“Whenever I am asked, I cannot help but be brisk when relating what followed, for it is too difficult for me to make the story into what it ought to be: a saga in itself, a long death that spirals down slowly to the ground” (Yanagihara 363).
Thus begins protagonist Dr. Norton Perina’s lamentation on the destruction of Ivu’ivu, Hanya Yanagihara’s fictional Micronesian island in The People in the Trees. This death, of people, of tribal culture, plants, animals, species, innocence, utopian longings, and personal safety, embodies the impact of an anthropologist and a medical doctor’s search for a “lost tribe” and its subsequent progressive extinction over a period of twenty years. After Dr. Perina “discovers” on the island an indigenous turtle, the opa’ivu’eke, which contains an enzyme that appears to grant immortality to its consumer, pharmaceutical companies from the West ravage the island for its every resource. After visiting dozens of times over this period of the island’s slow decay, Perina recounts a bevy of the island’s losses in his memoir: “Shall I tell you about trying to recreate the effect using every animal, every plant, every fungus that could be harvested from Ivu’ivu? […] shall I tell you how the island was stripped of everything, whole forests razed, whole fields of mushrooms and orchids and ferns picked like fat red strawberries and shiny green lettuces and loaded onto the helicopters that were able to land directly on the island because so many trees had been felled that there was open space aplenty?” (365). While Yanagihara’s account is a fictional one, this is not unfamiliar tale the postcolonial world, especially in the Pacific. Places like Hawai’i, New Zealand, Samoa, and others experienced dramatic declines in population after Western contact, while other low-lying atolls like the Marshall Islands and Kiribati risk becoming uninhabitable by the end of this century due to rising sea levels caused by climate change. Yanagihara’s rendering of death via global capitalism invokes two images from this week’s reading, anthropocene (Chakrabary) and necropolitics (Mbembe), as well as the notion of boundaries. While Dipesh Chakrabary asserts that “a critique that is only a critique of capital is not sufficient for addressing questions relating to human history once the crisis of climate change has been acknowledged and the Anthropocene has begun to loom on the horizon of our present” (212), I am curious about the temporal scope implied in his statement. What about communities for whom the effects of capitalism in the name of colonialism have superseded and accelerated the effects of climate change? Does the role/function of the anthropocene change if the destruction/decimation/death has already occurred?
Furthermore, Chakrabary argues, “without such a history of life, the crisis of climate change has no human “meaning.” [...] we have slid into a state of things that forces on us a recognition of some of the parametric (that is, boundary) conditions for the institutions central to our idea of modernity and the meaning we derive from them” (217). How do such boundary conditions apply to the colonial/postcolonial world? Additionally, Mbembe contends, colonies “are inhabited by savages. The colonies are not organized in a state form and have not created a human world. […] As such, the colonies are the location par excellence where the controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended—the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of “civilization”.” (Mbembe 24). Certainly, Yanagihara’s Ivu’ivu is inhabited by “savages,” as depicted by its narrator (who later deliberately calls Ivu’ivuans “animals” in a fit of rage…but more on that another day), but succumbed not to violence but to displacement due to the depletion of its resources as a result of capitalist greed. Considering Chakrabary’s “parametric conditions”/ “boundaries” as well as Mbembe’s “location par excellence” / “zone,” there seem to be exceptions to how we define meaning, culture, etc, or in Chakrabary and Mbembe’s cases, “modernity” and “judicial order,” respectively.
In terms of this role of boundaries/location, or perhaps “place,” I am curious about Chakrabary and Mbembe’s interpretations considering Derrida’s assertion of “the center is not the center.” This makes me think of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, and ideas on the core and periphery. In the case of colonialism, the core, or center, subsumes the periphery, making neither the center the center nor the periphery the periphery or center, if that makes any sense. One may call the result a third space (a la Homi Bhabha), but that is another topic for another day. All in all, I am curious about the role that both time and space/place play in the relationships between these destructive forces (e.g. global warming, sovereign killers, etc) and how they are most accurately applied to cultures in which colonialism has already made a devastating impact.
I thought you asked some pretty great questions here, using your primary text as a jumping off point for raising concerns about this week's readings. I am particularly struck by your question about if the role of the Anthropocene chances if the damage is already done, as is the case with countless peoples and species. My sense is that C would argue that it doesn't because the Anthropocene is delineating a geologic time period which may or may not yet have come to pass. But the underlying narrative of his article is that the Anthropocene is more than simply a geologic period: it's a new period of human existence marked by the destruction of one people and species. I think that's one of the troubling tendencies of taking a view of humanity as a species, that it has the potential to erase colonial histories.
ReplyDeleteOn a side note, your primary text sounds fascinating, something I definitely want to check out. It made me think of an older book by a Czech author called 'War with the Newts.' In that novel, intelligent amphibious sea creatures are discovered on a fictional pacific island and are enslaved and exploited by humans. However, the newts quickly gain human knowledge, lead a rebellion, overthrow their masters, and then challenge humans for control of the world.