The red leaf on the left is covered with iron ore dust, the leaf on the right has been cleaned. When plants are covered with dust they can no longer photosythesise, meaning they slowly die, taking with them the culture and societies that depend on them. Photo by Sean Kerins, used with permission. Kerins writes: “The photo was “taken at Bing Bong in the Gulf of Carpentaria. It’s the loading facility for both McArthur River Mine and Western desert resources. They only operated for 18 months… until iron ore prices dropped. They promised much and delivered next to nothing.”
The bang of a gun. The swish of a knife. The landing of a punch. The thud of a stone. Violence is often considered short, sharp and sudden. The consequences immediately obvious.
Not always, not now.
Rob Nixon conceptualises slow violence.[1] Slow violence is severe injustice that plays out over long periods of time. It is perpetrated by strong groups against weaker, smaller, less powerful, often Indigenous groups. It is perpetrated in the name of development. It often leads to displacement, physical impairment, illness or death. The consequences of slow violence are dispersed across time and space: its injuries can take months, years or decades to manifest or heal, the injuries can spread across entire communities, countries and regions.
The reality of slow violence is often one of having roots – both literal and figurative – poisoned by more powerful groups. Slow violence is the degradation and destructions of the foundations of societies: the environment and culture on which they depend. Like the roots of a tree, changes to these societal foundations are rendered imperceptible: geographic space and scale, the actions of powerful groups and temporal dispersion acting as a cruel, suffocating, nutrient-depleted, contaminated soil.
Thus, the consequences of slow violence lack the newsworthy imagery of a natural disaster, massacre or bomb. The consequences cannot easily be pasted cross a front page or lamented in a 120 character tweet.
Slow violence is perpetrated all over the world. Consider the pacific island-state slowly being engulfed by the rising seas caused by over-exploitation of fossil fuels. How is such an act of mass displacement to be photographed? Similarly, when the water resources or forests that have sustained your community and culture for generations are poisoned by a corporation in search of oil, how can you explain the loss and pain when the corporation champions that it has provided you with a “job”? This is a question that confronts Indigenous groups from Saudi Arabia to Nigeria and Alberta.
How do you prove the connection between your child’s physical disability and the depleted uranium bombs that were dropped near your home during the supposedly “clean” Gulf War over 20 years ago or the contaminated water and gas leaks from industrial facilities near your home in Bhopal, India? Once a dam wall has been built, your former home flooded in the name of national development, could the image of a supposedly serene lake illustrate the pain that has been inflicted on you and your community?
As well as providing striking and insightful socio-politico-historical background to these, and other, acts of violence, a central question of Nixon’s 2011 exploration of slow violence is: how can activists effectively draw attention to these issues, which lack a striking visual appeal, in the age of the 24-hour news cycle?
Nixon champions the writer-activist as a means to draw attention to these injustices. For each injustice he explores, he provides one or several major pieces of literature, both fictional and non-fictional, that bring the instance of slow violence into the public eye. Through critical and balanced discussion of the texts and their popular and critical reception, Nixon concludes that the writer-activist plays an indispensable role in exposing gross incidents of slow violence. “Writer-activists can help us apprehend threats imaginatively that remain imperceptible to the senses… [their] narrative imaginings… may thus offer us a different kind of witnessing: of sights unseen” (Nixon 2011, p. 15).
Texts act as a voice which overcomes the silence imparted on communities by the geographic and temporal dispersion of slow violence. This is part of the diagnosis and healing processes associated with slow violence, according to Nixon. Texts can act as grassroots activism, from those who are having their roots severed.
In Australia, Indigenous people continue to have their social, cultural and spiritual roots severed in gross acts of slow violence. Particularly applicable to Nixon’s conception of slow violence is the mining of sacred lands by corporations in search of commodities and big money. These corporations are destroying sacred sites, Country and culture in the name of “economic development”. Yet, Nixon mentions only in passing the plight of Australia’s first peoples.
Jane Bardon’s recent expose on the environmental catastrophe at the McArthur River mine in the Northern Territory confirms just one instance of the violence perpetrated by big business and governments against Australia’s indigenous peoples. The zinc, lead and copper mine has been allowed to continue to operate despite numerous unresolved waste and contamination issues that affect large tracts of sacred land.
As their water, food resources and land are poisoned, as their sacred sites are destroyed, Indigenous people, too, are being assaulted. Australian Indigenous people do not distinguish between nature, culture and humans. Rather, they are an integrated whole. An assault on what Europeans would term “the environment” is an assault on all Indigenous people. Jack Green, a Garawa elder who is fighting for the land and people at McArthur River, is quoted in Bardon’s text to illustrate this connection: “The hole [the mine] was hurting me a lot. It’s part of that old rainbow [a sacred site]. A lot of old people that were fighting for it; they’re all gone now.” He has presented this message to several audiences in the nation’s capital, yet few who are geographically and culturally removed from the injustice seem to be taking note.
The violence Green is fighting against is slow because it began years ago and will, in all likelihood, continue for years to come. It is slow because all the pain as it accumulates, as it is suffered by those affected, cannot be photographed. Bardon’s report reveals that the Garawa People are fighting back. But slow violence is hard to combat in the face of geographic isolation, temporal dispersion, economic rhetoric and developmental imperatives.
Bardon’s report is far briefer than the texts Nixon considers as writer-activism, which include novels and sets of extended essays. In addition, Bardon, hailing from Scotland, is not the ideal writer-activist for this cause; she is not one of the Indigenous people affected.[2] Structural inequalities, such as lack of access to education, and discriminatory biases in society mean that it is hard for Indigenous people to have their own voice heard, no matter how well they tell their story. Indeed, Nixon’s book fails to acknowledge that Peoples with strong oral traditions may not be inclined to pursue writer-activism to the same degree as those from traditions where writing is commonplace. For Indigenous Australians, non-written forms of storytelling and activism are also possible means to expose slow violence.[3]
Yet, the audience to whom slow violence must be exposed is also important. Regrettably, in order to halt the progress of the McArthur River mine’s violence, a predominantly non-Indigenous (white, European, upper-class, male) population must come to understand the slow violence. This is the audience that owns the mine, this is the audience that runs the nation, this is the audience who holds the majority of the votes. This is the audience, due to existing structural inequalities, with the power.
In this context, Bardon’s work is of utmost importance as a strong attempt to effectively and powerfully portray the plight of the people and land affected to an audience unfamiliar with and often suspicious of non-written activism and storytelling. Until we become more open to other forms of activism, writer-activism remains a powerful tool, as Nixon argues. However, we must also work towards removing the structural inequalities that allow slow violence to be perpetrated in the first place. Only by addressing both the invisibility of slow violence and the roots of injustice, can we, as a society, hope to heal the wounds inflicted by slow violence.
The potential remains for writer-activists to more fully expose and fight the slow violence being perpetrated against the Australian Indigenous peoples. The potential remains for such writing to be more effective in remedying the slow violence. Indigenous people’s voices, their stories, written in ways that reflect their culture and traditions, are powerful tools; it is up to us to read, listen, respond and change. This potential is repeated in many areas of Australia where environmental injustice threatens the lives, livelihoods and cultures of Indigenous groups. Rob Nixon eloquently persuades his readers of these potentials in his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. In the Australian context, the consequences of his findings are only just beginning to manifest.
Violence is slow: The cursorily accepted development application. The bodged environmental impact assessment. The bush clearing. The waste dumps. The poisoned water. The inadequate compensation. The hospitalisations. The economic rhetoric. All this has led to poisoned cultural roots and degraded social foundations. Writing has helped us understand that exploiting environmental resources can be deeply violent.
Bibliography
[1] Rob Nixon, 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 370 pages.
[2] While this article is by no means attempting to be a piece of writer-activism in itself, I recognise that I, too, am a white, settler Australian with no Indigenous heritage or connections and am therefore fundamentally limited in my ability to speak about or for Indigenous people. I acknowledge the aspects of Indigeneity that are unique and special to Indigenous people and welcome feedback if there are errors in this piece.
[3] While Jack Green has collaborated with academics to publish a book chapter in a notably non-academic style, this is related to a different issue and published in a book intended for an academic audience rather than a political or public one. The chapter is a good example of how non-Indigenous people can act as allies for Indigenous people, allowing them to pursue writer-activism in a way that balances stylistic preferences, factual considerations and audience engagement. See: Jack Green and Jimmy Morrison, facilitated by Seán Kerins, 2012. No more yardin’ us up like cattle, in People on Country: Vital Landscapes Indigenous Futures, edited by Jon Altman and Seán Kerins, The Federation Press, Leichhardt, New South Wales.