Abstract
Stories about “green carnage” often get lost among headlines, which most often emphasize civilian and material costs in times of war. War's violation of the environment, however, has serious repercussions for the communities who have strong economic, emotional, and sociopolitical ties to the land. Using Ecocriticism as a framework, I provide a close textual analysis of five contemporary war diaries by Arab women, Suad Amiry's (2004) Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries, Riverbend's (2005) Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq, Zena El-Khalil's (2006) “Beirut Update,” IraqiGirl's (2009) IraqiGirl: Diary of a Teenage Girl in Iraq, and Laila El-Haddad's (2010) Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything in Between. I demonstrate how these environment-centered diaries engage with contemporary debates about the impact of militarization on the environment and how that environmental impact affects the inhabitants. I argue that these counter-narratives demonstrate an increasingly prominent environmental consciousness among civilians in war-torn countries in the Middle East.
Highlights
In 2003, during the invasion of Iraq by the United States, American forces marched into a young boy’s neighborhood in Ba’aquba and began bulldozing orange trees
Joel Kovel (2007) discusses the workings and repercussions of the Israeli government’s environmental racism, which continues to build upon the enduring “making the desert bloom” narrative: Here we find deliberate actions taken to destroy the filaments of human ecosystems, by legal and extra legal means of expulsion, by removing, violently if necessary, the grounds of another’s communal existence, and by introducing physical means of disrupting the other’s relation to nature
In the introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader, Glotfelty writes that ecocriticism “will become a multi-ethnic movement when stronger connections are made between the environment and issues of social justice, and when a diversity of voices are encouraged to contribute to the discussion” (xxv)
Summary
In 2003, during the invasion of Iraq by the United States, American forces marched into a young boy’s neighborhood in Ba’aquba and began bulldozing orange trees. By documenting the environmental costs of war and civilians’ powerful reactions to environmental devastation, the selected narratives strive to illuminate what the mainstream media fails to expose: the hypocrisy of the United States and Israeli www.plutojournals.com/asq/
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