The bio-political and the post-human turn have come to the forefront of discussion among global intellectuals since the beginning of the ongoing Corona Crisis. Supporters of both these trends argue that the concept of the political must be found beyond the category of the human political (bios) – in order to find any kind of resolution in the post-corona. This theoretical backdrop, and two photos of a recent Eid Prayer in Bangladesh may provide us with a site on which we can articulate an idea of the political that binds the Zoe (animal life) of human and the Geo (non-life) in an intimate relation. My main argument is that these images help us to articulate a zone of intimate connection in which the human zoe and the non-human geo find themselves in common solidarity in suffering the brunt of the anthropogenic climate change, and a moment of mutual reflection that depicts a post-human subjectivity.
Fig. 1.
In one of these photos (fig 1), we see a group of people participating in an Islamic Prayer on knee-deep water. The randomness of gesture among the participants depicts an absence of rigidity in ritual movements, or a lack of concentration required for such maneuvers. Although such randomness and lapse regarding ritual movements are not uncommon for an event that occurs yearly, the particular emergency these images depict may very well have contributed to their amplification. In another photo (fig 2), we see them performing ritual prostration over water – giving us a very unusual depiction of an Islamic prayer, the very religious validity of such gesture may be questioned by some. Noting the fact that the prayer took place during the ongoing corona crisis, maintenance of the prescribed 1.5-meter social distance appears to be a matter of little concern among the participants. This exceptional situation would appear much normal if we take account of the fact that these are pictures of inhabitants of the Koyra sub-district in Bangladesh who participated in the once a year prayer of Eid Ul Fitr, the biggest Islamic festival, in a time when they were repairing a dam left devastated by the recent Super cyclone Amphan (Molla). Several photos of this event circulated in the mass media of Bangladesh. In the aftermath of the Cyclone, around two hundred thousand people of Koyra found their home destroyed and their agricultural land flooded by saltwater (Roy). They also found themselves without any effective government support and had to resort to repair kilometer-long breaches of a dam (Hossain). In a moment of an environmental emergency, the citizen of Koyra finds themselves as lives not dissimilar to that of the Rohingya refugees inhabiting the remote island of Vashan Char, who were also simply left behind the Bangladeshi government on the path of the cyclone (“Cyclone Endangers Rohingya”). That increasing number of people living in the southern territory of the country resembled bare lives who lacked the protection of a sovereign government during an environmental crisis, is not coincidental as the cyclone arrived at a time when the health and the economic sector in Bangladesh were already in disarray because of the corona crisis. What is also manifested in the situation and in these images, is the classist dimension of social seclusion policy of the corona crisis – that it is a privilege. Bio-political and populist discourses in the Indian subcontinent during the corona crisis is also revolving around the regulation and restriction of public places of rituals, and mosque-goers are often reduced as infectious agents in the mass media. In India, the Tablighi Jamaat members of Delhi’s Nizamuddin Markaz Mosque; and in Bangladesh, participants of a funeral prayer in Brahmanbaria have been the most famous examples of groups of human represented as contagious agents in the mass media. The state of exception which has actualized in the Indian subcontinent produces these human beings as abnormal. A crisis in which a non-human agent such as virus has become the most prominent actor, humans find themselves being reduced to infectious agents. The participants of this particular Eid prayer, however, remained beyond such representations. The dominant medical discourses of the corona crisis, collapse in case of this particular Eid prayer, as the event takes place amid an environmental crisis in which the prescribed safety regulations have become obsolete.
Fig. 2.
Bruno Latour in, a recent article, claimed that the bio-political caricature (in which the immigrant and black lives obliterate) of the present situation manifests under the same governments that lack policies that are conscious and decisive in term of anthropogenic climate change (“Dress Rehearsal”). The bio-political caricature of Bangladesh during the corona crisis is sharply manifested in a severe lack of ventilator for emergency patients (Anik). The right to keep breathing has become a matter of regional and class privilege. The struggle for fresh air for the citizen of Bangladesh, is, however, a norm rather than an exception. Recent studies and reports suggested that there could be a high fatality rate for COVID 19 patients in Dhaka due to air pollution (“Bad News”). Achille Mbembe, in an article centered around the political objective of the post-corona, proposed a concept of the “universal right to breathe” – which must be defined beyond its purely biological aspect, and as something common to “all lives” (“Right to Breathe”). While Mbembe does declare that the “humankind and biosphere are one”, his identification of the zone of this new politics barely glances beyond the political possibilities of the zoe. Breathing as a metaphor, however, provides us with a point of departure from traditional theories on bio-politics to the realm of post-human subjectivity. Redox reaction (breathing in animal) is a phenomenon shared by both lives and non-lives, and according to Elizabeth Povinelli, problematizes a simple separation between the two. Redox reaction is common to both lives and non-lives while life is defined by an ability of self-controlled redox reaction (Povinelli, “Can rock die”). It is also possible to treat the Bay of Bengal (BoB), whose saltwater has flooded the land of people already living in a crisis of respiration – as a material actant that has also been struggling to breathe. BoB’s ecological balance has long been threatened by industrial pollution and overfishing. It is also the location of one of the largest (60,000 sq km) marine dead zone (scientifically “oxygen minimum zones or OMZ”) which is only increasing in size. Pollution coupled with overfishing promoted by the governments around it has created a situation that may result in a plankton bloom – and in turn further reduction of oxygen content in water (Ghosh and Lobo). While the current crisis of breathing is an exception for most humans, it has been a norm for the BoB for a while.
That Bangladesh, more specifically its southern region faces a catastrophic backlash of the anthropogenic climate change – is a well-known fact. However, studies aimed at locating post-anthropocentric agencies in this region remains lacking. The Bay of Bengal as a material actant may provide a ground on which such post-anthropocentric agency can be articulated. During the last three decades, the pattern of tropical cyclones has become more volatile and unpredictable, while the region has suffered more and more powerful cyclones, which, according to many scientists is a direct result of global warming. An earlier research showed that the intensity of storm in the Bay of Bengal “went from an average classification of Category 3 between 1981-1995 to Category 4 on the 1996-2010 period” (Acharya). A recent research based on the data that tracked the source and landfall of cyclones from 1901 to 2010 in the region found plausible indication of the effect of global warming in the increase of spatial extent of the cyclone since 1961, as Tropical Cyclones had moved more towards the north and the north-east with an increase of landfall locations on the Bangladesh coast” (Rao et al 194). The rapid intensification of Amphan into a super cyclone has already been suggested as a result of anthropogenic global warming, as scientists lists “warming of the bay” as one of the favorable factors behind the intensification (Sangomla). BoB may not pass the criteria of having a self-contained redox mechanism as an existent, but its material agency can be felt and seen when its surface overheats and its saltwater regime extends into the human habitation.
Fig. 3. Tropical Cyclone tracks originating from the BoB for the periods 1901–1950 (left panel) and 1961–2010 (right panel; in Rao et al.
Within this material backdrop, the image of the ritual prostration on water (fig 2) reaches a new significance. The participants prostrate over their own distorted and wavy reflection, as if depicting the condition of the contemporary human subject, who according to Stacy Alaimo, finds herself in “a swirling landscape of uncertainty” (Oceanic Origins 112). It captures a moment of recognition in which the intimate connection of the human subject “with the flows of substances and the agencies of environments” is exposed – thus also becoming an image of trans- corporeality. According to Alaimo, “the recognition of trans- corporeality begins with human bodies in their environments, tracing substantial interchanges reveals the permeability of the human, dissolving the outline of the subject” (Oceanic Origins 112). In this photograph, the intra and inter connectedness of human subject with other forms of agency and forces is captured in a moment in which the human subject reflects on saltwater – and the saltwater gazes back. Ironically, this can also be read as the contemporary condition of the infancy of the post-human subject – still in its mirror stage of development.
Even in this mirror stage, however, we find the human zoe and the non-human geo in these photos in a relation of common solidarity, like the prayer in which they have meet in mutual reflection. The environment and the Anthropos find themselves together in a material relation in which they have become “the wretched of the earth” of our era – in suffering the brunt of anthropogenic climate change brought forth by an extractive and exploitive global capitalist economy. These photos depict a “real state of exception” in which the zoe and geo of our time live, and this exception has become the norm for a while. Mbembe delineates the political objective of the post-corona as the reconstruction of a habitable earth, declaring; “We must reclaim the lungs of our world” (“Right to Breathe”). These photographs, in a way, depict a political zone in which the subjectivity of the ‘we’ that must reclaim the lungs of the world appears in its post-anthropocentric form.
Works Cited
Alaimo, Stacy. “Oceanic Origins, Plastic Activism, and New Materialism at Sea” in Exposed. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Anik, Syed Samiul Basher. “Coronavirus: Bangladesh facing severe ventilator shortage”. Dhaka Tribune, 14 April 2020, https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/2020/04/14/coronavirus-bangladesh-facing-severe-ventilator-shortage
Acharya, Namrata. “Severity of cyclones in Bay of Bengal on the rise, say scientists; climate change, leading to higher sea temperatures, is to be blamed for this impending threat, say scientists”. Business Standard, 3 May 2019, https://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/severity-of-cyclones-in-bay-of-bengal-on-the-rise-say-scientists-119050300848_1.html
“Bad news for Dhaka: Coronavirus fatalities linked to air pollution”. Dhaka Tribune, 8 April 2020. https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/dhaka/2020/04/08/dhaka-residents-at-higher-risk-of-infection-as-study-links-air-pollution-to-coronavirus-fatalities
“Bangladesh: Cyclone Endangers Rohingya on Silt Island”. Human Rights Watch, 20 May 2020, https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/21/bangladesh-cyclone-endangers-rohingya-silt-island
Ghosh, Amitav and Lobo, Aaron Savio. “Bay of Bengal: depleted fish stocks and huge dead zone signal tipping point”. The Guardian, 31 January 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jan/31/bay-bengal-depleted-fish-stocks-pollution-climate-change-migration
Hossain, Imran. “Amphan-affected people left on their own”. 29 May 2020, New Age Bangladesh, https://www.newagebd.net/article/107173/amphan-affected-people-left-on-their-own
Latour, Bruno. “Is This a Dress Rehearsal?”. Critical Inquiry, 26 March 2020, originally published in French with Le Monde, 25 March 2020, https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/03/26/is-this-a-dress-rehearsal/
Mbembe, Achille. “The Universal Right to Breathe”. Translated by Carolyn Shread, Critical Inquiry, 13 April 2020, https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/the-universal-right-to-breathe/
Molla, Md Hedait Hossain, “Thousands offer Eid prayer in knee-deep water”. Dhaka Tribune, 25 May 2020, https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/nation/2020/05/25/thousands-offer-eid-prayer-in-knee-deep-water
Povinelli, Elizabeth. “Can Rocks Die? Life and Death Inside the Carbon Imaginary.” POVINELLI, E. Geontologies: a réquiem to late liberalism. Durham: Duke, 2016.
Roy, Dipankar. “Amphan aftermath: A trail of devastation in Khulna’s Koyra upazila”. The Daily Star, 24 May 2020, https://www.thedailystar.net/cyclone-amphan-aftermath-trail-devastation-in-khulna-koyra-upazila-1905517
Rao et al. “Trends in the genesis and landfall locations of tropical cyclones over the Bay of Bengal in the current global warming era”. J. Earth Syst. Sci, 128:194, Indian Academy of Sciences, 2019
Sangomla, Akshit. “A warming Bay of Bengal may have turned Amphan into super cyclone: Experts”. Down To Earth, 18 May 2020, https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/climate-change/a-warming-bay-of-bengal-may-have-turned-amphan-into-super-cyclone-experts-71214
Parvez Alam 