Decolonial Myths and Demi-gods of the Tropics: The More-than-Human Worlds of Manasa and Olokun

Abstract

In response to the current age of the Anthropocene, Posthumanist studies explore multispecies' entanglements and encounters in order to move away from the colonial binaries that separate humans from the environment. Adding to these studies, this paper explores the role of mythology in decolonising the Westerncentric strategies of narration. Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island and Rita Indiana’s Tentacle, envision the relationship of the human with other species against the deepening climate crisis, bringing to the fore the often-discounted discourses of cultural myths. In Gun Island, Manasa, the quintessential nagini is a folk deity of fear-based Nature worship from the Bay of Bengal, and an outsider to the established pantheon of Hindu gods. The Yoruba deity, Olokun, and his/her incarnations, move across the three time periods in Tentacle emerging as the saviour of the Caribbean islands. The novels reinterpret and re-evaluate the tropical Indigenous myths to implement alternate approaches of knowing and being in the world. This article seeks to explore how posthumanist and decolonial perspectives in these mythologies create new alliances that stretch across space, time, and species, symbolising the relationality of all life. The paper delves into the power of the mythical deities to highlight the existence of an interconnected network of human and more-than-human realms.