Strange Kinship Matters: Cultivating an Ecofeminist Ethics of Place in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood

Abstract

Then God establishes his covenant with Noah, and with his sons, “and with every living creature.” Many recall the Covenant with Noah, but forget the Covenant with all other living Beings. However, God does not forget it. He repeats the terms “all flesh” and “every living creature” a number of times, to make sure we get the point. -Adam One (Atwood, The Year of the Flood 91) In Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009), Adam One, the leader of the eco-conscious God’s Gardeners, leverages his cult’s revised Judeo-Christian religious narrative to argue for lateral species relations among humans and non-human animals—among “all flesh.” In doing so, Adam One and the Gardeners radically oppose the anthropocentric, patriarchal agenda of the CorpSeCorps, the former private security firm that controls military, economic, and scientific endeavors in the world of The Year of the Flood and its predecessor, Oryx and Crake (2003). Prioritizing consumerism and technological innovation, the CorpSeCorps authorizes the instrumentalization of “all flesh,” as demonstrated by the “pigoons” bred for human organ harvesting, the genetically engineered “ChickieNobs” that maximize food output, and the marginalized “pleebland” women who are vulnerable to sexual assault while working in CorpSeCorps franchises (Atwood, Oryx and Crake 22, 202). The CorpSeCorps enacts violence by normalizing the widespread victimization of female and animal bodies, thereby illustrating what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence”—attritional, invisible violence that spans multiple geographies and temporalities (2). Recognizing the difficulty of representing slow violence’s deleterious effects, Atwood uses her authorial visibility in The Year of the Flood to stage an ecofeminist “counter-narrative” to Oryx and Crake (Lapointe 141), a counter-narrative that emphasizes the recovery and regeneration of instrumentalized human and non-human animal bodies. The God’s Gardeners enact this ecofeminist response by revitalizing relationships among species within their shared environments and emphasizing their kinship with “every living creature.” Ultimately, it is the Gardeners’ reluctant convert Toby, herself a victim of the pleeblands’ slow violence, who hybridizes their ideology with her own experiences and creates a new ethics of place before and after the “Waterless Flood.”