Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World Narratives

Jungle Tide, Devouring Reef: (Post)colonial Anxiety and Ecocritique in Sri Lankan Literature

JungleTide, Devouring Reef (Post)colonial Anxiety and Ecocritique in Sri Lankan Literature sharae deckard Yonder, yonder spreads Sorabora tank! O! Maweli-ganga whose waters cry as they run O! Maweli-ganga thy waters never fail! O! Tank in whose waters sports the queen of blue flowers! —Translation of a traditional Vedda song by Mr. de Zoysa, Maha Mudaliyar, given at a meeting of the Royal Asiatic Society, Ceylon Branch, 1881, as cited in Bella Woolf, How to See Ceylon Within the developing field of postcolonial ecocriticism, critics are increasingly exploring the efficacy of postcolonial literatures and literary criticism to formulate resistive discourses to the economic dispossession , social injustice, and environmental degradation resulting from the continuing forms of colonialism and processes of exploitative global development across the world (Campbell 1). The “converging critique” of materialist and ecologist ideologies draws on Herbert Marcuse’s idea of a revolution that would radically transform not only society but also the relation between man and nature (59–78). It carries through Raymond Williams’s statement of the need for a “green socialism” combining ecology and economics into a “single science and source of values, leading onto a new politics of equitable livelihood” (237), and continues into David Pepper’s call for an “eco-socialism” that unites the struggle for social justice with environmental justice. By allying a commitment to the environment with a critique of the damaging effects of transnational ,corporatecapitalonlocal,indigenousecosystems,postcolonial ecocriticism insists on “the inseparability of current crises of ecological mismanagement from historical legacies of imperialistic exploitation and authoritarian abuse” (Huggan 702). Despite this insistence, ecocriticism has been met with suspicion by some third-world intellectuals in Africa, Asia, and Latin America for jungle tide, devouring reef 33 what they view as a hegemonic, white-centered, Eurocentric discourse emanating primarily from the metropolitan centers of Japan, Europe, America, and Australia (Slaymaker 683–84). Yet writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Wole Soyinka exercise a “concordant, radical postcolonial and ecological vision” (Campbell 1) throughout their fiction and nonfiction, while Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Derek Walcott, and Edward Brathwaite have all written about and taken positions on environmentalproblemsinSouthAsia,SouthAfrica,andtheCaribbean, thus demonstrating the global relevance and urgency of ecocritical writing . In Sri Lanka, the two most significant exploitative modernization programs to attract literary representation have been the nineteenthcentury highland clearances, in which the British colonial administrators undertook the most extensive conversion of rainforest into tropical plantation agriculture anywhere in the British Empire (Webb 2), and the twentieth-century implementation of the Mahaweli Dam Scheme. At the end of the nineteenth century, the German scientist Ernst Häckel expressed in his travel narrative A Visit to Ceylon (1883) a “constant delight and wonder” at the island’s “prodigal vegetation” (126) For Häckel, a prominent advocate of Darwinism and widely credited as the first ecologist, Ceylon was “the promised land” of his desires as a naturalist (73). However, he was disappointed by the colonial government ’s encroachment on the jungle, reducing “forest-primaeval” to “garden-wilderness” (120). Yet, Häckel retained his fantasy of Ceylon as anaturalist’sElDoradobyrelocatinghislibidinalattentionstotheteeming “ultramarine paradises” of the coral reef: “In purity and splendour of colouring, the sea creatures are even more remarkable than the fauna of the forests” (186). Häckel’s fluctuation from wonder to anxiety about the destructive projects of ecological change perpetrated under empire to renewed fantasy of the reef as ecological paradise marks a pattern of ambivalence that appears throughout Sri Lankan literature in relation to the colonial and neocolonial reordering of the natural world. In particular , literary tropes of “jungle tides” and “devouring reefs” constitute an evolving ecocritical response to the exploitative modernization projects of the highland clearances and the Mahaweli Dam Scheme, as seen in works such as Anglophone colonial writer Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913), John Still’s The Jungle Tide (1930), and postcolonial Sri Lankan writer Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef (1992). This essay delves into the Sri Lankan eco-imaginary—“jungle of demons and vast quiet waters” (Gunesekera 85)—in order to explore how Darwinian tropes of tropical forests and coral reefs are invested with a radical alterity that 34 sharae deckard signals the threat to Sri Lanka’s environment posed by the modernizing schemes of empire and global capital and gestures toward the possibility of grounding resistance in a revised understanding of the environment. Evolution of Environmental Anxiety in Colonial Ceylon From the...