“Two of the most important global crises of the current historical moment are migration and climate change, with the attendant biodiversity loss and other ecological disasters. Unsurprisingly, writers of fiction have been addressing these crises separately for some time now, and literary critics have been engaging with and analysing these distinct bodies of writing. There is, however, a small corpus of recent global novels that narrate these two crises in tandem. This emerging body of literature has not yet captured much scholarly attention. Making sense of these efforts to present migration together with the impact humans have had on other living species and the planet itself is the focus of my current research,” said Maureen Moynagh of the Department of English at St. Francis Xavier University, Canada.
“My goal is to make sense of the current preoccupation with human migration and our overall impact on animals and plants,” she continued. “I’m asking why bring these two concerns – migration and interspecies relations – together in the same work?”
“But, I’m in the early stages of the work and confess I don’t yet have an answer. At least not in the way that applies to the whole corpus I’m looking at,” she said.
Moynagh pointed out that the increasing recognition of the ecological damage humans are responsible for and our emerging planetary consciousness has moved beyond science and into the realm of literature for quite some time. And that writers have shown their interest in exploring our more-than-human relations – she mentioned J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals published in 1999 as an example.
“There are also, of course, many works, novels and poems about migration stretching back to the turn of the 20th century and the rekindled interest is not surprising in light of current geopolitics. But what does it mean to put these distinct concerns about migration and interspecies relations together in a novel?” she asked.
Moynagh explained that an obvious way to include non-human species in novels has been to use them as an allegory or extended metaphor for human migration. Allegory is a work of narrative or visual art in which characters or events stand in for abstract ideas that typically have political or moral significance. In such works animals are often used to make meaning that is exclusively human in focus. “Allegory is an obvious way to bring migration and other species together, but the novels I’m interested in are doing something different.”
She is interested in what it means to narrate human and non-human migration together, not in narrowly allegorical terms, but in a way that draws on the parallels and interspecies relationships involved. “How might such narratives propose kinships across the boundaries of kind/species at a juncture when, as Donna Haraway puts it, ‘the earth is full of refugees, human and not, without refuge’?”
“I’m asking to what extent novels can imagine kinships of this sort in a way that both acknowledges and resists thinking in terms other than the axiomatic precedence accorded to human suffering over that of plants and animals? How do writers attend to ‘the interconnectedness of things’ in a literary form that is inherently anthropocentric? And what, ultimately, is at stake in representing migration in concert with interspecies relations?”
“We need to find ways to take non-humans seriously without reproducing anthropocentrism,’ she added. “It means finding a different kind of space for the non-human in novel form.
Human migrants and urban wildlife
To explore these questions, Moynagh focused in depth on one novel − Aminatta Forna’s Happiness published in 2018, “the novel that started me thinking about this project”. Sierra Leonean/Scottish author Forna attended the Nobel in Africa Literature Symposium at STIAS last year.
Moynagh explained that the work’s narrative form and strategies provide insight into how the fictive world engages with human migrants and other species.
Happiness looks at the experiences of migrants in London specifically during 2014, two years after the UK government instituted a policy creating an explicitly ‘hostile environment’ for migrants. The novel also examines human hostility towards wildlife (like foxes) in the urban setting.
“These two strands of hostility meet and criss-cross through the developing relationship between two main characters – a US biologist and Ghanaian psychiatrist,” said Moynagh.
“Both the human migrants and non-human city dwellers are targets of hostility and control. Forna makes the parallels clear but refuses any hierarchy between humans and non-humans. She punctures the nature-culture divide specifically by highlighting the role humans have played in the presence of animals and birds in human spaces. These creatures are in the city because humans have created a habitat they can exploit. The novel insists they are not out of place. They have reasons for being here and knowledge of the human spaces they claim.”
“The way Forna draws attention to the metropolis as a shared and contested common space is key. The narrative strategy directs readers’ gaze to the narrative proximity of the foxes and parakeets to the human characters in a way that withholds any interpretive gloss. The reader is on scene and observing. We are not given either the human’s or the animal’s point of view and there is no effort to humanise the animal.” The fox is an agent driving the narrative. We don’t know what knowing what is going on in the fox’s consciousness. But there are breaks in what we can know or not know of the human characters’ interiority, too.”
Moynagh pointed to the juxtaposition of scenes describing human and non-human characters which she described as focusing the reader’s attention on the shared urban spaces and on the beings occupying them in peaceful cohabitation. “Forna does not imply there are no differences across species boundaries, but she does invite us to understand that non-human lives are valuable and to regard the birds and animals as legitimate co-inhabitants of urban spaces.
Against the idea that the wild creatures serve as a model of resilience and adaptability for the human characters, Moynagh argued that “The bigger question the novel asks is what makes us human in the current moment. Those who turn away from suffering exhibit a diminished humanness.” Further, the way Forna “attends to the wild spaces in the novel and her resistance to allegory can jostle us out of traditional ways of thinking about who occupies what spaces and why. It makes clear how problematic traditional ways of thinking, seeing and understanding shaping worlds are, and moves us in another direction.”
Moynagh pointed out that two other novels – Nigerian American writer Teju Cole’s Open City published in 2011 and Turkish-British writer Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees published in 2021 – “share key things – like Forna, Cole and Shafak also engage with the metropolis and, in Cole’s case, a critical exploration of cosmopolitanism’s history of and compromises with violence,” she explained. “Shafak examines the trauma conflict produces both in the site of conflict and that carries over into spaces of refuge. I see these three novels as a potential cluster in my book.”
Others in her corpus include Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dragonfly Sea from 2019 and Helon Habila’s Oil on Water from 2010 – “which offer a view from the South. I will also draw on African scholars who have looked at the animist tradition. I’m anticipating texts set in Africa will allow me to explore this more fully.”