A CHANCE ENCOUNTER*

The day after Christmas, I picked up Amitav Ghosh’s most recent book, Gun Island, at a neighborhood bookstore, Moon Palace Books. I found it by chance. I was in the store with my family, just browsing and mulling over where to go out for dinner.

 

I pulled the book off of the shelf and started reading, and I did not want to stop; I seldom enter into a novel like this. Ghosh’s new book is about the impacts of climate change. The story begins in Kolkata, India and ruptures in the Sundarbans, a mangrove forest located in the Bengali delta. It recalls the day in November 1970 when the region was hit by a Category 4 cyclone, obliterating and uprooting everything: the land, islands, rivers, plant, animal, and marine life, and the people and their way of life. Out of this devastation, Bengali folk poetry emerges in the story like a vortex. It generates and recalls one chance encounter after another that the protagonist has, and along the way the accounts of flooding, wildfires, and storms of all kinds, as well as mammal, insect, and human migrations take center stage to lay bare the causes of climate change.

 

How Ghosh reworks the enigmatic authority of the Bengali legend in idiosyncratic ways throughout the book, with much attention paid to different languages and etymologies, as well as the sounds of words in another language and practice of translation literally sets the context for dramatically recasting and decentering anthropocentric and androcentric world history since the seventeenth century. The reading experience is truly enchanting; one begins to learn how to reach across multiple worlds to establish historticity in wholly unexpected ways, all of which ultimately converge in the Mediterranean Basin.

 

If one is interested in, first, reorienting world history and, second, pondering how to begin reconceptualizing the interconnectedness of the climate crisis, displacement, and migration beyond the human experience, this book is a revelation; even the very category, “climate refugees,” a ubiquitous term in social science research and policy studies may appear insufficient upon reading the book. My sense is that the connection that one makes with the life of non-human species and ecologies and the emotive power derived from this encounter, or what could be characterized as “an emotional science” (a notion borrowed from another book I purchased on the same day, Long Live Latin: The Pleasures of a Useless Language, written by Nicola Gardini), can serve as a vehicle to help the critical mass get to a place where even climate scientists who issue a clarion call on the crisis again and again cannot help them reach. I came away feeling that a novel can and does restore a sense of hope, despite everything.

 

Acting Director, Immigration History Research Center
Associate Professor, African American & African Studies
Core Faculty, Asian American Studies Program
University of Minnesota
Board Member, East Side Freedom Library
*This essay first appeared in the IHRC Center Digest, January 2020.
It appears here with Yuichi’s permission