Cosmopolitan Belongingness and War by Matthew Leep

Author:Matthew Leep [Leep, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Violence in Society, Nature, Animal Rights
ISBN: 9781438482453
Google: Z5P1DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2021-05-01T05:19:03+00:00

Chapter 4

Black Sheep

ISIS and the Smoke of Qayyarah

And in a sense, as Valéry said, language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voices of the things, the waves, and the forests.

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

You became the wind in a forest, the shape of a ghost. A lost ghost, listening-lost in this lost forest. A breath-weight within us, lost within ourselves. The weight of your lost voice, it weighs without speaking. How do we hold onto loss, and how do we carry it? Derrida tells us there is a “spectral density” to death, that the specter “weighs” and “thinks.”1 The spectral weight of animal others and their thoughts has been pulling us into an apparitional space of listening and speaking. This dialogue has been an invitation to hold onto loss, to feel its weight within us. And there is a flow of the other specters pulling into us. The thoughts of forest and desert specters are arriving. On their way are destroyed desert and forest habitats and all of their inhabitants.

In war, “nature” becomes weaponized; it is converted into an instrument of death. Consider the Dibis forest in northern Iraq. In 2016, animals reportedly fled the forest, seeking to escape fires set by ISIS.2 ISIS fighters used “the forest as a weapon.”3 In the history of war, this forest weapon was nothing new. Bronwyn Leebaw reminds us that “environmental devastation … has … been implemented as a military strategy since ancient times.”4 She notes that in our thinking of war, nature has been conceptualized as a “power to unleash, yet not control,” and in regard to contemporary politics she writes how “nature has also been framed as a victim, or potential victim, of war crimes.”5 War plays out in nature, and opens onto the animals of the deserts, rivers, and forests. In this chapter, I attend to the moments of fire, toxicity, and animal anxiety in forests and deserts. In these moments, spectral birdsounds might find us. In these moments are half-hidden spectral cow conversations and spectral sheep thoughts. In these moments are voices within and constituting “nature,” posing questions of beyond-human belonging, queries about spectral entanglements of lost humans, animals, plants.

The notion of nature is indefinite. Nature “flickers between things—it is both/and or neither/nor,” writes Timothy Morton.6 “Nature opens up the difference between terms, and erases those very differences, all at once. It is the trees and the wood—and the very idea of trees.”7 The logic of its draw, its name—foreign and familiar, imagined and real, imagined-real—is embedded in and beyond our sense of where and who we are. So too are specters. The specter animals lost amidst the forests haunt our sense of self and other. In spectral-poetic moments, trees, the air, the water and their lost animal inhabitants connect to us.

War consumes nature and consumes us. It seeps into the water, trees, and air. It poisons forests, bodies, and human and animal communities. Unknown bodies bear witness.

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