Counter creaturely communities in Emily Nasrallah’s Yawmīyyāt Hirr and Hoda Barakat’s Barīd al-Layl

This article examines the possibilities as well as the limits of creaturely solidarity in Lebanese novelist Emily Nasrallah's (d. 2018) young adult novel Yawmīyyāt Hirr (A Cat's Diary), first published in Arabic in 1997 and translated by Denys Johnson-Davies under the title What Happened to Zeeko in 2001, and Hoda Barakat's (b. 1952) Barīd al-Layl (The Night Mail), first published in Arabic in 2018 and translated by Marilyn Booth under the title Voices of the Lost in 2021. I show how the ‘creaturely’ in both novels becomes a trope for inhumanity, dehumanization, and animalization. In other words, the creaturely denotes not only animals and nonhuman ecologies, but humans who have been stripped of their political humanity and thereby rendered ungrievable less-than-human beings. I argue that both writers foster a feeling of creaturely solidarity through poignant instances of shared pain, which are construed within the context of war and ecological calamity.