Ecofictions, Ecorealities, and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World

Ilka Kressner, Ana María Mutis, Elizabeth Pettinaroli, Ilka Kressner, Ana María Mutis, Elizabeth M. Pettinaroli, Elizabeth Pettinaroli, Ilka Kressner, Ana María Mutis, Elizabeth M. Pettinaroli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000753066
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Ecofictions, Ecorealities and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World brings together critical studies of Latin American and Latinx writing, film, visual, and performing arts to offer new perspectives on ecological violence. Building on Rob Nixon's concept of "slow violence," the contributions to the volume explore processes of environmental destruction that are not immediately visible yet expand in time and space and transcend the limits of our experience. Authors consider these forms of destruction in relation to new material contexts of artistic creation, practices of activism, and cultural production in Latin American and Latinx worlds. Their critical contributions investigate how writers, cultural activists, filmmakers, and visual and performance artists across the region conceptualize, visualize, and document this invisible but far-reaching realm of violence that so tenaciously resists representation.

The volume highlights the dense web of material relations in which all is enmeshed, and calls attention to a notion of agency that transcends the anthropocentric, engaging a cognition envisioned as embodied, collective, and relational. Ecofictions, Ecorealities and Slow Violence measures the breadth of creative imaginings and critical strategies from Latin America and Latinx contexts to enrich contemporary ecocritical studies in an era of heightened environmental vulnerability.

Part I
Bad Living

Mutations, Monsters and Phantoms

1
Monsters and Agritoxins

The Environmental Gothic in Samanta Schweblin’s Distancia de Rescate¹

Ana María Mutis

In Samanta Schweblin’s short novel Distancia de rescate (2015) (Fever Dream, 2017), terror emanates from the first line: “Son como gusanos” (7) (“They’re like worms” 1), says David, a nine-year-old boy to Amanda, a woman dying in a hospital.² Worms, as we later find out, is the simile David uses to describe the physical sensation of agrochemical poisoning. This frightening image opens the sinister dialogue between these characters around which Schweblin constructs a fable of the destruction of the Argentine countryside through toxic agriculture. The nightmare of ecocide that the novel depicts can be traced back to 1996, the year Monsanto’s genetically modified soy was approved in Argentina as an integral part of a new model of agriculture: no-till farming. This technique, which does not require ploughing and which depends primarily on agrochemicals to prepare the soil and eliminate weeds, depends on great quantities of glyphosate-based herbicides and genetically modified (GM) seeds that resist these herbicides.³ The widespread adoption of no-till farming in Argentina spiked the production of transgenic soy and, consequently, the use of glyphosate.⁴

Among the environmental costs of the increase in the direct-seeding of transgenic soy is the degradation of soil, the appearance of new pests and weeds resistant to glyphosate, and the deforestation of ecoregions through intensive agriculture (Pengue). Though the health impacts of glyphosate have been the subject of much debate, in 2015 the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an agency of the World Health Organization, declared that this pesticide could have carcinogenic effects. This announcement lent credence to studies demonstrating the toxicity of the herbicide and its relationship to the incremental surge in cancer rates and genetic malformations that had been ignored by the scientific community and the government until then.⁵

Agrochemical aggression toward the population and the environment adheres to the definition of slow violence that Rob Nixon offers in his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, since it constitutes a form of violence that occurs slowly and almost imperceptibly. Because the devastating effects of slow violence are dispersed over time and space, they do not capture the public’s attention the way other more spectacular catastrophes, such as natural disasters, do. Nor do they provoke the same repudiation as other forms of more visible and immediate violence, which conform to the traditional notion of violence as “a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event focused, time focused, and body bound” (3). Nixon explains that in order to confront slow violence, we must overcome the difficulties of representation caused by its dilated temporality and limited visibility. The challenge, says Nixon, is in “how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects” (3). Yet in order to achieve a deeper awareness of the catastrophic consequences of slow violence, we must also question our partiality to the visible. Following this concern, the critic asks, “How do we both make slow violence visible yet also challenge the privileging of the visible?” (15).

This chapter explores Schweblin’s engagement with Gothic fiction in Distancia de rescate to resolve the difficulties of representing agrochemical pollution and, at the same time, to criticize the tendency to privilege the visible and the immediate, which makes the silent and hidden damage of slow violence easier to ignore. The catastrophic consequences of the abuse of pesticides become obvious and urgent in Distancia de rescate, thanks to Gothic fiction’s ability to give form to invisible threats (Haber 2). In its origins in the eighteenth century,⁶ Gothic literature deployed horror, the supernatural, the irrational, and especially the ineffable to manifest a lack of confidence in the pretensions of the Enlightenment’s ability to explain the world through reason and logic. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Gothic aesthetic gave voice to societal fears about industrial and technological changes (Del Principe 2). As such, its application in contemporary literature to anxieties around environmental problems can be seen as a logical evolution. As Kelly Hurley notes, the Gothic is “a cyclical genre that reemerges in times of cultural stress in order to negotiate anxieties for its readership by working through them in displaced (sometimes supernaturalized) form” (194). This is demonstrated by its growing use in contemporary narratives that deal with environmental destruction and climate change.

This is the case with Distancia de rescate, a novel with an environmental theme that adopts various conventions from Gothic literature to represent the dangers of the pesticide-filled countryside. As previously mentioned, the work opts to narrate through a dialogue between little David and Amanda, and from this conversation, two interconnected stories are revealed. On the one hand, there is Amanda’s story. She has come to the countryside on holiday with her young daughter, Nina, and suddenly finds herself alone in a hospital on the verge of death, without understanding why. The events that led her to this place and the whereabouts of her daughter are discovered thanks to David’s insistence that she search her hazy remembrances until she finds the exact moment that her tragedy began. In this reconstruction, Amanda reveals to us a second, more remote story: David’s, the child with whom she is speaking. Carla, David’s mother, told Amanda that when the boy was only three, he suffered from poisoning after drinking water from the river. His mother brought him to a healer who performed a healing ritual whereby his soul transmigrated to another unknown body, taking part of the poisoning with it. Another soul then occupied the boy’s body and waged a battle against the remaining toxins. Thus, David survived the poisoning, but he is no longer himself; another soul occupies his body.

In her book The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick offers a list of Gothic elements, among them the use of narrative discontinuity that seeks to reconstruct a hidden past. The presence of multiple narrators, in this case Amanda and David, who, together, spin two stories and three different time periods—recent past, present, and remote past—is a frequent device in Gothic narrative to portray the difficulty of saying the unsayable and to reveal a secret story (Sedgwick 8). Similarly, semiconscious or dreaming states are another Gothic element we find in Schweblin’s novel, in her depiction of Amanda, who confuses her memories with dreams and even wonders if her conversation with David is actually happening. Amanda has trouble remembering and narrating what happened because, according to her, she is “anclada en este relato” (13) (anchored in this tale, my translation).⁷ Confronted with David’s insistence that she put the events in order and narrate them, Amanda responds anxiously: “lo veo perfectamente, pero a veces me cuesta avanzar” (13) (“I can see the story perfectly, but at times it’s hard to move forward” 5). Amanda’s torpor and confusion are effects of her poisoning and the reason why she has told David the same story four times without ever completing it or even realizing that she has recounted it before. The repetition of Amanda’s story has a counterpoint in the constant reiteration by David of sentences such as “eso no es importante” (“that is not important”) and “estamos perdiendo el tiempo” (“we’re wasting time”), which frame the narrative as circular and reinforce the idea of enclosure. If on a communicative level Amanda is trapped in her story, on a physical level she is stuck in a hospital that she won’t escape alive.

Situating the stories in closed, often subterranean spaces is another Gothic element according to Sedgwick (8). The doors of the hospital in which Amanda and David find themselves can’t be opened from within, and this physical enclosure is replicated in a suffocating narrative, in turn itself a metaphor for the reclusion of illness. Amanda is trapped in her poisoned body, confined to a place she won’t leave alive and tied to a narrative that reaches no conclusion. Just as Amanda’s captivity in the emergency room redefines the hospital as prison, the countryside is presented as a malignant space that poisons and destroys and that is also impossible to escape, as Amanda and later her husband will find out. Soy comes up a few times in the narration, and its description as green and perfumed constitutes a seductive but threatening presence. Interior and exterior spaces are similarly toxic and claustrophobic, relaying the imprisonment of poisoning. Sharon Rose Yang and Kathleen Healy explain that Gothic landscapes, whether natural or human-made, are more than the background in which action takes place; they are the principle vehicle to create “[an] ambience of uncertainty, delusion, fluidity, isolation, and instability” (5). Distancia de rescate’s rural landscape inverts the traditional association of the countryside retreat as a space of leisure and recreation to one of oppression and mortality, and the hospital from a place of healing and recovery to a prison cell where one meets certain death. The Gothic register under which these sinister mutations of space and nature are effected point to agrochemical pollution as a violence that asphyxiates, traps, and kills.

Another convention that Sedgwick mentions is the presence of duplication (8). This might be the most revealing Gothic element in Schweblin’s novel because it serves as a metaphor for pollution. Distancia de rescate is constructed on the number two: two mothers (Carla and Amanda), two children (Nina and David), and two husbands (Omar and Amanda’s) in almost identical circumstances, since in both families the children suffer from agritoxin poisoning and are subject to the transmigration of their souls. Moreover, David is Nina’s double: he presages the girl’s fate, and in the end he will become her. This is evident toward the end of the novel when Nina’s father gets into his car and finds David sitting in the back seat, with Nina’s stuffed animal, the seat belt tied and his legs crossed, just as the girl used to sit in the car. David’s desperate pleading look to leave with Nina’s father confirms the suspicion that Nina’s soul has transmigrated to David’s body and that she also finds herself trapped in a strange place. Nina had announced it before in her preference for the first person plural and when in Amanda’s dream she had said to her mother: “Soy David” (56) (“I’m David” 74).

In this way, the uncontrolled propagation of agrochemical poisons is paralleled in the Gothic code to the dispersion of souls invading foreign bodies. The transmigration of souls is in a way a form of duplication, since each child becomes two: the body of one person and the soul of another. Although, as the healer explains, each body harbors only one spirit, in the transmigration process “Algo de cada uno quedaría en el otro” (28) (“Something of each of them would be left in the other” 29–30). Duplication is, as Freud contends, directly related to the unheimlich, or uncanny, that frightening feeling produced by something that is both unknown and familiar, in this case a beloved child possessed by an alien spirit. Schweblin heightens the horror of splitting and altering a child’s identity by showing it through the lens of maternity. Having a stranger inhabit the body of one’s child is to disturb what is closest and most loved, bringing the Gothic mechanism of transforming the familiar into the uncanny to an intimate extreme.⁸

The theme of maternity is central in Distancia de rescate and invites explorations from multiple theoretical approaches. Among them and of particular relevance to the present study is the relationship between maternal narrative and ecological concerns and how this is connected to the Gothic genre in the novel. At first glance, we can see that this novel rests on the traditional identification in Western culture of nature with motherhood by presenting both as victims of agrochemical pollution. Moreover, the work adopts an ecofeminist rhetoric that Sherilyn McGregor has termed “Ecomaternalism,” which ties motherhood to a greater concern for the environment. According to McGregor, this rhetoric, prevalent in contemporary ecofeminism, explains the environmental activism of women through their maternal vocation and work, since caring for children and a concern for their future well-being leads to a greater engagement with environmental issues.⁹ These ideas are present in Distancia de rescate, which calls on the maternal instinct and the protector function of the mother to give us the drama of environmental destruction within a maternal discourse.

But it’s through the intersection of the maternal discourse with the Gothic genre that Distancia de rescate most powerfully politicizes motherhood in order to advance an ecological message.¹⁰ By way of the Gothic, Schweblin invokes the figure of the missing child and the mother as a political subject to make the slow violence of agrochemical pollution visible and urgent. From the title— Distancia de rescate (Rescue Distance) is the name Amanda gives to the invisible thread that links her to her daughter Nina—and throughout the novel we see that the work centers on the maternal anxiety around the loss of a child. This anxiety is inserted into a Gothic register, made clear in David’s soul transmigration and Carla’s persistent fear that her son shelters an alien spirit while his soul inhabits an unknown body. But it is her search for her son’s soul, checking all the kids his age, talking to them, and looking them in the eyes to see whether she can see David in them, that shows the desperation of a mother seeking to find her beloved child who is not dead but has disappeared. The horror of her child’s vanishing haunts Amanda as well, who in her conversations with David asks, unceasingly and with ever greater dread and anguish: “¿Dónde está Nina?” (“Where is Nina?”).

The Gothic genre also shapes maternal anxieties in the novel by associating the invisible thread with which Amanda defines the mother–child bond with the eerie presence of numerous sisal ropes in the narrative. The most chilling of these ropes is the one used by the healer to tie David down to prevent his body from escaping during the transmigration. The boy also uses a sisal thread to tie down different objects in an attempt to put order in his house after his mother abandons him. It’s notable that David uses this same yarn to tie, from a single nail, a photo of his father an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Bad Living: Mutations, Monsters and Phantoms
• PART II Econarratives and Ecopoetics of Slow Violence
• PART III Protracted Degradation and the Slow Violence of Toxicity
• PART IV Materialities, Performances, and Ecologies of Praxis
• Contributors
• Index