Sekhmet and the shaman : extinction, ferality and trans-species connections in Henrietta Rose-Innes’ Green Lion

Abstract

In her fourth novel, Green Lion (2015), Henrietta Rose-Innes depicts nature’s precariousness in a commercial-driven city. The novel focuses on how, in the Anthropocene epoch, destructive human activities such as property development and hunting have emptied the city of Cape Town’s peri-urban areas of wildlife, to the extent that Sekhmet is the last surviving black-maned lioness in the world. In response to this overwhelming loss, Green Lion turns its attention to what remains in nature, depicting what Fredric Jameson identifies as an ‘imaginary regression to the past and to older pre-rational forms of thought’ (64). The novel thus foregrounds the ecocritical concept of age-old interconnections between human and nonhuman life through its depiction of the transformative shamanistic relationship between the protagonist, Con Marais, animal activist Mossie and Sekhmet. In this article, I elucidate the change of state and ferality that this transformative relationship elicits in Con, and I extend the notion of ferality to encompass its ecological connotations.