Holding Water to Hold Water: Comparing Levees and Tajines as Bodies of Water

This essay notices a material commonality between levees and tajines, namely that they need to hold water to hold water. Drawing on Astrida Neimanis’ Bodies of Water, this essay takes that commonality as an occasion to comparatively read levees and tajines. Demonstrating the peculiar possibility of such a staging is this essay’s main contribution to debates about how climate change is framed. When starting from this comparative stance, thinking the levee with the tajine brings out the everyday-like character of levees. This contrasts with how they are sometimes presented as bulwarks against apocalyptic, aqueous futures. On the other hand, thinking the tajine with the levee emphasizes the tajine’s infrastructural character and the force of its vitally important nourishment. The current essay demonstrates how the humanities may be helpful when the exceptionality of apocalyptic narratives stifles action, reproduces nature-culture binaries, and obscures apocalypses which have already happened. By thinking across seemingly disparate phenomena, this essay produces a moment of strangeness where forms of water management come to leak through existing narratives.