"every moment takes on a startling clarity; small things bec

These moments of clarity for the characters are particular to each one, but it is in these understandings that we begin to see the dichotomies Ghosh has highlighted in this world.

fluidity of time

"But to look at them you would never know: the specialty of mangroves is that they do not merely recolonize the land; they erase time." (43)

past versus present

"'But we're here in the present now, aren't we?'...'Oh, no,' he said emphatically, 'For me Lusibari will always be part of the past.'" (165)

In The Hungry Tide, Ghosh weaves past and present. This quote is from Nirmal, explaining to a child Kanai about S'Daniel. Without a change of tense, the narrative switches immediately to modern Piya to Kanai and Nirmal in the past. The effect is that time itself in the novel is fluid. For Kanai, Lusibari might mean only exist in the past, but for Ghosh, the difference is negotiable.

For Kanai especially there is a significant divide between past, present, and future. He colors the landscape around him, but talking to Piya at this moment, Lusibari can only exist in the past, not the present.

fluidity of perspective

poetry

versus prose

fluidity of language

Perhaps seen most notably in Nirmal and Nilima's relationship, Nirmal believes in the dichotomy of poetry versus prose, the dreamers versus the builders.

"He'd have said, 'It's just social service--not revolution." (320)

the exciting versus the everyday

In a similar vein, Kanai feels the same struggle, as he speaks of the temptation to alter or heighten circumstance when translating.

"Not to succumb was to make yourself dispensable; to give in was to destroy the value of your word and thus your work." (265)

Ghosh's writing style not only weaves through times, but also through perspective. We move back and forth between Piya, Kanai, and Nirmal mainly, but sometimes we get other voices too. Fokir is not given a voice until the very end, and even then filtered through Kanai. Given the omniscient narrator, we often are uncertain of whose perspective we reading.

language versus existence

In Kanai's mind at least, there is not a way to embellish and also be truthful--to him this is what a "translator's bluff" is. There is not way to translate and retain the original meaning. There is that that is translated and exciting and that which is what it was--reality.

"He was a man of many words, your uncle--and I had very few. I knew he was wooing her with his stories and tales--and I had nothing to give her but my presence, but in the end it was me she chose." (301)

For everyone, language means something different. Kanai treats language a commodity that he sells, or gives, such as the story he 'gifts' to Piya. Piya observes language as "a bag of tricks that foolled you" (132). Horen entreats Nirmal to share language, for if Nirmal is reading he asks "why not tell me too" (121).

Ghosh often presents this question of language versus a language-less existence or connection. Piya and Fokir's relationship is also speechless for the most part. At moments language is not needed, other times it is all that is discussed, and sometimes both language and other forms of communication are woven together.

Piya and Fokir in the tree at the end:

"She remembered how close his lips had been to her ear, so close that it was from their movement, rather than from the sounds he uttered, that she had understood he was saying the names of his wife and his son." (324)

Even Ghosh's language must be fluid; he moves between narratives, between other's poetry and his poetic prose. He even uses language to ironically describe these language-less moments.

"For this I have seen confirmed many times, that the mudbanks of the tide country are shaped not only by rivers of silt but also by rivers of language...Flowing into one another they create a proliferation of small worlds that hang suspended in the flow." (205)

"Now, as she sat in the boat thinking about these connections and interrelations, Piya had to close her eyes, so dazzling was the universe of possibilities that opened in her mind." (105)

"every moment takes on a startling clarity; small things become the world in microcosm" (Ghosh, 124)

As Piya imagines "each balloon...a floating biodome," and realizes the connectivity of the ecosystem she seeks to study, she is consumed by the "startling clarity" of the moment.

This moment of Nirmal's comes at a time when he is considering the origins of an old and heavily translated story, and he sees in both the land and the language these "small worlds" that are born of intersections between many other. Each of these worlds come into being in relationship to other worlds, and here Nirmal has another moment of clarity.

...perhaps the novel itself takes on a cyborgian shape, of undefinable contradictions and themes that endlessly connect, only to be more strange the more they do.

As Morton puts it, Piya "imagines interconnectedness" or "the mesh" (15). She realizes that it is impossible to isolate on system or organism from the rest, which Morton continues to describe as the fact that "nothing is fully 'itself'" because "nothing exists by itself" (15).

As Nirmal in The Hungry Tide writes these words, Ghosh entreats us to consider possibilities for building an ecological understanding of the complicated, interwoven world we inhabit. We can begin by finding these moments of 'clarity' in the novel, and perhaps, envisioning them as understandings of the ecological forces at work.

"The spectacle was at once elemental and intimate, immense in its scale and yet, in this moment of tranquility, oddly gentle." (260)

"It was, thus, when reality ran afoul of her vocabulary, the Nilima had her epiphany. It did not matter what they were; what mattered was that they should not remain what they were." (68)

Nilima's 'epiphany' comes first, for she searches for a term to describe the workers' widows that she meets in Lusibari, but soon realizes that to name them as a class "[introduces] a false and unsustainable division" (68). She enters the situation attempting to place an understanding that she already has onto the women there. It is once she lets herself change in response to what there is that she feels an understanding--and the possibility for improvement.

Kanai, observing the island of Garjontola in the morning, seems to understand in this moment a contradiction, something that is "immense" but also "intimate," "elemental" but "gentle." Language can only pronounce this through opposing language, but the understanding, both for Kanai and the reader, is that the landscape he has stepped into is both at once.

Morton establishes ecological thought as needing to include "hesitation, uncertainty, irony and thoughtfulness" for it opens us up to caring for the "strange stranger," for those "no matter how uncertain we are of their identity" (17, 19). Haraway identifies a cyborg as a model for "pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction" as a cyborg is "resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity"(275, 276). The both envision the 'other'--people, places, concepts that stand outside or transcend the boundaries we draw. Several of Ghosh's characters have moments where they seem to touch or understand this cyborgian other, and Ghosh makes fluid any understanding of the narrative on a whole.

In light of these dichotomies, whether recognized by characters or narration, Ghosh also facilitates the creation of the "strange stranger" and cyborgs. The fluidity of time, language and perspective in the novel are instrumental in doing so.

"In other words, they looked like prose and read like verse, a strange hybrid, I thought at first, and then it occurred to me that no, this was something remarkable and wodnerful--prose that had mounted the ladder of meter in order to ascend above the prosaic." (205)

Nirmal and Nilima may be at odds with their poetry and prose methodologies, but here Nirmal discovers that a hybrid can exists--a cyborg of language, as it were. In language Nirmal sees the potential to create a hybrid to transcend these differences, and indeed Morton agrees that "there are no realms more ambiguous than those of language and art" (18).

"Each slow turn of the world carries such disinherited ones

to whom neither the past not the future belongs." (137)

This fluidity seems a way for Ghosh to imagine the complicated social, personal, historical, geographic, and scientific issues on the page. By putting them into a narrative both bounded and aided by translation, he can give shape to an ecological picture of this world that defies a single definition or dichotomy. We can find in this fluidity the strangeness and the cyborg for...

As Morichjhapi is occupied, Nirmal quotes Rilke, and seems to have identified those belonging to no time, and also at that moment, no place. Perhaps later he makes a 'responsible choice' when classifying them, as he realizes that "where else could you belong, except where you refused to leave" (211). This quote is also a poet in translation being quoted in a narrative within a narrative we are reading. If ecological thought is "uncertain" and "thoughtful," Ghosh is presenting many of these concepts as such, through these expanding layers of translation.

If we begin to imagine language and translation as a possible way to ecologically represent the world, perhaps we should revisit these dichotomies and how Ghosh may make them more fluid than they first appear...

To return to the moments of clarity we began with, in these instances Ghosh may be portraying the brief and occasional understanding of the "big picture," the seeing of the contradictions, the connections, the microcosms and the cyborgs for what they are.

But then again, we as the reader are are implicated as much as the author, as the final layer of translation, and at the any point the web of translation and thought can branch out even further.

Works Cited

Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2006. Print.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. "A Cyborg Manifesto." Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. N. pag. Print.

Morton, Timothy. "Introduction." The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2010. 1-19. Print.