The Postcolonial Toxic Gothic in Robert Barclay’s Meļaļ: A Novel of the Pacific (original) (raw)

Abstract

Environmental justice research has shown that environmental degradation and exploitation have conspicuously adverse effects on economically and politically marginalized communities in the global South. In his recent book, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), Rob Nixon analyses the role of activist writers who decry the exploitation and contamination of the environments of the poor in their works. Nixon argues persuasively that economic and political structures of oppression corroborate and enhance the negative effects of the environmental crisis, engendering a new form of violence, a “slow violence” (Nixon 2). Characteristic of slow violence is that “its calamitous repercussions [are] playing out across a range of temporal scales” (ibid.) and, he proceeds to add, also across space. This complex temporality provides a major representational challenge to authors who engage with issues of environmental injustice and slow violence. In this paper, I’m analyzing Robert Barclay’s novel Meļaļ: A Novel of the Pacific (2002) and the narrative strategies he uses to foreground the temporal complexity of nuclear colonialism’s slow violence on the Marshall Islands. In the years between 1946 and 1963, when the archipelago served as a nuclear test site for the U.S. military, more than 90 nuclear devices were detonated, to the effect that many islands remain uninhabitable until today and a great number of Marshallese suffer from severe health disorders, like cancer, infertility or birth defects (Robie 30). The novel has an interesting narrative framework with two converging story lines. The contemporary narrative strand is told in the past tense, whereas the mythological narrative strand, which stretches from a “time even before time itself” (Barclay 27) onward, is presented in the present tense. This temporal framing suggests a correlation of environmental time with the temporality of Marshallese mythology. It thereby not only embeds the Marshall Islands’ nuclear colonial history within a history of prolonged colonial occupation, but also foregrounds the Islands’ precarious situation as endangered habitable space as a result of human agency (cf. Chakrabarty’s “geological agents”, 206). Apart from contextualising the environmental destruction of the Marshall Islands within these more encompassing temporalities, the novel also discloses the oppressive historical and political complexities of colonialism. By employing something that I call ‘postcolonial toxic gothic’, Barclay draws attention to the contaminating, corroding and pathogenic repercussions of nuclear colonialism. Referring to demonic presences from Marshallese mythology, the novel merges the gothic imagery characteristic of toxic discourses (Buell 38) with indigenous mythology. The ‘postcolonial toxic gothic’, thus, discloses contingencies between gothic representations of toxic contamination in a postcolonial condition and their origin in the ‘magical’ reality of indigenous cosmology.

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