Nigerian). Such mimicking of the American action film, along with the film’s neat Hollywood ending, is certainly problematic and threatens to undermine the sociopolitical impact of the film. However, informed viewers (and specifically a South African audience more sensitive to the nuances of the film) will be alerted to the element of playful critique at work here. Those viewers with little or no awareness of South African political history may walk away from the cinema thoroughly entertained, at the very least touched by the “human” drama that has unfolded on the screen.
As suggested earlier, District 9 not only addresses past and present concerns of racial discrimination and oppression within South Africa, but also seeks to situate the country in relation to a global, technologically advanced future. The SF mode allows for the creation of a dystopic future world in which alien spacecraft and mechanical combat suits (presumably inspired by Japanese anime) are not out of place, and a militant corporation (MNU) can run amuck—a scenario that does not seem too unbelievable in view of increasing globalization, rapid technological advances, and the continued rise of the multinational corporation.
In addition to addressing questions of human injustice in the face of an uncertain future, District 9 is concerned with human-animal conflict. Thus far, it has been suggested that the alien refugees can be read as representative of disempowered black South Africans. However, the film’s use of the word “nonhuman” to describe the alien other,23 as well as the term “prawn,” also suggests a connection with the animal nonhuman (a notion that is strengthened by the a fact that the aliens’ main source of nourishment is tinned cat food). In this sense, the torturing of captive prawns raises debates regarding the ethical treatment of animals used for medical experimentation. Once his metamorphosis is uncovered by his colleagues, Wikus is himself subjected to violent experimentation, forced to murder a hapless prawn in order to demonstrate his control over alien weapons. In this way, the boundaries between cold-blooded torture and “necessary” scientific experimentation are blurred. Similarly, human consumption of animal flesh is rendered morally suspect through Wikus’s transformation. As Wikus’s body is composed of both human and alien flesh after his exposure to the alien liquid, the Nigerian gang’s attempt to consume his alien arm then constitutes a kind of cannibalism.
Wikus is abruptly torn from his human self and forced to occupy the physical and psychological position of a prawn. Despite the violence of this transition, the film suggests that Wikus now occupies a productive and just space—and paradoxically a more human(e) space. As a human, Wikus is a one-dimensional caricature of the “idiot Afrikaner” or “van der Merwe,” but as a prawn he becomes the visual embodiment of the psychological and ethical processes associated with Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming-animal.”24 Wikus occupies the interstitial position of the cyborg or trickster and falls outside the category of “genuine” human, thus exposing its instability.
► ► ►
The ecological messages of the speculative texts included for discussion in this chapter are intertwined with an acute awareness of pressing sociopolitical issues in South Africa and the rapidly shifting notion of what it means to be human. South African speculative narratives approach the question of identity formation in South Africa as a complex process, influenced not only by violent legacies of oppression and institutionalized racism, but also by the effects of global technological advances on nature and on the human body. Many contemporary, post-apartheid South African speculative narratives draw on the technological aspect of the SF genre, introducing nonhuman or post-human characters such as clones, genetically engineered donors, extraterrestrial aliens, technologically altered humans, and high-tech equipment such as spaceships and heat-regulating suits.
The South African speculative narratives discussed in this chapter thus have in common not only the representation of a futuristic or alternative South African landscape, but also the expression of an entanglement between self, other, and environment. This is evinced as the need for a sense of responsibility toward and connection with both human and nonhuman others in the face of global ecological disaster and an uncertain technological future. The speculative mode is a useful means of staging such an encounter between self, environment, and human and nonhuman other precisely because the established SF tropes of the apocalyptic wasteland and the altered body allow for the creation of a literary space in which all established boundaries between selves and others can be erased and reestablished in different ways. These tropes highlight the issue of survival and suggest that continued existence of any individual is interdependent with that of the other, be it human, animal, or environment.
Notes
1. Deidre C. Byrne, “Science Fiction in South Africa,” PMLA 119, no. 3 (May 2004): 522–25 (522).
2. See David Barnett, “Putting South African Fiction on the Map,” Guardian.co.uk (May 26, 2011), http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/may/26/south-africanscience-fiction.
3. Felicity Wood, “Subversive, Undisciplined, and Ideologically Unsound or Why Don’t South Africans Like Fantasy?” Language Projects Review 6, nos. 3–4 (1991): 32–36.
4. Introduced in Woolf’s essay “Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown” (1923).
5. Ursula K. Le Guin, “Science Fiction and Mrs Brown,” in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (London: Women’s Press, 1989), 86–102 (90).
6. Ibid., 87–88.
7. Ibid., 102.
8. An apocryphal, dimwitted “Mr. van der Merwe” is the subject of many South African jokes.
9. Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 56.
10. Jane Rosenthal, Souvenir (Johannesburg: Bromponie Press, 2004), 4. Additional references to this text are given in parenthetical citation.
11. Andy Caffrey, “Antarctica’s Deep Impact Threat,” Earth Island Journal 13, no. 2 (Summer 1998).
12. Wendy Woodward, “Whales, Clones and Two Ecological Novels: The Whale Caller and Jane Rosenthal’s Souvenir,” Ways of Writing: Critical Essays on Zakes Mda, ed. David Bell and J. U. Jacobs (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009), 142.
13. Stewart Crehan, “Disowning Ownership: ‘White Writing’ and the Land,” Routes of the Roots: Geography and Literature in the English-Speaking Countries, ed. Isabelle Maria Zoppi (Rome: Bulzoni, 1998), 41–71 (58–59).
14. Neil Evernden, “Beyond Ecology: Self, Place and the Pathetic Fallacy,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 101.
15. Joan Slonczewski and Michael Levy, “Science Fiction and the Life Sciences,” in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 174–85 (174).
16. Adam Roberts, Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 2003), 100.
17. Donna Harraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association, 1991), 149–81 (150).
18. “Stap Fanta in die hand uit op die stofstoep van die kafee en onthou maar
: Oor daardie ruggens van die Swartberge begin die Groot-Karoo, asvaal en gedaan van oudgeid. Daar bly mense so lank as ’n mens kan onthou en dit is ook joune, dit maak nie saak wat daar gesê word nie. En daar mag jy gaan áánlewe.” Eben Venter, Brouhaha: Verstommings, Naakstudies en Wenresepte (Cape Town: Tafelberg Publishers, 2010), 57. My translation.
19. District 9, dir. Neill Blomkamp (2009; Culver City, CA: Tristar Pictures, 2009), DVD.
20. This aspect of District 9 evokes Andrew Buckland’s play The Ugly Noo Noo, first performed in 1988, which depicts the fantastic battle between a man and a Parktown prawn. This conflict between man and insect is representative of Buckland’s own struggle against the restrictive apartheid government of the time, but can also be seen as a critique of irrational fear and intolerance of difference.
21. Andries Du Toit, “Becoming the Alien: Apartheid, Racism and District 9” (October 1, 2009), http://asubtleknife.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/science-fiction-in-the-ghetto-loving the alien.
22. Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, The Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Donis, ed. Giacomo Donis and David Webb (Malden, MA: Polity Press / Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 26.
23. This use also echoes the term “nonwhite,” which was commonly used in apartheid legislation.
24. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 1988).
9
Ordinary Catastrophes
Paradoxes and Problems in Some Recent Post-Apocalypse Fictions
CHRISTOPHER PALMER
Send me, sir, a few trifles to read, but nothing about the prophets: everything they predicted I assume to have happened already.
Madame du Deffand to Voltaire
In a recent essay, Perry Anderson offers a parable that reflects on the novel as a form. He tells how Franco Moretti and Carlo Ginzburg visited the Metropolitan Museum in New York; Moretti paused before a Vermeer painting with a lucid depiction of everyday life and proclaimed, “That is the beginning of the novel”:
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