“5” in “Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth”
5
A Violence “Just below the Skin”
Atmospheric Terror and Racial Ecologies from the African Anthropocene
Esthie Hugo
Let us return to that atmosphere of violence, that violence which is just below the skin.
—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Traditional gothic tales, as many critics have shown, glean much of their terror from their claustrophobic spatial settings, in locations such as closed-off cellars, chambers, and attics, which “bespeak abandonment and unlife.”1 Chris Baldick writes that gothic tales attain their “Gothic effect” through a combination of “a fearful sense of inheritance in a time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space . . . to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration.”2 Baldick’s description of the sickening disintegration experienced through the enclosure of space reads starkly in light of recent global events. As I write, the world is in the throes of a protracted lockdown period resulting from a new virus named SARS-CoV-2 and the Covid-19 pandemic it engendered. The virus contaminates through droplets that can spread through the air via coughing and sneezing, attacking the respiratory system, causing inflammation, and making it difficult to breathe. To curb its spread, countries across the world have implemented various stay-at-home-measures, framing confinement and isolation as necessary precautions against contamination. So, how do we read gothic under these new conditions, when the meaning of terror once again becomes reconfigured—no longer located in the enclosure of space but in the very air we breathe? Such events force us to reconsider how the gothic form reconfigured might give expression to a world suffocated and suffocating, radically reframed, in other words, by the terrors of an atmosphere.
The pandemic has unfolded across various fault lines, particularly in terms of racial inequality. Evidence shows that the Covid-19 disease has more severely affected people of color across the world.3 In the United States, the phrase “I Can’t Breathe,” which memorializes the dying words of Eric Gardner, Byron Williams, and George Floyd, has become both an anthem of dissent against the American state’s deadly toll on Black lives and a slogan that captures the racial inequalities structuring the current racialized experience of the pandemic.4 In Africa, the proliferation of Covid-19 has similarly exposed how global crisis is shouldered disproportionately by Black bodies, which have long borne the effects of airborne toxicity in particularly violent ways. Like the Black men who recently died at the hands of American police brutality, African civilians regularly describe air quality in urban Africa through fears of asphyxiation. In Johannesburg, the center of South Africa’s gold mining sector, the air quality is so poor that it has been dubbed “airpocalypse.”5 In Niger, also known as the “Uranium Capital of Africa,” locals employ a similarly gothic lexicon to describe the contamination of land, water, and air by radioactive dust. “Have you seen the soil in the country?” asks a local mining worker from Arlit, an industrial town in north central Niger. “It is dry and lifeless. . . . There is something evil in the dust.”6
Focusing on the uneven experience of global environmental crisis, this chapter is interested in mapping new directions in the gothic through an analysis of West African forms of cultural production in which the site of gothic terror becomes reconfigured and located in atmospheric racism. I chart the evolving politics and aesthetics of racial toxicity by focusing on the mobilization of atmospheric terror in the writings of Nigerian author Ben Okri and in the artistic portraits of Beninese photographer Fabrice Monteiro. Comparing these works allows for the interrogation of how different African artistic mediums draw on gothic aesthetics to give shape to the racist history of toxic exposure and, in the process, enable us to model a new analytic framework for understanding global environmental crisis as a political and ecological project that distributes life and death unevenly.
The racialized experience of deathly atmospheric exposure is not a new issue. The World Health Organization (WHO) has long argued that air pollution is the world’s most severe environmental health concern.7 Recognizing that nine out of ten people worldwide breathe air containing levels of pollutants that exceed WHO guideline limits, the organization has implemented a series of air quality programs across Europe, the Western Pacific, and the Americas, which recommend “threshold limits for key air pollutants that pose health risks and provide a reference for setting air pollution targets at regional and national levels to improve air quality.”8 While the WHO acknowledges that the effects of pollution are intensified by poverty, no air quality program currently exists for sub-Saharan Africa, despite the fact that pollution-related deaths have increased in the region by nearly 60 percent over the last two decades.9
Pavithra Vasudevan argues for the espousal of the term racial ecologies to describe these uneven geographic zones, in which corporeal vulnerability is experienced through the “slow violence”10 of poisoned air, water, and land, which recomposes Black bodies “through intimate relations with . . . non-human species and inorganic matter.”11 Vasudevan’s critique draws on emergent Fanonian readings that attempt to account for the place of race and empire in popular understandings of the Anthropocene, which, as a planetary condition framed by the name of the Anthropos, has been criticized for ignoring the uneven history of development in favor of analyses that opt instead “for indictments of the entire species.”12 As Rebecca Duncan notes in chapter 9 of this collection:
The broad category of human activity cannot bring into focus the principle that organizes patterns of violence and security over time and that is clearly bound up with geopolitical distributions of wealth and power, with legacies of empire and colonial settlement, and with race.
Similarly suspicious of the fault lines encoded in Anthropocenic thinking, a number of scholars have opted for a range of alternative terms to account for the formative role played by transatlantic slavery in the instantiation of capitalism as modern-world-system.13
Racial ecologies thus nudge us usefully toward what Christina Sharpe describes as “monstrous intimacies”—intimate violences inherited from slavery that continue to shape Black subjectivities into the present.14 Espousing Sharpe’s formulation of postslavery subjectivity in her study of aluminum smelting in twentieth-century North Carolina, Vasudevan argues that the logics of racial ecologies are manifested in the “everyday corporeal negotiations [that Black communities experience] with waste materials,”15 leading to “a transgenerational inheritance that manifests in chronic illness and premature death.”16 Like the intimate violences of the colonial slave system, which resulted in “Black bodies serv[ing] as both lifesource and toxic sink,”17 the materiality of toxic exposure in contemporary Black communities substantiates arguments made by Saidiya Hartmann about the continuities between field and factory in the postslavery era.18 Borrowing Hartman’s insights into how slavery “lives on” through racial capitalism, Vasudevan shows how afterlives of the forcible use of Black labor in sugarcane and cotton production become embedded in racial ecologies that intertwine race, waste, and extrahuman natures in new and disturbing ways, as the “ghostly agents” of corporeal toxicity supplement slavery’s “ball and chain.”19
Racial ecologies give expression, then, to the lived experience of consumptive capitalism’s intimate bodily invasions, elucidating imperialism’s social-ecological violence as suffocation. As a material manifestation of the socio-natures of ongoing forms of coloniality across urban Africa, suffocation gives expression to Fanon’s critique of colonialism as Manichaean spatial demarcation. As Fanon argues,
the zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity. . . . They both follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity.20
Fanon’s description here of the settler town and the native town are reanimated through environmental crisis, where the global centers responsible for climate crisis are more secured against its violence, while African cities are left vulnerable—“smother[ed],” as Jonathan Silver puts it in “Suffocating Cities,” under “new extreme conditions” that replicate the processes of underdevelopment and racial capitalism that shaped African urbanization.21 In thinking about the coloniality of this global condition, Silver pushes us to consider how climate change cannot be understood “as a series of dramatic events”; rather, it forms part of a long history in which violence is “disproportionately centred on the black body.”22 In what follows, I trace the toxic history of atmospheric terror in West Africa as both corporeal violence and contestation and insurgency, concluding by exploring how Okri and Monteiro draw on gothic to give expression to what we might understand as a decolonial praxis for understanding the Anthropocene.
Waste, Race, and the Suffocating City
Atmospheric toxicity plays a central role in Ben Okri’s short story “In the City of Red Dust.”23 This tale charts the travails of two friends and ghetto dwellers—Emokhai and Marjomi—in an unnamed Nigerian city during the day on which the country’s military governor celebrates his fiftieth birthday. The story is set during the Harmattan period, when great winds carry vast amounts of mineral dust from the Sahara Desert toward the Gulf of Guinea from November to March every year. Though a common annual occurrence throughout West Africa, the Harmattan haze in Okri’s story brings with it more than the usual seasonal discomfort “of dry skins and chapped lips.”24 Instead, the narrative is replete with images of decay and suffocation caused by an unusually “massive cloud of red dust”25 that hangs over the city, coating in red sediment “all natural life,” from “the cockroaches, the cats, the dogs [and] the leaves of the stunted orange tree” through to “the zinc rooftops”26 of the houses among which Emokhai lives.
No reason is provided for the Harmattan season’s abnormal levels of dust, but we can surmise that the dust cloud has formed as a result of the country’s near-complete reliance on the extraction of oil to grow the postcolonial economy. As is well known, Nigeria’s political economy has been shaped by the petroleum sector throughout its postcolonial history. “Nigeria,” writes Michael Watts, “is an archetypical petrostate, the eleventh largest producer and the eighth largest exporter of crude oil in the world.”27 Many critics have read Okri’s narrative, which employs a series of gothic images and devices adapted from African folklore, as mediating the neocolonial logics of petro-predation. For Elleke Boehmer, the gothic elements of the story, in particular Okri’s use of the vampire figure, “act[] as a powerful reminder of the vampire-like (post)colonial economy that the friends inhabit, in which the state feeds upon the blood of its citizens.”28
Resource extraction and labor relations are given form through Okri’s turn to the Yoruba myth of the obayifo. This myth is based on Ashanti vampire lore, which dictates that the obayifo is a witch that preys on children and crops by draining their “life-energy.”29 Drawing on the Yoruba belief in this creature’s “insatiable appetite” for both human and extrahuman natures, Okri reifies capitalist predation through the corporeal practice of bloodletting.30 Broke, hungry, and unable “to make money honestly,” Emokhai and his friend Marjomi survive by selling their blood to a local hospital in exchange for a pitiful two naira per pint—less, they complain, “than what a prostitute gets.”31 Marjomi, prized for his “expensive . . . high-grade blood,” sells so regularly that he exists in a state of near zombification. The hospital’s nurses complain that his body is “like a skeleton with dried skin,” and when he walks, he does so “muttering to himself, stumbling forward.”32 As it literally exhausts his lifeblood, the exsanguination also results in Marjomi being overcome by a seemingly supernatural stupor. While his blood is being drawn, Marjomi feels “that he has fallen into a dream”; his eyes become “liverish” with “a tortured light” as “a strange demented energy tak[es] over his movements.”33
Barely alive, and suggestively “possessed” by the extractive economy, Marjomi and Emokhai stagger through the streets as military planes circle the sky, releasing large reams of paper stamped with the portrait of the city’s dictator, “a soldier who had reputedly saved the city during a siege in the war.”34 This scene directly links the depleted bodies of Marjomi and Emokhai to the petro-economy via the figure of its petro-chemical coordinator. While these papers are meant to remind the city’s citizens of the governor’s birthday celebration, they simply exacerbate the city’s high level of existing pollution. Watching as this “cascade of confetti . . . pirouetted towards the ground,” Emokhai laments that the “formless” rubbish dump near to where he lives merely “grows bigger each day.”35
Like Boehmer, many critics have read Okri’s turn to a gothic vocabulary as an extension of “peripheral irrealist”36 forms of narrativization that mediate the contradictions of Nigeria’s first petroleum cycle, in which the contrast between boom and bust, growth and contraction, development and inertia, windfall and precarity, became particularly spectacularized.37 In Okri’s tale, oil capital explicitly produces inequality. Roaming the streets in search of work and food, Emokhai and Marjomi notice how the city’s uneven development produces wealth for some and poverty for others. The street where Emokhai lives is covered in rotting “garbage heaps,” while the city’s wealthy live on “clean avenues . . . sealed behind barbed wire fences [and] named after rich men, governors, and freedom fighters.”38 The figure of the military dictator is embellished with “gold necklaces from secret societies and multinational concerns,” while Marjomi and Emokhai must literally sell their lifeblood to make ends meet. Moreover, while the friends exist in a state of depravity and atrophy, above them the skies roil with the threat of military action. The thousands of fighter planes, which make Emokhai feel “as if he were under invasion, as if a new war had been declared,”39 emblematize how, under such extreme inequities, order can only be maintained under threat of military force.
The “shock” of oil in Nigeria has not only resulted in forms of governance that reproduce social and political violence but has also led to the emergence of “occult economies,”40 in which “bewitched accumulation” is generated through the discourse of “market-monstrosity.”41 Pointing to the increased circulation in urban Africa of “tales of enrichment via cannibalism, vampirism and extraordinary interactions between the living and the dead,” David McNally suggests that Okri turns to the “fantastic genre” to provide a vessel for “the systematic assaults on bodily and psychic integrity that define the economic infrastructure of modernity.”42 Like Jennifer Wentzel, who coined the influential concept of “petro-magic-realism” to describe how Nigerian fiction aestheticizes the “magic” of petro-modernity,43 McNally argues that Okri’s fiction disturbs “the naturalization of capitalism” through the fantastic mode, which offers “a kind of grotesque realism that mimics the absurdity of capitalist modernity.”44 Rather than view them as “expressions of traditional values in opposition to the forces of modern capitalism,” McNally sees in Okri’s fantastical aesthetics a counterhegemonic disruption. This grows out of an experience of “social life in the age of globalising capitalism,”45 which, in Okri’s novel, is framed via an unevenness that is inflected specifically by a Yoruba cosmology.
Written in the aftermath of Nigeria’s 1980s oil crash, the text is shaped by a need both to make sense of the wreckage of a once hopeful future and to come to terms with the legacy of faltering development and the political instability cemented by the perversity of oil wealth. The metaphor of vampiric corporeal predation responds to this dual imperative, making legible the devastating effects of the postcolonial petrostate through its figuring of oil as “blood circulating through the national body.”46 Key here is that Okri draws an explicit comparison between medicalized bloodletting, which takes place at the tellingly named Queen Mary Hospital, and the predatory methods of accumulation that continue to structure the postcolonial state through what Immanuel Wallerstein terms the “world-system.”47 As such, Okri’s vampirism also encodes the coloniality of socioecological violence and the inextricability of human and extrahuman resources in the context of the extraction economy. Just as the hospital appropriates the life energies of Emokhai and Marjomi, so, too, does the global oil economy draw both on the life energies of African labor power and the potential energies of the extrahuman through its extraction of oil from the literal “veins” of the earth. The seemingly “fantastic” operations of foreign oil investment—which obscures the transactions between human bodies, ecology, and capital—are powerfully captured, then, in Okri’s espousal of the vampire figure of the obayifo, which feeds not only on human life but also on crops—which is sustained, in other words, by both human and extrahuman prey.
While Okri highlights the mechanics of oil predation through the metaphor of vampirism and the Black bodily vulnerability this produces, the narrative places equal emphasis on the effects of oil through its inclusion of the blood red color of the dust that covers and consumes all who inhabit the city, thereby making use of the gothic mode to figure both the systemic extraction of labor and the aftereffects of this process of capitalization. As critics have noted, some of the most devastating effects of oil extraction concern its waste products and pollutants. Since the onset of the petro-regime, Nigeria has been home to some of the worst cases of oil pollution in the world. Hundreds of oil spills have occurred over the last few decades, but oil spills are not the only hazards produced by the oil economy. The flaring of petro-associated gas remains commonplace in oil-producing Nigeria, despite governmental promises to ban the practice since 1984.48 Gas flaring, in which the natural gas associated with petroleum extraction is burned off into the atmosphere, significantly impacts air quality. Pollutants released by gas flaring are carried far from the actual sites of extraction into the city, where rising levels of airborne toxins have been linked to cancer and lung damage, as well as reproductive and neurological problems.49
Like his delineation of petro-extraction, Okri’s illustration of atmospheric toxicity underscores how its distribution reproduces neocolonial oppression. Looking out at a city “obscured in dust, plaster and smoke,” Emokhai sees “the patterns of an empire stifled in history.”50 Emokhai literally breathes in the dust of empire as he passes “an area which used to be a market where slaves were sold a hundred years before,” feeling “his nose and lungs getting clogged from the dust and air.”51 Walking through this toxic cloud, Emokhai’s body becomes recomposed and remade in the ghostly image of the dust that chokes him; he emerges from the dust “whittled . . . a shade more invisible”52 than before. In this ghostly specter, Okri proffers the suffocating confines of the slave hold, as the very air Emokhai breathes becomes as terrifying as the injurious tomb of “racial terror” that was the slave ship.53 As the violence of empire becomes diffused and expanded to permeate the everyday, Emokhai, in an uncanny invocation of the dying words of Floyd, Gardner, and Williams, describes walking through a city so hazardous that he feels as though “he [can’t] breathe.”54 Moreover, as a trope that gothically registers both the processes of historical consumptive extraction and their toxic afterlives, Marjomi’s zombie-like stupor similarly takes on new meaning, drawing into sharp focus how bodies become gothically “undone”55 through the uneven transformation of human lives and extrahuman geographies, here reified through Black exposure to airborne toxicity.
Thus, while Okri’s turn to a fantastical lexicon stylistically mediates the Nigerian state’s “enchantment” with the global oil market, the gothic aesthetics of the story, in particular its invocation of the suffocating and zombified body, can equally be read as giving fictional meaning to the material realities of racialized toxic exposure. By shifting our focus from the actual time and site of extraction to the “monstrous intimacies” effected by the corporeal interaction of race and waste, Okri’s tale allows us to look more closely at the living residues to which planetary extractive industries gave rise. In the process, his narrative opens up ways of viewing the Anthropocene that move away from common historical points of departure that prioritize the Industrial Revolution, focusing not on the temporal delineation of a single historical event but rather on “the temporally diffuse violence of an atmosphere.”56 To borrow from Christina Sharpe, who in turn draws on Fanon, Okri’s story shows “how it is not the specifics of any one event or set of events that are endlessly repeatable and repeated, but the totality of the environments in which [Black bodies] struggle.”57
Summoning colonial and contemporary conditions of racial vulnerability through gothic bodily suffocation and debility, Okri calls up the horrifying afterlives of human-made matter, in the double sense. Such visions of Black corporeal debility point to the cumulative weight of what Fanon saw as the colonized subject’s “permanent struggle against omnipresent death . . . and the absence of any hope for the future.”58 In Okri’s tale, the omnipresence of toxicity gives potent expression to the unlivable life of racial ecologies, in which the terms of a racist world continue to be lived “as a suffocating and inescapable atmosphere—as necessary sustenance, even as it sickens and depletes.”59 In this sense, Okri’s delineation of atmospheric toxicity gives new meaning to Fanon’s urgent descriptions of the Wretched of the Earth, those racialized subjects who are forced to live in a “narrow world strewn with prohibitions,”60 where conditions of being “hemmed in” and “smothered” give way to the act of living as a form of “combat breathing.”61 The continual repetition of breath required for life becomes a site of struggle, making breathing itself part of the fight to maintain life in a suffocating and suffocated world.
Animated Monsters of the African Anthropocene
Alongside Okri’s narrative, more recent West African artistic forms have begun to emerge that similarly look to portray how Black bodies disproportionately bear the bodily burden of industrial waste through gothic modes of representation. The photographic portraits of Beninese photographer Fabrice Monteiro are particularly instructive here, as his work extends Okri’s focus on racialized bodily asphyxiation through the creation of what he describes as “visions of a world strangled by waste.”62 Monteiro was born in Namur, Benin, but currently lives and works in Dakar, Senegal. The city of Dakar plays a formative role in his work, as many of his most famous portraits from his 2015 collection The Prophecy were shot in the infamous Mbeubeuss: Senegal’s largest waste dump. This landfill was created six years after Senegal’s independence from French rule, in 1968, and sits on a floodplain outside Dakar, close to the ocean. It sprawls across the floodplain, covering more than 175 hectares and taking in more than 475,000 tons of waste every year. This makes it one of the largest open waste dumps in the world.63 Not only is Mbeubeuss home to some of the world’s worst pollution but it is also a lifeline for thousands of the city’s poor. Working in a constant stream of poisonous gas and smoke, an estimated thirty-five hundred workers salvage materials collected from the site, selling these in bulk to Chinese and Indian scrap metal companies in the hope of earning a daily wage.64
Like these workers, who generate life from the “castoffs” that make up the waste dump, Monteiro draws from the landfill a range of waste materials to construct huge, monstrous figures that emerge from the city’s excessive refuse and devastated landscape. Monteiro’s figures are at once gothically monstrous and strangely beautiful, uncanny in their use of abject garbage to create prized objects of great beauty. Alongside his use of waste objects, Monteiro’s photographic series takes inspiration from the ancient story of the Greek goddess Gaia.65 As he puts it himself, the narrative of his series reconstructs Gaia’s “incapacity to maintain the natural cycles of the planet in front of new modes of life and consumption.”66 Infuriated by what she sees, Gaia “resolves to send her djinns to let them appear to the humans and deliver a message of warning and empowerment.”67
Of the images that compose Monteiro’s 2015 collection, one is particularly striking for its comparative framing of slave histories and present-day Black corporeal negotiations with the wastes of the global oil economy. Unlike Okri’s narrative, which hinges on the airborne residues of land-based oil extraction, this portrait takes us offshore, to the oceanic site of extractive capitalism. Here Monteiro depicts his monstrous goddess emerging on the Atlantic shores of Dakar’s Hann Bay, from which the ancestors of modern Senegalese citizens were forcibly transported via the transatlantic slave trade centuries before. Monteiro’s figure resembles the pan-African deity that goes by the various names of Mami Wata, watermamma, Liba-Mama, and mama dlo. This aquatic divinity typically takes the form of a “beautiful black woman with black braids and the tail of a colourful fish”68 and can be found across the African diasporas, in the Americas, and in the Caribbean under many different guises.69 She is believed to have “developed from a local water goddess within a wider pantheon of gods connected with various societies.”70 As other critics have shown, “the origins of this figure lie in a combination of Amerindian mythology, European mermaid lore, and the water-spirit beliefs brought to the region by enslaved Africans.”71
Figure 5.1. A black-clothed figure, in the image of the pan-African deity Mami Wata, emerges from the polluted oceans of Dakar’s Hann Bay. Copyright ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021.
While many have read Mami Wata as emblematic of the “cultural mixing” that emerged from the colonial encounter,72 Michael Niblett has argued that versions of the deity from the Atlantic World, which emphasize her “violent, death-dealing” qualities, should rather be “interpreted with reference to the brutal violence and structural inequalities imposed on the Caribbean by capitalist imperialism.”73 Like Niblett’s analysis of this water spirit’s Caribbean manifestation, Monteiro’s West African Mami Wata encodes the ongoing ecosocial imperialism of extractivist systems in postcolonial Senegal via offshore oil exploration. His Mami Wata takes the familiar form of a mermaid, but Monteiro renders her in decidedly more gothic terms than those in which she normally appears. In place of her vibrant scales, Monteiro’s goddess is clothed in black fabric and white feathers that appear slick with crude oil. The black fabric makes her appear as if she is in the throes of death, as it consumes her entire body, from her face, which is drawn in an expression of pain, to the rolls of shiny black plastic—one of oil’s main by-products—that compose her mermaid’s tail.
The reason for her emergence from the water is ambiguous, but the deathly mask of her face suggests she has been forced out of her oceanic home as a result of the oil pollutants that cloud the black water frothing at her feet. As such, Monteiro’s gothic contortion of the Mami Wata figure registers how capitalist transformations of the biosphere distort what Jason W. Moore refers to as the “relations of life-making”74 into corrosive, monstrous configurations, recalling how “existing socioecological unities are violently disaggregated” under capitalist incursion, giving rise to “strange new configurations of human and extra-human nature.”75 Monteiro’s work registers the “strange” new configurations of capitalist appropriation, then, by encoding them into this gothic figure, who is incapable of supporting life as it is habitually lived.
Certainly Monteiro’s depiction of this water spirit clothed in slick black cloth plays on the proliferation of images of marine creatures writhing in thick murky waters, gasping for breath in oceans increasingly contaminated by the millions of barrels of crude oil that are released into the sea each year.76 As such, the black residue that cloaks Monteiro’s figure gives life to the devastating aftereffects that attend the search for and claiming of raw materials. Unlike Nigeria’s administration, the Senegalese government has only recently become interested in the profit potentials offered by foreign oil investment. Since 2014, a series of foreign multinationals have marked the country as the new oil frontier, when Senegal’s deepwater wells opened up a new basin on the Atlantic Margin.77 In collaboration with Australian oil giant Woodside Energy and U.K. company Cairn Energy, the Senegalese administration has invested in the creation of a new “world-class” oil rig called the Sangomar Field, which promises to deliver “billions of dollars of revenue to the government of Senegal and provide social and economic benefits for generations to come.”78
Yet, in Monteiro’s photographic imagination, oil investment is framed not through celebration but through gothic images of ruination and decay. The new arrival of offshore oil extraction is given expression via a large ship in the background that lies perilously on its side, the source—it seems clear—of the ocean waters’ deathly color. However, the ship could equally be a fishing vessel, thus referencing the Senegalese fishing economy, which is the backbone of local life, accounting for up to 75 percent of the protein consumed by millions of the country’s citizens.79 In addition to domestic industrial and artisanal fishing fleets, many foreign countries—including Japan, China, and states from within the European Union—maintain access to Senegalese waters, and this has placed unsustainable pressures on limited fish stocks over the last three decades.80 But the Senegalese ocean has not only seen plummeting fish reserves. Since Senegal’s independence from French rule, its beaches have become some of the most contaminated on earth. Lacking systematic municipal waste collection and disposal, residents regularly deal with their waste by discarding it along the country’s shorelines.81 As the beaches and ocean waters become dumping grounds that threaten to reach the size of the Mbeubeuss landfill, local fishermen sense that the sea’s character is changing. Alongside lamentations of rising sea temperatures and pollution, locals describe the damage done to their once-plentiful fishing stocks through the oft-repeated refrain “There are no more fish in Senegal.”82
As Monteiro’s image of the oil-consumed ocean divinity suggests, the looming extraction of offshore petroleum is only set to exacerbate further the fragility of this already unstable ecosystem, leading to what many see as Senegal’s “dystopian future.”83 Like these critics, Monteiro’s Mami Wata similarly warns of an imminent apocalypse wrought by oil. In her one hand, she carries the skeletal remains of a white dove splattered with black resin. This is a reference to the archetypal white dove released by Noah in the biblical tale of Noah’s Ark, in which Noah, his family, and the world’s animals survive God’s wrath though the construction of an ark that protects them from a world-engulfing flood. Unlike the bird in this scenario, Monteiro’s dove does not bring the safe harbor of good fortune and a hopeful future; rather, it symbolizes the ruinous trajectories of resource extraction. Such signs make visible how Senegal’s ocean is being remade, once more, into a site of death for Black African bodies and communities, recalling from its polluted depths the submarine history of New World slavery and “hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions” of African captives thrown overboard during the Middle Passage.84 Invoking these histories through a gothic dynamic of the returning of the repressed, Monteiro shows how the conditions of this racist history become lived in an ocean made unheimlich, in the terms elucidated by Freud’s seminal essay.85 Such conditions have led the simultaneous unhoming of Black bodies and marine life in asphyxiating waters that recall Fanon’s meditation on the violence of the colonial state, which amplifies its wounding effects across the Black body by reducing the colonial subject to a state of combat breathing.
Figure 5.2. A large and brightly colored female figure stands on top of Mbeubeuss, Senegal’s largest landfill. Copyright ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021.
Moreover, while the biblical Noah survives the terror of a collapsing planet in the original tale, Monteiro’s figure can only move from one strangled world to another. In a further image, a larger-than-life female figure stands above Mbeubeuss’s trash-filled mound. Elaborating Okri’s aesthetics of asphyxiation, this figure’s face is adorned with a black oil mask, presumably as protection against the cloud of black smoke in which she is encircled. Her skirt is fabricated from pieces of brightly colored refuse that flow into the rubbish that collects at her feet, making her body indistinguishable from the trash heap on which she stands commingled with “other things.”86 Neither human nor nonhuman, the figure is simultaneously both and neither, a reminder of the “transcorporealities”87 produced between the human and the extrahuman under the conditions of racialized toxicity from which she emerges.
The extreme largeness of Monteiro’s figures also forces the viewer to confront how the peripherialization of Africa has resulted in its creation as “waste-world”—as the site in which modernity’s castoffs are “carried away into obscurity”88 and “forgotten,” thereby transforming the continent into “a convenient sink for toxic waste.”89 Monteiro reframes these colonial categories of human surplus—of “waste and waste beings”90—to include contemporary interactions of Black bodies with the toxic products of capitalism. In this sense, Monteiro’s gothic figures serve as urgent allegories for the unevenness of capitalist development, where foreign investors prepare to feast on the profits of new ventures, while locals must endure the horrors of a dying planet shaped by centuries of social and ecological violence that have inaugurated “an environment of fatality”91 from which they cannot escape.
New Genres of the Human
Yet, both Okri narrative and Monteiro’s photographs retain a sense of hopefulness. As Julietta Singh argues with reference to Monteiro’s series, there is a “breath-taking endurance in each of these figures” that not only reminds viewers of the ecological catastrophes produced by globalization but also points toward “other ways of generative living, of human and more than human cohabitation.”92 Indeed, while Monteiro’s turn to gothic evokes the terrorized and terrorizing environments of racial ecologies, it simultaneously pays homage to the strategies of survival that are opened by the violent socioecological realities of contemporary African life. Such visions, in which “beauty, debris, danger and hope [become] closely interwoven,”93 point in turn to the emancipatory potential encoded in the coproduction of life-making that takes as its foundation the intertwining of human and extrahuman natures. Niblett similarly argues, with reference to combined and uneven development in the Caribbean during the twentieth century, that gothic figures such as the massacouraman signal “a different kind of existence—a different way of being human,” via their bodily manifestations of the “reorganisation of existing ecological unities.”94 For Niblett, the transcorporealities of gothic bodies allow for both the registration of the transformations attendant on the expansion of imperialist capitalism and the embodiment “of an amalgam of multiple orders of existence” that do not ascribe to “the contained corporeality of the isolated individual of capitalist modernity.”95
Viewed with Niblett, Monteiro’s gothic becomes particularly powerful, as it provides a visual vocabulary that enables him not only to give form to the “ghosts” of past environments that contour Black bodies under conditions of global crisis but also to approach the human in ways that avoid recourse to the modern “Western” subject—the same subject who gives to the Anthropocene its name. In this sense, Monteiro’s gothic bodies resonate with Alexander Weheliye’s description of “different genres of the human,”96 which attend to the “always enfleshed alterities of being human.”97 These corporeal alterities, to which gothic has long been attuned, simultaneously recall Sylvia Wynter’s delineation of a decolonial project that unsettles the production of “Man-as-Human” through attention to “the worldviews of those who have been cast as non-Human or less-than-Human.”98 Monteiro’s work is alive to this imperative, as it maps the modalities of an uneven geography of global crisis in which racial violence is practiced and lived, while also paying tribute to the emancipatory Black corporealities that both emerge in its wake and exceed its terms.
While Monteiro’s use of gothic may be more explicitly attuned to such a decolonial praxis, Okri’s short story offers “distinctive understandings of suffering” that equally serve as “speculative blueprints” for “new forms of humanity.”99 Like Monteiro’s work, Okri’s narrative highlights the devastating effects of atmospheric toxicity on Black bodies and environments but places equal emphasis on the forms of endurance that emerge under the lived conditions of racial ecologies. Salient here is that Okri’s tale concludes with a poignant reflection on the relations of care that structure the friendship between Marjomi and Emokhai. As the story draws to a close, Emokhai searches the polluted “red city” for Marjomi, eventually finding him asleep in his makeshift dwelling.100 Marveling “at the gentle ferocity of his spirit,” Emokhai watches over his slumbering friend, careful to maintain the peace he finds in sleep, noticing how his face is “completely devoid of its [previous] tortured expressions.”101 Here, then, the act of caring becomes framed in terms that emphasize the resilience that remains even in the absence of obvious agency. While Emokhai and Marjomi dwell in the “intimate monstrosities” produced by petro-capitalism, this lived condition also inspires a commitment to forms of caring rooted in “the shared materiality of suffering.”102 When Marjomi awakes, Okri concludes his story with a final scene in which the friends smoke dope stolen from “the governor’s secret farms.”103 The story ends, then, with this final act of defiance, in which the act of breathing—the narrative’s key source of traumatic wounding and pain—is reconfigured into a practice of insurgence that takes the form of social bonding and pleasure.
Thus, by recentering the historical conditions of atmospheric toxicity, and by constructing alternative forms of humanness that respond to the realities of racial ecologies, both Okri and Monteiro reject the universalized version of Western man in favor of gothic visions that emphasize “a lived experience of modernity’s violence.”104 Situating this experience as “historically and systemically produced within an uneven global geography,”105 the gothic aesthetics in Okri’s story and Monteiro’s photographs construct new forms of humanity that work against concepts of the human that are embedded in colonial capitalist systems and, in so doing, breathe life into a decolonial praxis for understanding the Anthropocene that might usefully disorientate us from our inherited habits of interpreting and acting in the world.
Notes
Jack Morgan, “Toward an Organic Theory of the Gothic: Conceptualizing Horror,” Journal of Popular Culture 32, no. 1 (1998): 73.
Chris Baldick, Introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), xix.
For a delineation of the racial disparities of Covid-19, see Robert Booth and Caelainn Barr, “Black People Four Times More Likely to Die from Covid-19, ONS Finds,” The Guardian, May 7, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/07/black-people-four-times-more-likely-to-die-from-covid-19-ons-finds.
Mike Baker, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Manny Fernandez, and Michael LaForgia, “Three Words. 70 Cases. The Tragic History of ‘I Can’t Breathe,’” New York Times, June 29, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/28/us/i-cant-breathe-police-arrest.html.
Sipho Kings, “Breath, Death and Data: The Air in Our Cities Is Killing Us,” June 28, 2019, https://mg.co.za/article/2019-06-28-00-breath-death-and-data-the-air-in-our-cities-is-killing-us/.
Abhijit Mohanty, “Extracting a Radioactive Disaster in Niger,” Down to Earth, March 5, 2019, https://www.downtoearth.org.in/blog/health-in-africa/extracting-a-radioactive-disaster-in-niger-63451.
World Health Organization, “Air Pollution,” https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution.
World Health Organization, “Air Quality Guidelines,” https://www.who.int/airpollution/publications/aqg2005/en/.
Priyom Bose, “How Africa Is Tackling Pollution (Plastic/Emissions),” AzoCleanTech, September 25, 2019, https://www.azocleantech.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=977.
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011).
Pavithra Vasudevan, “An Intimate Inventory of Race and Waste,” Antipode 4 (2019): 1–21.
Stacey Balkan, “Anthropocene and Empire,” The Caravan: A Journal of Politics and Culture, October 19, 2016, http://www.caravanmagazine.in/vantage/anthropocene-and-empire-amitav-ghosh.
Of these critics, Donna Haraway, Monique Allewaert, and Jason Moore have risen to prominence for their formulation of terms such as the “Plantationocene” and the “Capitalocene,” proposing that the extractive processes of capitalist slavery might be taken as the key transition into the current planetary condition of ecological devastation. See this collection’s Introduction for more.
Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-slavery Subjects (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography,” Professional Geographer 54, no. 1 (2002): 15–24.
Vasudevan, “An Intimate Inventory,” 11.
Vasudevan, 11.
Saidiya Hartman, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors,” Souls 18, no. 1 (2016): 166–73.
Vasudevan, “An Intimate Inventory,” 17.
Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (London: Penguin, 2001), 30.
Jonathan Silver, “Suffocating Cities: Climate Change as Social-Ecological Violence,” in Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene, ed. Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw (Arlington, Va.: Routledge, 2019), 143.
Silver, “Suffocating Cities,” 139.
Ben Okri, “In the City of Red Dust,” in Stars of the New Curfew (London: Vintage, 1999).
Adam Voiland, “Choking on Saharan Dust,” NASA Earth Observatory, February 2, 2016, https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144970/choking-on-saharan-dust.
Okri, “In the City,” 74.
Okri, 61.
Michael Watts, “Oil Frontiers: The Niger Delta and the Gulf of Mexico,” in Oil Culture, ed. Ross Barret and Daniel Worden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 197.
Ellekhe Boehmer, “Foreword: Empire’s Vampires,” in Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires: Dark Blood, ed. Tabish Khair and Johan Höglund (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), ix.
Theresa Bane, Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology (Raleigh, N.C.: McFarland, 2010), 111.
Bane, 111.
Okri, “In the City,” 49, 46.
Okri, 42, 43, 46.
Okri, 45.
Okri, 48.
Okri, 48.
Benita Parry, “Aspects of Peripheral Modernisms,” Ariel 40, no. 1 (2009): 27–55.
Peter M. Lewis, “Nigeria’s Petroleum Booms: A Changing Political Economy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Nigerian Politics, ed. Carl Levan and Patrick Ukata, 7:502–19 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Okri, “In the City,” 39.
Okri, 47.
Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony,” American Ethnologist 26, no. 2 (1999): 279–303.
David McNally, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
McNally, 6.
Jennifer Wenzel, “Petro-magic-realism: Toward a Political Ecology of Nigerian Literature,” Postcolonial Studies 9, no. 4 (2006): 449–64.
McNally, Monsters, 7.
McNally, 185.
Andrew Apter, The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 201.
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I (New York: Academic Press, 1974).
Leonore Schick, Paul Myles, and Okonta Emeka Okelum, “Gas Flaring Continues Scorching Niger Delta,” Deutsche Welle, November 14, 2018, https://www.dw.com/en/gas-flaring-continues-scorching-niger-delta/a-46088235.
Godson Rowland Ana, “Air Pollution in the Niger Delta Area: Scope, Challenges and Remedies,” IntechOpen, September 26, 2011, https://www.intechopen.com/books/the-impact-of-air-pollution-on-health-economy-environment-and-agricultural-sources/air-pollution-in-the-niger-delta-area-scope-challenges-and-remedies.
Okri, “In the City,” 61.
Okri, 42.
Okri, 57.
Hartman, “Belly of the World.”
Okri, “In the City,” 41.
Vasudevan, “An Intimate Inventory,” 17.
Romy Opperman, “A Permanent Struggle against an Omnipresent Death: Revisiting Environmental Racism with Frantz Fanon,” Critical Philosophy of Race 7, no. 1 (2019): 69.
Sharpe, In the Wake, 111.
Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 128.
Opperman, “A Permanent Struggle,” 74.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 29.
Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 65.
Fabrice Monteiro, “Bio,” https://fabricemonteiro.viewbook.com/bio-1.
Nadia Beard, “Senegal Waste Pickers Fight Dump Closure amid Hazards and Health Risks,” Reuters, November 23, 2016, https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-senegal-environment-landrights/senegal-waste-pickers-fight-dump-closure-amid-hazards-and-health-risks-idUKKBN13I1KV.
Simeon Ehui, “‘You Only See Trash. We See a Treasure Trove’: Why Waste Management in Senegal Is a Critical Step toward Sustainability,” World Bank Blogs, March 9, 2020, https://blogs.worldbank.org/nasikiliza/you-only-see-trash-we-see-treasure-trove-why-waste-management-senegal-critical-step.
Gaia has, of course, become a central concept in environmental science and the humanities. See James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), and Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Cathy Porter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017).
Zahra Jamshed, “‘The Prophecy’: Photographer Captures Terrifying Vision of Future,” CNN Edition, November 17, 2015, https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/photographer-fabrice-monteiro-the-prophecy/index.html.
Jamshed.
Esthie Hugo, “Looking Forward, Looking Back: Animating Magic, Modernity and the African City-Future in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon,” Social Dynamics 43, no. 1 (2017): 49.
Henry Drewal, “Introduction: Charting the Journey,” in Sacred Waters: Arts for Mami Wata and Other Divinities in Africa and the Diaspora, ed. Henry Drewal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 2.
Alex van Stipriaan, “Creolization and the Lessons of a Watergoddess in the Black Atlantic,” in Multiculturalism/Power and Ethnicities in Africa, ed. Antonionio Custodio Goncalves (Porto: Centro de Estudos Africanos, 2002), 93.
Gordon Gill, “Doing the Minje Mama: A Study in the Evolution of an African/Afro-Creole Ritual in the British Slave Colony of Berbice,” Wadabagei 12, no. 3 (2009): 7–29.
See Drewal, Sacred Waters.
Michael Niblett, “Peripheral Irrealisms: Water-Spirits, World-Ecology, and Neoliberalism,” in Marxism, Postcolonial Theory and the Future of Critique: Critical Engagements with Benita Parry, ed. Sharea Deckard and Rashmi Varma (New York: Routledge, 2019), 81.
Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015), 13.
Michael Niblett, World Literature and Ecology: The Aesthetics of Commodity Frontiers, 1890–1950 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 61.
“11 Major Oil Spills of the Maritime World,” Marine Insight, January 10, 2020, https://www.marineinsight.com/environment/11-major-oil-spills-of-the-maritime-world/.
“Operations: Senegal,” https://www.cairnenergy.com/operations/senegal/.
“Operations: Senegal.”
“‘Fish Are Vanishing’—Senegal’s Devastated Coastline,” BBC News, November 1, 2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-46017359.
Meaghan Beatley and Sam Edwards, “Overfished: In Senegal, Empty Nets Lead to Hunger and Violence,” Medium, May 30, 2018, https://gpinvestigations.pri.org/overfished-in-senegal-empty-nets-lead-to-hunger-and-violence-e3b5d0c9a686.
Sushmita Roy, “Senegal, One of the World’s Biggest Ocean Polluters, Will Enforce Fines on Plastic Use,” Global Citizen, August 1, 2019, https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/senegal-will-enforce-fines-on-plastic-use/.
Beatley and Edwards, “Overfished.”
Matthew Green, “Plundering Africa: Vicious Fishmeal Factories Intensify the Pressure of Climate Change,” Reuters, October 30, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ocean-shock-sardinella/.
Meg Samuelson, “Thinking with Sharks: Racial Terror, Species Extinction and the Other Anthropocene Fault Lines,” Australian Humanities Review 63 (2018): 31.
Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 1919, Standard Edition 17 (1954): 219–52.
Julietta Singh, “Disposable Objects: Ethecology, Waste, and Maternal Afterlives,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 19, no. 1 (2018): 53.
Vasudevan, “An Intimate Inventory,” 8.
Singh, “Disposable Objects,” 49.
Vasudevan, “An Intimate Inventory,” 4.
Gabeba Baderoon, “Surplus, Excess, Dirt: Slavery and the Production of Disposability in South Africa,” Social Dynamics 44, no. 2 (2018): 257–72.
Vasudevan, “An Intimate Inventory,” 2.
Singh, “Disposable Objects,” 49.
Priscilla Frank, “Afrofuturist Photos Transform Senegal’s Trash into Haute Couture,” Huffington Post, October 7, 2015, https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/fabrice-monteiro-senegal-trash_n_560f1262e4b0af3706e0fbf4.
Michael Niblett, “Demon Landscapes, Uneven Ecologies: Folk-Spirits in Guyanese Fiction,” in Cultures of Uneven and Combined Development: From International Relations to World Literature, ed. James Christie and Nesrin Degirmencioglu (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 335.
Niblett, 337, 328.
Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 2–3.
Julietta Singh, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018), 4.
Walter D. Mignolo, “Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human?,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 108.
Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 14.
Okri, “In the City,” 78.
Okri.
Vasudevan, “An Intimate Inventory,” 17.
Okri, “In the City,” 79.
See chapter 9.
See chapter 9.
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