Climate change and ecological literacy in Ghassān Shibārū’s climate fiction novel "2022"

Abstract

Climate change has been attracting increasing attention as one of the most significant consequences of the anthropogenic global warming and fictional narratives have increasingly been involved in engaging human imagination on the topic of climate change. Climate fiction, or cli-fi, is the umbrella term that designates fiction with climate change as its main theme. Climate fiction has been primarily published in English so far and narratives specifically problematising anthropogenic climate change are still quite rare in the Arabic literary landscape. In this regard, the novel 2022 by the Lebanese author Ghassān Shibārū constitutes an interesting case, given that it is authored in Arabic but displays several of the characteristics typical of the cli-fi genre. This paper aims at providing an analysis of Shibārū’s novel 2022 as representative of Arabic climate fiction. The main features of the climate fiction genre and its relationship to the scholarship of ecocriticism are first outlined. An overview of the environment as a theme in Arabic literature and Arabic literary studies then follows. The paper subsequently presents the concept of ecological literacy, which constitutes the theoretical framework for the analysis of the characters in the novel. After a synopsis of the plot, the characters are analysed and discussed and the novel itself is examined as instance of climate fiction as intended by the Anglophone definition of the genre. The authors argue that the purpose of the novel is didactic, since, rather than narrating a fictional story, the novels exploits a fictional story in order to spread awareness of global warming and climate change.
 Keywords: Contemporary Arabic literature • Climate change • Climate fiction • Ecocriticism • Ecological literacy