Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

Nixon states that “contests over what counts as violence are intimately entangled with conflicts over who bears the social authority of witness, which entails much more than simply seeing or not seeing” (16). Stories of slow and long-lasting violence are often buried in more economically developed countries, especially if the storytellers are people who have been “culturally discounted” (16). As a result, one of Nixon’s goals in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor is to detail writer-activists, particularly from economically developing countries, who are documenting the human and ecological costs of slow violence.

Nixon highlights writer-activists, including Maathai and Saro-Wiwa, who helped launch environmental movements. Other writers, like Roy and Sinha, affiliated themselves with well-established environmental movements, “helping to amplify causes marginalized by corporate media” (23). Roy also helped turn the anti-dam movement in the Narmada River valley into an international campaign. Other writers grapple with their own reflections about representational authority, such as Ndebele, Baldwin, and Gordimer. Nixon also examines writer-activists who, like Munif, wrote at a time where there were no existing environmental movements.

Writers also struggle with their own privilege and representational authority. Many of the writers he discusses, such as Maathai, Jordan, and Saro-Wiwa, were the first in their families to go to college. A college education propelled them into a higher economic class. They constantly negotiated their own privilege with being able to tell the stories of those less privileged than themselves. Writers in this circumstance “stand above the immediate environmental struggles of the poor yet remained bonded through memory (and through their own vertiginous anxieties) to the straitened circumstances from which they or their families recently emerged” (27). Nixon argues that these experiences help writer-activists translate the challenges vulnerable communities face across countries, gender, race/ethnicity, and class.

The work that writers do in trying to break the narrative monopoly can be dangerous and even deadly. Saro-Wiwa lost his life because of his writings and his attempts to get justice for his people. His martyrdom made it difficult initially for another leader to take over the movement.

Nixon also illustrates how those who control the narrative do not always easily relinquish their control over it. One poignant example is American novelist John Updike’s criticism of Munif’s Cities of Salt. Nixon notes that Updike “bristles at the novel’s stance toward America” (86). Updike also believes that Munif does not have the qualifications to write a story like Cities of Salt. By this, Updike means that Munif is “insufficiently Westernized to produce a narrative that feels much like what we call a novel” (86). Updike appears unwilling to allow non-Western writers a voice in documenting environmental injustices on the frontiers. Nixon strongly criticizes Updike’s viewpoint and argues that the American way is not the only way to write a frontier novel. Nixon notes that:

instead of crafting an adventurer who faces down some Persian Gulf version of the wilderness and Native Americans, Munif summoned to life a radically different kind of historical panorama, a violent conflict on a communal scale, as the uprooted Bedouin fought for ecological subsistence, cultural dignity, and scraps of power against an advancing petro-capitalist imperialism in league with an emergent oligarchic client state (92).

Through all of these examples, Nixon underscores that it is not only possible but imperative that people work to break narrative monopolies on accounts of environmental injustices. Failure to do this will be perpetuate the dangers of deciding who does and does not have a voice.