Creaturely Encounters: Animals in the Libyan Literary Imaginary
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Olszok, Charis (2016) Creaturely encounters: animals in the Libyan literary imaginary. PhD Thesis. SOAS, University of London. http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/23805 Copyright © and Moral Rights for this PhD Thesis are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners. A copy can be downloaded for personal non‐commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This PhD Thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder/s. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. When referring to this PhD Thesis, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the PhD Thesis must be given e.g. AUTHOR (year of submission) "Full PhD Thesis title", name of the School or Department, PhD PhD Thesis, pagination. Creaturely Encounters Animals in the Libyan Literary Imaginary Charis Olszok Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD 2016 SOAS, University of London 1 Declaration for SOAS PhD thesis I have read and understood regulation 17.9 of the Regulations for students of the SOAS, University of London concerning plagiarism. I undertake that all the material presented for examination is my own work and has not been written for me, in whole or in part, by any other person. I also undertake that any quotation or paraphrase from the published or unpublished work of another person has been duly acknowledged in the work which I present for examination. Signed: ____________________________ Date: _________________ 2 Abstract Animals occupy a strikingly prominent place in modern Libyan fiction. Woven into allegory and evoked in remembrance of nomadic and rural lifestyles, they appear in a variety of narrative guises, most often encountering humans in situations of crisis, rebellion and transformation. Critique of political oppression is certainly one reason for their prominence, while Libya’s rapid urbanization and movement into global oil markets represent other important contexts. From Independence in 1951, animals have been used to plot the course of the nation, assess its nomadic past and gauge its uncertain future. Examining fiction from the 1960s until 2011, I read animals, on one level, through allegory, interpreting them as sites for exploring human discourses and practices, and expressing human suffering and violence. I also, however, indicate how their encounters with humans are disruptive of social and political discourses, producing visions of shared human and animal suffering, and a spiritual and environmental wholeness transcending notions of nation. These visions, emerging from reflections on Libya’s turbulent history and harsh geography, and marked by the folkloric, Qur’ānic and Sufi influences on its fiction, may be read through a ‘creaturely poetics’ (Anat Pick, 2012), in which the shared physical vulnerability of human and animal is emphasized. Through this poetics, animals become not allegorical mirrors of nation, but ‘other worlds’ in parallel to it, challenging human fallacies and accepted notions of citizenship, power and possession, and embodying alternative forms of relationality and being. From depictions of childhood to those of subsistence survival and deep ecological history, they are used to track primordial facets of the human and animal condition, with this reflection then brought to bear on modern contexts. As mystical signs and struggling creatures, as well as humanity’s former ‘self’ and subjugated ‘other’, animals in Libyan fiction express the hardship of existence, as well as offering a means for imagining worlds beyond it. 3 Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... 3 Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... 8 Introduction – A Nation and its Others: The Animals of Libyan Fiction ............................. 9 Animals in Arabic Literature: Negotiating Community and Wilderness .................. 11 Animal Allegory: From Political Subversion to Species Critique ............................... 19 Animal Encounter: Reading the Other ........................................................................... 26 Nation and Other Worlds: Writing Libya’s History ...................................................... 30 Libyan Fiction: A Brief Overview .................................................................................... 36 Folkloric Animals .......................................................................................................... 41 Qur’ānic Animals ........................................................................................................... 43 Sufi Animals ................................................................................................................... 45 Thesis Structure and Scope ............................................................................................. 48 Part 1 – Growing-up: Rite-of-passage Manqué ...................................................................... 54 A Child’s World: Growing-up Gone Wrong .................................................................... 55 Chapter 1 – Sheep Sacrificed: From Celebration to Sadness ........................................... 61 A Nation through its Sheep ............................................................................................. 63 Salted Meat and Squandered Wealth ......................................................................... 68 Woolly Skins and Wrongdoers .................................................................................... 69 A Sceptical Child and Curious Companion ................................................................ 73 Sheep and Soldiers: From Ritual Slaughter to Inevitable War ................................... 77 Sacrifice and Circumcision: Rite-of-Passage into Other Worlds ................................ 85 Creaturely Meat: Eid Sheep and the Vulnerability-of-Being ...................................... 91 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 98 Chapter 2 – Flight Curtailed: Birdsong, Stories and Other Worlds ................................ 99 4 Bird Traps: Grandmas’ Tales and Children Transformed .......................................... 102 Unhappy Owl and Unseen Worlds ............................................................................ 103 A Happy Hoopoe and a Different Kind of Story...................................................... 108 Birdsong: Embracing the Unintelligible ...................................................................... 113 Bird Signs: Plurality, Mysticism and the Creaturely .................................................. 115 The Many Meanings of a Bird Pursued .................................................................... 119 A Nation from Above and Beyond ............................................................................ 121 A Crane Down and a Different Kind of Sign ............................................................ 125 Creaturely Signs: Symbols and the Secrets Within .................................................... 130 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 133 Part 2 – Survival: The Collapse of Community and Call of the Creaturely ...................... 134 Geographies of Subsistence: Nation, Environment and Animals............................. 137 Heterotopias of the Nonhuman: Animal Ethics through Hybrid Aesthetics ......... 142 Chapter 3 – Beasts that Speak: Fables of Subsistence and the Crisis of Communities ................................................................................................................................................ 148 Worlds of Struggle: Human Dilemmas and Animal Victims ..................................... 151 The Jerboas of Jandūba............................................................................................... 152 Sūsa’s Sea Life .............................................................................................................. 157 Waddān in the Wadis .................................................................................................. 160 Creatures Eaten: Human Discourses and the Call to Respond .................................. 163 Jerboa Jokes .................................................................................................................. 163 Turtle Weapons ........................................................................................................... 167 Gazelle Feasts and Beliefs .......................................................................................... 169 Creaturely Ethics: Beast Fable and the Way of Other Worlds .................................. 173 Self-Preservation ........................................................................................................ 174 Struggle ........................................................................................................................ 177 Self-sacrifice ................................................................................................................ 184 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................