Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

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Only a revolutionary or confused historian would consider Chernobyl, the transatlantic slave trade, and World War II in the same study. I don’t know much else about the book, but it opens on a high floor of an office tower in central London in the early hours of a Sunday morning. The academic Niall Martin has suggested that the value of Alexievich’s book about Chernobyl lies in its ability to listen into nonhuman spaces: it pays attention to the ways in which human destruction affects nonhuman systems, communities, individuals. I pay a bit more attention to animals, I’m just more aware of their worlds going on around my world.

Attenborough, a nature broadcaster in his nineties, was reflecting on the changes in the environment that have been brought about over his lifetime. And yet it’s still unusual for any storyteller—historian or novelist—to describe the effects of a war on a particular species of insect. Watching the footage, I wondered why the fact that the environment was still highly radioactive was unmentionable. So for the essay, I’ve been speaking with people who monitor conflict in the environment, analysts or people who works for NGOs, who use very complex satellite technologies to look at landscapes from a distance and try to work out what’s happening in them.So I like words and I think they’re usable within and beyond the human world, but the particular ways in which they filter and prioritize are a concern, yes, very much. And then the more I think about the fact that I don’t particularly like the dairy or meat industries, the more I find it harder to justify those practices. Daisy Hildyard is the author of the novels Emergency and Hunters in the Snow, which received the Somerset Maugham Award and a ‘5 under 35’ honorarium at the USA National Book Awards. Slow violence is massive and everywhere, I don’t think I could identify a person or place on the planet that isn’t somehow marked by it.

The young girl’s need to love and protect a baby bird or animal and the need to manipulate or hurt it are collapsed together. Breaking apart well-worn tropes, Emergency provides an unaffectedly complicated picture of our shared environment, exposing the gaps in the lockdown narrative that ‘nature is healing’. With everything that is swirling in our world right now, how would you describe where writing is coming from inside of you, and what next you feel compelled to say? She shows how historical atrocity is a condition of the present: the transatlantic slave trade is animated, today, in oppressive or violent anti-Black laws, systems, and human interactions.Past and present, nature and humanity, life and death intermix, ebbing and flowing in a stream of prose that carries the reader on an exhilarating and frequently provocative and violent ride. She watches a kestrel hunting, helps a farmer with a renegade bull, and plays out with her best friend, Clare. Daisy’s first novel, Hunters in the Snow, was published by Jonathan Cape in July 2013, and has been hailed as ‘a remarkably intelligent debut’, a ‘truly dazzling first novel’, and as a book ‘so rich in texture it deserves many re-readings’. Sharpe begins with the physical events of the transverse waves at a slave ship’s stern, but from there she finds Hurricane Katrina, medical inequalities, the twenty-first-century carceral system, police brutality, and everyday racism being drawn into the outspreading waves of the wake. Where he describes how a bomb’s physical effects are held in the atmosphere, Luftkrieg could also be taken to mean war in the air.