Body as a Memory and Human as a Refugee in the Era of Droughts: Doris Lessing’s Mara and Dann
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This paper aims to explore how Doris Lessing in her novel Mara and Dann (1999) embodies the female body of Mara and nonhuman bodies intra-actively co-constituted in the times of severe droughts, inviting the readers to perceive droughts affectively and cognitively, and suggests that like a refugee girl, Mara, human species should be able to identify themselves as migrants or refugees equipped with the decision to leave and the courage to travel for their survival in the era of climate change. Furthermore, it examines the way Mara and Dann envisions the human civilization beyond the Anthropocene and women combining professional expertise and response-ability qualified for leading new communities after the climate change. The novel proposes new heterarchical posthuman communities supported by companionship and caring, resisting the hierarchical society of Eurocentrism in the past. In this novel both human and nonhuman bodies including inorganic bodies such as stones and cities, manifest themselves as material narratives which tell their stories eloquently. Mara and Dann provides extraordinarily vivid descriptions of sufferings caused by drought and thirst, and draws particular attention to the fact that in underdeveloped countries, women and girls suffer disproportionately in severe water shortages. These water-related injustices and discrimination that women face are tacitly reported in the novel. By tracing the growth of Mara as cartographer and storyteller, Lessing implies that the Anthropocene literature is a sort of cartography which helps the readers to imagine the incalculable scales of the Anthropocene through the shift of spatial-temporal scales even though it requires their deciphering the signs on the map.
Abstract
This paper aims to explore how Doris Lessing in her novel Mara and Dann (1999) embodies the female body of Mara and nonhuman bodies intra-actively co-constituted in the times of severe droughts, inviting the readers to perceive droughts affectively and cognitively, and suggests that like a refugee girl, Mara, human species should be able to identify themselves as migrants or refugees equipped with the decision to leave and the courage to travel for their survival in the era of climate change. Furthermore, it examines the way Mara and Dann envisions the human civilization beyond the Anthropocene and women combining professional expertise and response-ability qualified for leading new communities after the climate change. The novel proposes new heterarchical posthuman communities supported by companionship and caring, resisting the hierarchical society of Eurocentrism in the past. In this novel both human and nonhuman bodies including inorganic bodies such as stones and cities, manifest themselves as material narratives which tell their stories eloquently. Mara and Dann provides extraordinarily vivid descriptions of sufferings caused by drought and thirst, and draws particular attention to the fact that in underdeveloped countries, women and girls suffer disproportionately in severe water shortages. These water-related injustices and discrimination that women face are tacitly reported in the novel. By tracing the growth of Mara as cartographer and storyteller, Lessing implies that the Anthropocene literature is a sort of cartography which helps the readers to imagine the incalculable scales of the Anthropocene through the shift of spatial-temporal scales even though it requires their deciphering the signs on the map.
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