Sea of secrets: Imagining illicit fishing in Robert Barclay’s Meļaļ and Rob Stewart’s Sharkwater

Abstract

This essay analyses the way in which contemporary literature and film critically respond to criminalized fishing practices in the Pacific, at a time of severe marine environmental degradation. It argues that in the documentary film Sharkwater (2006). Rob Stewart works to designate the shark fin industry as illicit, placing shark fishers on the margins of ethical and social life. Stewart’s emphasis on the marginal status of shark fishers is complicated, however, by his awareness of the complex network of economy, state, environment and culture within which illegal shark fishing takes place. In Meļaļ: A Novel of the Pacific (2002), Robert Barclay is also concerned with marine ecological degradation and criminalized fishing. Like Stewart, Barclay situates criminalized fishing within the context of the capitalist economy, but he also shows that illegal fishing in the Marshall Islands takes place in the context of multiple colonialisms and military occupations. Barclay suggests more sharply than Stewart that the language of illegal fishing diminishes the possibilities for meaningful understandings of ecological degradation and social justice at sea.

Keywords:

• ecocriticism
• illegal fishing
• marine ecology
• Meļaļ
• Sharkwater

Notes

1. On postcolonial environments, see Huggan and Tiffin; Cilano and DeLoughrey; and Nixon.

2. See DeLoughrey; Helmreich “How”; and Heller-Roazen.

3. For more detailed discussions of declining conditions for non-human marine life in the context of fisheries, see Ellis and Pauly et al.

4. This and all subsequent quotations are from Sharkwater, unless otherwise noted.

5. See Buell on environmentalism’s attachment to particular species.

6. Ellis writes that during the 1950s dolphins became a target for tuna fisheries, because they are known to congregate with tuna. In 1960, an estimated half a million dolphins were killed this way (219–35). As with sharks, the problems of enforcement of laws relating to dolphins and even acknowledgement of the situation are unresolved.f

7. Perhaps most striking for the purposes of this essay is David McDermott Hughes’s recent analysis of imperial environmentalism in relation to the reorganization of fresh water systems in Zimbabwe. He argues that colonizers imagined hydrological projects such as dams and reservoirs as positive ecological practice.

8. Here, my interpretation differs slightly from Simone Oettli-Van Delden’s excellent discussion of the relevance of the term “postcolonial” in relation to Meļaļ. She is concerned that “The use of Marshallese mythological characters [in Meļaļ] to explain the misery of the oppressed indigenous people suggests that we are dealing with an apologia for American intervention” (48). My own sense is that in Meļaļ Barclay does not choose between emphasizing American or Marshallese spiritual agency, but rather complicates both. Furthermore, Greg Dvorak’s research suggests that Barclay here repeats “a well-known Marshallese tale” in which “Etao’s magical powers are in fact so formidable that the Americans depend on him as well” (65).