Black as Drought

Abstract

In the poem “ca’line’s prayer,” Lucille Clift on marks the progression of Black generational memory through the metaphor of drought. The poem’s 1969 publication coincided with one of the worst droughts in modern history. Across the West African Sahel late rains and the onset of famine led to widespread death and displacement. Starting from this conjunctural moment in the late 1960s and using Clifton’s provocation about the “Blackness” of drought, this article contemplates representations of arid environments in African and Afro-diasporic texts. I consider various imaginings of arid spaces, presented simultaneously as wasteland and homeland. Surveying critical scholarship on the Sahelian drought, I interrogate the contested meanings of Black life and death in deserts. I also consider the contemporary resonances of these themes, engaging African eco-critical and Afro/African futurists texts. I show how these portrayals of actual and imagined deserts reveal alternate modes of encounter forged through Black/African ecological thought.

Earth stewardship, water resilience, and ethics in the Anthropocene

“…In such cases, the choice of which relations matter in a social–ecological system is also an ethical choice of whose relations matter. Similar concerns hold for racialized assumptions by colonialists and early 20th-century scientists who blamed desertification in the Sahel on local African communities in ways that continue to influence narratives of desertification in climate change policies at the expense of understanding local, Black practices of resilience (Benjaminsen & Hiernaux, 2019; Meché, 2022).…”

Weathering Saharan dust beyond the Spanish Mediterranean Basin: An interdisciplinary dialogue

“…In this sense, ideas of climate and the ideological mechanisms of colonialism are inextricably linked (Berland, 1993; Mahony, 2021; Mahony and Endfield, 2018). Climate determinism, for one, designates the pejorative characterisation of whole groups of people (and retroactive justification of violence towards said groups) based on climatic differences (Mahony, 2021: 48; Meché, 2022). Weather, extrapolated as climate, is always already political (Neimanis and Hamilton, 2017).…”

“…We also lean into other critical theories to this tune from multiple and cross-pollinating lineages, namely: political ecology, eco-feminism, eco-criticism, media theory, and critical race theory. Scholars in these fields reiterate, in distinct ways, that experiences of weather are all-encompassing for materially differentiated bodies: weather is transatlantic antiblackness (Sharpe, 2016: 104); weather stories lurk behind racialisation (Meché, 2022); climate controls (Furuhata, 2022); dusty weather shapes political spaces, livable spaces, possible interventions (Nieuwenhuis, 2018; Zee, 2017, 2022).…”

“…The desert is a beguiling yet inhospitable “medium” for the European Traveller to temporarily lose “himself” (Minh-ha, 2011: 40) in the act of encountering and performing the non-western Other: the nomad, the seeker, orientalised Islam (Nieuwenhuis, 2018: 21–29). Diana Davis ( Davis, 2016 ) and Brittany Meché (2022) have called for new narratives of deserts, droughts, and drylands beyond colonial legacies of pathologising, naturalising, or blaming the racialised Other for a supposed conflation of such spaces with lack, thus subverting the European dialectic of reconnaissance and hermeticism.…”

Hydrosocial geographies: Cycles, spaces and spheres of concern

“…Elsewhere, Debbané (2013) examined how control over water shaped agricultural economies along with racial lines in post-Apartheid South Africa. And Meché (2022) showed how notions of ‘Black as drought’ were shaped through twentieth-century environmental programs like UNEP that associated Blackness with desertification and social destitution. The drought in Cape Town mentioned earlier was also deeply inflected by racial inequalities both in policy responses and those built into infrastructural inequity (Robins 2019; Millington and Scheba 2021).…”