Deborah Bird Rose
I experienced a curious pleasure when I heard Vinay Lal refer to our time as The Age of Total Violence. No one would choose this to be so, but so it is. My research has never found a way to avoid violence, and yet I never feel I understand well enough the genocide, ecocide, speciocide, and other forms of mass death that characterise our time. We are caught up in all these processes; we are witness to this great un-making of our home habitat; we don’t know enough about how to slow ourselves down, or how to change ourselves and our way of doing life. My ‘best books’ help me better understand the imperatives of life in this actual moment. With apologies to all the wonderful writers whose work I haven’t included, either because it was from earlier decades, or because the list had to stop at some point, here are some of my ‘best books of the decade’.
W. G. Sebald On the Natural History of Destruction (translated by Anthea Bell), Random House, New York, 2003
Partway into reading On the Natural History of Destruction I realised I was in the midst of some form of magic. Not everyone enjoys Sebald’s writing, but I find it utterly compelling. His structure is elegant, and also mysterious. Anthea Bell is a brilliant translator. The power of Sebald’s words enters and affects you well before you realise what is happening. On the Natural History of Destruction is about living within, and writing about violence – about the conjoined necessity of language, and the limitations of language. It is about the will not to know, the desire to be elsewhere (morally, ethically, physically, emotionally). His chapter on Jean Amery is one of the greatest pieces I know on this man whose courage is almost unbearable, and who took his own life. Amery’s book is a ‘best book’ from an earlier decade: At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. Both authors probe in fine-grained, appalling detail the point made by Elaine Scarry in her classic The Body in Pain: that in torture, and Sebald would say in air war, the violence and consequent suffering are so far in excess of any instrumental reason that they become ends in themselves. Writing cannot communicate this through reason. Something else has to happen. Sebald is a master of that mysterious ‘something else’. While mentioning Sebald, I’d like also to say that his essay Camp Santo is one of the most impeccably beautiful and mysterious essays I have ever read. It is available online: http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/campo-santo
Suffering Witness: The Quandary of Responsibility after the Irreparable, James Hatley, State University of New York Press, Albany, 2000
Although the publication date is a bit more than a decade ago, this book came into my field of vision in about 2002. It hit me like a bombshell. This was the book I had been waiting for, perhaps longing for. This era of violence calls us to witness. And yet, how does one witness? What could it possibly mean to witness the irreparable, and then again, what could it mean to refuse or refrain from witness? James Hatley takes up these questions with great eloquence. He is a Levinas scholar, and one learns a great deal about Levinas in this work, as well as about witness, and in a non-overt way, about Hatley. I started studying this book in time to work it into my 2004 book Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation, and I’ve been working with it ever since. One of the great insights, for me, is captured in the term aenocide. Aenocide denotes the murder of time across generations, the idea being that destruction of future generations constitutes ‘the murdering of ethical time through the annihilation of all the following generations’ (page 219). This insight is every bit as significant in relation to nonhumans as it is to humans, and is a key idea that we are working within a developing environmental humanities approach to the contemporary mass extinction event now in process. (www.extinctionstudies.org)
The Ancient Ship, Zhang Wei, Harper Collins, New York, translated into English 2008, originally published 1987
Speaking of man-made mass death … The Ancient Ship (itself a trope for China) is a novel that tells the stories of three generations of three families living in a fictional town in northern China during 1949-1969. As a young woman I had read and been inspired by William Hinton’s Fanshen, published in 1966 and describing the land reforms that he had witnessed in 1949 and into the 1950s. The Ancient Ship spans four decades, and thus chronicles one turmoil after another, one new leap for greater production after another, one more disruption to the capacity of people to organise their lives in any enduring manner. The bonds of fidelity that survive this turmoil are every bit as steeped in violence as in love, and the depictions of socially driven famine, executions, campaigns of vilification, and the enforcement of impossible requirements is altogether almost too vivid. The Ancient Ship offers a close-up encounter with village China during the years when we of the west knew almost nothing about what was happening in the lives of everyday people. The ship of the title has run aground, the river has silted up, nothing is moving, there’s no direction. This is a bleak but incredibly important book.
Wolf Totem, Jiang, Rong (Howard Goldblatt, translator), Penguin, London, 2008
Speaking of China and destruction, this semi-autobiographical novel tells of the experiences of a young student from Beijing who is sent to Inner Mongolia in 1967, at the height of China’s Cultural Revolution. No one could call this a well-written book – it is way too long, and the writing is cumbersome. And yet, it has had fantastic success around the world. It is the most graphic account I have ever read of the process through which a whole social/ecological system is ruined through the violent imposition of bureaucratic demands for production made elsewhere by people who know nothing about the living systems they are purporting to manage. What really struck me is how true this account is of so many aspects of contemporary life. I think of the academic world, of which I’ve been a participant for several decades now, and how we are being forced again and again to meet production requirements that are handed down by bureaucrats who know nothing about the actual work we do. I am confronted almost every day with the destructive effects of this power – how it misses the point of everything good, and how it is systematically violating our several-thousand-year history of scholarship. Between Mongolia and the contemporary university there is this thread of connection marked by violence that is not imposed in an exercise of instrumental reason, but rather is an exercise in power. I keep thinking of how one might paraphrase Tacitus and apply his insights to Mongolia, to China, to universities and … I hesitate to think how widely this process has entered into every aspect of global life these days. Tacitus wrote of the Roman conquest of Britain, putting some of his most damning critique into the voice of one of the natives, Calgacus: ‘Pillagers of the world, they have exhausted the land by their indiscriminate plunder, and now they ransack the sea. A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one their lust for power … To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of “government”; they create a desolation and call it peace.’ (Tacitus in the Agricola) In Mongolia, they called it production. In contemporary western universities, desolation is called excellence.
Apocrypha, Peter Boyle, Vagabond Press, 2010
I don’t read a lot of poetry, but this prize-winning book is something wildly different – poetry – yes, philosophy – yes, prose – yes, and an imaginative reconstruction of purportedly ancient texts that offer engagements with the present that are by turns wildly satirical, and almost heartbreakingly evocative of worlds being lost every day. Where do lost voices, lost texts, lost worlds go? What forms of witness and fidelity might bring them back into visibility? Apocrypha takes up these and many other questions, working in part with the empire of Eusebius, where the goal is to maximise all inequalities, and its depredations on other realms, including the gentle, mysteriously vanished kingdom of Siripech: “Sensing that the final hour had arrived, its leaders retreated below the sea, taking their knowledge with them. Siripech is the name given to the music that drifts some mornings almost audible above the waves, and Siripech is the name of a high-browed woman with sharp jet-black eyes, a face beneath the sea visible from certain cliffs where the Pharaohs gazed, understanding too late how what is overlooked and despised alone blesses and saves.”
People of the Whale, Linda Hogan, W. W. Norton & Co, New York, 2008
Linda Hogan weaves magic, but not at all in the way Sebald does. Hers is the magic of the love of life. It may not even be magic, perhaps it just feels that way because we are so unaccustomed to encountering other living beings in the mode Hogan conveys them. On the face of it, this is a book about the controversies within the thinly veiled community of Neah Bay in the state of Washington where Makah people chose to exercise their treaty rights by hunting whales. One aspect of Hogan’s work deals with binarised issues: tradition vs change, wealth vs subsistence, fidelity vs self-interest. She is an immensely powerful storyteller, though, and these binaries never take over. What could have been a book about treaties and governmental instrumentalities, or about authenticity and indigeneity, becomes a book about life, love, time, ancestors, nonhuman animals, and the communicative, participatory world of life. I found myself holding my breath in parts of this book, as if by doing so I could remain within its spell. Hogan uses literature to bring us into a world in which there are multiple worlds. The membranes between them are porous, at least for some, and Hogan’s gift is to enable the reader to discover her own glimpses of this shimmering complexity.
For Love of Matter, Freya Mathews, State University of New York Press, Albany, 2005
For me, the ‘wow moment’ in this great philosophical book occurred in Mathews’s discussion of derealisation. She shows how the Cartesian mind/matter dualism actually would make any knowledge of anything other than mind impossible. Her aim is to offer a philosophical account of the ‘mind’, or interiority, of matter. Mathews situates her account of matter within a field of ‘panpsychism’. I don’t fully relate to panpsychism, but I am consistently blown away by the clarity of her thought, her engagement with all matter (living and nonliving), her prioritising of encounter over knowledge, and her work with eros. Mathews is the most careful and clear philosopher I am aware of. Every idea is thought through. Consistent with her philosophy of the priority of encounter, she is moving toward more philosophical field work and more storytelling (in Reinhabiting Reality). For Love of Matter lays the foundation for one of her most brilliant ideas, expressed more fully in recent essays: ontopoetics. With this term she denotes interactions between the human self and the world that are not merely causal but mutually meaningful. Like Linda Hogan, she is a fearless writer.(http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-December-2007/EcoHumanities/EcoMathews.html)
The Memory Chalet, Tony Judt, The Penguin Press, New York, 2010
Tony Judt was prolific and invariably insightful, one of the great intellectuals of our era, but this book is unlike all his others. I am not sure that The Memory Chalet is his greatest, but it is his most compelling. It comprises essays he wrote from his bed where he lay paralysed from the effects of progressive amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. He could not move, he was losing capacity for speech, and yet he could think as clearly as ever, and, of course, he could feel pain. The essays were published, one by one, in the New York Review of Books. I will never forget sitting down in the easy chair with his essay ‘Night’ and discovering that he was dying, that this was the first of a series of essays that would enable him to reach out to the world with the one great medium he had left: memory. No one knew how many essays there would be. Each was a gem, and the book itself is a gem. I love it for its contents, and also because Judt gave us readers the precious opportunity to share some aspects of his last months of life as he visited his memories, examined his life, shared his insights from his painful, immobile, condition. (‘Night’ – Jan 14, 2010 http://www.readability.com/articles/utcops0a)
