Abstract
‘We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children.’ This widely quoted Native American proverb embodies an epistemology that resonates with contemporary ecological thinking, bridging the gap between the world-view of the pre-Conquest inhabitants of the Americas and those forms of postcolonial praxis that challenge unsustainable versions of ‘progress’. In the face of climate change, the mining and burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, hydro-electric projects that have inundated vast swathes of land, and the threats to endangered animal species and botanical biodiversity posed by anthropocentrism, it should perhaps seem self-evident that the instinctive respect for the environment that has traditionally characterized the beliefs of the vast majority of Indigenous peoples offers a superior wisdom. Yet practices that were once unquestioned in their cultures now find themselves in conflict with majoritarian national and global interests and any idea of putting the clock back to the imagined ‘purity’ of a pre-colonial past is an idealized fantasy. Nevertheless, discourses of the past remain an invaluable source for Native authors, along with many other writers from societies affected by colonialism, whether historically or in the contemporary world; they function as a font from which they can draw to evolve new narrative strategies that will help them to combat the attenuation of their culture in the fissured and ever-changing present and to protect the environment for future generations to inherit.
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Notes
- 1.
The Farraka Barrage, constructed at a point just before the Ganges forks near the end of its course, with one part going into the Hooghly River in West Bengal and the other going into the Padma River in Bangladesh, has been a particularly contentious site. The Indian government’s damming of the river brought benefits to Kolkata and the land on its side of the border, while depleting the water supply to the Padma. The regulation of the water supply to Bangladesh has been the subject of recurrent fractious negotiations between the two countries since the Barrage was completed in 1975.
- 2.
Cf. Kroetsch’s epigraph to Badlands, referred to in Chapter 1 above, which cites a Blackfoot Coyote legend.
- 3.
Subsequently referred to as the Haisla, the form Robinson uses in the novel.
- 4.
See Soper-Jones, 2009, for a fuller account.
- 5.
Soper-Jones refers to ‘salvage ethnography’ as ‘the frequently aesthetic (re-)construction of pre-contact Indigenous experience [which] presumes the extinction of the culture under study’, arguing that ‘Robinson takes issue with this problematic ideology’ (2009, p.16).
- 6.
Robert J. Muckle comments that Euro-Canadian residential schools were notorious for their physical and sexual abuse of Indigenous youth, but the last school in British Columbia did not close until 1984 (Muckle 1988, p. 82; cited by Purhar 2011, p. 39).
- 7.
Alcan’s development of the area also involved a hydroelectric dam, but this does not carry the same negative connotations as the Grand Coulee in ‘This Is a Story’, or as the Alcan smelter does in Monkey Beach. Following the power lines to the dam is Lisamarie’s ‘favourite walk’ (Robinson 2001, p. 214).
- 8.
See A. Pratt (1981) on this aspect of Surfacing. Other parallels with Atwood’s novel include the motif of a descent into water, the quest for a missing relative, therianthropic intersections and an emphasis on the power of names (Atwood 1979, p. 175; Robinson 2001, p. 180). Even the likening of a blue heron to a pterodactyl (Robinson 2001, p. 118) resonates with a similar reference in Surfacing (Atwood 1979, p. 57).
- 9.
Mda’s account makes extensive use of J. B. Peires The Dead Will Arise (1989) and, despite the fact that his indebtedness is acknowledged in the novel’s Dedication, he has been accused of plagiarizing Peires. Caminero-Santangelo (2011, p. 306, note 3) offers a useful brief summary of the controversy, which effectively rebuts the charge of plagiarism.
- 10.
Ghosh characteristically acknowledges numerous sources in his concluding ‘Author’s Note’ (2004, pp. 401–3).
- 11.
See Gurr (2010), for a discussion of The Hungry Tide, which argues that the tension between land and water is central to the form of the novel as well as its content.
- 12.
Waterland is a novel that Ghosh particularly admires, personal conversation, Turin, April 2006.
- 13.
Ghosh does talk explicitly about climate change in the Sundarbans in an interview for the UN Chronicle (2005).
- 14.
Also, and slightly more frequently, rendered as ‘Marichjhãpi’ in English. ‘Morichjhãpi’ is used here, since this is the form Ghosh employs in the novel.
- 15.
- 16.
See Chapter 6 for further discussion of this aspect of the novel.
- 17.
Cf. Ghosh (2004), pp. 247 and 354 ff.
- 18.
While the novel’s quotations from the Duino Elegies are taken from A. Poulin Jr’s 1975 translation, Ghosh’s ‘Author’s Note’ adds that ‘All references to Bengali versions of the Elegies are from the superb translations published by Buddhadeva Basu in the late 1960s’ (p. 402). Basu’s translations have done much to secure Rilke’s particular place in the imagination of many educated Bengalis. I am indebted to Mahashweta Bhattacharyya for discussing this with me.
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Thieme, J. (2016). Borrowing the Earth: Postcolonial Ecologies. In: Postcolonial Literary Geographies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-45687-8_5
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