The depiction of climate change is not a new topic in the realm of Arabic science fiction (ASF); it has been addressed in the past few decades, albeit sporadically. Palestinian/Jordanian author Ibrahim Nasrallah is one of the novelists who critically engaged with the climate crisis in Dog War II (2016), which won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) in 2018. Nasrallah draws on ASF for the first time in his writing to underscore environmental decay by depicting an anonymous dystopian world, which suffers a decline of daylight, a stinky atmosphere, short supplies of oxygen, and the spread of respiratory disease, among other things. In doing so, he issues warnings about serious environmental problems that are exacerbated by climate change, while concomitantly offering some technological solutions. Nasrallah’s novel conveys critical expressions of local and global concern while reflecting eco-anxiety, critiquing predictable yet relevant issues in the present. His dark narrative invokes urgency to deal with the grave consequences of climate change nationally and internationally, stressing the need to invest in technological advancement before it’s too late.
Ibrahim Nasrallah, Dog War II
Introduction
Given the significant impacts of climate change in the Arab region and globally, several authors depict its consequences in ASF.[1] Perhaps one of the earliest examples is the Egyptian novelist Sabri Moussa’s Seeds of Corruption (1973, translated into English by Mona N. Mikhail in 2002). It focuses on the eastern Egyptian desert and the deleterious impact on an ancient mountain of mining through the use of explosive chemicals. It is considered “a pioneering novel for its focus on nature and the transformations it has endured owing to man’s interventions” (Nouri, 2022). The theme has elicited more attention in the twenty-first century. The Lebanese writer and environmental activist Ghassan Chebaro explores pressing environmental issues, such as stifling pollution, global warming, and lack of clean water resources in his seminal novel of 2008, titled 2022, a name which suggests an imminent threat, given the closeness of the dates. Jordanian author Sobhy Fahmawi’s Alexandria 2050 (2008) imagines Alexandria in the year 2050, highlighting drastic climate hazards, such as unprecedented high temperature and elevated sea levels, the latter of which cause the disappearance of some tourist cities from the Egyptian coastline. In Geography of Water (2009), Yemeni writer Abd al-Nasser Mujalli is concerned with ecological issues underscoring water scarcity and pollution. To wit, Mujalli imagines the disappearance of water on Earth, caused by aliens of (the white planet), after they themselves were negatively impacted by the gas emissions from Earth. Mujalli’s work is one which criticizes not merely conditions, but, by implication, faults guilty parties for their active destruction of the planet at the expense of the sufferings of others.
Nasrallah’s Dog War II similarly emphasizes culpability for environmental problems exacerbated by climate change and hastened by harmful human activities, being mindful of both regional and global concerns. Thus, this essay mainly explores Nasrallah’s text with particular attention to climate change. It reveals how it conveys critical expressions of the climate crisis to raise awareness at local and global levels, anticipating predictable environmental issues based on analysis of the present, while manifesting eco-anxiety about an uncertain future.
Ibrahim Nasrallah
Review of Literature
The scholarship and literary criticism that examine the depiction of climate crisis in the contemporary landscapes of ASF are rather scant. In a key study, Teresa Pepe focuses on a few Egyptian and Iraqi works, which were translated into English following the Arab Spring. By examining Ahmad Naji’s Using Life (2014), Ganzeer’s The Solar Grid (2020), Hassan Blasim’s “The Gardens of Babylon” (2016), and Diaa Jubaili’s “The Worker” (2016), Pepe argues that these works constitute climate fiction participating in climate change and environmental decay. According to her, Naji, Ganzeer, Blasim, and Jubaili imagine apocalyptic urban versions in the future based on their present cities to highlight unseen violence perpetrated by colonial forces and ruling elites against the backdrop of climate change, oil scarcity, and urban mega projects (99). In doing so, she aims to initiate scholarly discussions about contemporary ASF as climate fiction.
Barbara Bakker and Nejood al-Rubaye explore Chebaro’s 2022 (2009), arguing that the purpose of the novel is didactic, to raise awareness of global warming and climate change as well as highlighting a struggle between the dichotomy of the “good” of environmental concern and the “evil” of environmental neglect that results, unusually, in a happy ending (2023, 39). In his review of the same novel, Ahmad Ghashmari has noted that Chebaro’s text serves as a cautionary tale of the ever-worsening climate crisis while simultaneously expressing an optimistic look at a near future by showing how the new generations “fight for the environment by challenging corrupt politicians and greedy capitalists” (2022, 40). That being said, my essay analyses Nasrallah’s Dog War II, underscoring how it critically expresses regional and global concerns in one go by depicting an apocalyptic scenario in the future map with ubiquitous environmental degradation alerting readers to an extreme weather shift causing severe crisis, such as the spread of disease, air pollution, shortage of food, series of tsunamis, etc.
Nasrallah’s Writings Between Past and Future
Nasrallah’s oeuvres are predominantly associated with historical events as is best exemplified in The Palestine Comedies, which contain a series of literary works, aiming to construct a national, historical narrative of his native homeland, Palestine. In it, he grapples with nation, novel, and form reflecting the “concrete elements” of Palestine (Parr 2019, 44-45). Regarding The Balconies series, it examines societal problems in the broader Arab region (Alhashmi 2022, 313), and by extension, the entire planet. Dog War II is the fifth novel of this series, where he shifts his attention to the future for the first time in his writing, projecting the consequences of a climate crisis, in order to alert the readers to its grave ramifications. By venturing in this direction, he subscribes consciously or unconsciously to Arabfuturism, which is a cultural movement that interprets the future of the Arab world through various literary forms (Yafai 2021). This particular (and still nascent) field is associated with several themes, including “forming new narratives, science fiction, openness, and indefinability,” and is focused “on an individual rather than consciously collective level” (Nazif, 2018). In this light, Nasrallah’s sci-fi novel is linked to Arabfuturism, especially in its imagination of the future based on ongoing circumstances with the potential of re-orienting the present.
Moreover, insofar as it is overwhelmingly concerned with the consequences of climate change, Nasrallah’s text resonates with the relatively emergent literary movement of climate fiction. Arguably, climate fiction has its genesis in the ecologically minded science fiction novels of Frank Herberts’s Dune series, which first appeared in the mid-1960s. Climate fiction continues to grow and is now recognized “as a significant sub-genre of contemporary SF” (Milner 2020, 360). Nasrallah’s text can be contextualized within climate fiction, dealing with some aspects of dystopian conditions, as well as ecological and biological changes, which are aggravated by severe climate shifts.
Countering Climate Change: To Fact from Fiction
Needless to say, the increasing impact of climate change in the MENA region is growing more than ever before. It is highly vulnerable due to its geographical location, which is exposed to high solar radiation, combined with a soil type that naturally absorbs heat. A new study reveals that “the Middle East is warming up twice as fast as the rest of the world” (Tsui 2022). Several MENA countries are already witnessing unprecedented heatwaves in the summer causing extreme weather, droughts, and wildfires, consequently elevating the risk for “a scorching area” (Lelieveld, Proestos, Hadjinicolaou et al 2016, 257). The International Aid Groups (IAG) warned in 2021 that: “more than 12 million people in Iraq and Syria are losing access to water, food, and electricity because of rising temperatures and record low rainfall” (Mroue 2021). As a result of temperature extremity and water shortages, people's lives are threatened, not merely their ways of life, which exacerbates their living conditions, forcing many of them to migrate to safer and more sustainable locations as their own regions become increasingly inhospitable due to severe climatic conditions.[2]
Against this background, Nasrallah’s novel is profoundly concerned with these grave issues, highlighting the threats of predictable and relevant climate problems in the future, while contrasting ongoing ones, such as the increasing temperatures in the real Middle East with low sunlight and long nights in fiction. To that end, he depicts a radical shift in climate change, where the main resources on Earth have become scant: oxygen levels are in short supply and daylight has become scarce, whereas nighttime has become quite long. In this dystopian urban environment, moldiness is everywhere, and the atmosphere has become foul-smelling due to the carcasses of birds and many other animals and excessive moisture, the presence of which causes the spread of respiratory diseases; as a result of this decrepit state of affairs, weather forecasts are no longer accurate or reliable.
In the opening section of Nasrallah’s novel, entitled “An Introduction Before Omission,”[3] the narrator describes an extreme shift in the environment, depicting even the condensation and collapse of distinctions in both space and time:
At a rapid pace, the daytime began to shrink incomprehensibly. In less than ten years, daylight was no more than five hours. The death rates of birds and animals shockingly increased. The production level of vegetables, fruits, and grains dramatically declined ... The four seasons are confused into a single long season. Additionally, due to the scarcity of resources, scientists resorted to cloning technology, relying on cell reproduction or reproduction by cloning to provide the essential needs for the continuation of life. At a time, the salvation of the world would not happen unless the remaining countries joined in an agreement to abolish the past. At a time, the great powers monopolized light technologies to control the weak governments and manage the course of their lives and affairs through what is known as the Castles. (2016, 7)
In portraying such a terrifying dystopian scenario, Nasrallah calls attention to the threats of environmental catastrophe upon the planet due to the critical consequences of climate change, affecting the atmosphere, people, flora, fauna, and crops. Since the novel takes place in an anonymous location, the implications of climate change are both local and global, suggesting that the humanitarian crisis eventually will affect everyone, which connotes an omnipresent threat. Nasrallah himself comments on his novel, stating that “it speaks of the collapse of nature and of human civilization” (Jalal 2018). This powerful statement explains why the dystopian environment dominates every aspect of Dog War II. He acknowledges its gloomy nature, telling his readers: “I felt darkness engulf me as I wrote” (qtd. in Parr 2018).
Arabfuturism and Nasrallah’s text tend to illustrate how people are capable of finding new ways to adjust to such challenging conditions. The main character (Rashed) dwells on the fact that “people can cope with the worst conditions eventually, even if they protest at the beginning” (Nasrallah 2016, 89-90). In other words, Rashed’s statement draws on the adaptive nature of human beings, and reasons that they can be conditioned to accept arrangements and practices that ultimately will prove beneficial to themselves, even if resisted at first.[4] In this context, Nasrallah explores the potential of technological solutions in dealing with some environmental problems. As the narrator recounts, “the project of the Ministry of Health of operating giant tanks was spouting medical steam into the air to prevent coughing fits and control the smell of moldiness—a terrible air quality!” (2016, 22). This quote demonstrates how the government finds a solution to air pollution by treating the rottenness in the atmosphere and the spread of cough infections with gigantic medical tanks to spray medical steam in order to reduce respiratory disease and lessen the odor of the musty atmosphere. Here, there is a call for the role of cooperative governments to find solutions to combat unbearable living conditions, which can be achieved through investing in sophisticated technology. In this light, Nasrallah’s text and Arabfuturism are optimistic about what changes can be made to improve future conditions on the planet.[5]
Ecology is one of the paramount aspects of Nasrallah’s narrative. In the following example, Nasrallah displays how “Mother Nature” is angered by harmful human activities. In a TV program titled All Directions, one of the guests who is an evolutionary biology professor explains, “Let’s not forget that Mother Nature is angry, very angry with us. For instance, what we witnessed in the shortness of daytime and the extension of the nighttime as well as the confusion of the seasons are evidence thereof” (2016, 235). Here, Nasrallah implies how the weather extreme shift is attributed to negative human activities on Earth by invoking the notion that “Mother Nature is angry.” Namely, he criticizes human-made crises, which directly result from harming the environment and eventually will cause severe weather changes.
Additionally, Nasrallah makes a reference to tsunamis in his narrative to depict a cataclysmic environmental scenario in the future to provoke his readers with its potential consequences. The narrator recasts:
He [Rashed] looked outside. The world was more mysterious than ever before. The darkness swept through the windows inside like the fifth tsunami hurricane ... It became the most notorious (devastating) hurricane that occurred on Earth, as its waves exceeded the lands of some countries that still preserve their old names, such as France, Netherlands, and Germany. It even reached the outskirts of Vienna, carrying millions of people's bodies from country to country, in the largest forced migration witnessed in the old continent, as it were. (2016, 231-232)
This dreadful scene speaks to Nasrallah’s growing concerns about the anger of nature, thereby drawing on a familiar terrifying natural disaster that happened in the past and could happen in the future. In doing so, he grapples with the already alarming consequences of anthropogenic climate change and its potential threats of causing massive destruction and numerous deaths. By depicting the most destructive natural forces through a chain of hurricanes that hits the world, he reflects his anxiety about the uncertain future to the extreme. Namely, invoking tsunamis in his narrative expresses his fears of the unknown while simultaneously shocking his readers by exacerbating current environmental problems in induced-ecological natural disasters in the future map.
Moreover, Nasrallah portrays the treacherous impact of environmental changes on agricultural products. To illustrate this further, Rashed gets confused when he enters the grocery store as he is unable to distinguish between vegetables and fruits:
When Rashed saw the piles of vegetables and fruits, he got confused.
Do not be confused, Mr. Rashed. This problem has appeared frequently in the past weeks with many people who find it hard to distinguish between fruits and vegetables, especially those who do not cook. You do not know how to distinguish between cucumber and zucchini or between tomato and apples, or potatoes and guava, right?! [The grocery seller asks]
Rashed’s nods confirm what the seller has just said.
Our problem, Mr. Rashed, is that the fruits begin to resemble each other to a great extent. I am afraid that one day we can no longer distinguish between orange and cucumber or banana from grape.
…
At any rate, I will deliver your groceries to your home. Do not worry! We also have alternative grains for many kinds of endangered fruits if you need to buy some. [The grocery seller responds] (2016, 167-168)
The conversation shows striking similarities between vegetables and fruits to the point where Rashed gets perplexed. Apparently, this is due to biological changes in the environment, which in turn have resulted in a significant impact on agricultural products. It also reveals the extraordinary steps undertaken to combat famine and food scarcity resulting from the extremities of climate change, as the merchant informs Rashed: “Do not worry! We also have alternative grains for many kinds of endangered fruits if you need to buy some” (2016, 167). Such a brief interlude is quite revealing, in that it points to both the forward-looking and anticipatory efforts made on the part of growers, as well as demonstrating a cooperative governmental commitment to funding and research directed towards meeting the challenges anticipated by climactic changes. It also invokes adopting necessary measures to minimize the damage to crop production and find alternatives. Again, because Nasrallah’s text refuses to name the region in which the catastrophe takes place, he suggests that the cause for concern is ubiquitous, and the call for remedy and action is universal.
Conclusion
All in all, Nasrallah’s text and Arabfuturism critically respond to the increasing threat of climate change while sparking the possibility of finding technological solutions. By portraying an apocalyptic scenario in the future horizon, Nasrallah engages in climate fiction by dealing with the impending ubiquitous calamities in order to spread awareness at regional and global levels. Dog War II exemplifies a new paradigm in Nasrallah’s writings, drawing on ASF to portray a new map in the future horizon of the impending ubiquitous calamities to issue warnings about a dark future based on extrapolation of the here and now. Hence, Nasrallah’s text serves as a cautionary tale and critical commentary about climate change and its grave ramifications on regional and global levels. The overall message of Nasrallah’s novel is that climate change is a humanitarian crisis, and the international community must take climate action before it is too late, thereby avoiding a shared apocalyptic global fate.
References
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[1] The depiction of environmental decay is not limited to science fiction in modern Arabic literature. For instance, prominent Saudi writer Abdulrahman Munif’s The Cities of Salt (1984) explores the life of an anonymous Gulf society in the twentieth century. Munif addresses the environmental erosion by underscoring the radical transformation of innocent Bedouin nature to an industrial architecture driven by capitalistic interest after oil discovery. Munif highlights the ecological collapse in the transformation of the natural environment, which is influenced by America’s oil-driven intervention in the Gulf region. The Cities of Salt series is an extraordinary literary work that addresses crucial issues in the MENA region, including colonialism, environmental transformation, power dynamics, capitalism, modernity, politics, etc.
[2] It is noteworthy that the annual conference of the United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP), which is devoted to combatting climate change, has had no real success on the ground yet.
[3] All translations are mine unless otherwise stated.
[4] This is also true for some animals. The narrator delineates, “He [Rashed] glimpsed a flock of bats in the darkness passing by the lights of the hospital facade, but he was not sure if they were really bats, because he noticed that some birds began to adapt to darkness by adjusting their biological clocks and instincts, setting new times for their singings and mating times. But other birds couldn’t ,,,” (Nasrallah 2016, 90).
[5] In a similar manner, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020) resonates with Nasrallah’s Dog War II in dealing with climate change while emphasizing potential technological solutions to mitigate its disastrous consequences in the future. Despite belonging to different literary traditions, both texts stress the urgency of fighting the consequences of the global climate crisis.
Editor: Gautam Bhatia.
Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department.