It’s been interesting so far reading The Hungry Tide from the perspective of having read Ghosh’s essay “The Great Derangement.” The novel itself is really good and entertaining in more ways than one, especially in it’s rich description of the setting. Ghosh spends a lot of time describing the setting of Lusibari and the Mangrove environment, the Sundarbans and the river that Piya ends up traveling and studying through. It’s really beautiful and important to the worldbuilding of course, but it also builds up this perspective of the anthropocene in places that are likely unfamiliar to the audience of The Hungry Tide which is the sub-continent of India. People who live in any of the Sundarban islands have a very different relationship to their environment compared to people in Parable of the Sower. I say this because the Mangrove environment, at least from my understanding, is based on a current lived reality and thus has created an established understanding of nature, which I am still trying to figure out.

I think Piya’s career being within the field of nature and environment, further allows Ghosh to explore the environment of the setting. There have been hints of environmental issues present within the Sundarban islands, starting from when Kanai first arrives and see his aunt, “That’s the problem, you see: there isn’t as much water in the river nowadays and at low tide it gets very shallow” (Ghosh 22),and again when Piya makes observations of her dolphins “But that made no sense either, she told herself; it just didn’t fit with what she knew about these animals” (Ghosh 103). It hasn’t yet been hinted that these irregularities of the environment is a result of the anthropocene, or in other words because of humans. But the environment adds to the mysterious aspect of the novel where there is a lot of going back and forth between Kanai and Piya’s point of view. Also, I like how because of their disconnect of personal relations, considering Piya grew up in Seattle, the main connecting and grounding factor between the two is their environment which we have seen to almost behave as it’s own character. So the environment is both a mysterious feature for both the reader and the novels character to unmask, but also the one grounding feature connecting the experiences and stories of Piya and Kanai. The worldsetting plays a really beautiful and important role in The Hungry Tide so far, and i’m looking forward to reading about the anthropocenic connections that I am struggling to make.

Personally, I had a hard time trying to understand Haraway’s conclusion of “Making KIn.” I think in this text there are a lot of broad connections being made, but it’s being done on purpose as if to show that these connections aren’t all that broad after all. The most obvious example is that of the Anthropocene, Capitlocene, plantationocene being connect to what she refers to as the “Chthulucene.” She also connects bacteria, and symbiotic life to anthropocenic habits, as well as the disconnect of human, nature, and technology, cheap nature, genocides, system collapse, post-humanism all to the anthropocene. Her quick listing of the many things that are actively changing the earth in order to connect them back to the term “Anthropocene” strengthened her point, and my confusion, of the very not obvious  critique of the vague umbrella term of the anthropocene. I think shes trying to argue against stuffing the issues of climate change under the “human era,” hence the overwhelming dump of different thing that effect the climate, down to the bacteria within our bodies that we need to survive.

”Recursion can be a drag,” all these things are just feeding into the next. What good is a broad umbrella term like the human era, or “anthropocene” going to do about it. Haraway draws all of these connections that I, again, found confusing. But with some further reading, all these “broad” connections serve purpose, being that they’re not so broad but are being treated as such. Hence, her aiming at humanists that just believe the earth and it’s resources are at it’s complete and total disposale. She challenges the anthropocene, as opposed to being “broad” which is how I see it, as being a blip. A blip in that, it’s ridiculous to believe that humans will destory the Earth to the point of return. But humans, as a blip, will only destroy their Earth to the point of THEIR own destruction, and the Earth will just regenerate itself.

The concept of the human being a blip, is not meant to encourage accelerationism, but is rather connected back to what Haraway calls the “Chthulucene.” I understood the Chthulucene as, not a return to not knowing or understanding, but integrating the aspect of not knowing certain things, not looking to have control but instead knowing how to react, behave and plan. Also explaining her self-identification as a “compostist” as oppsed to a post-humanist, utilizing what humans already have and know. Lastly, allowing me to connect back to making kin, not babies. Connecting with what we already have, “We need to make kin sym-chthonically, sym-poetically,” using what we already have in order to create a new symbiotic relationship with nature.

That’s sort of how I undertood this piece by Haraway. Overall, I found it quite strange. Mostly because of the different ecological words that took a while for me to registeras english rather than gibberish, but also because, to be quite frank, the slogan to “Make kins, not babies” is ridiculous to me. Which is why I still feel like i’m missing something. I find it to be a larger version of individualism? Like collectivism, but not on the actual collective that I understand to be the actual perpetrators of climate change. Corporations, big businesses, produce companies, bomb-droppers, building-burners for the purpose of insurance etc. So is it an issue of population? Maybe, but why are so many people unable to have control of when they want to have babies? Also, what about people that have babies born for a few minutes beforoe they die because of post-environmental effects. This reading was very unsatisfying for me, but interesting and still important to read.

“Slow Violence” is a concept introduced by Nixon that is entirely new to me, as is the anthropocene. Because of this, I am having a hard time looking at the issue of climate and the anthropocene through the lens ofthe perceived “slow violence.” I am used to looking at the climate issue as secondary part of a larger issue of what many of our readings refer to as “global capitalism,” and therefore have focused on it’s direct effect. While it is very important to look at the root of a problem, I was intrigued by the concepts introuced by Nixon to push writers to produce elements of slow violence into their works of fiction in order to make it conceivable in order to then change the framework of how society sees the issu of climate.

I am still pretty confused by the connections of slow violence, climate and literature so that is what I plan to use this blog post for. For my own practice and for the purpose of correction/clarification. Slow violence is the gradudal development of climate change that with time grows more and more violence. Because of the gradual and, hence, slow development, this type of violence becomes normalized and almost unseen, unrecognized and dismissed. So not only is sort of violence happeing slowly, there is little to nothing actively being done since it it not only develops more violent, but more normal and routine as well. So, what Nixon’s piece seeks to do is draw connections between fiction novels and modern culture and coonsciousness in order to connect how writers today can bring an almost unconscious connection between their works of fictional literature and climate to their readers.

-C