TY - JOUR
AU - Jylkka, Katja
AB - Finnish author Johanna Sinisalo’s work is often aligned with “weird fiction,” a genre that combines speculative fantasy with horror and includes the work of Jeff Vandermeer and China Mieville, among others. Her fiction tends to explore nonhuman lives and environmentalist issues, and Birdbrain (2008) is no exception. Indeed, this novel can also be usefully categorized as “cli-fi” since climate change catalyzes and intensifies the particularly posthuman questions raised in the text. Birdbrain tells the story of Heidi and Jyrki, a young Finnish couple on a long backpacking trip through Australia and New Zealand. Their relationship is relatively new and uncertain, even at the beginning of the hike, and the events of the novel test their bond. The novel is fragmented in style, composed of narrative sections that alternate between Heidi, Jyrki, passages from other texts, and unlabeled sections of narration. The novel’s plot and characters trouble the binaries of wilderness and civilization, human and nonhuman, and, in doing so, posit the relationship between humans and invasive species as not merely one of metaphor but one of ecological fact. In this article, I argue that Birdbrain uses a posthumanist mode of horror to figure humans themselves as an invasive species rather than as creatures that have transcended the laws of nature. To do so, I first sketch a small part of the history and discursive patterns of invasion biology and then show how Sinisalo’s novel explores the flawed ways that humans often envision themselves as somehow categorically different than nonhumans. I then place the novel in the context of other posthumanist ecohorror texts in order to demonstrate how Birdbrain uses its fragmented postmodern narration and themes from ecohorror, specifically to deconstruct that sense of human exceptionalism. An illustrative starting place in the history of invasive species is with the cane toad. In the 1930s, the cane toad was imported from South America to Australia to solve a problem in the country's growing sugarcane industry. The toads were intended to eat the beetles that were ravaging sugarcane crops; however, the giant toads ended up creating more problems than they solved. They reproduced rapidly, spread throughout Australia, lacked any controlling predators in their new home, as they are extremely poisonous, and, to add insult to injury, had no interest in eating the beetles. Decades later, Australia’s cane toad problem has reached such proportions that the Australian government has sometimes enlisted the help of average citizens to control the toads’ population through events such as Toad Day Out, a deceptively charming name for a day that rewards Queensland residents for collecting as many live toads as possible to be humanely killed by local scientists. Today, the cane toad is one of the most studied and most iconic invasive species in the world.1 Like many other invasive species, it has often been vilified and, like many others, its introduction to its new habitat was initially facilitated by humans. But the at-times extreme and emotional reactions to invasive species like the cane toad, as well as the ambiguity of which species are designated as “invasive” (not all non-native or introduced species are put in this category), suggests that at stake in the field of invasion biology are foundational ideas about where and how human and nonhuman animals “should” live.2 The study of invasive species—defining them, mapping their impact, and recommending policy for their management—began to cohere in the 1990s. However, only in recent years have scholars in and outside of this subdiscipline of ecology begun to rigorously question the nature of the discourse regarding “invasive species.” This field of study has often relied heavily on metaphor and figurative language to discuss the roles played by introduced species and those native to a given environment. Ecologists as well as social scientists have more recently expressed concerns that the use of various metaphors is not, in fact, value-neutral, and that depending on certain metaphors may impact the very composition of the discipline itself. Josef Keulartz and Cor van der Weele’s “Framing and Reframing Invasion Biology,” published in 2008, illustrates some of these concerns. Keulartz and van der Weele first discuss “how debates on bioinvasion tend to result in stalemates, which is at least partly due to the dominance of political metaphors that lead to polarization” (95). The use of explicitly political metaphors, such as “illegal alien” or “colonizer” to describe introduced species, encourages the application of human emotions and biases, which can be detrimental to scientific progress. Their article then presents a number of alternative metaphorical frameworks that rely less on dualisms, thereby offering other ways of working with invasive species that are potentially less inflammatory and anthropomorphizing. Keulartz and van der Weele’s concerns are well founded. When terms like “war,” “aliens,” and “invaders” are applied to introduced species, emotions run high and inhumane methods of eliminating them often follow. After all, one can only be “at war” with agential enemy combatants, not apolitical animals, which means that vehemence normally reserved for human “enemies” can become directed at nonnative nonhuman species. In other words, the discourse of human conflict, when applied to nonnative species management, confuses scientifically sound goals with the appeal of a familiar story. One of the other problems with these politically charged metaphors is that they create such powerful narratives that they can overwhelm other ways of talking about ecological relationships. The empire metaphor, for instance—invasive species as nonhuman agents of some anonymous animal empire eating and outcompeting indigenous species—has its usefulness, but its polarizing concepts can do more harm than good in helping us to better understand the processes of invasion biology.3 Susanna Lidstrom et al., in “Invasive Narratives and the Inverse of Slow Violence: Alien Species in Science and Society,” take a similar approach to Keulartz and van der Weele, arguing that certain metaphors can work to the detriment of the discipline. More specifically, they build on Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence,” the idea that certain kinds of environmental events defy easy, compelling storytelling, making the attraction of public attention to those events difficult. “However,” they write, “we wish to add to Nixon’s argument by drawing attention to the inverse of the representational bias he describes, namely the ways that ‘arresting stories’ about environmental change can also reduce complexity in unhelpful and even misleading ways, often exacerbating rather than solving the environmental ‘problems’ they seek to ameliorate” (Lidstrom et al. 3). A scientific narrative can be too successful in capturing the public imagination and prevent the spread of other, more complex, potentially more accurate ways of viewing the issue, and one of these “environmental problems” that Lidstrom et al. discuss is that of invasive species and how the imperial metaphor in particular encourages overly reductive ways of thinking. These issues of terminology affecting practice in the field are increasingly documented and understood, so why does invasion biology continue to struggle in defining its key terms?4 Part of the reason seems to be the powerful utility of these figurative relationships. The metaphorical relationship between invasive species and human culture is not unidirectional, going solely from the human realm to that of the nonhuman. In Keulartz and van der Weele’s work, they cite another invasive species scholar on the type of language that travels from the nonhuman realm to the human: “In her coverage of this controversy, Kim Todd recorded a typical comment from a city official: ‘How many of us are ‘invasive exotics’ who have taken root in San Francisco soil, have thrived and flourished here, and now contribute to the wonderful mix that constitutes present-day San Francisco?’” (99). Inverting the more common metaphor relating nonhuman invasive species and human immigrant populations, this city official invokes the ecological concept of the benefits of biodiversity to emphasize the benefits of human individuals moving to and thriving in new environments. Much of the discussion and research alluded to above are founded in the premise that some of the problems in nonnative species management would be solved if we could only find the “right” metaphor with which to talk about the field of invasion biology. Yet these studies take the same basic assumption for granted: that the relationship between invasive species and humans is one of metaphor. My aim in this article is to examine a work of fiction that does not make the same assumption and thus explores different perspectives on not only the concept of invasive species but on environmental practices as a whole. At times, Birdbrain works to set up a well-known dichotomy between intrepid human adventurer and untouched “virgin” nature. Heidi, in particular, feels adrift from her fellow humans during the hike and oppositional toward the nature that surrounds them. Her attitudes about that nature are heavily influenced by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which she picks up early in the trip at a cabin for some reading material. She narrates, “At some point I started to know that Joseph Conrad book off by heart. It whispers to me. I wondered whether the stillness on the face of the immensity looking at us two were meant as an appeal or as a menace. What were we who had strayed in here? Could we handle that dumb thing, or would it handle us? I felt how big, how confoundedly big, was that thing that couldn’t talk and perhaps was deaf as well. What was in there?” (Italics in original) (Sinisalo 17). This style of integrating appropriate quotes from Heart of Darkness into Heidi's narration becomes characteristic of her sections throughout the text. Furthermore, the voice and perspective of Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, make their way into Heidi’s own speech, not just in quotations but also in his ideas and ways of speaking. A little later in the novel, Heidi observes, “By now the rivulet is wide and deep, although through the brown water you can’t see quite how deep. To me it almost seems like the work of some malevolent magic. I can understand how the rivers flood in Ostrobothnia when the snow melts in the spring or during the monsoon season in tropical regions, but how a river can widen and deepen so dramatically twice a day is beyond my comprehension. It’s almost as though it’s breathing in horrifically slow motion” (38). This description echoes Marlow’s vision of wilderness; the river’s rising and falling as the slow-motion “breathing” of a giant creature conveys a sense of wild nature as a monstrous, malevolent being that is inherently opposed to humankind. The prevalence of these kinds of descriptions, largely in Heidi’s sections, encourages the reader to think that perhaps the text will echo not only the language but the themes of Heart of Darkness as well. Namely, these quotations and ways of describing humans and nature suggest that Birdbrain, like Heart of Darkness, will pit the human against an all-powerful and indifferent nature. Yet, for nature as a malevolent power to work in a Conradian way, there must be a shared sense among the characters of what that nature is, and that shared sense is absent in the novel. From the beginning of their hike, Jyrki is frustrated that they aren’t deeper in the wilderness already. In a section he narrates, he laments, “This is supposed to be the edge of the Southwest National Park. This was supposed to be almost in the Great Outback. Correct answer: this is nothing but a spruced-up, sanitized, middle-class playground” (14). This part of Australia, according to Jyrki, is “supposed” to be essentially untouched by humans; it is supposed to be “wilderness” in the problematic sense of the word as discussed by William Cronon in “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” In Cronon’s view, the “trouble” with wilderness is that it is often conceived of as a discrete category rather than a question of degree, an attitude that encourages an all-or-nothing approach to environmental protection. At this point in the novel, far from being threatened by the wilderness, as Heidi feels, Jyrki feels that they aren’t truly in “wilderness” at all. The subjective nature of defining “wilderness” is clear from Heidi’s descriptions of the same space: “My eyes automatically start scanning around for a cafe, a restaurant, an ice-cream stand, a souvenir shop. The only sign of civilization is an outdoor toilet cubicle hidden in the thicket” (13). To Heidi, the same space that Jyrki interprets as a “sanitized, middle-class playground” is undoubtedly wild and carries none of the familiar and reassuring signifiers of human civilization. For Jyrki, the area around them carries nothing but the markers of human influence, while Heidi sees the “outdoor toilet cubicle” as the solitary signal of human presence in an intimidatingly nonhuman context. These conflicting descriptions not only foreshadow the interpersonal conflict that dogs Heidi and Jyrki’s relationship throughout the novel, but they also open up the space to question what “wilderness” truly is and what place humans have in it. The sharp divide between how Heidi and Jyrki envision wilderness, and their relationship to it also extends to discussions of invasive species more specifically. As formerly colonized island nations, both Australia and New Zealand are particularly attuned to the effects that introduced species can have on their native ecosystems.5 In Tasmania, Heidi and Jyrki are halted in their day’s hike by a sign planted next to the trail along with a couple of heavy duty plastic scrubbers. Jyrki explains the significance of the sign and the scrubbers to Heidi: “‘The Europeans must have brought it here,’ says Jyrki, already kneeling by the water’s edge with a boot in one hand and a scrubber in the other. ‘Root rot. It’s some sort of fungus that kills local plants. At the moment it’s one of the most destructive plant diseases in the world; it threatens something like nine hundred species here alone. And that, of course, threatens animals as they lose their food and shelter. It spreads through mud and soil, so via car tyres and shoes, that sort of thing. We must be about to enter an uninfected area’” (81). Jyrki vigilantly complies with practices such as this, adamant that he not contribute to the degradation of a natural environment. Elsewhere in the text, he evangelizes about the damage that past generations of humans have inflicted on the environment, making morally equivalent what he calls the “active crimes” of species extermination and pollution and the “passive crimes” of ignorantly facilitating the spread of invasive species and contributing to atmospheric carbon dioxide (82). Heidi, on the other hand, upon hearing about the problem of the root rot, responds dismissively. “‘Is it really that important?’ Jyrki jumps to his feet, muddy water splashing around him, and looks at me as though I’d just suggested barbecuing a baby” (81–82). The two characters clearly have dramatically different attitudes toward wilderness and humans’ responsibility in the maintenance of ecosystems. Although Heidi and Jyrki’s expectations of wild space do differ, they share one essential characteristic: both of the hikers envision themselves as humans utterly and categorically distinct from the “nature” that surrounds them. Both Heidi and Jyrki’s vision of nature is one in which “wilderness” is always synonymous with “untouched by humans,” ignoring the fact that nature is always “touched” and shaped by agents, human and nonhuman. For all of Jyrki’s careful practices and environmentalist preaching to Heidi, his belief that humans are fundamentally distinct from their environment creates a harmful, all-or-nothing attitude toward wilderness preservation. As Cronon argues, the “trouble” with such a concept of wilderness is that it encourages Jyrki’s kind of absolutism regarding “untouched,” “virgin” nature. For instance, near Nelson Lakes in New Zealand, Jyrki looks around and narrates, “At last, a fleeting glimpse of something real” (86). Anything where the hand of humans can be perceived, even a pit toilet in the Australian backcountry, taints the space with “unreality” for him. If the world is divided into black and white, wilderness and civilization, then conservation of the nonhuman world is an uncompromising proposition and impossible to sustain. Birdbrain condemns Heidi and Jyrki’s shared idea of humanity’s distance from nonhuman nature, using elements of the horror genre and posthumanism to decenter the human perspective from a position of preeminence. As Christy Tidwell argues in “Monstrous Natures Within: Posthuman and New Materialist Ecohorror in Mira Grant’s Parasite,” ecohorror fictions of the twentieth century have been traditionally thought of as “revenge of nature” narratives, stories such as the 1975 film Jaws in which “nature enacts violence on humans in response to the damage caused by human behaviors” (538). Stacy Alaimo makes a similar point in “Discomforting Creatures: Monstrous Natures in Recent Films,” claiming that many modern monster movies “erect rigid distinctions between ‘man’ and nature,” using a monster figure to test those boundaries before reaffirming them by movie’s end (283). This final reaffirming of human/nonhuman boundaries is often marked, in the films Alaimo discusses, with the physical literal transcendence of the human, such as when the human characters of a film escape to safety in a helicopter. While such texts may often advance environmentalist causes or explore humanity’s relationship with nature in fruitful ways, their plots and their ability to produce “horror” only function through this boundary policing work. However, Tidwell points out that alternative ecohorror narratives exist, ones that, for instance, “challenge th[e] division of human and nonhuman, internal and external” or ones that show how “connections between species … are not inherently positive but may just as easily be harmful or dangerous” (539, 548). These types of ecohorror narratives draw implicitly on concepts from posthumanism, particularly as the term is defined by Alaimo. For Alaimo, posthumanism entails “imagining human corporeality as trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world” and “underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’” (Bodily Natures 2). Posthumanist ways of thinking can therefore introduce new forms of environmental justice by decentering the human and introducing other perspectives, reminding us that humans have more in common with other species than differences. Birdbrain, I argue, can be identified with this latter group of posthumanist ecohorror texts, ones that do not reaffirm the human/nonhuman boundary but instead derive fear and discomfort by eliminating that line. Sinisalo’s novel, also unlike more traditional ecohorror a la Jaws, leaves the transcendence of its human characters much more in doubt, throwing into question if there is truly a “victor” in the novel. The text establishes a clear pattern of using figurative language to encourage cross-species connections. Various human characters think or speak using human–nonhuman similes, from a brief thought such as describing cars as “like quick, scurrying beetles” to more extended examples (63). However, similes alone are not, perhaps, enough to classify the novel as “posthumanist” in its perspective. The novel’s use of metaphor, on the other hand, posits the relationship between human and nonhuman not as one of analogy, but one of identity. Metaphor eliminates the distance of “like” between the human and the nonhuman. Metaphor allows the text to frame humans and their actions in nonhuman terms. At one point in their hike, Heidi and Jyrki grudgingly share a cabin with a “hen” or bachelorette party. According to both of the couple’s narrations, the women involved are loud and inconsiderate of the clutter and noise they are producing; they have not even left a single bunk available for Heidi and Jyrki to share, forcing them to sleep on the floor. Increasingly irked as the night goes on, a thought occurs to Heidi when she steps outside to go to the bathroom. Having recently heard about keas, a native parrot species that are said to be keenly intelligent and mischievous, Heidi thinks: The keas. The keas, those mean, intelligent birds. The hen party’s things were on the veranda, to the left of the door. I knew this because the girls had been going in and out all night to collect various things, to go to the toilet, and on their way tying their shoes or rummaging in their bags right over there. Now I had a beak. Now I had claws. I ruffled my feathers in the night air and the pale golden moonlight shining across the glens. My wings fluttered for a moment before closing shut in a quiver. (107) Identifying as a kea the entire time, Heidi takes quiet revenge on the women, tossing their belongings around and removing their shoelaces from their boots and hiding them. Describing her actions as those of a kea seems to allow Heidi to both identify with nature and avoid feelings of guilt and responsibility for her vengeful behavior. Moments such as Heidi’s adoption of a kea identity to wreak havoc on the bachelorette party’s belongings might seem to suggest that this novel, like many others, is using the kea’s intelligence as a way to show a metaphorical kinship between humans and a form of nonhuman animal. However, the text’s use of a fragmented narrative perspective both extends and literalizes the metaphor. Although much of the novel consists of the alternating (and clearly labeled) sections narrated by Heidi or Jyrki, there are other texts and narrators throughout Birdbrain. There are the passages quoted from Heart of Darkness, usually labeled as such and written in italics. There are also sections narrated from the point of view of an initially unidentified character. These sections often discuss scenes of urban life and are filled with descriptions of violent, mischievous, and anti-social acts the narrator and their friends commit. Lastly, there are labeled pages purportedly excerpted from issues of a periodical called National History Digest, which explains the biology and habits of the kea. From an issue marked March 2006, the text reads: “The kea belong to a group of animal species that can well be compared to humans, inasmuch as its ability to adapt to changing conditions, such as the diminishing of their living environment or the arrival of new sources of nutrition, is both fast and exceptionally efficient. The kea’s resilience as a species is based on its resourcefulness and opportunism, qualities which some researchers now believe can no longer be considered simply instinctual actions” (109). These sort of descriptions of the kea create parallels between the bird and the human by suggesting that both have evolved beyond a purely instinctual life. The unlabeled narrations further invite the reader to see the connections between kea and human as more than symbolic. Although these italicized sections are unlabeled and therefore the narrator is technically unidentified, clues in the narrative allow the reader to confidently posit that the narrator of those sections is Heidi’s younger brother, Jesse. One of these unlabeled sections, fairly early on in the novel, comes immediately after Jyrki describes meeting Jesse for the first time and telling him about their upcoming backpacking trip to Australia. In the unlabeled narration that follows, the speaker relates, “It’s a while yet till the sun stain comes, and it makes me think of those two twats traipsing about in the back of fucking beyond in some fucking part of Aus-fucking-tralia. That’s where the sun is now, shining down on ‘em, koalas and kangaroos all around. That’s where they’ll be, frazzling their skin. The Princess and the fucking Peahead. What the hell are they trying to prove?” (52–53). The clearly antagonistic encounter between Jesse, Heidi, and Jyrki followed by this angry portion of narration, in combination with certain descriptions of her brother from Heidi’s perspective, are enough to identify the italicized portions as narrated by Jesse. Jesse’s anger is by no means confined to his sister and her new boyfriend. The novel presents him as antisocial and someone who enjoys causing pain and distress in others. Spoiled and with no need to work, he scams his wealthy father for money and spends his days with his equally malevolent friends, coming up with tricks to play on people. These schemes are sometimes hard to decipher from Jesse’s narration, as he describes them somewhat abstractly. For instance, the day that he and his friends stand on a highway overpass and throw rocks at the windshields of the cars driving below them, he first describes the sight as, “There they are, in a line down below. Like quick, scurrying beetles” (62). In the next paragraph, he begins to describe how he enjoys the sight of the drivers’ faces as they panic and try to figure out what has happened. Elsewhere in the text, Jesse explains in part why he feels compelled to do such things. He describes how people feel compelled to key a line of cars parked by the side of the road or graffiti their name on a wall: “They just want to leave their mark on the world” (86). The novel presents Jesse as utterly unsympathetic—his actions are so cruel as to make identification with him extremely difficult—yet his reasoning frames his decisions as deeply human in nature. Whenever I teach this novel, my students usually feel confident by the middle of the book that the italicized portions are Jesse’s, given the evidence above. However, the final few of those sections in the text trouble that conclusion. In one of those sections, Jesse and his friends seem to be planning their most horrific prank yet—dousing a homeless man on the street with gasoline and setting him on fire. Amidst these last narrative sections is another excerpt from the National History Digest, which ends by saying, “In any case, it seems clear that the arrival of the Europeans and their sheep provided the kea with a new, plentiful food source, the extensive use of which attests to a certain parallel between keas and humans: when there is plenty of food and obtaining it is relatively simple, the very act of hunting can become a pastime in its own right” (205). Shortly afterward, in the last sections of the text narrated by Heidi and Jyrki, the reader learns that their lighter has gone missing and, not long afterward, the pair crests a ridge to a horrifying sight: they are surrounded by flames; the whole forest around them is on fire. Were it not for Heidi writing their name in the last logbook they passed, the helicopter that lifts them to safety would never have been able to find them. The penultimate page consists of one of the italicized, unlabeled sections, so the reader might assume they are witnessing Jesse’s reaction to lighting the homeless man on fire. The narrator relates: I can see flames and hear a hoarse shrieking, voices ringing with mortal fear and panic - and with good reason, because everything in sight is ablaze. My heart’s pounding, almost bursting, because this is exactly what I wanted. For a moment it feels as though I’m dreaming, just about to wake up, but I shake the thought from my mind because this is good. And then I’m in the air; with a few beats of my wings I rise up higher and look down at the two of them staggering around, their heads bowed, caps covering their mouths as they stumble forwards, tripping over the scrub, their legs taut as they run, crouched low so that the blades whirring above don’t take off their scalps. The metallic bee shoots upwards, swaying, the flames almost singeing its iron legs. There’s fire all around. Hot, cleansing fire. Black, fertile soot. A moment ago it was still in these claws, the color of sunset, small and smooth - and, now, behold. I swoop lazily, buoyed in a jet of hot air, and look down at the mark I’ve left on the world. (216) In some ways, this could be Jesse speaking—his exhilaration at the “mortal fear and panic” of others, the references to the “cleansing” properties of fire—but in others, it seems to be coming from someone else—the references to the “beats of my wings” and “these claws,” for instance. Given all of the novel’s hints about the keas’ intelligence and suggestions that something is following or hunting Heidi and Jyrki, this last section should be read as from the point of view of a kea. Earlier in the novel, Jyrki had mocked Heidi for ascribing too much intelligence and capacity for emotion to nonhuman animals, saying that only fools would believe in a Disney-fied version of animal life that gave them “good” and “evil” character traits (90). Considering this to be the kea’s narration, however, troubles Jyrki’s assessment. This kea appears to have very strong emotions and its motivations seem to be the same as those of some humans. It seems to derive pleasure from the fear and pain of others and, most significantly, it derives personal meaning from leaving its “mark” on the world, just as Jesse does. This last section of the novel shows the artificiality of human–nonhuman distinctions and communicates the idea that nonhumans can have the same motivations as humans: ego, emotion, and drives that have little to do with pure survival. In more traditional ecohorror narratives, humanity’s triumph over adversity (and the nonhuman) is often, according to Stacy Alaimo, accompanied by a literal ascendence into space. Alaimo writes that, particularly in film, “The preferable vehicle for escape is the helicopter, which is able to fly straight up … Helicopters, the quintessential symbol of transcendence, come into view at eye level, linking our superior vision to our technological advances and rendering nature a pleasant background” (284). A version of this plot device occurs in Birdbrain as well, yanking Heidi and Jyrki to safety before they are consumed by the (what they believe to be “natural”) wildfire. However, I argue that the triumph ordinarily denoted by the helicopter escape is undercut by this last narration by the kea. First, the couple remains ignorant of the fact that they have been hunted and successfully evicted from the forest by a bird, so the text lacks the sense of victory over the nonhuman that Alaimo finds in her objects of study. But second and more importantly, the physical transcendence of the two humans in the helicopter is paralleled and, therefore, nullified in a sense by the kea’s own flight upward. The kea watches the helicopter (or, as it calls it, the “metallic bee”) and flies with it, “buoyed by a jet of hot air” (216). In other words, while traditional ecohorror texts have been critiqued by Alaimo and others for the ways that they use monstrosity to reinforce the boundaries between the human and nonhuman, Birdbrain offers no such consolation. Yes, the humans escape upward at the end of the novel, but the kea is mobile in the same ways and holds the world around it in the same powerful gaze. The kea’s actions and narration of those actions offer much to decenter the human and little to concretely answer the questions posed by the novel. There is little sense of a “victor,” in a traditional horror movie sense. The bird succeeds in removing the humans it dislikes and in having a marked effect on its habitat, but it does so anonymously, perhaps leaving the “lesson” unlearned. The kea’s unclear motivations in driving Heidi and Jyrki out of its environment, whether based in a hatred of the humans or simply a desire to create pain and suffering, certainly blurs the line between humans and nonhumans. And in drawing parallels between Jesse and the kea, the novel asks but doesn’t answer the question of what it means to characterize behaviors as typically “human.” Sinisalo’s novel uses this mode of posthumanist horror to expand the debate around “invasive species” to include Homo sapiens, which it normally does not. Discussions of invasive species in the scientific and ecological communities tend to focus on the strengths and weaknesses of various management strategies, while work in the social sciences and humanities has incorporated questions of how certain metaphors and ways of speaking about invasive species affect those management strategies. However, very little discussion in any of these fields has been devoted to what might happen if we were to include humans in these debates. Part of the reason for this silence is that considering ourselves as “invasive” in an ecological sense seems almost unthinkable. Where are humans “meant” to be? What is our “native” habitat? On the continent where the species originated? In the city habitats we have created for ourselves? By introducing the nonhuman perspective, the novel makes those questions thinkable—but no more comfortable—in ways they were not before. The novel further encourages considering the human as invasive species through the ways in which its characters discuss the concept. Throughout the text, Jyrki lectures Heidi about mitigating their impact on the environment and helping to stop the spread of nonnative species, unwilling to imagine himself as an individual of the most “invasive” species of all. During one of many conversations the pair have about leaving human food products in wild spaces, Jyrki narrates: We have a responsibility to take care of our environment. Of course, any animal will eat something that tastes good and that it instinctively senses will give it sustenance. But animals can end up being poisoned. Animals can become ill just from the quantity of salt in some foods. Animals can react in unexpected ways to different food additives. Animals can develop behavioral anomalies. I tell her about seagulls, crows and rats. No animal in this world is as unpleasant as one forcing its way outside its natural environment, feeding itself off human waste like a parasite. A creature eating only rubbish saturated in additives with no nutritional value will change its form and forget all about its evolution and its ecological niche. (188) Of course, Jyrki is not thinking about humans when he asserts that “no animal in this world is as unpleasant as one forcing its way outside its natural environment,” but the novel clearly suggests a connection to humans. This sentence implicitly critiques any approach that treats humans as somehow distinct and transcendent from evolution and ecology. The novel certainly imagines the pair’s hike as an example of creatures forcing themselves out of their “natural” environment. Jyrki is constantly disappointed when he sees signs of other humans on their trip as those signs indicate that they have not yet reached “real” nature. Yet he does not think about how his own presence in those spaces will “contaminate” them in the same way he detests when other humans do so. The irony of Jyrki’s lectures works as one of the novel’s strategies for complicating the reader’s expectations of invasive species management and environmentalism more broadly. The novel’s criticism of Jyrki, implied through his hypocritical posturing, is also a criticism of the assumption that humans have grown beyond their position as only one of many species on this planet. The addition of the kea’s narrative perspective makes explicit the questions of native and nonnative species that are present, but not explicit, in Jyrki and Heidi’s narrations. The kea is quite literally a native species that sees a nonnative species—humans—as a threat or an annoyance. The fragmentation of narrative perspective and posthumanist blurring of the line between human and nonhuman life allow the novel to ask uncomfortable questions about how deeply entrenched anthropocentrism is in modern ecological thought. Jyrki is undeniably an environmentalist, conscious of the repercussions that his actions have on the natural world, yet the way that he envisions himself as separate from that nature goes completely unexamined by him. The ideas brought to the fore by Sinisalo’s text also illuminate the dilemmas of the cane toad and many creatures like it. Invasion biology, unlike many fields of science, is explicitly and purposefully centered around human interest. A species is not deemed “invasive” until it “causes or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to human health” (“What Is An Invasive Species?”). The novel reminds the reader of the deep and foundational anthropocentrism of invasion biology as a field of study and pushes that reminder to its most discomforting extremes. The concept of humans not as symbolically linked to the concept of invasive species but as literally categorized as a species that has spread beyond its natural environment, causing harm to other species and spaces as it goes, is the ultimate source of horror for the novel. Footnotes 1 Time Magazine listed the cane toad in its “Top 10 Invasive Species” in a 2010 article (Friedman). 2 This article will largely use the phrase “invasive species,” although alternative terms exist. “Invasive species” is the most common usage despite problematic connotations. 3 In response to this specific metaphor, for example, some scholars have critiqued the simplicity of the colonizer/colonized dualism and sought alternatives to it. Nicholas J. Reo and Laura A. Ogden have worked with members of the Anishnaabe in Michigan to learn more about how indigenous people of a certain culture understand and deal with nonnative species. Reo and Ogden conclude, “According to Anishnaabe teachings, culpability lies in ‘invasive’ ideologies rather than the fault of specific animals or plants” (5). That is, many of the Anishnaabe interviewed for the study found the very concept of “invasion” harmful, rather than the actual spread of certain species. 4 An article from fifteen years ago, published in 2004, made the call for a “neutral terminology to define ‘invasive’ species” in light of the “lack of consensus” caused by the pervasive use of nonscientific terms (Robert and MacIsaac 135). The call has apparently gone largely unheeded as the current Wikipedia page for “Glossary of invasion biology terms” lists all of the following as synonyms: alien species, exotic species, introduced species, nonindigenous species, foreign species, and nonnative species. 5 The example of the cane toad that began this article demonstrates how the impact of invasive species can be magnified in the case of island habitats such as Australia. Works Cited Alaimo Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self . Bloomington, IN : Indiana UP , 2010 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Alaimo Stacy. “Discomforting Creatures: Monstrous Natures in Recent Films,” Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Eds. Armbruster Karla and Wallace Kathleen . Charlottesville, VA : University Press of Virginia , 2001 . 279 – 95 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Colautti Robert I. MacIsaac Hugh J. . “ A Neutral Terminology to Define ‘Invasive’ Species .” Diversity and Distributions 10 ( 2004 ): 135 – 41 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Conrad Joseph Goonetilleke D. C. R. A. . Heart of Darkness . Peterborough, ON : Broadview , 1999 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Cronon William. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature . New York : W. W. Norton & Co ., 1995 . 69 – 90 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Friedman Megan. “Top 10 Invasive Species.” TIME, 2 Feb. 2010 , content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1958657_1958656_1958331,00.html “Glossary of invasion biology terms.” Wikipedia, 4 Apr. 2018 , en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_invasion_biology_terms Keulartz Josef van der Weele Cor , “ Framing and Reframing Invasion Biology .” Configurations 16 . 1 ( 2008 ): 93 – 115 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Lidstrom Susanna et al. “ Invasive Narratives and the Inverse of Slow Violence: Alien Species in Science and Society .” Environmental Humanities 7 . 1 ( 2016 ): 1 – 40 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Reo Nicholas J. Ogden Laura A. . “ Anishnaabe Aki: An Indigenous Perspective on the Global Threat of Invasive Species .” Sustainability Science 13 ( 2018 ): 1443 – 52 . Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Sinisalo Johanna. Birdbrain . Chicago : Peter Owen Publishers , 2008 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Tidwell Christy. “ Monstrous Natures Within: Posthuman and New Materialist Ecohorror in Mira Grant’s Parasite .” ISLE 21 . 3 (Summer 2014 ): 538 – 49 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat “What Is An Invasive Species?” National Invasive Species Information Center, 24 May 2016 , www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/whatis.shtml © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Invasive Humans and Posthumanist Horror in Johanna Sinisalo’s Birdbrain
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isaa083
DA - 2020-09-15
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/invasive-humans-and-posthumanist-horror-in-johanna-sinisalo-s-VfFb43bXPL
SP - 1254
EP - 1268
VL - 28
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -