In THE NUTMEG’S CURSE Amitav Ghosh gives voice to our ailing planet
In The Nutmeg’s Curse, Amitav Ghosh explores the epistemic gap between Enlightenment modernity’s designation of all nonhuman beings as objects meant to cater to human needs, and the indigenous worldview that identifies these ‘objects’ as active, vibrant, sentient individuals.
Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021) hinges upon a central literary conceit: the hemispheric morphology of nutmegs. Shaped like the Earth, the nutmeg’s deep structure of nested layers—along with its elliptical form—is a storied reminder, in a nutshell, of the interconnected interplay of scales that constitutes planetary ecology, where a humble and quotidian object like a tropical fruit is enmeshed in vital relations with larger climatic and geological processes. To disrupt the existence of any single player in this networked but fragile web of interdependencies is to interfere with the DNA of the planet at its eco-systemic level.
The nutmeg is Ghosh’s chosen world-historical protagonist, not only because it allows him to demonstrate ecological entanglements, but also because a crucial aspect of such planetary ecology is the interwovenness of ‘human’ history and nonhuman phenomena: vegetal, animal, mineral, and meteorological.
Ghosh brings the nutmeg to the forefront of the narrative of colonial history, showing in turn how imperial geopolitics and cultural transformations have been contingent upon human encounters with nonhuman species, and on the latter's capacity to influence bodily, affective, and psychological dispositions of individuals and collectives.
Ghosh begins by chronicling the random association of events that set into motion the course of a brutal genocide. The coveted nutmeg, which attracts the administrators of the Dutch East India Company to an Indonesian archipelago in the 17th century, ends up becoming caught in a complex and macabre drama combining greed, vengeance, fear, superstition, cultural alienation, weather, and seismic activity. As stalled negotiations for ownership of land between indigenous inhabitants of the nutmeg rich Banda islands and the company’s representatives take a neurotic turn (on the heels of an earthquake and a broken lamp), Ghosh suggests how it is the terrain itself—along with its nonhuman components—that implicates and manipulates its human interlocutors, and not the other way round. The difference between the local Bandanese of the Maluku islands, the nutmeg’s original custodians, and the European mercenary, is the ability to recognize this paradox.
The nutmeg is Ghosh’s chosen world-historical protagonist, not only because it allows him to demonstrate ecological entanglements, but also because a crucial aspect of such planetary ecology is the interwovenness of ‘human’ history and nonhuman phenomena: vegetal, animal, mineral, and meteorological.
For the Bandanese elders the nutmeg, “the gift of Gunung Api” belongs to a larger existential ethos in which consumption and use are based on a recognition of the nutmeg’s status as part of an ecological whole, a set of relations mediated by the land itself, in particular by the decisive, temperamental presence of the Gunung Api volcano:
“The modern gaze sees only one of the nutmeg’s two hemispheres: that part of it which is Myristica fragrans, a subject of science and commerce. The other half eludes it because it will only manifest itself in songs and stories. And in today’s stories and songs there is no place for the nutmeg; it is merely an inert object, a planet that contains no intrinsic meaning, and no properties other than those that make it a subject of science and commerce. For the Bandanese, too, the nutmeg was an object of horticulture and commerce, both of which demanded considerable technical and practical skills. But for them the nutmeg also had other properties, hidden in the hemisphere that recedes from the modern gaze.” (43)
Within this worldview that Ghosh variously terms “animist” and “vitalist”, human society is part of a constellation of distributed agencies, rather than an organizing and executive centre. The Dutch arrivals on the archipelago who encounter the nutmeg as a commodity to be instrumentalized and exploited do so because of an epistemic gap between Enlightenment modernity’s designation of all nonhuman beings as objects meant to cater to human needs and desires, and the indigenous worldview that identifies these ‘objects’ as active, vibrant, sentient individuals, capable of acting upon and influencing the course of human affairs. In The Nutmeg’s Curse, Ghosh attempts a rewriting of colonial ethnography to explore the geopolitical and cultural implications of this epistemic gap: the nutmeg facilitates the articulation of a new historical idiom where the contested status of the nonhuman ‘other’—and attempts to incorporate it within linguistic, cognitive, cultural, economic, and political regimes—plays a central role in the consolidation of empire, a role that is usually sidelined in standard postcolonial historiography.
The fall of a lamp that triggers a phobic violence is not mere happenstance, or if it is, it is markedly so. Ghosh’s point in reinstating this chance incident as the catalyst that brings about a major shift in colonial power dynamics is to emphasize the role of nonhuman forces, or what his citing of Louis Couperus calls “the hidden force” in determining human/cultural activity. It makes us imagine the need thus to expand our existing epistemic systems—including cultural memory and historiography—to acknowledge forms of agency that transcend the Enlightenment concept of human reason and will.
This brings him to a second feature of the nutmeg’s geological structure: its division, analogous to the earth, into two zones– of presence and absence, disclosure and obscurity, visibility and invisibility– and the nutmeg’s symbolic function in the book as an index of opacity and unknowability at the heart of all existence.
This ‘planetary’ mode of writing… exposes the links between the minute with the grand, of spices and fossil fuels, archipelagic topography with indigenous geography, petroleum fracking with botanical transplantation, European extractive colonialism with the contemporary neoliberal prison-industrial complex
Thus a new model of storytelling in the Anthropocene era must not only—in Ghosh’s understanding—account for, in a patently anti-anthropocentric manner, the role of planetary actors in shaping the course of history and decentring the human subject from the historical foreground; in order to be ethically oriented towards the various nonhuman entities it shares the globe with, it also needs to acknowledge the limits of the dominant (Western) knowledge systems through which our perceptions about human and nonhuman ontologies are cemented as truths. The Nutmeg’s Curse—like Ghosh’s 2019 novel Gun Island—continues on a similar trajectory of defamiliarizing entrenched narrative habits and vantages by asserting the role of ambiguity and multiplicity, incoherence and uncertainty, the numinous and the spectral in conceptualizing discourse beyond the primacy accorded to linear causality and empirical fact. Like the earlier text, The Nutmeg’s Curse explores an integral connection between how stories are told, and the power dynamics they enforce.
To take into consideration those hemispheres of unknowability, where our cognitive and semantic capacities and grammars encounter forms of unraveling, discomfort, and failure, is to concede narrative, epistemic, and ontological authority to otherness. This includes those iterations of otherness that cannot be theorized, about which stories cannot be told without reconfiguring the simultaneously-existing notions about what constitutes a story and what stories can do. In following the nutmeg’s wayward adventures across time, space, and cultures—without imposing on these traversals a particular framework of colonial history—Ghosh seems to perform the writing of history in the planetary (and nonhuman) register that he advocates.
This ‘planetary’ mode of writing—one that exposes the links between the minute with the grand, of spices and fossil fuels, archipelagic topography with indigenous geography, petroleum fracking with botanical transplantation, European extractive colonialism with the contemporary neoliberal prison-industrial complex—underscores the ongoing legacies of imperial formations, while urging for transnational, intersectional narratives of oppression and dispossession to be accounted for. These decentralized and plural histories can only be adequately articulated when our understanding of what constitutes narrative legibility, meaningfulness, authenticity, point of view, and coherence are revised to take into account the agency and power of more than human beings and relationships.
Ghosh shows how the bracketing of nonhuman presence and authority from cultural accounts—or conversely, the inclusion of the nonhuman as mere passive backdrop to more ‘consequential’ human action—is the product of certain disciplinary axioms stemming from the Western Enlightenment tradition. For him history as we know it is ideologically shaped by normative paradigms of truth. These are socio-political constructs enmeshed in the workings of colonial and neocolonial power, so that the narrative gesture if left unexamined for its political anchoring is itself a mode of suppression and displacement of other stories and models of storytelling—including local, vernacular, and indigenous forms.
Drawing on Native American myth and cosmology, Ghosh shows how nonhuman animals, elements, and inorganic planetary matter, have a long prehistory of inhabiting cultural narratives as protagonists with agency and efficacy. In order to fully recognize the violence of erasure performed by white settlers and imperial nations on global geography, it is important to see colonial plunder not just as a mode of aggrandizement of material and human resources, but rather as a concerted destruction of nonmodern, non-European knowledge systems.
We see this most powerfully recounted in the book’s exploration of the relationship between what it calls “terraforming” and the decimation of the Algonquin and Sioux tribes in America. The imperial drive for amassing wealth through the ownership and control of resource-rich landscapes culminates in attempts to dramatically alter the physical geography of these places. Ghosh describes the occupation of the Algonquin territory of Long Island during the 17th and 18th centuries as part of a biopolitical agenda of destroying entire populations by contaminating, eradicating or radically altering to the point of impoverishment their life-sustaining environments. One of the concrete ways in which these biopolitical manoeuvres take place is through a progressive introduction of new species of flora and fauna that are associated with modern industrial production and proprietorial notions of domesticity, centred on private property, possessive individualism, and the nuclear family, modeled on the burgeoning nation-state. This leads to a disproportionate increase in livestock and grazing animals that in turn disrupts the existing ecological balance causing clashes between “wildlife” and cattle, making way eventually to the brutal extermination of both indigenous animals and native populations.
The imposition in this case—as in the instance of the Bandanese nutmeg—of tangible shifts at the level of topography has more pervasive intangible repercussions. Geoengineering not only alters harmonious relations between various nonhuman entities, it also acts as a form of assault on cultures that derive from and participate in those symbiotic or what Donna Haraway calls “sympoietic” processes. An example of this is the idea of shamanic authority among Indonesian native islanders—explored in Nukila Amal’s novel The Original Dream (2003) and cited by Ghosh—as a form of empathy emerging out of a corporeal exchange between the embodied human and geological matter, allowing the shaman to enter into affective intimacies with the earth’s emotions and desires, including the desire to communicate. The Shaman’s knowledge is the product of a process of sharing, reciprocating, and viscerally bearing and transmitting the Earth’s pain through the medium of the human body.
In The Nutmeg’s Curse, Ghosh is deeply concerned with empire’s erosion of these precise ways of living and thinking, techniques of commemoration, communal practices, and symbolic repertoires based in nonhierarchical, egalitarian, and living associations with nonhumanity—including the terrain itself—that have nourished cultures and constituted ecosystems.
Colonialism’s legacy of ecocide is also at once one of epistemicide. Ghosh’s choice of a nutmeg is thus meant as a material antidote to this discursive erasure. Its prefatory purpose, leitmotif-like recurrence, and structuring imperative in the book enables the author to highlight the ecological underpinnings of cultural systems, and explore how certain ‘commodities’ and their economic or social histories are tied to complex ecological relations in which these so-called resources vitally participate. The extrication of something and its transplantation or transvaluation—taking it out of its natural and cultural ecosystems, the natural habitat or symbolic context of values and meaning of which it is a part—is also a form of colonial violence against the very integrity of planetary systems.
As Ghosh demonstrates, this hubristic ontotheology of God-like omniscience does not unite all humanity in a shared species identity. On the contrary, the ideal ‘anthropos’ has always been a figure of exclusion
For Ghosh, any reckoning in the Post-Holocene era with the effects of climate collapse, industrial pollution, fossil fuel consumption, habitat loss, ocean acidification, and species depletion needs to go beyond the geological marking of the Anthropocene as an epoch of humanity’s self-inscription into the Earth’s strata, actively locate the bases of such anthropogenic disruption in a long durée of imperial processes and ideologies, and examine the persistent and continuing legacies of imperial formations in contemporary neoliberal structures.
Ghosh’s nonhuman planetary history for the Anthropocene is also a travelling history, moving intercontinentally from the remote islands of the Bandanese archipelago, through accounts of settler colonialism and appropriation of indigenous resources in the Americas, U.S. monopoly over the fossil fuel economy and its impact on global oil and energy consumption, the inadequacy of modern, capitalist infrastructure to provide accessible rehabilitation and care in the face of climate catastrophes and pandemics, 17th Century witch-hunts and incarcerated or unpaid gendered labour, to multiple and overlapping instances of genocidal violence against racial, sexual and ethnic minorities. The common thread connecting this narrative is mankind’s systematic decimation of nonhuman lifeforms and stories by instituting the hegemony of the Cartesian subject as the apotheosis, and thus controlling centre of all creation.
As Ghosh demonstrates, this hubristic ontotheology of God-like omniscience does not unite all humanity in a shared species identity. On the contrary, the ideal ‘anthropos’ has always been a figure of exclusion: white, male, Protestant, upper-class, able-bodied and heteronormative, just as the desire for such an idealization and universalization of the human is itself part of a Eurocentric agenda for planetary domination through an erasure of difference.
In his nonfiction work The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), a thematic precursor to his latest work, Ghosh takes up the issue of genre more directly, tracing another kind of genealogical parallel, this time between colonial-industrial capitalism that ushers European modernity and the mass produced European novel with its predominantly middle-class readership, and its reflection of bourgeois values. As a cultural form meant to sustain socioeconomic structures in which our contemporary climatic and geopolitical crises originate, the novel is morally and formally incommensurate with the need to bring these crises to the frontline of intellectual and ethical inquiry. This idea also elaborated in a series of lectures delivered at the University of Chicago in 2015, finds a more elaborate fruition in The Nutmeg’s Curse in its expansive and panoramic collocation of multiple genres, narrative strategies, methodologies, and sources, as well as it’s effortless manoeuvering between different times and spaces.
Towards the close of the book, Ghosh refers to James Lovelock’s controversial Gaia theory: a proposition that the Earth—far from being a mute and inert rock—is a living entity capable of autonomy, will, feeling, and action. Gaia speaks to us through vibrational, molecular, and meteorological registers—plate tectonics, viruses, mutations, deglaciation—calling for a mode of literary attunement that can translate without appropriation such planetary semiotics.
Ghosh analyses Gandhi’s ashram, the BLM and Occupy movements, the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, as generating new tactics for inhabiting shared spatio-temporal sites, mobilizing resources in relation to contexts of global scarcity, economic disparities, toxic pollution, unequal infrastructural access, and more. Such collective efforts organize modes of grassroots resistance from mutual aid, repurposing, community farming, and crowdsourcing, to squatting and striking, suggests that a need for new ecologically sensitive ways of articulating culture does not merely pertain to literary aesthetics or discursive representation. It has a wider political significance that relates to modes of everyday performative recalibrations and solidarities in the face of neo-imperial and neoliberal capitalism’s continuing destruction of the planetary commons by metabolizing the Earth itself into a resource for ceaseless consumption, a process for which Ghosh uses the term, “omnicide.”
Only by reconfiguring ways of living, acknowledging the relational, interdependent, entangled nature of life itself, and relinquishing the position of insular exceptionality for one of shared vulnerability, can what Sylvia Wynter calls the “overrepresented” man be dislocated from anthropocentric epistemologies at the heart of colonial and capitalist systems. This would allow the human to be rethought outside the rubric of ownership and mastery as an open and porous form of life. This open subject is ethically oriented in relations of obligation, stewardship, and care-giving, towards various human and nonhuman others.
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Paromita Patranobish is an independent researcher based in Delhi, moving between academic and creative interests. She has a PhD on Virginia Woolf, and has taught in SNU, Daulat Ram College and Ambedkar University Delhi. When not teaching or writing, she loves to spend time with her camera and telescope doing amateur photography and stargazing. You can find her on Twitter: @paromita33.
