In Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, water is a physical element of the landscape and symbolizes identity, memory, and survival. The chapters from “Memory” to “Kratie” use metaphors to show how the tides and rivers of the Sundarbans represent the constantly shifting environment, personal history, relationships, and struggles of human life living in an unpredictable environment. The motif of water is essential to how the novel portrays identity. Kanai, Piya, and Fokir find their sense of self shaped/reshaped by their encounters with the Sundarbans, where the boundaries between land and water are constantly changing. Kanai arrives in the region as an outsider and gradually confronts the fragility of his identity in the face of the vast, untamable waters of the Sundarbans. In the chapter “Memory,” Kanai begins to feel the weight of his outsider status as he witnesses the locals’ intimate connection with the land and water. Kanai starts to realize this when he observes Fokir, who navigates the treacherous waters with a skill that Kanai, despite his education, can never hope to match. When Kanai sees Fokir jump into the water to push their boat, even though the water reaches his neck, he is astonished at how easily Fokir acted in the water. Despite his intellectual prowess, Kanai felt powerless against the forces of nature that dominate the tide country. His identity –rooted in urban privilege and education– forces him to accept that he is inadequate in this environment where survival depends not on intellect but intuition and survival-based knowledge that, in this case, Fokir holds, but not Kanai.

Water also serves as a metaphor to show how unstable memories can be. Just as the tides constantly shift the landscape of the Sundarbans, so too do memories shift and change in the characters’ minds. Kanai’s reading of Nirmal’s notebook in “Words” and “Crimes” reveals how the forces of history and personal bias often shape memory. His political ideals color Nirmal’s recollections of the Morichjhãpi massacre and his desire to frame the events within a narrative of resistance and defiance. Nirmal’s idealized vision of the settlers’ struggle blurs between reality and his passion for a revolutionary narrative, making Nirmal’s memory of Morichjhãpi both a tribute and distortion, much like the shifting currents of the Sundarbans that reveal and conceal the land in unpredictable ways. “Saar, the worst part was not the hunger or the thirst. It was to sit here, helpless, and listen to the policemen making their announcements, hearing them say that our lives, our existence, were worth less than dirt or dust.” (Ghosh 215) Kusum’s words are preserved from Nirmal’s point of view, but their desire to live and historical context are filtered through his interpretation of the suffering and oppression they experienced.

Moyna describes the river similarly to the reality of life in the Sundarbans, where survival depends on understanding the waters, which often hold invisible dangers. For the people of the Tide country, survival means knowing how to navigate these hidden forces, much like understanding the currents that guide the tides. The notion that survival, memory, and identity are intertwined with the forces of nature is further explored in the dialogue between Kanai and Moyna. Moyna tells Kanai, “Because words are just air, Kanai-babu. When the wind blows on the water, you see ripples and waves, but the real river lies beneath, unseen and unheard.” (Ghosh 213) Moyna suggests that social and emotional survival depends on navigating relationships and situations that may not always be clear on the surface. Just as the Sundarbans’ waters conceal their most powerful currents beneath calm surfaces, the characters must navigate complex, often hidden, emotional landscapes to survive. Fokir, for instance, moves through life with an intuitive understanding of the rivers. Yet, simultaneously, Kanai, an outsider, doesn’t have these deeper connections that tie the community to the land and water.

Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, the Sundarbans, a mangrove forest of tidal islands, strongly influence/determine the fate of the characters’ lives. The environment is not a background figure with less meaning but an active force influencing human destiny, reflecting the Anthropocene, where nature and humanity are intertwined, and environmental forces exert as much agency as human actions. Recalling Haraway’s take on the Chthulucene shifts away from a human-centric narrative and focuses on multispecies entanglements. Ghosh’s work describes the dynamics between the environment and people in the Sundarbans – how the characters’ choices, struggles, and fates can easily be changed outside human control –.

Ghosh shows how helpless humans can be when they have limited control over nature, and describes how environmental forces shape human history and identity. The death of Kusum’s father comes from an uncontrollable force of nature and shows how the natural world dictates human life and death. “The sounds that accompanied the kill carried across the water with exceptional clarity: Kusum heard the roar that froze her father… She heard the sound of his bones cracking” (Ghosh 88). His death is not a result of human violence but of trying to survive in a precarious relationship with the environment; he was left with no other choice than to venture out into the wild to find firewood, only to have been killed by a tiger. They showed that humans and nature are deeply intertwined, with neither entirely in control. The tides and forests of the Sundarbans demand some kind of respect from humans, showing that survival in such an environment is subject to change depending on how it is balanced. These forces shape Kusum’s life and her family, showing a symbiotic relationship between humans and nature and proving that nature is alive and cannot be easily taken advantage of.  In the Sundarbans, there is a relationship between beauty and terror. Kanai reflects on this paradox; the poet says,  “Beauty is nothing but the start of terror we can hardly bear, and we adore it because of the serene scorn it could kill us with” (Ghosh 59). The duality of the natural world in the Anthropocene, where landscapes are admired for their beauty, can also pose existential threats. The beauty of the environment means there is a capacity for destruction, which serves as a reminder of the fragility of human life. Kanai describes gods and goddesses (Bon bibi and Dokkhin Rai) as representing earth’s natural forces, gesturing that nature itself is/can be animated by spiritual powers, further supporting the idea that humans sometimes do not have control over the environment. 

The Morichjhãpi massacre also represents a combination of political power and environmental forces. The government’s violent removal of settlers from Morichjhãpi is both a political and environmental act, where the Sundarbans become both the battleground and the silent witness to human suffering as the government violently took force to relocate refugees and reclaim the land. As if the land could speak for itself, constant flooding and harsh conditions made the island inhabitable. The massacre reflects how marginalized communities are exploited, especially in developing countries, and shows how human lives are sacrificed in an attempt to control nature. Nature and its dangerous and unpredictable forces cause it to become a space where human violence and natural forces converge, evidence of the complexity of human-environment interactions. In the Anthropocene, humans often believe they are the main characters of the world – that they can shape and control the environment – but Ghosh’s novel reminds readers that the climate has a mind of its own. The environment may wipe away human history, erasing memories and records as quickly as they reshape the land. The environmental elements play into the more prominent theme of the Anthropocene. They are one of the critical components of the view that human actions do not solely shape human history because even the land we live in can grow violent and try to destroy us.

In the context of where Parable of the Sower takes place, Lauren’s hyper-empathy becomes her fatal flaw and is more than just a personal vulnerability. Lauren’s condition represents the unsustainable interconnectedness of humanity in a broken world where showing feeling/compassion becomes a liability. Lauren resorts to working to hide and lessen her reactions to those suffering, which seems selfish because our morals expect us to help others when they need help. Lauren has to train herself to act narcissistic in a not selfish way but to protect herself from the cruelties of society. In a time of need, when everyone around her and the neighborhood she resides in can’t trust anyone other than her father or brother. In Chapter 4, she trains to use a gun for self-defense. By law, it is illegal to bear arms, but breaking a minor rule is the last of their worries when death is at bay at all times. Lauren’s sense of empathy makes it hard for her to protect herself, yet she doesn’t realize that and tells herself,  “Besides, just because I can shoot a bird or a squirrel doesn’t mean I could shoot a person—a thief like the ones who robbed Mrs. Sims. I don’t know whether I could do that” (Butler 38.) Being able to kill a small animal is different from killing someone of the same species, but Lauren cannot falter; she is defenseless if she treasures every living being in this world. If her father, stepmother Corey, and her brothers aren’t home, what will she do for herself to survive? Lauren knows that she lives in a dangerous neighborhood, neighbors get killed, and people get robbed. Still, at the same time, her family is not wealthy enough to run away to another state or country – and even if their family could relocate, what if danger spreads there? There is no guarantee that any place or anywhere, is safe because the world is too chaotic for anyone to ensure their own/other people’s safety. 

The law still applies in chaotic times, but anyone can become a criminal – it’s just a matter of time -. When people grow desperate, their only means is to try and survive. The world has grown to become so disorganized that there are fees to call the police, the police aren’t going to do anything, and there are murders, people getting raped, and robberies happening everywhere; it has become such a norm that crime is no longer shocking anymore. Lauren still thinks of crime as “something wrong” and tries not to become a criminal; her entire family works not to break the rules, steal materials, or kill people as long as they are not being attacked first. Self-defense goes as far as behavior; sometimes, even friendly small talk or reminders of their current reality can drive chaos among others. When Lauren gets yelled at by her dad for talking to Joanne about wanting to leave and run away, she is reminded of why you cannot easily trust anyone. You can know someone for ages, but you don’t know anything about them at all. Lauren’s dad tells her, “Don’t warn Joanne or any of your other friends,” he said. “Not now. I know you think you’re right, but you’re not doing anyone any good. You’re just panicking people.” (Butler 63) For Lauren, it’s wiser to keep her words to herself because friendship becomes a delicate bond when the world has grown into an apocalyptic state. If Joanne could tell her family what she and Lauren talked about, she would no longer be worthy of keeping secrets. In the face of life’s most trying moments, everyone wants survival: to live, have enough food and water, and save shelter for themselves and their families. Some might even abandon their families when things get worse because there is no guarantee that their situation will improve. Supplies are still being depleted, and no one will survive unless you are filthy rich. What truly draws the line between being heartless and protecting yourself and your family? When the government and all safety personnel are no longer trustworthy, do morals still matter in times of life and death?

Using Nixon’s concept of slow violence and LeMenager’s emphasis on the everyday Anthropocene, we notice the imminent destruction caused by environmental degradation, whose effects become unacknowledged as it unfolds. Once the adverse effects of climate become catastrophically irreversible, they become the main focus of the public eye – the new hot topic. At that point, the “small” issues must be so big because so much time has been wasted. Climate fiction “Cli-fi” serves to help reclaim lost time by incorporating these events into personal, collective stories that resonate with people on an emotional scale, bringing the audience’s focus to the unseen impacts of climate change. 

Novels focus on the lives of everyday people, which reveals how climate change affects people casually yet profoundly. Stephanie LeMenager argues that the everyday Anthropocene allows readers to place themselves in these imaginative yet semi-realistic scenarios – god forbid they happen one day – to work and educate themselves and become aware of the hardships others face globally due to climatic and environmental changes. LeMenager mentions the “abstract futurism” aspect of climate change, which, by thinking about climate change and its effects as something to happen in the future, allows people to prevent/protect the future ahead of time. “Own explorations for reseeding our home world,’ for making refuges for those threatened by displacement and extinction.” (LeMenager 7) People often disregard what Not everyone is aware of the Anthropocene, but in a sense, that is because what is happening is not affecting them in their everyday lives. LeMenager also mentions how human civilization has developed a strong understanding of the world through literature, history, and other scientific advancements. This accumulated knowledge is vital to changing the world around us, “If we are going to refuse to let ourselves sink into the futility of life without memory, then we must not lose our few thousand years of hard-won knowledge, accumulated at great cost and against great odds.” (LeMenager 18) Not everyone will be aware and knowledgeable enough to prevent climate change; climate change does not happen only in extreme weather events or distant places. Novels can help describe the little bits of their daily existence through small details, which raises awareness in various ways, helping prevent catastrophes, and is still better than not doing anything for the environment/causing significant damage. 

Nixon’s focus on the representational challenges of slow violence with LeMenager’s insight into the power of genre to capture the everyday novels offers a powerful narrative for exploring the profound, long-term consequences of climate change and humanizing its abstract threats. Nixon introduces slow violence as almost invisible damage done by climate change needs narrative forms that “render apprehensible.” This gradual destruction brings attention to what he calls “uneventful violence” (Nixon 2.), which can be viewed as fiction in the sense of predicting what might happen to the future and utilizing the descriptions of disastrous events in fiction to plan what to do and prevent such disasters from taking place in the future. Nixon also emphasizes the role of fiction, which engages with “the temporal dispersion of slow violence” and devises ways to “render them apprehensible to the senses” (Nixon 5.)​ Most of the time, what catches the eye of the public is not limited to newspapers or other news sources but can be made attractive to expand on the subtle effects of these topics and draw the viewers to what Nixon calls “layered invisibility.” “It is here that writers, filmmakers, and digital activists may play a mediating role in helping counter the layered invisibility that results from insidious threats, from temporal protractedness, and from the fact that the afflicted are people whose quality of life—and often whose very existence—is of indifferent interest to the corporate media (Nixon 18.) The public only pays attention to urgent issues, ignoring those suffering the effects of slow violence in the global south, less developed, politically powerless communities. 

By taking into account both LeMenager and Nixon’s points of view, we often disregard what is going on in the world around us; slow violence is a fundamental concept; people just do not have a sense of urgency when they hear the news run about environmental damage causing major hidden crises, the voices of marginalized communities are just as important as those in a more privileged part of the world. Instead, because these people are in less privileged parts of the world, we should speak up for them, advocate for their rights, and through writing – despite incorporating a fictional aspect – let the world know and educate ourselves and others about the future because if we do not protect the planet, no one else will.