South Asian Review

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Romancing the Environment: Romesh

Gunesekera's Reef and Heaven's Edge

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

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2012.11932894

Published online: 08 Dec 2017.

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 29

Romancing the Environment: Romesh

Gunesekera's Reefand Heaven's Edge

Shalini Jain

National University of Singapore

[Abstract: Romesh Gunesekera's novels Reef (1994) and Heaven's

Edge (2003) signal the multi-layered connections between the socio-
political disintegration of Sri Lanka from civil war and the destruction
of its natural ecosystems. However, the narratives' ecocritical
interventions, informed by its exotic and erotic registers, run the danger
of objectifying, gendering and colonizing nature and reinforcing the
human-nature binary in asymmetrical power relations. The
representations of landscapes and waterscapes here call into question
the ethics of human engagement with the natural world and the
ecological dangers of an attenuated phenomenological connection with
nature that celebrates sensory interactions but eschews human agency
and responsibility toward conservation.]

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)

omesh Gunesekera's novels Reef (1994) and Heaven's Edge

R (2003) measure the tragic distance between the paradisiacal
memory of a homeland and the reality of its disintegration from civil
war, and gesture unmistakably toward the deep connections between
South Asian Review, Vol. 33, No.3, 2012
30 Shalini Jain

the sociopolitical disintegration of the country and the destruction of its

natural ecosystems. 1 Reef opens in London with an encounter between
Triton, a Sinhalese migrant restaurateur, and a struggling Tamil petrol
station attendant, which recalls to Triton's mind the memory of his
childhood home in Sri Lanka, scarred now by the carnage of war: "I
could see a sea of pearls. Once a diver's paradise. Now a landmark for
gunrunners in a battle zone of army camps and Tigers" (12).
Conversely, Heaven's Edge opens with the arrival of Marc, its London-
based diasporic protagonist, in a tropical "pearl of an island" (6) that is,
however, still under the control of gunrunners. 2 This evocation of war
and peace, of Sinhalese and Tamil kinship and divide, of paradise and
purgatory, and of nature's erstwhile prosperity and current poverty
forms some of the key concerns animating the two narratives. This
paper critically examines the Sri Lankan-born British writer's two
novels to demonstrate how these narratives actively but problematically
draw upon nature imagery as a literal and metaphorical symbol for
sociopolitical and ecological dilemmas that Sri Lanka has to urgently
address in the wake of its violent political and ethnic divide.
Although Gunesekera's novels deserve approbation for
highlighting the environmental impact of the protracted ethnic conflict
and for offering a valuable corrective to the dominant tendency of
modern Sri Lankan literature in English, which tends to be "written and
read against the background of civil war, nationalist ideology, and
ethnic conflict," (Deckard 41) my critique of his novels nonetheless
takes into account the implications of its ecocritical interventions when
these are informed by an explicit exotic and erotic register that runs the
danger of objectifying, gendering and colonizing nature, and
reinforcing the human-nature binary in asymmetrical power relations.
While most critical reviews have tended to focus on the political,
postcolonial and diasporic contexts that underpin these narratives, this
reading adopts an ecocritical perspective that pays attention to the
phenomenological constructions of the human-nature relationships here
in ways that problematically reinforce the dominance of human power
over the natural world, even while attempting to work toward
restituting these imbalances. My main concern is to examine how the
landscapes and waterscapes represented in these narratives call into
question the ethics of human engagements with the natural world;
specifically, what price Mister Salgado and Nili's dancing the cha-cha-
cha on the seafront extracts from the coral and the pearls; and how
visualizing Sri Lanka as an island of dreams, even as it is shown to be
patently not, asks probing questions of the role of both the writer's and
the readers' agency and responsibility toward their environment. At the
heart of this examination lies an enquiry into the fictional construction
of the human-nature relationships here that centers on what Val
 Romancing the Environment 31

Plumwood terms the "hyperseparation between the sphere of the human

and that of nature [that] leads humans to see themselves as 'outside
nature,' and correspondingly to ignore or deny their reliance on
biospheric services" (128).
This ethical disconnection between humans and nature stems from
what I demonstrate to be the outcome of the protagonists' attenuated
phenomenological connection with nature. My understanding of
phenomenology is informed by Emmanuel Levinas, whose
interpretation of this philosophical approach draws attention to its vital
role in the "disclosure of how meaning comes to be, how it emerges in
our consciousness of the world, or more precisely, in becoming
conscious of our intentional rapport (visee) with the world" (14). In the
present context, while Gunesekera may not be explicitly espousing an
ecocritique in either narrative, his choice of protagonists in both texts (a
marine scientist and an eco-warrior) signals his preoccupation with the
ecological problems confronting his native country. I argue that both
protagonists' romantic obsessions compromise their rapport with the
natural world and prevent them from responding to the critical task of
building synergic connections with their natural surroundings.
In this essay I also draw attention to the neglected role of intuition,
which Edmund Husser! identifies as one of the key principles
governing phenomenology. Contrary to the current meaning or usage of
the word "intuition," the Finnish philosopher Jaakko Hintikka explains
that Husserl's term "intuition" (Anschauung) assigns no privileged
position to sense perception or empirical intuition. Husserl's leading
principle is that "Immediate 'seeing,' not merely sensuous experiential
seeing, but seeing in the universal sense as an originally presentive
consciousness of any kind whatever, is the ultimate source of all
rational assertions" (Husser) qtd. in Hintikka 88). Thus empirical
intuition, to be meaningful, needs to transform into essential intuition
or insight. For Mister Salgado and Marc, their inability to recognize the
role of intuition in their relationship with the forces of nature, and the
interconnectedness of human ipseity with the natural world, signals
what I have termed an attenuated phenomenological connection with
nature. This partial engagement then, bereft of any meaningful intuition
that productively forges a symbiotic connection with the natural world,
further isolates the human in a state of hyperseparation from the
environment. Reef and Heaven 's Edge demonstrate the real and
potential damage of neglecting this fragile relationship between
humans and nature.
But is this disrupted human-nature relationship a deliberate
strategy on Gunesekera' s part to foreground the increasing divide
between the human and nonhuman world? Do the narratives
incorporate a nuanced and ambivalent use of strategic exoticism that
32 Shalini Jain

plays a crucial role in strengthening or undermining his characters'

phenomenological relationship with their surroundings? Or is the tragic
collapse of the paradisiacal but war-prone eastern country an easy way
into the circuits of the exotic literature genre? Gunesekera's work has
often attracted criticism for its putative exoticism and orientalism,
notably from Thiru Kandiah (47-72) and Ruvani Ranasinha (87-89).
Minoli Salgado's cautionary note that this form of labeling, or "cultural
exclusion" (147) in the critical evaluation of contemporary Sri Lankan
literature potentially undermines such texts of their cultural import and
throws serious doubt on their ethical drives is especially timely when
there is a growing emergence of well-publicized and internationally
honored diasporic narratives, consumed by western audiences as
"authentic accounts" (Deckard 162) of the country's ethnic crisis. Reef
and Heaven's Edge, successfully circulating in the international market,
are arguably open to the charge of subscribing to the exotic genre,
marked as they are by an overt homage to the culinary delights of a
South Asian country whose ongoing civil strife receives only oblique
references (Reef); and of celebrating the success of the western-
returned diasporic protagonist who builds a sanctuary (and a way of
life) dedicated to peace and prosperity even as all locals fail to do so
(Heaven's Edge).
Alternatively viewed, given that the protagonists' relationship with
the natural world plays such a pivotal role in both texts, this reading
examines the implications of a construction of nature that is conflated
with sexual desire and conquest, and a phenomenological engagement
with nature when it remains at a sensory level. Yet Heaven's Edge
concludes with Marc assuming agency and commitment, prompting
reflection on the benefits that can potentially accrue when this
engagement with one's environment goes deeper and provokes an
ethical response that answers to the summons of the other with love,
care and a sense of kinship.
Gunesekera's wistful vision of a utopian alternative reality for Sri
Lanka, one that eschews violence and promises a new beginning for its
long-suffering people, finds many echoes in the work of his
contemporaries. While Michael Ondaatje's Ani/'s Ghost (2000) turns to
a renewed religious and epistemological awakening to bring succor to a
war-ravaged nation, Shyam Selvadurai acknowledges that his novel
Cinnamon Gardens (1998) is a parable for the dismantling of
conservative social hierarchies that is required to usher in a new era of
equality, freedom and ethnic tolerance. 3 In When Memory Dies ( 1997),
Ambalavaner Sivanandan 's concern for the "loss of collective memory
and the dissolution of alternative social and political solutions"
(Jayawickrama 142) is met by an effort to recreate a sense of
community using memory itself as a means of resistance. Gunesekera's
 Romancing the Environment 33

fictional responses to the pressing sociopolitical problems of his native

country take on markedly different perspectives in the two novels under
review. In Heaven's Edge, he responds to the ongoing political and
environmental crisis by drawing upon an imaginary utopian
reconstruction of Eden from the dystopian realities of a thinly disguised
Sri Lanka, prompting the question of what allegorical significance of
hope and despair a narrative can have when it detaches from
sociopolitical engagement and advocates a return to a primeval Eden
inhabited by lovers and children. In the case of Reef, while certain
critics have faulted its limited engagement with sociopolitical issues
and its preoccupation with an exoticizing culinary leitmotif for the
benefit of foreign audiences, I read Triton's perspectives as deeply
insightful and critical of the upper classes he serves, and the ways that
Sri Lankan society itself is implicated in the perpetration of
environmental disasters like the Mahaveli irrigation project.
Of Corals and Contesting Environmental Visions
Reef's narrative, with its retrogressive flashback of Triton's
adolescent experiences growing up as a houseboy in his employer
Mister Salgado's house in Colombo in the 1970s, revolve around the
protagonist's emerging individuality, sexuality and ambition, echoing
features of the traditional Bildungsroman genre. The tensions
engendered by the increasing civil conflict between the Sinhalese and
the Tamils, catalyzed by the Mahaveli irrigation project, form a subtle
but powerful environmental backdrop to the novel. 4 The narrative
approaches the tense sociopolitical conflicts covertly, with the
deteriorating state of the reef acting as a powerful symbol of the
worsening ethnic relations in the country. Triton's developing
consciousness soon registers the implications of governmental and
private investments in natural resource utilization, and the ways these
go awry, misled by false ideologies, changing value systems, and a
transition from a colonial to a neo-colonial, market-driven export
economy, all of which are exploitative of natural resources in their own
varying ways.
Viewed from a postcolonial perspective, Jose Vazquez draws
attention to the conformable and subversive aspects of the postcolonial
Bildungsroman in Reef (30), yet leaves the crucial linkages between a
developing consciousness and its engagement with the external
environment unexamined. Lee Erwin argues that Reef's attention to
national, ethnic and class politics have in different ways both given a
voice to its domestic subaltern Triton, even while problematically co-
opting it within hegemonic beliefs in crucial ways (325). Erwin's
contention that such contemporary domestic novels risk "constructing a
'subaltern' whose apotheosis into cosmopolitan, erotic, or national
34 Shalini Jain

forms of transcendence may continue to stand in for transformations of

entire social formations and their relations of production" (335) rightly
identifies not only Mister Salgado's but also Gunesekera's and his
urban, cosmopolitan readers' complicity in shifting attention away from
the sociopolitical readjustments necessary to bring equality in a divided
society. Yet Triton's role in making explicit the elite's usurpation of the
ecological resources of the land and sea deserves more credit than they
receive. Susheila Nasta's critical examination of Reef, which pays
attention to the way a diasporic sensibility and sensitivity inform
Gunesekera's fiction by "vividly dramatiz[ing] the difficulties of
imposing a false historiography on the discursive discontinuities of
diasporic lives," (217) utilizes nature imagery to foreground her point;
she acclaims the narrative's lyrical and poignant use of oceanic
imagery as powerful metonyms for forces of "irreparable human loss,
but also of connection and reconstitution" (215). From an ecological
perspective, Gerd Bayer argues that the novel's subversive questioning
of the grand narrative of western science's efficacy in evaluating
ecological loss is based on debatable methods that are adopted blindly
by Mister Salgado but intuitively questioned by Triton.
My contribution- in this critical conversation, drawing from
Richard Kerridge's definition of ecocriticism as a discipline that seeks
to "evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their coherence and usefulness
as responses to environmental crisis," (5) extends these perspectives
but foregrounds the relatively unexamined impact of a
phenomenological approach in interpreting texts that ostensibly
valorize human nature interactions. Specifically, here I argue that
Mister Salgado's professional approach to his scientific knowledge
falls short of a phenomenological intuition, one that could potentially
enable him to understand and connect the meaning of the vulnerable
coral and reef in a larger context that included the sociopolitical
conditions responsible for the deterioration of the country and its
ecosystems, and his role and agency in limiting or reversing this
destruction.
Gunesekera repeatedly mentions the young Triton's initial awe for
his employer's passion and knowledge about marine life, but
destabilizes it with the houseboy's increasing awareness of the
insularity and privilege of his employer's class, thus revealing a
postcolonial critique that renders an alternative history of a nation and
its class structures as experienced by the subaltern. "To him there were
no boundaries to knowledge. He studied mosquitoes, swamps, sea
corals and the whole bloated universe ... he wrote about the legions
under the sea, the transformation of water into rock-the cycle of light,
plankton, coral and limestone-the yield of beach to ocean" (34) is
Triton's early paean to his master's knowledge, but even this heady
 Romancing the Environment 35

admiration is tinged with a strong sense of irony: "Although he had

been to the best of Colombo's schools, Mister Salgado regarded
himself as largely self-educated" (34). Yet Mister Salgado remains
aloof from any endeavors to comprehend the reality of both the
political and the social problems confronting Sri Lanka. This portrayal
is an instance of a diminished phenomenological relation with the
natural world, one that separates objective science from its specific
connections with the larger ecosystem and evades the question of
individual and collective responsibility and agency. Ironically, it is the
semi-literate houseboy Triton who is perspicacious in understanding his
master's neglect and failures and who takes up the burden of
connecting and acknowledging the impact of human destruction of
natural forces.
Mister Salgado's marine study reveals the devastating effects of
bombing, dynamiting and netting on the fragile reef and coral, thus
obliquely referring to the destruction ensuing from both developmental
activities (coastal tourist resorts, large-scale irrigation projects), and the
violent political activities of rebellion and suppression engaged by
government and separatist parties. While aware of the immediate threat
to the marine life surrounding Sri Lanka, he makes little or no attempt
to transform his knowledge and concern into meaningful and socially
relevant interventions by, for example, mobilizing public opinion about
environmental devastation. His friend Dias stresses the importance that
this marine study has for Sri Lanka, invoking both Mister Salgado's
scholarship and his nationalistic duty. Implicit in this plea is a critique
of the upper Sinhalese and Tamil classes who are educated and
cognizant of the unfolding destruction to their environment but have
done little to halt this exploitation, or are complicit in it and benefit
from it. Dias's displeasure with his friend's lack of commitment is
evident in his refusal to stay for a lunch of Triton's famed string-
hoppers, and Mister Salgado too settles for a western sandwich,
foreshadowing his eventual migration from Sri Lanka to the West. Here
Sri Lankan food mediates the change in moods and choices, contrary to
Walter Perera's view that the narrative emphasis on culinary matters is
solely a vehicle for Gunesekera's exoticism of the East (69).
The juxtaposition of science with history and narrative echoes the
concerns raised in Ondaatje's Ani/'s Ghost, as its protagonist Ani!
Tissera, reflecting shades of Mister Salgado's scientific approach,
embodies the western scientist who believes in accessible and
unproblematic truths based on "information [that] could always be
clarified and acted upon" (55), but who is countered by the archeologist
Sarath's reminder that truth is not only available in empirically present
bones and sediment, but also in "character and nuance and mood"
(259). Like Ani! under Sarath's tutelage, Triton learns to understand the
36 Shalini Jain

nuance and mood of his fellow countrymen when he becomes the

recipient of the Marxist revolutionary Wijetunge's confidences. The
simmering resentment visible in Mister Salgado's assistant, who
believes that Sri Lanka needs to be radically cleansed of repressive
social systems, completely escapes the landed and elite scientist, who is
unable to intuit the truth that his country is as endangered by ethnic and
class divisions as the reef he researches is by pollution. 5 Confronted by
Wijetunge's exposure of the corruption fostered by the upper classes,
Triton's early defense: "But I am only a cook" (121) reveals his
sheltered existence in the sanctuary of his employer's home, but is
gradually replaced by a growing unease that perhaps the radical
assistant was not entirely wrong. Initially unable to comprehend the
magnitude of the rising anger of the lower classes, this frustration
strikes Triton too when he is forced to cater to Mister Salgado's drunk
friends during a poker party, and realizes his "kolla" or servant boy
position will be his trap forever.
However, Gunesekera does not draw a very sympathetic portrait of
the lower classes either; Wijetunge's zeal for social revolution is not
invested with an understanding of the real problem of his situation, and
instead appears malicious and exaggerated. His "Five Lessons" which
"explained the crisis of capitalism, the history of social movements and
a future shape of a Lankan revolution" (Reef 121) are treated with scant
attention or respect and ignore the urgent summons for a political and
economic restructuring that was required to avert or halt the imminent
ethnic and class conflict.
Triton's portrayal as a semi-literate servant boy who is positioned
outside of the privileged class systems even while being in intimate
contact with the elite is invested with a keen sense of irony and
perspicacity that reveals not only the foibles and changing values of the
upper classes, but also categorically indicts Mister Salgado's
irresponsibility toward his marine conservation work, an indifference
that critically impacts the country's environmental policies. He
trenchantly (and jealously) notes the stupor and solipsism that engulfs
Mister Salgado once he falls in love with Nili. Once again, his wryly
ironic comment-"She brought out the urban socialite in him and
shrouded the scholar" (129)-hits the mark.
This negligence has serious consequences for the nation itself. Sri
Lankan politicians, in a bid to stir Sinhalese patriotism, embark on an
ill-advised attempt to imitate the idea of the irrigation tanks that the
ancients had created, by building multiple dams on their longest river.
In the absence of any resistance from scientists like Mister Salgado,
Triton recognizes that the politicians' "machinations" (129) had
triumphed, causing widespread social unrest. Asoka Bandarage details
the various ways in which the Mahaweli irrigation scheme became "an
 Romancing the Environment 37

economic and ecological disaster for the country as a whole" (82).

Multinational companies and governmental officials bought up the
agricultural land and exploited the locals as contract labor, leading to
further "peasant indebtedness, pauperization and discontent" (84 ).
Ethnic divisions also arose as Tamil and Sinhalese peasants fought over
the allocation of resources, with the Tamils increasingly feeling
neglected in the Mahaveli development plans and resenting the state's
endorsement of Buddhist culture that the majority of the Sinhalese
followed.
But early warnings of these impending crises appear to have no
bearing on Mister Salgado's life. He attends the inaugural party of the
irrigation project dressed in a "pale grey nationalistic tunic over dark
trousers," (133) signifying his co-optation into the governmental
project. As Triton recalls, "It was a bubbly world of gaiety that seemed
to belong to a previous, more frivolous generation. At the kade on the
main road the talk was on the need for revolution, or for a return to
traditional values ... but in our house none of that mattered," (93)
ironically drawing attention to the privileged lifestyles and semi-feudal
structures of upper Sri Lankan society whose lives were at a great
remove from those of the impoverished classes, and was one of the key
causes of the insurrections of the early 1970s and the late 1980s. Triton
imagines Mister Salgado and Nili dancing the cha-cha-cha in a posh
seaside resort, while alive to the fact that the coral reef remains in a
state of disintegration, a victim of the complicated political and social
maneuvers that privilege the economic, religious and ethnic discourses
put forward by the dancing politicians, bureaucrats and the elite.
In spite of Mister Salgado's support of the governmental irrigation
project, it is clear that he is not entirely ignorant of what ails his
country. At a Christmas party, he entertains his guests with a lively
retelling of the great Biblical flood as nothing more exotic than the
annual monsoon rains that deluge Sri Lanka. While making a playful
postmodern attack on the construction of the Biblical meta-narrative as
the source of history, it also draws attention to the contemporary
construction of Buddhist and Tamil meta-narratives and the way these
are co-opted to suit the chauvinism of its proponents. "Choose a
religion, pick your fantasy. History is flexible" (95) is his cynical
response to his friend's assertion that Sri Lanka is "Buddha's special
haven" (95). Explicitly linking Sri Lanka to a past paradise, here Mister
Salgado's exoticism teases his guests with a vision of his country's
putative Edenic past. Recalling the regenerative role played by the
ocean in recreating a new world after the breakup of the supercontinent
Gondwana, Mister Salgado gestures implicitly to the need for another
renaissance in his country, corrupted as it is by its brutal ethnic strife.
38 Shalini Jain

Tragically though, the rebirth promised by the Mahaveli scheme brings

forth more social chaos and environmental destruction.
But just as Mister Salgado's vision of a pre-colonial Sri Lanka,
famed for its architectural marvels in constructing mega-water tanks, is
co-opted in the re-engineering feats of his present government, his
dream of celebrating Triton's cooking by opening an exotic floating
restaurant in the bay, nurturing rare breeds for the wild even while
serving customers with delectable seafood cooked by Triton, shows
uncomfortable liaisons between conservation and the
commercialization of utopia. As Minoli Salgado points out, "the
representation of this sanctuary is contained within a utilitarian model
of conservation that is, in its own way, exploitative of nature, prompted
by an individual work ethic that shows how capitalism can be made
more ecological, rather than by the more radical desire to respect
nature's laws" (159). Mister Salgado's environmental awareness is
ultimately unable to transform into meaningful agency; the failure of
his love affair, coupled by political trouble, causes him to abandon his
project and migrate to a secluded life in Britain.
Triton on the other hand, with his characteristic zeal (and his
master's help), opens a restaurant in London, learning to stand on his
own feet, and completing the Bildungsroman narrative. This success is
presaged by his growing awareness of the joy the creative act of
cooking gives him: "In my case, the giving was in transforming the
intention into something edible. I gave by cooking and it gave me
pleasure in return" (102). Triton's phenomenological response to his
vocation as a chef, one that enables him to use nature's offerings of
meat, fish, fruits and vegetables to creatively fashion new dishes that
delight his master, Nili and their guests, enables him to find meaning in
his life; at various times, food becomes a seducer, a weapon, a source
of pride, an offering of comfort, a means of livelihood, a link to the past
and a route to an independent future. Instinctively mediating his
relations with the external world through food, Triton is overjoyed
when Nili presents him with a recipe book for Christmas, but appalled
when she also gifts him some money. Although a poor servant, the
money gives him no pleasure; the gulf between his love for and
pleasure in cooking and its monetary reciprocation only reminds him of
his social and financial inferiority, leaving a trace of"sourness" ( 109).
While cooking and eating form one of the chief leitmotifs of the
narrative, the eponymous reef surrounding the island functions as a
signifier on several different registers. It becomes a literal and symbolic
reminder of the fragility of the marine environment: "skull-heaps of
petrified coral, five-foot pyramids beside smoky kilns, marking the
allotments of a line of impoverished lime-markers, tomorrow's cement
fodder, crumbling on the loveliest stretch of the coast" (69-70), and
 Romancing the Environment 39

"small pieces of bleached white coral marked the municipal parking

lot," (128) recall the churning coral sand of the epigraph, as precious
marine life is eroded in order to service industrial and petty needs.
Research conducted by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) prove
conclusively that coral reef and mangrove forests form an important
barrier against the force of deadly tsunamis and are credited with
saving not only human lives and property during these storms by
absorbing the energy of the waves, but also in normal times, of
ensuring a healthy number of fish for local fishermen to live off of
without depleting natural resources to unsustainable levels (Kinver
n.pag.). Scientists studying the impact from the deadly Indian Ocean
tsunami in December 2004 have proved that the maximum destruction
was wreaked on those coastal places that had minimal coral and reef
presence, thus confirming the importance this resource has in
protecting living beings on land and sea.
The reef also echoes the vulnerability of the multi-ethnic Sri
Lankan society itself in the face of its own implosion. Dias's
mysterious death recalls the mythical massacre of innocent people at
the hands of Angulimala, a legendary prince who, following his
master's orders, turned into a mass murderer. But when he meets the
Buddha, he realizes the error of his ways, and through his new devotion
to peace, becomes a venerated saint. The legend captures the
contemporary horror of ethnic carnage, and the unmistakable allusion
of the need for a similar Buddhist adoption of non-violence is evident.
Dias's death in the sea is an urgent warning that like the reef, human
society also forms a network that can flourish only when there is
cooperation and altruism in a society that is fast abandoning these
values.
Nature, however, is not always a passive VICtim of human
brutalities. The Indian Ocean in Reef is also an imposing and terrifying
figure in its own right; while a source of life and livelihood, its
enormity is incomprehensible and even frightening. The sea, while
appearing to silence human atrocities by sweeping away the bodies
murdered on its beaches, is also a powerful witness by re-washing them
back for public knowledge and exposure. Triton finds in its endless
pounding a reminder of the sea's inevitable mastery of the land, while
to Dias its vastness precludes any attempt to measure and predict its
movements and activities, thus undermining the human sense of control
over nature. 6
Nature is itself invested with far more agency, with the ocean and
the reefs power and fragility poignantly evoked in scientific, physical,
emotional and mythical registers that remind readers of the ineluctable
ways humans constitute part of this very ecosystem, are deeply affected
by its exploitation, and the ecological dangers that inevitably arise
40 Shalini Jain

when we ignore this fundamental truth. In his later book, Heaven's

Edge, Gunesekera locates his narrative in an imaginary, post-nuclear
landscape that needs eco-warriors to preserve its scarce vegetation in a
country that has disintegrated completely into a war-zone, signaling his
fears over the future of Sri Lanka.
Environment as Ars Erotica
In Heaven's Edge, Gunesekera's lyrical prose describes a diasporic
longing for an imaginary homeland that is, however, so steeped in
violence that nostalgia culminates in a montage of utopia and dystopia.
Whereas the historical and geographical coordinates are clearly drawn
in Reef, Gunesekera eschews them in his futuristic depiction of an
unnamed post-apocalyptic island in the Indian Ocean. The uneasy
escalation of class struggle and ethnic rivalry in Reef, and the parallel
destruction of the island's protective marine life, meets its imagined but
terrible nadir in the dystopic reality of Heaven 's Edge. It is to such a
dystopic world that Marc returns, in search of love and meaning in his
life, and meets a subversive eco-warrior Uva with whom he attempts to
build a refuge.
By locating the narrative on an anonymous island, Gunesekera at
once broadens the story of political conflicts and environmental
apocalypse to other such nations in the developing world like
Mauritius, Timor Leste, Fiji and Papua New Guinea; invokes the horror
of a post-apocalyptic nation having lost all identity following its
protracted civil and nuclear warfare; and makes a plea for a utopian
rebirth of a new caste-less, class-less and environmentally respectful
society. The imminent destruction of this sanctuary, however, gestures
toward the author's deep despair about the viability of a peaceful
existence in a country long wrecked by civil war.
But this pessimism does not preclude attempts at eco-resistance,
even if they are ultimately doomed to fail. Marc and Uva, in their
different capacities, challenge the dominance of the shortsighted
political parties whose environmental policies are clearly destructive to
the natural world. Yet, an erotic and exotic perspective mediates the
protagonist's interactions with nature. Marc, even as he inherits his
grandfather's love for the natural world, ultimately views it as an exotic
backdrop framing his romance with Uva, rarely accepting or respecting
nature on its own terms.
Gunesekera's portrayal of Marc's maiden voyage to his ancestral
island in the east is ridden with cliches and signals his touristic outlook:
"I was keen to explore it, imagining that perhaps there I might discover
the hidden charm of a long-suffering but colorful land" (9). He longs to
encounter this island as an "exotic spectacle" (Huggan xi) and to find in
it a home that is also a "mythic place of desire," (Brah I92) in sharp
 Romancing the Environment 41

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

continues to portray Marc trapped in this reductive thinking, crucially

aligning his sympathy with his protagonist and privileging his position.
For instance, when Marc mentions the arrival of a new night guard,
Nirali, at his hotel, Uva is skeptical about the latter's chances to remain
free from forced inscription in the military. When Marc's naivete about
Nirali's choices gives Uva a "cerebral pain," (28) his attention
immediately shifts to his physical attraction for her: "Nirali was not the
one I wanted to talk about. I wondered what would happen if I kissed
her. Would the world change then, at least for us?" (28). Instead of
attempting to understand the troubled political and socio-economic
realities that locals like Uva and Nirali have to contend with, Marc's
response is instead exclusively focused upon his physical desires.
While Marc explicitly aspires to find purpose and meaning in his
life, my contention is that his relationship with nature remains
entangled within a utilitarian register that functions as a backdrop to his
ars erotica fantasy. With regard to my earlier question of the
implications of a construction of nature that is conflated with sexual
longing and conquest, Marc consistently seems unable to relate with the
environment on its own terms. When Uva is nabbed by guerilla forces,
he imagines her dead, and visualizes his grief-stricken response in the
erotic terms that fuse nature and ars erotica: "I felt sure Uva was dead.
I wanted to plunge into her darkest, thickest jungle to die too and rot;
fertilize her wretched earth if nothing else" (185). In his despair, if he
cannot possess Uva, then he decides to possess, and be possessed by,
nature in her place. His libidinal energy is sublimated into the creation
of a garden, but his efforts to construct an Eden arise not from a
genuine altruistic attitude toward conservation (like Uva's, her parents,
and Eldon's), but as a magnet for Uva: "A garden husbanded for her,"
(193) in the hope that by creating an Eden, bees, birds and butterflies
would arrive there "to bring Uva with them, and if she could not come
here, I wanted the garden to become her" ( 193). The recurring imagery
of Uva as a bird, as a butterfly and as a fish is now transformed into a
vision of her as the garden.
While gardening in this island is itself an act of subversion against
the military's orders, what makes this vision particularly troubling is
Marc's energy and zeal in controlling and ordering this wilderness into
his vision of Eden. Marc's fervor in creating this sanctuary is portrayed
in terms reminiscent of imperial drive: "I wanted to tame the plot to
produce all that I needed, and exactly when I needed, as ambitious
agriculturists the world over have done so often before" (192). Whereas
Melanie Murray interprets the garden in Heaven's Edge as "a non-
political and imaginary space in which issues of survival are
addressed," (127) I contend that Marc's thoughts and actions are
couched in such persistently sexual and hegemonic terms that they
 Romancing the Environment 43

preclude an altruistic interpretation of concern for nature per se, instead

inviting a reading that links the historical recovery of the lost Eden in
gendered terms, as ecocritic Caroline Merchant points out. Merchant
asserts that since the Enlightenment, recovering the lost Eden has been
a major western cultural project, with reason and experiment becoming
the keys to reinventing Eden on earth, and "human labor was glorified
as the means of improving nature" (66). Uva, with her name explicitly
invoking the lush Uva province in Sri Lanka, home to the Yala
National Park and the Gal Oya National Park, is also etymologically
linked to a grape, and reminiscent of ova or seed. Cast in the role of
Eve to Marc's Adam in their Garden of Eden, and portrayed as "virgin
land to be exploited, as fallen nature to be redeemed through
reclamation, and as fruitful garden to be harvested" (Merchant 117),
Uva's portrayal problematically taps into all the gendered and
exploitative concepts of women and nature to be rationally utilized as
resources. 7
Uva's role as a noble native living in rhythm with nature,
reciprocating the cosmopolitan Marc's desire but also charged with
having to educate him about the struggles of daily livelihood in
politically and economically oppressed regions, shares some interesting
parallels and differences with the attraction between Fokir and Piya in
Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (2004). Both Uva and Fokir return
Marc and Piya's eroticizing and exoticizing gaze respectively, refusing
to be seen as part of a romantic, pre-lapsarian world that has little to do
with the strain of contemporary reality. They provide fresh insight to
the intended global audience of these novels, whose knowledge and
interest in "forgotten, assaulted" (Heaven's Edge 7) places is largely
dependent upon media representations, which often present biased
perspectives, promoting exotica, sensationalizing violence without
providing an in-depth context, or silencing plurality of perspectives.
However, the diasporic Piya is ultimately perspicacious in linking the
effects of political policies on the environment, recognizing her own
complicities, and actively drawing upon her knowledge and resources
in fostering a more equitable urban and rural society. Where Minoli
Salgado views the sanctuary in Heaven's Edge as "symbolically
weighted and geographically dislocated to emphasize the idealism
underpinning its representation," (157) I contend that Marc's continued
exoticist outlook (his initial encounter with the "island of dreams" is
echoed even in the end, when arriving in Samandia, he views it as a
"hallucinogenic island" ( 180) robs the sanctuary of its idealism,
inviting instead the echoes of tourist brochures promoting the exotic
east as a (fallen) paradise.
Gunesekera's lack of ironic detachment toward Marc's exotic and
erotic perspectives contributes to the inconsistent and ambivalent
44 Shalini Jain

positioning of the text in the global market for South Asian

postcolonial literatures. Marc lacks what Rob Nixon terms the
"environmental double consciousness," (239) one that "refracts an
idealized nature through memories of environmental and cultural
degradation in the colonies" (239). While he is aware of the island's
colonial history and the long-term consequences of the exploitation of
its natural resources, as a postcolonial protagonist he is unaware of his
own colonizing and reductive approaches. Having his desire
reciprocated by the far more mature and knowledgeable local woman
only serves to strengthen his erotic impulses, not his understanding.
While acknowledging the novel's attempts at addressing these exotic
readings through the portrayal of Uva, I assert that ultimately the
narrative privileges Marc's position and perspectives, and reinscribes
this very orientalization. Marc's inability to view the natural world on
its own terms, and not solely in the light of his own desires, echoes the
portrayal of Mister Salgado's phenomenological relationship to the sea,
diminished by his failure at understanding its significance, its power
and its vulnerability in relation to humans.
Thus, the confrontation between Marc and Uva's opposing
perspectives does not foster a revised view of nature that liberates it
from the twin exotic-erotic typecasts it is enmeshed within. Nature in
Heaven 's Edge remains a gendered, exoticized and colonized entity
that is deployed in the service of human desires, alternatively cast as a
utopia or dystopia with no innate agency. Such a construction of nature
seriously undermines the important ecocritical critique that promotes
respect and recognition of the environment as a living entity with
rights. In her article "Decolonizing Relationships with Nature,"
Plumwood notes, "anthropocentric culture often endorses a view of the
human as outside, and apart from, a plastic, passive and 'dead' nature,
which lacks agency and meaning" (504). Gunesekera's preoccupation
with the conventions of the tragic love story set against an exotic
background ultimately undermines its potential for an effective critique
of environmental devastation, and the urgent need to view humans as
an integral part of the ecosystem, and not in charge of it.
However, while much of the narrative portrays Marc as
preoccupied with his own personal affairs, a turning point in his
outlook deserves attention as it signals his move away from solipsism
toward a greater awareness, intuitiveness, and responsibility to the
island and its inhabitants: his decision to build a sanctuary for war
victims in Samandia. Where Mister Salgado dreams of building a
marine preserve to protect endangered fish, Marc gets to work building
a refuge for victims of the war, perhaps inspired by the real efforts by a
Sri Lankan non-governmental organization which built a Butterfly
 Romancing the Environment 45

Peace Garden in Batticaloa in 1996, a refuge for the victims of the

country's long civil conflict.
This transformation in Marc arises from his encounter with an
injured monkey; it is a pivotal meeting that evokes in him a sense of his
own agency, responsibility, and compassion. 8 Taking care of the
monkey, he gains a new kind of intuitive clarity about his own innate
convictions: "I couldn't [kill it]. I felt a bond. Evolution was not the
survival of the fittest. Our evolution must come from the survival of the
weak, retrieved against the odds, I realized. It must matter, otherwise
why would we care about anyone? ... I could see then why I had to
value life over death" (186). This rejection of Darwinism marks an
epiphany in Marc's life, and he is finally able to assert, "my priorities
became clear," (187) as he demonstrates a sense of agency in the
creation of a community for war victims. Even his understanding of the
love he has for Uva seems to have achieved a greater depth; his desire
now appears not only to be the result of the meeting of "scattered
neurones" (186) and accidental chemical reactions, but is also graced
and made meaningful through the recognition of deep-seated affection
and care.
In Cordula Lemke's optimistic reading, Marc's gradual conversion
from a detached quasi-tourist to a sensitive eco-warrior "whose whole
being has to be in touch with the surrounding world" (304) is deeply
connected with a phenomenological reawakening that is predicated
upon the Levinasean notion of non-violence, and a recognition of the
necessity of a loving (as opposed to a detached) interaction with a
place. However, while Marc does gain agency and compassion, he
resorts to violence to safeguard their sanctuary, tragically killing Uva in
the process. The garden he had created in her honor is finally
threatened by her death; the novel ends with his recognition that their
"fragile world [was] for ever altered; riven" (234). His continued
reluctance to understand or engage with the sociopolitical realities that
Uva had tried to impress upon him, his inability to communicate in the
language of the children and widows he hopes to help, and the loss of
Uva, his raison d'etre, does not bode well either for his future or for the
sanctuary he has created.
The narrative ends with Marc attempting to formulate a new ethic
in which care emerges triumphant, edging strength and fear out, driven
by his conviction that "We have to live in hope" (187). Acknowledging
the value of this utopian aspiration, Minoli Salgado states "the
presentation of Sri Lanka as a past paradise is not only recognized as an
imaginative construction, but is also shown to be a necessary myth to
grant hope for the future" (153). Whereas her focus is on Marc's
migrant sensibility that she demonstrates is unable to surmount an
exoticist outlook, I argue that the construction of such a myth,
46 Shalini Jain

precariously poised between simultaneously challenging and

reinscribing perceptions of "Oriental" realities as viewed by
international audiences, is problematic at the very least in its
exploitative engagement with the very natural environment that it seeks
to reclaim here. Determined to find paradise and a passionate lover in
the eastern country of his forefathers, Marc conflates both Uva and the
garden he creates with his erotic fantasies, and in this very act
succumbs once again to the colonialist attitudes the text purports to
disturb.
Both Heaven 's Edge and Reef deal with tales of human love and
loss against a backdrop of a beloved paradisiacal country disintegrating
from civil strife. Both narratives nurture the idea of a sanctuary that
will keep out human violence and foster a peaceful coexistence
between humans, flora and fauna. But the narratives differ markedly in
terms of their portrayal of the natural world and authorial tone.
Whereas nature is a force to reckon with in Reef, it lies completely
subdued and defeated in Heaven 's Edge. Gunesekera has used a fine
sense of irony in Reef that successfully identifies the crucial gaps
between privilege and agency, desire and responsibility, and offers a
subtle but critical view of the social and environmental costs of the
developmental and ethnic policies adopted in Sri Lanka. Heaven 's
Edge, however, suffers from an ambivalent strategic exoticism that
ultimately contributes to its exoticism rather than contesting it. In both
cases, the protagonists' phenomenological response to the natural
environment, shaped by their perceptions, memories, imagination,
emotions and desires, remains for the most part at a sensory level, and
undermines Deckard's optimistic reading that Gunesekera's eco-
sensibility gestures toward the possibility of "grounding resistance in a
new relation to the environment" (161). My examination of the ethics
of engagement with nature in these narratives ultimately reveal
Gunesekera's protagonists' struggle to enter into a symbiotic
relationship with their natural environment.

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.

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