Fragile Waterscapes Flashcards
Steve Mentz and Martha Elena Rojas on ‘The Hungry Ocean’
- The shore-surf system circulates energy without dissipating it. The apparent permanence of the system, in fact, counterbalances the sonnet’s one-way thrust towards decay: human cultures and bodies will perish, the poem insists, but the ocean remains hungry. The sea counter-balances and exceeds all human structures. It creates an alternative ecology, inhuman but alluring. […] The sea’s nonhuman force modifies human systems from empire to trade to slavery that structure global Anglophone culture during and after Shakespeare’s lifetime.
- Part of the challenge making an oceanic turn in ecocritical studies is the persistent whiff of timelessness about the ocean. Throughout the nineteenth century, the notion that the great waters were apart from history, rolling timelessly around the globe, carried great cultural weight.
Aims of blue humanities
- take into account water spaces in history, cultural and literary studies
- historicize water spaces
- acknowledge agential force of water
John Gillis. The Human Shore about Fragile Waterscapes
Global increase of coastal populations by 30 % in 30 years; USA: coastal zone (15% of US land area) inhabited by 53 % of US population; similar trends in Australia, S. America, Europe and Asia
Humanity’s current relationship to the shore is that of a stranger, for after millennia of coastal existence, it has forgotten how to live with coasts and oceans. Not that inhabiting shores was ever easy. Rising sea levels, overfishing, and pollution all happened in the past, and coastal peoples have always had to cope with natural and man-made disasters. By trial and error, they became adept at dealing physically and culturally with this challenging environment. But never before has the scale or frequency of threats been as great as now, complicated by the fact that so many who live on shores have no idea of how to live there in a sustainable way.
Alternative account of global history: emphasis on littoral space
- coastal people: evolutionary and cultural vanguard; the coast = “the launching pad for all subsequent social and cultural change” (Gillis 20)
- flourishing of human species in ecotones (zones where ecosystems overlap): access to fatty acids necessary for brain development
- great biodiversity of littoral space: fish, shellfish, amphibians, land animals and migrating birds, and coastal plants are rich in nutrients such as iodine and fish oils
- emergence of agriculture in the neolithic = “an extension of techniques learned at the water’s edge” (25)
- but: coasts are fragile spaces; life along the shore is precarious; historical traces are easily wiped out
Entangled space by Gillis
- The idea of a shore as a continuous, linear border between land and sea did not arrive until the nation-building efforts of a newly independent territorial state, based on a new kind of capitalism that was less based on trade than on agrarian and industrial production, had begun. Then, for the first time, coasts were reimagined as continuous, the edges of something greater, namely continents.
- Our visual culture, which relies so heavily on cartography for way finding, has conditioned us to see lines in nature where none exist. Because of their tidal nature, seacoasts are notoriously difficult to delineate and measure. Ecologists tell us that they should be treated as broad zones where land and water are inseparable, but we insist on seeing them from a Cartesian perspective that imposes binaries.
Coastal fragility and ecological endangerment by Gillis
- There is no ark capacious enough to sustain the billions of people who may be displaced by coastal erosion and flooding. What is really needed is a fundamental rethinking of not just how but why they built on coasts. We will not engineer our way out of our current vulnerabilities, but we can reconsider the relationship between land and sea, recognizing that coasts constitute a unique ecotone requiring a wholly different way of life. Coasts are moving, and we must also move to survive.
- It is also the moment to give up the very notion of shoreline defense […], accepting the scientific evidence that nature can do the job for us if only we will allow it to do so.
Amitav Ghosh wrote?
The Great Derangement (2016)
The Hungry Tide (2004)
What is Ghosh’s claim?
- literature and art after the Enlightenment, in the age of rising carbon emissions, became radically anthropocentric and “increasingly self-reflexive”: It was thus that human consciousness, agency, and identity came to be placed at the center of every kind of aesthetic enterprise.
[…] many traditions, including those that accorded the nonhuman a special salience, were jettisoned. (120)
The Hungry Tide: narrative structure
Tidalectic structure:
- Part One – The Ebb: Bhata
- Part Two – The Flood: Jowar
Two alternating narrative strands:
- focaliser Kanai Dutt (translator from New Delhi, spent childhood in Sundarbans):
past –> Nilima, Nirmal, Kusum
- focaliser Piya Roy (American cetologist of Bengali descent, on research trip):
present –> Fokir, Tutul, Moyna; Orcaella (river dolphins); cyclone
Who are the two focalisers in Hungry Tide?
- Kanai Dutt
- Piya Roy
What’s Tidalectics?
Tidalectics: tide + dialectics: oscillating and cyclical rather than linear and teleological narrative
Who is the mute subaltern in Hungry Tide?
Fokir (fisherman)
Intimacy on the river
- he corkscrewed his body under her, pushing her out of the water (56)
- Then again, his hands gripped her shoulders, flipping her over. Throwing a leg across her hips, he weighed her down with his body and fastened his mouth on hers, sucking the water from her throat and pumping air into her lungs.
- After Fokir had stripped down to his breechcloth, […] Piya could see the bones of [his] chest, pushing against his skin
- When she touched [the piece of cloth], she had an intuition that this was what Fokir had been wearing when he had dived in after her. […] when she put it to her nose she had the impression that she could smell […] the salty scent of his sweat.
What are Sundarbans?
mangrove area in the delta formed by the confluence of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna Rivers in the Bay of Bengal.
Bangladesh
- After Partition of India in 1947, Bangladesh formed a Muslim union with Pakistan
- 1971 separation from Pakistan, after Bangladesh genocide perpetrated by Pakistan
Armed Forces - C. 10 million East Bengali refugees fled to Indian territory
- In The Hungry Tide: refugees held at detention centres in the interior illegally settle on an island in the Sunderbans
- At (fictional) massacre of Morichjhāpi 1979, Fokir’s mother Kusum is killed
- Events are described in Nirmal’s notebook (read by his nephew Kanai)
