Toxic grace? Tahmima Anam’s The Bones of Grace and the pollution trade

ABSTRACT

This article explores how Tahmima Anam’s 2016 novel The Bones of Grace responds to the notion of development as understood with reference to the transfer of pollution from rich to poor countries in an age of neo-liberal globalization. It argues that by bringing together the past experiences of environmental subalterns, their deplorable present, and macabre future, Anam constructs temporal relationality that resists the tendency of the western discourse on the pollution trade to naturalize the cumulative economic effects of neocolonial power in developing countries. While this discourse creates a singular reality around economic growth by carefully concealing the concomitant risks, Anam, by invoking different political, cultural, historical, and ecological associations, invests each aspect of reality with multiple meanings. She thus creates plural and complex realities around inequity, injustice, and poverty resulting from the pollution trade and enables the reader to see beyond mere economic growth brought about by such trade.

KEYWORDS:

• Tahmima Anam
• development
• environment
• pollution
• globalization
• relationality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Tahmima Anam’s Bengal Trilogy recounts the story of three generations of the Haque family. The first two volumes of the trilogy are A Golden Age (2007) and The Good Muslim (2011). The Bones of Grace (2016) marks the end of the trilogy.

2. For Chatman, “chrono-logic” is a unique characteristic of narrative. By “chrono-logic”, he refers to two kinds of time – external and internal – that narrative involves. He observes that “[n]arrative entails movement through time not only ‘externally’ (the duration of the presentation of the novel, film, play) but also ‘internally’ (the duration of the sequence of events that constitute the plot)” (1990, 9). The internal logic of the narrative can also “evoke a certain situation or state of affairs” (9) by making events, whether closely connected or not, work together.

3. For an insightful analysis of Anam’s exclusion of the effects of toxic chemicals on the ship-breakers, see Rose (2018).

4. James (2015) defines storyworld as “a mental model of context and environment within which a narrative’s characters function and to which readers transport themselves as they read narratives (253).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Md. Alamgir Hossain

Md. Alamgir Hossain is an assistant professor of English at the University of Rajshahi, Bangladesh. At present, he is completing his PhD in English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. His research interests include postcolonial theory and literature, diaspora literature, world literature, critical ethnic studies and the environmental humanities.