While attempting to braid my daughter Alethea's hair one fine evening in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, my attention was suddenly drawn to an animated conversation between the cartoon versions of the Kratts Brothers. The brotherly duo of the 'Wild Kratts' planet-saving, creature-transforming team were excitedly talking about camels and camel humps, Bactrian camels and dromedary camels, and other such camel stuff as to excite zealous members of the camel-loving community. One of the brothers explained that camel humps stored fat, not water. Camels then metabolize the fat into water and energy to survive without drinking for long periods of time.
I never really thought about camel humps before. Something about their stunning physiology made me pause my braiding (much to Alethea's exaggerated relief; to be fair to her, I may have been making hirsute bonfires on her head instead of cornrows). I rushed to my notes; I wrote: we need camel humps.
I find camel humps to be fascinating phenomena largely obscured by their popular descriptions as 'batteries'. In a manner of speaking, camel humps do behave like battery packs fitted for the harsh and abject conditions of the desert. But even though we use the language of storage and energy retrieval to describe their function, something more than energy retrieval is at work.
The question I scribbled down in my notebook was: "What are camel humps composed of?" The official account about the miraculous emergence of humps insists that prehistorically humpless camels slowly evolved humps by a long, slow, and arduously staccatoed process of natural selection. But that account leaves much to be desired. The creationist perspective (which is that a bearded Gandalf-like deity made humped camels wholesale) seems to operate by the same logic. Why these accounts feel inadequate is that they begin - as our analyses often do - from camels as stable, individualized, categories that add on newer accoutrements over time.
What if 'camels' and 'camel humps' are provisional becomings intimately connected with their environments, emergent properties of camel-desert assemblages, not discrete functional units? How might that trouble the linear trajectories with which we coddle and curate our stories of complex emergence? What if camels - real, material, bovine, and seemingly bored - are transcorporeal marks, intensities within ecological becomings, densities of geophilosophical flows, instead of already-made 'things'?
I think camel humps are composed not of fat or water per se, but of the desert. They are how the desert lives in camel bodies. They are the transcorporeal marks that blur the divide between the camel and the desert.
When I say "we need camel humps", I'm trying to suggest we need more than solar panels or newer batteries. I'm trying to gesture at the sensuous rephrasing of the body that is often forgotten in our neurotypical accounts of resolution.
Addressing climate collapse, genocidal loss, and necropolitical forces in racialized arrangements isn't exclusively about humans acting on an external environment, or about designing our way out, or about asserting our divinely ordained capacities of agency, or about 'changing the world', but about recognizing our always-already entangled relationships with ecological processes. Perhaps "climate action" isn't always traceable to what humans are doing, but how 'doing itself' - untethered from human drivers - is reconfiguring the assemblages we're 'part' of. How 'doing itself' is learning it can move differently.
Camel humps force us to think beyond adaptation and mitigation, beyond responsibility as anchored to choice, beyond intentional design, beyond intelligence as property of higher order species, and about how processes are already afoot. Already underway. Beyond justice. Beyond our efforts to save the world.
Camel humps can invite a vital, parapolitics of cultivating sensuous perceptions, of etching grooves in the troughs of experience, of c/rafting and experimenting with tentative gestures which, in the larger framework, are never solutionistic or final. We are sprouting humps, so to speak. The camel hump is a story: the camel didn't merely pass through its desert. It became its desert. We are becoming-with-this-moment.
Bayo Akomolafe
