Ruins of the Future: On the Possibility of Life in the Aṭlāl

Abstract

This article explores two tales of future ruination from the collection Iraq+100 (2016): Diaa Jubaili’s ‘The Worker’ and Hassan Blasim’s ‘The Gardens of Babylon’. These stories, contained in what has been described as ‘the first anthology of science fiction to have emerged from Iraq’, imagine post-oil futures set in the ruins of Iraq’s petroleum industry. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has lamented the fact that the ‘driving beat’ of progress controls us ‘even in tales of ruination’. Here, I argue that reading ruins in these speculative stories anachronistically, through the pre-Islamic poetic tradition of the aṭlāl (which can be translated as ‘remains’ or ‘ruins’), disrupts the driving beat of progress to reveal heterogeneous temporalities and alternative histories. Whereas the poetics of the aṭlāl are traditionally associated with nostalgia, I trace how ruins in Iraq+100 induce states of ‘solastalgia’, a neologism coined by environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003 to describe the existential distress caused by environmental changes. I conclude that the aṭlāl topos is a renewable poetic and political resource which illuminates alternative rhythms of ruination through an ancestral narrative syntax and, when read in this anachronistic mode, exposes changing dynamics in the nature/culture dialectic across centuries.