Toxic mobilities and the politics of unending in Henrietta Rose-Innes’s “Poison”

Abstract

The few readings of Henrietta Rose-Innes’s short story “Poison” have so far focused on how it critiques the racial politics of eco-apocalypse and the ways narratives of the end are inflected by the privilege of whiteness. In this paper, I take a different approach, examining the eponymous poison and the ways it is narrated to challenge not merely the eschatological sentiments underlying the prevalent imaginaries of the future but also the (anthropocentric) idea of the end itself as an expected and natural denouement to the world. Reading the toxic conceptually, I suggest toxicity becomes a signifier of no-end. Inspired by recent scholarship on toxicity, especially Daniel Hofmann’s stunning take on the toxic, I cull from its properties its resistance to endings, looking at how toxicity can help us think beyond human exceptionalism and the human species’ extinction this exceptionalism propounds. I highlight, in particular, the motility and persistence of toxic matter, which unsettles what Achille Mbembe calls the regimes of borderisation. Mobile and enduring, travelling freely across all kinds of entities, human and otherwise, Rose-Innes’ toxicity re-scripts the dominant narratives of eco-apocalypse, offering a vision of the future world which may be mutated yet is ongoing and fuelled by toxified, recomposed, perishable human bodies.