Beings Seen and Unseen An Interview with Amitav Ghosh

 

Amitav Ghosh:

 

Wisdom exists in the context of stories, in the context of storytelling, in the context of songs. And all of that is what we’ve lost and what we have to try and bring back.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Amitav Ghosh calls on storytellers to lead us in the necessary work of collective reimagining: decentering human narratives and re-centering stories of the land.

https://emergencemagazine.org/interview/beings-seen-and-unseen/

 

Photo by Sumit Dayal

CONTRIBUTOR BIOS

August 31, 2022

In this wide-ranging conversation, Amitav Ghosh calls on storytellers to lead us in the necessary work of collective reimagining: decentering human narratives and re-centering stories of the land.

Transcript

Emergence MagazineYour new book, The Nutmeg’s Curse, takes you on a remarkably deep journey into our collective past, exploring the root causes of climate change and ecocide, and how climate change is intimately linked to colonialism, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and structures of organized violence that you describe as being foundational in forming the modern geopolitical order. And you take us on this journey through the story of the nutmeg, the spice that originated in the Banda Islands in Indonesia. The nutmeg really becomes the lens through which you explore so much in this book. How and why did you end up choosing the nutmeg to tell this story?

Amitav GhoshWell, I think the nutmeg’s history encapsulates the history of the planet in some bizarre way—the modern history of the nutmeg. Because really, the nutmeg was a gift of volcanic earth. It was a gift of incredible forests, of Maluku. And in the end, for more than a millennium, it made the people of this tiny archipelago, the Banda Islands, rich and prosperous, and they had good lives. They were rich. They were great traders. They were trading across the oceans. But in the end, it brought doom upon them. All that prosperity and wealth was really a kind of mirage, because ultimately those people were just massacred by the Dutch colonialists. It was one of the first early modern genocides. So the people of the Banda Islands became among the earliest victims of what you might call the resource curse. And in a sense, that’s exactly the curse that’s fallen upon the entire planet, and it’s come about now because we’ve treated the planet as a sort of inert repository of resources for a very long time. But the planet is striking back, you might say, almost vindictively at us.

EMMm-hmm. You wr