Sobre A Play of Giants by Wole Soyinka (1984):

 Journeying Through Hell: Wole Soyinka, Trauma, and Postcolonial

Nigeria
 Anne Whitehead  (bio)

In The Harmony of Illusions, Allan Young questioned whether the category of trauma, which
first emerged during the nineteenth century, could be referred back through historical time
and identified in, for example, Pepys’s diary, Shakespeare’s plays, or the epic of Gilgamesh
as certain literary scholars have claimed. Young concluded that this was not possible, that
none of these pre-nineteenth-century texts refer to what we now know as traumatic memory
because this form of memory was not available to their writers. For Young, our sense of
identity is shaped as much by our conceptions of what memory is as by the memories that we
have. Trauma, like other forms of memory, is a historical and cultural product, which is not
to deny its reality or the suffering that is associated with it but rather to locate that reality in
the individual and collective investments that are made in it and in people’s beliefs and
convictions. In sum, Young argues, “This disorder is not timeless, nor does it possess an
intrinsic unity. Rather, it is glued together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with
which it is diagnosed, studied, treated, and represented and by the various interests,
institutions, and moral arguments that mobilized these effects and resources” (5). The
emergence and diagnosis of trauma attracted the attention of clinicians and researchers
throughout the western world. Its influence rapidly spread through the Americas, Britain,
Australia, Europe, and Israel; and it was used in turn to describe and to shape treatment of
responses to extreme events in many different situations. Young reminds us that trauma is
not a universal category found in many different places and times but rather a discourse of
memory that emerged at a specific time–in the late nineteenth century–and that is embedded
in and inseparable from the particular concerns of western culture. [End Page 13] 

Building on the work of Young, a group of professional aid workers articulated

in Rethinking the Trauma of War their growing concerns regarding the uncritical export of
trauma discourse to non-western societies. Based on their own experience of helping adults
and children to rebuild their lives after the devastation of war, the contributors to this volume
underline that because the concept of trauma derives from a particular (western) cultural
orientation to suffering, its relevance to non-western communities may be limited; that
trauma, in other words, should be regarded not as scientifically neutral but as culturally
specific in its concepts and interventions. The volume highlights three particular assumptions
that are inherent to and embedded within current trauma discourse. First, this discourse
operates on the basis of a strongly individualist approach to human life, with a marked
emphasis on the disengaged self and on intrapsychic conflicts. However, this notion of the
self may not be valid in many non-western cultures, which are predicated on alternative
notions of the self and its relationship to others. Secondly, it is assumed that the forms of
mental disorder that are described by western psychiatry map unproblematically onto those
found elsewhere. However, in non-western contexts, it is likely that the idioms of distress
vary considerably; the emergence of a particular symptom does not necessarily mean that it
has the same meaning or significance across different cultures. Finally, the emergence of a
professionalized trauma discourse has tended towards the handing over of memory to experts
to pronounce on its meaning and significance. The assumption that the West represents the
center of expertise, which is exported to non-western war zones, risks ignoring local concepts
of suffering, misfortune, and illness and eliding those discourses of loss and bereavement that
may fulfill the role for the local community that in western cultures is provided by the trauma
discourse. While they do not critique the relevance and efficacy of trauma discourse in the
West, the contributors to the volume provide a compelling argument that its dominance in
approaching the suffering of non-western societies can silence local perspectives on what is
important and blind us to alternative ways of helping.

Although the critique of trauma discourse articulated in Rethinking the Trauma of

War emerges from those engaged in emergency relief work, the issues that are raised also
have significance in a literary context. Postcolonial texts invite readings in terms of trauma
because they are concerned with articulating the ongoing after-effects of colonial domination
and violence in contemporary society. Postcolonial writers often emphasize that the
encounter between western and non-western societies remains a traumatic one, because the
processes and systems of empire continue to inform and shape the present. However, the
question arises as to whether using the category of trauma to interpret a postcolonial text
represents a western-dominated approach that may not necessarily be relevant to, and that
may in addition silence aspects of, the text itself. The assumptions of trauma discourse
highlighted in the preceding paragraph can be rephrased in the literary context as
follows: [End Page 14] first, do postcolonial texts articulate the effects of trauma in terms of
the individualist self, or do they emphasize alternative notions of the self and its relation to
the wider community? Secondly, does the category of trauma map straightforwardly onto the
postcolonial text, or does something in that text itself remain resistant to it? Finally, can we
see the postcolonial text as a site for articulating local, non-western concepts of suffering,
loss, and bereavement or alternatively of recovery and healing? In this paper I seek to
demonstrate, by addressing these questions, that the inscription of trauma in postcolonial
literature is both responsive to and reflective of the concerns of non-western commonalities.
My analysis will focus specifically on the representation of trauma in postcolonial Nigerian
literature by investigating selected works, both fictional and non-fictional, by the celebrated
writer and activist Wole Soyinka.

Soyinka represents a prominent voice in what has become designated as the “second
generation” of Nigerian novelists, namely those writers publishing in the immediate
aftermath of the Nigerian Civil War. A large part of Soyinka’s creative output has been
dedicated to a vigorous critique of the postcolonial leadership in Nigeria and the prolongation
by that leadership of the destructiveness that colonialism caused. My paper will attend to
three of Soyinka’s works in particular. My central focus will be on the novel Season of
Anomy, first published in 1973, which addresses the trauma of the events leading up to the
Civil War. I will frame my reading of the novel with interpretations of Soyinka’s prison
memoir The Man Died, initially published in 1972, and his recent political commentary The
Burden of Memory (1999). In his texts Soyinka uses the motif of the journey through hell,
and the myth of Orpheus in particular, to articulate the traumatic encounter with a violent and
repressive postcolonial regime. I will argue that Soyinka also makes expedient use of the
trope of katabasis (descent into hell) in order to restage the encounter between western and
non-western cultures. His interweaving of Yoruba myth with western myth asserts the values
 and self-apprehension of the African world and thereby resists colonization by western
“theories and prescriptions” (Myth x). Soyinka also notably estranges western discourse,
renders it unfamiliar to us, by mingling it with Nigerian cultural and storytelling practices; in
this way, he reveals that the western perspective is not the only, or indeed the central, source
of knowledge and understanding.

Rewriting Hell
As Rachel Falconer has convincingly demonstrated in Hell in Contemporary Literature, the
trope of the journey through hell is central to the contemporary western imagination. The
western cultural tradition has long been fascinated with this journey as a transformative
passage that is expressive of an encounter with the dead and the unmaking and rebirth of the
self. From the classical tradition on, the descent into hell has been associated with coming to
know the [End Page 15] self through undergoing a series of tests; the survivor of the ordeal
brings back with him a potent wisdom, a narrative of the unimaginable. Looking across a
range of post-1945 katabatic narratives, Falconer argues that the horrors of twentieth-century
history have convinced many in the West that hells do actually exist and that survivors have
indeed returned from them. By framing the experience of hell as a journey of descent and
return, contemporary katabatic narratives emphasize that the infernal experience is one that
has been survived even if the dark realm can no longer finally be subjugated or overcome.
For Falconer, then, the contemporary descent narrative powerfully exposes to us “the infernal
nature of…twentieth-century institutions, governments and histories” (5).

The western descent narrative that assumes a particular significance in Soyinka’s work is
the myth of Orpheus. The most well known version of the myth derives from Virgil
(Georgics, Book 4) and entails the hero descending into the underworld to ask for the return
of his wife, Eurydice, who died after suffering a snake bite. Orpheus the poet wins over the
guardians of the underworld with his songs, and Eurydice is returned to him on the condition
that he does not look back. He fails to keep this condition, so he loses Eurydice once more;
she dies again and is returned to the underworld. Orpheus himself is then dismembered and
claimed by the underworld to rejoin his wife in death. Other versions of the story have more
positive endings. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses 10, for example, Orpheus leads a rich existence
after the death of Eurydice, becoming a respected musician and shaman. It is, however,
Virgil’s version of the story that predominates in western narratives; the death of Eurydice
occurs twice over and is experienced by Orpheus as a calamitous event that cannot be
undone, even through the power of poetry.1

Soyinka has been criticized for drawing on the Orpheus myth in many of his works, and
most explicitly in Season of Anomy, because he is adopting western narrative models.2 He
thus seems to set himself against Frantz Fanon’s rejection of western classical myth as
irrelevant to the experiences of those from formerly colonized nations: “all the Mediterranean
values… become lifeless, colourless knick-knacks…because they have nothing to do with the
concrete conflict in which the people is engaged” (38–39). However, Soyinka uses western
narratives not to replicate or reinforce western values, as Fanon suggests, but rather to
articulate a new mythography that draws from the indigenous Yoruba tradition. Soyinka thus
interweaves the Orpheus myth with the Yoruba narrative of Ogun, whom he has described as
his patron deity. Soyinka was fascinated from an early age with the god Ogun, who was
treated with great respect by his grandfather in Isara. Ogun, the patron god of hunters and
soldiers, is capable of a powerful destructive violence; but he is also an artist and creator.
Soyinka returns throughout his work to the god’s combination of creativity and
destructiveness in order to question the social and political role of the writer. [End Page 16] 

In the Ogun story that exerts a particular hold on Soyinka’s imagination, the gods descend
to earth as a group, and find themselves separated from mankind by a marshland, which
Soyinka has termed a “chthonic realm”–to Soyinka a place of death, dissolution, and
disintegration (Myth 2). Ogun launches himself into the abyss and makes a road in order to
provide a bridge between gods and humans. Through an effort of the will he traverses it and
re-emerges on the other side wiser and more powerful for the experience. The Ogun myth
thus provides parallels with Orpheus’s descent into the underworld, but Soyinka emphasizes
that Orpheus’s quest was undertaken on his own behalf while Ogun’s journey through hell is
undertaken “on behalf of the well-being of the community” (Myth 3). Soyinka thus
underlines the solipsistic character of the western protagonist and hero. In addition, Ogun’s
act of traversing the gulf that separates humans and gods is one that, for Soyinka, must be re-
enacted periodically through rituals and ceremonies, which help to diminish the distance
between the human and the divine. The rituals of drama take on a particularly charged
significance in this context and act as a cleansing, binding, communal force. Soyinka has
observed in Myth, Literature and the African the central role that music plays in ritual and
drama among the Yoruba. He points out that, for the Yoruba, music is inseparable from myth
and poetry and that the singer is “a mouthpiece of the chthonic forces” (148). Here, then, the
Orpheus myth is once again recalled: Orpheus is a poet whose music tames wild beasts and
charms the guardians of the underworld. Soyinka combines Orpheus’s musical power with
the Yoruba belief in incantation as the means by which men gain control over the forces of
evil to suggest that the poet–or the writer more broadly–has an important social and
communal role as healer. Faced with the frequent eruptions of violence in Nigeria, Soyinka
repeatedly returns to and revises the myth of Orpheus in order to test the beneficent effect of
the poet’s art.

Soyinka’s use of the Orpheus myth is thus nuanced and complex. He seeks to demonstrate
that Yoruba culture can contribute meaningfully to world culture, that it can form a part of
modern consciousness and does not have to be
abandonedinaglobalizedaestheticeconomy.Atthesametime,theincorporation of Yoruba belief
systems into Soyinka’s writing does not represent a return to tribalism; his is, in the words of
Ato Quayson, an “exuberant re-writing of Yoruba mythological discourse” (98). Soyinka’s
reworking of the Orpheus myth is also suggestive for thinking through the relation between
trauma and postcolonialism. The Ogun myth contests the privileging of an individualist self
who is disengaged from others; Quayson thus observes the importance in Soyinka’s scheme
“that Ogun sacrifices himself to affirm the community’s sense of corporate identity” (70).
More broadly, Soyinka’s affirmation of Yoruba culture indicates that, faced with the traumas
of violence, civil war, and repressive regimes, Nigerians have local ways of absorbing and
responding to grief and conflict and envisaging modes of healing. The emphasis in
western [End Page 17] versions of the story is on Orpheus’s catastrophic turning back, but
Soyinka locates its significance elsewhere: in the importance of ritual and in the healing
social role of the poet or musician.3 His texts are thus resistant to western expectations and
readings, even as they implicitly invite them. In what follows, I will trace the various
 alterations to the Orpheus myth, and its continual growth and elaboration in Soyinka’s work
as he responds to changing political events in Nigeria and continually calls into question the
most appropriate form of political and creative response.

The Descent into Hell

Following Nigeria’s independence in 1960, an intense political rivalry developed between the
country’s three main regions, each of which was dominated by a different ethnic group: the
Hausa in the north, the Yoruba in the west, and the Igbo in the east. Each competed against
the others for economic and political advantage, and dissatisfaction with the government was
soon widespread. In January 1966, a group of mostly Igbo army majors attempted a military
coup against the government of the Federal prime minister Balewa. This resulted in the
coming to power of Ironsi, supreme commander of the armed forces and an Igbo who was
not involved in the original conspiracy. The takeover was initially popular among a populace
disillusioned by the corruption of Balewa’s regime, but fears soon surfaced of Igbo
domination, and outbreaks of violence in the north resulted in the massacre of hundreds of
Igbos. In a military counter-coup in July 1966, northern officers captured and killed Ironsi,
and Lieutenant Gowon took over government. October 1966 witnessed a pogrom in the north
in which thousands of Igbos were killed and their property seized. In May 1967 Gowon
proclaimed that Nigeria would consist of twelve states, only one of which would be
predominantly Igbo. In response, the eastern region seceded from Nigeria, and, on 30 May
1967, Ojukwu declared the independence of the republic of Biafra. Five weeks later, Nigeria
attacked Biafra; in the ensuing civil war, starvation and disease were widespread in the
eastern region until Biafra finally surrendered in January 1970.4

Soyinka was prominent as a political activist throughout this period. He was first arrested
in 1965 for attempting to take over the Ibadan radio station, in protest against elections held
in western Nigeria, accompanied by violence. Soyinka was brought to trial and eventually
acquitted, but the incident placed him at the center of public attention in Nigeria for several
weeks. In the months following his trial, Soyinka campaigned through the Nigerian press for
peace initiatives to stem the rising tide of violence in the north. He was re-arrested in August
1967 by the Federal Military Government, for his contacts with secessionist Biafra and for
campaigning against the supply of weapons to both sides in the war. He was detained without
trial for twenty-seven months until October 1969; during this time, he was mostly held in
solitary confinement in [End Page 18] Kaduna prison. He described his experience of
imprisonment in The Man Died, a memoir that has been praised by Nadine Gordimer as “the
most complete work of prison literature ever written in Africa, and–to my knowledge–written
in modern times in the world” (41).

Throughout his memoir, Soyinka explicitly figures his prison experience, which represents
his own traumatic encounter with the Nigerian state, as a journey through hell. He draws in
part on Dante’s Inferno; his narrative is framed as a descent into evil, and as in Dante, hell is
conceived as having many layers, each defined by a different form of punishment. Soyinka
descends from his interrogation in Lagos to the prolonged torture of his solitary confinement
in Kaduna. His prison cell, filled with the howling of the harmattan wind, distinctly recalls
the icy punishment of the lowest circle of Dante’s hell. However, if those in Dante’s hell
receive the punishments that they deserve and that have been determined for them within a
scheme of divine justice, Soyinka suffers a capricious and arbitrary punishment which he has
done nothing to merit and to which he has been consigned without any form of trial.

Although Soyinka evokes Dante, the Orpheus myth provides the central narrative of hell in
his prison memoir. As Dan Izevbaye points out, the jailers of Kaduna are represented in
terms of animal imagery; Polyphemus, Hogroth, and Caliban are all depicted as “creatures of
brute flesh…lacking in song” (152). Soyinka accordingly assumes the role of Orpheus, and
the text calls into question whether his creative impulse has any power to charm these
infernal creatures or whether it is itself overwhelmed by them. The memoir affirms that art
retains its power even in the very depths of hell, but its agency is surprisingly associated not
with Soyinka himself but with the group of Igbo prisoners who are held beneath him in the
most inhumane conditions. Reminded of the recent massacres of the Igbo in the north, the
prisoners join together in a nocturnal song that Soyinka describes as seeming to come from
another world. The song binds all of the other prisoners into a community with the Igbo: “it
involved us all, strangers to their homes, in one common humanity.” Soyinka explicitly
identifies the music with chthonic forces; it came from “somewhere deep down in earth, from
crushed soil” (111). Soyinka thus draws on the Orpheus myth to assert, through the
incantatory voices, the power of song and ritual to combat the forces of evil. His emphasis,
however, is not on the solitary protagonist but on the community of the prisoners, which is
primarily communicated in the text through the sound of the human voice.

The myth of Orpheus is referred to explicitly in Soyinka’s evocation of the ending of

Marcel Camus’s Orphée Nègre, a description that is resonant of promise and new life: “the
dance of spring by the two children, heirs to the evocative magic of sunrise, of seed
awakening in the soil” (198). The passage in which this description occurs is, however, in
stark contrast to the vision that it provides. It is framed by the nocturnal cries of a dying man,
repeated “groans of anguish” (196), that can be heard across the prison and contrast [End
Page 19] with the incantatory song of anguish performed by the Igbo. Unable to bear
listening to such human agony, Soyinka forces himself through an act of will to recall other
human cries that he had heard several weeks before; the cries of a baby born in the prison.
This memory brings hope to Soyinka, articulated through his involuntary association with the
birth of Christ: “For unto us a child is born” (199). This sense of promise is reinforced by
Soyinka’s memory of an encounter earlier that day with a boy in a mango tree, which
recalled to him painful childhood associations. Through a further effort of will, he turned
from these recollections to reach the positive memory of Camus’s film. The ending of the
passage returns to the cries of the anonymous man, which are unheeded by the authorities so
that he is left to slowly die. The following morning, Soyinka asks his guard what happened to
the man, to be simply told: “The man died” (200). Soyinka’s recounting of the incident
reminds us that others who suffered the infernal torments of hell did not survive the inhuman
passage; he records the man’s death, even if he cannot finally give him a name. The passage
also suggests that survival is identified for Soyinka as an effort of will; if any hope is to be
found in the depths, it is through a concentrated act of attention. This recalls the Ogun myth,
for it was through a similar act of determination that the god traversed the realm of death and
re-emerged on the other side. As noted above, however, this effort was undertaken not on his
own behalf but in the interests of the broader community. Soyinka’s imprisonment is
likewise prompted, although not justified, by his actions of political protest against the
 Gowon regime; and crucial to his own survival is the encounter with others, both fellow
prisoners and–in the rare instance–guards, who treat him with generosity and humanity.

Rachel Falconer notes that the important question arising out of katabatic narratives is
whether anything of value has been gained from the descent into hell. A contrast emerges
between those for whom the journey is meaningful retrospectively and those who can make
no sense of it. The descent narrative thus tends either towards the making of the self or
towards its dispossession, so the subject remains traumatized and haunted by the infernal
encounter. In Soyinka, there is a notable emphasis on the self as strengthened by the
experience undergone, both because of the assertion of will necessary to its survival and
because he has been bound into a community of suffering with his ordinary countrymen.
Through the Igbo song, Soyinka asserts the value of poetry and ritual in combating
destructive forces and in bringing hope. He also affirms the value of local modes of
articulation; the song is powerful because it is a communal expression of grief by the Igbo
prisoners for the massacre in the north. The prison memoir represents a powerful personal
testimony of Soyinka’s traumatic confrontation with the Gowon military regime, but it is also
a narrative of resistance to it. Soyinka was not the man who died–he was not destroyed by the
tortures he underwent even though this was precisely their [End Page 20] intention–and his
journey gives him compassion and understanding for those others who did not, or who could
not, survive the infernal passage.

The Journey through Hell

Soyinka began writing both The Man Died and Season of Anomy in Kaduna prison, between
the lines of books smuggled into his cell. The novel is closely linked to the memoir; both
explore the oppressive power of postcolonial Nigerian governments, specifically the brutal
nature of Gowon’s military regime. The novel treats Soyinka’s prison experience–Kaduna
prison is renamed as Temoko–but it also explores the traumatic events leading to civil war in
Nigeria, especially the violent massacres in the north. The narrative is closely structured
around a retelling of the Orpheus myth, which is clearly signalled from the outset by the
renaming of Orpheus and Eurydice with the Yoruba names Ofeyi (“he who loves this one” or
“this love”) and Iriyise (“dew on the feet”). As in the Orpheus myth, Iriyise is held prisoner
in the underworld, and Ofeyi descends into hell to search for his lost love. The novel recounts
his passage through a barren wasteland, representative of the northern region of Nigeria,
where he undergoes a series of trials and terrors. The outlines of the Orpheus myth are
strongly pronounced in Soyinka’s version so as to draw the reader’s attention to the story that
he both revisits and revises, creating a specifically African retelling of it. Throughout,
Soyinka’s specific focus is on what represents appropriate action within a political state that
is ruled by terror.

Ofeyi, the protagonist of Soyinka’s novel, is Promotions Officer for the Cocoa Corporation
that belongs to the Cartel: a group that represents four members of a corrupt and repressive
government and that reveals the operations of neocolonialism in Nigeria. Like Orpheus,
Ofeyi is a poet, a composer of songs, but he has sold out to the Cartel and is employed in
writing “shallow… jingles” (19). His inspiration is his beautiful lover, Iriyise, and he asks
her to perform for the promotion campaign as the Cocoa Princess. Throughout the novel,
Iriyise is associated with regenerative possibilities and is symbolized as a “Queen Bee” (56),
suggesting that even though she seems dead in the long winter of her abduction, she will
nevertheless re-emerge in the spring.

In his retelling of the Orpheus story, Soyinka emphasizes the importance of ritual and its
potency in bringing about change and transformation. The narrative contains five sections:
“Seminal,” “Buds,” “Tentacles,” “Harvest,” and “Spores.” These titles–at once vegetal,
biological, and sexual–underline the theme of rebirth. Ritual is particularly associated in the
novel with the village of Aiyéró. Ofeyi is dispatched to the village by the Cartel when it is
identified as a potential market for cocoa products. Aiyéró represents the antithesis of the
greed and cynicism of the Cartel; it is governed by a humane politics, and all property is held
in common. On his initial arrival, Ofeyi is resistant to life in Aiyéró, identifying the
“stagnation that clings to places like this” (6); [End Page 21] he accordingly refuses the offer
of the elders to become the “Guardian of the Grain,” a leader in the community. Over time,
however, he finds the values of Aiyéró increasingly persuasive. The ritual slaughter of the
bulls by Pa Ahime, the current Guardian of the Grain, makes a particular impression on
Ofeyi and assumes a central symbolic role in the novel. The extended description of the
ceremony relates the bloodletting to natural processes; it replenishes the earth, and binds and
sustains the community. The regenerative function of the sacrifice, in which the beasts
willingly give their lives to appease the ancestral spirits, contrasts powerfully with the
unwilling sacrifices that are to follow in the purely destructive violence of the Cartel.

Inspired by the way of life that he encounters in Aiyéró, Ofeyi initially seeks to use the
facilities and methods of the Cocoa Corporation to undermine the Cartel. He composes songs
and promotions that are deliberately ambiguous and subversive and seeks to deploy the
Cartel’s propaganda machine against itself. Aiyéró offers Ofeyi a preexisting network, which
has always diffused the values of the community to the larger society, and Ofeyi extends this
network to the rest of the country and uses it to organize strike action and protest. In Ofeyi’s
organization of resistance, and in his subsequent journey through hell, a supporting group of
individuals help him wherever he goes so that his agency is embedded within a wider
community or network. Of particular importance in this context is Pa Ahime, to whom Ofeyi
continually looks for guidance and support. Ahime introduces him to the silted pool that
forms the symbolic heart of Aiyéró, and it is here that Ofeyi–an outsider to the village–is
bound to the community through recognition by its ancestral spirits. In the pool, past human
suffering is transformed into the silt out of which new life grows; history is thus refigured as
the mythical, and the surface calm of the pond conceals an energy and dynamism that is
waiting to be released. Ofeyi aspires to attain Ahime’s ability to replicate the calm of the
lake, camouflaging his actions beneath the appearance of normality, but he notably fails in
this task. The Cartel quickly recognize Ofeyi’s resistance activities and respond by
kidnapping Iriyise and hiding her away in the hope that this will deter him from further
action.

As in the Orpheus myth, the search for the lover propels Ofeyi into the journey through
hell; however, Ofeyi does not travel alone but is accompanied by his friend Zaccheus
throughout his hazardous quest. The bridge that crosses into the imaginary country of Cross-
river is designated by Soyinka as “the formal doorway to the territory of hell” (187). It is at
this point in the narrative that the events described fall into a clear historical shape: set after
the coup that brought Gowon into power, the killings in Cross-river represent the massacres
of Igbo in the north that took place in October 1966. Before Ofeyi and Zaccheus reach the
bridge, they come across a sign announcing “TO DAMN,” referring to the dam constructed
by the Aiyéró men as part of the Shage project. Ofeyi turns off to visit the site only to find a
“dead place” (167): all of the men have been brutally slaughtered and left there to
decompose. He absorbs the true [End Page 22] import of the sign, which signals the territory
as a threshold to the infernal region but also specifically damns Ofeyi himself, who
unwittingly condemned the men of Aiyéró to their fate. The dam itself lies outside of Cross-
river, and Soyinka emphasizes that, through the contagion of violence and corruption, hell is
no longer contained within its borders but has spilled out to the surrounding area.

In the devastated landscape of Cross-river, Ofeyi pursues his quest to find Iriyise. Cross-
river itself represents a grotesque dystopia; nature has been infected at the root, and only the
tree of death can grow in this soil, with its diseased “lumps, swellings and distortions,” its
twisted “abortion of limbs” (207). Throughout his journey, Ofeyi is repeatedly tempted by
others, including Zaccheus, Lieutenant Sayi, the Dentist, and Taalia, to abandon his
apparently suicidal course of action. These insistent deterrents, which succeed in swaying
Ofeyi momentarily, emphasize his journey as an act of will and so situate him in relation to
Ogun, whose passage through the underworld succeeded through his own determination. The
journey reveals the atrocities–including murders, the stealing of land, depriving the people of
dignity, and creating a climate of terror–that have been perpetrated by the Cartel. It thereby
allows Soyinka to reveal the corruption of the political system and the collapse of the social
fabric under the newly created Nigerian governments, in addition to representing the specific
horror of the northern massacres. Ofeyi travels through five distinct places in his journey,
which together demonstrate that the violence of the Cartel is targeted against difference on
ethnic, religious, and tribal grounds. After first visiting the house of Chief Batoki, where
Zaccheus saw Iriyise disappear, Ofeyi witnesses the terrible slaughter of worshippers at a
church in Kaduna and then visits the morgue in search of Iriyise’s body. Here, Soyinka
emphasizes Ofeyi’s conviction that Iriyise remains alive: “the ritual had to be undergone, no
more” (221). At another church, significantly called “The Tabernacle of Hope,” worshippers
hide in the crypt, and Ofeyi’s overwhelming sense is of people buried alive in the darkness.
As in his prison narrative, however, confinement is rendered bearable by song that provides
“stubborn hope” and the “warm essence of survival” (264). In his journey through this
region, Ofeyi–like Soyinka in the memoir–is sustained by the ordinary men and women
whom he encounters as well as by the continued support from Aiyéró in the form of Ahime
and the Dentist. As in The Man Died, the passage through hell cannot be achieved alone;
brief but significant encounters with others encourage the protagonist and enable him to go
on.

The final location through which Ofeyi must pass in his search for Iriyise is Temoko
prison, a re-imagining of Kaduna. Temoko is a maximum-security prison, and Ofeyi is led
through innumerable corridors, gates, and yards until he finds Iriyise, held in the waiting
room of the execution chamber, in a deep coma. At the gateway to Temoko, Acting
Superintendent Karoun explicitly evokes Dante: “People outside think that this is a kind of
morgue–abandon [End Page 23] hope all who enter here, something like that” (276).
Accordingly, the prison is laid out in differing grades or levels of horror: Ofeyi is led from
the outer courtyards through the Lepers’ Yard to the Lunatics’ Yard, which in turn encloses
the Death Cells and the execution chamber. Iriyise is held prisoner at the very innermost
circle of hell, and it is here that Ofeyi must reach if he is to rescue her. Deceived by Karoun,
he is himself imprisoned alongside Iriyise; and it is only through the intervention of
Zaccheus, the Dentist, and Chalil that he is able both to escape with his own life and to
release Iriyise from her captivity. Again, Soyinka reinforces the vital importance of the
community in surviving the infernal realm rather than Ofeyi’s individual achievements and
actions.

Until this point in the narrative, Soyinka remains close to the Orpheus myth, but the
ending of the novel most strongly marks his departure from it. As noted above, Orpheus wins
Eurydice from the underworld by charming the powers that reign there with his song. A key
stage in his journey is thus represented by his encounter with the god Dis. In Season of
Anomy, Zaki Amuri is the all-powerful tyrant of Cross-river, the Head of the Cartel in that
region, and he is represented throughout the novel as the center of the evil that spreads
throughout his territory and beyond. He holds an oriental court, surrounded by languid young
boys, and a young man lies spread-eagled before him in an act of contrition and ritual
humiliation.5 At the heart of Tomoko prison, Ofeyi witnesses the prisoners in the Lunatics’
Yard holding a court of justice that recalls Amuri’s, with a turbaned figure at the center and
another prisoner prostrate before him. Although no explicit comparison is drawn between the
two scenes, the parallel suggests that Amuri also holds a lunatic court and is concerned only
with a parody or perversion of justice. Ofeyi notably does not encounter Amuri in the course
of his journey through Cross-river, but it seems highly doubtful that he could have persuaded
him to release Iriyise from her confinement with the power of his words, as Orpheus was
able to do for Eurydice. In the contemporary rewriting of hell, the infernal power can be
survived, but it cannot finally be tamed or subjugated.

It is also notable that Ofeyi does not look back at the close of the novel and thereby lose
Iriyise once more. Soyinka thus replaces the tragedy of the Orpheus myth with a more
positive ending that focuses on the possibility of healing and the fulfilment of the quest. The
closing sequence begins with the conversion of Suberu, the former prisoner and prison guard
who holds Ofeyi and Iriyise captive. In a highly poetical speech, which draws extensively on
images from the oral tradition, Ofeyi persuades Suberu to leave the prison with them rather
than remain in bondage. Soyinka thus demonstrates that, even in the very innermost circle of
hell, Ofeyi’s words do have some power to charm and enchant. However, as noted above,
Ofeyi’s agency alone is not enough to rescue Iriyise or to save himself. At the end of the
novel, Iriyise remains alive but in a deep coma, although the closing words signal that she
will indeed [End Page 24] re-awaken: “life began to stir” (313). As Irène Assiba d’Almeida
observes, Iriyise serves throughout the novel as a metaphor for Africa, and it is therefore
important that she retain the potential to become an “active, full [agent]…in rebirth” (62). It
is also central to Soyinka’s retelling of the myth that Ofeyi, as an Ogun figure, fulfils the
ritual quest that he has undertaken, for it is through his action that regeneration can occur.
However, although both Ofeyi and Iriyise remain alive, signalling that the hell of Cross-river
can be survived, the power of evil and corruption remains overwhelming at the end of the
novel; the forces of the Cartel have not been vanquished or overcome. It seems that, after the
rescue of Iriyise, the Aiyéró men will regroup and continue to fight the Cartel, but it is also
clear that the Cartel has no intention of relinquishing any of its privileges without a struggle.
 The central question that is raised in the novel is whether the use of violence is justified in
countering state violence. The journey through Cross-river persuades Ofeyi that force is
necessary in some situations as he is faced with the threat to Iriyise, the massacre of his
supporters, and the atrocities committed by the Cartel. The novel stages this moral dilemma
in the confrontations between Ofeyi and the Dentist, who believes that the only way to purge
Cross-river is the selective assassination of members of the Cartel. Ofeyi’s shift in viewpoint
is registered most powerfully when he resorts to violence himself and kills a man during an
attack on the house of “Semi-Dozen,” the mining engineer, by supporters of the Cartel.
However, this does not represent, as some critics have suggested, a decisive vindication of
the Dentist’s methods over Ofeyi’s: it remains uncertain whether the counter-violence
reaches the inner circle of the Cartel as intended, while the atrocities committed against the
lesser agents of the Cartel seem merely to replicate the violence of the Cartel itself. Although
Ofeyi is caught up in the preparations for violence at the end of the novel and is rescued by
the Dentist from Temoko, he does not conclusively assent to the latter’s methods and
continues to question violence as the inevitable response in an oppressive state. To claim,
then, as Abdulrazak Gurnah does, that the novel “debates and resolves” (78) the question of
violence seems to simplify the issue. For Soyinka, the claims of violence are compelling; but
they are also dehumanizing, of limited political efficacy, and difficult if not impossible to
contain. Izevbaye has rightly pointed to the centrality of the Ogun myth in the novel, which
means that Season of Anomy is not reducible to a “clear-cut conflict between violent methods
and peaceful ones.” Ogun is both warrior and artist, and accordingly the two claims are held
by Soyinka in “trembling balance”; what is stressed in the narrative, Izevbaye argues, is
rather the “toughness required to cope with an uncongenial environment” (154).

Soyinka’s exploration of the claims of violence notably recalls Frantz Fanon’s famous
defense of violence against the colonial oppressor in The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon
contended that, at the level of the individual, violence freed the native from a sense of
inferiority and restored self-respect; [End Page 25] at the collective level, it unified the
people in a sense of national purpose and was all inclusive, thereby collapsing the barriers of
regionalism and tribalism imposed by colonial power. Soyinka is concerned, however, with
the use and function of violence in the postcolonial state. The governments of Nigeria
replicated the separatist politics of colonialism and reinforced the divisions in the country so
that it was eventually pulled apart in the secession of Biafra and the ensuing civil war. In this
context, violence is directed not against the colonial oppressor but against other Nigerians,
and Soyinka highlights how complex and troubled the issue has become. If Fanon offers a
defense of violence as the necessary response to colonization, Soyinka remains justifiably
skeptical of the extent to which violence can take on a healing or regenerative role in
addressing the regional conflicts of the postcolonial nation-state.

In revising western myth, Soyinka also invites comparison with Homi Bhabha’s work on
the trope of mimicry, which is itself a form of repetition or remembrance.6 Bhabha argues
in The Location of Culture that there are two aspects of mimicry worth considering: mimicry
as a practice encouraged by colonizers in an attempt to create an identity for colonized
peoples–in which the colonizer requires colonial subjects to remember and repeat the norms
of the occupying power–and mimicry as a signifier of ambivalence through which the binary
relationship of the colonizer and the colonized is undermined. Colonialism creates subjects
who are “almost the same but not quite” (89), and in difference lies potential subversion and
resistance. Bhabha’s interest in ambivalent formulations of colonialism provides, in contrast
to Fanon, a tentative model for non-violent anti-colonial agency. Soyinka’s novel is centrally
concerned with the extent to which the formerly colonized subjects of Nigeria replicate in the
postcolonial state the values and structures of the colonizers, but his narrative strategy evokes
an alternative form of remembrance, that repeats while asserting difference and that can be
used to analyze and potentially to undermine or contest the structures of (neo)colonial power.
If the logic of the novel signals us, albeit hesitantly, towards violence as the preferred mode
of resistance, its form is suggestive of non-violent modes of critique and response; in this
way, the two contradictory impulses are held in balance and in tension by Soyinka.

In Season of Anomy, Soyinka’s rewriting of the Orpheus myth echoes its treatment in The
Man Died: the emphasis is on a positive retelling of the story in which the protagonist
survives his trials and is strengthened by them for future conflict. Ritual is seen to have a
central healing or regenerative role; it is primarily associated in the novel with the village of
Aiyéró, which offers an idealized–almost mythologized–vision of rural life but which
nevertheless does not represent a simple retreat into nostalgia. The community has adapted
its way of life to the present and continually engages with external developments; indeed,
they are willing to appoint the outsider Ofeyi to be the Guardian of the Grain. Aiyéró also
represents the importance of community in Soyinka’s [End Page 26] version; although
Ofeyi, like Orpheus, decides to make his journey through hell alone, Soyinka draws attention
to the supporting group of men and women who surround and help him. Soyinka’s telling of
the Orpheus story asserts a Yoruba mythography, and the story of Ogun accordingly
underpins the narrative. Soyinka’s incorporation of the Ogun myth emphasizes that Ofeyi’s
journey requires a sustained act of will on his part; it underlines that the rescue of Iriyise is
not merely a personal quest but is undertaken on behalf of the community, for her re-
awakening signifies the potential rebirth of Africa–and it allows for a complex exploration of
the competing claims of violence and art. Although Ofeyi, when confronted with the
massacre of his men at the dam, responds by turning to Ahime’s “scalpel of light” (171), the
novel calls into question the healing potential of counter-violence. Soyinka does not,
however, offer art–the regenerative power of words–as a straightforward alternative: words
are not powerless, as the conversion of Suberu conveys, but Ofeyi’s strategy of resistance
through language succeeds only in provoking the Cartel into abducting Iriyise.

Through his assertion of Yoruba myth, Soyinka also requires his readers to attend to a
rupture of western narrative, to recognize the otherness of the discourse and the events that
are at stake. Although the Orpheus myth initially seems to domesticate the story, Soyinka
refuses to accommodate his narrative within a framework that is familiar to us. We are asked
to put our assumptions into dialogue with, to test them against, and to question them in
relation to a very different cultural formation. The novel engages in complex ways with the
traumas of state oppression, ethnic violence, and civil war. Soyinka forces us to encounter a
response to trauma that asserts the relevance of localized modes of belief, ritual, and
understanding, thereby undermining the centrality of western knowledge and expertise. As he
notes in The Burden of Memory, “most African traditional societies have established
modalities that guarantee the restoration of harmony after serious infractions” (13; emphasis
added). In so doing, the novel implicitly feeds back into western trauma discourse through a
testimonial dimension that speaks of, indeed insists upon, a specifically Nigerian discourse
and context. It is apparent that simply applying concepts of trauma to a text such as this will
 not take us very far; we need to listen closely to what the text itself can tell us about its own
particular point of emergence, origination, and departure.

Afterword: The Song of Orpheus

The myth of Orpheus is of lasting importance to Soyinka in part because it allows him to
explore the role of the poet, or the writer, as a healer in the context of trauma. In The Burden
of Memory, published in 1999, Soyinka turns his attention to the South African Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (TRC). He expresses skepticism that the TRC can indeed heal
society in South Africa; for him, reconciliation should be based not simply in the telling of
truth, but [End Page 27] in the moral and material weight of reparation. More broadly,
Soyinka worries that the TRC demands a quality of accommodation that is rooted in a
specific view of a uniquely African humanism and generosity, which emerged out of the
Negritude movement. Soyinka accordingly devotes the central section of The Burden of
Memory to a critique of the Negritude poet Léopold Senghor, whose writing advocated such
a “philosophy of wholesale remission” (32). The largeness of black generosity that Senghor
promoted is, Soyinka notes, not only grounded in a problematic essentialism but is also hard
to discern in the contemporary Africa of Rwandan genocide and Abacha-governed Nigeria.
What, then, is the role of the poet when confronted with the traumatic realities of
postcolonial Africa? Soyinka frames his response by relating his unexpected encounter in
Paris, at a celebration for the ninetieth birthday of Senghor, with the historical musical
instrument, the balafon. The instrument, which is a form of xylophone, was made toward the
end of the twelfth century by Soumare Kante, the king of Soso, and was endowed with sacred
properties. In the battle of Kirina, in 1230 or thereabouts, the instrument was won by
Soundiata Keita and became a symbol of the Mandingo empire, which covered the area of
today’s Republic of Guinea. He placed it in the care of his personal griot, Bala Fasseke, and
his family remained its guardian over the next eight centuries. Today, the instrument remains
under the personal charge of the Republic of Guinea, and it inspired many of Senghor’s
poems.

The balafon appeals to Soyinka in part because of its “innate contradiction”; like the god
Ogun, it is caught between “the contrary truths of strife and harmony” (191). It also holds his
attention because it accompanies the griot; the poet, epic narrator, and custodian of history
and memory for traditional African communities. Soyinka recounts that the instrument was
surprisingly unassuming, given its illustrious history and sacred heritage. It was made of
unpolished wood, with unadorned strikers, and the sound itself seemed an “anti-climax”; it
was nothing out of the ordinary, and did not possess the mystic resonance that was supposed
to emanate from the “flute of Orpheus” (192). However, combined with the voice and words
of the griot, the music assumed for Soyinka a compelling harmony and power; it “enfolded
the gathering in a mantle of humanity that excluded none,” and it spoke at once of “a loss too
great to quantify” and of “human resilience” (192). Here, then, is the possibility of
harmonization, of forgiveness and the remission of wrongs. But Soyinka remains doubtful:
does this music charm us too easily, return us merely to the ready consolations offered by
Senghor? Is it more concerned with forgetting, with a recovery of lost innocence, than with
the burdens of remembering? Soyinka thus rejects such an aesthetic for his own work: “I
possess neither the wish nor the temperament to abandon the continuing, combative
imperatives of the dialectics of human history” (193). He does not forsake the music
 altogether, however, for it does provide glimpses of, and open up horizons for, a more
humane and reconciled future. In assessing the [End Page 28] role of the poet, and thereby
his own role as a writer, Soyinka finally opts for the path of Ogun before that of Orpheus;
Orpheus’s harmonies, particularly associated for Soyinka with the lyric poetry of Senghor,
charm and seduce, but they can also potentially tranquillize and numb us in the face of
trauma. For Soyinka, the writer-activist, whose own works often convey the urgency of an
immediate response to political events, the strains of Orpheus are not without their own
power of enchantment, but they need to be combined, as the complex dialectic that runs
throughout his writing powerfully demonstrates, with the constant vigilance and the
continued combativeness of the warrior-poet; his own patron deity, the god Ogun.
Anne Whitehead
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Anne Whitehead
Anne Whitehead is a senior lecturer in the School of English at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. She has
published Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh UP, 2004), W.G. Sebald: A Critical Companion (Edinburgh UP, 2004),
and Theories of Memory: A Reader (Edinburgh UP, 2007). She is currently working on a volume
entitled Memory for the Routledge New Critical Idiom series.

Footnotes
1. Virgil’s version of the Orpheus myth notably resembles the story of Tancred and Clorinda, which Amy Novak discusses
elsewhere in this issue. Although Eurydice, like Clorinda, dies twice over, it is Orpheus–like Tancred–who constitutes the
traumatized subject. Soyinka’s version of the Orpheus myth reinscribes the protagonist as African subject, yet the gender politics of
the novel–as of Soyinka’s writing more broadly–nevertheless remain problematic. Iriyise may have a potential regenerative agency,
but she takes on a fundamentally passive role in the novel, powerfully symbolized by her deep coma. She thus acts as inspiration for
Ofeyi, conforming to his plans for her, and her abduction merely provides the motive for Ofeyi’s heroic quest and journey.

2. Such criticism ignores Soyinka’s implicit engagement with Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous and influential preface to an anthology of
Negritude poetry titled “Black Orpheus.” Sartre’s view of the Negritude poets, which drew from Senghor more than other poets in
the volume, tended to romanticize an essential and primitive black consciousness. Soyinka’s use of the Orpheus myth therefore
seeks, in part, to counter Sartre’s Europeanized vision of Africa as the exotic unknown. For more on Soyinka’s engagement with
Senghor and the Negritude movement, see my discussion of The Burden of Memory in the final section of this essay.

3. One example of the centrality of Orpheus’s turning back to western conceptions of literature is Maurice Blanchot’s “Orpheus’s
Gaze.” In this essay, Blanchot positions Orpheus’s backward look as the founding act of writing: “Writing begins with Orpheus’s
gaze” (176). Literature is for Blanchot based on language that perpetually and inevitably thwarts the desire for presence and
plenitudinous meaning. Although Orpheus crosses the threshold of death, he seeks in vain to return to an immediacy that cannot be
restored. Eurydice’s disappearance thus represents for Blanchot the futility of the quest for presence, and literature (Orpheus’s
song) is accordingly viewed as a compensatory surrogate. As a non-western writer, Soyinka asserts an alternative perspective and
locates the significance of the myth elsewhere. Although the Orpheus story is still associated with trauma, it is no longer evocative–
as in Blanchot–of the Lacanian unsymbolizable Real.

4. The information in this paragraph is indebted to the historical summary provided by Griswold, esp. 227–29.

5. As Gurnah justifiably points out, this brief glimpse of Amuri in the novel draws on problematic orientalizing tropes of Islam in
northern Nigeria (77–78).

6. I am indebted to Gemma Robinson for these reflections on postcolonialism and memory. [End Page 29] 

Works Cited
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
Blanchot, Maurice. “Orpheus’s Gaze.” The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982. 171–76.
Bracken, Patrick J., and Celia Petty, eds. Rethinking the Trauma of War. London: Free Association Books, 1998.
D’Almeida, Irène Assiba. “Echoes of Orpheus in Werewere Liking’s Orphée-Dafric and Wole Soyinka’s Season of Anomy.” Comparative
Literature Studies 31.1 (1994): 52–71.
Falconer, Rachel. Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives since 1945. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2005.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1967.
Gordimer, Nadine. “Soyinka the Tiger.” Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal. Ed. Adewale Maja-Pearce. Oxford: Heinemann, 1994. 36–42.
Griswold, Wendy. Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers and the Novel in Nigeria. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.
Gurnah, Abdulrazak. “The Fiction of Wole Soyinka.” Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal. Ed. Adewale Maja-Pearce. Oxford: Heinemann, 1994. 61–
80.
Izevbaye, Dan. “Soyinka’s Black Orpheus.” Neo-African Literature and Culture: Essays in Memory of Janheinz Jahn. Ed. Bernth Landfors
and Ulla Schild. Mainz, Germany: B. Heymann, 1976. 147–58.
Quayson, Ato. Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing: Orality and History in the Work of Rev. Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole
Soyinka and Ben Okri. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997.
Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature and the African. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976.
———. Season of Anomy. Walton-on-Thames, England: Nelson, 1980.
———. The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.
———. The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1975.
Young, Allan. The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995. [End Page 30]

Sobre Men in the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani (1962):

Chapter 5 – “The meaning of disaster: the novel and the stateless nation in Ghassan
Kanafani’s Men in the Sun”
Cleary, Joe. Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland,
Israel and Palestine, Cambridge University Press, 2001 (REVISA EN BIBLIOTECA)

“Beyond Collective Violence: Capturing Context and Complexity in Palestinian Diasporic

Resistance” (RECOMENDADO, ADJUNTO EN PDF)

“POSTCOLONIAL ARABIC FICTION REVISITED: NATURALISM AND

EXISTENTIALISM IN GHASSAN KANAFANI’S MEN IN THE SUN” (OPCIONAL,
ADJUNTO EN PDF)

The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski (2002).

Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski (1992).
The Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song by Frank M. Young & David
Lasky (2012).

The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (2007):

Occidentalism: Rewriting the West in Marjane Satrapi's "Persépolis" (ADJUNTO EN

PDF)

Playing in the Dark by Morrison, Toni (1993):

Playing on the "Darky": Blackface Minstrelsy, Identity Construction, and the

Deconstruction of Race in Toni Morrison's Paradise (ADJUNTO EN PDF. YA QUE ESTE
E SUN TEXTO DE POR SÍ ACADÉMICO, ACÁ CREO QUE VALE LA PENA REVISAR
LO QUE DICEN LOS ARTICULOS SOBRE LA OBRA DE MORRISON, EN ESTE CASO
DE PARADISE)

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri (2009):

 The Archaeology of the Colonial—Un-earthing Jhumpa

Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth
 Michael Wutz  (bio)
We need to stop assuming a one-to-one correspondence between the geographic origins of a
text and its evolving radius of literary action. We need to stop thinking of national
literatures as the linguistic equivalents of territorial maps.
Wai Chee Dimock, “Literature for the Planet”1

Since the publication of her Pulitzer prize-winning debut collection of stories, Interpreter of

Maladies(1999), Jhumpa Lahiri has come to be seen as a preeminent interpreter of the
postcolonial condition of the Indian diaspora. By chronicling the lives of, mostly, privileged
Bengalis transitioning into the West, she has mapped the anxieties of a population caught in
the dual allegiance of transcontinental citizenship. At the same time, critics have ascribed the
appeal of her work, in the United States and abroad, to her skillful portrayal of dislocation
and generational crises, which has been judged to carry the universalizing qualities of
serious, ambitious fiction. As the editors of Naming Jhumpa Lahiri observe, Lahiri’s work
“sheds light on both universal dimensions of human experience andmore specific Bengali,
postcolonial, Indian diasporic, South Asian American, and Asian American politics.”2

Exceeding this concentric reach, Lahiri has also been grouped with a cadre of
contemporary writers that has slid out of—or rather, beyond—the loose mesh of the
postmodern vocabulary. Rachel Adams has recently identified Lahiri as an avatar of a newly
emergent “American literary globalism,” which she understands as a generalized [End Page
243] feeling of social simultaneity across national borders, boundaries, and oceans, and
which succeeds the more narrowly-Western aesthetic imperatives of the postmodern:
“Relatively unburdened by the legacies of Euro-American modernism or the politics of the
Cold War, their fiction reacts against the aesthetic sensibilities of high postmodernism while
providing American literature with a new set of genealogical, geographic, and temporal
referents.”3

This configuration of referents—from genealogy and geography to time, especially the

vast temporalities of geologic time—is indeed fully evident in Lahiri’s work and provides the
framework for a sustained eco-critical reading of Lahiri’s collection of stories and
novellas, Unaccustomed Earth(2008). While Adams is primarily interested in mapping a
global sensibility in American fiction that is operative in the present, I want to extend those
terms, both historically and geologically, into the past and future by combining them with the
thematic foci Lahiri’s work has, so far almost exclusively, been identified with:
postcoloniality and immigration. Those twin themes provide the narrative spark for the
stories in Maladies, but don’t extend into historical or temporal reflection. The
intergenerational vector of The Namesake (2003), Lahiri’s first novel, is driven by time and
change, but historical or geological ruptures are largely absent from its texture. The
Lowland (2013), Lahiri’s most recent novel, is rich with a colonial and ecological sensibility
that suggests centuries of human intervention and biological niche-building, but doesn’t
explore them against planetary and geological time. Only with Unaccustomed Earth does
Lahiri locate the story of migration and resettlement within the immensities of a
transhistorical scale;4 and only Unaccustomed Earth—as its earth-bound title already
suggests—carries the imprint of a deeply felt environmental and ecological sensibility in its
texture. The presence of natural history within a typically more narrow human history; an
awareness of the agency of natural or nonhuman forces; a sense of human accountability for
its impact on the earth; and an understanding of the dynamic processes of the natural world—
Lawrence Buell’s criteria for the identification of literary texts as being properly imbued with
environmental and ecological concerns are all fully realized in Lahiri’s collection.5

It is against this geological, geographical, and ecological background that I want to offer a
reading of Unaccustomed Earth that revolves around the figurative axis of its title: the earth.
I submit that Lahiri articulates a multi-leveled theory of postcoloniality through the trope of
the earth itself, the terrific and terrifying terrain having offered humans habitation for
millenia. As a layering of tensional plate tectonics, the imbricated strata of the earth’s crust
become a figure for the dynamic forces of history pressing from [End Page 244] their
subterranean torque to the surface. Such a dynamic is often invisible but inscribed only as an
aftereffect in the human fossil record, the palpable repercussions deriving from cryptic
human politics and policies (what Victorians called “the testimony of the
rocks”).6 Geological upheaval, in that sense, encodes the geopolitical upheaval that has
divided global populations—at any point in their history—into dominators and dominated,
colonizers and colonized; and it encodes the coming and going of civilizations, their waxing
and waning, in concert with historical and terrestrial forces. Put differently, Lahiri seems to
say, the unceasing energies of geo-historical change have made colonization, migration, and
transplantation into the human condition per se—a kind of historical norm(alcy) that has
pressured humanity into becoming a perennially transitional species.

Exceeding such a geological understanding of the always already postcolonial, (with its
suitably Foucauldian inflections of unearthing muted histories), the terranean trope also
grounds Lahiri’s understanding of writing in literary traditions that see human life, and
indeed species behavior, in terms of migration and a re-grounding in the earth as a primal
source of space, nutrition, and nourishment. If Unaccustomed Earth resonates with structural
allusions ranging from Homer and Hawthorne to Native American tales, it does so because
Lahiri articulates her own location within a long and varied literary tradition that is mindful
of the synergy between human settlements and their environment. The resulting layering
yields an archaeology of narrative that, while connecting to Homeric bedrock, condenses
toward Lahiri’s historically recent contemporaries in the American Renaissance, who ground
her own interest in the myth of the American pastoral now enlarged to a global scale.
Centered on the author’s own literary-cultural origins, yet reaching back to the oral traditions
in the West and beyond, Unaccustomed Earth embodies Wai Chee Dimock’s vision of
American literature as part of a planetary rhizome, to be seen “against the history and habitat
of the human species, against the ‘deep time’ of the planet Earth.”7

In a final, outermost, yet most centrally ecological, layer of my argument, the complex
trope of geological rupture in Unaccustomed Earth also intimates a radical change in agency
with regard to the evolutionary ecology of humans and their global habitat. Nomadic tribes
have for millennia flourished on the earth because of an essentially ecological synergy
between soil and need. The earth has been able to get accustomed to them because their
impact has been largely negligible. Yet beginning with the Industrial Revolution—when
humans switched from wood and other renewable fuels to coal-powered steam technology—
humanity for the first time in the history of the earth has evolved into a collective force with
a veritable planetary impact so vast in scale that geologists [End Page 245] have coined the
 term “Anthropocene” to mark this most recent moment in human-earth relations.8 The
contemporaneous geothermal upheavals and eruptions in Unaccustomed Earth might suggest
the recuperative agency of a planet reacting to the destructive agency of humanity—the
damage done to its surface space and subterranean resources—and such a reading is certainly
within the spirit of sustainability that undergirds Unaccustomed Earth. Lahiri, however,
works on a much larger (appropriately, geological) scale than puny human concerns of
species survival, ecological responsibility, or adaptability. More concerned with cosmic
rhythms and natural forces than human purpose or teleology, Lahiri suggests that the seismic
energies in Unaccustomed Earth signify a planet with the capacity for perpetual
reconstitution, that a humanity unaccustomed (or unaccustomable) to symbiotic thinking
may, indeed, be a transitional sojourner on the diasporic space that is the earth, and that
change is the one large bio-geological constant in the age-old game of migration and
transplantation.

Thus, this essay seeks to locate Lahiri’s oft-cited interest in generational migration and
postcolonial thinking within a larger geological and ecocritical framework that has, so far,
escaped critical attention. It seeks to unearth a literary genealogy that grounds Unaccustomed
Earth in a, predominantly (but not only), American tradition with the pastoral; and it
advances a reading of Unaccustomed Earth along the lines of a renewed interest in
materialism in American culture, not only by acknowledging, as does Lahiri, the agency of
the earth as an active and reactive biological entity, but also by being cognizant of the way
“seemingly insignificant daily activities work synergistically to produce effects that devastate
the global environment.”9

Geological Upheaval, Geopolitical Upheaval

It is in detecting the traces of that uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the
text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history, that the doctrine of a
political unconscious finds its function and necessity.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious10

Unaccustomed Earth introduces the subterranean energies of the earth, in both the past and
the present, as its very framing condition. The collection’s title story takes place in
Washington State, home to the dormant volcanic range of the Cascades; Ruma has a
spectacular view onto “the Olympic Mountains, whose snowy peaks seemed hewn from the
same billowy white of the clouds drifting above them.”11 In the volume’s concluding story,
Kaushik retraces his travels through Central and South America, which are located on the
same tectonic fault lines that connect the Northern and Southern hemispheres in [End Page
246] deep, geological terms. His beginnings as a photojournalist explicitly link geology to
geopolitics. In El Salvador, he first takes “pictures of the volcano that loomed west of the
capital, buildings pocked by bullets and cracked in half by an earthquake earlier that year”
(303). Shortly thereafter, while eating lunch with a Dutch photo journalist, “the table [begins]
to shake, dark stew spilling from bowls. By then he had grown used to occasional tremors,
the earth’s violence yielding a moment’s pause” (304).12 In the instant following, he takes his
first picture of political violence—of a young man bleeding to death—thus capturing the civil
unrest and revolutionary ferment of a country that is intimated in the subterranean trembles
and the overflowing stew-qua-magna.
 What is more, both framing narratives connect to Italy and the Mediterranean generally as
one of the cradles of Western civilization with a long history of geological activity, conquest,
and colonialism. The Olympic Mountains derive their name from Mount Olympus in Greece,
and Ruma’s father has just recently returned from Italy, equipped not only with the clichéd
knick-knacks of a global consumer economy, but also sporting a baseball hat with the imprint
of POMPEII (11), thus providing a first glimpse into Italy’s violent volcanic and historical
past. “Going Ashore” extends this history into the vanished culture of the Etruscans, a
mysterious civilization who, as Hema puts it, “had possibly wandered from Asia minor to
central Italy and flourished for four centuries, who had ruled Rome for one hundred years
before turning obsolete” (300).13 During Hema and Kaushik’s visit to Volterra, a town
founded by the Etruscans, they note its precarious position “perched on a cliff high above the
open countryside,” and when they peer “over the walls at the Balze, a precipice beneath
which the earth had fallen away,” they observe the remnants of a church below and an
actively morphing landscape “always threatening to take more” (318–19).

Significantly, Volterra (following a violent takeover by the succeeding culture) was a

Roman stronghold through the Second Punic War (205 BC) and actively involved in the
Roman civil wars (81–80 BC), before taking the Latin name of Volaterrae, which roughly
translates, as the narrative itself suggests, as “an island surrounded by land,” and which is
indeed within view of the Ligurian Sea (318). Thus, as with the current geo-thermal rumbles
in El Salvador, but now removed in geographical space and historical time, political and
geological instability coalesce into a statement about the fickleness of human civilizations
against the backdrop of geological forces. Whether in the case of Italy’s Volterra or El
Salvador’s terra nostra (to speak with Carlos Fuentes), terra infirma—the unruly earth
following its own internal laws—may, indeed, be the critical historical determinant and the
name of the global human game of migration and mortality.14 [End Page 247] 

The punctual references to current political events embedded in the surface narrative
of Unaccustomed Earth, in that sense, are legible as the aftershocks of the text’s deeper
narrative, which recounts the long-term effects of global imperial politics. More than simple
orienting markers to endow the collection with a contemporary flush, they condense into a
narrative of colonial violence that has repercussions for and into the historical
present.15 When Amit returns to New Delhi “the year of Indira Gandhi’s assassination,” in
1984, “the riots that subsequently raged there, the curfews and the constant vigilance with
which his parents had to live,” effectively put him under house arrest, and he experiences a
fractured country in the condition of a police state, whose historical origins hearken back to
British colonial rule (96). Similarly, when his boarding school hosts its annual Thanksgiving
dinner, gathered around the table are young expats from “Santiago, Tehran, and other
troubled parts of the world,” who were unable to return to their home countries because of
internal strife and political instability, thus gesturing to Chile and Iran’s histories of imperial
domination and fights for independence (98). The political aftershocks of the Middle East
and South America resurface in Unaccustomed Earth once more when Hema and Kaushik’s
parents speak “about Reagan winning the election, all the ways that Carter had failed,” and
when Hema, shortly thereafter, explains to a newly-returned Kaushik the significance of
“yellow ribbons” in the context of the Iran-Contra crisis (233, 235). Pranab and Usha’s father
discuss “Kissinger and Watergate” to intimate the Indo-Chinese theater and the covert and
overt U.S. interventions in South America (67), and, in the collection’s concluding story,
 Kaushik’s professional life reads like a summary of migration and political violence the
world over, as if to suggest that—coincident with the terminal layer of the narrative—the
archaeology of the effects of imperial politics is up to date.

Starting out as a photographer in El Salvador and then Mexico and Argentina, Kaushik
amasses pictorial evidence so ghastly that he “could no longer remember all the corpses he
had photographed” (305). He works in Israel, part of the war-torn Mediterranean cradle of
civilization, covering the “bombing of a hotel banquet hall,” and, once stationed in Rome,
photographs “Senegalese immigrants in Italy” and “the nineteen caskets containing the
soldiers in Iraq being carried past the Colosseum”—the ancient arena of deadly combat
accentuating contemporary warfare (302).16 Eventually posted in the Middle East, he covers
the “Second Intifada” (307) and “Arafat’s funeral” in Ramallah, where thousands of
mourners had been “scaling walls and tearing down barbed wire for a glimpse of the coffin.”
A “detailed map of the West Bank” and “an international news channel,” turned to silent,
help him trace moment-by-moment developments in the [End Page 248] region (315–316),
and even his scheduled relocation to Hong Kong figures as a symbolic site of cultural and
economic diffusion, with a long and recent history of conquest and territorial transfer.

Thus, in their entirety, these scattered escarpments of violence in countries with a recent
colonial past suggest a reading of the shards of an historical archaeology aggregated into the
deep structure of Unaccustomed Earth. Precisely because these scarrings are below the
surface of the narrative, they point to the subterranean energies that have moved the
collection’s players to their destinations, in both local and economic terms. The global
mobility of the diaspora—including the paradigmatic little Neel, who descends from Indian-
born grandparents, a mother born in Britain but reared in the United States before returning
to the seat of the former Empire, there to meet her Indian-born English husband and give
birth to their postcolonial son—are effects of imperial power that, to this day, trigger and
orchestrate migrant fluidities, boundary dissolutions, capital flows, and, of course, numerous
civil wars and the emergence of new countries and ethnic identities. Unaccustomed
Earthilluminates this power through such moments of (e)rupture, when brief historical
probes break through the narrative surface to lay bare the larger, and often buried, forces of
historical agency. Mediated through the trope of deep geological activity and layering, with
its irruptive vectors upward and outward and its often complex agency, Unaccustomed
Earth exemplifies a form of what Fredric Jameson has called “the political unconscious,”
which denotes the fact that texts contain irrepressible political energies pushing from the
subtextual deep. For Jameson, that value lies primarily in “detecting the traces of that
uninterrupted narrative”—of class struggle and displacement—for historical modernity, and
in “restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental
history.”17 Lahiri, working with a larger aperture, extends that history to the immemorial
beginnings of human civilizations: that is, to geologic time.

Narrative Archaeologies and the Contingency of the

Postcolonial
Given the history of the United States, all American fiction could be classified as immigrant
fiction. . . . From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives
on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar.
 Jhumpa Lahiri, “By the Book”18

Building on the geopolitical tectonics rumbling underneath Unaccustomed Earth, and indeed

informing its migratory dynamic, Lahiri also striates her narrative with literary [End Page
249] traditions that resonate with (pre)historical migration and concerns for the earth. More
than a matter of “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in which contemporary authorship is
imbued with “the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer” and which assumes the
historical timelessness of a “simultaneous order,” Lahiri allows significant prior work to
resonate in her own, without, as Eliot would ask, “the continual surrender of [her]self.”19 On
the contrary, Lahiri writes herself into various traditions that reflect her thematic affinities
with migration and the earth, and in so doing breaks new ground on the transnational literary
terrain.

Lahiri’s nod to Homer, for example, figures as a feminist rewriting of one of the Western
world’s founding narratives of travel and migration, and gestures to the Olympic Mountains
and vanished cultures of the collection’s opening. But rather than straining for a sustained
parallelism between The Odyssey and, say, Ulysses, as does Joyce in his modernist epic,
Lahiri embeds textual shards into her own narrative that are more allusive than strictly
allegorical, suggesting the limits of such male-driven master narratives for her own project.
Much like the itinerant Odysseus, Rahul in “Only Goodness” is in search of unaccustomed
earth, which he first finds in the ports of call of the Greek’s peregrinations: he enrolls in
Ithaca (Cornell), wooded and mountainous like Odysseus’ home, from where he is expelled,
and eventually settles in Syracuse (whose Greek namesake is within view of Mount Etna),
where he lives with Elena, the woman bearing a suitably Greek name. Sudha looks up the
town in “an atlas”—another, literal, echo of Greek path-finding—and clinches the circular
travels of both voyages: “The town was north of Ithaca. . . . She never thought he’d want to
return anywhere near the place where he had so spectacularly failed” (160). What is more,
during his meanderings, Rahul also sends a letter from “Columbus, Ohio,” thus figuratively
extending his role as an arch-explorer to the putative discoverer of America, who was as
much in search of India as Rahul is trying to get away from it (158).

More importantly, it is Sudha (whose Hindi name signifies “living water”) who is cast in
the role of a female Odysseus trying to navigate her way through a patriarchal world as yet
unaccustomed to womanly strength and independence. When her brother announces his rash
engagement, Sudha is temporarily thrown off course, aware that his life of preferential
parental treatment has led to irresponsibility and sibling rivalry: “The room seemed to tilt;
she pressed down on the table cloth as if a forceful wind were about to come and blow
everything away” (154). Similarly, when she learns of her parents’ narrative of almost-
expulsion from a racist England as yet unaccustomed to its former subjects, she sees the story
“like an episode out of a Greek myth or the Bible, rich with [End Page 250] blessing and
portent, marking her family as survivors in strange intolerant seas” (135).20 Like her
mythological template, Sudha wears a “protective coating”—a diamond ring concealed on a
chain beneath her sweater—to give her immunity (149), and when she returns to the country
of her birth, she feels “an instinctive connection” and “a sense of belonging” (144). The
immigration officer at Heathrow—much like Eumaeus in Odysseus’ Ithaca—is the first who
“welcomed her home” (144). Her nostos, already legitimized by her new British passport and
much in contrast to the male narrative of failure, is brought to a close in educational and
social terms through a Ph.D. and a family.

As variants of such allusive textures, fairy tales form part of the narrative bedrock
of Unaccustomed Earth as well, and provide similar textual density along the lines of growth
and cultivation. Fed on a steady diet of TV, little Akash may, in the title story, already have
seen Disney’s Pinocchio by the time his grandfather brings the puppet from Italy. The gift
embodies the intergenerational relationship between the paternal Dadu and the filial
grandson, and Akash’s growing experiences under the tutelage of his Geppetto. Not only
does Akash perform his first baby steps in Hindi during the grandfather’s stay, thus fostering
his re-grounding in the language and culture from which he is removed by two generations.
Much like his wooden model, who plants gold coins in the “Field of Miracles,” in the naïve
belief that they will multiply, Akash sows his own field of miracles under the direction of
this grandfather, thus linking the tale explicitly to the motifs of growth and sustenance at the
heart of Unaccustomed Earth (44).

For that very reason, the intertextual tectonic Lahiri acknowledges uppermost is
announced in the collection’s title and elaborated in its epigraph. It is the deepest and most
immediately grounded in Unaccustomed Earth, and it is, significantly, the most American,
resonating as it does with transplantation and the ethos of a virgin continent. If
the Odyssey and the Mediterranean provide the locale for cultures come and gone (even as
immigrants from Senegal settle in present-day Italy), the land known as America provides
new ground for growing cultures (even as it has already unsettled native populations). It
derives from the beginning of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Custom-House,” the preface
to The Scarlet Letter, when the narrator distances himself from his ancestors, whose
infamous involvement in the Salem Witchcraft Trials makes any close association uneasy:
“Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and re-planted, for
too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other
birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into
unaccustomed earth.”21 What is more, the narrator’s figural use of a potato not only connects
to a crop that has, for millennia, been domesticated by numerous cultures, but also explicitly
associates agricultural with human transplantation and colonization. [End Page 251] 

The motifs of gardening and (trans)plantation form of course the narrative bedrock
of Unaccustomed Earth and link Lahiri explicitly with the pastoral ideal in American
literature, as it was first and most prominently articulated by Henry Nash Smith and Leo
Marx. The notion of an agricultural society became a “poetic idea” that defined “the promise
of American life. The master symbol of the garden embraced a cluster of metaphors
expressing fecundity, growth, increase, and blissful labor in the earth.”22 Like Hawthorne,
Lahiri significantly adds the severance of old and the knitting of new bonds, across
generations and continents, to this master trope, and like Hawthorne, Lahiri suggests in
numerous scenarios that a form of crop rotation is the template for agricultural vitality,
growth, and rejuvenation, just as it is for human colonizing and migration.23

Lahiri has been explicit about this recognition of kinship with a writer who, for decades,
served as an anti-model of what she aspired to be. Upon re-reading Hawthorne while
working on the collection, she was
 both startled and unspeakably reassured. I felt that a writer who represents everything that I
seemed not to be while growing up—an American, a New Englander, whose work is set in
the very terrain in which I was raised and from which I felt always estranged—had
articulated, almost two centuries ago, the journey and experience of my family, and had also
expressed my project as a writer.24

Sensing a deep rapport “across space and time” with her canonical predecessor, Lahiri
identifies that connection as appropriately geological: “It was the crossing of a fault line.”25

Lahiri’s corresponding gestures toward Emerson and Thoreau reaffirm her intellectual
heritage and further combine notions of migration with those of cultivation. The Indian-born
Pranab does an improvisational doggie paddle in Walden Pond and performs the
quintessential American act of sink-or-swim, as have generations of newcomers before him
trying to make it on the slippery slopes of an unaccustomed earth (66). Paul, the only
European American narrator in the collection, spots two people “swimming in Walden Pond,
their heads above the surface of the water,” even as he himself has a hard time staying afloat
(200). And the Canadian-born Deirdre tells Paul that her Egyptian lover took her to Walden
Pond “[f]or their first date” before sharing a meal (197). All pay homage to the baptismal
font of American self-reliance, the trough of absolution, courage, and tenacity that has come
to symbolize resolve and risk, watering and growth. And in what amounts to a refresher of
his own reliance, Paul makes a pilgrimage to “Concord, to visit Emerson’s house,” to
supplement his readings for his Ph.D. exam in English, the field trip ostensibly promising
experience on the ground no amount of reading can offer [End Page 252] (200). With
Hawthorne as a key archaeological link—whose model of crop rotation suggests a “proto-
ecological” sensibility (the phrase is Karl Kroeber’s)—Lahiri locates her own genealogy in
the tradition of nineteenth-century American writing about the land, which functions, as
Lawrence Buell succinctly put it, “as a bridge, crude but serviceable, from anthropocentric to
more specifically ecocentric concerns” (52).26

What is important here is that Lahiri combines the predominant theme of human with the
notion of literary migration, grounded as it is in ancient Mediterranean culture or, more
prominently, the writings of the American Renaissance. In so doing, she offers an expanded
understanding of what it means to inhabit a colonized space. If the term “postcolonial” in
contemporary discourse generally marks the political landscapes and transnational migration
flows following World War II, Lahiri draws attention to the historical permanence—or,
better, historical contingency—of postcoloniality per se by foregrounding various proto-
postcolonial moments of American history. Beginning with Hawthorne’s mid-nineteenth-
century America, when the former British colony was beginning to emerge as a major
immigrant country, Unaccustomed Earth gestures toward the influx of today’s global
diaspora into the United States, while locating the country’s precolonial past in the settlers’
first mythical encounter with the Native American other: Thanksgiving. (That is also the
moment, as the narrator of “The Custom-House” puts it, “when India was a new region and
only Salem knew the way thither,” an illusion of navigational centrality Unaccustomed
Earth dispels on every page.)27

If the narrative of Etruscan Italy grounds Unaccustomed Earth in the ancient history of a

global diaspora, the collection’s first story focuses that diaspora within the American
continent of today. Traveling from east to west, more than a century after the end of the
Frontier, Ruma strikes her roots into unaccustomed soil (and thus repeats her parents’
relocation within one land mass). What is more, she does so in Washington, the state named
after the first U.S. President, and in Seattle, the city named after the Native American chief,
whose people—like virtually all Native American tribes—were pressured into relocation and
land surrender (while living under the volcanic shadow of the Cascades). More importantly,
it is Chief Seattle’s legendary speech in 1854 which—in the wake of modern
environmentalism—has been unearthed as a major document embodying Native American
ecological sensibilities in harmony with the present-day concerns about the nature
world.28 When Seattle notes that “Every part of this country is sacred to my people,”
including “the rocks that seem to lie dumb as they swelter in the sun,” he acknowledges the
age-old synergy between the earth and its inhabitants against the background of a geological
time frame. When he observes that “Men come and go like [End Page 253] the waves of the
sea. . . . Even the white man . . . is not exempt from the common destiny,” he describes the
coming and going of cultures, including the likely extinction of the current colonizer. And
when he observes that the ancestors of his people “still love its verdant valleys, its
murmuring rivers, its magnificent mountains, sequestered vales and verdant lined lakes and
bays,” he expresses an elemental appreciation for the environment that is nourishing beyond
life into the spirit world.29 As much a prophecy as it is a profoundly simple statement of
humans and their embeddedness in the earth, it serves as a paradigmatic voicing of geo-
ecological issues that, in its sentiments, predates any major white Anglo-Saxon statement
about land use and environmental appreciation. Sensibilities such as these resonate in the
symbolic surcharge of a city named after the chief of dispossessed Indians, and a city that is
now repossessed, as it were, by second-generation Indian immigrants from South Asia. Such
sensibilities furthermore map the territorial disputes—essentially about resources and land
use—within the United States that the text otherwise intimates on a global scale, and that
rarely lead to harmonious cultural encounters, Thanksgiving or otherwise.

Indeed, beginning with the second story, Unaccustomed Earth dispels Thanksgiving as the

American founding myth of cross-cultural acceptance, and what should, in theory, be a
meaningful dialogue among resident nations and new arrivals over a shared meal recognizing
the bounty of the earth, becomes a hollow ritual leading to estrangement and distance. As
guests at Deborah’s, together with other Bengali families, Usha’s parents do not celebrate the
holiday, in the first place, because the American custom of “a large sit-down dinner and the
foods one was supposed to eat was lost on them.” Aghast at “the chaos of people” and
“enormous dirtied bowls,” Usha’s mother refuses wine and makes offhand comments about
the “tasteless and bland” food. The boy-girl formation at the table “made the Bengalis
uncomfortable,” and when the crowd goes for a walk on the beach, “[n]one of the Bengalis
wanted to go, preferring to sit with their tea and cluster together, at last, at one end of the
room, speaking freely after the forced chitchat with the Americans during the meal.”
Deborah’s father, for his part, can’t help but say a toast that is as crude as it is “historical”
(while unwittingly gesturing back to the opening story): “Forgive me, but I never thought I’d
have the opportunity to say this: Here’s to Thanksgiving with the Indians” (77–79). “A
Choice of Accommodations” then widens and reconfigures the holiday, when the
headmaster’s family of Langford hosts “boys who were from Santiago and Tehran and other
troubled parts of the world, or were the sons of diplomats and journalists who moved around
even more frequently than Amit’s parents” (98). And the one Indian-Egyptian couple—yet
 another nod to the collection’s [End Page 254] transnational sensibilities—has its first
blowout “around Thanksgiving,” when Sang asks Farouk “why he didn’t invite her to his
cousin’s house for Thanksgiving” (188–89).

By presenting these instances of Thanksgiving as iterations of one of America’s founding

myths, Lahiri reconnects the country’s historical present to its colonial past, and she updates
the primordial culinary encounter with a contemporary flush. She renders none of the
scenarios as moments of intercultural communion over a shared meal, but rather as moments
of resistance and reserve, habit and hollow ritual—from both sides of the table—oblivious to
culinary traditions and the bounty of the American Garden. In so doing, she not only raises
questions about the construction of any originary moment, but also grounds these encounters
in a series of moments extending into the future. Just as past generations of migrants have—
since time immemorial—broken bread with local populations, so will travelers of the future,
be they nomads, refugees, immigrants, asylum seekers, or the like. Significantly, in terms of
a head count, the Thanksgiving dinners in Unaccustomed Earthcontain large numbers of
non-white ethnicities, suggesting a profound shift in the center of gravity away from WASP
to NRI, PIO, ABD, ABT, ABCD, and BME, and reflecting the rhizomatic space that is the
United States.30

Thus, Lahiri inscribes herself into various literary and oral traditions about land, migration,
and cross-cultural encounters that date back thousands of years, or are alternately close to the
writers of the American Renaissance. She has long maintained that “given the history of the
United States, all American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction,” further noting
that “from the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on
crossing borders, on wandering, on exile. . . . The tension between alienation and assimilation
has always been a basic theme,” including in tales by Native Americans and the Homeric
bard.31 While grafting her contemporary sensibilities onto a multiply-layered tradition, she
not only writes herself into the American foundations of her literary heritage, but also
acknowledges the transcultural origins of storytelling that is coterminous with language, land
use, and migration. The result is something like a Hegelian synthesis that lays bare the
cascade of narrative themes across cultures, continents, and time. Unaccustomed Earth, in
that sense, embodies a vision of American literature Dimock has described as “a
crisscrossing set of pathways, open-ended and ever multiplying, weaving in and out of other
geographies, other languages and cultures.”32 Such a vision of literature centers around “input
channels, kinship networks, routes of transit, and forms of attachment—connective tissue
binding America to the rest of the world,” and is measured outside the traditional framework
of a historical, nation-based chronology.33 Instead, Dimock proposes to rethink “the shape of
literature against the [End Page 255] history and habitat of the human species, against the
‘deep time’ of the planet Earth, as described by two scientific disciplines, geology and
astronomy.”34 Unaccustomed Earth takes such a long view, as is evident in its archaeologies
of cultures and literary traditions and its understanding of humanity as “a species with a
sedimented imprint”35—the footprints of land settlement, migration, cultural flowerings, and
demise.

Geology, Geopolitics, and the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century,
when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global
 concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane. This date also happens to coincide with
James Watt’s design of the steam engine in 1784.
Paul J. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind”36

In the final part of this essay, I want to suggest how the geological trope in Unaccustomed
Earth also interrogates the possible transitionality of the human species on the very site
which it names—the earth—and how Lahiri subsumes concerns of species survival,
sustainability, and teleology to the even larger—that is, appropriately geological—
observations about cosmic rhythms and seismic shifts. Such a reading begins with the
impeccably precise semantic range of the collection’s title, which points to a reciprocal
relationship between the earth and its inhabitants. In synch with its epigraph, Unaccustomed
Earth suggests that humans may initially, indeed, be unaccustomed to the earth, but flourish
in unpredictable ways in new soil over time. Conversely, the title also suggests that the earth
—as an organic entity—may be equally unaccustomed to new or migrating populations, but
gets used to them as they carve out living space for themselves. If its geography offers
territory to expanding and migrating populations, so too are new inhabitants—transplants,
one might say—elements in a complex ecology to which the earth can be reactive.

In the history of migration from its beginnings to the European Renaissance, that ecology
has been rather simple, as the earth has had the capacity to absorb the footprint of an
emergent humanity due to its surface space and humans’ correspondingly negligible impact
on that space. Neither in terms of numbers nor technological possibility were humans able to
bring about significant lasting changes to the earth’s surface, biosphere, and (subterranean)
resources. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution and the European colonial projects in the
nineteenth century, however, that impact has become increasingly palpable: the despoliation
of natural reserves, the scarring of surface area, the intoxication [End Page 256] of the
atmosphere, the overfishing of waters, and, as a kind of global collateral damage, the
deformation of local and regional identities under the aegis of global consumerism and the
elevation of living standards for all. Technological innovation, combined with a global
population explosion, has led to a seismic shift in mass and scale and thus fundamentally
reconfigured the relationship of humans to their habitat.

About twenty years ago, practicing scientists coined the term the Anthropocene to
designate this massive impact of humanity on its global environment, “at a time of dawning
realization that human activity was indeed changing the Earth on a scale comparable with
some of the major events of the ancient past. Some of these changes are now seen as
permanent, even on a geological time-scale.”37The collective impact of humanity on their
habitat is now seen as being equal to the gigantic disasters that have decimated their numbers
in the past. Humans themselves are now endowed with a de facto geological agency which,
in the not too distant past, had been the exclusive preserve of the natural world.

Framed in such anthropogenic terms, Unaccustomed Earth juxtaposes the deep time of

global seismic activity with the aggregate of human energies on the level of a geological
force, however recent in contemporary time that force might be. The earth and humanity are
both endowed with geological agency or (re)activity to restore or adjust the ecological
feedback loop between host and inhabitant. Earth’s geothermal upheavals in Unaccustomed
Earth, in that sense, might be legible as a way of assigning agency to a planet seeking
retaliation for the damage done to it, of a (naively) anthropomorphized earth eager to slough
off populations unmindful of the age-old ecological contract. Lahiri, however, works with an
aperture that is much wider than the insignificant human need for survival or adaptability.
Grounded in cosmic rhythms and natural forces that are divorced from human purpose or
teleology, Unaccustomed Earth intimates a planet whose seismic cataclysms suggest a
capacity for perpetual reconstitution conceivably without a human footprint in the future.38

On the surface of it, the collection is devoid of loud political statements about climate
change, population control, and resource exploration, preferring to let such issues emerge
through the cracks of its narrative crust. As an updated refrain of the American pastoral
myth, the reciprocity between planting and thriving, for example, is a prominent leitmotif
that points, on a microcosmic scale, to the link between soil and survival traversing the
collection. First moving into an apartment in Garden City in New Jersey, the Garden State,
before eventually relocating to Pennsylvania, the land of forests, Ruma’s parents embody
their flourishing immigrant experience through [End Page 257] repeated associations with
the natural world. A metaphor for transplantation, Ruma’s father “toiled in unfriendly soil”
and “coax[ed] such things from the ground” as her mother liked to cook with—“bitter melon,
chili peppers and delicate strains of spinach” (16). He plants a hydrangea in honor of his
wife, noting that it “won’t bloom much this year. The flowers will be pink or blue depending
on the acidity of your soil” (51). And when he moves into an apartment, following his wife’s
sudden death, what he misses most is “working outside, the solid feeling of dirt under his
knees, getting into his nails, the smell of it lingering on his skin even after he’s scrubbed
himself in the shower” (49). More generally, even, in a suggestive moment of
miscommunication, he tells Ruma that a “nursery” is not just an educational setting but also a
“place that sells plants,” before taking his grandson on a plant-buying spree and converting
her backyard into a nursery school of a different sort (42).

On a larger, macrocosmic scale, the links between global consumerism and eco-systemic
pressure are intimated in the history of colonial violence mapped in Unaccustomed Earth.
Corresponding to the geological figuration of the political unconscious, readers can follow
the subterranean rhizome and piece together the history of exploitation and resource
extraction that undergirds every colonial project from its very beginning. Whether it’s the
Iran-Contra crisis, the covert operations of the CIA and the FBI in Central and South
America, the Watergate break-in at the height of the Vietnam War, or the sustained attention
to the Middle East, allusions to U. S. foreign interference, in particular, accumulate to open
up punctual windows into the history of political influence going back several centuries and
involving numerous European countries. While typically done in the name of democracy or
liberty, or, as in much of the nineteenth century, to imprint enlightened values on inferior
ethnicities, the animating concerns underlying all colonial endeavor were, and still are,
strategic gain, access to cheap labor, and perhaps most prominently these days, the oil
reserves in the Middle East and South America and the mineral resources in Africa.

Similarly, Unaccustomed Earth points to a consumer economy that is global in its network

and distribution patterns. Ruma’s father returns from Italy with “a marionette of Pinocchio”
for Akash, a “handpainted cruet that had the word ‘olio’ on its side” for Ruma, and a
“marbled box” for Adam, “the sort of thing one might use for storing paper clips” (18).
Meant to authenticate his experience, they in fact reproduce mass-marketed clichés of Italy
that might equally have been plucked from the shelves at a neighborhood Walmart and been
made in a factory in China, not a workshop in Italy. Rahul wants to bring back a little tea set
for the daughter of his fiancée, “something really English,” again [End Page
258] reproducing a stereotype that is, in this instance, connected to England’s imperial
history with India (164). And, in a further tightening of this postcolonial consumption loop,
Sang returns from England with “tea from Harrods,” thus in effect exporting further what are
already Indian imports in one of the most high-end shops of the former Empire with a history
of marketing merchandise from former colonial outposts (199).39

What is more, migration itself, as with all first-generation Bengali (or Senegalese)
immigrants in Unaccustomed Earth, is motivated by the wish for economic improvement, not
political stability, and they periodically return to India with their families and, like their
offspring, hopscotch throughout the globe for pleasure, profession, and economic gain. In the
postcolonial world of today, airline traffic is such that, whenever Ruma’s retired father is
scheduled to fly, “she watched the news, to make sure there hadn’t been a plane crash
anywhere in the world” (3). Her husband Adam works for a “hedge fund”—a suitably loaded
word in a book centered on growth and cultivation—and “had yet to spend two consecutive
weeks at home” following their move (5). Helping to manage an international portfolio with
a strategy of maximum capital appreciation, Adam works in the grey zone of regulatory
restrictions and with private financiers investing large sums of money in often emerging
markets. His non-denominational currency functions as a synecdoche for mobility and the
migrant streams flowing through the world; his life, as is that of both disadvantaged and
well-heeled immigrants alike, is as mobile as digital capital is fluid. And in what may be the
best example of such fluidity, Amit’s parents embody true transnational citizenship by
making the world their global village, working (as his father does, as an eye surgeon with
pop star status) for periods of time in New Delhi, Boston, Houston, Lausanne, and Riyadh,
without settling anywhere or assuming responsibility for a child left abandoned in a boarding
school.

Significantly, it is these third-world emigrés turned first-world nouveaux rich that seem
best to imitate their former colonizers not only in their drinking habits, but also in their
patterns of consumption. When her father shares their impending relocation from Cambridge
to New Delhi in a seafood restaurant, Amit remembers that the table had been “heaped with
the bright red claws and shells from which his father had effortlessly extracted the meat for
all of them” (95). Signifying abundance and removal, the leftover debris suggests the
ongoing exploitation of resources perpetrated by superpowers and former colonizers—often
in the name of resource management—but now with the tables turned. In effect relishing the
benefits of whatever their current host country is, before leaving behind an empty shell,
Amit’s father practices a consume-and-spit-out model of economics that, in a postcolonial
world, is no longer reserved for traditional colonizers [End Page 259] but the domain of
countries—typically rich in human, intellectual, and natural capital—emerging into global
economic players of their own. If the empire has been writing back for a while, Lahiri seems
to say, it now mines back as well.40

On the other side of the eco-sensitive spectrum, Sudah’s professional trajectory in “Only
Goodness” suggests an awareness of the more constructive impact of capitalist practices on a
global economy. Sudha double majors in “economics and math” and, after a “first master’s in
international relations” from the University of Pennsylvania, pursues a second master’s
degree from the London School of Economics (129). She explains that “LSE had one of the
best programs in developmental economics, that she was thinking of doing NGO work”
(133), and after she completes a dissertation on deregulation indeed works “as a project
manager for an organization in London that promoted micro loans in poor countries” (150–
151). Often given to women and other economically disenfranchised groups—and much in
keeping with LSE’s founding principles of the Fabian Society—micro loans foster local and
sustainable business practices free from the pressures of a competitive international market
that tends to be profit-driven and shareholder-based. Sudha thus becomes an active player in
promoting ecological awareness and in nourishing a climate of responsible stewardship over
local resources. In terms of the larger architecture that carefully governs much
of Unaccustomed Earth, Sudha’s activism counterbalances the models of corporate
expansion embodied by the fathers in the same story. As an employee of Raytheon, her father
serves the interests of the military-industrial complex (135), just as the father of her husband
Roger “had worked overseas for Singer sewing machines,” including in India, presumably to
help establish an emerging sweat shop culture (146). The spirit of Sudha’s community-based
NGO work goes in the opposite direction.

What emerges from this discussion is Lahiri’s understanding of humanity as one eco-
economic entity, and an understanding that intersects with more theoretical calls for an
enlarged investigation into the relation of humans and their habitat. Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, for example, has coined the notion of “planetarity” as a way of “inscribing collective
responsibility” and of philosophizing about global ecological concerns.41 Paul J. Crutzen and
Eugene F. Stoermer note that developing “a world-wide accepted strategy leading to
sustainability of eco-systems against human-induced stresses will be one of the great future
tasks of humankind.”42 E. O. Wilson has famously noted that “Humanity has so far played the
role of planetary killer concerned only with its own short-term survival. We have cut the
heart out of much of biodiversity.”43 And Dipesh Chakrabarty, echoing current anthropogenic
thinking, notes that we live “in an age when the forces of globalization intersect with those of
global warming,” and argues that “the idea of the human needs to be stretched beyond where
postcolonial thought advanced it.”44 Further [End Page 260] observing that humans now “act
as a geological force on the planet, changing its climate for millennia to come,” Chakrabarty
makes a strong case that progressive postcolonial thinking—like progressive scientific
thinking—must be cognizant of humans as being constitutively one: “a species, a collectivity
whose commitment to fossil-fuel based, energy-consuming civilization is now a threat to that
civilization itself.”45 Unaccustomed Earth is endowed with just such a sensibility and
intimates that living is a matter of social responsibility toward others and of an ecological
responsibility toward an earth whose capacities for supporting life are grounded in
sustainable stewardship.

Precisely because of this radically enlarged aperture, which subsumes human history
within a much larger natural history, does Unaccustomed Earth also portray an earth that
follows larger cosmic rhythms and geological forces divorced from human concerns and
sustainability. If the collection’s major players are in search of grounding and contact with
the earth, they also have an affinity for the element of their evolutionary origin: water.
Juxtaposed to the ground precisely because it removes any solid footing, water
in Unaccustomed Earth becomes the primordial source of being in which nourishment and
destruction, fertility and fatality, emulsion and extinction, are ceaselessly washing against
one another. The ground in Unaccustomed Earth is shaky not only because of geothermal
energy working from below, but also because two thirds of the globe’s surface space is
literally inundated, making an illusion out of the seeming solidity of the earth. In terms of the
planet’s deep time, terra infirma is the rule of the game, not the other way round.

Negotiating the slippery fluidity of ground and the instinctive orientation toward water is a
major motif in the collection. When Amit and Megan travel to Puerto Rico, they move from a
hotel room “on the ground floor” to a suite “overlooking the mesmerizing blue-green ocean
and the contrasting blue of sky.” They leave the curtains open and make love sideways, the
effect being “as if the whole room, and the bed, and they themselves, were somehow afloat
on the sea.” They had a similar experience in Venice—an ancient floating, and sinking, city
in itself, on the Mediterranean—when they relocate from a wall-facing room to one “by a
canal, where a small barge docked each morning selling fruits and vegetables” (87).46 During
one of their trans-Pacific stopovers, Ruma and her family want to visit, but never do,
Bangkok’s “Floating Market” (8), and she explains to her father in Seattle that the bridges
spanning Lake Washington “floated on pontoons at their centers because the water was too
deep” (14).

Significantly, as if to compensate for this suggestion of suspension in mid-water, the father

falls back into his habit of measuring physical space. “It appeared,” Ruma notes, “as her
father walked from one end of the living room to another, that he was inwardly measuring its
dimensions.” Ruma remembers him doing so on numerous occasions, and [End Page
261] she now imagines him “on his tours, in public squares, walking from one end to
another, pacing up and down a nave, and counting the number of steps one had to ascend in
order to get to the library or the museum” (14). Like many characters in the collection who
use maps to get their bearings—from road atlases and MapQuest to high-resolution detail
charts—the father seeks to control space by quantifying it, however simply, precisely
because water is not measurable in the same way. Its dimensions especially on an oceanic
scale are elusive and not amenable to the coordinates of cartography when compared to the
putative stability of land. The numerous maps in Unaccustomed Earth, in that sense, are
more than props to find one’s way, but forms of grounding one’s being, ways of countering
the uncontainable and unpredictable fluidity of water.47

That this sense of being awash is, for all its uncertainty, primordial is evident in the
characters’ affinity for inundation. It isn’t just Pranab and others who consecrate their
migrant status by keeping their head above water in Walden Pond. Amit and Megan, too,
desire to go swimming in the Berkshire lakes, and when they fail to do so, enjoy the caress of
“an undramatic drizzle” and vicariously observe a man swimming in the “dark gray water,
quite far out” (89, 121). Akash, among several children, takes swimming lessons (with a
“floatation device” strapped to his back); he practices in an “inflatable kiddie pool” and is
comfortable splashing in the lake bordering his parents’ house (38, 32). Usha’s little son Neel
is naturally unperturbed in the chest-high water of the bathtub, while his sitter-uncle has
passed out on the floor (170). And in the most sustained association of elemental buoyancy
with the rhythms of life, Kaushik’s parents buy a house in Boston with a pool so his mother
can enjoy her daily rejuvenation, recreational, and ablutionary swim. This association
underlies the surcharged configuration of water as a vast geothermal entity beyond probing,
and orchestrates the core dynamic of much of Part Two of the narrative of Unaccustomed
Earth.

In a concentric arrangement of scenes that function as micro- and macrocosmic

representations of one another, water is associated with the maternal element that is all-
enveloping and all-exposing, life-giving and life-taking. Kaushik, toward the end of “Year’s
End,” doesn’t “bother getting a map,” but drives along the New England coastline and is
carried along not by seeing the sea but by “detect[ing] its salty smell” (287). He finds the
water “violent enough to break me apart” and the inhospitable coastline irresistibly attractive:
“the landscape drew me, claimed me as nothing had in a long time” (289). Reaching his
terminal point, “he watches the approach and retreat of the waves . . . that eternally restless
motion having an inversely calming effect on me,” before burying the pictures of his mother
on a rock, not yet ready to let them blow into the Atlantic where his mother’s ashes have
already been strewn (292). [End Page 262] 

In a parallel sort of homecoming years later, toward the end of “Going Ashore,” that cycle
then completes itself, when an anxious Kaushik, now on a beach in Thailand, gingerly enters
the element of his attraction-repulsion. He has a vision of his swimming mother, “her body
still vital, a brief blur that passed as effortlessly as the iridescent fish darting from time to
time beneath the boat,” and he eventually steps into the water, wanting “to show his mother
that he was not afraid.” As he lowers himself, “the sea was as warm and welcoming as a
bath. His feet touched the bottom, and so he let go” (330).

Meeting in the liminal space of the shoreline, and gaining ground as the smothering wave
is coming ashore, Kaushik’s submersion in water has all the trappings of an oedipal conflict
finally resolving itself, and Kaushik certainly has a profound fixation on his mother that,
among other blockages, complicates his relationship with his father and prevents him from
forming enduring relationships. Reducing this configuration of scenes to a Freudian template,
however, ignores the complexity of Lahiri’s thought (even if psychoanalytic structures are
already anchored in the evolutionary imprints of humanity’s deep time). While Kaushik is,
on one level, no doubt returning to the womb, Lahiri submerges this singular oedipal drama
within the larger catastrophe of geothermal upheaval. Tens of thousands of innocent victims
along the low-lying coastline of India, Thailand, and Indonesia are absorbed back into the
source of their primordial being, a no-longer-pacific Pacific that transforms into a gigantic
whirlpool catapulting untold masses of humans back into the void of their originary
plentitude. If the seas (may) have eroded ancient Etruscan culture, among others, now
contemporary cultures with exposure to the oceans are flushed off the earth in a kind of
global cleansing. Restoring a form of tabula rasa back to earth’s surface, the planet, Lahiri
suggests, is a celestial body on which humans may never be able to be fully at home, after
all.48 The cosmic rhythms of earth’s deep time, in the final analysis, prevent humanity from
getting accustomed to it long-term.49

Significantly, Lahiri punctuates the hiatus before and after the oceanic surge with a Gingko
leaf (331). Imprinted on the collection’s inside cover, and demarcating Kaushik’s last
moments from Hema’s epilogue, the leaf functions as an organic framing device and suggests
biological endurance following a global catastrophe; it literally fills the lacuna of that
 catastrophe whose rendition Lahiri carefully omits. If Hema’s pregnancy gingerly intimates
such endurance on a human and generational level—and furthermore gestures toward the
protective and fertilizing agency of the amniotic fluid—the Gingko embodies survival in the
dimensions of earth’s deep time, and perhaps the delicate beginnings of a new pastoral.
Framing both the beginning and the end of Unaccustomed Earth, it is one of few plant
species classified as a “living fossil,” having survived countless major [End Page
263] extinction events and falling within the vast temporalities of geologic time, with
recognizable ancestral fossils going back several hundred million years. Individual specimen
have been estimated to be 2,500 years old and older, their longevity partly a result of their
capacity for adaptive reproduction in periods of dryness and soil erosion.50 More in tune with
the biological rhythms of the earth than acts of human colonization and territorial usurpation,
the Gingko represents a plant-based model of ecological synergy that embodies survivability
and sustainable co-habitation with its host. Indeed, if oceanic surges periodically wash away
human life, they not only destroy and reshape but also water and reseed shorelines, which in
turn allows for the redistribution of trees and other plants, provided they enter into the large
measures of their ground of nourishment.51

These cycles return this essay to the large feedback loops between migration and geology,
colonization and geopolitics, and anthropology and the Anthropocene that
undergird Unaccustomed Earth. Its narratives, I have been arguing, expose the various
archaeologies driving their dynamic and orchestrate their interconnectedness through the
governing trope of geothermal agency. Geopolitical upheaval and historical force,
colonization and migration, and the sequence of pastoral in literary traditions are all mediated
through a model of archaeological tension and stratification that compresses into reflections
of what it means to settle and colonize space. As a global biological motor, water
fundamentally expresses the subterranean energies shaping the earth and its conditions for
habitation, and as such marks the unceasing energies literally shifting the ground under the
feet of humanity. Geothermal ruptures similarly encrypt the human history of emergence and
growth, conflict and domination, but also of erasure and disappearance. If the earth provides
grounding for civilizations to prosper, it also periodically removes that ground by allowing
cultures to fall into the abyss of silence. Literature, too, offers a foothold for cultural
understanding, as in Lahiri’s self-conscious complication of the American pastoral into the
realm of a global ecology. Unaccustomed Earth urges that human life on earth—including its
migration flows and literary and other artifacts—ought to be seen through the aperture of
geologic time, the deep time of the cosmic processes of coming and going, waxing and
waning. Doing so re-perforates traditional notions of nationhood and nation-states, whose
boundaries have always been permeable, and suggests that humans have been inhabiting a
space that has, fundamentally, always been “post”colonial, or indeed planetary. From their
very beginnings until the contemporary historical moment, human beings have been on the
move, have been living in largely imagined communities on the unstable quicksand that is
the earth. [End Page 264] 
Michael Wutz
Weber State University
Michael Wutz
Michael Wutz is a James Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Weber
State University and the editor of Weber - The Contemporary West. He is the co-editor of Reading
Matters (Cornell, 1997), the co-translator of Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford,
 1999), and the author of Enduring Words - Narrative in a Changing Media Ecology (Alabama, 2009). His co-
edited volume Conversations with W. S. Merwin appeared earlier this year from the Univ. Press of Mississippi.

Notes
. I dedicate this essay to Priti and Raj Kumar, and thank the anonymous readers for Studies in American Fiction for their supportive
and insightful comments on an earlier version of this essay.

1. Wai Chee Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001): 175.

2. Lavina Dhingra and Floyd Cheung, eds., Naming Jhumpa Lahiri: Canons and Controversies (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books,
2012), xxii.

3. Rachel Adams, “The Ends of Postmodernism,” Twentieth-Century Literature 53, no. 3 (2007): 251.

4. In “Neoliberal Family Matters,” American Literary History 25, no. 2 (2013), Susan Koshy similarly notes that “the shift from
small-scale diachrony... in Interpreter of Maladies to larger-scale diachrony in Unaccustomed Earth recasts character and action
against the background of generational time” (354).

5. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American
Culture (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1995), 7–8.

6. The term derives from amateur geologist Hugh Miller’s widely-known book The Testimony of the Rocks (Edinburgh: Shepherd
& Elliot, 1857), and, as a suggestive phrase, quickly entered the Victorian imagination.

7. Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006),
6.

8. As Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer famously put it in “The Anthropocene,” IGBP Newsletter 41 (2000), “Considering...
[the] major and still growing impacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere, and at all, including global, scales, it seems to us
more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term
‘anthropocene’ for the current geological epoch” (17). For similar references, see Crutzen’s slightly longer essay, “Geology of
Mankind,” in the journal Nature 415 (January 3, 2002): 23, and Will Steffen, Crutzen, and John R. McNeill’s landmark essay, “The
Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?,”Ambio 36, no. 8 (2007): 614–621.

9. Diane Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2010),
16.

10. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981), 20.

11. Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 14. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

12. This moment is so formative for Kaushik that he remembers it decades later, on the last day of his life, on the beach in Thailand,
when he hears of the “small earthquake” that has already triggered the tsunami (329).

13. This history of migration is also inscribed in the Etruscans’ sarcophagi-like urns that were “covered with carvings showing so
many migrations across land and departures in covered wagons to the underworld” (319). For a nuanced reading of the links
between death, immigration, and memory [End Page 265] in Lahiri’s work, see Mridula Chakraborty, “Leaving No Remains:
Death among the Bengalis in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction,” South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 4 (2011): 813–829.

14. Given Lahiri’s professional and personal interest in Italy—her Ph.D. is in Renaissance Studies and she has been living in Italy
for several years now—she may have drawn from Fernand Braudel’s landmark study, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean
World in the Age of Phillip II (1949, 2 vol, trans. Siân Reynolds; repr. New York: Harper & Row, 1972), in which he argues for the
centrality of natural rhythms as a determinant of human history.

15. Rajini Srikanth offers a non-political reading of Lahiri’s work, arguing that her wide popular appeal and easy digestibility in the
United States are grounded in her portrayal of “ornamental Indians” who conform to a comforting “model of successful
citizenship”; see Srikanth, “What Lies Beneath: Lahiri’s Brand of Desirable Difference in Unaccustomed Earth,” in Lavina Dhingra
and Floyd Cheung, eds., Naming Jhumpa Lahiri, 59. While I would agree that her immigrants are nowhere near being political
agitators or militant activists threatening a Western, democratic status quo, I am in fact arguing for a vast political subtext
grounding Lahiri’s work.
16. On the recent influx of Senegalese immigrants into Italy, see Joseph Winter, “Italy’s ‘little Senegal,’” BBC News, accessed
March 16, 2015, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3622953.stm.

17. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 20.

18. “Jhumpa Lahiri: By The Book,” The New York Times, September 5, 2013, accessed September 5,
2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/books/review/jhumpa-lahiri-by-the-book.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

19. T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1932), 4–
6.

20. Kaushik couches his mother’s story of departure and return in similar mythological terms. A twice-lost daughter, whose
marriage put her parents into mourning, before her eventual death, returned to them, “first from Boston and then Bombay, like
Persephone in the myth, temporarily filling up and brightening their rooms” (253). Likewise, Paul in “Nobody’s Business”
associates Sang with Penelope who, attempting to keep her suitors at bay, kept weaving and unweaving a shroud (176).

21. See Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, ed. Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, E. Hudson Long, and Seymour
Gross (New York: Norton, 2nd Ed., 1978), 13.

22. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950), 123.

23. In “Neoliberal Matters,” Koshy reads the often haphazard and hesitant trajectory of Lahiri’s characters as an ironic foil to the
seeming intentionality behind Hawthorne’s generational statement (356). While I agree that Lahiri reflects on the limited agency of
her twenty-first century subjects, I would submit that Hawthorne, too, is aware of the multiply circumstantial nature of regeneration.
His narrator notes that it is only “so far as [his children’s] fortunes may be within my control,” that he may exercise limited agency
over generational rejuvenation (The Scarlet Letter, 13).

24. “Jhumpa Lahiri on Unaccustomed Earth—Guardian Book Club,” The Guardian, August 30, 2013, accessed September 28,
2013, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/31/unaccustomed-earth-lahiri-book-club. [End Page 266] 

25. Ibid. As a further indication of her thinking along geo- and genea-logical lines, Lahiri notes in the same article
that Unaccustomed Earth is traversed with “the fault lines between parents and children.”

26. Buell, Environmental Imagination, 52. In Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind, Kroeber
designates the term “proto-ecologist” for the British Romantics and their contemporaries, which would certainly include Hawthorne
as well (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994).

27. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 26.

28. I quote from the so-called “Original Smith Text” (one among several apocryphal and contested versions) commonly recognized
as the most authentic rendition of Seattle’s 1854 oration and first published in the Seattle Sunday Star, October 29, 1887: 3.

29. Ibid.

30. NRI (Non-Resident Indian) and PIO (Person of Indian Origin) are rubrics of classification created by the Indian government to
encourage esp. wealthy members of the new diaspora in the West and Middle East to reconnect with their home country (see
Koshy, “Neoliberal Family Matters,” 376). ABC and ABT are acronyms for “American-born Chinese” and “American-born
Taiwanese” within the Chinese diaspora, and ABCD (American-Born Confused Desi) refers to South Asian Americans born in the
United States, in contrast to those born overseas and immigrating later. BME stands for “Black and White Minority Ethnic.”
If Unaccustomed Earth doesn’t explicitly question the nation-state as a political structure, it certainly suggests that such forms have
always been, in the memorable phrase of Benedict Anderson, “imagined communities” held together more by phantasmagoric
projections than “deep, horizontal comradeship.” See Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (1983, rev. ed. London: Verso, 2006), esp. 5–7.

31. “Jhumpa Lahiri: By The Book.”

32. Dimock, Through Other Continents, 6.

33. Ibid, 3.

34. Ibid, 6.
35. Ibid, 6.

36. Crutzen, Nature 415 (January 3, 2002): 23.

37. Jan Zalasiewicz, et. al., “The New World of the Anthropocene,” Environmental Science & Technology 44 (2010): 2228. Ulf von
Rauchhaupt discusses the various models determining the beginnings of the Anthropocene in “Wie kommen wir nur ins
Anthropozän?,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 22, May 31, 2015: 59.

38. This configuration of themes, including a concentrated political subtext, emerges full blown in Lahiri’s most recent novel, The
Lowland (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013).

39. As the narrator of Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone notes more directly: “I am convinced that one can buy in Harrods of
London a kit that allows an enterprising Englishman to create a British school anywhere in the third world. It comes with black
robes, preprinted report cards for Michaelmas, Lent, and Easter terms, as well as hymnals, Prefect Badges, and a syllabus. Assembly
required” (Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone[New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009, 233]). [End Page 267] 

40. My reference is of course to Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s postcolonial classic, The Empire Writes Back:
Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature (London: Routledge, 1989). Lahiri, in a kind of literary-critical recursive loop,
may well have that book in mind when a school friend invites Hema to watch the newly-released The Empire Strikes Back (240).

41. Spivack, “Planetarity,” in Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2003), 101–102.

42. Crutzen and Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” IGBP Newsletter 41 (2000): 18.

43. Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (New York: Vintage, 2003), 102.

44. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” New Literary History 43, no. 1 (2012): 13.

45. Ibid, 2.

46. One of the ancient ports of the spice trade, Venice’s grocery boats also intimate the history of imported food consumption. See,
for example, Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley, Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), 13.

47. The collection interrogates quantifying geographic space into maps as a primary act of colonization and occupation. For
Benedict Anderson and Anthony Giddens, such attempts to bring unruly nature under human control are one of the hallmarks of
modernity and the rise of the nation-state. See Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (1983, rev. ed. London: Verso, 2006), esp. 28–32, and Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford:
Stanford Univ. Press, 1990), esp. 17–21.

48. It may be worth noting that the evolution of agriculture was largely the result of the waning of the last Ice Age brought about by
the so-called “Milankovich phenomena: the orbital and tilt relationships between the Earth and the Sun.” See Lawrence Guy Straus,
“The World at the End of the Last Ice Age,” in Humans at the End of the Ice Age: The Archaeology of the Pleistocene-Holocene
Transition, ed. Lawrence Guy Straus et. al. (New York: Springer, 1996), 5.

49. This fundamentally nonhuman or naturalistic vision is close to the writer Lahiri has named as her favorite novelist: “Thomas
Hardy. Ever since I first read him in high school, I’ve felt a kinship with his characters, his sense of place, his pitiless vision of
humanity” (“By The Book”).

50. See, for example, Dana L. Royer, Leo J. Hickey and Scott L. Wing, “Ecological conservatism in the ‘living
fossil’ Ginkgo,” Paleobiology 29, no. 1 (2003): 84–104. Within the context of anthropogenic extinction events, the adaptability of
the Gingko is evident in Hiroshima, Japan. Among the few life forms surviving within about a mile of the nuclear ground zero in
August of 1945 were six Gingko trees. While virtually all other plant forms were killed, the trees were charred but soon fully
recuperated. See “A-bombed Gingko Trees in Hiroshima, Japan,” The Gingko Pages, accessed July 30,
2013, http://kwanten.home.xs4all.nl/hiroshima.htm.

51. Michel Serres offers a more detailed analysis along similar eco-scientific lines of Jules Michelet’s La Mer (1861), which also
resonates with the geological reading of Uncaccustomed Earth I develop in the first part of this essay. To engage the chain of global
energetic exchange, notes Serres, Michelet posits two “circles of fire,” “a circle of active or extinct volcanoes border[ing] the
Atlantic and a comparable ring surround[ing] the Pacific.” See Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josué V. Harari
and David F. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982), 29–31. [End Page 268]