ABSTRACT
By focusing on three species—the wolf, the bee, and the cockroach—that display a biocultural history suspended between vulnerability and sustainability, this chapter explores the links between human and non-human species vulnerability, how these ambivalent species are exploited metaphorically, and how Anthropocene fiction employs such metaphors specifically in the context of forced migration and biocultural diversity. The literary texts analyzed for the wolf metaphor are Roland Schimmelpfennig’s novel One Clear, Ice-Cold January Morning at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century (2018), Francisco Cantú’s memoir The Line Becomes a River (2018), and Hassan Blasim’s 2009 short story The Truck to Berlin; Norbert Scheuer’s novel Die Winterbienen (The Winter Bees [still untranslated], 2019) on the contextualization of bees and refugees; and Rawi Hage’s Cockroach (2008). Of particular interest is the question not only how these narratives, on the one hand, draw on the negative cultural history specifically of the wolf and cockroach in representing conditions of flight, exile, forced migration, and strategies in dehumanizing refugees but also how the authors discussed here liberate species metaphors from their stereotypical metaphorical use, allowing refugees’ vulnerability to give way to renewed identities with a potential for resistance and resilience.
