Two Book Thursday

Over spring break I decided to FORCE myself to read TWO novels. Both books had to do with climate change, and my rationale for such a frivolous distraction from my appointed rounds was that these books would help me think more creatively about the the archaeology of climate change which as you (maybe) read yesterday has been on my mind. 

Here are the two books:

Nnedi Okorafor, Noor. 2021

Yoko Tawada, Scattered All Over the Earth. Trans. by Margaret Mitsutani. 2022.

I’m not very comfortable reviewing fiction. So I’ll proceed with my normal list of things that made me think a bit more. 

1. A Changed World. Both books introduce there reader to a time in the near future when the world is fundamentally the same, but somehow profoundly different. The setting for Noor is a northwestern Africa where the western part of the Sahara is subsumed by a great perpetual sand storm that makes life in the desert completely impossible. Scattered is set in Europe, but the characters exist in a world where Japan has disappeared and information about the changing planet seems fragmentary and incomplete. Instead of a future where information flows freely, information seems to be impacted, the past obscure, and human connections predominant.

2. Displacement. Both books present a world dominated by a sense of displacement. In Noor, the eponymous main character becomes friends with a Fulani tribesman who lives along the edge of the great storm. He has just witnessed a massacre of his cattle and some of his fellow herdsman and is despondent. Scattered features a motley crew of displaced people including a woman from Japan, a mis-recognized “Eskimo” from Greenland, an Indian from Pune, and a wandering Dane and German. The book exudes being lost and loss with a pervasive sense of displacement.     

3. Cyborgs and Hybrids. The 21st century may well be when we normalize hybrid, cyborg identities that break down boundaries and categories associated with the 19th century and the modern world. The displaced individuals in Scattered have complicated identities by modern standards: a native of Greenland passing as Japanese, a gay Indian man dressed in a sari, and a Japanese woman who speaks her own language. The eponymous hero in Noor has transformed her body with robotic prosthetics which not only enhance her physically, but also (without giving anything away) cognitively. They also make her more vulnerable just as the group of friends in Scattered continuously confront the vulnerability of their own hybridity. They also do this in a series of bizarrely hybrid places: German, Finnish, and French sushi restaurants, shabby hostels, and Roman ruins that linger and shape the modern world. 

4. Skepticism of Technology. Despite the recent (and incessant) drumbeat of triumphal science, both novels offer compelling reminders that technology alone can’t make the world better. In Noor, it is more obvious as the main character constantly negotiates between her cybernetic self and a material environment that is both hostile and somehow profoundly forgiving. The characters in Scattered live in a world where they are free to move about, but somehow information is constantly being sequestered, lost, and obscured. No one seems to know what happened to Japan and the characters seem rely on physically meeting up to share information as the technological landscape seems fragile and inadequate. 

5. Novels as Research. Like most scholars, I struggle to make time to read fiction. There’s always another monograph, dissertation, article, edited volume, or student paper to read. I can always find ways to tell myself that I need to get serious and read serious, focused, professional work, by trained scholars directly relevant to my particular research. Of course, I don’t want to suggest for a second that these two novels aren’t serious in their own way and that the authors aren’t committed to their craft. 

Instead, what I’m trying to say is that reading outside my field and even outside my professional wheelhouse is hard to justify even though I find it almost invariably rewarding. It’s interesting to think about how much professionalization and the habits that it instills invariably circumscribes the ideas and approaches that we take to what we know. Everybody know this, but what surprises me the most is how hard it is to break out of these habits and to encounter something different, interesting, and important.