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Shalini Jain
Shalini Jain
Shalini Jain
To cite this article: Shalini Jain (2012) Romancing the Environment: Romesh Gunesekera's Reef
and Heaven's Edge, South Asian Review, 33:3, 29-49, DOI: 10.1080/02759527.2012.11932894
Article views: 3
Shalini Jain
Anything was possible: that was the point, I told myself, about an
island of dreams. (Heaven's Edge 12)
They had not said where the party was but I imagined Mister Salgado
and Nili out on some terrace by the sea, dancing the cha-cha-cha or
the kukul-kakul wiggle ... Mister Salgado's crushed coral sand
churning, and their feet tracing a complicated pattern across a
polished tiled floor. (Re~f 134)
contrast with the seclusion and drabness of his lonely London life.
Marc's exotic gaze soon finds its erotic object in the appearance of
Uva. But while he is instantly transported into a rhapsody by his
intense desire for her, she is far too experienced by her tragic
circumstances to share his illusions of a happily ever after; while she is
busy protecting them from the trigger-happy night-patrols, Marc is
oblivious to the immediate dangers: "I wasn't sure whether I should
hold her hand again. I swung mine close as we sauntered out into the
open, but she seemed too busy thinking about military maneuvers to
notice" (23).
This disjuncture between Marc's and Uva's perspectives arguably
situates Heaven 's Edge in the booming "alterity industry" that such
literatures, as Huggan points out, at once serve and resist. The
diasporic's romantic conviction that he would discover the elusive
(eastern) paradise he is searching for: "anything was possible: that was
the point, I told myself, about an island of dreams," (12) is here
contested by the realities of an island and its population suffering from
civil and nuclear warfare.
Gunesekera draws attention to this collision of touristic fantasy and
sociopolitical reality through Uva 's repeated countering of Marc's
romanticism. His use of strategic exoticism is evident through the
characterization of Uva, who unsettles the normative stereotypes of
Marc's exoticizing western gaze and debunks his paradisiacal fantasies,
even as she returns his erotic desires. The dystopic fantasy narrative,
while ostensibly providing ammunition for Gunesekera's detractors by
its profuse depiction of an imagined, encountered, re-created and
threatened paradise, nonetheless has a strong and salutary
countermovement which exposes the western tourist gaze by
highlighting its insularity. Marc is content to label the romantic world
he has found with Uva as his Eden. To this she responds with brittle
sarcasm: "What? You think just because we can jiggle our hips together
everything is all right? ... If we think this is the best we can do then we
will have become just like them: forgetting pain and remembering
nothing" (39). This refusal to let her erotic desires eclipse her
environmental mission is in sharp contrast to Marc's own desire (and
Mister Salgado's in Reef), which culminates in having found her and is
heedless to all external realities. She also contests his version of Eden;
her efforts lie in creating an Eden instead of arriving at an existing one.
Her attunement with nature is predicated upon a reciprocity and
responsibility that completely eludes Marc at this moment.
However, this strategic exoticism meets with limited success in the
narrative, as evident from Marc's continued inability to recognize his
own erotizing and exoticizing tendencies; nature, and by extension Sri
Lanka, retains an objectified, eroticized and exotic gloss. Gunesekera
42 Shalini Jain
Notes
I would like to thank Dr. Ross G. Forman, University of Warwick, for his
critical comments on an earlier draft of this paper, as well as the two
anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback.
I. For an incisive account of the violent conflict between Sri Lanka's
predominantly Sinhalese government and the Tamil separatist group, the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, see Bandarage, especially chapters three to
six.
2. This anonymous island-country nonetheless is clearly reminiscent of the
author's native Sri Lanka, as evident from various textual references to the
island's political, topographical, climactic and historical similarities.
Romancing the Environment 47
3. See Shyam Selvadurai's interview at www.quillandquire.com. In his
earlier book Funny Boy ( 1993), the wealthy Tamil characters have little choice
than to migrate to Canada as a result of the violence between the Sinhalese and
the Tamils leading up to the 1983 ethnic riots.
4. See Minoli Salgado's book Writing Sri Lanka, in which she states that
the Mahaveli project was "enforced through resettling nearly 130,000
families-including 100,000 Sinhalese peasantry into Tamil-dominated areas-
and also resulted in the dramatic cultural and material dispossession of the
indigenous forest dwellers of Sri Lanka, whose dwelling space and hunting
lands were made into a national park" ( 14 ).
5. See Maryse Jayasuriya 's book Terror and Reconciliation, which
critiques Reef's conflation of a variety of crises (the ethnic conflict as well as
the class-based Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna [JVP] insurrections of the early
1970s and late 1980s) into an undifferentiated maelstrom of violence, thus
detracting from the specificities of context, and positing brutality as "endemic"
(137) to Sri Lanka.
6. For an interesting interpretation of the environmental symbolism in
Reef, in which the ever-shifting and un-mappable coastline of Sri Lanka is
viewed as contesting the very notion of a fixed and static island which a
rational, modern knowledge system sought to circumscribe, see Jazeel 582-98.
7. My thanks to Maryse Jayasuriya for pointing out the physical
invocations ofUva's name, with its resonances of Sri Lankan landscape.
8. It is significant that Marc encounters a wounded monkey, with its echo
of the mythical monkey god Hanuman from the Ramayana legends. Hanuman
is believed to have arrived in Sri Lanka in search of the goddess Sita, and
destroyed the corrupt kingdom of Ravana. Heaven 's Edge incorporates
elements of Hindu, Buddhist and Christian mythology to repeatedly evoke the
need for a radical cleansing of a violent and unjust regime, and the necessity of
ushering in a new one based on mutual care and concern.
Works Cited
Bandarage, Asoka. Separatist Conflict in Sri Lanka: Terrorism, Ethnicity,
Political Economy. New York: Routledge, 2009. Ebook.
Bayer, Gerd. "Marine Biology and Scientific Discourse: Gunesekera's Reef as
Postcolonial Resistance." British Asian Fiction: Framing the
Contemporary. Ed. Neil Murphy and Wai-chew Sim. Amherst: Cambria,
2008. 273-87. Print.
Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London:
Routledge, 1996. Print.
Deckard, Sharae. "Jungle Tide, Devouring Reef: (Post)colonial Anxiety and
Ecocritique in Sri Lankan Literature." Postcolonial Green: Environmental
Politics and World Narratives. Ed. Bonnie Roos and Alex Hunt.
Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2010.32-48. Ebook.
Erwin, Lee. "Domesticating the Subaltern in the Global Novel in English." The
Journal of Commonwealth Literature 47.3 (2012): 325-39. Web. I Oct.
2012.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Hung1y Tide. London: HarperCollins, 2004. Print.
Gunesekera, Romesh. Ree.f London: Granta, 1994. Print.
48 Shalini Jain