Resilience Stories

Resilience Stories: Narratives of Adaptation, Refusal, and Compromise

Author(s): Susie O'Brien

Source: Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities , Vol. 4, No. 2-3, Environmental Futurity (Spring-Fall 2017), pp. 43-65

Published by: University of Nebraska Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/resilience.4.2-3.0043

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Resilience Stories Narratives of Adaptation, Refusal, and Compromise

Susie O’Brien

A common way to imagine environmental futurity in the early decades of the twenty- fi rst century is through stories about resilience. At a time when the concept of sustainability has largely given way to a sense of recurrent crisis, narratives of successful adaptation have powerful cur- rency. Th e United Nations’ Rio + 20 Conference on Sustainable Devel- opment, held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012, is a case in point. While re- newing and reaffi rming sustainability goals established in the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the resolution that emerged from that meeting— titled “Th e Future We Want”— contains frequent, sobering references to di- sasters and recommends fostering resilience in the face of their inevi- tability.1 An easy- to- digest expression of the resolution’s themes can be found on the UN website, where a series of videos, titled “Disaster Re- silient Societies,” relates stories of individuals and communities that are managing to thrive in the face of disaster. Together, they present resil- ience as a strategy of adaptation that will enable us to shape “the future we want” rather than fatalistically succumb to disaster and impoverish- ment due to climate change and other socioecological challenges. Tak- ing the videos as a starting point, this essay thinks through the aff ects and eff ects of resilience as a way of imagining environmental futurity. In particular, it analyzes the function of resilience stories as a way to cope with present disasters and to prepare for future ones.

With this analysis, I hope to contribute to a burgeoning critical dis- cussion about the uses and dangers of resilience thinking. Occurring mostly in the social sciences, that discussion has clearly demonstrated the way the concept of resilience operates in the service of neoliberal-

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Resilience Vol. 4, Nos. 2–344

ism, ushering in a future that, contra the UN’s optimistic slogan, very few of us will want, let alone be able, to inhabit.2 While this discussion has signifi cantly informed my own sense of the implications of resil- ience thinking, I seek to extend it here, using insights from the post- colonial environmental humanities, particularly Anthony Carrigan’s conception of postcolonial disaster studies.3 To this end, following a de- tour into the antiresilience camp, exemplifi ed by Brad Evans and Julian Reid’s Resilient Life: Th e Art of Living Dangerously, I consider Ishmael Beah’s 2014 novel, Th e Radiance of Tomorrow, as an illuminating com- mentary on the uses and limitations of resilience stories.4 Beah’s novel off ers a more complicated perspective on environmental futurity than the UN’s inspirational videos, and yet its account of a group of villag- ers in Sierra Leone struggling to survive the “slow violence” of environ- mental devastation in the aft ermath of war also confounds the logic of antiresilience critique.5 In both its hopefulness and its failures, this is a story of postcolonial disaster, which might also be called a compro- mised resilience narrative. I will return to the signifi cance of compro- mise at the end of the essay. For the moment, it is suffi cient to note that rather than invalidating resilience as a tool for thinking about postco- lonial environmental futurity, Th e Radiance of Tomorrow invites us to engage it, with careful attention to its specifi cally narrative— along with its psychological, ecological, and political— signifi cance. Rather than providing a picture of the future we should want or not want, I suggest that Beah’s novel compels us to engage with the circumstances that con- dition our imagination of the future, raising questions about author- ity, agency, and spatiotemporality, such as: Who is “we”? Who gets to imagine the future? From what location? Th ese questions don’t refute resilience as an idea so much as they invite us to enlarge the scope of critique to consider the uneven terrain from which resilience stories emerge, along with the kind of worlds they allow us to imagine.

Resilience Stories

Despite their recent popularity, there is nothing new about resilience stories. In a 2001 essay, “Une littérature de résilience?,” Angelo Gi- anfrancesco describes the emergence of the theme of resilience in nineteenth- century literature.6 In authors ranging from Charles Dick- ens to Victor Hugo, he traces the recurrence of narratives focused on

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O’Brien: Resilience Stories 45

characters’— generally children’s— transformation through adversity. In each of these examples, “aft er much suff ering, [the children] moved up in the world by dint of hard work, merit, and honesty, achieving good positions and whatever happiness, comfort, and respect one could ask for in this world.”7 At fi rst glance, these examples bear little resemblance to contemporary resilience science. Th ough early (1970s) studies in psy- chological resilience sought to understand the qualities that made cer- tain children impervious to negative experience, the fi eld has extend- ed its focus on character to encompass external and neurobiological components of resilience and expanded its emphasis from individuals to entire communities.8 Ecological concepts of resilience, focusing on the adaptive capacities of complex social- ecological systems, depart still further from the typical nineteenth- century resilience narrative of an individual traversing a more- or- less- linear path to success.9 A grow- ing body of research and policy combines psychological and ecologi- cal conceptions of resilience in an eff ort to “manage complex systems with human and ecological components in the face of recurring nat- ural disasters.”10 In this domain in particular, resilience has a strongly normative fl avor; more than a measurable characteristic of systems or communities, it is a value to be aspired to.11 Th us, in the course of gain- ing scientifi c rigor, resilience has not lost its popular appeal as the an- choring idea of a powerful story in which moralism and hope combine to produce a successful outcome.

More specifi cally, today, as in the nineteenth century, the idea of re- silience compels us as the foundation of a belief in a survivable future. In the nineteenth century, processes of rapid industrialization, with ac- companying social and economic upheaval, introduced new forms of precarity and uncertainty. In the early twenty- fi rst century, in an era of globalization, intensifying capitalism, and anthropogenic climate change, those dangers have multiplied to encompass the planet. Th e fu- ture is a site of acute concern, and resilience— which suggests that we thrive not in spite of upheaval but because of it— appears to provide an eff ective conceptual apparatus for dealing with it. Th ere is another area of commonality— or, more accurately, continuity— between the nine- teenth century and today: the structure of exploitation that operated through colonialism and persists through the dynamic of what David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession.”12 Th at structure creates a wrinkle in the fabric of social life that the UN’s resilience stories (much

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Resilience Vol. 4, Nos. 2–346

like their nineteenth- century antecedents) struggle to smooth out, even as they expand to encompass the planet. Against the easy movement be- tween plucky individuals and robust systems, a postcolonial approach to resilience demands that that wrinkle be accounted for, that we attend to the circumstances that determine not just the cultivation of certain kinds of resilience but also the telling of resilience stories.

United Nations Resilience Stories: Adaptation to Uncertainty

Following the World Disaster Reduction Conference in 2005, resilience has become an important feature of UN development programs, par- ticularly within the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction. It draws signifi cantly from the concept of ecological resil- ience, which describes a system’s capacity to retain its basic function and structure in the face of disturbance.13 Key to resilience thinking is the challenge that it poses to traditional ideas of a harmonious balance in nature. Rather than persisting in a mythical state of equilibrium until something comes along to shatter it, the natural world is in a perpetual state of fl ux, in which continuity is maintained by constant adaptation. Ecological resilience theory is based on three key premises: (1) social and ecological systems are inextricably connected with and dependent on each other, (2) systems subsist through an interplay between con- servation and transformation, and (3) self- organization is critical to a system’s resilience. Since the 1980s the elaboration of resilience in ref- erence to social- ecological systems informs its increasing use in devel- opment discourse.14 In this context, models of adaptive management drawn from ecology combine with psychological concepts of mental and behavioral health and wellness to describe resilience as an essential capacity for individuals and communities to cultivate in order to navi- gate an uncertain future.15

Th e UN videos of disaster- resilient societies exemplify this focus, which characterizes resilience through repeated reference to a core set of values: education; capacity building; sharing; responsibility; and, most of all, adaptability. Th e fi ve- to- ten- minute videos have diff erent formats, but most feature local commentary and footage accompanied by an upbeat, culturally appropriate soundtrack, knit together by a BBC- accented narration. Two videos focused on Jakarta, Indonesia, and

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O’Brien: Resilience Stories 47

a farm in Ethiopia exemplify the dominant fl avor of the series. “Jakarta, Indonesia: A City in Jeopardy” depicts a Jakarta neighborhood facing recurrent killer fl oods— the result, we are told, of development issues, such as waste- management problems, overpopulation, and unplanned construction, exacerbated by climate change.16 Speaking through a translator, one man describes the increasing frequency of fl oods (up to twice weekly), and a woman describes the drowning death of her son. Th e video features clips of fl ooded neighborhoods, with people wading up to their armpits and even attempting to ride bikes through streets submerged in murky brown water. All appear to be doing what they can to go about their daily lives in spite of the fl ooding. Th is response, we are told by the invisible authoritative voice, is something that the UN and other agencies are working to change. A Red Cross worker explains that they are “teaching [people] that this is not an ordinary situation that they have to accept. . . . One problem faced by the authorities here is that many people are oft en willing to accept even extreme risk rather than being relocated to safer grounds.”17 So building a resilient society, in this instance, involves not just changes to building construction or drainage systems but also shift ing a culture of fatalism to one of ener- getic adaptability.

Th e second video, “FAO Building Resilience in Ethiopia,” tells a sto- ry with a happier outcome.18 Th e story features a farmer who struggles to feed his family in the face of recurrent drought. “Sometimes,” he re- calls, “my children had to go to the neighbors to ask for food.” Here the narrator chimes in: “Wadebo had to fi nd a way to adapt to the adverse conditions, so he was willing to try a special variety of the root vegeta- ble taro . . . developed by Ethiopian research centers to give high yield. And in just a few months, Wadebo’s harvest had tripled.” Wadebo says, “Now I can feed myself and my family. Th anks to God, there is no more poverty in the house.”19 Th e narrator drives home the point: “His fam- ily is more resilient, with food to eat and the means to support them- selves, even in times of drought.”20 Th is video, perhaps more than any other, encapsulates the lesson of resilience; Wadebo “had to fi nd a way to adapt to the adverse conditions, so he was willing to try.” Th ough Wadebo strays off message in crediting God for his good fortune, the key ingredients in this resilience success story are clear— technology, knowledge translation, and willingness to change produce the desired

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Resilience Vol. 4, Nos. 2–348

outcome of self- suffi ciency. Th e story has another message running through it as a dark undercurrent: we live in a turbulent world, and those who are unwilling or unable to adapt are not likely to survive.

Antiresilience: Resisting Neoliberalism, Recovering Autonomy

In their emphasis on adaptation to an environment characterized by ever- looming or present disaster, the videos resonate with a dominant strand of contemporary resilience thinking that has been subject to considerable critique. In particular, numerous critics have noted the dovetailing of resilience with principles of neoliberalism. Jeremy Walk- er and Melinda Cooper have illuminated the genealogical intersections of resilience and Hayekian economic theory, while other critics have fo- cused on the biopolitical function of resilience discourse and the need to supplement concerns about resilience with attention to structural inequities.21 While each of these off ers crucial critical interventions, some of which I have taken up elsewhere, antiresilience has also begun to coalesce into its own narrative, one which, like all narratives, both illuminates and occludes, opening up some paths while shutting down others.22 Evans and Reid’s Resilient Life: Th e Art of Living Dangerously, a comparatively recent book- length critique of resilience, is a productive site for the examination of those dynamics. In particular, I suggest that this book exemplifi es a signifi cant risk in antiresilience arguments. Th e risk is this: we jettison resilience science’s vision of planetary turbulence in order to reassert an older, romantic image of autonomous human agency as a force that is able to transcend the limits of the world. In positing a critique that is based on a binary opposition between com- pliance and refusal, antiresilience fails to apprehend the complexity of postcolonial ecologies and the place of human agency within them.

Evans and Reid do compellingly demonstrate the problems with the hegemonic resilience narrative that the UN videos exemplify. Th at nar- rative, they suggest, subordinates human life to the perilous natural and economic systems that sustain us— systems to which we must contin- ually adapt, abandoning all hope of security or resistance. Evans and Reid locate their critique in the conjunction of resilience with sustain- able development, a project, they note, whose once- qualifi ed subjection to the market has been consolidated under neoliberalism. Resilience plays a key role in this process, its ecological model of complex adap-

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O’Brien: Resilience Stories 49

tive systems serving to naturalize the “creative destruction” of the cap- italist economy. Th e upshot of the new resilience ethos, which extends biopolitics from human populations to the biosphere, is that we must surrender the liberal project of security in favor of adaptation to an at- mosphere of perpetual danger.23

In the United Nations videos, for example, subjects of “disaster re- silient societies” absorb the lessons of urban planning and agricultural science experts, while ultimately assuming the responsibility to adapt to their circumstances and enhance their self- suffi ciency; they “had to fi nd a way to adapt to the adverse conditions, so [they were] willing to try.”24 Evans and Reid demonstrate the poverty of this vision of the transformation that is required to adapt to a dangerous future. Most importantly, their argument highlights the evacuation of politics such discourses entail. Th e resilient subject depicted in the UN videos is, borrowing their framework,

a subject that must permanently struggle to accommodate itself to the world. Not a political subject that can conceive of changing the world, its structure and conditions of possibility, with a view to securing itself from the world; but a subject which accepts the disastrousness of the world it lives in as a condition for partaking of that world and which accepts the necessity of the injunction to change itself in correspondence with the threats and dangers now presupposed as endemic. 25

Key to the problem with resilience thinking is what Evans and Reid de- scribe as the “ecologizaton of the political.”26 Humans’ reduction from biopolitical to biospherical subjects corresponds to “their interpellation within markets, their diversity as economic subjects, and their subjec- tion to systems of governance,” which renders them vulnerable to the instabilities of environment and economy, both coded as natural and inescapable.27

Th e problem with the resilience model of transformation, Evans and Reid suggest, is not that it goes too far but that it doesn’t go far enough. Th e concept of inevitable catastrophe should not evoke a timid eff ort to maintain as far as possible and for as long as possible our current way of life, including the economic practices that have imperiled the planet. Rather, it should prompt a refusal to resign ourselves to the crip- pling doctrine of inevitability in favor of a will to radical transformation.

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Resilience Vol. 4, Nos. 2–350

Rather than fearing environmental catastrophe, Evans and Reid suggest that we would do better to “welcome this inevitable event as the process of passage to a new world and new life,” one that “requires an entirely new ethical relationship with the human as an irreducible entity, and the world that is forever transforming to the creation of new ecologies.”28

Th e path Evans and Reid are prescribing is a radical departure from the one set out in the UN videos. And yet, in a couple of key ways, their perspective echoes the videos’ limiting assumptions. First, though they herald the death of the liberal subject, Evans and Reid’s defense of “the human as an irreducible entity” and “the affi rmative potential of the autonomous subject” betrays their attachment to it.29 Th e sub- ject of their call to arms is, they specify, not a suff ering victim. She may be exhausted, as to be exhausted is “to have done with what one has been,” to be undone by the intolerable conditions of contemporary life and thus primed for transformation.30 But she is categorically not tired: “Tired people continue to perform that which they are already doing in a laborious way. Th ey suff er that which they are and have to do. And tired people are tiresome in their suff ering.”31 In their impa- tience with those who endure, confronting us with a tiresome spectacle of suff ering, Evans and Reid echo the perspective of the Red Cross of- fi cer in Jakarta, who is exasperated by those who put up with the con- stant threat of fl ooding rather than uproot themselves. And while Evans and Reid embrace a narrative trajectory of transcendence— even tragic transcendence— over adaptability (they cite the Lars von Trier fi lm Mel- ancholia as an example of the exultant embrace of the end of the world), they follow the UN videos in dismissing the weight of history in favor of an exhortation to embrace change. Th e story they tell is ultimately a very simple one that, in spite of their insistent rejection of resilience, echoes the nineteenth- century resilience stories of the triumphant hu- man spirit. It fails to deal in any signifi cant way with the dimensions of the twenty- fi rst- century problem of a perilous future, in which hu- mans and nonhumans together confront ongoing relations of capitalist exploitation in the shadows of colonialism.

Postcolonial Resilience Narratives

Where resilience and antiresilience fall short (in oddly similar ways), the broken resilience narrative of Beah’s novel Th e Radiance of Tomor-

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O’Brien: Resilience Stories 51

row may off er a more suggestive guide for navigating a disaster- strewn present, toward a habitable future. My reading of this novel draws on Anthony Carrigan’s important work on the relevance of the postcolonial environmental humanities to the fi eld of disaster studies.32 A postcolo- nial perspective, Carrigan suggests, enriches current thinking about di- saster in a number of key ways, of which I will note just three. First, he suggests that “the designation ‘postcolonial disaster’ can help negotiate the dichotomy between event and process. Th is is because it always im- plies the kind of ‘complex emergencies’ or ‘compound disasters’ evoked in humanitarian and disaster relief discourse, which are conditioned by the ‘ruinous’ . . . consequences of specifi c imperial formations.”33 From this observation arises a second point about the temporal orientation of disaster studies. Drawing on the work of Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite, Carrigan argues for the recalibration of risk- based analyses of disaster, which are usually directed toward “future apocalyp- tic scenarios” to take into account past and present experiences of real- world along with their deep- lying causes.”34 Finally, Carrigan points to the need to supplement and challenge current disaster discourse, which remains dominated by formalist, Western (particularly US) approaches, with non- Western perspectives on specifi c disasters and their histori- cal, social, and political contexts.35

I follow Carrigan in seeing postcolonial literature as a vital repos- itory of such representations and analyses. My sense of the nature of these representations, and the disaster discourses in which they might productively intervene, diff ers from Carrigan’s somewhat. Carrigan fol- lows recent disaster theorists in condemning disaster discourse for its “technocratic” approach and alliance with “normative politics,” lead- ing to policies driven toward the restoration of disaster- stricken com- munities to a “pre- disaster norm.”36 Th e strategy he supports calls for “replacing technocratic ‘attempts to control the environment’ with ap- proaches that . . . stress fl exibility, adaptability, resilience and capacity.”37 But as the UN videos on disaster- resilient societies illustrate, resilience approaches need not be incompatible with technocracy. Conversely, adaptability is not necessarily conducive to decolonization; it is import- ant to consider who is being asked, by whom, to adapt to what, to what end. At issue is not simply the susceptibility of terms like “resilience,” “capacity,” and “adaptability” to neoliberal appropriation— a point Car- rigan acknowledges; it is also necessary to scrutinize the implicit dis-

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Resilience Vol. 4, Nos. 2–352

tinction that informs the fl urry of interest around these terms, between “technocratic” approaches and more “creative” (read: progressive) ones.38 Th is assumed distinction, which characterizes conventional calls for resilience, as well as many critiques of it, ignores the way in which technocracy and innovation tend to combine in the narratives that sup- port that approach to “recovery” that Carrigan identifi es as particularly toxic— the formation Naomi Klein has called “disaster capitalism.”39

Th e Radiance of Tomorrow illuminates the devastating eff ects of di- saster capitalism in the form of development “opportunities” that arrive in the wake of war. Th e novel relates the story of a group of villagers who, having been displaced by civil war, return to their village of Imperi to begin to rebuild their community. Th ings go relatively well at fi rst. Th e burial of the bones of the dead— initiated by the elders, who are fi rst to arrive back in the village— establishes the foundations for heal- ing the wounds of war (the returnees include both victims and their attackers, who must learn to live together) and cultivating hope for the future, which is solidifi ed by the establishment of a new school. Th e process of renewal falls apart with the resumption and enlargement of a rutile mine that had begun to be developed before the war. Controlled by corrupt corporate and government offi cials, the mine devastates the still- fragile economy, ecology, and social relationships of the village. A narrative that began with the sense of promise of a better future plays out in the stories of diverse characters grappling with ecological and social fragmentation, looking for new ways to get by. In short, Radiance of Tomorrow details the lives of people struggling to assert sovereignty over their land and to cultivate “habits of survival” in times of chron- ic devastation.40 Th ese habits highlight three critical but confounding elements of ecological— and specifi cally postcolonial— resilience not featured in the UN videos: the embeddedness of humans in a more- than- human world, the interplay between destruction or re- creation and memory, and the importance of self- organization.

Social- Ecological Resilience, or Being in Place

In contrast to the video in which residents of fl ood- prone Jakarta neighborhoods are exhorted to adapt by moving, Beah’s novel begins with a group of elders returning to the village of Imperi following years of exile during the war. Soon followed by others, they begin to rebuild,

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O’Brien: Resilience Stories 53

successfully at fi rst, then increasingly challenged by the expansion of the mine. Th e narrative dwells on the complex ties that connect people to their land in spite of its growing uninhabitability. It is worth pausing for a moment on this dynamic to consider how it both exemplifi es the concept of resilience and stretches it to a breaking point. In Beah’s nov- el, the characters are not habituated to a stable way of life that becomes threatened by a disaster. Th eir world is already shattered; their lives already disrupted. Th eir return to a devastated landscape conforms neither to the UN formula of smart choices nor to Evans and Reid’s heroic refusal; and yet their resilience, which they see as inextricably entangled with the resilience of the land, depends on the maintenance of their connections to place.

While Evans and Reid challenge the extension of resilience from the physical environment to human society, Beah’s novel, on the contrary, emphasizes deeper, more encompassing interconnections with the non- human world than even prevailing ideas of resilience recognize. Knowl- edge in the novel is indigenous not just in the anthropological sense increasingly recognized by the UN and other agencies but in a way that originates in the nonhuman world, where the earth itself possesses an intelligence.41 Oumu, a young girl in the novel, fi nds sustenance at a crit- ical moment by remembering the advice of the elder Mama Kadie: “Al- ways press your bare feet to the ground and listen to what the earth says and what it has to give you for the day. She always has something, but you have to listen to receive it.”42 In place of the values of self- suffi ciency, which are stressed in the UN videos, or autonomy, which Evans and Reid uphold, the novel promotes a vision of profound interdependence. Human and nonhuman elements operate in a relation of reciprocal in- fl uence, such that seasons, days, and corresponding variations in ani- mal behavior help to determine human activity, while human activity in turn conditions natural cycles. For example, the specifi c disruptions the mine introduces— including the pollution of the river, the generation of toxic dust, and the deaths of miners— precipitate broad and inexplicable changes throughout the land, including the disappearance of lightning and a confusion of night and day. When the rooster starts crowing at 9:00 p.m., the villagers know things are really bad.43

Th e entanglement of human and nonhuman worlds does not entail an evacuation of the political, as Evans and Reid warn. Complementing the ecological wisdom of the elders in the novel is the model of polit-

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Resilience Vol. 4, Nos. 2–354

ical agency embodied in the character of the colonel, a former soldier who mobilizes a group of young people to sabotage the mining com- pany’s equipment and enact revenge against irresponsible and ruthless offi cials. Th e narrator refl ects, “Some might say their methods were vi- olent. But what was more violent than making people disbelieve in the worth of their own lives?”44 Targeted acts of violence in the novel repre- sent a viable response to the more pervasive form of structural violence perpetrated by foreign mining interests and a corrupt state govern- ment. Political agency takes another form in the less prominent charac- ter of Ernest, a young man who, in the war, had the ominous nickname Sergeant Cutlass. It was as Sergeant Cutlass that he carried out orders to amputate the hands of captured victims, including a father and two children, whom he eventually follows back to the village. Th ough he never identifi es himself to them, they know who he is and accept the many small acts of kindness he directs their way, from chopping fi re- wood to delivering food, in an eff ort to make amends for the unfor- giveable act of brutality. He, along with his victims, demonstrates an extraordinary capacity to adapt to changed circumstances in a way that recognizes the principle of radical interdependence. Other villagers fol- low suit. When his amputated right hand makes Sila, newly arrived in the village, hesitant about how properly to greet people, elder Pa Kaine- si tells him, “Shake my hand with your left , and we should do so from now on, as this hand now has the responsibility of both. . . . Times have changed and so must certain traditions.”45

In its treatment of habits of survival, from political violence to social rituals, the novel advances a concept of resilience that is at once more radical and more conservative than that advanced by the UN or cri- tiqued by Evans and Reid. It is more radical in its acknowledgment that certain elements of the current system— entrenched forms of power, corrupt management, the dynamics of capitalism itself— must be dis- mantled if life is to thrive. But it is conservative in its insistence that human autonomy is subject to the social and natural world— a world that is itself dynamic, unstable, and characterized by diverse agencies and relations. Th is complexity challenges the conventional model of the human protagonist on which both the UN and Evans and Reid rely in their imagination of the future.

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O’Brien: Resilience Stories 55

Revolt and Remember

In its articulation of a complex interplay between human and nonhu- man worlds, the novel both confi rms and confounds the tidy social- ecological container of the dominant resilience model. Something sim- ilar happens with the novel’s representation of the temporality and scale of change. In contrast to the strategies of adaptation endorsed in the UN videos (genetically modifi ed crops, migration) and the model of wholesale, if abstract, transformation that Evans and Reid call for, Ra- diance of Tomorrow describes a more complex model of resilience in which processes of destruction and conservation operate in dynamic tension. Transformation is not primarily a matter of changing climate; nor is it located in the fi gure of human agency, the capacity that both the UN and Evans and Reid want in diff erent ways to cultivate. Rath- er, change arises through interactions that occur within and between diff erent scales of a system. Each scale operates according to its own temporal rhythm, cycling through periods of stability and processes of transformation— all of which are crucial to the overall adaptability of the system.

In stressing transformation, many proponents of resilience, includ- ing the UN, overlook the crucial tension in periods of instability be- tween the functions of what ecologist Carl Folke terms “revolt” and “remember.”46 While “revolt” refers to the cascading eff ects of a dis- turbance throughout a system, “remember” describes “the accumu- lated experience and history of the system, [which] provides context and sources for renewal, recombination, innovation, novelty and self- organization following disturbance.”47 Resilience thus requires diff eren- tial rates of change, with some parts of the system in relatively stable phases while others are undergoing reorganization. It also depends on memory. A postcolonial perspective on disaster understands the im- portance of this complex interplay, at the same time as it proceeds from the starting point of its historical disruption. Resilience requires long periods of relative stability within parts of the system in order to enable others to engage in processes of learning and adaptation. Th e speed and magnitude of change in Beah’s novel make this impossible.

Th us, the new disaster that befalls Imperi is not simply a matter of the violent nature of mining; it is a disaster of timing:

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Resilience Vol. 4, Nos. 2–356

If the elders had been asked, they would have advised the compa- ny to let Imperi become stable before beginning operations. But this wasn’t the case, and the presence of the mining company took the town and its people in a direction of “many crooked roads,” as the elders said soft ening the truth about the devastation that gradually became accepted as the only condition possible for the inhabitants.48

Th e degree of upheaval the village is undergoing confounds the tradi- tional maxim (and truism of resilience thinking) that “no condition is permanent.”49 Bockarie, the teacher, can’t take comfort from this idea, as he recognizes that “in this part of the country, the condition of their lives and the despair were bringing about changes in people that would become permanent even aft er the conditions that had brought them about had changed.”50 Th e speed and magnitude of the mining opera- tion does not just pollute the air and water and alter the culture of the village; it also embodies a slower, in Rob Nixon’s terms, more inexora- ble kind of violence in its disruption of the temporal cycles necessary for the village’s renewal.51

In resilience theory, complex systems possess signifi cant capacity to absorb disruption before reaching a threshold or limit, at which point the system collapses, turning into a diff erent, oft en less vibrant entity. In Beah’s novel it is the mining company’s destruction of the cemetery— long aft er its corruption of the water and the land— that marks a break- ing point for the people of Imperi. Th e location of a village depends on three crucial things: “a good source of water, good land for growing crops, and a suitable place for burying the dead.”52 On their return to the village, the fi rst task the elders set for themselves was to gather and bury the bones of war victims. Just as this act signifi ed the rebirth of Imperi, the mining company’s destruction of the cemetery heralded its destruction:

Th e blades of the machines dug into the graves, pulling out bod- ies, skulls, and some bones still wrapped in old cotton clothes; they were all deposited in a big hole the machines had dug.  .  .  . It seemed the sun had told the moon what it had seen, because the moon refused to come out that night. Th ere was a silence that made the dark last longer, longer than it had even during the war.53

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O’Brien: Resilience Stories 57

Shortly aft erward the whole village is relocated— a displacement more traumatic than that which caused the war. Th en, “you knew that no matter what, if you stayed alive, you would be able to return home and stand on your land. Now the land would be fl ooded; it would disap- pear.”54 Some characters move to the city; some of the elders die, ap- parently of grief. Others stay to bear witness to what has happened. It is diffi cult to know where, with whom, or with what to locate resilience in this narrative of change.

Suffering Agency, Self- Organization, and Storytelling

In the UN videos and Evans and Reid’s book, the concept of choice as- sumes crucial signifi cance. “Smart choices,” the videos suggest, can de- termine an individual’s ability to survive disaster. Evans and Reid are “categorically” committed to “the affi rmative potential of the autono- mous subject.”55 But circumstances oft en constrain the capacity of in- dividuals to make choices, even as neoliberalism demands that we bear total responsibility for our circumstances. In Beah’s novel the acciden- tal death of a sixteen- year- old boy by electrocution from a live electric wire in the dark is blamed on “carelessness. [Th e police] neglected to mention the fact that there had been no danger signs alerting the pres- ence of live wires, or that the wires should have been covered in the fi rst place.”56 Emphasizing the power of choice, for individuals, communi- ties, and even cities, risks ignoring the multiple and sometimes con- fl icting scales of authority that constrain action. Th e villagers’ appeal to the local chief for assistance is futile: “She  .  .  . had received her bribe” and works in service to the company now.57 While the novel condemns her corruption, it also portrays sympathetically many characters’ reluc- tant “choices” to work for the mining company, “their morals defeated by necessity.”58 Th ey are not helpless, but they are “tired,” to use Evans and Reid’s phrase (but without their mocking tone). Th ey have choices, but they are terrible ones, conferring on them a condition of what Jane Elliott calls “suff ering agency” that is the hallmark of living under neo- liberalism.59

In resilience ecology, renewal depends on “the degree to which [a system] is capable of self- organization (vs. lack of organization or orga- nization faced by external factors) and the degree to which the system

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Resilience Vol. 4, Nos. 2–358

can build and increase the capacity for learning and adaptation.”60 Th e UN videos place signifi cant emphasis on the capacity for learning and adaptation. Evans and Reid adopt a more politically engaged model of education in the form of critical pedagogy. Both (in diff erent ways) ac- knowledge the validity of local lived experience as a predicate for the necessary estrangement of learning. However, each draws on systems of thought (urban planning and development studies, critical theory) whose universalist prescriptions obscure their European Enlighten- ment roots.

Working from the premise that the most eff ective tools for self- organization and self- repair emerge from within specifi c ecosystems, what might it mean to count resilience narratives themselves among these tools?61 Th e ways in which Evans and Reid, the UN, and Beah each refl ect on the value of art and stories is instructive. For Evans and Reid, following Nietzche, life itself must become a work of art, “rejoicing in the fullness of an experience that embraces the poetic and the aesthet- ic.”62 Th e UN takes a more limited, conventional, and instrumental- ist approach to cultural expression, deploying stories as moral lessons whose geographical and cultural diversity dissolves in the presumption that the lessons are interchangeable. For example, deploying an increas- ingly common trope in which Europe’s others serve to embody a “goth- ic future” or “projected future inferior,” what is happening in Jakarta is represented by environmental scientist Anders Granlund as a preview of global climate change: “An awareness bell will ring here hopefully a little earlier and we can use that information for the rest of the world.”63 Leaving aside the lugubrious quality of this hope, the assumption of an easy transferability of lessons also ignores the context of representation. Language, as postcolonial writers and critics have long noted, is located “neither before the fact nor aft er the fact but in the fact,” and sharing requires a commitment to careful translation.64

Beah highlights the inseparability of language and environment in the preface, where he describes his struggle to approximate in English the meaning of phrases in his native Mende: “For example, in Mende, you wouldn’t say ‘night came suddenly’; you would say ‘the night rolled over and changed its sides.’”65 Language makes a diff erence, as the novel illustrates in the awkward translation for the elders of “geologists” as “those who speak to the earth to fi nd out what it chooses to give to the

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O’Brien: Resilience Stories 59

living.”66 Th e mistranslation is revealed as everyone sees that the geolo- gists aren’t listening.

Th e capacity to speak and to be heard— a capacity not restricted to humans— plays a fundamental role in resilience, Beah suggests. Bocka- rie’s determination to write down his observations on a restaurant nap- kin with a borrowed pen and his subsequent observation of a boy scrib- bling the alphabet in crayon on a car because, he tells the owner, “my father has no money to buy me a notebook,” highlight the vital impor- tance of self- expression as well as the material obstacles that constrain it.67 Th e plight of Imperi is compounded by the diffi culty of conveying the truth to the outside world against the propaganda of the mining company, whose brochures “were fi lled with colorful stories of commu- nity building, stories of new schools and libraries.”68 Th e situation ex- emplifi es the symbolic economy of globalization, in which personal ac- counts of living through disaster are pitted against state and corporate propaganda or fi ltered through dominant narrative forms of successful adaptation (the conventional resilience narrative) or principled resis- tance (the antiresilience narrative). One way of thinking about these subaltern accounts, exemplifi ed by Beah’s novel, is as compromised re- silience narratives.

Compromised- Resilience Narratives

In the nineteenth century, resilience emerged as a dominant theme in a host of novels, relating the stories of ordinary individuals overcoming seemingly insurmountable adversities on the path to self- realization.69 At a time of rapid change, along with diminishing religious faith, these narratives off ered reassurance that a combination of pluck, resource- fulness, and good fortune would ensure the successful navigation of an uncertain future. It is worth recalling this history, not in order to sanctify our more sophisticated contemporary understanding of resil- ience as a property of social- ecological systems, nor to support the re- jection of resilience as an ideological ruse masking pervasive structures of exploitation, but to understand it as a compelling narrative to think through in relation to our own, even more precarious, future.

I suggest that we read Ishmael Beah’s novel Th e Radiance of Tomor- row as a compromised- resilience narrative. It is compromised in a num-

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Resilience Vol. 4, Nos. 2–360

ber of diff erent ways: First and most obviously, the novel shows what it means for resilience to be compromised in the sense most familiar in medical discourse, in which an immune system, or health more gener- ally, is impaired “by disease, toxicity or injury.”70 Th e multiple onslaughts suff ered by humans and nonhumans in Beah’s novel has eroded their capacity to thrive; their resilience— and with it, the vision of their fu- ture prospects— is compromised. We can also think about compromise in another way. Th e word derives from the Latin com (“together”) and promittere (“to send forth,” “to foretell,” or “to assure beforehand”); more generally, promittere is a “declaration made about the future, about some act to be done or not done.”71 A compromise is an agreement on how to go forward that is reached by diff erent sides making concessions. If we stretch the meaning a bit, compromise describes a situation of inter- dependence in which the only way to go forward is through attentive engagement with and adaptation to the other elements, relations, and processes in a particular environment. Th ere is nothing pure about the “promise” in compromise; it is a mixed thing, an imperfectly negotiated pathway from a divided present to an uncertain future. Of course there is a signifi cant risk of idealizing this notion of compromise; it can be in- voked, as it oft en is in politics, in such a way as to conceal the radically unequal terms from which diff erent constituencies navigate the future. Whether compromise is seen as a good or a bad path to the future de- pends signifi cantly on where you are in the present.

Here it becomes crucial to understand the word compromised as applying both to resilience and narrative; in this novel the trajectory of overcoming— the one that, in simplifi ed form, drove the novels of Dickens and other nineteenth- century resilience stories— founders and struggles to fi nd new directions. Resilience narratives, past and pres- ent, have an air of truth about them. Whether it is understood in terms of providence, psychology, or ecology, resilience is oft en represented as something that unfolds in the natural course of things, facilitated with the tools of education and capacity building. In reality, the dynamics of postcolonial neoliberalism (with which those tools are deeply imbricat- ed) confound the life chances of myriad humans and nonhumans. It is hard under those circumstances not to see resilience as ideology at best and, at worst, as a conspiracy that blinds us to a truer path of resistance and revolution. Beah’s novel shows resilience to be neither ideology nor conspiracy. Like “the radiance of tomorrow,” belief in which the people

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O’Brien: Resilience Stories 61

of Imperi’s ancestors maintained was necessary to survive the struggles of today, resilience is a narrative, a collective fi ction of the possibility for surviving present and future disasters.72 As Th e Radiance of Tomor- row shows, it is a deeply compromised narrative, in its form and in the telling. Like the “many crooked roads” that have come to replace the familiar paths in Imperi, it is a necessary but insuffi cient condition for moving forward.73

About the Author Susie O’Brien is an associate professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, where her research and teaching focus on postcolonial and environmental literary and cultural studies. Her publications include arti- cles and coedited collections on slow and local food movements, scenario planning, risk and resilience, environmental futurity, and the temporality of globalization. She also coauthored, with Imre Szeman, Popular Culture: A User’s Guide, 4th ed. (Toronto, ON: Nelson, 2017). She is currently working on a monograph tentatively titled “Surprise! Th e Cultural Politics of Resilience.”

Notes 1. UN General Assembly, Resolution 66/28. 2. Zebrowski, “Governing the Network Society”; Walker and Cooper, “Genealogies of Re-

silience”; Neocleous, “Don’t Be Scared, Be Prepared”; Joseph, “Resilience as Embedded Neo- liberalism”; Evans and Reid, Resilient Life.

3. Carrigan, “Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies.” 4. Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow. 5. Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. 6. Giafrencesco, “Littérature de résilience?” 7. Giafrencesco, “Littérature de résilience?,” quoted in Cyrulnik, Whispering of Ghosts,

106. 8. Anthony, “Syndrome of the Psychologically Invulnerable Child”; Werner and Smith,

Vulnerable but Invincible; Masten, “Resilience in Developing Systems”; Ungar, “Social Ecol- ogies and their Contribution to Resilience”; Healey, “Cultural Resilience and Political Trans- formation in Bolivia.”

9. Folke, “Resilience.” 10. Gunderson, “Ecological and Human Community Resilience.” 11. UN Development Programme, “Human Development Report 2014.” 12. Harvey, New Imperialism, 144. 13. Holling, “Resilience and Stability”; Walker and Salt, Resilience Th inking, xiii. 14. Folke, “Resilience.” 15. Norris et al., “Community Resilience.” 16. “Jakarta.”

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Resilience Vol. 4, Nos. 2–362

17. “Jakarta.” 18. “FAO Building Resilience in Ethiopia.” 19. “FAO Building Resilience in Ethiopia.” 20. “FAO Building Resilience in Ethiopia,” emphasis in original. 21. See Walker and Cooper, “Genealogies of Resilience”; Zebrowski, “Governing the Net-

work Society”; Neocleous, “Don’t Be Scared, Be Prepared”; Joseph, “Resilience as Embedded Neoliberalism”; Evans and Reid, Resilient Life; Mackinnon and Derickson, “From Resilience to Resourcefulness.”

22. See O’Brien, “Edgework of the Clerk.” 23. Evans and Reid, Resilient Life, 2– 3. 24. “FAO Building Resilience in Ethiopia.” 25. Evans and Reid, Resilient Life, 78– 79. 26. Evans and Reid, Resilient Life, 162 27. Evans and Reid, Resilient Life, 37 28. Evans and Reid, Resilient Life, 163, 191. 29. Evans and Reid, Resilient Life, 191, 174. 30. Evans and Reid, Resilient Life, 178. 31. Evans and Reid, Resilient Life, 177. 32. In arguing for a productive interchange between postcolonialism and disaster stud-

ies, Carrigan makes the crucial point that the postcolonial perspective should not be treated “simply as another ‘dimension,’” but as “necessarily constitutive of ” disaster studies going for- ward (“Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies,” 122).

33. Carrigan, “Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies,” 126. 34. Carrigan, “Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies,” 191. 35. Carrigan, “Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies,” 123. 36. Carrigan, “Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies,” 121. 37. Dorothea Hilhorst and Greg Bankoff , “Mapping Vulnerability,” introduction to Map-

ping Vulnerability: Disasters, Development and People, ed. Susanna Hoff man and Anthony Oliver- Smith (London: Earthscan, 2004), 4, quoted in Carrigan, “Towards a Postcolonial Di- saster Studies,” 130.

38. Carrigan, “Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies,” 130. 39. Carrigan, “Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies,” 121; Klein, Shock Doctrine. Th e

technocracy- versus- creativity opposition also obfuscates the complexity of biopolitics, whereby technocratic apparatuses such as public health care don’t only serve not to regulate but may also play a role in fostering “social equality, justice and well- being” (Cheryl Lousley, e- mail comment to author, June 10, 2016). Recent work in literary and cultural studies on the ambivalent function of infrastructure and the social signifi cance of maintenance (versus innovation) serves helpfully to unravel the technocracy- versus- creativity myth. See Robbins, “Smell of Infrastructure”; Sahlins, “Infrastructuralism”; “Maintenance in Progress?,” Th e Maintainers, June 3, 2016, http://themaintainers.org/blog/.

40. Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow, 74. 41. UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, Indigenous Knowledge for Disaster

Risk Reduction. 42. Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow, 236.

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O’Brien: Resilience Stories 63

43. Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow, 93. 44. Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow, 92– 93. Rejecting the common wisdom that dictates that

former child soldiers must be helped to forget their experience, Beah, who as a teenager fought in the Sierra Leone war, argues that “certain skill sets and certain habits and certain things that you’ve acquired during war  .  .  . can be used for positive force” (Beah, “Former Child Soldier Imagines ‘Tomorrow’ in Sierra Leone.”

45. Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow, 45. 46. Folke, “Resilience,” 259. 47. Folke, “Resilience,” 259. 48. Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow, 76. 49. Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow, 61. 50. Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow, 61. 51. Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. 52. Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow, 112. 53. Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow, 162. 54. Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow, 164. 55. Evans and Reid, Resilient Life, 174. 56. Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow, 88. 57. Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow, 75. 58. Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow, 67. 59. Elliott, “Suff ering Agency.” 60. Folke, “Resilience,” 260– 61. 61. For a discussion of this principle in relation to Australian aboriginal place- thought,

see Rose, Reports from a Wild Country, 48– 51. 62. Evans and Reid, Resilient Life, 171. 63. Lousley, “‘Th ird World’ as Gothic Future”; Wenzel, “CO2 and the Coeval”; “Jakarta: A

City in Jeopardy.” 64. Ashcroft , Griffi ths, and Tiffi n, Empire Writes Back, 44. 65. Beah, “Author’s Note,” Radiance of Tomorrow, viii. 66. Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow, 160. 67. Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow, 203, 206. 68. Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow, 170, 163. 69. Gianfrancesco, “Une littérature de résilience?” 70. American Heritage Medical Dictionary, rev. ed., s.v. “compromised.” 71. Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. “promittere,” accessed May 25, 2017, http://www.ety-

monline.com/index.php. 72. Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow, 167. 73. Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow, 76.

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Resilience Vol. 4, Nos. 2–364

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