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Animal Death As National Debility: Climate, Agriculture, and Syrian War Narrative

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Animal Death As National Debility: Climate, Agriculture, and Syrian War Narrative Animal Death as National Debility: Climate, Agriculture, and Syrian War Narrative Neel Ahuja New Literary History, Volume 51, Number 4, Autumn 2020, pp. 855-874 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2020.0053 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/781687 [ Access provided at 20 Feb 2021 17:36 GMT from University of California @ Santa Cruz ] Animal Death as National Debility: Climate, Agriculture, and Syrian War Narrative Neel Ahuja n her memoir The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria, journalist Samar Yazbek frames her memories of the Syrian war as a Iprocess of dismemberment that occurs upon parched earth: “In my mind, I hold a portrait of Syria, but it is no ordinary image. It shows a dismembered collection of body parts, the head missing and the right arm dangling precariously. Then you notice a few drops of blood slowly dripping from the frame, disappearing as they are absorbed by the dusty soil below. This is the catastrophe Syrians deal with every day.”1 If Yazbek’s vision of Syrian dismemberment echoes other gory depic- tions of wartime brutality that are familiar across geographic contexts, the image of blood absorbed by dry land evokes a particular ecology of violence—a backdrop of drought signifying the deadly force of global warming—which has become common to international representations of the Syrian war. In the construction of Syria as one of the world’s first “climate wars,” animality and debility are conjoined in representations of how climate change produces the mass death of farmed animals and the precarious movements and physical conditions of fleeing refugees. While Yazbek’s depiction of violence gives a close-up view of the Syrian war, a variety of outside observers of the war have more broadly referenced the drought as a sign that climate change has played a significant role in the violence. Given the massive human casualties of the Syrian war—hundreds of thou- sands dead and over twelve million displaced—the emphasis by outside observers on accounts of animal depopulation underpins the role of climate change in the war, while displacing discussion of the proximate wartime contexts of displacement and death raised by Syrian activists. As such, this essay asks that we pause and carefully consider how tropes of disability and animality work in tandem to sidestep revolutionary cri- tiques of the government and outside interventions in Syria, and what role disability studies and animal studies might play in understanding how the representation of war assembles its notions of the human and the environment. I conclude that while the figuration of the Syrian New Literary History, 2020, 51: 855–874 856 new literary history war as climate war appears as a posthumanist redefinition of war itself, the context of such a discourse is informed by neocolonial processes of intervention and securitization that overemphasize abstracted visions of debility and animal death as humanitarian tragedy. As such, the Syrian war offers disability studies and animal studies an opportunity to clarify how liberal visions of the tragedy of disability and the cruelty of animal killing work to obfuscate materialist methods for understanding the entanglements of disability, animal life, and neoliberal forms of warfare. On Posthuman War Narrative Given that colonial humanitarian representation suffuses modern war narratives, perhaps it is not surprising that texts and images of the ongo- ing Syrian war proliferate visions of tragedy.2 Yet to observe the nexus of animality and death in journalistic and academic representation of the Syrian war in the Global North is to also note the management of time itself as a marker of the proliferation of Syrian national debility in the tragic mode. For surely “not only bodies but also crucial infrastruc- tures are being maimed” in Syria.3 This observation has led journalists and other observers to toggle between the spectacle of carnage in the present and the concomitant, retrospective tracking of lifeways into the prewar past, which constitutes a prior moment of wholeness from which to view how lives recede into debility and death against the forces of slow violence. This negative type of representation of the refugee body as tragic will be familiar to disability studies scholars, who, following the work of David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, understand how views of the tragedy of disability perform important narrative work for configuring the loss of mobility and the restoration of the wholeness of embodiment in the novel and other narrative genres.4 In this case, representation of the Syrian war yokes debilitation to processes of mass animal killing. According to this posthuman logic in war representation, climate change accounts for vectors of social and ecological reproduction that are the basis of futurity but that are written out of anthropocentric accounts of the nation. Here, the recalibration of war itself as an environmental process may, for some observers, ap- pear to radically breach borders between human and nonhuman, built environment and living environment, in ways that challenge not only our sense of modern infrastructure as the prosthetic domination of earth by humans, but also the very formation of the political configured narrowly as a human sphere of action.5 A certain type of climate migra- tion discourse, which suggests that drought causes agricultural collapse animal death as national debility 857 followed by mass migration and war, participates in the resulting tem- poral management of war narrative: the wearing down of animal life forms one node of national debilitation. This process demonstrates the interconnectedness of ecological and infrastructural precarity: the war on the “life-support system.”6 I use the distinction between debility and disability advisedly here, as the wearing down of national embodiment does not transform the Syrian war refugee into a subject of disability rights but rather into an avatar of linked ecological and social processes that systematically generate violence.7 In turn, the refugee body is invested in a process of turning from debilitation to the emergence of disabled subjectivity elsewhere, often once the refugee exits the national borders, whether to Turkey or Europe. Yet we must critically examine what it means that the depopulation of sheep, goats, and other “livestock” in Syria—which, along with the loss of wheat yields, is the most widely cited sign of climate change’s contribution to the war’s destruction—is configured as a sign of the demise of the national life support system. The unquestioned state-vision of this for- mulation that hungry and desperate human climate migrants destabilize the state and society leading to war should be a clue to the overdeter- mined nature of the figures of disappearing livestock and the disabled Syrian migrant. For there is a slippage from politicizing the nonhuman force of climate change to writing the revolutionary subject out of the political struggle over infrastructure. The Syrian dissident Yassin al-Haj Saleh, for one, argues that the movement from colonial discourses that highlight the cultural and geopolitical difference of “the Middle East” to ecological discourses concerning the loss of agricultural productivity and ecological sustainability in the region rhetorically depopulates the land, “making local populations invisible, indeed nonexistent.”8 One sign of this move is the “scandalous” coverage of the Syrian war that obfuscates political struggles under the rhetorical authority of scientific discourse: “There prospers in the United States a theory of explaining our struggle through drought! Four years of drought preceded the revolution and caused it. So it’s not a matter of politics, or of social demands or of a thuggish ruling junta. It’s not what those irrational Syrians think; sci- ence says it is . drought. But this science is full of politics as much as it suffers from ethical drought.”9 Saleh’s critique of the writing of the Syrian war as a climate war of- fers a starting point for rethinking the politicized relation of animality and debility. Accounts of the death of sheep and goats in the north and northeast of Syria in climate change journalism and research of- fer a fraught example of how the posthuman reconfiguration of war as an environmental process connects human and animal precarity into 858 new literary history a vision of national debilitation. The class and spatial dynamics of this framing contend that the violence of war, and the vector by which the state makes some bodies die, involves debility and desperation of the pe- ripheral agrarian classes, all of which leads them to unleash unpredictable social violence. Climate war discourse depicts environmental maiming in the Syrian context in a manner different from Jasbir Puar’s important reading of Israel’s purportedly “humanitarian” war against Palestine as the expression of a sovereign will to “not let die.”10 In this case, a policy of “letting die” under a climate-induced drought (whether attributed to Bashar al-Assad’s agricultural policy or to global carbon emissions) reaches a breaking point when slow violence against the ecosystem “trig- gers” the reactive fast violence of human displacement and warfare. In this sense, the narratives of environmental migration and war as national debility and death involve an implicit theory of human action where the incidental process of slowly making some species and social groups die crosses a threshold, suddenly transitioning environmental causes into the bewildering realm of human effects. In this essay, I argue against the neo-Malthusian precepts of such a discourse, wherein mobile pastoralists become the avatars of the earth’s blowback against human domination of nature. The end of essay tracks some agro-environmental critiques emerging from the Syrian opposition that rethink land, agricultural policy, and property. They suggest how representations of the Syrian war and its environments can militate against both the spectacle of debility as tragedy and the depoliticization of ecology as deep time.
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