Abstract
War has been instrumental in destroying land and forests and thus is a major contributor to climate change. Degradation due to war has been especially significant in Africa. The African continent, once green, is now almost denuded of its rich forests and pillaged of its precious natural resources due to the brutality of colonisation and more recent postcolonial civil wars. In Sierra Leone the civil war continued for over eleven years from 1991 to 2002 and wrought havoc on the land and forests. Thus the anxiety and trauma suffered by the people not only includes the more visible aspects of human brutality, but also the long lasting effects of ecocide which relate to climate change. Underlying narratives that address traumatic ecological disasters is a sense of anxiety and depression resulting from the existential threat of climate change. This paper demonstrates how narratives can metaphorically represent both ecocide and climate change and argues that such stories help people in tackling the real life stresses of anxiety and trauma. To establish the argument this paper has drawn on scientific and sociological data and placed these vis-à-vis narrative episodes in Aminatta Forna’s novels Ancestor Stones (2006) and The Memory of Love (2010). In these novels Forna depicts the ecological crisis that colonisation and civil war have wrought on Sierra Leone. The anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder – of war and ecocide – suffered by the fictional Sierra Leonean characters are explained through Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory.
Highlights
War has been instrumental in destroying land and forests and is a major contributor to climate change
Given the interconnectivity between ecologies and climate change, massive land degradation and deforestation becomes a form of ecocide, and the resulting climate change, intangible, significantly impacts human life and induces anxiety
As Una Chaudhury and Shonni Enelow explain in their article “Theorizing Ecocide: The Theatre of Eco-Cruelty”: The first thing that makes climate change difficult to represent in art is the maddening fact that climate—unlike weather—can never be directly experienced
Summary
I n October 2009, a few months before the Copenhagen UN Climate Change Conference (COP15), President Mohamed Nasheed of the archipelago nation of the Maldives, convened an urgent underwater cabinet meeting. The dramatic signing was intended to alert the world to the imminent environmental dangers of greenhouse gases which contribute to climate change effects, including – and of particular concern to the Maldives – rising sea levels. The objective of this paper is to analyse how Forna’s stories of personal trauma, as depicted through characters in the two novels, direct the reader to the significant issue of climate change due to the severe impact of mining and deforestation in Sierra Leone beginning with colonialism, but especially felt during the postcolonial period of the nation’s civil wars. Ecocide is committed largely during international wars and long-drawn-out civil wars This was the case in Sierra Leone which was rich in diamonds and natural resources.
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