Borders, Toxins, and the Refugee Condition

I really enjoyed the Chen article and especially like the ways in which it brings together discourses on environmental justice, critical race studies, queer theory, and biopolitics. Were I to teach it, I would certainly use it in a lesson on a primary text related more directly to toxicity than By the Sea. Gain, by Richard Powers, is in my experience many people’s go-to text regarding toxicity, the environment, and global/transnational capitalism, and would probably work nicely in this case (it could also lend itself to a discussion of whiteness re: toxicity), but I’m sure there are many other texts that I’ve not yet encountered that would work well, or even better, in combination with the article. For the purposes of this blog post, however, let’s suspend disbelief and pretend that I’m teaching an upper-level undergraduate class for which I have had my students read By the Sea, Chen’s “Toxic Animacies,” and the Tompkins chapter on “Graham’s Imperial Dietetics.”

I would focus my class on going through Chen’s article and using it to explicate the basic strands of queer, environmental, and race criticisms upon which it expands. After that, I would bring in By the Sea to start a discussion on borders, biopolitics, and toxicity. Introducing the idea of thinking through a possible connection between refugees and toxins, I would break the class up into groups and assign each group a coupling of a quote from the novel and a quote from a critical essay to analyze.

Group #1

When Latif asks Saleh about why he chose not to reveal that he speaks English to the immigrations officers, Latif says that without English, “You’re just a condition, without even a story” (Gurnah 143). Chen’s conclusion states, “Unlike viruses, toxins are not so very containable or quarantinable; they are better thought of as conditions with effects, bringing their own affects and animacies to bear on lives and nonlives” (Chen 281-2). Gurnah and Chen are using the word “condition” in different ways, but what similarities can we read into them? How does Saleh’s lack of a backstory in the eyes of the British government affect his subjectivity, his animacy? What happens when the British government does “quarantine” refugees in detainment centers?

Group #2

For this group I would combine the above quote from Chen with the line that the airport immigration officer, Kevin Edelman, tells Saleh, even though he thinks Saleh doesn’t understand: “People like you come pouring in here without any thought of the damage they cause” (Gurnah 12). What damage does the British state think that refugees can cause; what will Saleh’s effects on the British nation be?

Group #3

Chen’s essay opens with the observation that “figures of toxicity have moved well beyond their specific range of biological attribution, leaking out of nominal and literal bounds while retaining their affective ties to vulnerability and repulsion” (Chen 266). When Saleh is first placed in a homestay in the small seaside town in England in which the present tense of the novel is set (he later is given his own apartment), he is repulsed by the guest room and ends up sleeping on a towel on the floor: “I daren’t even sit on [the bed] out of an irrational fear of contamination, not just fear of disease but of some inner pollution. … sitting on the floor of that dusty overcrowded room, unable to think about anything else except my own worthlessness” (Gurnah 56-7). Remember the very last line of the book, when Saleh visits Latif in London and worries about the messy state of Latif’s apartment, wondering whether he’ll have clean sheets: “I had Alfonso’s towel with me if the worst came to the worst” (245). How can we use Chen’s analysis of toxicity to think about these instances of repulsion, these worries of contamination? What do these show us about Saleh’s experience as a subject? What effects does British culture or the British state (his condition, rather than reading Saleh as a condition) have on him?

Group #4

While being questioned by Kevin Edelman, Saleh reflects on why the British government has offered asylum to Zanzibaris: “It was a cheap way of showing stern disapproval, and there weren’t too many of us” (Gurnah 10). In her article, Tompkins discusses how 

in Alcott’s vision the body/home is thus ever susceptible to collapse and/or pollution and ever in need of shoring up against the threat from without. … However much the civilized body, domicile, and nation seek to seal themselves off from the exteriority of nature, they can never wholly succeed without some impossible act of sewing up the mouth and orifices, without becoming entirely isolate. This would, of course, mean death. (Tompkins 76)

If we think of refugees as metaphorical toxins entering the British nation, how can we use Tompkins’s assessment of the impossibility of complete isolation to explain what Saleh sees as the British rationale for offering Zanzibaris asylum?

I’d then have each group present their ideas and have a brief class discussion to synthesize these readings and think about the questions of national borders, imperialism, biopolitics, and the subjectivity of refugees in By the Sea.

(P.S. Here’s a fun fact, because I can’t resist talking about my alma mater: In the early 1840s, Oberlin College strictly enforced the Graham diet in its dining halls.)