Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

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The academic Niall Martin has suggested that the value of Alexievich’s book about Chernobyl lies in its ability to listen into nonhuman spaces: it pays attention to the ways in which human destruction affects nonhuman systems, communities, individuals. By collecting incidental details from contemporary narratives, Sebald was able to put together a description of the wider environment after the bombs: standing chimneys, torn net curtains, and the smell of decomposition in the air. Nic didn’t say hello or speak in the indulgent but dishonest tone that adults usually used when speaking to me at that time in my life. We watch what happens to a litter of fox cubs during the days after their mother’s disappearance, and then move down to the stream that runs along the hill below their den.

Her book was published in 2016, and so she was writing and thinking in a political climate different from that of Sebald and Alexievich in the late 1990s.

DH: I’m working on a novel that holds whole (fictional) biographies, to think about how life rises and falls and is shaped from birth to death, collecting different experiences of place and time. This moment is seen as a critical turning point because the detonations left discernible and lasting effects on the atmosphere, including a spike of radionuclides—a human signature on the air. It isn’t always possible to see this imprint positively, in the way that you might look out of the window and see a striped beetle or a tree with pale purple flowers, but it is possible to understand that human disaster runs beyond the frame of human experience. Rich and unflinching, this writing expands our sense of what it means to live, as we do, in a time of crisis. So I hope that within and beyond my novel, whether it’s the contents of the novel or just the feeling of busyness and liveliness, that’s what people feel and think about.

Attenborough tells his viewers that the evacuation of the Exclusion Zone has turned the area into a sanctuary for animals that are very rare elsewhere. When he moves on he leaves behind an empty plastic noodle pot and we stay with that for a while… I imagined that over time, a picture of the area, and its workings, energy, and relationships, would emerge. Parallel to this creature, high above the pool of water on the quarry bed, there was a female kestrel, floating. In 1997, the year that Sebald delivered his lectures, Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich published Chernobyl Prayer (released in the US as Voices from Chernobyl), a tale of over fifty million radionuclides.During the last two days of Vasya’s life, Lyudmila said, she’d “lift his arm and the bone would be all wobbly, hanging loose, the tissue hanging out. DH: People have different feelings about language, but I get a sense that many of us, perhaps especially those who are invested in environmental or ecological relationships, dislike and mistrust it at the moment. But in any story, there’s other stuff going on, you know – minor characters have stories going, and then also the plants, animals, you know, the earth itself. I went back to the book to check and found that the title wasn’t Sebald’s phrase—it originated, in fact, not with a literary publication but with a killing campaign.

Rachel Carson shared a similar thought when she invoked a decimated ecosystem with the title Silent Spring. When the huge black rabbit who lived in a run in our garden had a nest full of babies, my parents had told me not to touch them. Clare wasn’t there, but Nic was sitting on the back step with a mug of tea and a biscuit, one cigarette waiting beside her on the warm brick. And yet, he describes this devastation only glancingly, in generic terms (a town is “badly damaged”), or in brief glimpses (trees in a wood near Aachen have suffered “decapitation”).

I wanted to make a modest, preliminary attempt to tell some stories that explore the realities of slow violence, how it moves on unhuman scales and what happens to people as they receive and feel it in their lives.

The results of this project were “roughly analysed, but [he] never had time to get down to the job of producing a picture of an air raid as seen by children. He went into libraries and archives to study photographs and contemporary accounts of the Allied bombing campaigns from the perspective of Germans on the ground. I found another, shorter film about wildlife in the Exclusion Zone, in which an ecologist spoke to National Geographic about this condition.Chernobyl has been here since 1986, it is here today, and it will extend into the deep future, long after Alexievich and all her subjects and all her readers have gone. The idea of entering into silence and mystery is challenging for anybody who has participated in cultures whose knowledge, whose sciences, are formed on empiricism: on a faith that human experience is the most solid foundation for human belief. DH: Covid exposed interconnectivity to many people in new ways, or changed interconnectivity from something known, in an academic way, to something that was actually (and often cruelly) apparent or felt. There was an island of grass in the middle of the track, and taller grasses across the field all around – this was the only area that was bald and open, and the only place the vole could look so dark and substantial against the beige dust. There is something dissociative about a description of war as chains of interactions between beings and forces, rather than as the exclusively human story of nations and disagreements.