In The Hungry Tide, Ghosh portrays a relationship between nature and humans through the dynamics between Piya, Kanai, and Fokir as they guide Piya in her dolphin research. 

Piya, though devoting her career to animals and wildlife, actually seems heavily disconnected from nature, and this is evident when she first meets Fokir as well as in the different perspectives that arise between the two when it comes to killing the tiger later on in the novel. Increasingly, Piya seems to be transforming from someone invested in cetacea, nature, and connecting with it, into the kind of person we might imagine Canavan and Frazier to be speaking up against when we talk about white environmentalism. Though Piya is Indian by descent–and not to diminish Piya’s nuances by equating her to the “typical Bushwick nature-lover who uses reusable shopping bags” as we said in class–she is extremely disconnected from the language and culture in this setting, she grew up in America, and has made a point that her study of dolphins has nothing to do with her heritage. Over the course of the novel, she turns from someone who seems to us as knowledgeable about nature, with all her Western equipment, into someone who is at a loss when it comes to actually understanding life alongside these animals. 

This is why Fokir is so appealing to Piya. To her, it is “amazing to come across someone like Fokir”, who knows how to live with the rhythms of the tides (Ghosh, 221). He spots alligators in the rivers with as much perception as a tiger stalking prey, his knowledge about finding dolphins or hunting crabs is attractive to Piya for its inherent connection to nature. But doesn’t every Sunderban have to learn to adapt to the “rhythms of the tides”? The nets that surround the beds in Nilima’s home, Horen and his son’s knowledge about boats and navigation, and the people who–as Nirmal notes in Morichjhapi–had very quickly organized themselves in shelters and communities, are all reflective of people whose lifestyles have forced them into “becoming animal”, to function under a certain bare humanity where the only thing separating them as a human collective from the dangers of their world are their myths about Bon Bibi, Dokkhin Rai and the threshold between humans and the mangroves, and Ganga. The difference between Piya–and often Kanai due to his retrospective accounts of Lusibari as something “always a thing of the past” and not having a present or future of its own– compared to the rest of the Sunderbans is that the inhabitants of the tide country understand what nature is–it impacts their life everyday, twice a day at that. Piya and Kanai seem to only know about nature. It is for this reason that Piya can, with some privilege, be angry about the angry mob setting the tiger on fire. For her, it was “the most horrifying thing [she’s] ever seen,” but for everyone else, it is a necessary sacrifice as people like Piya and Kanai–who are as close to a first world character as the novel gets–contribute to these climate disasters and increasing man v. nature brawls due to the consequences that their lifestyles in their respective western and elitist worlds perpetuate. 

The culture shock between these three characters seems to be reflective of a broader idea of climate fiction, and pushes us to reevaluate what privileges or positions we might be in in the world, and what we think we might understand. Fokir and Piya show us there is a difference between knowing about something and knowing the thing for what it is.

In “The Great Derangement”, one argument that Amitav Ghosh makes is that science fiction as a genre belongs in the “outhouse” of literature, partially due to its tendency to rely on dramatic, futuristic, not-quite-our-reality details to prove its point or further its plot. It might be this dedication to remaining part of the mansion of “real fiction” that makes his novel, A Hungry Tide, one that, though its plot is entirely reliant on the structure of climate and its changes over time, does not feel to be a cli-fi novel. Instead, it feels more that Ghosh is using the kinds of symbolism and language that invite a broader audience — not just science fiction readers—and through these devices he seems to be making connections to nature or science.

One way Ghosh does this is by describing the environment as something that just is. Passengers coming off boats and wading through silt up to their hips, or people tying mesh nets around their bedposts to keep out snakes are just examples of everyday life. Not too much time is spent on explaining why these things happen, they just do. No one besides readers spontaneously, is made to feel surprised by these details. Instead, I find myself more inclined to look at the relationships between characters like Piya, Fokir, and Kanai, and by looking at the ways these characters are similar or different, I see some connection to ideas about the anthropocene that we read by Frazier and Haraway, rather than it to be handed to me in the way typical sci-fi might.

For example, one of the first and compelling differences between Piya and Kanai is that Piya can only speak English, while Kanai can speak “six languages not including dialects”. However, Piya’s “Words” chapter shows us other ways things can have meaning and other ways we can communicate without the very human tool of language. Fokir’s ability to handle the water and be weary of predators while still making productive use of the nature around them demonstrates Haraway’s emphasis on the daily anthropocene. The knowledge Fokir has of water, land, and food result from a lifetime of being embedded in these daily habits, passed on culturally. On the other hand, the silence in the way Piya and Fokir act, the way Fokir helps Piya, and even Piya’s studying of dolphins is kind of reflective of Frazier’s “becoming animal”. There is something very simple about Piya and Fokir’s connection from an anthropic perspective: they can’t relate to each other, they can’t speak to each other, they are of different lives and genders and backgrounds. However, when taking away these “civil” differences, they still remain connected, and neither Piya nor Fokir have any claim to be better than the other–they are on the same horizontal plane. On this plane also exists the respect for tigers, the necessity of living around animals and nature, and the interaction with nature that subtly reflects this horizontal idea.

The way that Ghosh frames details the silt to the hips, the animals, the poverty– that might have been otherwise front and center in sci-fi novels makes him different as an author, but the fact that these details even exist in his story at all still put him in a position of criticizing and commenting on human nature, but in a way that fits his mansion v. outhouse narrative. I wonder how effective this method is in the long term as a method of talking about the moment we’re in, and how to deal with it.

Ghosh’s idea of the Great Derangement and the way that we like to think of ourselves as aware and adaptable while we adapt in all the wrong ways is similar to some themes emerging in Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Ghosh first mentions the “great derangement” by saying that this era that we live in, “which so congratulates itself on its self awareness, will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement” (10). When he brings up novels and “serious fiction”, which iterate everyday life and make themselves relatable to the reader, it reminds me a lot of Barthes’ reality effect–the idea that, sometimes, the importance of everyday objects in novels is that they are immune to any kind of symbolic or sign/signifier deconstruction. Barthes’ example was of a barometer on a wall that seems to serve no purpose other than to render a real barometer, which was supposed to mean that the novel is touching on real life. In a similar way, Ghosh’s category of serious fiction novels are novels that bring “everyday moves into the foreground”. It seems that in this way, we like to think that we are so acutely aware of our lives. The logic might go something like: if authors are spending time and effort describing this pointless barometer on a wall, it is because we as people find such acute awareness of our surroundings so valuable! It is a habit we have to be so self-conscious! 

However, the trouble of such short-sightedness arises in contexts like that of Lauren’s life in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. At first it seems like Lauren’s father, or even the people who make up Lauren’s community, are working towards the so-called bigger picture, when in reality they are only adapting to what is right in front of them and only doing so when there really is no other choice. For example, teaching the children how to shoot might be a productive use of time given the dangers of thieves, dogs, and killers outside of the community wall, but it is only in response to this surrounding violence that they become aware of self defense. When Lauren tries to bring up the importance of making your own food, preparing emergency packs, or learning to live outside of the wall because “[they] need to learn what [they] can to stay alive while there’s time” she gets into trouble for fear mongering and paranoia (Butler 64). It does seem quite deranged that, in a society so bent on being aware of how they look (the dirtier the better so as not to attract attention), how tall and strong their community wall is, the value of water and fruit, or the start of a night watch committee, they seem to be taking everything one day at a time. All this “preparation” and they don’t seem prepared for the robbery of Ms. Simms, or the killing of little Amy, or even how to deal with Lauren’s hyperempathy. It seems that they just take the hits as they come. How can a community so bent on “self awareness” as Ghosh would label it, be so ostracizing and in denial of Lauren’s actual self awareness and push for change? 

It seems so easy for us as outsiders to be on Lauren’s side in the context of this dystopian clifi novel, but at the same time–and really confusingly– I find myself as a person living in the world probably contributing to Lauren’s, and really only be able to focus on things like Bartes’ barometer on the wall. So far, Parable of the Sower has made me think about the ways in which I act and behave shortsightedly without realizing, because the real “big picture” is difficult to grasp but also hard to find a space to communicate about it with–a struggle that Lauren faces as well. 

Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence seems to couple with LeMenager’s Climate Change and the Struggle for Genre to serve as an explanation for the changes in everyday life that she notices in this new “era”, as she calls it, of life that cli-fi as a genre features. 

The “slow violence,” as Nixon calls it, that we are being subject to in the anthropocene is so structural and embedded in our lives that we can’t really get a grasp on the fact that it is even happening in any of its dimensions, which is what I think LeMenager’s emphasis on what defines a human daily habit is based on. The slow violence that Nixon describes seems almost omnipotent; it “needs to be seen–and deeply considered–as a contest not only over space, or bodies, or labor, or resources, but also over time” (Nixon 2361). And what is a human habit if not a temporal response to our space, bodies, and resources? However, climate change has really catalyzed the degrading effects of structural, slow, deeply embedded violence that “kill slowly by means of stress, sleep deprivation [and] anhedonia” and thus changed what it means to live “moment by moment” as a fragile human in the anthropocene (LeMenager). 

Nixon and LeMenager seem to agree that slow violence has absolutely redefined, if not crushed, what it means to be human, and the most clear manifestation of this can be examined by looking at the privileged class, and how their incrementally changing “habits” have effects on a global scale. We see this through the spread of technology, especially in the global north. Technology has modified our– “us” and “our” being the privileged class with access to such technology–means of thinking and processing from collective, aware, and perhaps “slow” to “continuous partial attention”. How I understand it is that we are so used to getting information immediately, skimming articles, looking at ten second videos on tiktok, writing paragraphs of texts on iMessage in seconds, that we do not have the attention span or commitment to anything that would take more time: reading a book, research, writing a letter, telling someone you appreciate them rather than double clicking to “like” their photo. The fast paced environment we live in conceals even further the slow violence we are contributing to, because it doesn’t match our style of life. In this way, we seem to be losing grip on reality–literally. We are having such a hard time defining and addressing slow violence because we can’t seem to grasp the grandiosity of the world. To connect this slow violence back to my point about habits, LeMenager defines habits as “the subjective practice of reality”. I think technology has warped our perception of reality and subjectivity. We live in our own worlds, our own curated feeds, and think everything is so personalized to us. Our minds now function in discrete bits, where my lack of awareness of geological time and space puts things like my skincare routine or my back to school outfit on the same level of importance as the election or animal extinction. If everything is all “the same”, tackling slow violence becomes even harder because we do not have a sense of connection to the outside world as it impacts humans and society as a whole vs how it impacts me and my immediate needs. As I’m typing this, it seems we have grown impulsive and childish. Climate change and its impacts on the world really shows us this in the way that we–as the privileged class in the global north–can seem to put the water crises and floods in Bangladesh or the garbage islands in the ocean in the back of our mind, until they start hitting us directly. Ultimately, slow violence prompts genres such as cli-fi that LeMenager discusses, of which the goal is to reconnect the world, create culture, and as she sweetly puts it: “to love”.