AbdelRahim, Layla Backwoods journal #2; 2018 1

The Storyteller Who Ate the World:

Interview with Layla AbdelRahim
conducted by Bellamy Fitzpatrick for Backwoods journal
Summer, 2018
http://layla.miltsov.org/
https://www.routledge.com/authors/i10144-layla-abdelrahim

In this interview, Layla AbdelRahim expands on the analysis of the predatory and
parasitic foundation of civilized economies. She explains how narratives, whether
fictional or scientific, encode templates for socio-economic praxis and clarifies the
concept of rewilding that she develops in her books Children’s Literature,
Domestication, and Social Foundation (Routledge 2015; 2018) and Wild Children –
Domesticated Dreams: Civilization and the Birth of Education (Fernwood 2013).

Bellamy Fitzpatrick Question 1. One of the main themes of your writing is that the
stories we tell ourselves, and perhaps more importantly our children, are of the highest
importance, that they shape the ways we think and view the world on levels we don’t even
notice because they are so normalized to us. Can you talk a bit about how you became
interested in this topic with your radical analysis, and then further on how you see
civilized stories as crucially different from indigenous ones?

Layla AbdelRahim Answer 1. Storytelling in general, and especially recorded stories,

provide an efficient mechanism for the transmission of cultural choices. After all, even in
oral traditions, stories have proven to be effective in recording past experiences, which
they transmit along with warnings, instructions, and prohibitions. Thus, stories can serve
as an ethnographic or historical record and concomitantly influence our actions.

I became aware of the insidious power of stories when I was working in journalism in the
late 1980s. Everyone had their own story to tell: the rebels leading wars in Africa had
their story, the presidents and economy ministers had theirs, while the neo-colonial state
representatives provided the metanarrative that fit everyone into one camp or another.
After all, it was these foreign representatives who decided how much “aid” was going to
be given and to whom, whether the IMF was going to interfere and devalue the national
currency, or whether military invasion was going to take place. I soon noticed how my
pieces could be framed within the political narrative a newspaper was adhering to and my
contributions could end up being inscribed into that narrative regardless of the truth or
facts and regardless of what I was saying. Most important, there were always serious
economic, political, and existential repercussions to the story one chose. This was one of
the reasons I ended up moving away from journalism to anthropology and comparative
literature. I wanted to understand the Truth behind or beyond the Story.
AbdelRahim, Layla Backwoods journal #2; 2018 2

However, it soon became clear that the same forces were at play in scientific production.
After I received my Masters in Social Sciences from Stockholm University, I got hired as
an anthropologist by the Swedish Board for Health and Social Work (the main ministry
of Sweden called Socialstyrelsen; which literally means: “the government of the social”)
to study the encounter between the centralized Swedish medical system and Somali
immigrants. At the end of the year, I began to write my report while still in Sweden but
applying for funding for another project. Things didn’t work out and, less than two years
later, I decided to return to Russia. When I picked up the report to finish it in Russia, now
that I had no funding and no intention of going back to Sweden, I noticed how different
my perspective was on subtle yet important points in that encounter. I then saw clearly
that funding was domestication par excellence and that the purpose of education was to
prepare people to take their place in its hierarchy, heed its perspective, and desire to
satisfy its needs for a few pennies in return. In short, it dressed us to stick to the
Narrative.

These are some of the experiences that prompted me to re-examine the foundation of
knowledge and its manifestation through both narratives and praxis. My subsequent
research confirmed the intricate nexus where anthropology, philology, and economics
meet and prompted me to redefine how we understand literature and culture. Basically, I
arrived at the conclusion that stories – whether fictional or scientific – reflect how a
group chooses to understand and depict itself. Yet deeper than that, it is the premises at
the heart of the stories that the narratives propagate and thereby reproduce the cultural
choices that had been made in the past. The most fundamental choices any group of
living beings can make necessarily pertain to the economy of subsistence (linked to the
socio-environmental culture), reproduction of bodies, and the reproduction of the choices
themselves.

So, what do I mean by cultural choices? Living organisms devise life strategies, namely,
(1) where to obtain the energy to sustain their movement, reproduction, subsistence, and
emotional nourishment; and (2) where and to whom to provide the same services. Hence,
cultural choices are rooted in subsistence economy and socio-environmental culture. For
life to continue on earth, these systems must be sustainable and, if we study the history of
life on earth, we see that, indeed, they have been sustainable throughout the history of
wilderness –3.5 billion years – while the Anthropocene has proven to be hazardous for
life – after a mere 11 thousand years, Homo not-so-sapiens has already ravaged and
consumed over 80% of wilderness (Potapov et al., 2017) and shows no signs of slowing
down.

However, the metanarrative of civilization flips these facts and presents a skewed, if not
false, picture of the nature of life. And, as my book on children’s literature shows, even
the stories that try to challenge this narrative, inadvertently fail, because they continue to
AbdelRahim, Layla Backwoods journal #2; 2018 3

operate from the same premises. They actually end up reproducing the same false
narrative.

Therefore, if we want to halt the apocalypse and allow life on Earth to continue, it is not
enough to simply change the stories we tell. It is imperative that we address the premises
about who we are and who we can evolve to be. Equally important, we have to demolish
the institutions that ensure the self-propagation of this predatory culture. Unfortunately,
all we have is the very same technology that, in the first place, has been responsible for
reproducing violence and predation: human language and symbolic culture. The
challenge is to move beyond these technologies, beyond the stories and language. We
have to go to the root of our anthropology and the physical institutions that work in
tandem to ensure the smooth operation of civilization.

As with regards to Indigenous stories, while I discuss the premises of wilderness at length
in my books, I would like to point out that it is dangerous to essentialize and idealize the
Indigenous story-telling tradition. I see people either doing that, or deprecating it,
particularly in the White groups that embrace hunter-gatherer cultures. First, blind
imitation is meaningless, if not harmful. Second, the human First Nations on this
continent had also developed systems of hunting and sometimes this led to civilization,
e.g. Maya, Inca, Aztec, among others.

Furthermore, I have come to view as problematic the term “indigenous” to refer

exclusively to First Nations people, because this term obscures the nomadic origins of all
humans and veils the fact that all humans and nonhumans are migrants. We all, including
the First Nations, at some point, have come from somewhere else and we should all feel
indigenous to Earth. In any case, the terms we use to refer to earlier human inhabitants
are settler colonial names. But, at least, “First Nations” captures more aptly the fact that
these were the humans who came to the continent before the present settlers, and it allows
for the fact that other nonhumans have been here before the First Nations themselves.
This leaves us with the question: whose seniority should we honour then? It is here where
wild and First Nations stories can teach us what it means to be indigenous, that being
indigenous is shedding our human hubris and shifting back into the animals that we have
always been. For, non-domesticated stories do not have a grammar for murder. Their
meaning is derived in the presence of the story-teller, which bonds the community but
never in a deterministic and permanent manner. Most important, they are not
anthropocentric and the community is defined as multi-species. Humans and nonhumans
in these stories interchange experience, consciousness, and shape. They tell of a deep
kinship between us and the rest of life. The final question is: what are we going to do
about this kinship?
AbdelRahim, Layla Backwoods journal #2; 2018 4

BF Q2. Central to your critique of civilization is the concept of domestication, a word

with many valences. Both anarchists and non-anarchists have asserted that
domestication is intimately tied to the origins of civilization - and hence our present
crises - but precisely what constitutes domestication (and therefore what it would mean
to try to stop doing it or undo it) is not so easy to say. There are many significantly
different definitions of this word on offer from academics in various fields who have
studied it, and I have one here that is typical: “Domestication is a sustained,
multigenerational, mutualistic relationship in which one organism assumes a significant
degree of influence over the reproduction and care of another organism in order to
secure a more predictable supply of a resource of interest, and through which the partner
organism gains advantage over those individuals who remain outside this relationship,
thereby increasing benefiting and often increasing the fitness of both the domesticator
and the target domesticate.” Now, that probably captures most people’s conception of
domestication roughly, but I am guessing you, like me, seriously disagree with this
definition on multiple levels. Can you talk about your definition and why you think
domestication is important to understanding our current crisis?

LAR A2. Indeed, I strongly disagree with the typical definition of domestication, for it
describes the relationship from the human perspective. It is a narcissistic description, in
which the one who domesticates imposes a definition on the dominated and this
definition is contingent solely on the value the domesticator sees for himself with total
disregard for the well-being of others. If the human domesticator sees little or no value in
the “resource”, this spells death for the “pest”. If the slave becomes too costly, the slave
is disposed of. Referring to human civilization as benign and referring to domestication,
its main institution, as “mutualistic” assumes that rape, enslavement, and slaughter are
good for others and that the victims themselves want it. This definition ignores the
suffering of the victim and claims that the signs of pain are instead signs of joy. In his
autobiography, titled Narrative of a Slave Written by Himself, Frederick Douglas
describes his incredulity at the White liberals’ – probably deliberate – ignorance, their
deafness to the deep pain expressed in Black people’s song: “I have often been utterly
astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing,
among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to
conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs
of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an
aching heart is relieved by its tears” (Douglass, 1997:30).

The same is true of all nonhuman people. They suffer, and they fight to the last breath to
protect their children and to be wild and free. Even though horses were domesticated over
5 thousand years ago, still to this day, every foal needs to be “broken”. Breaking someone
is not mutualistic. It is sadistic.
AbdelRahim, Layla Backwoods journal #2; 2018 5

In a state of anarchy or wilderness parties enter into mutualistic relationships out of free
will, because each of them sees that the relationship will bring them happiness and health.
When bees engage in the intimacy of plant procreation, none of the parties suffers. On the
contrary, not only both of them thrive, but whole communities of life around them do as
well. The same is true of the disseminators of seeds, such as primates and mice. When
wild disseminators engage with plants, they do not kill or harm the plants or other
members of the ecosystem. They engage in a mutualistic economy where everyone in
their diverse community flourishes. This is also true of another symbiotic relationship,
the commensalistic, where one party benefits but the other remains unaffected.

Of course, the situation is different with the other two symbiotic relationships, the
parasitic and amensalistic which exist in the wild. However, these systems are in the
minority and if the ecosystem is healthy, it keeps these economies under control,
particularly the parasitic ones. For, if a parasitic system takes over, the result can be
devastating for the whole region. This is what human civilization has done; it has become
an epidemic, only on a much larger, global scale.

To go back to the beginning of your question, regarding the origins of civilization and
domestication, I see them both as the result of an unviable economic choice that some
humans had adopted at a certain point in history, prior to the emergence of domestication,
namely that of predation. As I discuss in my work, and will address in-depth in my
forthcoming book, because hunting is too expensive (i.e. it is unviable), domestication is
a logical response to the deficit in that system; and civilization, with all its horror,
desertification, and extinctions, is the material manifestation of that choice. Therefore, if
we sincerely want to get out of this mess – and we must, at least for the sake of the
nonhuman victims of civilization, who have not signed up for this ride – we have to
address the roots of the problem – predation – and extinguish the cancer from there.

BF Q3. First, as a persnickety side note, I actually will push back on the point comparing
parasites and civilization, as parasites are an important part of the biosphere. It is
estimated that fully half of all organisms are parasites, and they act to keep populations
in balance with one another, since as a population of creatures increases, it becomes
more vulnerable to its parasites and vice-versa - as the parasites increase, they bring
down their host populations' numbers and then decrease in numbers themselves, in a
perpetual cycle. So the parasite, as harmful and unpleasant as it is to the individual host,
is still healthy in its relations to its ecosystem: it takes and gives in balance. Civilization
is not like that, though, since civilized humans consume whole ecosystems to increase the
numbers of themselves, their domesticates, and their machines, and then just move on
and expand when an area is depleted. So, I would say civilized humans' relationships to
each other are parasitic, whereas our relationships to other creatures are better
AbdelRahim, Layla Backwoods journal #2; 2018 6

described, as you said later, as cancerous, as a cancer will keep taking from its host and
expanding until it kills the host and thus itself.

LAR A3. In my Routledge book on children’s literature, I discuss in-depth the different
symbiotic systems and their effect on the environment. To summarize and reiterate my
point above: a parasitic relationship is when one party benefits from the association, but
the other one is harmed. This is textbook definition. If there is no harm to the second
party, it is a commensalistic relationship. In a healthy system, parasitic relationships are
either eradicated or kept under control and prevented from growing or spreading.
Otherwise, the parasite will kill the host. But unlike cancer, who dies with the demise it
brings upon the host, the parasite is contagious and spreads to other hosts.

Human predation and parasitism are different from other species, for they have come to
constitute a perilous epidemic that has gone out of hand. And yet, in spite of the evidence
of the global extent of the anthropogenic destruction of life systems on our planet, people
continue to abide by the narrative that insists on false analogies, such as: “look there are
parasites who do well; see, lions eat zebras; you cannot tell me I should be different”. But
we are not Giardia liamblia, nor are we lions. Giardia liamblia measures 10-15 µm in
length and, so far, has not taken over the world or threatened with the annihilation of life
on Earth. Nor have the lions, who like other predators, have always kept their numbers
low, slept long hours, and ate a little sporadically. We are apes. And as such, even if we
have made up a story that we are liamblia who need to mindlessly imitate lions, the
evidence shows that, no matter how hard we try to pretend, this is not so. Mental illness
and the extreme violence of civilized societies (rape, poverty, war, etc.) are only some of
the manifestations of the problems associated with such pretense.

BF Q4. Second, regarding domestication, I agree wholeheartedly that how a culture eats
- and even more fundamentally, how it views the other creatures it depends upon - is the
core of that culture and thus the core of our crisis. One of the things we are trying to do
in Backwoods is arrive at a more precise understanding of where 'tending the wild' ends
and agriculture begins - it is relatively easy to point at certain clear examples of one or
the other, but there is a lot of gray area that is relatively harder to parse. How do you
distinguish domestication from co-evolution and symbiosis? Influencing the growth and
evolutionary trajectory of other species seems impossible to avoid, since even by foraging
we are shaping other creatures - an act as simple as selecting the most enticing fruits of a
tree means encouraging the spread of some seeds and not others, meaning the genetic
characteristics most desired by the frugivore are encouraged while less desirable traits
are suppressed. More intentionally, one might deliberately plant the seeds of
exceptionally delicious fruits, placing them in prime locations. Moving a bit further
along, one might then do some occasional light cutting of plants surrounding this fresh
planting in order to offer it more light and then mulch the soil surrounding it with the
AbdelRahim, Layla Backwoods journal #2; 2018 7

plant cuttings, and so forth. Imagining this spectrum continuing, where does ‘tending the
wild’ end and domestication begin? It seems to me, at least prima facie, that we have
something like the ancient Sorites Problem in philosophy - the fact that there are
infinitesimal edge cases makes the boundary hard, if not impossible, to precisely define.
Moving to the nonhuman world, various ant species, for instance, rear aphids and scale
insects like cattle and tend to fungal gardens upon which they even practice a kind of pest
control with the secretions of symbiotic bacteria that live on the ants’ exoskeletons. These
fungi exist nowhere outside of ant colonies, and the ants are totally dependent on the
fungi for survival - a similar phenomenon occurs with certain termites and fungi. Do
these interspecies nonhuman interactions constitute domestication? Finally, in light of all
of these philosophical problems, what do you think are the most ontologically and
ethically salient features of domestication?

LAR A4. First, evolution simply means change through adaptation. Co-evolution is
change through co-adaption, i.e. when both parties change and adapt to each other. All
life continues to change and adapt, including under civilized and domesticated
conditions. Serfs in Europe or kidnapped Africans during the slave trade, for example, all
had to adapt to the system of domestication of the time, while working to resist and
demolish it. Had they not adapted and had they not resisted most of us would not be here
today.

Second, there are viable evolutionary choices and there are unviable ones. In wilderness,
species and groups within species cooperate to make the world viable. Domestication is
an unviable cultural choice. It is a system where one group imposes, often by means of
violence, its will and interests on others with disregard to the others’ well-being. We have
evolved under these pressures. The same with the other domesticated people, like cows,
horses, wheat, among others. We have destroyed the economic relationships with others
they had in wilderness and instead we have, and continue to, murder and exterminate
other species. The fact that they refuse to die and instead choose to continue to survive in
the horrendous conditions, which our perceived needs and civilization impose on them,
should not be taken to blame the victim and say they chose it themselves. And it is wrong
to bring in the “look the ants do it too” rhetoric when the principles of what the ants do
are the complete opposite of what the civilized humans do. The ants and the fungi enjoy
an intimate relationship that does not eradicate whole systems allowing them to obtain
full possession of the land they are on. These ants do not threaten anyone. On the
contrary, their relationship is an important link in the viability of the biosystem.

A more accurate analogy between civilized humans, fungi, and ants would be the
parasitic fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, who attacks the brains of the ants and
forces them to sacrifice themselves for the short-lived benefit of the parasite. But of
course, the Narrative discourages us from using this analogy, because the principles of
the unviable economic choices that the brain-controlled zombie ants are forced to make
AbdelRahim, Layla Backwoods journal #2; 2018 8

on behalf of the master of their minds are the same that prompt the brain-controlled
zombie humans in domestication to continue to harm themselves and the world around
them. Where the analogy fails to work, however, is the scale of the suffering and
destruction that the humans and the fungi can cause.

In short, it is easy to distinguish human domestication from wild symbiotic relationships.

The problem is that often those who have a higher standing in this system and who are
not directly threatened with annihilation, by virtue of being categorized as “human” and
having the right to access “resources”, tend to be resistant to the truth of the brutality and
unviability of human parasitism. Hence, they tend to be more willing to go along with the
false analogies of the Story of civilization. After all, it seems to be serving them
adequately. And perhaps the most nefarious lie is that the Story implies that humans have
reached the epitome of evolution and that we cannot change who we have become, that
we cannot choose to cease to be predators, parasites, cancerous, and civilized. But that is
the beauty of evolution: we continue to evolve and we can still make a different, wild and
viable choice.

BF Q5. Third, you advocate for veganism as a means to exit the Predatory culture. Many
would say veganism is only possible through agriculture, as the diet generally involves
consuming legumes and nuts as storable, primary protein sources, which would likely
necessitate at least some significant management of land and the coordinated harvest,
processing, and storage of these foods to last through the winter (depending on the local
climate) or at least between yields. Many anarcho-primitivists, in contrast, view
moderate hunting as a means to live relatively more lightly on the land, and/or as a way
to avoid, or at least mitigate, the potential social problems (hoarding of wealth,
weaponizing access to food, bureaucratization, etc.) that come from dependence on
stored surplus. How would you respond to these arguments? I am especially curious on a
personal note, as I actually stopped being vegan (after seven years of strictly keeping the
diet) because I thought it was better to eat meat and live more immediately off of my land
base, and it seemed impossible to keep vegan while doing that without managing
relatively large areas of land to try to grow enough legumes and the like for myself.

LAR A5. I advocate for wilderness. I do not advocate for agriculture. The fact that many
equate rewilding of the civilized human primate to either adopting a hunting culture or a
subsistence based on vegan agriculture is a good illustration of how the civilized
narrative works in tandem with the institution of predation. It frames the problem and the
solution in a narrow, self-serving binary of “either, or”: “Either you kill and eat wild
animals or you participate in their extermination through agriculture; there is no other
option”. But, refusing to participate in a predatory system does not mean that the only
alternative is agriculture. In the first place, agriculture has been a response to the choice
for predation. Both are intimately interlinked and both are unviable.
AbdelRahim, Layla Backwoods journal #2; 2018 9

The fact that you have access to a land base and to killing the few remaining wild animals
(more than 80% of wilderness has been eradicated by humans) indicates that you are not
in the 80% of human population around the world with no access to either a land base, or
to wild or domesticated animals. You cannot give this as an argument to the people in
refugee camps around the world – to the displaced, who have to walk thousands of
kilometers through the desert. The displacement of humans today has nothing to do with
voluntary migration, and hunting is simply not an available solution for the millions of
these refugees in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

In fact, hunting is what brought us here in the first place: it is too expensive and requires
a classification of work specialization by gender. Have you tried hunting a buffalo when
you were 7 or 8 or 9 months pregnant or having a newborn clinging to your side? No, you
would have been required to stay behind and practice the domestication of plants in order
to produce the surplus to sustain the hunter who was not at risk of being pregnant or
otherwise physically disabled. Hunting is the root of hoarding, ableism, gender, and
speciesism.

The problem, however, is that the many who are resistant to re-evaluation of civilized
anthropology have never been in a refugee camp, not even as an observer. These are the
people who own or control land and who have access to supplementary sources of
energy. The surplus of resources they can access has to be produced by others. Again, in
wilderness these are self-balancing economies; while in civilization the workers are
forced to labour at great cost to themselves and the detriment of the eco-system. And, yet,
the people who are intentionally ignorant of the suffering, the feeling of loss and
deprivation their “prey” endure, keep pushing their narrative on everyone – a narrative
that is based on the needs and experiences of a predatory minority and which keeps
eclipsing the real problems and viable solutions. I advocate for the abolition of this
anthropology and the culture that violates life on Earth. I advocate for humans to stop
being the harbingers of death and instead reintegrate themselves into wild economies as
disseminators, the bearers of life.

BF Q6. In reply to your answer to question four: I agree with you that there is a clear
and immense difference between the human practices of agriculture and animal
husbandry on the one hand and the activities of the various insects and parasites we have
been discussing on the other hand - but I want to parse out exactly what that difference is
because I think the discussions amongst radicals who are critically analyzing
domestication often end up with the term 'domestication' being poorly defined. Most
critical definitions are based on force, domination, exploitation, and so forth, but it is
quite plain that some interactions among nonhumans feature these elements: parasitoids
often seize control of their hosts' minds, as you mentioned, and eusocial insect colonies
AbdelRahim, Layla Backwoods journal #2; 2018 10

involve violently enforced hierarchies and behavioral norms. So, to revisit the issue a
final time - what are the key, specific elements that differentiate human domestication
from these nonhuman behaviors? It seems to me that you are saying the distinguishing
element is how these behaviors fit into the broader ecology, is that
right? Ophiocordyceps is brutal to its prey, but it isn't ecologically harmful.

LAR A6. I agree with you that people often operate from a superficial, in fact
domesticated, understanding of the term “domestication”. That is why I delve into these
terms, “domestication”, “civilization”, “culture”, “wilderness”, and “rewilding”, in-depth
in my work and dedicate a full subchapter to each term in the introduction to my book on
Children’s Literature. Namely, I propose to approach these phenomena with a cross-
species and cross-cultural analysis. This method has allowed me to look at the essence of
the socio-economic relationships that emerge under the various conditions. These
relationships manifest themselves in cultural production and the imprint they leave on the
environment. By studying the nexus of the conditions under which they operate and the
socio-economic systems they concomitantly re/produce, we can reveal their principles
and essence. In short: I examine which socio-economic cultures lead to the health and
happiness of its individuals and the bio-system and which do not. There are both
qualitative and quantitative differences between human and nonhuman parasitism and it
is from these various levels of comparison that I draw my conclusions. So, yes, I am
approaching these terms from a broader ecological perspective, a perspective that
threatens human supremacy. Probably thence the resistance on the part of those people
who would like to improve the quality of their lives but have no desire to give up their
own status as “predator”; some even proudly refer to humanity as the “ultimate predator”.

BF Q7. In reply to your answer to question five: Certainly, I am not and was not
advocating hunting-and-gathering as a solution for the global population (I have actually
criticized some anarcho-primitivists on this front for not offering a practical praxis for
most people), least of all those who are displaced - I find this to be a very odd counter-
argument, though, given that those same people are obviously not able to do what you
are advocating (vegan foraging in wild lands), either, since, as you said, very few people
have access to such land and there is less and less wilderness all the time. Regardless, I
do not think there is any ecologically sane and healthy solution that can be practically
massified to seven billion human lives, since it is only industrial agriculture that allows
for over seven billion humans to be living on this planet. So, I am not advocating a
global, mass-solution blueprint, but I also think we need to put forth some sort of positive
vision of ecologically-whole life if there is ever going to be a return to sanity (whether
that happens after some sort of civilizational collapse or not) - as you say, we need to
learn how to "reintegrate [our]selves into wild economies as disseminators, the bearers
of life." I agree with all of my heart and mind. And so my specific question is whether and
how veganism fits into that ideal, when, to me - both as a former staunch vegan who is
AbdelRahim, Layla Backwoods journal #2; 2018 11

now actively part of a subcultural effort to transition toward ecological harmony in

everyday life and as a layperson who has listened to and read anthropology on
indigenous people in my area (the Northeastern United States) - it is very difficult to see
how it would be possible to live harmoniously as a vegan: that is, non-agriculturally, as
in not clearing and maintaining significant areas of land for legumes and the like - at
best, I can imagine some sort of legume and nut-tree polyculture, which could be
relatively benign on a small scale, but still certainly horticultural, with sedentism and
fairly closely managed land. Do you disagree? Perhaps you do, as I have heard lectures
and discussions of yours where you have in passing mentioned vegan indigenous groups
living in the Northeastern United States, which surprised me because I have never heard
of such people. Who were they?

LAR A7. It appears that you are ascribing to me a position that is not mine. Nowhere in
my published work or in my talks and interviews do I call for the unleashing of 7 billion
– and growing – human population onto the last remnants (about 17%) of fragile
wilderness, a wilderness that is occupied, defined, and encircled by civilization. I do not
advocate this for vegan foraging nor for hunting. In fact, I have already said in previous
interviews that it would be, not only unfair towards the nonhumans whom we have
already dispossessed, it will continue the devastation of the very last bits of viable
wilderness.

What I call for, instead, is a collaborative effort around the globe to addresses several
levels of the system simultaneously. The most urgent problems are the epistemic and
demographic, which are interrelated. To approach the anthropogenic environmental
catastrophe, we have to rewild our anthropology, or self-knowledge, and we have to halt
the growth of domesticated populations, both of nonhuman and human animals. And, no,
I do not call for the genocide of either of these populations. Instead, I call for the
rewilding of the spaces they currently occupy, that is rewilding the social and other
economies so that nonhuman and human animals can reintegrate themselves into
biodiverse and thus viable ecosystems. Fertility rates go up in domestication and go down
and balance out in wild primates and other animals.

The following statements summarize what I usually get as “argument” against my

critique of predation: 1) yes, most people around the world cannot afford to consume
animal flesh in their diet; 2) yes there is a massive exodus of people from lands whose
ecosystems have been destroyed by the industries that support civilization; 3) yes, I
know, alas and alack, most of the starving are Brown and Black; 4) however, you cannot
say that carnivory is wrong, because “we” cannot feed the population “out there” on
veganism; 5) therefore, you must concede that I should continue my carnivorous
sustenance, since it is available to me.
AbdelRahim, Layla Backwoods journal #2; 2018 12

Regardless of whether this logic is expressed by supporters of agriculture or by critics of

civilization, this is a status quo position that is pro hierarchical predation and pro
civilization in its current manifestation as a White Supremacist, Humanist, capitalist,
patriarchal system. This rationale is the cohesive fabric that informs all the shades of
liberal, radical, and conservative ideologies, with the difference that the conservatives are
more aware and honest about how civilization works, while the liberals come up with all
sorts of self-serving, made-up stories, which Trump referred to as “Fake News”. What
unites them is the agreement that this predatory order is not only natural, it is the best and
thus must be maintained as the only order at all cost. Their main disagreement is with
regards to who should preside at the table and who should constitute the resources, pests,
and the “waste”. In fact, often, even those who cannot afford a carnivorous life-style
aspire to a place at the table with the Ultimate Predator and thus continue to work
towards sustaining a system that allows some to devour everyone else, even when they
themselves are the primary losers.

If, we accept statements 1, 2, and 3 as true; if we agree that civilization is the cause of
ecocide and tremendous suffering; and if we have empathy for the suffering of our fellow
earthlings, then we need to examine what brought about civilization and understand our
own place in its hierarchy. This is precisely why I wrote Children’s Literature,
Domestication, and Social Foundation.

As for your personal dissatisfaction with the agricultural diet, I am on board with you.
However, I brought up the refugees in response to your using yourself as an example to
illustrate the necessity of the carnivorous diet for you. You explain above that you do not
advocate your lifestyle as a solution for the “global population”, because, fundamentally,
you understand that your solution is globally unsustainable. I would add that it is not even
regionally sustainable and it is definitely not available to the majority of the inhabitants
of the Pacific Northwest, because those who are employed spend their time working for
the system, thus solely relying on farming, while those who are unemployed cannot
afford to use the infrastructure that is both unsustainable and intentionally designed to
keep them stuck in the squalor of their neighbourhoods with no access to wild spaces.

Furthermore, there is the fact that the disaster “there” – the places global refugees flee –
is part of the food chain that supplies the “here” (gas, oil, “market”, etc.). There is also
the fact that if all of the present-day “migrants” – the millions displaced by the arms and
bombs – or even if only the inner-city dwellers of the American cities descended upon
your bit of land, it would be ravaged before you could blink. Therefore, it is important to
recognize that your diet, whether it comes from domesticated sources or from the 17% of
the remaining wilderness, depends not only on the wars outside of your country, but it
also requires the wall – be it physical, legal, or symbolic; be it Clinton’s, Obama’s, or
Trump’s; be it the fence that designates private property and No Trespassing; this wall
must be protected by armed guards and backed by an “effective” prison system and
AbdelRahim, Layla Backwoods journal #2; 2018 13

detention centers. There must be a wall that keeps out those who bear the brunt of
civilization’s collapse while letting in the resources taken from their lands. All of this
needs an epistemic system that delivers a story to assuage the ensuing cognitive
dissonance and make both the predator feel good about himself while causing pain to
others and the prey accept this order and pain as natural and ineluctable.

These threads, such as the problems of immigration, education, economy, private

property, diet, among others, must be examined together as they constitute important
factors in the development of civilized socio-economic paradigms. That is why my book
on children’s literature and narratives (Routledge 2015 and 2018) gives so much weight
to this nexus and to examining the legitimating aspect of civilized epistemology, which
has been constructed by the very same people responsible for genocides and ecocide,
while my book on education, Wild Children – Domesticated Dreams (Fernwood 2013)
explains how the pedagogical cultures in civilization train the civilized subjects to be
apathetic precisely so that some can blithely consume the lives of others without
understanding or responding to their pain.

In this interview we can touch on only some of the aspects of the violent foundation of
our co/existence. But even here we can see that the only analysis that explains the
ecological disaster, as well as the current political and economic events in the U.S. and
the rest of the world, is my analysis of predation, because it considers all of these issues
together and thus offers a way forward.

BF Q8. And some new territory: A theme of your examination of stories is how they
influence our ontology - that is, our view of what fundamentally exists and what the
qualities of existence are. This issue is one of the deepest and most subtle, since the
ideology of techno-industrial modern life is that we, the dominator culture, understand
the world better than anyone ever has and that there is little that is mysterious or unclear
about our everyday lives. Why do you think ontology is important, and what do you think
is wrong with the modern, civilized view in this respect?

LAR A8. Simply put, ontology is the study of being. Like any “study” or body of
knowledge, the explanations for what exists and how it came about to exist, in
civilization, works to support the hierarchy of things. This body of knowledge consists of
religious explanations, philosophical musings, and scientific explorations that
inadvertently share the departing premises from which the inquiries stem. That is why I
pay so much attention to the underlying premises that inform our knowledge and praxes.
I discovered that the main difference between these premises is not due to the epistemic
discipline or tradition from which they operate; their differences stem from whether they
presume the universe as existing for its own purpose or from the civilized desire to
control and consume. So, it is not stories per se that influence ontology, rather, the
AbdelRahim, Layla Backwoods journal #2; 2018 14

ontological explanations we devise influence how we experience, act, and narrate. Story-
telling is merely the means for the cementing and transmission of these fundamental
ontological explanations, which then our actions reify.

BF Q9. You discuss in your work the importance of monotheism in shaping the Western
worldview, even among self-described secular people. How do you see monotheism
shaping our values and our conception of what exists in the world?

LAR A9. To clarify, in my work, I discuss the evolution of the civilized narrative and I
demonstrate how monotheism evolved from polytheism. I also argue that polytheism has
had a much longer experience under civilization. If we look at the religions that originate
in Asia, they are as effective as the monotheistic ones, if not more so, in segregating the
different human castes and nonhuman groups and normalizing violence. It is obvious that
monotheism informs present-day civilized epistemology, be it Western or Eastern. At the
same time, none of these texts are monolithic. They all contain forces of resistance,
voices that call for the triumph of Wilderness, Chaos, and Life. And there have always
been animistic approaches to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, such as the various
mystics and the Sufis. Namely, they relied on the personal, physical, cognitive, and
spiritual reconnection with what is beyond the self and thus threatened organized
religion, which relies on language and a linguistically instituted order that ruptures the
integrity of body, praxis, and soul. The point of my book on narratives (Children’s
Literature, Routledge), particularly the chapter on language and literacy, is to show how
any text, be it religious or scientific, regardless of its contents, within civilization will end
up upholding the interests of its institutions and will inevitably be inscribed within the
metanarrative, or the Fake News, of civilized epistemology.

BF Q10. Many thinkers have lain at the foot of monotheism a whole host of the problems
facing us today: the domination of nature, as Yahweh says in Genesis that humanity will
rule over other creatures; patriarchy, due to the Biblical portrayals of Eve and Lilith; the
desacralization of the Earth, which is profane relative to the transcendent Deity, angels,
and Heaven; the universalization of Truth and the Good in God; the elevation of
submission to authority and deferred enjoyment to virtues; the eventual advent of
metaphysical materialism, in which the world is viewed as fundamentally made of dead,
manipulable matter; one could go on ad nauseam. Often, thinkers critiquing monotheism
contrast it to animism or pantheism, which are seen as liberatory. I find these arguments
very persuasive myself, but what are we then to make of dominator societies with non-
monotheistic religions? - take, for instance, Japan, where the state religion now (Shinto)
and folk religions historically is and were more or less animistic; or pre-Christian Rome,
which was polytheistic; or the early Mongol Empire, which was again something like
animistic before it became cosmopolitan and heterogeneous?
AbdelRahim, Layla Backwoods journal #2; 2018 15

LAR A10. Yes, this is what I argue in my work. Namely, I demonstrate that organized
religion is an institution of civilization, regardless of place or whether it is polytheistic or
monotheistic. I touch on this in my essay titled “Genealogies of Wilderness” published in
the Paulinian Compass in vol. 1, no. 4 (2010) and I elaborate this point in my book on
children’s literature and narratives. To close this interview, I would like to share the
following passage from the introduction chapter, “The Root of It All”. It discusses the
evolution of the epistemic tradition from animism towards domestication, i.e. through
paganism and the rest of the debris of civilization, until we get to the present-day
dogmatic religions, including that of secularism, all of which, and regardless of their
internal tensions and contradictions, uphold violence and predation as the basis of what
makes us human:
This violence can be traced throughout the history of the written word. Most stories
rationalize murder by weaving ontological reasons for killing into their stories of origins
that explain the raison d’être of beings. The slaying of disobedient deities, of human
animals, and nonhuman people, or of trees in these stories rationalize the necessity of
these acts of violence and destruction. For instance, one of the earliest written texts is
“The Stories of Heaven and Hell” from ancient Mesopotamia, dating more than 2,000
years B.C.E. The most well-known of them, The Epic of Gilgamesh, recounts the murder
of the guardian of the forest, which is followed by the felling of the cedar trees and then
by the murder of animals. This great act of violence moved mountains and hills and
changed the world.
“At the third blow Humbaba fell. Then there followed confusion for this was the
guardian of the forest whom they had felled to the ground. For as far as two
leagues the cedars shivered when Enkidu felled the watcher of the forest, he at
whose voice Hermon and Lebanon used to tremble. Now the mountains were
moved and all the hills, for the guardian of the forest was Killed” (Sandars, 1972:
83).
Sacred Hindu texts, too, speak of the violence of domestication and the destruction of
chaos: “The Devī Durgā has eight arms and in her many hands she holds the weapons and
emblems of all the gods, who turned their weapons over to her to kill the demon of
chaos” (Eck, 1985; p. 28).
AbdelRahim, L. Children’s Literature, Domestication, and Social Foundation:
Narratives of Civilization and Wilderness; Routledge 2014, 2018; pages 21-22.

To right this wrong we have to bring back the Forest. I do not mean this metaphorically
or only in the abstract “out there”, but right here within our city spaces, our bodies, our
minds and hearts. And thus, we need to disarm the gods of civilization, those predators
we have constructed, whom we feed, and in whose image we choose to see ourselves. We
have to disable these gods, regardless of whether they masquerade in the robes of Justice,
Piety, or Knowledge, and give back the world to those who know how to care for it.