Living Deserts and Colonial Afterlives: A Conversation with Jill Jarvis

What is the relationship between imagined and embodied knowledge of geographical space? In July of 2024, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Jill Jarvis over Zoom about her work in progress, Signs in the Desert: An Aesthetic Cartography of the Sahara. Jarvis defines the book project as an act of “aesthetic cartography” in which she argues that aesthetic works such as literature, art, and film fill in the knowledge gaps left behind by state-sponsored maps and colonial histories.

The conversation explores the Sahara as a conceptual space mapped through aesthetics in literature, art, and film in opposition to a historically objective space defined by political relationships of power. Both hailing from the arid climate of Idaho and pursuing research in French, Arabic, and African Studies, Dr. Jarvis and I traced our shared imaginaries of the Sahara from such diverse works as the 1946 children’s book Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry to Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako’s 2014 film Timbuktu.

Signs in the Desert is in progress, under contract with University of Chicago Press.

Stream or download our conversation here.

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Interview Highlights

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Angeline Peterson: Can you explain how the Sahara has historically been reduced and misunderstood in terms of cultural significance, and also how important is it that we understand the Sahara from the perspective of creators and storytellers from that region in Africa?

Jill Jarvis: Nowhere in my education, nowhere in my reading had anyone ever talked about the seventeen nuclear bombs that the French detonated in the Algerian Sahara during the Algerian War for Independence. That very absence of memory puts a point on how the Sahara has been made into an absence, and a place that is represented as empty, which is what the French officials did in order to justify these bombs. The afterlives of colonial violence is absolutely not a metaphor. What is decolonization if the land itself forever bears that violence? The very idea deserts are empty continues to be useful to colonizing and extractive projects which need waste, landed spaces or empty spaces in order to function as they do.

AP: In her book The Forbidden Woman, Malika Mokeddem uses the desert and this metaphor of the liver. There’s geographic studies about how the Sahara actually operates as the “liver” of the world, that the winds from the Sahara and the sands filter air in the rest of the world.

JJ: There’s this incredible work about how the the sand in the Sahara is irredeemably irradiated with toxicity and radioactivity from those seventeen bombs, and that sand circulates throughout planetary biomes. This idea that the desert is somewhere elsewhere, disconnected from us—whoever we are—just falls apart. Nuclear toxicity and radioactivity respect no boundaries, then circulates in subterranean ways and in aerial ways.

AP: You have an excerpt from the Algerian writer Safia Ketou: “The desert is peopled. It is not deserted. So many mystical atoms animate its gaze.” What do you think Ketou means by “mystical atoms,” and the implications that phrase has for our understanding of all life forms in the desert and how they interact? What is the desert’s gaze, and how is it animated?

JJ: It is that kind of resistance that I’m trying to sink into and inhabit through this project. It is not just peopled, but animated itself. It’s not just about the desert as a container for human lives and animal lives and plant lives, but the matter itself is alive. I learned from Tuareg—nomadic people who live and work in the area—that they really thought of the mountain and the other features of the landscape as living. It’s in some sense, active and agential, but it’s also been infused with a kind of toxic radiance that is part of the infrastructure of the colonial project. I felt like Safia Ketou somehow got that right, that the very matter itself is vivid and active and in some sense interacting with us.

AP: In Sound Senses, your chapter contributes Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako’s film Timbuktu. What do you make of the greater metaphor behind “sonic death” and the way of life that Sissako insinuates is dying? How does it speak to the importance of your work of archiving and analyzing the aesthetics of the desert?

JJ: Everyone talks about the film as a depiction of terrorists. Timbuktu itself is the signifier of the exotic, impossibly distant nowhereland. It’s not really about that at all. What emerges is this much bigger picture. It’s not about terrorists destroying everything, it’s about changing ecosystems and changing cultural systems, and also the histories of occupation and the separatist movement. There’s changes in the ecosystem that are making it such that they’re competing for resources. It’s the sorrow over the loss of a cow, but also the grief over these larger ecological, environmental changes and political changes that make it so that people are competing in this way.

AP: Would you define your approach to writing about the Sahara through close reading as ecocriticism?

JJ: This project has pushed me to think of literary works in an intertextual relationship with other kinds of representation like films, photography, exhibits, and sculpture. It’s still close reading, it’s also interacting with these other forms of representation that help our other senses to activate, in order to know about these histories that have been effaced—that are profoundly consequential and that are deadly to not just humans, but nonhumans as well. I’ve found my way into ecocriticism, but it didn’t start there. It became about all of these relationships between humans and other-than-humans, and how we are all interconnected. Radioactivity and nuclearity in particular has compelled me to reckon with that.

AP: What are three works of art and or literary criticism that you would recommend to people interested in further learning about this topic of desert futures?

JJ: I would point them directly to Samia Henni. She edited a book called Deserts Are Not Empty, which is an anthology of essays. I am an advocate for putting any of Mahmoudan Hawad’s work into people’s awareness. He calls the form of his work “furigraphy.” His book Sahara Atomic Visions (Sahara Visions Atomiques) is just mind warping and amazing. There’s an artist named Lydia Ourahmane, and she had an installation called Tassili, an incredible video sculpture piece.

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Featured image: Camel riders in the Moroccan Sahara Desert. Photo by Saâd Jebbour, 2019.

Podcast music: “Gloves” by Julian Lynch. Used with permission.

Jill Jarvis is an assistant professor in the Department of French and a member of the Councils on African Studies and Middle East Studies at Yale University. Her scholarship has been shaped by research in Algeria, but her interest in questions of state violence, translation, and justice have led her to investigate aesthetic and intellectual networks across the African Sahara. Website. Contact.

Angeline Peterson is a dissertator in the Department of African Cultural Studies at UW-Madison. Her doctoral research traces representations of shame that resonate between Greek tragedy and diasporic African horror film. She conceptualizes shame as a genre encapsulating stories of modern exile, spiritual rebirth, and the postcolonial condition. Contact.