I really love the “ethics of the garden” connection and framework that Taneja employs throughout the Sharing a Room with Sparrows piece. It reminds me of some Amazonian (and some Andean) Ecuadorian Kichwa ways of thinking about the world. Sumak Kawsay, which translates roughly to the “good life,” requires a healthy relationship with nature and also comes with a set of human responsibilities. For example, (I was told) when you begin a hike, you must bring a rock with you from the bottom of the trail to place it as an offering to the mountain at the top. Carrying the stone shows that you are willing to suffer/ struggle for the mountain and land you’re walking on, and it also allows communication between the bottom and top of the mountain, tapping into the idea that nature is all interconnected. It also reminds me of Eduardo Kohn’s book, How Forests Think, which talks about how non-human species communicate and coexist. Kichwa ontology is so grounded in the interconnectivity of the human and non-human worlds, not even really separating them sometimes, that it’s interesting to read about how Indian Muslim discourse shares some of the same thoughts.
I wonder why Western scholarly attention has not focused much on the elevated moral status given to animals and plants in the Quran until recently? What changed to make this so?
I also really enjoyed the way that Anand Taneja drew parallels between the altered temporality that Azad experienced and the early COVID lockdown that we experienced in 2020. The altered relationship to time, she argues, allowed Azad to observe nature, in this case, birds, in different ways and think about new ways of existing that were not possible before. She points out that COVID lockdowns, in some ways, offered her similar pause to do the same. I like how she called the time in lockdown a time to pay attention that was not “dominated by relentless cycles of productivity and entertainment” (239). This description really struck me–the way that we do boomerang from productivity to entertainment (at least, I do!) during the day–from working to social time or social obligations and back again–really do make up most of our lives. The sentence, “When George Floyd was killed, the world paid attention” (239) was especially striking. You couldn’t escape this news. It wasn’t lost in the news cycle or drowned out by the cycle of life’s other demands, the way that it could normally be for populations privileged enough to ignore this kind of news. I wonder, how exactly do we get the world to keep paying attention? How do we keep intertwining minority rights and ecological thought together with shared language, like Taneja points out? Once (and now that it is) the world spins into action again, how do we resist the temptation to throw ourselves back into the cycles of entertainment and productivity again? Or maybe this is a futile attempt in a capitalistic world, and the better question is, how do we take the lessons of ecological observation and rest from COVID and apply them to our reality?
In the last section, Taneja describes Christian Cooper’s graphic novel outlining his experience of getting the cops called on him while bird watching in Central Park. Jules, the character, sees the faces of black people killed by police violence while looking through the binoculars. I wanted her to extend this metaphor of the binoculars further–how does this idea intersect with Azad’s experience with the birds and possibly, his greater political project in writing down his thoughts? Even though Taneja disagrees with Mufit’s reading of Azad as being purely allegorical in service to politics, I wonder if Taneja does think that Azad had some kind of political project in mind when writing them?