Weapons of War and Ecocide: Depiction of Environmental Injustice and Slow Violence in Nadeem Aslam’s Fiction

This chapter draws upon the insights from the field of environmental posthumanities and material ecocriticism to illustrate the ‘Environmental InjusticeEnvironmental Injustice’ and ‘slow violenceviolence’ caused by the proliferation of weapons as portrayed in Nadeem AslamNadeem Aslam’s The Wasted VigilAslamThe Wasted Vigil and The Blind Man’s Gardenculture. Aslam’s novels illustrate the sites of ecocideecocide, environmental injustice for human communities, increased oppression of marginalized communities by weapons (children and women), and the emergence of an environmentally unjust world for the people of colour. Wars and the use of weapons have acute environmental ramifications. These wars not only destroy human habitats but also devastate the ecology of a spatial location. I conflate AppaduraiAppadurai’s concept of “technoscape” to propose the term ‘weaponscapes’ to describe the globalglobal flow of weapons, which in Pakistan’s case has been a key feature due to its involvement in wars imposed on Afghanistan by Russia and the USA, and its ongoing geopolitical tensions with India. The influx of weapons into Pakistan has profound impacts on the nation’s culture, society, and security, creating landscapes of violence, or ‘thanatoscapes’, marked by environmental degradation, ecocide, and human security crises. This section argues that one dimension of analysing the intra-actionintra-action (between war technology and human communities) is to study the destruction of ecology, environment, and ecospheres. These weapons, which are being used by neocolonialneocolonial powers, are destroying the habitats of the people of colour in various parts of the underprivileged world, which is always under invasion by one colonial power after another.