When settlers of European descent arrived in the Willamette Valley of western Oregon in the mid-19th century, they found a well-tended landscape nearly emptied of human inhabitants. Successive waves of trapper-borne diseases in the preceding two decades had decimated Indigenous populations. One might imagine the settlers’ emotional response as being like that of Noah and his shipmates as they exited the Ark into a world cleansed of what had gone before. “Oriented to landfall, the story of Noah’s ark plays as the archetypal settler colonial fantasy,” write Jeffrey Cohen and Julian Yates in Noah’s Arkive (351).
The flood narrative of Genesis has provided a skeletal framework for ubiquitous stories of security and refuge under threat—the trope is nearly unavoidable in the face of the disrupted weather events and rising seas of climate change—but that safety comes at cost, with the attendant suffering unequally distributed. Troubled by the inhospitality and exclusion inherent in the project of securing refuge, Cohen and Yates consider retellings of the Ark story in art, fiction, and film. By means of this wide-ranging analysis, they guide readers toward possibilities for a more humane telling. “The ark cannot offer salvation or even consolation to many; it may however offer possibility, an ecology of refuge, even at times to those on the wrong side of its closed door” (20-21).
Cohen and Yates articulate their thesis as follows: “The brute sketchiness of the biblical injunction ‘make yourself an ark’ demands that its readers think hard about the difficulties of preserving a community against deluge, about who gets included and who excluded, about how the threat of the flood is experienced differently by varied groups of people and animals” (3). Because the Genesis text provides scant details, there are abundant opportunities to reimagine possibilities and strive for different outcomes.
The ark, after all, changed little of what was wrong with the antediluvian world. Beyond the astonishing loss implied in Genesis, the biblical narrative makes explicit God’s realization that humanity will not cease its reckless ways (Gen. 8:21), a trait evident when the recently disembarked Noah promptly sets about getting drunk and cursing his descendants (Gen. 9). Retellings of the biblical flood narrative, even within the traditions that hold the text to be sacred, have exploited the strangeness and contradictions of the opening chapters of Genesis to imagine deaths, stowaways, familial tensions, avian motives, the devil, apocalyptic beasts, and extinctions. The brokenness of Noah’s Ark is central to Cohen and Yates’s argument about the biblical narrative’s many afterlives: “the story operates as a failed or self-ruining totality, a chest or vessel that leaks, a collection of stories that play with and resist the familiar contours of the Noachic narrative vehicle as it continues to be routinely invoked” (20).
Cohen and Yates survey diverse retellings of the biblical tale. They describe visual artworks, poetry, songs, short story collections, architectural efforts, design concepts, novels, and film. They structure their interpretation and analysis not around individual works or genres but—to great effect—via the successive elements of the storyline: setting the context, designing and building the ark, boarding the ark, living onboard, sending birds to test for closure, and setting new patterns of existence upon landfall. The authors demonstrate a depth of humanities scholarship while remaining accessible to readers across and beyond disciplinary boundaries.
Noah’s Arkive is a rich resource for anyone seeking to deepen their abilities to imagine better—more humane and inclusive—responses to threats that arise in all realms of our lives together, not only in environmental contexts. The ethical commitment of this text is especially encouraging to those striving to imagine just and compassionate possibilities amid the divisive rhetorical context of contemporary American politics. Echoing Donna Haraway (Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016), Cohen and Yates invite readers and activists to delay closure; in other words, to stay with the trouble and, in the metaphor of the ark, not rush to landfall. Landfall, for Cohen and Yates, marks “the stabilization of scales and lives that ark thinking can set into motion” (21-22). On the ark, we can imagine (idealistically) all life forms being preserved and living in some sort of harmony. But the Genesis narrative marks the dissolution, upon landfall, of planetary kinship, when “God gives the animals over to Noah and his descendants not to preserve (that moment has passed), but to hunt, eat, and sacrifice” (22). With this changed relationship comes fear and dread. A repeated refrain in the book is the authors’ insight that “the worst thing you can do is to think that you are not on an ark” (329), an insight resonant with Rebecca Solnit’s argument in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (New York: Viking, 2009). Under stress and in times of peril, our better selves often arise.
By analyzing the many afterlives of the Genesis narrative that are already in existence, Cohen and Yates demonstrate the continuing ability of the biblical text to stimulate creative reflection and ethical action. Their inviting writing style encourages readers to join them in imagining more humane and inclusive futures.
Nancy Menning is a courtesy research associate in the environmental humanities at the University of Oregon.
Nancy Menning
Date Of Review:
February 26, 2024
