Welcome to the Desert of Not-Thinking

The desert is a different thing to different people. It is a controversial term even in geography and environmental sciences.¹ But what interests me here is not the definition of the desert as much as its different conceptions. At one level the desert is a physical space with specific attributes that can be described in scientific terms. The desert can be at a different level, though also physical, a place to which one belongs and is attached to, a place that gives meaning to one’s being like any other place to which one has some attachment and that can invoke emotions. However, there is another level, which is related to how the desert is made to produce meanings rather than being a symbol or a metaphor for something else or some other idea. This is the level that some desert writers seem to be interested in and develop in their narratives. In order to find a way to understand some of the ways of these writers, I propose to divide the perceptions and conceptualizations of the desert and its representations based upon the spatial proximity to it. There are those that live far away from it and those who have had little, if any, direct contact with it. There are those who live close to it or at its borders, and last there are those who live in it and are a part of it.

For those who live far away from it, the desert generally represents scarcity, aridity, dryness, barrenness in contradistinction to the abundance and plenitude associated with the rural and the urban. In that sense the desert represents poverty or a lack. It is a place where nobody desires by nature to be. But it is exactly within such a dichotomy that the desert may assume different and even contradictory meanings. The appearance of the desert, which is generally associated with that yellowish-brownish concoction of shades that is juxtaposed to the greenness associated with the abundance of water, has given rise to some interesting dualities that penetrate into some deeper structures of signification. One is reminded of the hypothesis of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari that the central metaphor in the European environmental vision is the tree that dominates “Western reality and all of Western thought, from botany to biology and anatomy, but also gnosiology, theology, ontology, all of philosophy” (18). Because European landscapes were dominated by trees, they argue, “arborescent structures” (17) became the dominant social, political, cultural, and epistemological organizing principle of the West. They continue that if arborescence is “the root foundation, Grund, racine, fondement” (1987: 18) of Western culture, then the East is imagined through a different eco-spatial figure, namely, the rhizome. The rhizomatic structure underlying Eastern cultures derives from “a relation to the steppe and the garden (or in some cases, the desert and the oasis), rather than forest and field” (18). In other words, the dichotomic structure of the west (whatever this may be) is the duality of the forest and the field, where the forest is that which is given in nature and the field is the transformation of the forest through human activity. The structure of the East, however, substitutes this with the duality of the steppe and the garden, the latter being the product of human activity (Ekphrasis as a traditional literary convention would fit very well within such a dichotomy²), but there also exists the duality of the desert and oasis. Although Deleuze and Guattari insist that the rhizomatic structure is non-dualistic, the steppe and the garden can be conceived as dualistic. It is the desert and the oasis that fit more into the hypothesized rhizomatic structure that they construct. Oases are not only parts of the desert but (mostly and until recently) are the products of nature and not of human activity.

When the desert (oases being by definition parts of deserts) is seen as having a rhizomatic structure, it can be easily conceived as a Foucauldian heterotopia, a challenge to the dominant urban and rural conceptions of progress and abundance associated with modernity, and thereby functions...