Our adventures with Haraway continued today with the "Camille stories" which wrap up Staying with the Trouble. These stories, developed by Haraway at a workshop in France with two partners, imagine the next 400 years of human life through a series of remarkable reimaginings of how humans should live. In response to environmental degradation, the story begins in 2020 with small communities (300 or so) who seek out devastated landscapes and commit themselves to rehabilitating them.
None of the Communities of Compost [as they were known] could imagine that they inhabited or moved to “empty land.” Such still powerful, destructive fictions of settler colonialism and religious revivalism, secular or not, were fiercely resisted. The Communities of Compost worked and played hard to understand how to inherit the layers upon layers of living and dying that infuse every place and every corridor. Unlike inhabitants in many other utopian movements, stories, or literatures in the history of the earth, the Children of Compost knew they could not deceive themselves that they could start from scratch. Precisely the opposite insight moved them; they asked and responded to the question of how to live in the ruins that were still inhabited, with ghosts and with the living too. (138)
These communities live out Haraway's injunction to "Make kin, not babies" and abandon expectations of reproduction and biological lineage; each new child is raised by three adults, two of whom may have no genetic connection to the child. Meanwhile, the children are made kin of other species - endangered ones like monarch butterflies - through implantation of some of that species' genetic material, which lets these persons come to know the world in more than human ways. By the time the story ends, the human population has fallen to 3 billion, fully a third of whom are "syms" - with millions of other species, many of which have, in the meantime, gone extinct.
It's a challenging and intoxicating work of imagination, a defiant dare to us not to give up, not to think the unsustainable way things have been is the only way we can be human. Its radical reimagination of what "kinship" can be, within and beyond the human community, is already worth the price of admission. But there's something powerful already in the way she repeatedly uses the phrase ways of living and dying where most would speak just of ways of life or living. This is "compost" thinking at its most fundamental. In a time of unspeakable and largely unspoken grief at the ongoing loss of ecosystems and species, it provides a way to accept transience and change and even to go a step further: we learn anew to see life coming back out of death. Haraway does that in the excerpt quoted above, as layers upon layers of living and dying in the third sentence give way to ghosts and ... the living too in the fifth. Haraway's reimagining religion, too.
