Reading Reef in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Set between Sri Lankan independence and the outbreak of civil war, Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef features a marine biologist named Salgado who predicts the decay of the island’s coral exoskeleton, a fragile barrier against inundation by the sea. Critics overwhelmingly view the eroding reef as a symbolic harbinger of the violence that eventually engulfed Sri Lanka. But this essay takes the novel’s motif of dying coral and rising seas more literally, reading Reef as an incipient work of postcolonial Anthropocene fiction. A finalist for the 1994 Booker Prize, Reef preceded a wave of climate novels published by prominent authors after the turn of the millennium. More remarkable, it appeared five years before the first major report linking widespread coral damage to anthropogenic climate change. While Salgado’s research serves as a failed fictional antecedent to these findings, his servant Triton ultimately perceives that carbon emissions are destroying the reef. Indeed, what makes Gunesekera’s novel a postcolonial work of Anthropocene fiction is precisely Triton’s status as a servant. I argue that this status not only enables Triton to perceive the material and social conditions that cause climate change. It also shapes his interspecies perspective, allowing Triton to think and feel like a reef.

Keywords:

• Romesh Gunesekera
• Reef
• Anthropocene
• climate fiction
• postcolonial literature
• coral reefs

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Of the Indian authors Ghosh cites – Mahasweta Devi, Adwaita Mallabarman, Siviram Karanth, Gopinath Mohanty, and Vishwas Patel – only Devi is widely read beyond the subcontinent. This list seems particularly paltry given his references to Defoe, Rousseau, Austen, Goethe, Hölderlin, Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, the Shelleys, Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Tennyson, Melville, Flaubert, Zola, Tolstoy, Rilke, Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Nabokov, Kerouac, Updike, Gary Snyder, and M.S. Merwin.

2 These include Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2004) and The Year of the Flood (2009), T.C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth (2000), Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010), and Jeannette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2008).

3 The notable exception is Hans-Georg Erney (2011), whose essay I address below.

4 Gunesekera completed the novel’s proofs on Easter 1994, two years after starting the book (2015, 26). Deckard claims that Salgado studies “reef bleaching,” but she attributes the novel’s coral damage to mining, fishing, and tourism (2010, 166). Lavery (2015, 92) and Sen (2013, 486) also mention bleaching, but not in relation to Salgado’s hypothesis.

5 In 1957, the year his study was published, Revelle presided over the first meeting of the IIOE’s forerunner, the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (Rao and Griffiths 1998, 48).

6 Gunesekera also claims he “read everything that had been published on coral reefs during the time the novel is set” (quoted in Nasta 2019, 76; also see Gunesekera 2015, 34). A throwaway line near the end of Reef may offer an indication of his reading. Sometime after 1976, Triton notices “a newspaper report about a symposium on Man and Coral” (185–186). This was likely inspired by “The Reef and Man,” title of the 1981 International Coral Reef Symposium, “the first major attempt” to warn coral scientists about the threats facing reefs (Wilkinson 2006, 3). The symposium was held in the Philippines, where Gunesekera spent a portion of his youth.

7 Salgado overtly bypasses import restrictions when serving his Christmas guests a black-market turkey (100–101). A similar scheme for breeding chickens is hatched in Gunesekera’s latest novel, Suncatcher.

8 Short for tarmacadam, “tarmac” is often used interchangeably with asphalt, which is “made directly from petroleum” (LeMenager 2014, 149).

9 “Past Galle,” Salgado tells Dias, the reefs are “out of this world. Fabulous. But it’s all going. I must take you before it all vanishes” (57).

10 Gunesekera has elsewhere called their relationship one of “symbiotic dependency” (quoted in Nasta 2019, 76).

11 “Coral grows about as fast as your fingernails,” Salgado tells Dias (57–58), and he later compares coral samples to “a tiny bit of skin from your finger” (72). Space prohibits me from addressing the novel’s reference to Anguli-maala, the Buddhist story of a prince ordered to collect the fingers of a thousand victims.

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Todd Kuchta

Todd Kuchta is an associate professor of English at Western Michigan University, specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature and postcolonial studies. He is the author of Semi-Detached Empire: Suburbia and the Colonization of Britain, 1880 to the Present, and has also published on postcolonial literature and 9/11 fiction.