Thinking with Crocodiles, Thinking Through Humans: Vulnerable, Entangled Selves in Lauren Beukes's Zoo City

Abstract

ABSTRACT Zoo City's (2010) author, Lauren Beukes, claims to have written her novel in response to widespread xenophobic attitudes towards refugees in South Africa. The frequent attacks made by crocodiles on these people as they attempt to enter the country by crossing the Limpopo River are a fitting, if gruesome, metaphor for such prejudice. Against this background, I read Zoo City's own crocodile as a central figure in Beukes's engagement with discourses of prejudice. The animal familiar of a murderous human, this crocodile is blatantly politicised. Anthropomorphising nonhuman animals, as Beukes does here, is generally criticised for perpetuating anthropocentric ways of looking at the world. However, I read Zoo City's crocodile in light of work carried out by scholars such as Neel Ahuja, Nandini Thiyagarajan, and Kari Weil, who suggest that this contested practice might yet be of value to wider efforts to combat prejudiced and hierarchical ways of thinking about others. Straddling the boundaries between human and nonhuman, predator and prey, Beukes's crocodile dramatises the extent to which humans and nonhumans are entangled with and connected to one another, not only through prejudiced language and imagery, but also through their shared vulnerability. Acknowledging such shared vulnerability is, I suggest, a good way for humans to begin to rethink themselves and their place in the world. Through her nonhuman animals, and in particular her crocodile, Beukes explores, then, the potential for human prejudice that has infiltrated the rest of the animal kingdom to be reappropriated as a tool for ethical progress. Indeed, if nonhumans are already present in the biopolitical fold on account of the human prejudice they bear, then they might just be able to help challenge, from the inside, the very human hierarchies of being on which prejudice is founded. This, I argue, is precisely the work performed by the complex figure of the crocodile in Beukes's Zoo City.