Green Planets (30 page)

The notion of the Karoo as a primeval landscape, a region that predates human beings and will in all likelihood continue to flourish long after humankind is eradicated from the planet, is articulated in Afrikaans writer Eben Venter's
Brouhaha
, a collection of essays and columns. Venter devises a strategy for living without cynicism in crime-ridden South Africa, what he calls “die land van melk en moorde” (the land of milk and murders). Thinking back to the sense of peace he experienced at a small café in Uniondale, he advises his (presumably white, beleaguered Afrikaans) readers: “With a Fanta in one hand, walk out onto the dusty step of the café and remember: Across those peaks of the Swartberg begins the Great Karoo, ashy and worn from age. There people have been living for as long as a person can remember and it is also yours, no matter what is said. And there you are allowed to go and live forth.”
¹⁸
Souvenir's version of the Karoo landscape, plagued by severe weather and strange, genetically modified creatures, may look vastly different from Venter's, but the sentiment that the Karoo can provide those who feel themselves beleaguered by a hostile dominant system with a safe haven of peace and acceptance remains the same.
Souvenir
, then, like many of the speculative works examined across
Green Planets
, suggests that a sense of self is ultimately (but not unproblematically) rooted in place. The Karoo belongs to Souvenir by virtue of her Aunt Jem's legacy of rosebushes and hedges. She is inscribed in the landscape through a shared history, a legacy.

Rosenthal's futuristic novel is comparable to other speculative South African texts such as Jenny Robson's
Savannah 2116
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in the sense that ecological disaster is used as a means of exploring human relationships, and particularly what it means to be different. Such emphasis on humanistic concerns through the lens of the popular
SF
trope of ecological crisis is not uncommon in South African speculative fiction. Because of the country's violent legacy of human rights violations, South African literature continues to be concerned with questions of alterity and belonging. That the effects of global warming and other ecological crises serve mainly as the backdrop for the human drama in Rosenthal's
Souvenir
does not detract from the ecological message of the novel, which both offers a
dire warning regarding the ecological fragility of our planet and speaks specifically to the impact that environmental decay will have on a South African future.

FAMILIAR ANIMALS: NEILL BLOMKAMP'S
DISTRICT 9

Like Rosenthal's
Souvenir
, Neill Blomkamp's
District 9
not only highlights the myriad forms of otherness through the introduction of an altered body or trickster figure, but also turns the gaze inward, exploring moments of self-awareness of alterity.
¹⁹
D
₉
explores productive imaginings of hybridity in the form of human/animal couplings that serve to destabilize hierarchized binary oppositions, challenging of the kind of anthropocentricism that serves as justification for the human population's continued dominion over our animal others.

Blomkamp uses conventional
SF
tropes to express anxieties regarding social, political, and economic uncertainty within a specifically South African context. South African audiences in particular (perhaps expecting the sterile glamour of a typical Hollywood production) may initially be struck by the gritty realism of the film's depiction of the bustling, dirty streets and shantytowns of Johannesburg, the commentary by unpolished local “actors,” and the authenticity of the various South African accents and languages. The film maintains a playful attempt at verisimilitude, presenting its “findings” and interviews in documentary style, juggling between polished, edited scenes and unsteady handheld footage, and even featuring a mock television news report in which real-life SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation) news anchor Mahendra Raghunath delivers an update on alien/human conflict. Only after the camera pans out to reveal a colossal spacecraft hovering over the familiar skyline of Johannesburg, and the audience is given its first glimpse of the ship's bizarre alien “prawns” (presumably named after the Parktown prawn, a cricketlike insect common to the Johannesburg area),
²⁰
is the very fantastic nature of the narrative is revealed.

For anyone familiar with the
SF
genre, and particularly the Hollywood-style “alien” film, such suspension of disbelief is not difficult. However, this acceptance of the alien presence takes on a different level of significance in
District 9
. Here, the alien is accepted not only as a terrifying, unnatural presence that threatens the lives of the heroic human characters, but as a protagonist with whom the audience gradually begins to sympathize. The audience's growing empathy with the plight of the “prawn” is due to the development of a relationship between the “trickster” protagonist, Wikus van der Merwe, and an alien individual known as Christopher Johnson. While heading up an Multi-National United operation
to vacate the alien population from District 9, Wikus is accidentally infected by an alien fluid (carefully collected by Christopher from discarded alien devices in order to power the abandoned prawn spacecraft), which causes him to gradually transform into a prawn. Driven by the promise of a reversal of this metamorphosis, Wikus undertakes to help Christopher regain the fluid from
MNU
headquarters.

It is at this juncture in the film, when Wikus and Christopher storm
MNU
headquarters with guns blazing and stumble across a torture chamber used to do medical experiments on alien individuals, that Andries Du Toit notes a radical shift in the way both Wikus and the audience respond to the prawn Christopher. He writes:

By now we are used to anthropomorphising “Christopher,” and we can see the horror and the pity—and the rage—that we imagine flowing through him as he looks at the ravaged body of his murdered kin. We can see that he would be entirely within his rights to smear Wikus then and there, and go his own way. But he runs across the passage to join him, and together they crouch behind a bulkhead, the room filling with smoke and the thunder of gunshots, firing madly round corners, covering each other as they dash down the passage. And suddenly we are watching a buddy movie…. There are many movies in which the aliens are good guys—but never aliens that look like this. Wikus has crossed over to the other side. And so have we.
²¹

Du Toit's suggestion that we can “imagine” the outrage Christopher Johnson experiences when he discovers
MNU
's gruesome laboratory implies that we can imagine Christopher's revulsion at the sight of such slaughter, because we can think ourselves into the situation. It is the same revulsion we experience when visiting similar sites of torture and captivity at Dachau or Auschwitz or, closer to home, Robben Island and Vorster Square. Despite the strangeness, the complete
alienness
of the prawns, the audience is called on to develop a sympathetic imagination, to
empathize
with the suffering of the extraterrestrial other.

Wikus van der Merwe's Kafkaesque metamorphosis, his process of becoming prawn, allows for some critical reflection on the ways in which the film's human characters, and particularly
MNU
employees, have treated nonhuman others. Wikus occupies a precarious interstitial position between being human and being prawn, thus taking on the role of the “trickster” and destabilizing distinctions between lawful and unlawful behavior and self and other. In the instant—for “a
just decision is always required
immediately
”
²²
—that Wikus decides to take up arms and fight alongside Christopher, he is responding to the call of the
wholly
other. This decision to act is made from a position of “undecidability,” which Jacques Derrida considers to be the condition for ethical responsibility and hospitality. Thus, Wikus's actions can be considered absolutely just and responsible.

Wikus's unique hybridity and his journey to reclaim his former life, set against the backdrop of a bizarre fictional landscape, also becomes the vehicle for Blomkamp's commentary on contemporary South Africa and its many social and political problems. The film also invokes the country's violent past, while simultaneously succeeding in situating South Africa in relation to a
global
future.

The title of the film clearly references District Six, a former residential area of Cape Town from which the apartheid government forcibly removed tens of thousands of citizens in the 1970s, immediately suggesting that
District 9
can be read as a response to South Africa's policy of institutionalized racism (apartheid) prior to 1994. Casting the alien refugees as representative of the millions of disadvantaged black South Africans who were oppressed by the tyrannical system of apartheid is not by any means a stretch of the imagination: these aliens live in an informal settlement on the outskirts of Johannesburg under the threat of forcible removal, speak a San-like “click” language, and are derogatorily referred to as “prawns” in the same way that offensive, racist terms were used to describe black South Africans in the past and, in some cases, even today.

If
District 9
is a reflection on South Africa's traumatic history of epistemic violence and oppression, it also allows for the imaginative rethinking of present-day concerns, particularly the issues of continued racialized discrimination and xenophobia in South Africa (the film was coincidentally released in the wake of a series of violent xenophobic attacks that spread across the country in 2008).
District 9
's precursor,
Alive in Joburg
, a 2005 science fiction short film directed by Blomkamp, likewise addresses the issue of xenophobia, with many of the “interviews” about the aliens now living in Johannesburg taken from authentic interviews with South African citizens about their feelings toward Zimbabwean refugees.

District 9
's seemingly insensitive treatment of Nigerian nationals is of particular interest in this regard. Blomkamp's depiction of Nigerians as ruthless criminals who exploit the aliens' weakness for tinned cat food in order to amass prawn weapons and technology has been dismissed as discriminatory and offensive by some, including Dora Akunyili, Nigeria's information minister, who requested that the film be banned from cinemas in Abuja. However, the film appears
to be lampooning the Nigerian-as-violent-criminal stereotype rather than reinforcing it—suggesting a certain level of self-awareness and ironic distance. The notion of trading cat food for advanced alien weaponry is clearly an exercise in reductio ad absurdum and can thus be seen as a
critique
of such negative stereotyping. In this regard, the film's position as Hollywood blockbuster must also be considered. It appears that Blomkamp is at once lampooning
and
buying into Hollywood's need for “recognizable” villains (mostly Russian, German, South African, or Nigerian). Such mimicking of the American action film, along with the film's neat Hollywood ending, is certainly problematic and threatens to undermine the sociopolitical impact of the film. However, informed viewers (and specifically a South African audience more sensitive to the nuances of the film) will be alerted to the element of playful critique at work here. Those viewers with little or no awareness of South African political history may walk away from the cinema thoroughly entertained, at the very least touched by the “human” drama that has unfolded on the screen.

As suggested earlier,
District 9
not only addresses past and present concerns of racial discrimination and oppression within South Africa, but also seeks to situate the country in relation to a global, technologically advanced future. The
SF
mode allows for the creation of a dystopic future world in which alien spacecraft and mechanical combat suits (presumably inspired by Japanese anime) are not out of place, and a militant corporation (
MNU
) can run amuck—a scenario that does not seem too unbelievable in view of increasing globalization, rapid technological advances, and the continued rise of the multinational corporation.

In addition to addressing questions of human injustice in the face of an uncertain future,
District 9
is concerned with human-animal conflict. Thus far, it has been suggested that the alien refugees can be read as representative of disempowered black South Africans. However, the film's use of the word “nonhuman” to describe the alien other,
²³
as well as the term “prawn,” also suggests a connection with the
animal
nonhuman (a notion that is strengthened by the a fact that the aliens' main source of nourishment is tinned cat food). In this sense, the torturing of captive prawns raises debates regarding the ethical treatment of animals used for medical experimentation. Once his metamorphosis is uncovered by his colleagues, Wikus is himself subjected to violent experimentation, forced to murder a hapless prawn in order to demonstrate his control over alien weapons. In this way, the boundaries between cold-blooded torture and “necessary” scientific experimentation are blurred. Similarly, human consumption of animal flesh is rendered morally suspect through Wikus's transformation.
As Wikus's body is composed of both human and alien flesh after his exposure to the alien liquid, the Nigerian gang's attempt to consume his alien arm then constitutes a kind of cannibalism.

Wikus is abruptly torn from his human self and forced to occupy the physical and psychological position of a prawn. Despite the violence of this transition, the film suggests that Wikus now occupies a productive and
just
space—and paradoxically a more
human(e)
space. As a human, Wikus is a one-dimensional caricature of the “idiot Afrikaner” or “van der Merwe,” but as a prawn he becomes the visual embodiment of the psychological and ethical processes associated with Deleuze and Guattari's “becoming-animal.”
²⁴
Wikus occupies the interstitial position of the cyborg or trickster and falls outside the category of “genuine” human, thus exposing its instability.