ABSTRACT
Ancient visual art looms large even as it serves as a powerful tool with which the novelist opens out multiple perspectives on the transformative potentials of human-animal relations in precise locales. Quoting Saleh Nuwaiji, President of the Al-Haya Association for the Protection of Wildlife, the animals are portrayed in the accompanying news story as becoming the wrong victims of a desire to murder that now roams unchecked in the interstices between dictatorial and other possibilities for statehood. This chapter explores the valorization of intersubjective human-animal relations as well as to the growing awareness of the intercorporeality of mixed-species populations. In this context, Asoufs choice to become vegetarian seems a logical next step, against which the likewise desert-born but oasis-raised Cain Adams relentless hunting strictly to feed his craving for meat appears to be a retrograde turn, as it leads to the destruction of humans and animals, and along with them of intrahuman and human-animal relationships.
