Future Ecologies, Current Crisis
Ecological Concern in South African Speculative Fiction
ELZETTE STEENKAMP
In a 2004 essay titled “Science Fiction in South Africa,” Deirdre Byrne laments “the regrettable dearth … of published science fiction and science fiction readers” in South Africa. Byrne argues that “one cannot expect an advanced awareness of technological or scientific developments” or “even a basic acquaintance with published literature” in a country where the majority of the population live well below the breadline, the spread of HIV/AIDS is rampant, and levels of technological literacy are extremely low.1 Fast-forward a decade, and the prospects of the South African SF scene seem far less dismal. In 2009, South African–born Neill Blomkamp’s Oscar-nominated film District 9 captured the imagination of audiences worldwide, resulting in an unprecedented boom in local science fiction and fantasy. Add to this the success of Lauren Beukes’s Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning SF noir, Zoo City (2010), and South African speculative fiction appears to be blipping happily on the international radar.
Aside from comparisons between the sudden international popularity of South African speculative fiction and the meteoric rise of the Scandinavian crime novel,2 very little has been written in the way of scholarly articles examining the role of science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction in South Africa literature. This is partially due to science fiction’s association with “pulp” fiction and lowbrow escapism, but can also be attributed to the widely held perception that SF has more to do with shiny machines and spaceships than with actual people. Because of the country’s complex history of colonial and apartheid oppression, much attention is paid to the narrative representation of human conflict, and particularly the issues of race and gender, in South African literature; the neglect of SF as an area of critical inquiry in South Africa is based on the mistaken belief that the genre does not address these sorts of “real world” issues. In “Subversive, Undisciplined and Ideologically Unsound or Why Don’t South Africans Like Fantasy?” Felicity Wood asks: “Why is there so little fantasy in English South African literature?” Wood attributes this “resistance to fantasy” to the fact that “it’s sometimes perceived as being distinct from reality, an escape from it, and thus the way in which fantasy serves as a means of exploring reality has often not been adequately acknowledged.”3 This chapter argues that South African speculative fiction is in fact deeply concerned with the very issue that “serious” South African authors have been examining for many years—alterity.
The notion that SF is more concerned with technology than human lives is explored in Ursula Le Guin’s “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown.” Le Guin employs Virginia Woolf’s conception of “Mrs. Brown”4 as representative of a fully rounded, “human” literary character, in order to comment on the apparent lack of “real people” in fantasy and science fiction narratives.5 Le Guin questions whether there is room for the “too round” Mrs. Brown in the “gleaming spaceships” of SF—in short, whether “a science fiction writer [can] write a novel.”6
Le Guin, inspired by a hobbit named Frodo who looks very much like Mrs. Brown, concludes that SF is “worth talking about, because it is a promise of continued life for the imagination, a good tool, an enlargement of consciousness, a possible glimpse, against a vast dark background, of the very frail, very heroic figure of Mrs. Brown.”7 The questions surrounding Le Guin’s Mrs. Brown are equally important from a South African perspective. What place does Mrs. Brown’s South African counterpart—let’s call her Mrs. Khumalo, or Mrs. van der Merwe for that matter8—have in a spaceship equipped with ray guns? Surely we cannot dismiss the plight of Mrs. van der Merwe, for she has for too long been restricted to impoverished townships, forcefully displaced, left to die in concentration camps, subjugated, and ignored. The region’s legacy of violence demands that the stories told in post-apartheid South Africa should be those of real people. But can we successfully write about real South Africans who happen to be clones, or genetically engineered donors, or cyborgs?
This chapter argues that the field of South African speculative fiction presents a rich, uncultivated area of study that allows for the exploration of a range of themes relevant to the South African condition, including (but by no means restricted to) issues of gendered and racialized inequity. It examines how South African speculative narratives not only explore the construction of identity in a deeply divided and rapidly changing society, but also the ways in which human beings place themselves in relation to nature and nonhumans and form notions of “ecological” belonging.
These crises of self and place are taken up in South African speculative fiction, most notably through the use of the altered body and the post-apocalyptic wasteland. These tropes are of course well established in Western European and North American SF as well. In the South African speculative texts to be examined in this chapter, the symbolic novum of the altered body (in the form of the alien, clone, or cyborg) is utilized in order to comment on racial and gendered relations in South Africa, and related manifestations of alienation and displacement. These texts interrogate the notion of a nuanced and complex identity and its relation to a myriad of hierarchized other(s), proposing afresh the slipperiness of the boundaries between self and seemingly “alien” other.
These encounters with alterity are played out against the backdrop of ecological catastrophe, pointing to an engagement with ecological concerns, particularly the dire threat to Earth’s ecosystem as a result of the massive impact of global warming, pollution, the human population’s overexploitation of natural resources, and ruthless experimentation with weapons of mass destruction. Identity formation in post-apartheid South Africa is a multifaceted, entangled process, influenced not only by a traumatic history of oppression but also by increased exposure to globalizing supranational factors. In an era of genetic engineering, plastic surgery, and rapid advances in technology and science, questions regarding what constitutes a human being have become ever more complex. What’s more, the idea of environmental belonging, the positioning of the self in relation to the natural world, is inevitably problematic for a nation still very much burdened by a violent past characterized by racial segregation, land disputes, forced removals, and the restriction of movement across the land in the form of pass laws. Within a South African context, the notion of belonging to a particular environment or ecosystem is inevitably interwoven with questions regarding the adequate distribution and conservation of natural resources. Lawrence Buell asserts that “for half a century science fiction has taken a keen, if not consistent interest in ecology, in planetary endangerment, in environmental ethics, in humankind’s relation to the nonhuman world.”9 Although the trope of an ecologically endangered futuristic landscape is a key feature of post-apartheid South African speculative fiction, the ecological message is often subordinate to the human drama that unfolds on the page. This chapter examines the ways in which the altered bodies presented in Jane Rosenthal’s futuristic novel Souvenir and Neill Blomkamp’s SF film District 9 attempt to establish a sense of self eroded by dislocation, problematizing the notion of belonging to a specific place or ecology, but ultimately envisioning new and fruitful ways of connecting with both human and nonhuman others.
CLONES IN THE KAROO: JANE ROSENTHAL’S SOUVENIR
Set in late twenty-first-century South Africa, Jane Rosenthal’s futuristic novel Souvenir is primarily concerned with the fragmentary nature of the female experience, a splintering that is expressed through the symbolic novum of the clone. Rosenthal’s young protagonist, Souvenir Petersen, or Souvie, is a “barbiclone”—one of “various types cloned from the ideal women of the early years of the century, whether blonde, oriental or dark.”10 Viewed by some as little more than a cloned sex slave and domestic worker, the extraordinarily beautiful, blond Souvenir attempts to escape the discriminatory treatment of others by seeking solitude on a journey across a vastly altered, ecologically threatened Karoo landscape.
Rosenthal draws on scientific postulation, specifically Andy McCaffrey’s article “Antarctica’s ‘Deep Impact’ Threat,” in order to explore the possible ramifications for South Africa if West Antarctica’s ice sheet were to melt.11 Souvenir’s futuristic South Africa is geographically and climatologically altered by storms and tsunamis caused by exactly this ecological catastrophe. The region is plagued by “turbulent weather and heavy rain … something that had to be endured while the icebergs passed by, sometimes taking several weeks” (139), and Souvie wryly notes that “the science of weather prediction had long been in disarray, and the only thing that could safely be predicted was that it was hot and would get hotter” (12).
Souvenir can be read as a recasting of the popular genre of the Karoo travelogue. Souvie’s expedition is as much a journey of scientific endeavor (she travels with an itinerant lepidopterist) as a quest for self-discovery—not only a means of coming to terms with her own contradictory feelings regarding her clone status, but also an attempt to inscribe herself in the history of her adoptive family, the Petersens. The novel is interspersed with diary entries by Aunt Jem, Souvie’s adoptive father’s aunt “from the days when everyone had families,” a farmer and artist who, seventy years prior to Souvie’s tale, made a similar passage across the Karoo (18). A kind of freelance gardener, Aunt Jem traveled the Karoo, leaving behind rosebush hedges and avenues on several farms in the area. Guided by the journal, Souvenir retraces the footsteps of her nonbiological aunt, finding in what remains of Jem’s rosebushes and hedges a connection not only to a family, but also to an otherwise hostile and unpredictable landscape.
In “Whales, Clones and Two Ecological Novels,” Wendy Woodward suggests that Obed Will Obenbara, the lepidopterist who later becomes Souvenir’s husband, “exhibits nostalgia for the days of colonial exploration and scientific amateurism in the best meaning of the word, as one who loves what he does.”12 In Rosenthal’s words, “Obed Will sees himself as a gentleman-adventurer of scientific bent…. modelled on explorers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that tribe of Europeans—Dutch, French and English—who came to Africa. He felt he was dressed in the manner of Le Vaillant or Lichtenstein” (35).
Parallels can be drawn between Woodward’s reading of Obed Will as intrepid explorer, interested only in the pursuit of knowledge, and the reputation of François Le Vaillant, the eighteenth-century French ornithologist on whom Obed Will Obenbara models himself, as gentlemanly scholar. Le Vaillant undertook two journeys across the Cape Colony between 1781 and 1784, the first of which took him through the Karoo. Large parts of Le Vaillant’s accounts of these journeys (published as two volumes in 1790 and 1795 respectively) are considered to be embroidered. Similarly, his magnum opus, the six-volume Histoire naturelle des oiseaux d’Afrique (1796–1810) is riddled with inconsistencies and mere fabrications. Stewart Crehan comes to Le Vaillant’s defense, arguing that the “insatiable curiosity which we find in Le Vaillant … is not the same as a repressive, egocentric desire for control…. His visit to South Africa as a student of natural history was motivated not by acquisitiveness but by a desire to discover new information.”13
In some ways, Le Vaillant’s fabulous accounts of the animals and inhabitants of the Cape of Good Hope (and specifically the Karoo) in the late eighteenth century can be seen as the precursor to Rosenthal’s fantastic travel narrative. As much as the entertaining nature of Le Vaillant’s penchant for exaggeration belies the more sinister expansionist agendas of his colonial counterparts, Rosenthal’s account of Obed Will’s encounters with fabulous composite creatures such as the “badass” (a genetic mutation that is part donkey and part baboon) is rooted in suspicion regarding modern-day advances in genetic engineering and the possibility of the ruthless exploitation of such technology for profit. Obed Will’s mapping of the butterfly population of the Karoo, and Souvenir’s retracing of the journey documented in Aunt Jem’s botanical journal (an artifact similar to Le Vaillant’s illustrated map of his voyages) are indeed attempts at claiming ownership over a place, inscribing the Karoo with their presence. However, much like claims surrounding the intrepid Le Vaillant’s benign exploration, these characters’ attempts to write themselves into the landscape are presented as a nonthreatening desire to belong. Obed Will’s nostalgia for a world still untouched by humankind is reminiscent of Coetzee’s Michael K’s wish for a piece of land, existing outside the violent grasp of history, where he can live lightly off the land:
Obed Will knew that this old, almost pre-colonial world was long gone. Yet whenever he thought this he immediately felt a desire to deny or contradict it, arise in him. Somewhere there must be pockets, small corners, tops of mountains, difficult and inaccessible ravines, dry inhospitable canyons where there were no traces of the present, where no one had ever lived or farmed, not even the Khoikhoi. Obed Will, suffering from a surfeit of the crowded present in city life, longed for that past wilderness. (35–36)
This nonacquisitive approach to belonging to a specific place is proposed in Neil Evernden’s “Beyond Ecology.” Evernden suggests that the “act of naming” can be a fruitful process through which one may learn to see oneself as imbedded in the physical environment, as part of a complex network of life forms:
The act of naming may itself be a part of the process of establishing a sense of place. This is fairly easy to understand in a personal sense, that is, giving personal names to special components of a place, but it also may apply in the case of generic names. Perhaps the naturalist, with his penchant for learning the names of everything, is establishing a global place, making the world his home, just as the “primitive” hunter did on the territory of his tribe.14
Rosenthal’s nostalgia for the spirit of exploration and scientific endeavor of South Africa’s settler past is extended to the character of Souvenir, who is herself described by her adoptive mother, Mara, as being “in a way … a relic of the settler past” (19). As a clone, she represents a scientific frontier, and specifically one that has come to define the twenty-first century as much as the space race defined the twentieth century—what Joan Slonczewski and Michael Levy refer to as “the quest for the genome.”15
In the case of Souvenir, anxieties surrounding the issue of cloning are employed in order to explore, as Adam Roberts puts it, “what it is like to have the label ‘different’ imposed on a person by some normalising system.”16 Souvenir’s femaleness is ultimately the site of her difference. Her blond hair, blue eyes, long legs, and ample breasts mark her not only as female, but as über-female, the perfect specimen in terms of the Western ideal of feminine beauty. However, these features are also what mark her as a clone, genetically engineered to conform to such an idealized vision of femininity. Souvenir, at once a representation of ideal femaleness and an unnatural product of genetic manipulation, recalls Donna Haraway’s theories regarding the fragmentary nature of femaleness in “A Cyborg Manifesto”; Rosenthal’s barbiclone is the embodiment of Haraway’s “fabricated hybrid” or “cyborg.”17 Souvenir is indeed a “postmodern collective,” a kind of simulacrum that no longer has an original. She is haunted in her dreams by a mysterious connection to other clones who share her DNA, experiencing memories that she does not recognize as her own.
Throughout the novel, Souvenir must negotiate not only her own unease about her clone status, but also the suspicion and prejudices of others. Although Souvenir is assured that people from the rural areas are more tolerant of cloned individuals, some tension is evident almost immediately after her arrival on the Karoo farm, Springfontein. Here she meets ten-year-old twins Uzi and Clara, whose perfectly formed features cause her to wonder whether they are cloned children or “Dollybabies” (7). The term “dollybaby” is a reference to Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, but can also be read as referring to the doll-like features of the children. Here the association with a doll or plaything reinforces the view of barbiclones as submissive sex toys and servants expressed in the novel. The children’s mother, Magda, immediately insists that the twins are naturally born children, and Souvenir is disturbed by her defensive attitude.
However, this small confrontation is relatively insignificant in comparison to accounts of other, more vicious, prejudices against Souvenir as barbiclone. It soon becomes apparent that barbiclones are often adopted solely as “indispensable sextoys and household skivvies” (6). In this sense, the barbiclone is representative of not only the fragmented nature of female experience, but by extension also of the sexual exploitation of women. Rosenthal is critical of the ways in which women are held hostage by unattainable versions of feminine beauty perpetuated by Western-centered mass media: that double-edged sword that proclaims a woman unattractive if she does not conform to the pinup ideal, and frivolous, incompetent, unintelligent, and sexually available if she does.
The romance that blossoms between Souvie and Obed Will Obenbara—the two are eventually married, and Souvie becomes pregnant despite the fact that she is a clone—sits uncomfortably given the novel’s commitment to the representation of alterity. It may be argued that Souvenir has to relinquish a measure of difference, that is, take on the traditional role of mother and wife, in order to find true contentment. Rosenthal attempts to resolve this tension by drawing on an established trope in South African literature: the Karoo as timeless landscape, which, belonging to no one, belongs to everyone. By establishing the Karoo as the one place that an unorthodox family of hybrids—a barbiclone mother, Nigerian father, and three “café au lait” daughters (triply marked as different through their race, gender, and genetic legacy)—can call home, Rosenthal does not propagate the abdication of difference in order to belong, but rather the desire to belong despite difference (177).
The notion of the Karoo as a primeval landscape, a region that predates human beings and will in all likelihood continue to flourish long after humankind is eradicated from the planet, is articulated in Afrikaans writer Eben Venter’s Brouhaha, a collection of essays and columns. Venter devises a strategy for living without cynicism in crime-ridden South Africa, what he calls “die land van melk en moorde” (the land of milk and murders). Thinking back to the sense of peace he experienced at a small café in Uniondale, he advises his (presumably white, beleaguered Afrikaans) readers: “With a Fanta in one hand, walk out onto the dusty step of the café and remember: Across those peaks of the Swartberg begins the Great Karoo, ashy and worn from age. There people have been living for as long as a person can remember and it is also yours, no matter what is said. And there you are allowed to go and live forth.”18 Souvenir’s version of the Karoo landscape, plagued by severe weather and strange, genetically modified creatures, may look vastly different from Venter’s, but the sentiment that the Karoo can provide those who feel themselves beleaguered by a hostile dominant system with a safe haven of peace and acceptance remains the same. Souvenir, then, like many of the speculative works examined across Green Planets, suggests that a sense of self is ultimately (but not unproblematically) rooted in place. The Karoo belongs to Souvenir by virtue of her Aunt Jem’s legacy of rosebushes and hedges. She is inscribed in the landscape through a shared history, a legacy.
Rosenthal’s futuristic novel is comparable to other speculative South African texts such as Jenny Robson’s Savannah 2116 AD in the sense that ecological disaster is used as a means of exploring human relationships, and particularly what it means to be different. Such emphasis on humanistic concerns through the lens of the popular SF trope of ecological crisis is not uncommon in South African speculative fiction. Because of the country’s violent legacy of human rights violations, South African literature continues to be concerned with questions of alterity and belonging. That the effects of global warming and other ecological crises serve mainly as the backdrop for the human drama in Rosenthal’s Souvenir does not detract from the ecological message of the novel, which both offers a dire warning regarding the ecological fragility of our planet and speaks specifically to the impact that environmental decay will have on a South African future.
FAMILIAR ANIMALS: NEILL BLOMKAMP’S DISTRICT 9
Like Rosenthal’s Souvenir, Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 not only highlights the myriad forms of otherness through the introduction of an altered body or trickster figure, but also turns the gaze inward, exploring moments of self-awareness of alterity.19 D9 explores productive imaginings of hybridity in the form of human/animal couplings that serve to destabilize hierarchized binary oppositions, challenging of the kind of anthropocentricism that serves as justification for the human population’s continued dominion over our animal others.
Blomkamp uses conventional SF tropes to express anxieties regarding social, political, and economic uncertainty within a specifically South African context. South African audiences in particular (perhaps expecting the sterile glamour of a typical Hollywood production) may initially be struck by the gritty realism of the film’s depiction of the bustling, dirty streets and shantytowns of Johannesburg, the commentary by unpolished local “actors,” and the authenticity of the various South African accents and languages. The film maintains a playful attempt at verisimilitude, presenting its “findings” and interviews in documentary style, juggling between polished, edited scenes and unsteady handheld footage, and even featuring a mock television news report in which real-life SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation) news anchor Mahendra Raghunath delivers an update on alien/human conflict. Only after the camera pans out to reveal a colossal spacecraft hovering over the familiar skyline of Johannesburg, and the audience is given its first glimpse of the ship’s bizarre alien “prawns” (presumably named after the Parktown prawn, a cricketlike insect common to the Johannesburg area),20 is the very fantastic nature of the narrative is revealed.
For anyone familiar with the SF genre, and particularly the Hollywood-style “alien” film, such suspension of disbelief is not difficult. However, this acceptance of the alien presence takes on a different level of significance in District 9. Here, the alien is accepted not only as a terrifying, unnatural presence that threatens the lives of the heroic human characters, but as a protagonist with whom the audience gradually begins to sympathize. The audience’s growing empathy with the plight of the “prawn” is due to the development of a relationship between the “trickster” protagonist, Wikus van der Merwe, and an alien individual known as Christopher Johnson. While heading up an Multi-National United operation to vacate the alien population from District 9, Wikus is accidentally infected by an alien fluid (carefully collected by Christopher from discarded alien devices in order to power the abandoned prawn spacecraft), which causes him to gradually transform into a prawn. Driven by the promise of a reversal of this metamorphosis, Wikus undertakes to help Christopher regain the fluid from MNU headquarters.
It is at this juncture in the film, when Wikus and Christopher storm MNU headquarters with guns blazing and stumble across a torture chamber used to do medical experiments on alien individuals, that Andries Du Toit notes a radical shift in the way both Wikus and the audience respond to the prawn Christopher. He writes:
By now we are used to anthropomorphising “Christopher,” and we can see the horror and the pity—and the rage—that we imagine flowing through him as he looks at the ravaged body of his murdered kin. We can see that he would be entirely within his rights to smear Wikus then and there, and go his own way. But he runs across the passage to join him, and together they crouch behind a bulkhead, the room filling with smoke and the thunder of gunshots, firing madly round corners, covering each other as they dash down the passage. And suddenly we are watching a buddy movie…. There are many movies in which the aliens are good guys—but never aliens that look like this. Wikus has crossed over to the other side. And so have we.21
Du Toit’s suggestion that we can “imagine” the outrage Christopher Johnson experiences when he discovers MNU’s gruesome laboratory implies that we can imagine Christopher’s revulsion at the sight of such slaughter, because we can think ourselves into the situation. It is the same revulsion we experience when visiting similar sites of torture and captivity at Dachau or Auschwitz or, closer to home, Robben Island and Vorster Square. Despite the strangeness, the complete alienness of the prawns, the audience is called on to develop a sympathetic imagination, to empathize with the suffering of the extraterrestrial other.
Wikus van der Merwe’s Kafkaesque metamorphosis, his process of becoming prawn, allows for some critical reflection on the ways in which the film’s human characters, and particularly MNU employees, have treated nonhuman others. Wikus occupies a precarious interstitial position between being human and being prawn, thus taking on the role of the “trickster” and destabilizing distinctions between lawful and unlawful behavior and self and other. In the instant—for “a just decision is always required immediately”22—that Wikus decides to take up arms and fight alongside Christopher, he is responding to the call of the wholly other. This decision to act is made from a position of “undecidability,” which Jacques Derrida considers to be the condition for ethical responsibility and hospitality. Thus, Wikus’s actions can be considered absolutely just and responsible.
Wikus’s unique hybridity and his journey to reclaim his former life, set against the backdrop of a bizarre fictional landscape, also becomes the vehicle for Blomkamp’s commentary on contemporary South Africa and its many social and political problems. The film also invokes the country’s violent past, while simultaneously succeeding in situating South Africa in relation to a global future.
The title of the film clearly references District Six, a former residential area of Cape Town from which the apartheid government forcibly removed tens of thousands of citizens in the 1970s, immediately suggesting that District 9 can be read as a response to South Africa’s policy of institutionalized racism (apartheid) prior to 1994. Casting the alien refugees as representative of the millions of disadvantaged black South Africans who were oppressed by the tyrannical system of apartheid is not by any means a stretch of the imagination: these aliens live in an informal settlement on the outskirts of Johannesburg under the threat of forcible removal, speak a San-like “click” language, and are derogatorily referred to as “prawns” in the same way that offensive, racist terms were used to describe black South Africans in the past and, in some cases, even today.
If District 9 is a reflection on South Africa’s traumatic history of epistemic violence and oppression, it also allows for the imaginative rethinking of present-day concerns, particularly the issues of continued racialized discrimination and xenophobia in South Africa (the film was coincidentally released in the wake of a series of violent xenophobic attacks that spread across the country in 2008). District 9’s precursor, Alive in Joburg, a 2005 science fiction short film directed by Blomkamp, likewise addresses the issue of xenophobia, with many of the “interviews” about the aliens now living in Johannesburg taken from authentic interviews with South African citizens about their feelings toward Zimbabwean refugees.
District 9’s seemingly insensitive treatment of Nigerian nationals is of particular interest in this regard. Blomkamp’s depiction of Nigerians as ruthless criminals who exploit the aliens’ weakness for tinned cat food in order to amass prawn weapons and technology has been dismissed as discriminatory and offensive by some, including Dora Akunyili, Nigeria’s information minister, who requested that the film be banned from cinemas in Abuja. However, the film appears to be lampooning the Nigerian-as-violent-criminal stereotype rather than reinforcing it—suggesting a certain level of self-awareness and ironic distance. The notion of trading cat food for advanced alien weaponry is clearly an exercise in reductio ad absurdum and can thus be seen as a critique of such negative stereotyping. In this regard, the film’s position as Hollywood blockbuster must also be considered. It appears that Blomkamp is at once lampooning and buying into Hollywood’s need for “recognizable” villains (mostly Russian, German, South African, or Nigerian). Such mimicking of the American action film, along with the film’s neat Hollywood ending, is certainly problematic and threatens to undermine the sociopolitical impact of the film. However, informed viewers (and specifically a South African audience more sensitive to the nuances of the film) will be alerted to the element of playful critique at work here. Those viewers with little or no awareness of South African political history may walk away from the cinema thoroughly entertained, at the very least touched by the “human” drama that has unfolded on the screen.
As suggested earlier, District 9 not only addresses past and present concerns of racial discrimination and oppression within South Africa, but also seeks to situate the country in relation to a global, technologically advanced future. The SF mode allows for the creation of a dystopic future world in which alien spacecraft and mechanical combat suits (presumably inspired by Japanese anime) are not out of place, and a militant corporation (MNU) can run amuck—a scenario that does not seem too unbelievable in view of increasing globalization, rapid technological advances, and the continued rise of the multinational corporation.
In addition to addressing questions of human injustice in the face of an uncertain future, District 9 is concerned with human-animal conflict. Thus far, it has been suggested that the alien refugees can be read as representative of disempowered black South Africans. However, the film’s use of the word “nonhuman” to describe the alien other,23 as well as the term “prawn,” also suggests a connection with the animal nonhuman (a notion that is strengthened by the a fact that the aliens’ main source of nourishment is tinned cat food). In this sense, the torturing of captive prawns raises debates regarding the ethical treatment of animals used for medical experimentation. Once his metamorphosis is uncovered by his colleagues, Wikus is himself subjected to violent experimentation, forced to murder a hapless prawn in order to demonstrate his control over alien weapons. In this way, the boundaries between cold-blooded torture and “necessary” scientific experimentation are blurred. Similarly, human consumption of animal flesh is rendered morally suspect through Wikus’s transformation. As Wikus’s body is composed of both human and alien flesh after his exposure to the alien liquid, the Nigerian gang’s attempt to consume his alien arm then constitutes a kind of cannibalism.
Wikus is abruptly torn from his human self and forced to occupy the physical and psychological position of a prawn. Despite the violence of this transition, the film suggests that Wikus now occupies a productive and just space—and paradoxically a more human(e) space. As a human, Wikus is a one-dimensional caricature of the “idiot Afrikaner” or “van der Merwe,” but as a prawn he becomes the visual embodiment of the psychological and ethical processes associated with Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming-animal.”24 Wikus occupies the interstitial position of the cyborg or trickster and falls outside the category of “genuine” human, thus exposing its instability.
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The ecological messages of the speculative texts included for discussion in this chapter are intertwined with an acute awareness of pressing sociopolitical issues in South Africa and the rapidly shifting notion of what it means to be human. South African speculative narratives approach the question of identity formation in South Africa as a complex process, influenced not only by violent legacies of oppression and institutionalized racism, but also by the effects of global technological advances on nature and on the human body. Many contemporary, post-apartheid South African speculative narratives draw on the technological aspect of the SF genre, introducing nonhuman or post-human characters such as clones, genetically engineered donors, extraterrestrial aliens, technologically altered humans, and high-tech equipment such as spaceships and heat-regulating suits.
The South African speculative narratives discussed in this chapter thus have in common not only the representation of a futuristic or alternative South African landscape, but also the expression of an entanglement between self, other, and environment. This is evinced as the need for a sense of responsibility toward and connection with both human and nonhuman others in the face of global ecological disaster and an uncertain technological future. The speculative mode is a useful means of staging such an encounter between self, environment, and human and nonhuman other precisely because the established SF tropes of the apocalyptic wasteland and the altered body allow for the creation of a literary space in which all established boundaries between selves and others can be erased and reestablished in different ways. These tropes highlight the issue of survival and suggest that continued existence of any individual is interdependent with that of the other, be it human, animal, or environment.
Notes
1. Deidre C. Byrne, “Science Fiction in South Africa,” PMLA 119, no. 3 (May 2004): 522–25 (522).
2. See David Barnett, “Putting South African Fiction on the Map,” Guardian.co.uk (May 26, 2011), http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/may/26/south-africanscience-fiction.
3. Felicity Wood, “Subversive, Undisciplined, and Ideologically Unsound or Why Don’t South Africans Like Fantasy?” Language Projects Review 6, nos. 3–4 (1991): 32–36.
4. Introduced in Woolf’s essay “Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown” (1923).
5. Ursula K. Le Guin, “Science Fiction and Mrs Brown,” in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (London: Women’s Press, 1989), 86–102 (90).
6. Ibid., 87–88.
7. Ibid., 102.
8. An apocryphal, dimwitted “Mr. van der Merwe” is the subject of many South African jokes.
9. Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 56.
10. Jane Rosenthal, Souvenir (Johannesburg: Bromponie Press, 2004), 4. Additional references to this text are given in parenthetical citation.
11. Andy Caffrey, “Antarctica’s Deep Impact Threat,” Earth Island Journal 13, no. 2 (Summer 1998).
12. Wendy Woodward, “Whales, Clones and Two Ecological Novels: The Whale Caller and Jane Rosenthal’s Souvenir,” Ways of Writing: Critical Essays on Zakes Mda, ed. David Bell and J. U. Jacobs (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009), 142.
13. Stewart Crehan, “Disowning Ownership: ‘White Writing’ and the Land,” Routes of the Roots: Geography and Literature in the English-Speaking Countries, ed. Isabelle Maria Zoppi (Rome: Bulzoni, 1998), 41–71 (58–59).
14. Neil Evernden, “Beyond Ecology: Self, Place and the Pathetic Fallacy,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 101.
15. Joan Slonczewski and Michael Levy, “Science Fiction and the Life Sciences,” in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 174–85 (174).
16. Adam Roberts, Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 2003), 100.
17. Donna Harraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association, 1991), 149–81 (150).
18. “Stap Fanta in die hand uit op die stofstoep van die kafee en onthou maar: Oor daardie ruggens van die Swartberge begin die Groot-Karoo, asvaal en gedaan van oudgeid. Daar bly mense so lank as ’n mens kan onthou en dit is ook joune, dit maak nie saak wat daar gesê word nie. En daar mag jy gaan áánlewe.” Eben Venter, Brouhaha: Verstommings, Naakstudies en Wenresepte (Cape Town: Tafelberg Publishers, 2010), 57. My translation.
19. District 9, dir. Neill Blomkamp (2009; Culver City, CA: Tristar Pictures, 2009), DVD.
20. This aspect of District 9 evokes Andrew Buckland’s play The Ugly Noo Noo, first performed in 1988, which depicts the fantastic battle between a man and a Parktown prawn. This conflict between man and insect is representative of Buckland’s own struggle against the restrictive apartheid government of the time, but can also be seen as a critique of irrational fear and intolerance of difference.
21. Andries Du Toit, “Becoming the Alien: Apartheid, Racism and District 9” (October 1, 2009), http://asubtleknife.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/science-fiction-in-the-ghetto-loving the alien.
22. Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, The Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Donis, ed. Giacomo Donis and David Webb (Malden, MA: Polity Press / Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 26.
23. This use also echoes the term “nonwhite,” which was commonly used in apartheid legislation.
24. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 1988).