Cultural ecologies, human sensations and natural environments: A transitivity analysis of I am Afraid of Muslims

Abstract Ecocritical scholarship has encouraged diverse contributions from varied disciplines to the discussion of environmental issues across the globe. Given the magnitude of the problem and the frequency of the mutilation it carries along, there is a call for every segment of the society to contribute towards the theme. Literature being one of the strongest social stimulants has taken up the responsibility to address the issue from multivariate perspectives. Ecopoetry, one of the recently evolved literary genres, construes environmental representation as a pertinent category of literary, artistic, and political deliberation, often in conjunction with a focus on developing sensation, generating awareness, raising consciousness and problem-solving. Waqas Khwaja, one of the Pakistani English poets, writing “I am afraid of Muslims” Waqas Khwaja, articulates human-nature relation situating the responsibility of the devastation of nature on every born human soul beyond the boundaries of ethnicity, religion, knowledge and ideology. The present study offers an ecocritical analysis of the poem appraising the ideological stance built up by the poet by exploring the relationships construed through the consumption of the linguistic creativity and symbolic mapping of the concepts. The study revealed that Pastoral, as one of the forms of environmental imagination, synonymous with the idea of (re)turn to a less urbanized, more ‘natural’ state of existence formed the core thesis to express the environmental values and to render voice to nature. The study also traces global political ideologies entrenched in the modern world of human beings.


Literature review
Ecocriticism is a combination of Eco from Greek Oikos meaning house and critic from Greek Kritos meaning judge. Oikos refers to nature and Kritos refers to the authority who wants the house organized and clean. Since ecology means the science concerned with the interaction of organisms and their environment, and criticism means judgment of literary works; by analogy, ecocriticism is the study of representation of human beings in relation to their physical environment. The application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of the literature is named "ecocriticism". It was William Rueckert who coined the term in 1978 in his essay, "Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism", Glotfelty (1996) defines ecocriticism as " . . . The study of the relationship between literature and physical environment . . . ecocriticism takes an earth-centered approach to literary studies" (xviii). It is "a study of the relationship between literature and the environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis" (Buell, 1995, 430). Camilo Gomides (2006) defines ecocriticism as "The field of enquiry that analyzes and promotes works of art which raise moral questions about human interactions with nature, while also motivating audiences to live within a limit that will be binding over generations" (16). The scope of ecocriticism has become wider rapidly from nature writing, romantic poetry, and canonical literature to art and architecture, animal stories and science fictions. Multidimensional nature and diverse perspectives of the theory of ecocriticism have not yet been allowed it to single out a method of analysis and, therefore, is still relying on borrowed methodologies and theoretical approaches from literary, social and scientific studies. Despite the broad scope of enquiry and contrasting dimensions, all ecological criticism shares the fundamental premise that "human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it" (Glotfelty, 1996, xix).
Ecocriticism, as a growing field of study, is non-static and integrating new thoughts (Buell, 2005). The study of nature writing was the beginning of ecocriticism, but it has extended to include the ecocritical reading of texts (Branch & Slovic 2003;Buell, 2005) also. All texts carry environmental properties, even if they do not explicitly attend to environmental concerns (Buell, 2005). Fiction, poetry, drama, women's writing, native American/Canadian writing, African American literature, and mainstream genres such as science fiction have all turned out to be the objects for ecocriticism. Ecocriticism is dominated by American theorists but has expanded beyond its American boundaries in other parts of the world (Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan, Korea, Europe, and India). Patrick Murphy's "ency clopedic Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook" Murphy's (1998) illustrates with references and examples to mention the global nature of this critical approach. The articles in this collection range from China to the Caribbean. Murphy (2009) in "Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies: Fences, Boundaries, and Fields" adds more to the scholarship. Karl Kroeber's "Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind" is another example of ecocritical approach of the Euro-American literature. Kroeber's (1994) not only put emphasis on the discourses of nature linked to eighteenth and nineteenth-century Romanticism but also highlights a vocabulary and worldview established by ecology and the politics of environmentalism. A British romantic scholar Jonathan Bate, whose 1991 Romantic Ecology initiated British ecocriticism, writing "Song of the Earth" (Coupe, 2000) he has placed Heideggerian ecocriticism to its peak. According to Karen Thornber (2011), Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Taiwan and Sinophone environmental criticism seem to approach ecocriticism under the influence of Western ecocritics. Canadian ecocritics, Rebecca Raglon and Marian Scholtmeijer (2007) are of the view that the combination of common ground and balancing strategies in environmental and animal sustenance make it necessary to attempt for a closer compromise. Ecocritics all over the world have tried generating models for the elucidation of the idea of being in the world that is concurrently animal, technological, and environmental.
Ecocritical studies, "a multiform inquiry extending to a variety of environmentally focused perspectives" (Buell, 1995, 430), have tried hard to take position, through analytical as well as narrative practices, as an identifiable and organized literary theory on the critical canvas. One strategy still in practice is to build selectively on poststructuralist theory. Conley (1997) hypothesized "that the driving force of poststructural thought is indissolubly linked to ecology" (7).
Ecocritics question anthropocentrism, and the "mainstream assumption that the natural world be seen primarily as a resource for human beings" as well as critical approaches to changing ideas in "the material and cultural bases of modern society" (Clark, 2011). Estok (2005) claims that ecocriticism is more than "simply the study of Nature or natural things in literature; rather, it is any theory that is committed to effecting change by analyzing the function-thematic, artistic, social, historical, ideological, theoretical, or otherwise-of the natural environment, or aspects of it, represented in documents (literary or other) that contribute to material practices in material worlds". Zapf (2008), designs a functional methodology of ecocriticism, which investigates the similarities between ecosystems and artistic texts and postulates that such texts hypothetically have an ecological meaning in the cultural system.
Ecocriticism as a theory still lies on the academic margins. It does not have a widely known set of assumptions, developed procedures and outlined principles. Ecocriticism as a critical approach began in the 1980s in America and in the 1990s in the UK. American ecocriticism takes its bearings from American writings by transcendentalists (a group of New England writers) of mid-nineteenth century, celebrating nature, life force and wilderness as evident in America. However, the UK's ecocritical tradition takes its bearings from the British Romanticism of late eighteenth century, but its development is faster in America as compared to the UK. The existence of two separate versions of this critical approach is similar in their aims but differs in emphasis. Americans call it "ecocriticism", while the British name is "green studies". American ecocriticism is festive, commemorative and joyful in its tone, whereas the British green studies emphasize the harmful effects of different institutions on the environment. The theory in general rejects the idea that everything in this world is socially and linguistically constructed. For ecocritics, nature is a concrete reality which cannot be reduced to a concept of cultural practice. By looking at nature as "simply given" is a technique to stay away from the politics framing it (Liu, 1989), social inequalities are disguised as nature, and supposed as God's will and explained under the philosophy of human fate which cannot be changed, for example, "being poor" is not a person's fate neither God's will but is a social injustice and a product of societal politics and power (Glotfelty, 1996, 254-255). Carl Marx (1844) criticizing the Hegelian philosophy of right referred to the same as "religion is the opium of the people" (Daji, 2014, 225). According to Liu, "nature is the name under which we use the nonhuman to validate human" (Liu, 1989, 38). Attitudes towards nature vary, but the truth of its very existence and contradiction with cultures is a fact undeniable. We have nature, and we have cultures, both are real and distinct, and both affect each other. We can differentiate them by considering nature as fact and culture as concept. The cultural concepts vary for the same reality of nature as for example, the concept of baldness is taken as negative by associating it with increasing age and is taken as positive when associated with wisdom. So, the same natural reality has been conceptualized differently even in the same culture, which questions the truth. It is the job of an ecocritic to clarify our thoughts.
Despite the fact that nature has often been acknowledged as a significant element embodying literature and its impact on man, man-nature relationship was not studied. It is only the running down of natural resources, climatic changes and uncontrolled pollution as a result of industrial growth and societal development that have compelled literary critics to study this relationship. Ecocriticism, a branch of literary criticism emerged to fill this gap. It is a multidisciplinary mode of inquiry which draws upon science, literature, anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc., to study the attitude of mankind towards nature. As per Heise, literature and ecocriticism is viewed as an artefact of modernization and efforts against environmental degradation. He further says that environmental justice, social and racial inequality, globalization and human exposure to technology are the recent ecocritical trends in literary studies.
Texts are reflective of civilization's attitude towards natural heritage. Nature is known to us in the form of concepts and words, thus inseparable from language. Lewis Thomas (1974) sees language as the core of life, both mechanical and organic, "and the principal way we transform energy" (Glotfelty, 1996, 80). According to Edward O. Wilson, poetry crafts science "convergent in what they might eventually disclose about human nature" (Wilson, 1992, 76). Every field of study, either science or humanities, makes use of language for description of ideas, but specific vocabulary and grammar of that field of study shape the discipline. Ecocriticism examines the presence of signs that shape and form meaning in nature and culture. It is assumed by the ecocritics that scientists make use of language to represent (mimesis) and ecocritics examine "deixis", which express relative direction and point of reference in space, time and social context thus providing a cognitive basis for interpretation and explanation of an object. Through deixis, meanings are developed. Therefore, while reading a text, identification of the objects alone is not sufficient but pointing to what they do is also important to interpret ecocritical meanings. Timothy Morton in his essay, "Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology" (Morton, 2010), demands us to consider text in deconstructive relations. He asserts, "When we zoom into life forms we discover textuality". He further says that texts cannot be understood in isolation from their environments, which are made of signs. "There is more than a neat chiasmic symmetry here, a strange entanglement in which we cannot distinguish between what counts as an entity 'in' an environment and an entity 'in' a text". " . . . how nature writers see and understand nature has everything to do with how they see and understand the society whose relations with it they hope to change" (Newman 2002, 209). Newman is of the view that understanding "ecocentric consciousness" requires a "historical consciousness" paying special attention to the "coevolution of material social and natural systems that has produced the present crisis" (ibid, 21) of environmental endangerment.
There are as many methods to study a literary text ecocritically as many points of intersection of ecology and human beings are there. The present study intends to draw upon the linguistic resources employed by Waqas Khwaja in the selected poem to reveal the aims of the study.

Methodology
In order to investigate the theme of environmental values and symbolic mapping of the concepts through the construction of a pastoral discourse, the study aims to develop a poetic response to the impact of social, political and religious turmoil on human life in the selected poem. The selection of the poet and the poem is purposive, as the poet is a Pakistani Muslim immigrant in the USA and has experienced the post 9/11 hatred of non-Muslim communities against Islam and Muslims. The choice of the poem is due to its biocentric argument gelling in together many social and political issues of the time. The analysis is performed in accordance with the theories put forward by M.A.K Halliday in some of his books, especially, "An Introduction to Functional Grammar" (Kroeber, 1994). Systematic Functional Linguistics, also referred as SFL, is an approach in the field of functional linguistics which deals with the relationship between language and the function it performs in a social context. According to Halliday, language is not a personal process rather it is a social process which focuses on form and function. In 2004, Halliday and Matthiessen claimed that sematic meaning of SFL is divided into three functions which they termed as metafunctions. These three metafunctions are experiential (which is about the natural world), interpersonal (focuses on relationship between speaker and hearer, considering text as interaction) and textual (which considers text as a message). The grammar of experiential metafunction is labeled as "Transitivity", which helps in revealing the participants involved in an action, how they relate to others and if they take an active or passive role in the event (Nguyen, 2012) and therefore it well suits the purpose of the current study. Transitivity classifies a clause into three components: the process which is realized by the verb phrase, which is the nucleus, identified as Material, Mental, Relational, Verbal, Behavioral and Existential, the participant(s) carrying out or affected by the process and usually realized by noun phrases, and the circumstance(s) forming the adjunct component of the clause generally expressed by the prepositional and adverbial phrases (Simpson, 2004).
For the sake of analysis, the text is divided into clauses, and then, the subsequent clauses are coded according to the key provided in Appendix A. In order to investigate the Global political ideologies entrenched in the modern world of human beings the vocabulary of the poem will be analyzed for Repetition, synonyms, antonyms and pronouns. Later, khwaja's engraving engagement with the concept of contiguousness within the cultural as well as the ecological contexts will be explained on the basis of the transitivity in specific and vocabulary in general. The title of the poem is a mental clause as per transitivity analysis. By giving this title to his poem and choosing "afraid" as an action word and "Muslims" as acted upon, he is trying to refer towards a populous global islamophobia tension. Islamophobia is a concept; therefore, the author has used a mental process to reflect upon it. The term "islamophobia" gained commonness in public discourses after 9/11 attacks in 2001, but the concept refers to "xenophobic" reactions (both fear and hatred) to the Islamic faith and to Muslims. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word means "Intense dislike or fear of Islam, esp. as a political force; hostility or prejudice towards Muslims". The poet connotes a social anxiety about Islam and Muslims but at the same time he refers it to himself by choosing the pronoun "I am", thus bringing up that it is a stereotype; therefore, everyone has internalized it, including him. He, acknowledging the reality of anti-Muslim prejudice, is trying to negotiate and resist islamophobia. Khwaja is expressing his anger for such a confused and illogical narrative towards Islam. The experiential clause analysis suggests that humans are engaged in mental processes like "fear", "dismay", "rattle" etc. The discourse of fear has been construed through the use of mental processes where the sensors are nouns and pronoun "me" and Hindus, Guatma, Christians and Nanak are at a phenomenal position. This transitivity construction shows that all the fears pointed out are psychological. Moreover, the idea proposed in these lines reflects social, religious and political diversification and discrimination existent in the contemporary human world. Throughout the stanza, Khwaja uses words with specific etymological histories and connotations to explicate the idea of human cultural relationships in the global landscape. He outlines the intertwining history of different religious and ideological groups with references to religious and social dissonance. Here, the poet's representation of environmental imagination "has become almost synonymous with the idea of (re)turn to a less urbanized, more 'natural' state of existence" (Buell, 1995: 31). These lines evoke a pastoral physical environment through the portrayals like "I flee in terror" to nature". Buell writes: "Historically, pastoral has sometimes activated green consciousness, sometimes euphemized land appropriation. It may direct us towards the realm of physical nature" (Buell, 1995: 31). While describing the ecological sensitivity through a poetic account of his inner landscape from which he writes, he is shaping up the idea of psychotherapeutic healing power of Nature. The poet imagines humans have turned so cruel to each other when he says "An ominous firelight flares up in my brain", and in the next lines, he adds "The moment I see a human figure" and then going on, he takes natural environments as a place to rescue himself from his fellow beings. The experiential analysis of the clauses of the stanza reflects the contiguousness of the non-human worlds, despite diversity these worlds are sharing borders and living in harmony. The word "without" is used with "rituals of aversion", "philosophy", "religion", "law" and "affliction of private visions" which are all negative attributes for the human world. Whereas life has been valued with "art", "living" and "science", which are positive connotations. Contiguous words are attributed with sorrows, joys, raptures, ecstasies, envy, and spite and are valued with no killing, no words, adequately contained and bloom which shows that all values are positive and all attributes are negative. When the values are positive, it means that there is a positive potential in the contiguous worlds to get themselves out of all the negativity they have acquired as their attributes. Here, again the idea of pastoral seems to be endorsed by adding to the qualities of the non-human world. 5.2.1.5. Stanza 4. The detailed transitivity analysis of the clauses in the stanza shows that contiguous worlds are being identified through relational processes in terms of the values and attributes. All values are negative here, like "garbage bins", "litter pits", "radioactive disposal dumps" and "collective indifference". These all values are of the human world assigned to it by human destructive behaviour. This implies that the relationship between nature and human has become anthropocentric. Through these lines portray a literal example of a world where the humans have polluted and destroyed the natural environments. The lexical choices like "invaded", "annexed", "ruptured", "torn" and "robbed" in this stanza provide an image of how human histories, social ideologies and global politics have played out in the actual world. All these words are grammatically attributed to the human world.

About the poet
Look  [ph] (the whole clause is phenomenon)

Stanza 5.
The experiential analysis highlights man's weaknesses through mental processes like; oblivious, unmindful, blind, although mind, soul and rationality form the basis for legitimizing human superiority over non-human/nature. The verbal processes "look" "look" and the behavioural process "cry out" are together used by the poet to stress the anthropocentric practices which are portrayed by a long material process "assembled" with five goals which are referring towards the heinous acts performed by the dwellers of the earth. "They" have been used as indicative of a group acting against nature and distancing himself from them. The poet is trying to highlight that those who have done harm to the nature are oblivious and unmindful of the fact that harmonizing with nature brings human the spiritual enlightenment, physical, emotional and psychological healing (as endorsed by the romantics Stanza 6: The analysis reveals that the poet has projected nature as an unaffected, sustainable and over powering entity. The behavioural clauses in the stanza suggest that processes like smile, shake and ring are psychological and physiological in nature which are the features of human beings. Behavioural clauses typically take a conscious being as their participant, but here in these clauses, the plains, deserts and rocks are the participants which make these ecological entities conscious beings. Shake, stretch and dissolve are material processes of nature which show that nature is active and the actions are goal oriented. The shaking of heads of the plains and dissolution of waters in wild guffaws hint towards nature's retaliation towards human anthropocentrism.

Conclusion
This poem aims both to mesmerize the readers with peace and harmony of natural life and to offend anthropocentricism. It is lyricized to reflect on the gap between cultural and environmental ecologies. Hubert Zapf, elucidating the relationship between natural and cultural ecologies articulated that "the internal landscapes produced by modern culture and consciousness are equally important for human beings as their external environments," he argues that these two types of ecologies influence each other, on the one hand, by shaping human sensations and, on the other hand, the responses produced as a result of those sensations to the natural environments. Taking this sense of the relationship, the poet instigates human figures to get influence from the natural ecologies and revisit their consciousness for their fellow human beings beyond the religious, political and ideological differences. To conclude, the title of the poem, "I am afraid of Muslims", refers towards a universal global fear which has been developed through political means by the exploitation of religious differences. In the contemporary human world, it is the ultimate fear on the globe. Making this fear as a point of departure, he refuses to allow any of the human civilization, ideology and religion to determine what nature is to humans. An ecocritical reading of the poem suggests that the poet proposes humans to learn to live in harmony with other human fellows and that the idea of relocation of nature from peripheral position to centre is recommended. The notion of human accountability is also presented by attribution of power to Nature for acting brutally and pitiless in the form of natural calamities.

Me
Christians unnerve and alarm me, Jews fill me with dread, Rattle and dismay me

My
An ominous firelight flares up in my brain

They
The stockpiles they have assembled, Oblivious to what they foment, They have prepared for themselves

Their
The toxic malice of their words and deeds, The malevolence of their contempt, The impunity of their depredations, The freedom of their slaughter, But the plains smile and shake their heads

Its
No species its lexicon, its call, its order, its practice, Where life itself is art, living, science, Where the plant of infections and defilement pitches its roots deep into the earth's core

Imperatives
Look, look, I cry out

Declaratives
The whole text poem

Modality
Nor killing bloom into calamity no words may adequately contain