Romancing the Environment: Romesh Gunesekera's Reef and Heaven's Edge

Abstract

Romesh Gunesekera's novels Reef (1994) and Heaven's Edge (2003) signal the multi-layered connections between the sociopolitical disintegration of Sri Lanka from civil war and the destruction of its natural ecosystems. However, the narratives' ecocritical interventions, informed by its exotic and erotic registers, run the danger of objectifying, gendering and colonizing nature and reinforcing the human-nature binary in asymmetrical power relations. The representations of landscapes and waterscapes here call into question the ethics of human engagement with the natural world and the ecological dangers of an attenuated phenomenological connection with nature that celebrates sensory interactions but eschews human agency and responsibility toward conservation.