Outsides and outsiders: Environmental critique in Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle and Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef

Introduction: “the sea of trees”

The remarkable first lines of Leonard Woolf’s novel, The Village in the Jungle, published in 1913 and based on his seven years of experience as a colonial officer in Ceylon, establish the jungle as an all-important setting:

The village was called Beddagama, which means the village in the jungle. It lay in the low country or plains, midway between the sea and the great mountains which seem, far away to the north, to rise like a long wall straight up from the sea of trees. It was in, and of, the jungle; the air and smell of the jungle lay heavy upon it — the smell of hot air, of dust, and of dry and powdered leaves and sticks. Its beginning and its end was in the jungle, which stretched away from it on all sides unbroken, north and south and east and west, to the blue of the hills and to the sea. The jungle surrounded it, overhung it, continually pressed in upon it. It stood at the door of the houses, always ready to press in upon the compounds and open spaces, to break through the mud huts, and to choke up the tracks and paths. (Woolf, 2008: 9) ¹

The jungle permeates the village, such that it is not only “in” but “of” the jungle. The overlap is highlighted by the melded senses — the smell of the jungle is the smell of the village, the blue of the hills is the same as the sea — and the repetition of “press in”, “pressed in”, in the final lines. The beginning ominously and accurately prefigures the ending of the novel, in which the jungle breaks through the walls of the abandoned houses and overruns the unused tracks. The biblical phrasing — “its beginning and its end” — suggest the jungle’s almost divine supremacy, as well as an overriding atmosphere of fatalism. In the rest of the novel, more so than usurious middlemen and colonial oppressors, the encroaching, overwhelming, god-like jungle determines the villagers’ fate.

Significantly, for my purposes, the jungle in this novel is also repeatedly described using metaphors of the sea. Even here at the beginning, the jungle is termed “the sea of trees”. The link is strengthened a few paragraphs further on:

If you climb one of the bare rocks that jut up out of it, you will see the jungle stretched out below for mile upon mile on all sides. It looks like a great sea, over which the pitiless hot wind perpetually sends waves unbroken, except where the bare rocks, rising above it, show like dark smudges against the grey-green of the leaves. (10)

The jungle looks like the sea: grey-green, a suggestive sea-colour, and punctuated with bare rocks that rise out of it like islands. The rocks highlight the relative fluidity of the trees, whose wave-like motion contrasts with their stillness. The jungle is imbued with a sense of oceanic infinitude, highlighting its disorienting, dangerous, unknowable nature.

This jungle–ocean metaphoric link reappears, although inverted, in another novel about Sri Lanka, written nearly 80 years later, in the postcolonial period — Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef. Reef is narrated by Triton, who, as a successful London-based chef, recalls his experience as an 11-year-old boy hired to work in the house of Mister Salgado, a Sri Lankan marine biologist. Triton, looking back at the significance that the island-surrounding Sri Lankan reef played in their lives, remembers snorkelling only once at Mister Salgado’s research site. In his narration, the reef is described in terms that invoke a jungle:

The one time I did swim out to Mister Salgado’s real reef, back home, I was frightened by its exuberance. The shallow water seethed with creatures. Flickering eyes, whirling tails, fish of a hundred colours darting and digging, sea snakes, sea-slugs, tentacles sprouting and grasping everywhere. It was a jungle of writhing shapes, magnified and distorted, growing at every move, looming out of the unknown, startling in its hidden brilliance. Suspended in the most primal of sensations, I slowly began to see that everything was perpetually devouring its surroundings. I swam into a sea of sound; my hoarse breathing suddenly punctuated by clicking and clattering, the crunching of fish feeding on the white tips of golden staghorn. My own fingertips seemed to whiten before me as trigger-fish, angel-fish, tiger-fish, tetrons, electrons and sandstone puffer-fish swirled around me, ever hungry. (Gunesekera, 1994: 186) ²

The reef is described as a horrifying “jungle of writhing shapes”. Its dynamism is emphasized by many verbs — whirling, darting, digging, devouring — and its myriad colours, shapes and species are overwhelming to sense and comprehension. The “real” reef, far from the manageable ideal that Mister Salgado’s research project suggests, is fearsome and enigmatic.

Both novels foreground the importance of the natural world not only in their text but in their titles. The oceanic reef and the encroaching jungle form the spatial and discursive limits to the imagined island. It is this portrayal of the natural world, independent of and yet interlinked with the lives of the protagonists, through which these novels engage with and critique the construction of an outside space. By this I mean something similar to what critic Timothy Clark (2008) calls, via David Wood, “externality”, in his essay “Towards a Deconstructive Environmental Criticism”. Derived from economics, the term “externality” implies space for expansion, terra nullius, slack, “‘out’ or ‘away’ as when we throw something ‘out’ or ‘away’” (Clark, 2008: 48). Wood makes the link between globalization and the loss of externality in empirical and historical terms — for one thing, there are no more desert islands. Similarly, the natural resources used to produce goods can no longer be considered “free”, and waste dumped into the sea or atmosphere cannot be conveniently thought to disappear (Clark, 2008: 49). In Clark’s words, “the end of ‘externality’ means that the consequences of human action do not go away anymore” (Clark, 2008: 49).

Several such externalities are and have been, Clark suggests, “the sea, the atmosphere, people outside the ‘developed’ countries and, above all, the future” (Clark, 2008: 48). I want to focus on two from that list, what we might call outsides and outsiders, in order to explore some critical correspondences between these two otherwise very different Sri Lankan novels. The sea, jungle, villagers, and servants in these novels are interlinked and, in this holistic representation, gain figurative and moral weight. This reading will also engage with that last, futural element, highlighting the temporal shift which a focus on the natural world entails. This elongated vision, as well as the transference of representations of externality from space to populations, will be read as revealing aspects of what Rob Nixon (2011) calls “slow violence”.

Violence is predominantly conceived as an instantaneous, spectacular event. However, Nixon proposes emphasizing a different kind of violence, one that is accretive and incremental, its calamitous consequences drawn out and only gradually revealed. This slower kind of violence is not usually considered to be violence at all; however, as Nixon suggests, to comprehend ecological collapse, the aftermaths of war and the workings of underdevelopment, it is imperative to focus on “the long dyings”, the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects (2011: 2, 3). Slow violence highlights the longue durée, and in so doing draws together the postcolonial critique of structural injustice — including the insidious and underlying violence of capital, underlined by Dominic Davies in his reading of Woolf included in this special issue — and the ecocritical analysis of environmental destruction. It therefore relies on what Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin have called a “postcolonial environmental ethic”, which seeks to read colonialism, the oppression of ethnic others, and environmental domination together, as always mutually implicated (cited in Roos and Hunt, 2010: 3).

Slow violence foregrounds questions of time, specifically gradual, drawn-out timescales; externality, on the other hand, is primarily spatial, foregrounding questions of inside and outside, proximate and distant, visible and invisible. The imaginative critique in the novels considered seems to operate at that point of articulation, moving, if anything, from resisting outside space to exposing violent time. Reading externalization also clarifies the operation that links the natural world and human populations in these novels: rather than demoting disposable populations to the level of scenery, they raise the setting to the level of character and therefore consideration. In this way, they can be read as responding to what Nixon describes as not only a strategic but a specifically and deeply representational challenge: of conveying in narrative form kinds of exploitation which are image-poor, slow-moving, and anonymous (Nixon, 2011: 11, 277). In reading the ecological and political together, it is perhaps not surprising that the distinctions between the colonial and postcolonial — always under examination — are similarly blurred. As Pablo Mukherjee argues in Postcolonial Environments, the “postcolonial” can be understood not as a clean break between European domination and national independence, but rather as an intensification of exploitation (2010: 5–6). I therefore maintain an emphasis on the operations rather than the instances of exploitation, through constructions of externality or disposability, conceived here as outsiderhood. Additionally, I aim to pay attention first, as Mukherjee does, to the literariness of these novels, through which the “necessarily linked devastation of the humans, non-humans, soil, air, water” is performed (2010: 11).

Outsides: “the world of water and trees”

Through their portrayal of the natural world, reef and jungle, as interpenetrated by and actively relevant to the human world, these novels resist its characterization as spatial externality. The natural world is represented as neither impotent nor invulnerable; it is the subject of, rather than merely the context for, the narrative. This foregrounding of the natural world diminishes its invisibility and provokes an imaginative shift to a longer timescale. This, among other things, reveals the effects, jointly on both nature and populace, of slower kinds of violence (Nixon, 2011: xiii).

In The Village in the Jungle, the metaphoric link between jungle and sea is strengthened about half way through the novel, as the two elements meet at the coast and become symbolically conjoined. The protagonist Silindu and his gentle son-in-law, Babun, are falsely accused of theft by the village headman. They are tried before the colonial judge, having travelled from the village to the relatively large town on the coast, three days’ journey away. The narrative shifts between the court proceedings — involving failures of translation at multiple levels, linguistic, cultural, discursive — and the view from the courthouse windows:

The courthouse stood on a bare hill which rose above the town, a small headland which ran out into the sea to form one side of the little bay. The judge, as he sat upon the bench, looked out through the great open doors opposite to him, down upon the blue waters of the bay, the red roofs of the houses, and then the interminable jungle, the grey jungle stretching out to the horizon and the faint line of the hills. And throughout the case this vast view, framed like a picture in the heavy wooden doorway, was continually before the eyes of the accused. Their eyes wandered from the bare room to the boats and the canoes, bobbing up and down in the bay, to the group of little figures on the shore hauling in the great nets under the blazing sun, to the dust storms sweeping over the jungle, miles away where they lived. (114)

The metaphoric correspondence between sea and jungle is transformed into a literal overlap, the jungle stretching almost to the beach, separated from the blue waters of the bay only by a thin line of houses. The bay, the beach, and the jungle — metonymically indicated by boats, fishermen, and village — are linked by the wandering eye movements of the judge and the accused. The villagers gaze over the jungle, which both obscures and leads to their home in the village, and the ocean bears a similar significance for the judge, as both barrier and pathway to his more distant home.

After the long and dispiriting case, for the last time before making his judgement, the judge leans back and gazes out of the window: “The wind had died away, and the sea and jungle lay still and silent under the afternoon sun. The court seemed very small now, suspended over this vast and soundless world of water and trees” (125). At this late moment, the jungle and the sea are linked both in stillness and through the telescoping effect of the now even more distant vantage point, as the judge gazes from a suspended position seemingly a world apart. The distance highlights the ultimate powerlessness of the judge even as he pronounces the sentence of imprisonment. The perspective seems to shift to the natural world itself — the world of water and trees — to which the court, with all its colonial significance and devastating impact on Silindu’s life, appears tiny and faraway.

There is an ambivalence in these depictions: the natural world represents both barrier and connection, both intrusive presence and impassive observer. In the passage from Reef, quoted above, the correspondence between reef and jungle rests partly on the sense that, as Woolf’s narrator repeatedly avers, “all jungles are evil” (10). Both writers describe the natural world in terms of fear and hunger. Triton realizes that the reef is “ever hungry”, that “everything is devouring its surroundings”. He is startled, frightened by it. Woolf’s narrator insists that “the rule of the jungle is first fear, and then hunger and thirst” (11):

There is fear everywhere: in the silence and in the shrill calls and the wild cries, in the stir of the leaves and the grating of branches, in the gloom, in the startled, slinking, peering beasts. And behind the fear is always the hunger and the thirst, and behind the hunger and the thirst fear again. (11)

Yet, Silindu feels as much fear for the jungle as love, approaching it “with a long, slinking stride, which seemed to show at once both the fear and the joy in his heart” (14). And while Triton as a young boy is terrified by the reef and ocean, his employer and interlocutor, Mister Salgado, treats them with appreciative awe.

These representations highlight the incomprehensibility and independence of the natural world, a world “where a man [is] helpless before the unseen and unintelligible powers surrounding him” (Woolf, 2008: 21). Sharae Deckard, in her chapter “Jungle Tide, Devouring Reef” (2010), describes this independence as the “radical alterity” of Ceylonese nature, through a reading of the two novels alongside British civil servant John Still’s collection of essays, The Jungle Tide (1930), and in their wider Ceylonese and Sri Lankan historical context. Focusing on nineteenth-century highland clearances and the twentieth-century implementation of the Mahaweli Dam Scheme, she argues that the representation of natural alterity has a dubious colonial legacy of nature-domination. During the early colonial period, portraying the jungle as dangerous and apart justified deforestation in favour of lucrative coffee and tea plantations (2010: 34). By the time of Woolf’s writing, that narrative is inflected by colonial guilt at overly successful deforestation and exploitation. Therefore, as Deckard suggests, the jungle is portrayed by Woolf either as “a malignant force directed against human civilization” or, later in the novel, as “a set of complex biotic interactions between animals, humans, and their ecosystem, a positive image of radical otherness” (2010: 36–38).

In the case of Reef it is the ocean rather than the jungle that signifies the environmental “outside”, signalled by Mister Salgado’s obsessive interest in marine biology. During the postcolonial period, it is the relatively unfamiliar and actively encroaching ocean which constitutes the site of environmental anxiety. The mid-century shift away from sea to road and air travel decreased everyday contact with the ocean at the same time as it overcame overland impenetrability. In addition, the shift in significance could be due in part to what historian Sujit Sivasundaram describes as a process of practical and discursive “islanding” by European, and particularly British, colonists: a tactic by means of which the island was “cast off” from the mainland through dredging of the channel and rivalry between the Ceylonese Crown Colony and the East India Company in India (Sivasundaram, 2013: 14; see also Jazeel, 2002).

Reef in particular emphasizes the way in which nature can neither be ignored nor easily mentally managed. Mister Salgado, preoccupied by the island’s slowly disappearing reef, describes to Triton the reef’s fragility, a function of its thin, living skin of polyps:

You see, this polyp is really very delicate. It has survived aeons, but even a small change in the immediate environment — even su if you pee on the reef — could kill it. Then the whole thing will go. And if the structure is destroyed, the sea will rush in. The sand will go. The beach will disappear. (58)

The apocalyptic future that he describes, in which the island of Sri Lanka disappears under the tidal wave of the oncoming ocean, turned out to be prescient: on 26 December 2004, the Indian Ocean tsunami struck the coasts of Sri Lanka, with devastating consequences. Additionally, those consequences were far worse in places that had experienced coral bleaching, mining, or stripping (Fernando et al., 2005: 201, 304). The fear of such an occurrence is a very vivid possibility to the young Triton, whose first experience of the sea is as terrifying as the reef, convinced as he is that “the sea will be the end of us all”: “those two nights we spent on tour I felt the sea getting closer; each wave just a grain of sand closer to washing the life out of us” (70). There is a slow, creeping pace to Triton’s terror, one that mirrors Mister Salgado’s sense of gradual destruction.

Therefore, while the natural world is portrayed as independent, it is never irrelevant. Gunesekera’s reef, like Woolf’s jungle, is active, dynamic, violent, rather than merely a static background. Both novels suggest an epiphanic discovery of the non-static, non-externalized natural world, and in both cases this experience is unnerving and disorienting as well as illuminating. Similar to Gunesekera’s active, dynamic reef, in the final pages of Woolf’s novel, the jungle is revealed to Silindu’s surviving daughter, Punchi Menika, as a living, moving entity. At this point, she “had returned to the jungle; it had taken her back; she lived as she had done; understanding it, loving it, fearing it” (178). The jungle is recovered, as Deckard describes, as an integral part of human life: inside and outside become indistinguishable.

The jungle also finally overcomes the village, not least in physical terms:

The fence itself merged into the low scrub which surrounded it, growing into a thick line of small trees. The wara bushes, with their pale grey thick leaves and purple flowers, the rank grass, the great spined slabs of prickly pear, crawled out from under the shadow of the fence over the compound up to the walls and the very door. […] Great weeds, and even bushes, began to grow up between the tiles, from seeds dropped by birds or scattered by the wind. An immense twisted cactus towered over the roof. The tiles were dislodged and pushed aside by the roots. The jungle was bursting through the walls, overwhelming the house from above. The jungle moved within the walls: at last they crumbled; the tiled roof fell in. (168–9)

After the intervening tale of village politics and colonial injustice, the jungle returns to a place of dominance here at the end of the novel. Simultaneously, the narrative adopts a bird’s eye view and elongated temporality. Observed at this fast-forwarded time-scale, the jungle appears as a great, crashing, oceanic wave, bursting through the walls and crashing down upon the house.

In Reef, Lucy-amma, Mister Salgado’s first cook and Triton’s teacher, is so elderly that she has lived through a number of cycles such as the one portrayed in close-up in Woolf’s novel:

The place where she had been born had turned from village to jungle and back to village, time and again, over her seventy-odd years. The whole country had been turned from jungle to paradise to jungle again, as it has been even more barbarically in my own life. (25)

The natural world requires a shift in timescale, one that resets the balance between nature and culture, the human and nonhuman worlds. This shift is evoked by one of Mister Salgado’s lectures, through which Triton learns a longer history than the one to which he is accustomed:

I was spellbound. I could see the whole of our world come to life when he spoke: the great tanks, the sea, the forests, the stars. […] His words conjured up adventurers from India north and south, the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British, each with their flotillas of disturbed hope and manic wanderlust. They had come full of the promise of cinnamon, pepper, clove, and found a refuge in this jungle of demons and vast quiet waters. (95)

Gunesekera, in this civil-war era novel, refocuses attention on slower manifestations of violence, waves of colonialism and gradual environmental destruction, rather than on the explosive, immediate violence of the civil war.

Both novels provoke this temporal shift, one that embraces a swathe of colonial history alongside an ongoing, cyclical process of natural change. In so doing, they expose the kinds of violence that have only gradually revealed consequences, and occur over a longer time period, effecting not only environmental destruction but social injustice. Slow violence, as Nixon describes, is that which “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space” (2011: 2). In writing the reef and jungle as central, both writers resist their externalization as somehow negligible, outside of the bounds of consideration; and in so doing reveal kinds of violence which are equally gradual and invisible.

Outsiders: “skull-heaps”

Externality can be a matter of space — whether jungle or ocean — which is figured in both colonial and national discourse as outside or beyond human affairs. Yet, empty, outside space is constructed and fictional (the uninhabited continent of imperial hopes was never truly in existence) and any externality is therefore at least partly or possibly human — either the humanity of future generations, as Clark suggests, or that of subalternity, as Nixon. Just as these novels disrupt the notion of a separate, ignorable or even assimilable natural world, they simultaneously place subaltern characters at the centre of the narrative, portraying the ways in which individuals or groups, portrayed instrumentally as outsiders, are sometimes made to bear disproportionate costs.

Other than its description of the jungle, The Village in the Jungle is remarkable for its preponderant focus on the experience and perspectives of the most marginalized of Ceylonese society. Christopher Ondaatje, in his afterword to the novel, suggests that it “shows a remarkable, deep empathy for the hard lives of poor Sinhalese jungle dwellers and their psychology, and gives a devastating portrayal of the irrelevance of the colonial regime to their needs and world” (2008: 201). It is in portraying this irrelevance that the novel can be read as a searing anti-colonial critique, as others in this special issue have also observed, an important precursor to Woolf’s anti-colonial activism on his return to London. In addition, however, the novel also offers a more universal critique: every intervening level of society attempts to employ the villager–protagonists to their own ends, exploiting them for economic, sexual, revenge, or other purposes. The protagonists seem to epitomize subalternity, and it is partly this that makes the sustained focus on their voice and experience so remarkable. As Elleke Boehmer writes, Woolf, by various formal means, provides “a view from within, of subjectivities which are in place in this environment” (2000: 207).

It is worth noting, however speculatively, that the sympathy Woolf displays may have something to do with the fact that he was himself considered an outsider, on the periphery of the Bloomsbury group, partly as a result of his Jewishness (see Rosenfeld, 2001; Ho, 2013; also Glendinning, 2015). Janice Ho argues that The Village in the Jungle implicitly links the position of Jews in English society with the worst-off of colonial society, and, insofar as it does, connects domestic with foreign structures of marginalization. This, she suggests, gestures at a transnational framework for reading histories of oppression in relation rather than isolation (Ho, 2013: 715). The novel, rather than being about “too many blacks”, as Lytton Strachey observed, examines the condition of outsiderhood in more general terms, a critique which therefore also, I would suggest, extends to the “outside” status of the jungle.

Woolf highlights the analogy between the natural world and the subaltern villagers in both physical and existential terms. Just as their smells are identical, the first rule of the jungle is the same for the village: “just as in the jungle fear and hunger for ever crouch, slink, and peer with every beast, so hunger and the fear of hunger always lay upon the village”. As he goes on, “the spirit of the jungle is in the village, and in the people who live in it” (14). Additionally, the protagonists are characterized by a special relationship with the jungle. Both Silindu, and later his daughters, spend their lives in the jungle. Silindu is described as having better knowledge of the jungle than any man in the district, although, as suggested, his feeling for it is a complex mix of terror and love. He speaks to the animals, calling the tigress he meets she-devil, as she calls him he-devil. He delights in telling his young daughters stories of the jungle, the “world of trees and the perpetual twilight of their shade” (21).

The mutually constitutive nature of the relationship is most fully developed in the case of Silindu’s sister, Karlinahami, who at the end of her life is described as almost indistinguishable from the jungle:

Her body was bent and twisted, like the stunted trees, which the south-west wind had tortured into grotesque shapes. The skin too, on her face and thin limbs reminded one of the bark of the jungle trees; it was shrunken against the bones, and wrinkled, and here and there flaking off into whitish brown scales, as the bark flakes off the kumbuk trees. (167)

Through time, the woman and the jungle have merged, in a manner that foreshadows Punchi Menika’s absorption into the jungle at the end of the novel, described in the previous section. It is through this absorption that she develops the capacity to understand and talk to the animals and devils, as her father had done, becoming in the process “one of the beasts of the jungle” (179). It is this final isolation — “it was as if she was the last person left in the world” (179) — that both confirms the wrongs done to her and her family, and offers her a reprieve through forgetfulness, as well as a kind of community.

Gunesekera’s novel more overtly evokes the correlation between environmental degradation and political violence, mapping through its narrative shifts the links between the slow, invisible beginnings of the civil war and the slow, invisible destruction of the oceanic reef. The novel is set between the 1960s and the 1980s, and traces the growing tensions between Tamils and Sinhalese leading to the outbreak of violence in 1971 and again in 1983 (Pichler, 2011: 93). In the first chapter of the novel, entitled “A Breach”, Triton encounters a Sri Lankan refugee at a petrol station, whose face through the glass of the attendant’s window looks uncannily like his own. Triton speaks Sinhalese and the attendant Tamil, and the two have trouble understanding one another in English. The encounter opens up a breach, as it were, to the past and to memories which have been held at bay for over twenty years in England. The attendant, Triton finds out, is from Silavatturai, and the place name prompts an initial, vivid memory: “I could see a sea of pearls. Once a diver’s paradise. Now a landmark for gunrunners in a battle zone of army camps and Tigers” (12). The image highlights the confluence of the degraded natural environment and the political conflict, setting the tone for the rest of the novel.

The main section of Reef proceeds with an almost hermetic attention to Mister Salgado’s house and garden, laying narrative weight on the private lives of the protagonists rather than the dire political backdrop:

All over the globe revolutions erupted, dominoes tottered and guerrilla war came of age; the world’s first woman prime minister — Mrs Bandaranaike — lost her spectacular premiership on our small island, and I learned the art of housekeeping. (55)

Despite this somewhat bathetic deflection, there is in the background a mature awareness of political realities throughout the novel. When Triton’s uncle drops him off with his distant relative, Triton is latterly aware that, to his uncle, “Mister Salgado was probably not much more than a boy, but a boy whom history had favoured — a product of modern feudalism — whereas my uncle was a road-runner, a driver for an oil company” (16). There is an overarching sense of class conflict, and the narrator, whose voice and perspective dominate almost entirely, is, significantly, doubly subaltern, as both child and servant.

In addition to this, like The Village in the Jungle, Reef imaginatively merges the island’s human and natural subjects, particularly as joint victims of war and destruction. The fishermen that Triton and Mister Salgado encounter around the coral reef research site are increasingly idle, as fish stocks decline due to overfishing: “Sometimes we go all night and there’s nothing. Not like in the old days when they used to fly into our hands” (124). These ex-fishermen mine the coastal coral to act as an ingredient in cement, and the coral they leave drying on the beaches is referred to as “skull-heaps”. The following passage self-consciously contrasts the idyllic, paradisiacal version of the Sri Lankan coastline with the invisible, underwater destruction:

We drove for hours; whistling over a ribbon of tarmac measuring the perpetual embrace of the shore and the sea, bounded by a fretwork of undulating coconut trees, pure unadorned forms framing the seascape into a kaleidoscope of bluish jewels. […] Mister Salgado only slowed down when we came to the skull-heaps of petrified coral — five-foot pyramids beside smoky kilns — marking the allotments of a line of impoverished limemakers, tomorrow’s cement fodder, crumbling on the loveliest stretch of coast. (69)

The chunks of dead, bone-like coral by the side of the road are an almost spectral intrusion of an outside space, the undersea world, into the socio-political landscape of the narrative.

Just as the coral appears as bone, later, the bodies of the war-dead float in the surf like torn-off coral. The many dead in the Sri Lankan civil war are imagined, by the expatriate Triton, as having been thrown in the sea, so that “every morning they reappeared by the dozen: bloated and disfigured, rolling in the surf” (176). As he goes on:

“Our civilizations are so frail”, Mister Salgado said, reading the news reports of ghastly beheadings on the beach. But these were only precursors of the staggering brutality that came, wave after wave, in the decades that followed […] The bodies would roll again and again in the surf, they would be washed in by the tide and be beached by the dozen. (183)

The slippage between the body of the reef and of the populace is suggested by the epigraph to the novel, the well-known line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “Of his bones are coral made”. In this case, rather than the absorption of a corpse in the seabed, the coral itself is revealed as originally part of a living body.

Rather than distracting from the novel’s political import, then, its emphasis on the ocean relates crucially to the exposure of exploitation broadly conceived; just as the writing into centrality of the jungle in Woolf’s novel works together with its evocation of slowly-operating colonial oppression. In these ways, among others, both novels portray the overlaps between the people and the spaces that are externalized in the interests of colonialism or capital. Sri Lanka is written here as both an environmental and a social space, and the novels perform the difficult task of portraying the slippage between these categories, and in so doing shore up the one against the other.

Conclusion: an imagined world

It is this slippage — or, expressed in another way, connection — which is possibly, in the end, most significant. Timothy Clark suggests that ecocriticism, and this is certainly true of postcolonial ecocriticism, is peculiarly challenging because thinking the environment means “thinking everything at once” (2010: vi). It may be useful to take Gunesekera’s Mister Salgado as a model of sorts, in attempting to convey the challenge of holistic thought to which the novels seem to respond. For him, in Triton’s words, “there were no boundaries to knowledge” (34). He conveys to the young boy a sense of social space that links jungles and oceans, as well as one mind to another:

“You remember, all one ocean, no? The debris of one mind floats to another. The same little polyp grows the idea in another head.” He smiled and touched my head. […] “In our minds we have swum in the same sea. Do you understand? An imagined world”. (186)

It is this imagined world which, produced spatially and socially in these novels, embraces the links between space and populace, environmental destruction and subaltern oppression. In placing the natural world centre-stage, closer to the narrative status of character than backdrop, both resist constructions of externality and embrace an elongated temporality that exposes the otherwise largely invisible effects of slow violence. In addition, they reveal and employ the slippage from outside to outsider, performing the interlinked nature of reef and populace, jungle and village.