Ecocriticism and the Bhopal Disaster: Indra Sinha's Animal's People, Appunti di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Ecocriticism and the Bhopal Disaster: Indra Sinha's Animal's People e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! 31/03/2022 Letterature anglofone Oggi ci sarà l’inizio di un nuovo discorso perché ieri abbiamo concluso le riflessioni su Coetzee. Today we will start another part of the course and we will analyse another author, another novel. The series of questions tight to the main themes, which are ecology and eco criticism. We are trying to look through novels, thinking about one particulation of the main problem of ecology, so we try to apply ecocriticism each time from different perspectives to render the complexity of this approach and the complexity of the ecological crisis. We are always looking at the same phenomenon but in a way from different perspectives, new novels, so we are also trying to assess the genre of the novel, the quality of the writing and the various stylistic devices. We are trying to keep a sort of double double course: on one hand the issue of the course, and on the other hand the fact that this is a course in the humanities and it is, in particular, on literature. So, we are trying to match literature and ecology each time in a slightly different way. Of course we will repeat some things because some contents come back regularly, but we are trying, each time we talk about a new author, to add something: a new perspective, a different one. Our next author is Indra Sinha. Indra Sinha was born in 1950 in Mumbai, alias Bombay, Maharashtra, India. He is a British writer of Indian and English descent. His father was an officer in the Indian Navy and his mother an English writer, so his nationality is mixed. He was educated in India and successively in England to refine and to complete his education, where he studied English literature. At the moment, he and his wife live in France. So, indeed his ethnicity is mixed by these two cultures and it is even more mixed because English culture, Indian culture and French culture flow together in his background. He was formerly a copywriter in London and Sinha has the distinction of having been voted one of the top ten British copywriters of all time. So, he was particularly efficacious, particularly effective in doing these activities. In particular, he became very known for hard-hitting, campaigning advertising for charities. So, in his activity of copywriter he often worked for charities such as Amnesty International and other companies. In particular he worked for the Bhopal Medical Appeal, which was a particular campaign raising funds for the victims of Bhopal incident, which is very important for us and our understanding of the book we are going to read, which is Animal’s people. At a certain point he was very successful as a copywriter but increasingly he got disenchanted with commercial advertising. So, he has split himself between commercial advertising and charities. In 1995, Sinha resigned from the agency to concentrate on writing, on literature. Works by Indra Sinha •His works include translations of ancient Sanskrit texts into English. He was born in India, so he devoted himself also to the study of a very old Indian language, which is Sanskrit, which is like for us Greek and Latin are, so dead language but which are very important to someone’s cultural heritage. He has translated into English from Sanskrit, he has published a non-fiction memoir of the pre-internet generation (The Cybergypsies), and a novel, The Death of Mr. Love. • Animal's People, his most renowned novel which was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize and was also the winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Europe and South Asia. There is a difference between him and the other writers because the others are typical literary authors. He is less typical, he has published less but what he has published has met quite relevant success because one of two novels was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. We are interested in him in particular for his campaign about the Bhopal incident. It is something like Chernobyl. In the 80’ two great accidents occurred and the first of these two was Bhopal, which is a town in India. Indra Sinha and Bhopal Sinha has been a passionate campaigner for justice for the victims of the Bhopal disaster since 1993. So he began this campaign in 1993 in favor of the victims of a ten years previous occurred accident. In 1993 he created the first advertisement for the Bhopal Medical Appeal that raised money to build a clinic to provide free treatment for the survivors. He is an outspoken critic of the multinational owner of Union Carbide, whose neglected chemical plant (stabilimento) in the city of Bhopal (a big city in Madhya Pradesh) leaked 27 tonnes of poisonous gas on the night of 3 December 1984 (you can see below a title of the journal and some victims), killing up to 8,000 people and injuring upwards of half a million, so 5000 were injured. Around 22,000 people have died as a result of injuries sustained on "that night". There are a number of victims, dead one or just injured, they got deformed from this. More than 100,000 remain chronically ill, even today; the abandoned, derelict factory continues to leach toxic chemicals into the groundwater, poisoning wells. So, they are still there and they are still poisoning the waters and, somehow, also the air, like Chernobyl. You cannot live near Chernobyl because it is still releasing his poisonous material into the air. It is a sort of a time bomb, because it was deflagrated at the time, but it went realising his poisonous and toxic materials all these years. It is almost 40 years of leaking his poisonous materials. You can see some pictures here connecting to what happened. to hug) forest movement and the Narmada Valley Dam protests (in which Arundhati Roy, a novelist, was involved). -> we have to figure out this sort of situation similar to the beginning of the modernity era in Europe. In the XVI century there was the phenomenon of the enclosures -> it was the first time, here in Europe when the land, which was considered a common property, was enclosured and privatized. Capitalism was born in the country and then it also originated the industrial revolution. But, from the phenomenon of the enclosures to the industrial revolution, to the modernity in the terms we now know, it has passed 400 years, almost 500 now, half a millennium from XVI century to the XXI century. So the West has at the time to deal with the consequences of this turbulent change in the economic model. Nonetheless we are suffering sometimes from this, we are still trying to cope with Neoliberalism and we are still worried about its consequences. But here, in the West, we have had the time to 30:29 these complexities. In the developing countries everything has happened in a much shorter time. So, they are facing the contradictions and the consequences of a too quick development. So, development is not bad in itself but 30:56 to hurried way, in a rush, then the consequences are really hard to cope with. This situation has affected more than everyone else the environment. In some areas of Africa is the same. Full-stomach and empty stomach environmentalism The Chipko and later Narmada Valley dam protests embody the distinction between the ‘full-stomach’ environmentalism of rich conservationists who seek to protect endangered species and habitats and the ‘empty-belly’ environmentalism of the poor, who fight to preserve the basis of their livelihoods… The environmentalism of the poor conjoins social justice with sustainability, emphasizing how unequal patterns of resource use damage environments and structurally disadvantaged communities, particularly minority, low-caste, and adivasi (indian name for indigenous) peoples or tribles (because in India there is a huge minority, about 80 millions people who are just tribles) . (S. Deckard) Particularly affected not only by Neoliberalism but also a kind of environmentalism whose goal is to protect 34:05, the environment and the animal species. So they are 34:19 carving parts for the protection of the endangered species, such as the elephants or the tigers. But to protect the tigers sometimes they evict the people from these areas. People who are able to survive because they were living in these areas and they were able to go to the wood for timber and for wood or to grow vegetables from small plots of lands. In the West, environmentalism is one and has just one main goal? 35:15 goal to protect the environment for our earth too. In developing countries sometimes this is an environmentalism which tries to protect the land, condemns the people to become refugees, to leave the lands of residence. You see the contradiction, they should go hand in hand but it is not easy in this context because the context is so full of contradictions that even environmentalism cannot be easy, linear. Reduce animals and people to fight for the same plot of land, we will see this in another novel that we will read (the angry..). We will see another aspect of environmentalism crisis in India SLOW VIOLENCE Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, 2011- Slow violence - Environmentalism of the global South - Writer-activism pp.1-6, 15 Rob Nixon was one the first to point at this difference between these two categories of environmentalism and to focus on the problem of creating a new form of environmentalism that in the developing countries could reconcile the necessities of both animals and of the poor, not to make them diverge or even to 37:29 to fight each other , but to make theme converge towards the same goal, which is to be able to survive in a natural environment which is not polluted but free of contaminations. The situation is that nowadays the land is either under the control of the corporations and the industrial system of exploitation of the resources or it is polluted,so it is not useful for nobody. Nobody is able to live on this already corrupted land. In this essay he introduces the category of “Slow Violence” and also he introduces the writer-activism, so the importance of humanities in dealing that such issues. In particular he draws his attention to the analysis of environmentalism in the global 39:00 there was already environmental sensibility. This sensibility has to be spread also in the global 39:13 but taking into account the situation and so connecting people to nature and not to privilege the second, sacrificing the first or vice versa. Animal’s People In the novel, magic realist tropes are employed, to relate the story of a major historical disaster (on one hand we have history, something that has really occurred, historical facts, on the other hand we have literature, not a particularly realistic kind of literature, but a literature which recurs to the magic realism. The magic realism was developed by latin american writers, but in India has found many exponents too, for example Rushdie, Tiroy and many others. Here we do find elements, but we cannot define novels completely, fully as magic realism. This is because Indian culture is in a way quite similar to Latin American culture. There is an attention towards the supernatural, so the supernatural is part of the imaginary. So, here we do find magic realistic tropes applied to a very hard reality, which is the story of historical disaster ): the infamous Bhopal tragedy. The causes of this tragedy – (which are) corporate negligence, political complicity, international structures of power, sabotage – are all reworked and and re-examined through the account of ‘Animal’, the protagonist of the novel (and the character through whom we focalised the story). Animal, victim of a chemical disaster caused by a ‘Company’ in Sinha’s novel, is a boy with a twisted spine, who roams around the fictional city of Khaufpur (it means ‘Fearville’, the city of fear) on his hands and feet (because of his deformed spine. He isn't able to have a standing position and to walk on his legs) (The disaster is the Bhopal disaster and the Company is the Union Carbide-> we know this but in the novel it is never mentioned in these terms because the town has a fictional name and the Company is labeled just as “The Company”. Why? In a way it is a reference of what happened in Bhopal, a reconstruction of what happened but it is also a fictionalized version of what can happen everywhere. It is pointing at what happened actually but what is liable to happen everywhere there is such an economic system and such a political collusion and such a poverty exploited by foreign corporations and so on. So it is a way to talk about that occurrence, that historical fact and at the same time to talk about a way of functioning of a certain model of economy in the developing countries. The corporations are really free to do whatever they want, to exploit, to poison and then to go away without pay anything) Characters ● Animal an orphan who rejects sympathy (who was not pitied, he abhors this pity )(he isn’t a pitiful character, he is a sort of picaresque, a literary category derived from some spanish novels of the XVI century and then developing in Europe, Germany, England. The Picar is a boy, usually roaming freely in town and criticizing society but in a very irreverent way, with the salacious style of the espressione?47:56. It is not pitiful, not a kind of sentimentalized narrative, it is very daring)spouts profanity and is obsessed by sex and the impossibility to have a normal sexual life (he is 18 when the story begins, so hi his in the full of his youth, he is not considered a man, but, in a way, he is a man because he is on the verge of adulthood. The strategy of the novel is not to silence this, but to give voice to rage, fear, envy and all the bad feelings that the situation implies when you are deformed by an accident. You are not really kind, you are not a very refined person. If you have to survive in the streets by little 49:49 threats, by little trade, by asking alms -la carità-, living on charity. ● Jara, Animal’s dog who stays always with her master (she is the beast of an animal…) The funny thing is that the name of the protagonist is the name of the animal, his name is animal, he wants to be called Beast. ● Nisha, a beautiful and gentle girl Animal falls in love with. Nisha sees Animal in the gutter and introduces him to Zafar. She is the object of his affection, yet sees him as a friend only. ● Pandit Somraj Tryambak Punekar, Nisha's father and a music teacher who no longer sings, because the night of the accident not only he lost his wife and baby son, but had his lungs damaged by the chemicals, too. ● Ma Franci, a French old nun who reared Animal. She acts as Animal's mother figure and can be described as kind, although mildly senile. Her affliction from the accident is her loss of understanding Hindi and English. She believes that everyone else is speaking gibberish and is unable to understand that they are using another language. ● Zafar is Nisha's activist boyfriend. He sacrifices everything, including his studies, in favour of the victims of the incident. He is considered a leader and a hero by the citizens of Khaufpur. ● Elli Barber, a young American doctor who comes to Khaupfur to open a free clinic. She is frequently described as an object of lust for Animal and others in the town. Acting out of philanthropy, she struggles to find acceptance. ● Anjali a young prostitute, who accepts with naturalness Animal’s freakish aspect; at the end of the story Animal will set her free, in order to live with her.