The Queer Ecologies of the Tambass Wetlands

With rhythms that may include coming completely in and out of being, wetlands trouble the kind of typological and binaristic thinking that governs much ecological thought. They offer instead relations characterized far more by change than by stability. We explore wetlands as queer, unstable, and impermanent social-ecological forms, with keen attention to the vulnerability that such queerness implies, through a consideration of Tambass, a wetlands complex in the Senegal River Valley in southwestern Mauritania.

Our aim in this essay, as well as in a documentary film to come titled Tambass: Life in Spite of It All (from which the accompanying clips are pulled), is to rethink relations to wetlands beyond the instrumentalist logics of development, reclamation, and even conservation. By accounting for the complex lifeworlds that wetlands embody and support, we endeavor to reframe wetlands as life, not just as a medium for it. Most importantly, we explore the forms of relating that the queer rhythms, syncopations, and vast diversities of wetlands invite.

Tambass after the return of the water. December 2024.

The Tambass wetlands at the center of our story are but one expression of the expansive category of “wetlands.” They are shallow, lacustrine, and connected to the Senegal River floodplain in the arid near-coastal, near-equatorial landscape of the Sahel. Their open water is ringed with Typha cattails, low shrubs, and upland Acacia trees that reach into the surrounding dry hills and dunes. The Tambass wetlands offer an essential, pulsating presence as sources of food and rest over seasons and along paths of bird migration.

Globally, wetlands and their ecological communities vividly shift in space and time with levels of water, climatic conditions, and surrounding landscapes. As fluctuating expressions of water on the landscape, wetlands rhythms may be felt over days, seasons, years, or decades. The stunning range of human and other-than-human creatures and life forms that characterize, depend on, and pass through them are adapted to thrive in this impermanence and flux.  

In Tambass, the ecological terroir includes the charismatic (pelicans, cranes, and storks), cute (goats and sheep), threatening (crocodiles), exuberant (donkeys), unnerving (leeches), parasitic (giardia), pathogenic (mosquitoes), and invisibly transformative (bacteria and archaea), all of which can generate intense felt experiences. Such strange, dynamic brilliance is queer in its range and in how it troubles notions of “balance” and obedient conceptions of containment and fixed boundaries of natural spaces so often conceived of as exploitable reserves. 

Development and “Reclamation” at Tambass

As a broad pattern, there exists a gulf between the relational orientations of many indigenous communities who live with wetlands and depend on them for food and livelihoods, and the extractive cultures who often perceive wetlands as inconvenient wastelands. Indigenous communities and cultures, such as the Halpulaar’en (Fulani) living around the Tambass wetlands, are often closely attuned to and reliant on the dynamics and health of wetlands and the species who co-exist with them. Indeed, the Halpulaar’en, who live in intimate proximity with their herds of goats, sheep, and cows, perceive the Tambass wetlands in profoundly positive and life-affirming ways. By contrast, extractive cultures generally focus on the need to drain, control, or otherwise regulate the life of wetlands. The indeterminacy, or queerness, of wetlands, often willfully interpreted in extractive societies as invisibility or non-existence, also renders them exceptionally vulnerable.

Multispecies encounters around the lightbulb. Tambass, December 2024.

The Halpulaar’en, like many indigenous communities, are subject to the “edge effects” of the extractive communities that surround them, including acts of “reclamation” and infrastructural development used globally to “rationalize” unruly wetland spaces. Wetlands across the Sahel are being “developed” at alarming rates, often with the goal of increasing rice production, despite its dubious yields and staggering negative externalities. These projects transform wetlands as aggregators of life into voids and repellants for resident and migratory creatures, including humans. They disrupt the queer flows and rhythms that underlie the vitality of Tambass.

At the invitation of the Mauritanian filmmaking team of Abderrahmane Sissako and Kessen Tall and their neighbors in Tambass, we made a first trip in September 2023. By that time, the wetlands at the center of the Halpulaar’en community of Khareirat had been drained to make way for an agricultural project. Four kilometers upstream of Tambass, an unknown and unnamed entity built an earthen dam to block the branch of the Senegal River that previously fed the wetlands. Workers then dug a 50-foot wide rectilinear canal to remove all of the remaining water in an act of terraforming violence that can be likened to a bloodletting.

Abou Sow describes the draining of Tambass and Abderrahmane Sissako surveys the consequences. September 2023.

Broadly, the aim of that agricultural project was the ostensible improvement of “unused” or “waste” lands to develop the economy, meet legitimate food security needs, ameliorate disease risk, and resolve ambiguous land and water claims. It followed years of declining water levels at Tambass, attributed locally to upstream withdrawals for rice production. (Here as elsewhere, localized human interventions are more determinant than climate change, for all the ravages the latter visits on Mauritania.)

The Tambass wetlands’ lively and dynamic web of interactions—taking place in the always-shifting ecotone of watery and terrestrial worlds between spur-winged lapwings, pied kingfishers, and other avians (migratory and resident), frogs, toads, dragonflies, Typha reeds, fish, monitor lizards, domesticated herd animals, butterflies, chemical-cycling microorganisms, and countless other creatures, including differently situated humans speaking a variety of languages (Pulaar, Hassaniya, Soninke, Wolof, French, etc.)—ceased almost immediately. 

When we returned to Tambass in December 2024, the situation had changed. As is so often the case, the narratives we construct regarding decline or progress were confounded by a wholly surprising ground truth.

In October 2024, a major rain event in eastern Mauritania and southern Mali led to a precipitous release of water from the Manantali Dam, letting loose a riverine pulse that flooded vast swaths of land along the banks of the Senegal River. In the process, the small earthen dam that had been built to “reclaim” Tambass was breached, and the water came flooding back in. Immediately, the Halpulaar’en  herders were able to water their cattle, sheep, and goats minutes rather than hours from home. Within days, the birds had come back, and within weeks, the fish and the frogs and toads. Fishermen had also spotted mermaids, as folks from Khareirat told us with glee.

The persistence of wetlands life, both witnessed and imagined, is itself a kind of queer configuration of survival in a time of pronounced threats to existence.

The Queer Survivance of Wetlands

As the events at Tambass so saliently show, wetlands teach us to be wary of triumphalist narratives.

The return of the water isn’t a victory. It is at best a reprieve. There is a tempting but shallow narrative: Reclamation destroys the queer, multispecies companionship of the wetlands, but “nature” restores it. There is, in fact, nothing “natural” in the return of the water to Tambass. The flood resulted from the precipitous opening of a spillway at a manmade structure. That shallow narrative belies the ongoing vulnerability of Tambass, its companionate community of species, and of the Halpulaar’en, a racialized and linguistically minoritized community in Mauritania.

The political-economic forces that existed prior to the initial draining of Tambass are still present. The agricultural project had stalled for a presumed lack of funding, but another attempt may already be planned. 

Lively companionship after the return of the water. December 2024.

Maybe what the community was experiencing, and we were witnessing, then, was not so much a reversal as another moment of what Blanche Verlie calls “living-with.” This different way of relating to environmental change avoids the trap of nostalgia and moves toward healing by centering relationality, Indigenous ways of knowing, and the power of mourning an earlier relation to climate. Amidst that mourning, these moments of relief, emotional release, and joy are possible and, in fact, essential. They are, in a sense, all we have. But they do not imply a teleology, let alone a triumphalist one.

The lifeworlds wetlands support are always precarious. Their queerness and the queer relations they inspire assert themselves in a deep orientation to return, survival, and presence, necessitating both mourning and joy amidst the ongoing history of repression, capture, and violence.

The natural variability of wetlands can obscure other patterns of change and their consequences. Deep uncertainty lives within their dynamism. Within some range of increasing variation, wetlands can maintain their queer life and capacity to respond as wetlands. However, beyond critical thresholds, changes may result in sudden shifts into alternative states or disappearance altogether. As several of our interlocutors at Tambass recounted to us, the nearly imperceptible but accumulating shifts in the weather have become the source of a deeper, shifting, and increasingly mournful attachment to place. 

Becoming (Queerly) Intimate with Wetlands

The uncertain relations made increasingly fleeting by climate and political-economic forces raise questions: What does it mean to give oneself over to a space that is characterized more by change than by stability? And what does this kind of relating ask of us?

At one level, relationality with wetlands invites a present-based form of attachment, a moving- or living-with. The seasonal and daily rhythms of frog, bird, and insect calls, silences, and shifting humidities provoke a slightly melancholy wonderment, and, in this, an appreciation of cycles, rhythms, and the beauty of passing things.

Wetlands’ queer and mutable natures also invite celebration of embodiments and expressions that can vary and change over time. The sheer range of water-related, mythic figures that are amphibious, liminal, and/or metamorphic speaks to this capacity of wetlands as imaginal terroir—queer, vivid, and contingent.

Relatedly, wetlands invite a relationship with obscurity, opacity, and awkwardness. Usually flat, often easily hidden, wetlands are hard to take in. It can be difficult to see in past the mucky ground and shrubbiness at eye level. Humans, whose physical form is poorly adapted to wetlands, often experience them either up close and incompletely or through openings that provide only a limited view. If not born into daily relationship, it takes time, presence, and patience to become intimate with wetlands.

The wetlands and their obscured companions at Diawling National Park. December 2024.

The panoptic, disembodied view afforded by drone footage does nothing to resolve this “problem” of limited sight. Instead, it resembles Donna Haraway’s “god trick,” which amounts to “seeing everything from nowhere.” That eye-in-the-sky perspective, which is, not coincidentally, a key part of the visual language adopted by many Anthropocene nature documentaries, runs contrary to the attentive, proximate seeing that wetlands require.

And then there is human awkwardness (no gills or wings or webbed feet) and thus the physical comedy of wetlands that mortifies the ego with all the slipping and sliding and face-planting in the muck. Yet there is an offering in not being able to see, in being graceless, in releasing oneself into being “in the thick of it,” present with the vivid encounters in one’s location of unknowing.

Flooding in Nouakchott from the novel monsoon season. September 2023 and December 2024.

The queer morphologies of wetlands require moving away from anthropocentric perspectives on optimizing, ordering, and rationalizing all that we live with and move through. They also demand a different mode of being with, one that seeks not a typological understanding of this landscape feature but a more relational posture to it. Relation moves us toward non-hierarchical encounters that leave the other—human or other-than-human—intact, opaque, and possibly enriched. We must see ourselves as entangled and co-constituted to begin to move past what Val Plumwood sees as the murderous dualism of colonizing societies. 

Wetlands’ queer mutability, multiplicity, interspersion in the landscape, as well as their capacity to rebound, complicate stories of fixed or atomized natures, or simple ecological dualisms. The rapid renewal at Tambass provides an opportunity to feel the loss and the life brushing right up against each other, as they do in queer worlds. Its transformations invite us to rethink and revalue ecological forms as opaque, impermanent, and alive all at once. 

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Featured Image: Acacia trees line the banks of the Tambass wetlands. Photo by authors, December 2024.

Richard Watts (he/il) is Associate Professor in the Department of French and Italian Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. He teaches and conducts research in the environmental humanities with a focus on the arts of the Caribbean and West Africa. He is Principal Investigator on an EarthLab Innovation Grant with Seattle collaborators Maureen Ryan, Danny Hoffman, and Meghan Halabisky and with Abderrahmane Sissako and Kessen Tall in Mauritania. Contact.

Maureen Ryan (she/they) is founder-principal of Dark Creature and multidisciplinary development lead at TealWaters. For over two decades she has studied the effects of climate and human-induced hydrologic change on amphibians and freshwater wetlands, while co-leading projects spanning sciences, arts, and humanities. She holds a Ph.D. in Population Biology from the University of California Davis and was a David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellow at the University of Washington. Instagram. Contact.

Danny Hoffman is a visual anthropologist. He is the author of The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone (Duke University Press, 2011) and Monrovia Modern: Urban Form and the Political Imagination (Duke University Press, 2017). His films include the shorts Make-It-Rail (2016) and Repair the World / Réparer le mode (2023, with Rich Watts) and documentary features Sparo: A Political Portrait (2019) and The Maple Thief (2022, with Lynn Thomas and Michael Sanderson). Contact.